Don’t Get Used to Me

On Tuesday, Emma heard Marta say reserve before she’d even managed to get dressed.

“The Council’s here to see Mr. Sorel. They’ve brought some measurements.”

Emma had one leg in her jeans. Yesterday she had secured her eighth Recognition; today, apparently, someone had come to measure what it had cost everybody else.

“Now?”

“That’s what I asked.”

Emma stood in the middle of the room, holding on to the back of a chair. The jeans had gone stiff in the wash, her knee still hurt a little, and the monitor lizard had settled exactly where she needed to put her other foot. She nudged its tail with the toe of her shoe. It raised its head but stayed put.

“Tell them I’m getting dressed.”

“I did. They want to start with him before you come down.”

Emma stopped pulling up the jeans.

“They can wait.”

Marta nodded as if Emma had asked for water with breakfast. Emma had learned to speak for herself in this house. It still surprised her when people took her at her word.

Marta left a T-shirt on the chest and shut the door.

Emma stared at the latch for a few seconds. Then she sat on the bed and finished getting dressed. A pale crease had appeared at the waist of her jeans, one that hadn’t been there at home. The shirt smelled of unfamiliar soap. Everything was hers—the pockets, the seams, the worn patch on the thigh—but she had no sense that she might step outside and find her own hallway.

A chair scraped on the other side of the wall.

“Tavian?”

“Here.”

“Are they with you?”

“Downstairs. I’ll bring them up to the study.”

She picked up her comb.

“I’m coming too.”

“Yes. It’s the measurements from the temple.”

Emma put the comb down without using it.

Yesterday’s sheet lay on the bedside table, a word circled in pencil. She could recognize the first two characters now. The others still looked like identical little hooks. She took the whole folder, leaving her letter to her mother tucked beneath the clean paper, and opened the door.

The lizard got up to follow. Its tail caught a chair leg. Emma waited while it worked its way around the other side.

Two unfamiliar chairs had been brought into the study. One stood with all four legs on the rug; the other straddled the bare floor. Marta was testing the one on the rug for wobble.

“This one’s yours,” she told Emma. “The guest can manage the other one himself.”

*

Two Council people had come.

The woman introduced herself as Ms. Arden, head of the investigation into the ritual accident. There was an old patch near the elbow of her sleeve, carefully matched to the fabric. The man with her was younger and carried a narrow handled box. He set it at the edge of the desk, saw that Tavian’s papers were in the way, and picked it up again.

“Here,” Emma said, clearing the pencils from a free spot.

Arden looked at her, then at the lizard.

“You may stay. We need to discuss the technical condition—”

“I intend to.”

It came out sharper than Emma had meant. She sat down with the folder on her lap.

Tavian remained beside her. When the younger man opened the box, she saw three narrow plates, each fitted into its own groove. Dark marks ran along them like uneven sawteeth.

“Are those from the diversion channel?” Tavian asked.

“No. From the reserve,” Arden said. “The channel is being assessed separately. So are the support beneath the plate and the conduit where the power stopped. We aren’t treating them as a single cause yet.”

She sat on the unsteady chair, felt it shift, moved it a hand’s width, and continued.

“The first plate predates the accident. The second was taken the following day. The third is from yesterday.”

Tavian lifted the last one by its edges.

Emma leaned in to study the marks. There were more of them on the third plate, but she had learned not to mistake a visible difference for an explanation.

“What am I looking at?”

The younger man pointed to a thin straight line below the sawteeth.

“The reserve level. And this is the power feeding an unfinished bond.”

“Mine?”

“Yes.”

“I was on the other side of the city yesterday.”

“Distance doesn’t close it.”

Tavian set the plate down.

“How much is it drawing?”

The man gave a number that meant nothing to Emma. From the way Tavian straightened, it meant plenty to him.

“All the time?” he asked.

“It fluctuates. We checked again after yesterday’s new Recognition. The bond remains open, although the record itself is valid.”

Emma pulled the sheet with eight names from her folder.

“Are you saying every Clan draws from the reserve?”

“No,” Arden said. “Other people belong to their Clans for life. The Circle stopped sustaining their Awakenings long ago. Yours is still in progress.”

Something heavy passed outside. The windowpane rattled. Emma waited for the noise to die away.

“So my beast has been taking power from the Circle this whole time?”

“Some of it,” Tavian said. “It doesn’t replace your own magic. We’ve seen how tired you get.”

She looked at the lizard. It lay by the desk with its head on its front feet, looking almost offensively content.

