CHAPTER 41: DEBRIEF

The south infirmary smelled like pine and boiled linen. Liora stood at a writing table with three files open and a glass of water she hadn’t touched. Dorian waited two steps back with his hands folded, the kind of still that makes rooms feel less nervous.

"Plain language," Liora said. "No theory. No blame. Start."

I gave her the night in the order it happened. The teeth sticking, the breath pulling out of the hall, the smell that wore wet leaves and wrong. The leaper on the wall. Cael’s rise under the jump. My point used as a convincer and not a knife. The loose bolt in the track, the tap on the vane, the chain team, the net. I said "we" when it had been "I" and "he." I said "we" when it had been "us" and "them." I didn’t fill the quiet with guesses.

Liora listened like a ledger. When I finished, she tapped once on the page. "You called audibles cleanly," she said. "Next time, call your point a heartbeat earlier. Your partner shouldn’t have to count your breath to know which way you’re about to cut."

"Understood."

She shifted the file to a done pile, then slid a second folder toward me. "Receipts."

A list sat inside: stipend repayment schedule, ten ethics hours a week logged with the chapel, two first-year mentees assigned by the commoner council, a note to return a misused room key that carried my name like a small crime.

"Sign," Liora said.

I signed. The pen scratched louder than it should have in the quiet. When I pushed the folder back, she didn’t smile, but the corners of her eyes eased by a line.

Ariadne stepped in as if the door had been waiting for her posture to give it permission. Silver trim straight. Gloves exact. She didn’t look at Liora first; she looked at the checklist, then at my signature.

"Ten hours weekly," she said. "No excuses."

"Yes."

"You will report to the ethics hall on time," she added. "Empty apologies don’t count."

"I know," I said. "I’m not offering one."

Her eyes didn’t soften. They also didn’t harden. "Good." She put a small ledger on the table. "Mentors will be assigned through Lyra’s roster. Don’t make her chase you."

"I won’t," I said.

She nodded once, then left. It felt like a door closing and a window opening at the same time.

Liora capped her pen. "Two more items," she said. "One: you will sit for a brief with Refuge coordination. Procedures for wardline fail and crowd flow. Professional, not personal."

"Understood."

"Two: walk the service corridors with Dorian. Use the building. Do not wrestle it."

Dorian tipped his chin and headed for the back door. I followed.

The service routes were the academy’s bones—narrow, clean, full of forgotten logic. Dorian didn’t lecture. He showed by moving. He set his palm to a wall so his foot found the seam that wouldn’t slip. He picked stairs that didn’t echo. He stopped where a breeze was wrong and waited until the building told him why.

"Everything made has a habit," he said once, without stopping. "Find it. Don’t force it."

We passed a maintenance hatch. The iron smelled like sap and smoke. Dorian touched the hinge, then held his fingers for me to smell. Resin. Not lamp oil. Not polish.

"Iron-pine," I said.

He didn’t nod; he kept moving. Ten yards down, a tool bin sat under a ladder. Inside, a ward pin had been filed where the eye meets the shaft. It was a small cheat. It makes a pin that should hold slip under stress. There was a smear of that same resin near the rim.

Dorian set both on a cloth. "Delivered to ops," he said. "Not to rumor."

"Plain language," I said.

He didn’t smile. "You’re learning."

Lyra’s brief happened in a narrow office off Refuge. The badge at her collar caught the light when she looked up from a stack of forms. She didn’t blush. Her ears went pink when she realized she’d been rubbing the edge of a checklist with her thumb.

"I need ten minutes," I said. "Wardline fail at an intake door. What do you do first?"

She tapped a page. "Don’t shut the door. That’s first. You slow the line with voice, not with wood. People move for clipboards and clear instructions." She pointed to three boxes on a sketched map. "You put your biggest bodies at the corners and make eyes. You don’t argue with boys who need an audience. You make the audience look somewhere else."

"Like a cart fire," I said. "Or a bell."

"Exactly. You can’t win with volume. You win with direction." She handed me a sheet with arrows. They were hand drawn, but they were neat, and whoever made them had tested them on actual feet. "You say ’line here, headcount here, water there.’ You don’t say ’stop.’ ’Stop’ makes people invent reasons not to."

"Thank you," I said.

She looked at my face for the first time since the square and held the look for a beat. Not long. Enough. "Don’t make me chase your mentor hours," she said. The ears went more pink and she looked down again. Young and professional in the same body.

"I won’t," I said. "And—I’ll keep using your procedures as written."

"That helps," she said. Then, because she is who she is: "You called the line clear so I could work. That helped."

In the rear yard after, I ran the leash until my breath and step matched like a metronome I didn’t have to hear. Marrow out. Hollow up. Bone Lantern low in my left hand with the shade hooded. Rotate on count, not on panic. Pulse the cold only when heel or palm touched. Thirty seconds, sixty, ninety. Somewhere around there the hum in my chest stopped feeling like a wire and started feeling like a rope you hang a lantern on without thinking about it.

A soft chime brushed the inside of my ribs. Not sound. The idea of one. The Compass didn’t show a screen. It didn’t need to. The cold sat where I put it and didn’t ask for praise.

’Closer,’ I thought. Not a number. Just true.

Dorian’s step came quiet at the gate. He set an oilcloth bundle on the bench. Inside: a glove. Good leather, tan, repaired at the thumb with a cross-stitch he’d pointed out yesterday. The same rare stitch as the one we’d seen on the roof sweep and the one found near Gate Six.

"Laundry chute," he said. "Found torn in the turn."

"Contractor?" I asked.

"Missing," he said. His tone didn’t bend on the word. "Ops is looking."

"Duskveil vendor on the receipt," I said.

He flicked a look at me. Not warning. Reminder. "Plain language," he said again. "Leave the names to the people who knock on doors."

"Understood."

He raised his eyes toward the chapel clock. "Eat," he said. "Then sleep. Then drills. Then Silent Hall."

"Silent Hall?"

"Sound discipline," he said. "Any clang is a penalty. Any hum longer than a breath is a penalty. Some people don’t know how loud they are."

"Aldric," I said.

He didn’t react.

On the way back through the corridor, a ward runner jogged past with a message slate held high. Liora read it without taking it. Her face didn’t change. She just said, "Night sweep at first bell. Pack light, don’t talk about it, and if anyone asks, you trip over your own feet and you’re embarrassed. Go."

"Understood," I said.

Back in my room, I wrote my report a second time in my own notebook, not because anyone asked for it, but because writing straight makes your head straight. I stopped before I started guessing. I slept with Marrow in Shade and the Lantern snuffed.

When I woke, the rope inside my chest was still there. Not tight. There.

’Closer,’ I told myself again. ’Not done.’

The bell for first period rang. Silent Hall waited.