Page 101 of The Truths We Hold

“I know. That’s the binding. It’s temporary.”

“How temporary?”

“Hours.” It might be days. I have seen it be weeks. “You’ll feel it come back in pieces. It’s not damage, Devin, it’s — it’s like a limb that’s gone to sleep. That’s all it is.”

“Okay.” He nods. He nods again, and then his face comes apart for about three seconds, and then he puts it back together, and that reassembly is the single most obscene thing I have witnessed in a life that has included some genuinely obscene things. “Okay. Is Yusuf all right? He went the other way.”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“When I can.”

He’s not the only one. Aisling Park has a burn across her forearm from her own shadow recoiling, and she is holding it against her ribs and telling everyone within reach that she’s fine in the bright, brittle voice of somebody who intends to fall apart later and privately. A boy whose name I should know and cannot retrieve has taken silver across the shoulder, and consecrated silver in a dark-wielder does not close the way ordinary metal does; it will scar in a pattern that anyone in this institution will be able to read for the rest of his life. Any Hunter who sees that mark in forty years will know precisely what made it, and will make an assumption about him, and the assumption will be wrong.

That’s what the institution has done to him in the space of an hour. It has written on him. He is sixteen and he will carry the sentence in his skin.

I have carried the equipment that writes it.

That is the thought I have to set down and step over, because it will take my legs if I let it, and I have a wall to hold.

—

Then the fire changes.

I feel her before I understand it. Ashley comes down the bond hot and immediate — not words, never words when she’s working, just the shape of a decision, and behind it something enormous moving across the whole building.

I sent you the fourth years.

Twenty seconds later they arrive in my corridor.

Thirty of them, coming down the service stair at a dead run, fourth-years, sixteen and seventeen years old, and they do not stop at the alcove or ask for instruction. They go to the mouth of the corridor and they ground, and thirty shadows drop out of them and pile up against the floor and the walls, thick and low and wide, the way I have spent four months trying and failing to teach a single student to do in a controlled classroom.

Ashley, there are children stacking shadow in my corridor.

I know. Use it.

I put my hand into it.

And this — this is the thing I will think about for the rest of my life, whenever anybody asks me what the bridge actually is, because every answer given in that governing chamber this morning was an abstraction and this is not.

My fire goes into their shadow, and their shadow holds it.

The heat stops bleeding upward. That’s the first thing — thirty grounded shadows form a dense floor and a dense wall and my sheet stops losing energy into a hallway that has been drinking it for twenty minutes, and my thirty percent, which was burning at a rate that gave me perhaps four more minutes, abruptly stops being thirty percent spent recklessly and starts being thirty percent spent well.

And then her voice arrives through it.

Not in my ears. In the flame. The Command riding the bond into my fire and out of my fire into the corridor, so that the wall I’m holding stops being a wall and becomes a sign — the students behind me feel the direction come off the heat, warm on the left, cooler on the right, a thermal instruction that says go that way, that way is the library, that way is warded, and fourteen second-years who cannot hear the Command directly can feel where the heat wants them and they move.

My fire is her infrastructure. That’s what I am now. Not a weapon, not a Hunter, not even really a professor — I’m the wire her voice runs down in the part of this building where the crimson can’t reach.

There was a version of me, eight months ago, who would have found that humiliating. He was very concerned with what his fire was for, and whose it was, and whether a man who has spent his life as an instrument of one institution was simply becoming an instrument of something else. I remember him fairly clearly. I don’t miss him.

I have never in my life been so glad to be a component of something.

“Vale.” Adler, hoarse. “You’re smiling. Why are you smiling?”

“Because it’s working.”