CHAPTER 24

The assessment center didn’t look like anything Association-run had a right to look like.

White walls, soft lighting, and the specific feeling of a building that had spent money making sure nobody ever needed to raise their voice in it. Yelena had booked us in at nine, and we were early enough that the waiting room was still empty except for us.

“Nervous?” Lisa asked.

“No,” I said, which was mostly true. “Mostly I don’t understand the spectacle. Nobody ran me through a machine like this before. They read your density at the annual medical, and the rest of your file was whatever your gates said about you.”

You should be nervous, not because of the test, but because whatever numbers they write down about you today, someone else eventually reads them.

I knew that already, but I didn’t say so out loud.

Nox had his eyes shut, hands in his pockets, doing his usual impression of a man who could fall asleep standing up.

A technician called Nox in first. He came back out twenty minutes later, a plastic card already in his hand, looking exactly as unbothered as he’d looked going in.

“How was it?” Lisa asked.

“Thorough.” He held the card out without being asked, which was as close as Nox came to volunteering anything.

Density: 47

Class: Assassin

Rank: Provisional D (Cleared to sit C-rank examination)

The number was one line. The word beneath it was the other. Density told them how much; class told them what shape it came in, drawn off the core type the way you read grain off a cut of wood.

“Forty-seven, provisional D,” Lisa read over my shoulder. “That’s a high forty-seven to be sitting under a D.”

“The technician said as much.” He took the card back and put it away like it was a bus ticket. “She ran it twice. Apparently the number wants to be higher than the letter, and the letter waits for the exam.”

A forty-seven meant Nox was strong. It didn’t say he was fast. The class line did the rest, or tried to. Assassin was as near as their taxonomy came to what he was, and near enough that he’d pocketed the card without comment. It was the one thing on the card that admitted a hunter had a shape at all. The number carried his mass. The word carried the rest, badly.

Lisa went in next. She was gone longer than Nox had been, and came back out with a faint crease between her eyebrows that hadn’t been there before.

“Everything alright?” I asked.

“They don’t have a category for what I do.” She held up her own card.

Density: 44

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Provisional D (Cleared to sit C-rank examination)

“The number is plainly ordinary,” she said. “It’s everything the number doesn’t say that they choked on.”

“That sounds like a category to me.”

“Density measures the well. It doesn’t measure what I pull out of it, or what I pull it out of.” She turned the card over as if the back might argue. “The machine filed my output under standard casting and came back with nothing it trusted. They wanted to write Caster and leave it uncategorized, which is a polite way of saying the box was too big to be useful. So I told them.”

“Told them what?”

“Necromancer.” She set the word down carefully, as if it were something she’d rather not have been carrying. “You’d have thought I said I raised the dead for a living, which is true, to be fair. The technician had to go and check whether the word was still on the approved list. There are so few of us on file she’d never once had cause to write it.”

“And now it’s on your card.”

“And now it’s on my card. In a country that keeps a very short list of who can do this, under a name that isn’t mine.” She rubbed her temple, offering a small smile without any humor in it. “I’ll be honest, I hadn’t decided how I felt about that until I watched her type it. Isn’t it just lovely?”

✦ ✦ ✦

When it was my turn, the room they led me into looked more like an operating theater than a doctor’s office. A raised platform sat in the center, ringed with equipment that hummed at a pitch just low enough to feel in the teeth.

The technician, a woman with tired eyes and a tablet, gestured me onto it without much ceremony. “Standard protocol. You’ll feel a pull. Don’t fight it. It’s reading your core, not taking anything from it.”

The pull came a second later, cold and deep, like something had reached into my chest and started counting.

That is a crude instrument, 

Sounding mildly insulted on my behalf. 

It is trying to measure an ocean with a teaspoon, and looking rather pleased with itself about it.

“Is it going to work anyway?” I whispered, quiet enough that the technician wouldn’t hear it as anything but muttering.

Probably. Crude does not mean blind. It only means slow, and slightly insulting to sit through.

The reading took longer than I expected. The technician’s eyes kept flicking to her tablet, then back to me, then back to the tablet, her expression staying carefully professional the whole time.

“That’s... hold still, please,” she said, mostly to herself.

I held still. Whatever her tablet was climbing toward, my own window had shown me a fuller version of it first, in a forest, on the worst morning of my second life.

When it finished, she didn’t say anything about the number. She just made a note and read it a second time to be sure the machine had meant it. I watched her face for a reaction and didn’t get one.

You are being remarkably restrained about this. I expected you to either hide it or show it off. You are doing neither, which I did not expect from you.

“Didn’t seem like the point.”

It rarely is. I find I like that about you more than I expected to.

The card printed a few minutes later, warm from the machine. My new name, my age listed as twenty-one, and the rank letter still sitting at D. Beneath it sat a note in smaller print: Eligible to sit the C-rank promotion examination.

