Page 7 of Cruel Rite

He doesn’t look up right away, which I’ve already learned from thirty seconds in this room means he’s actually listening. “That’s an easy one,” he says. “Give me a moment.”

I keep my voice exactly as flat for the second question, because the flatness is the whole strategy. “While you’re pulling that—does the archive hold procedural records for Cairnwood’s own Rites? Purely for comparative context. The response paper touches survivorship and succession, and I’d assumed a campus with this much institutional continuity would have something worth citing.”

He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t ask why a first-year-in-standing wants Rite procedure sitting next to inheritance law on the same request slip. “A Rite record’s a Rite record, same as any other,” he says, mild as everything else about him. “Held here same as the rest of it. Sit, if you’re stopping.”

He writes my request on a slip in a hand I can’t read upside down, and goes to the shelving on the rollers for the case reporter. While his back is turned I watch him set the slip—my slip, the only paper on the table that wasn’t already there—into a wire tray at the far end, apart from the shelving cart, apart from everything else.

I’m proud of it for about four seconds. Clean, deniable, exactly the kind of move I’ve built my whole life around: a real request wearing a real request’s clothes, with the actual question folded inside where nobody has to notice it arrived at all.

Then I watch the tray a second longer than the pride survives, and it curdles into something I can’t yet put a number on. I’ve spent a lifetime reading rooms for precisely this kind of detail, and I still can’t tell whether I just saw something or invented it out of nothing. The dehumidifier hums its one flat note. Cold gets into my hands within a minute of sitting down, the way it apparently gets into everyone’s hands who sits at this table.

I’ve been telling myself, since the quad, since the registrar’s pen, that the way through this year is invisibility—be useful enough to keep and quiet enough to lose in a crowd. Between the seminar and the dining hall I have been marked twice in one day by two men I didn’t choose, on terms I can’t refuse, and both markings happened in front of witnesses who will have repeated it twice by the time I’m back in my room.

So I stop treating invisibility as the plan. I take the paper Corvane handed me and use it as the reason I’m allowed to be standing in the one room on this headland that might tell me something true about either man, and I file a case citation and a Rite-procedure question on the same slip, in the same afternoon, before dinner, in my own hand.

I’m three steps from the Undercroft door when Hollis calls me back—not about the request.

“Miss Ferrante.” He says it without looking up from the ledger in front of him, mild as everything else he’s said all afternoon. “Would you like the paper topic entered under your own name, or filed with the seminar’s group record? Since Mr. Corvane generally prefers his assignments logged individually.”

I haven’t told anyone at Cairnwood that this response paper exists outside that classroom. I haven’t told Hollis Corvane’s name at all.

He already has it filed under Corvane’s, next to mine, before I said a single word to him about who assigned it.

Chapter 5: What It Cost

Rook doesn’t sit down to tell me things. He never has. He comes in still chewing whatever he grabbed off the kitchen table on his way past, plants himself in the middle of the president’s rooms with his hands full of nothing, and says the worst part first, because that’s the only order he trusts himself to deliver it in.

“Hollis logged two requests off one slip,” he says. “Case reporter for the Weatherby citation—that’s the real one, that’s cover. Second line’s the one that matters. She asked whether the archive holds Cairnwood’s own Rite procedure.”

The radiators knock twice behind the wall and go quiet, the way they’ve knocked every evening this early in the term since before I was tall enough to reach the valve myself, and under that, faint, coming up through the floor from the east corridor, somebody’s been at the gun safe again without wiping down after. I log both sounds the way I log everything in this room—background, not signal—and give the only sentence in front of me the attention it’s actually asking for.

“Word for word.”

“Whether the Undercroft holds procedural records for Cairnwood’s own Rites. Purely, and I’m quoting Hollis quoting her, for comparative context.”

I don’t laugh, but something in my chest does the thing that would be a laugh on a less controlled man. Comparative context. She built a real question about a real case, wrapped a second question inside it like a coin inside a fist, and walked both of them past an archivist old enough to have seen every version of that move performed by people with considerably more practice than a twenty-one-year-old four days into term. She did it on the same slip of paper. In one sitting. Without asking a single person at this school how the building works first.

Nobody teaches that. You either arrive already doing it or you don’t.

“He filed it under my name,” Rook says. “Next to hers. Told her Corvane generally likes his assignments logged individually. She hadn’t told him my name was attached to any of it.”

“I know. He does that.”

“He does that because it works,” Rook says, not a question, and eats the last of whatever he’s holding, and waits.

I stand at the window with my back to the room, which I do when I want to think without an audience watching me do it, though Rook has never once mistaken my back for privacy. Below, the quad is going dark early the way it does this far into September, lamplight starting to come up along the paths one at a time like somebody’s working down a list. Somewhere out there is a girl who has been on this headland four days and has already found the one question in this whole archive that could eventually take her out of my hands, and she found it inside a homework assignment, on the same afternoon she got assigned the homework, before she’d unpacked half her clothes.

There are two ways to run this, and I already know which one I’m bad at.

The safe one: flag it. Tell Hollis to slow the paper trail on anything with her name near it, restrict what the Undercroft releases to a first-year-in-standing regardless of what cover story she wraps it in, make the room harder for her to work before she’s worked out how good she is at working it. That’s the version that protects the receipt. That’s the version any man running an operation the size of the one I’m running would choose without needing to think about it twice.

The other version is the one where I do nothing, and watch her get warmer.

“Do nothing,” I say. “Don’t flag it to Hollis. Don’t slow anything she asks for. Don’t restrict what she can pull next.”

Rook doesn’t argue. He never does—it’s the single most useful thing about him, that he’ll tell me the truth exactly once and then do what I’ve decided regardless of whether I took it—but he says the one sentence he’s entitled to say, standing there with his arms crossed and grease still on his thumb from the kitchen.

“You’re handing her the receipt.”