“How long can this go on?”

Arden took out a folded sheet.

“The next seasonal Awakening is in eighteen days. Forty-six people are registered. We need a tested reserve and an available Central Circle. At present we have neither.”

“I wasn’t called to the Central Circle.”

“The temple hall,” Tavian confirmed. “But its Circle is connected to the central reserve. Recognitions pass through the same network.”

“Can’t you disconnect that hall?”

“The room is already closed,” Arden said. “That hasn’t severed the bond with its bearer. A full severing is a separate procedure. Without a completed Anchoring, we don’t know what it would do to you.”

Emma looked at Tavian. He didn’t contradict her.

She put her sheet back in the folder. Suddenly she wanted to move the cup of pencils on the desk. It seemed too close to the edge, though nobody had touched it.

“Then postpone the ceremony.”

“We can,” Arden said.

Emma looked up.

“We can postpone it,” the woman repeated. “If we find no other safe solution. But first we have to look for one. People are coming with their families. Some are already on the road. And there’s another group after them. We can’t simply promise everyone that it will work itself out.”

That was worse than a threat. Emma would have known what to do with a threat: get angry, demand answers, refuse. Arden sat opposite her talking about people who had already paid for seats in carriages.

Emma thought of Jonas. His room above the bakery.

“What are you proposing?”

*

The proposal came in its own folder.

Not an order. Arden made that clear before Tavian had even opened it. It was the masters’ assessment of one possible way to complete the ritual. Subject to further examination. Subject to Emma’s consent.

Emma listened, waiting for them to get to the verb.

“Maintain the current form through the Anchoring,” Tavian read.

“You mean the lizard.”

“Or another form that’s already been recognized,” Arden said. “If it can be reproduced safely. There’s no need for a new manifestation.”

Emma glanced at the snake beneath Tavian’s chair and looked away at once.

“How would you maintain it?”

The younger man took another plate from the box, this one without markings.

“A stabilizing circuit. It’s used when a manifestation is unstable. It keeps the form from coming apart while the Anchoring takes place.”

“And afterward?”

“The external influence is removed.”

“Will my beast still be able to change?”

The man looked at Arden.

She let him answer for himself.

“Ordinarily, a beast isn’t supposed to change form,” he said at last.

“Mine is. Or at least, it does.”

“Which is why we need a further examination.”

Tavian turned the page.

“There’s nothing here about a repeat Recognition.”

“There aren’t any,” Arden said. “We’ve never had another case like this.”

Emma rested her hand on her folder. Inside were three references to Ivar and the word she had been learning to recognize yesterday. They proved nothing. She couldn’t put them aside now, either.

“What if you anchor the wrong thing?”

“The monitor lizard Recognition is correct,” the man said.

“I’m not talking about the record.”

She leaned forward and picked up an unused pencil.

“Can I try to explain? You have a way to help a beast hold a form it ought to have anyway. You want to use it on a beast that has changed form eight times already. What if changing is normal for this one?”

Arden said nothing. Tavian squared the page he had been reading on the desk.

“We don’t know,” he said.

Emma wrote the question on her sheet. This time the pencil point held.

“Then that’s what we check first.”

“How do you suggest we check it?” Arden asked.

Emma didn’t answer immediately. She had been ready to explain why she wouldn’t agree. She hadn’t expected anyone to ask what came next.

Tavian slid yesterday’s plate toward her.

She looked at the scratches. Then at her folder.

“Do you have readings for every day?”

“Since the accident,” the man said.

“With times?”

He nodded.

Emma opened the notes from their examinations. Beside the names of the animals were the times Tavian had given her and her own remarks about how she’d felt. Some were approximate. She had left two spaces blank because she couldn’t remember.

“We wrote down the changes. And the dampening. Not everything, but some of it. We can see what the Circle was doing at those times. Maybe it was holding me the same way throughout. Maybe it wasn’t. We don’t have to make the beast do anything today to find out.”

The younger man bent over her sheet, then looked helplessly at Tavian.

“I’ll translate it,” Tavian said.

Arden folded her hands in her lap.

“That won’t complete the ritual.”

“No,” Emma said. “But I don’t know how to complete it yet. Neither do you.”

She braced for that to sound insolent. Arden merely reached for the plates.

“We can compare the records by tomorrow. Send over the Bestiary you mentioned for assessment as well.”

“We don’t have the original,” Tavian said. “Only copies of passages and some references. They’re looking for the owner.”