Beneath that sat the one figure the plate had been able to find:

Density: 87 (Capped)

The technician had spent longer on that line than on any part of the reading, and then longer still on the line beneath it, which had come back blank.

“The return ran hot, so I capped the display,” she said, already moving on. “If it bothers you, book a full assessment at the med bay. The plate only estimates at the top of the scale.”

“The class line is empty.”

“The class line is empty because the core came back unreadable, which the machine has decided is my problem.” She turned the tablet so I could see a field waiting for an entry it hadn’t been able to make. “It reads a core type off everyone. Striker, caster, the whole list. It gave up on yours.”

“So you ask.”

“So I ask, and you answer, and between us we put something in the box.”

Tell her the truth, Azazel suggested. It will be funnier than anything you could invent.

“Azazel,” I said.

She looked up. “Is that a class or a name?”

“It’s the name of the class.” I held her gaze and gave her nothing else. “Write Azazel. If the box needs more, write that it’s a kind of magic swordsman.”

She wrote Azazel. Then, after a moment, in the margin where technicians put the things they don’t trust, she wrote magic swordsman?

It didn’t bother me. Eighty-seven was the number the machine had settled on, and I wasn’t going to argue with its discretion. And now it existed in an Association database, searchable by anyone with the clearance to wonder about it.

“You’re going to get some attention with that,” the technician said, tapping the card over the figure without touching it. “I won’t pretend to explain the thresholds. That’s not my job.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not bad, and not normal either. Recruiters mostly, from the big five. They watch anything above baseline for rank.” It was a sentence worn smooth from being said too many times. “You’ll get letters. Ignore them if you want.”

Careful is the correct face for her to be making, Azazel said as she walked me out. Careful means she has half-decided the machine is broken. Machines break far more often than readings like yours occur. You have landed on the better side of her doubt, for now.

Lisa and Nox were waiting when I came out.

“Well?” Lisa said.

“D, still. Cleared to sit the C-rank exam whenever it’s scheduled.” I turned the card over once, mostly out of habit. “Same as you two, I’m guessing.”

“Same as me.” She glanced at my card without asking to hold it. “You looked pale walking out. What did they say?”

“That I’ll get letters.”

“From who?”

“Recruiters.” I put the card away. “Apparently my number is a little loud.”

A man with a Aegis Guild pin was waiting in the lobby when we came out, reading something on his phone with the practiced boredom of a recruiter who’d been told to be somewhere. He glanced up as we passed. His eyes went straight to my card, still in my hand, and stayed there. I pocketed it and kept walking. He didn’t follow. He had the number now, and that was the errand.

✦ ✦ ✦

We walked out into the grey morning together, three plastic cards between us and ninety days still on the clock.

Lisa held hers up against the light, comparing it to Nox’s without asking. “Forty-four to your forty-seven. Three whole points, and the machine still can’t tell either of us apart from a bricklayer.” She handed his back. “It doesn’t know you’re fast. It doesn’t know I raise the dead.”

“I could have told you that without the machine,” Nox said.

“I wanted the machine to tell you that. It’s more satisfying when it’s official.” She looked at mine next, tilting her head. “Eighty-seven, capped, and you walked out of that building like it was a parking fine.”

“Would panicking have improved it?”

“No. But most people would have needed to try not to.” She studied me for a moment longer than was comfortable. “You already knew, didn’t you? Before the machine. You knew what the number was going to be.”

I didn’t answer that, which was an answer.

“Above baseline isn’t the same as alarming,” I said, mostly to hear whether she believed it.

“No, but listen,” she stopped walking, which was how you knew she’d decided to teach. “Let me do this from the top, because you keep nodding like you followed it, and I don’t think you did.”

“I followed it.”

“You didn’t. The letters go by band, not by the figure. Under thirty is D. Nobody writes to a D.”

“Thirty to sixty?”

“C. Most working hunters live there, and the guilds skim the top of it for cheap labor.”

“And above that?”

“Sixty to ninety is B. That’s where the letters start being worth reading.” She folded the last finger down. “Ninety and up is A. A is where they stop sending letters and start sending people.”

I already knew all of that.

“And I’m eighty-seven.”

“You’re a capped eighty-seven,” she said, walking again. “Which reads as a B about to become an A, on a card that says you were born two months ago.”

“So the number’s the problem.”

“The number’s never the problem. Nobody’s frightened of a number.” She glanced sideways at me. “It’s a number that shouldn’t exist attached to a name that shouldn’t be able to hold it. The people who send people instead of letters are exactly the ones who notice that.”

“Everything about you is a little loud,” Nox said out of nowhere, like he’d been waiting for an opening. “You just usually manage to keep it quiet.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

We kept walking. None of us said anything else about it for the rest of the day.

I noticed Lisa kept glancing at her own card twice more before she put it away for good.