The uniform fit well enough.
He had tried it on the night before, the way he did with most things he was uncertain about, privately and without audience. It was white and black, the colors of Van Silvestria, a long black shirt with a white crest on the chest and black lines running along the seams and collar with the particular precision of something designed to look sharp under pressure. Black trousers. Clean cuts. Nothing decorative that didn't serve a function.
He looked at himself in the mirror that was too honest for the room it was in.
It would do.
He shouldered his bag, closed the door to his dormitory behind him, and walked.
The corridor on the third floor smelled of stone and metal polish and the faint chemical undertone of something industrial he had not yet identified and suspected he was better off not identifying. The other doors were mostly closed. It was early. Most of the students who had arrived in the same intake seemed to operate on the assumption that sleep was something that could be extended indefinitely through willpower alone.
He had no such illusions.
The elevator at the end of the corridor was old in the way that things in institutions are old, not neglected exactly, but worn down by the specific weight of having been used by too many people for too long. It announced its arrival with a sound somewhere between a groan and a complaint, the kind of sound that inspired confidence in no one, and opened its doors with the grudging patience of something that had given up expecting gratitude.
He stepped in.
It descended.
The hall it opened onto had nothing royal about it. Nothing ceremonial. No marble, no gilding, no portraits of distinguished alumni gazing down from the walls with the self-satisfied expressions of people who had died before the world ended and therefore never had to revise their opinions of themselves.
What there was instead was function.
Crates stacked along the eastern wall, each one bearing the colors of the Central Kingdom's military in that particular shade of dark green that existed nowhere in nature, stamped with insignia and reference numbers and the occasional warning in red lettering. Soldiers moving between them with the efficient disinterest of people who had somewhere to be. Officers in black standing near the main entrance in small clusters, speaking in the low considered tones of people discussing things that were not for general circulation. Everything smelled faintly of oil and discipline.
He walked through it toward the hall's main elevators.
He was approximately halfway across when someone wrapped their arms around him from behind.
He did not react the way most people would have reacted. He had been training for three years. His first instinct was the one that training produces, which is to say it was not a gentle instinct.
He stopped it.
Because he recognized her before he turned around.
The particular way she moved. The specific pressure of that embrace, enthusiastic in a way that did not account for the possibility that the other person might have preferences about spontaneous physical contact. He knew exactly one person in the world who approached other human beings with that particular combination of warmth and complete confidence that the warmth would be welcome.
He turned around.
Sera : "Solandre."
Sera Laurea was wearing the same uniform as every other student in the academy. Somehow this seemed to matter less on her than it did on anyone else. The black and white sat differently against the deep crimson of her hair, which she had pinned back with the approximate success of someone who had tried and accepted the partial result. Her eyes were blue, a clear and specific blue, the kind that caught available light and did something useful with it. She was smiling at him with the unguarded brightness of someone who had not yet learned to be strategic about her expressions, or had learned and decided not to bother.
She was, as she had always been, unreasonably beautiful. Not in a way that required effort or arrangement. In the particular way of something that simply was what it was and had no opinion about whether you found it convenient.
He let her finish the embrace.
Then he stepped back.
Solandre : "Sera."
Sera : "Six days. You've been here six days and I haven't seen you once."
Solandre : "The academy is large."
Sera : "I know where your dormitory is. I asked."
He considered that for a moment.
Solandre : "That's mildly concerning."
Sera : "It's called being thorough." She fell into step beside him as he continued toward the elevators, with the ease of someone who had decided the conversation was continuing regardless of whether he had formally agreed to it. "What floor?"
Solandre : "Four."
Sera : "Four."
She said it with the satisfaction of someone who had just received confirmation of something she had already decided to believe.
They crossed the hall together. Around them the soldiers continued their efficient movement, the officers their low conversations, the crates their patient stacking. The morning light came through the high windows at the angle that made everything look slightly provisional, as though it had been arranged for inspection and might be rearranged afterward.
Sera : "Do you think we'll be in the same class?"
Solandre : "I don't know."
Sera : "I looked at the intake numbers. The distribution should put us in overlapping sections if the allocation is alphabetical by kingdom of origin."
Solandre : "It isn't alphabetical."
Sera : "How do you know?"
Solandre : "The boy in room fourteen has a name that begins with A and he's in section seven."
Sera : "You've been paying attention."
Solandre : "I pay attention to most things."
She looked at him sideways. There was something in that look he recognized and had been recognizing for approximately a year, since the afternoon she had said what she said in the garden of her family's residence in a voice that was steady in a way that suggested it had taken considerable effort to make it so. He had not known what to do with it then. He did not know what to do with it now.
He knew what he did not want to do with it.
Which was not the same thing as knowing what he wanted instead.
The elevator arrived with the same groaning complaint as the one on the third floor, as though all the elevators in Van Silvestria had been manufactured by the same pessimist. They stepped in. The doors closed.
Sera : "A whole year. You leave, you don't write, and now you act like we simply ran into each other in a corridor."
Solandre : "We did run into each other in a corridor."
Sera : "You know what I mean."
He looked at the elevator doors.
Solandre : "I know."
Sera : "I missed you. My family asked about you. My mother asked about you three times in the same week and pretended each time it was the first."
He said nothing.
Sera : "That's all you have? You know?"
Solandre : "It's true."
It was not enough. I knew it was not enough. I said it anyway because the alternative was saying something that would require me to mean it. And meaning things had become, in the four years since the October Tuesday of my twelfth year, an increasingly expensive proposition.
The elevator reached the fourth floor.
The doors opened.
They stepped out into a corridor identical to the one below and stood for a moment reading the class numbers on the doors.
She was in 4-C.
He was in 4-F.
Sera : "Of course."
Solandre : "We'll have shared sessions. The curriculum overlaps."
Sera : "That's very practical of you."
Solandre : "It's true."
She looked at him for a moment longer than the situation required. Then she smiled, the smile she had, the one that did not ask for anything back, and turned toward 4-C.
Sera : "Don't disappear again."
He watched her go.
She deserved better than whatever I was capable of being. I knew that.She deserved someone who could receive that kind of honesty and return it in kind.
I was not that.
I was not sure I had ever been that. I was less sure every year.
He put his hand on the door handle of classroom 4-F.
He pushed it open.