The forum stayed up.

Dani couldn’t kill the source and wouldn’t waste a night pretending to, so the pack did the thing the pack did when a wall couldn’t be moved.

They pressed closer to the thing behind it.

Which was the problem.

Soren felt it start at breakfast and run the whole day.

Maren wanting the evening drill slot, the two of them, heat and terrain work.

Selah wanting the cold hour after, the roof, the quiet she was the only one comfortable in.

Mona at his shins by default, homing set to wherever he’d sit longest.

Dani needed an hour at the terminal with him reading over her shoulder.

Yara needed nothing out loud and all of it underneath.

Six pulls. One of him.

◆◆◆◆

He’d have called it a good problem, once.

Before the field, before Garrow, before a girl with a dead socket named the rate out loud in a yard.

A boy wanted by six was a boy who’d won something.

He knew the price of the story now.

Every hour he gave went deeper than an hour.

Closeness wasn’t time, it was thread, and thread was drawn off the same worn measure Yara counted at night.

More Maren meant a degree.

More Selah meant a degree. Mona cost the most and felt like the least.

He could give all of them what they asked.

He’d just be paying it out of a balance only two people at this academy could see, and one of those people had come to watch it hit zero.

◆◆◆◆

"You’re rationing," Selah said.

She’d found him on the roof in the cold hour, which was hers, and she’d said it flat, which was how he knew the funny had been switched off on purpose.

"I’m not," Soren said.

"You gave Maren forty minutes and cut it at forty. You gave Dani her hour and stood up on the hour. You’re counting yourself out in even numbers." Frost ticked along the ledge under her palm. "I count things too. I noticed you started."

Soren didn’t answer.

Selah watched him not answer, and something behind her face did arithmetic he couldn’t see the working of.

"How bad?" she asked.

"You don’t have a number for it either."

"No. But you flinch on the deep ones now. You didn’t used to."

◆◆◆◆

She stood off the ledge and came to stand in front of him, cold coming off her skin, and for once she didn’t lean in to take the warm spot she always took.

She stayed a step back.

That step back was the loudest thing she’d done all week.

"Here’s what I worked out," Selah said. "The closeness is what costs you. Not the time. The reaching-in part. So when Mona comes looking for her feelings-place at night, and she comes to you, that’s a deep one. That’s a degree."

"Selah."

"Let me finish." Her voice didn’t rise. It went colder, which on Selah was the same as louder.

"Joan doesn’t cost you. Joan’s a choice, no thread, nothing for the reaching to draw off. Joan can hold Mona’s feelings-hour and it comes free."

Soren understood it before she finished saying it, and hated that he understood it.

"You want to send Mona to Joan," he said.

"I’m already sending her." Selah didn’t soften it. "Tonight. I told her Joan tells the story of the surface better, the light she can’t look at, all of it. Mona believed me because it’s true. Joan does tell it better."

"That’s not why you sent her."

"No." No flinch. "I sent her because every night she spends learning the world from Joan is a night she’s not drawing a degree off you. I did the math on my tamer and I moved the piece that costs him least."

She said it cruel and she said it kind, and the two didn’t cancel, they just sat there together being both.

Soren looked at her for a long moment.

"You’re rerouting them," he said. "Around me. To save the balance."

"I’m rerouting the deep ones. You still get me." A flicker of the old thing, gone fast. "I’m not that generous."

◆◆◆◆

Below them the academy ran its evening.

Somewhere Mona was sitting with Joan, learning a surface she couldn’t look at from a woman who cost him nothing, and the logic of it was clean and cold and correct and Soren hated every clean cold correct inch of it.

He’d looked in on them once, earlier, before the roof.

Mona on the floor of Joan’s room with the tinted lenses pushed up, listening to Joan describe daylight, the color of it, how it fell across a courtyard she’d only ever felt as heat through a ceiling.

Mona’s whole small body had been turned toward the telling.

Not toward the door. Not toward him.

For one moment the homing hadn’t found him first, and Soren had stood in the hall and felt the exact thing Selah had engineered.

Relief and loss in the same breath. A degree kept.

A degree of her attention pointed somewhere it cost him nothing, which meant a degree of her pointed away.

He’d wanted to be glad. The math said be glad.

He’d gone up to the cold roof instead.

Because it worked.

That was the worst part.

Selah had found the one move that lowered the bill, and the move was to take the people who loved him and quietly point some of that love somewhere it wouldn’t reach in and pull.

Rationing affection. Not his. Theirs. Toward him.

"They can’t know," he said. "Why are you doing it?"

"Obviously." Selah looked out at the dark.

"The second any of them find out you’re a balance getting spent, they stop asking for less. They start fighting over who gets the last of you. This only works while I’m the only one cold enough to run the numbers."

She turned to go in.

At the stairwell door she stopped, and she didn’t make it a joke, which was to tell that she meant it more than anything she’d said with a smile.

"I know what you cost," Selah said. "That’s why I sent her to Joan."

She went down.

Soren stood in the cold hour alone, wanted by six, spent by all of them, saved a few degrees a night by the one who’d decided loving him meant doing his math for him.

He didn’t feel saved.

Soren felt rationed, and he couldn’t tell the difference anymore between that and being loved carefully.