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Edith Mercer. Contractor of record. Paid.

Paid.

There was a line item somewhere, in some ledger, with my name and a number beside it, and Edie’s hand on the pen.

I’d known she was involved, of course, she’d told me as much herself, but I’d assumed it was because she believed in me, valued me, wanted the best for me, not because she was being paid to scout for them. Maybe I was just a convenient name to give them after all?

I turned the page because the alternative was coming apart at this expensive table in front of a woman with a villainous face, and I would sooner have chewed glass and smiled while I did it. The assessment came next, and the assessment had a scoring key.

The blank cards were not blank in this folder. In here they had numbers, and each one carried a classification and a column headed response expectation. The stacks I had made on that scuffed library table without any idea what I was sorting by, the warm ones near the top, the cold-absence ones in a line, my hands moving faster than my head, all of it had names. Conductive recognition, heat tolerance, boundary response, untrained channel susceptibility.

I hadn’t been lucky the day I sorted those cards. I hadn’t done “rather more than pass”, in Edie’s soft sad voice.

I’d been graded.

I turned to another page.

Provisional status: manifest classifiable Order by year end or remand for evaluation. Evaluator of record: Cormac Vere.

There it was, the clock, written down for everyone to see, the one that everyone else seemed to know about, but no one had bothered to tell me about. I had felt the clock since the gate, ticking under the polite machinery of this place, but feeling a thing and seeing it there in black and white were two very different things. My eyes caught on the sentence, “Classify by year’s end or remand.” Remand was one of those words, like provisional, like privately, that they used because the true word had teeth. And under it, the reports.

Cormac’s reports.

There were weeks of them, my wrist and my nothings and the way I braced. My resistance to authority. My failure to perform on command. My anomalous responses, shaved down word by word into language that looked harmless right up until I understood that harmless was exactly where they put the dangerous things when they were preparing to get rid of them.

The reports shouldn’t have surprised me, but they did. They’d framed the sessions as Cormac tutoring me, bringing the poor first-gen girl up to speed, but considering he’d never done any of that I’d known that there was an alternate goal. I just hadn’t expected it to be so blatant now I was seeing the reports.

I lifted my head, and Cormac knew which page I had reached. I could tell, because for once I could read him, not because he’d let me, but because there was nowhere left in that room for him to hide that I could not see.

“You’ve been filing on me since week one,” I said.

Pelham’s mouth opened, and I didn’t look at him but kept my eyes on Cormac all the way across the tables. “Every session,” I said. “Every time. The candle. All of it went in here.” I laid my hand flat on the open file. “All of it was for this. I thought you were supposed to be tutoring me.” The last was a lie, a knife I wanted to dig in.

His face went still in that particular way of his. He held my gaze and didn’t look away, which cost him something, I could see it costing him. I didn’t care what it cost him, or I told myself I didn’t, and the two were close enough to the same thing.

“Was any of it real?” I asked. It came out quieter than the rest, and I hated it for coming out quiet. “The instruments. The candle. The part where you looked at my…at me like I was a problem you wanted to solve instead of a line to fill in.” I almost said more about my wrist, until I realized I hadn’t read anything about it in the reports he’d filed. They were incomplete.

His jaw moved, and for one second I thought he might actually answer, which would have been worse, so I was almost grateful when Pelham cut in. “Miss Lane,” he said, “the evaluator’s role in a provisional case is strictly⁠—”

“I’m reading,” I said.

The silence after that was beautiful, and I was surprised no one said anything if I was being honest. After all, I’d just snapped at the man in charge, or at least the man who was supposedly in charge. The lack of admonishment I received suggested that he wasn’t as in charge as everyone was supposed to believe.

I looked back down and I read every remaining page, slowly, taking my time, because taking my time was the one currency I had that they couldn’t dock.

The last page was a formal recommendation to censure me for the gallery and to defer the final recommendation. They ordered continued evaluation, more soft words wrapped around more polished knives.

When he saw which page I was on, Pelham decided to read it aloud to everyone. Every sentence felt like a trap that had already been sprung and now only needed me to admit I’d walked into it. When he finished, he slid a single sheet across the table and the prefect appeared again, transferring it over to me and setting a pen on top of it as well. There was an arrow that pointed to a line at the bottom, above my name, my whole name, Sybilla Lane in someone else’s hand.

“Your signature acknowledges that you have reviewed the record,” he said, gentle as a man closing a coffin. “It doesn’t constitute agreement.”

“I know what a signature does,” I said.

I picked up the pen, which was heavy and gold-nibbed, the kind of pen bought to make people feel how much their own consent weighed. My hand didn’t shake, which I decided was a small private victory and worth about that much.

I signed it because the signature didn’t matter half as much as the truth they’d already handed me for free, and because refusing to sign wasn’t exactly an option, was it? A difficult provisional student refuses to cooperate? That would be a point against me in the future, and I was done handing this room easy victories. I set the pen down exactly parallel to the edge of the paper.

Edie had flagged me. Cormac had filed reports on me. The school had a clock running on me that they’d never told me about, and it had been running before I ever walked through the gate.