Chapter 80: The Pen Moved On Its Own And The Handwriting Wasn’t The Author’s

Mona came off Joan’s face.

Joan wiped her cheek twice and did not say anything else about it, which from Joan was forgiveness.

Then the bracket on the wall ran the morning roster and Soren’s name was in the semifinal slot, and the room stopped being a thermostat dispute.

◆◆◆◆

The Central arena was bigger than the academy yard and built to be watched.

Vasquez Sr. had a box up in the high tier with glass that caught the light, and Soren did not look at it on the way in because it was what the man wanted.

His semifinal draw was a second-year named Aldric Pell, a borderline D-rank with a stone-shell boar that had taken two opponents off the board already without a scratch on it.

Soren ran the math on the walk to the ring.

Boar with subdermal mineralization, low mobility, high front armor, the kind of beast that won by making you spend everything on its face while it walked through you.

Soren was almost D and not D yet, and Script Sight was a dead window he no longer bothered to open.

He was going to have to take this one the slow way, with his own eyes.

◆◆◆◆

The boar opened by charging, which boars did, and Pell rode the line behind it like a man who had never needed a second plan.

Soren did not meet the charge.

He stepped off the line instead, and Mona dug toward him.

The mole wasn’t his to command and she wasn’t fighting the boar, she just wanted to be where Soren was, and Soren was past the trench she’d been carving across the ring all morning out of nothing but homing instinct.

The boar’s charge folded into Mona’s hole and its armored face hit the rim instead of hitting Soren.

That was luck.

Selah’s frost went out across the churned dirt in a sheet so the boar’s recovery foot found ice where it wanted purchase.

Maren’s heat came in on the other side, not at the boar, at the air over the trench, so the steam blinded Pell for the half second Soren needed.

It was not clean.

The boar was already swinging its head and one tusk caught Soren across the ribs as he closed, and he felt that one go in past the muscle.

He kept moving anyway.

He got a hand on the boar’s bond-line, the soft place behind the jaw where a tamed beast and its rider stayed joined, and, he leaned on it, the way Yara had taught him to lean.

The boar remembered.

It hesitated for Pell, one beat, and one beat was the whole fight.

◆◆◆◆

The Quill vibrated in his bag.

Soren felt it the way you feel a phone you forgot was on you, a small wrong motion against the side that should not have been moving at all.

The channel was cut.

The Author was not writing.

The Quill was a dead thing he carried because leaving it anywhere was worse than holding it.

It was writing.

He got Pell’s beast pinned and the official’s hand went up and the noise of the arena came down on him all at once, and through it he could feel the Quill scratching out a line in his bag against nothing, just the pen moving on its own.

He waited until they cleared him off the floor and his ribs were the only thing the medics cared about, then he opened the bag where no one could see.

There was one line on the inside of the leather.

The handwriting was not the Author’s.

The letters leaned the wrong way, like someone who had learned to write before the alphabet the Author used existed.

The one who wrote you is not the first to hold this, and he will not be the last to be held.

Soren read it twice.

He felt the specific irritation of a man who had paid in soul and skin to close one channel and was now being shown a door he had not known was in the wall.

The Author used the two-way ink.

The Quill had moved with nothing touching it and the line was inside the bag, where the Author’s channel had never reached.

Different thing.

◆◆◆◆

Yara was at the edge of the medic tent before he called her, she was up in the humanoid with the red eyes open and fixed on the bag.

"That’s the other one," she said. Quiet, for her. "The one under the one you cut."

"You felt it before back when the channel went quiet."

"I feel it more now." She put herself between him and the bag. "It waited for the loud part. It only writes when no one is watching the pen."

"Can it reach you?"

"I would prefer it to stay a question."

He closed the bag and the line was inside it doing nothing now, a sentence that should not exist on leather that should not move.

[DING! — Semifinal: WIN. Bracket advance: FINAL.]

[DING! — Tamer rank: threshold proximity. One bout from D.]

[DING! — Anomaly logged: third voice, unclassifiable. No prior signature match. Status: open.]

No DING from the Author.

There had not been one in a long time and there was not one now, and the silence where it used to be had stopped feeling like victory.

◆◆◆◆

They posted the final before the medics finished his ribs.

Soren Kane versus Troy Minden.

He read it on the bracket and Yara read it over his shoulder and neither of them said the obvious.

That Vasquez Sr. had built this whole tournament to put across from him was the one person in the building Soren had unfinished business with that had nothing to do with the Council at all.

The Quill sat in the closed bag with a line in it that no one had written.

"Get some rest," Soren told the room that was about to be five women and a hotel thermostat again. "Tomorrow I fight Troy."

Mona, who had no opinion on Troy, dug into the medic cot and went to sleep in it.