“Then send the copies. Alongside the measurements, not in their place.”

Emma nodded.

She hadn’t found an answer for the forty-six people waiting to Awaken. She hadn’t found a way home. She had managed only to keep herself out of another circuit today. For the first time that morning, she could lean back in her chair.

*

As they packed the plates away, Arden asked Tavian to stay by the door for a moment.

He didn’t go far. Emma could hear every word and suspected Arden knew it.

“At the hearing, a master will present the technical findings,” Arden said. “You’ll give your observations. The decision to use the circuit isn’t yours.”

“I know.”

“Nor should you refuse it on Ms. Reed’s behalf. They need to hear her without an answer from you first.”

Emma looked up from the papers.

“I’m right here.”

Arden turned.

“Yes. That’s why I’m saying it in front of you.”

Emma glanced at Tavian. His hand rested on the doorframe. The bandage barely hampered his fingers now.

“I’ll speak for myself at the hearing,” she said. “But he’ll translate the notes. No one else has read them.”

“We’ll need a copy we can understand by tomorrow,” Arden said. “Not just an oral account.”

“We’ll do it.”

Only after the visitors had left did Emma realize she’d answered for both of them.

Tavian went back to the desk and began gathering his papers into a single stack.

“You don’t have to copy it all out,” she said.

“I wrote out half of it earlier.”

“Then I’ll dictate the other half.”

“We’d better clear the desk first.”

He moved the box the masters had left for copies of the plates over to the wall. Emma shifted the pencils, moved her folder aside, and reread the question she’d written. Eighteen days. Yesterday, that had been some unknown point in the future. Today it had a date, and someone would be waiting for an answer when it came.

“I’m holding them all up.”

Tavian stopped with a book in his hand.

“Your bond is using the reserve. That’s true.”

She looked up at him.

“I was hoping for something kinder.”

“We’re responsible for finding a way to close it. Not just you.”

“I’m still the one who has to stand in the Circle.”

He set the book down.

“Yes.”

Emma rubbed her forehead. She wanted him to say something else. Something that would let her stop thinking about the lizard, possibly trapped as a lizard forever because it happened to be lying beside the desk today.

Tavian pulled her chair closer so they could both see the notes.

“Let’s start with the times we’re certain of.”

She let out a breath and found the right sheet.

*

Half an hour later, they discovered that Tavian could not read her handwritten numbers, listen to her explanations, and keep his elbow out of the bowl of sand at the same time.

Emma moved the bowl to the windowsill.

“That’s a seven,” she said.

“Yesterday, one like that was a one.”

“This one has a stroke across it.”

He pointed to the next number.

“So does this.”

Emma peered at it.

“I crossed that one out. It was wrong.”

Tavian leaned back and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Write out all ten digits for me. Separately.”

She took a clean sheet. While she wrote them out, he moved his chair aside to reach a letter in the bottom drawer. There was more room between their knees now.

Emma nearly asked him to move back.

Instead she checked her hands. Her fingers were steady. The lizard lay quietly, and she wasn’t dizzy. The distance was perfectly safe.

She finished writing the nine and passed him the sheet.

Tavian set it in front of him.

“Thank you.”

Emma watched him check the first time. She could ask for another arbiter now, another translator. Move her chair farther away. The practical parts of her treatment could all be arranged.

But this was where she wanted to sit.

She pulled the next page toward her.

By lunch they had copied six entries. They marked two with question marks. Tavian wanted to pin down another time, but Marta came in with plates and set them on the clear end of the desk without asking about the research.

“Move your papers.”

Emma began making space. Beneath her folder was a copy of the stabilizing-circuit proposal. She opened it to the last page, which Tavian hadn’t translated yet. A few short lines sat at the bottom, with plenty of blank space below.

“What does this say?”

He took the sheet and read it silently.

“Confirmation of consent. That the procedure and its possible consequences have been explained to you.”

“Which consequences?”

Tavian looked over the previous page, although they both knew what was there.

“The ones known for an ordinary unstable manifestation.”

Emma reached for a pencil.

“Write one more thing underneath. In their language.”

He pulled the page toward himself.

“What?”

“Will my beast still be able to change form after the procedure?”

Tavian wrote it down. Then he read it aloud to her.

Emma checked where the new words sat and circled the empty space beneath them.

“They can put their answer here. Before I sign.”

The bell in the tower rang outside. Marta pushed Emma’s plate closer.

Emma laid down her pencil. She could eat by herself today.