Chapter 2

Demon Hunters did not hold auditions. They held requests.

Malcolm had explained it on the climb back from the river bend, half a step ahead with the notebook under his arm, talking the way honors boys talked about a door they expected someone to open for them. He treated it as lucky gossip. Eva heard law. You did not apply. A commissioned Hunter put in a paper for a body, and a chaperone on campus said yes or no. More often than not the chaperone was Weston, who was already titled and already teaching the rooms that produced spare parts. Yes meant you walked off the hill behind someone who would grade you while the street was happening. No meant you stayed in bonding and flasks and called it a career.

Display printed a prettier list, and a framed copy hung outside the lecture hall. Show-rank. Control-rank. Ward-rank. Hunt-provisional if Undercroft had already used you. Fire that photographed. A close the donors could clap for. House names that made a mission look staffed. Honors bonding, because a flock that chewed together was supposed to hold together when a face came home wrong. The brochure needed all of that. The wall did not.

The wall wanted something shorter, and Eva could read it off the students going by.

First, it wanted someone who could finish. Out on the lawn a Fire senior was scuffing at the brown patch where his edge had outlived his count, and nobody was clapping now. A mage who could bring everything down at the end, wind and flame and the hum in the grass, was rarer than talent. First-years leaked. Tour students shut down too early and left something burning behind them, and the field punished both. The lanky boy in the borrowed pale shirt had sat down hard in the dirt because his edge kept going after his hands stopped. Eva had ended on the count in front of cameras, and that was why Malcolm kept saying soon.

It wanted someone who could stop a fire as well as start one. Hunters burned riders out of hosts, and some gifts, Weston’s among them, didn’t tell the difference between the rider and the person it was wearing. An apprentice who could path that burn, smother it, or hold the ground steady under it filled a hole on any team. An apprentice who only added more fire was one more accident waiting to happen, and there was a scorch mark on the lawn to prove it.

A request also wanted someone who stayed shut. Hunger to belong left a mage open, and so did panic, and riders came in through the open places. Four kids had crossed a dining hall to sit at her table because her face didn’t flinch. A student who needed a group to tell them they were good was a door left open. The school farmed that hunger on purpose, then treated it as a defect once you were down in the real work. A Hunter looking at a request read a quiet student one of two ways, finished or broken, and asked for the first, then watched the second on the job until it showed which it was.

Last, it wanted someone who would take orders. Special assignments weren’t group projects. A Hunter led, and the apprentice did whatever was needed: pathed, held, muffled, carried a second count, stood in the ugly angle. If you fought that in public, it looked like a quarrel. If you folded in completely, you burned the wrong body. The ones who lasted could switch between leading and following without anyone noticing. Malcolm had led every pair he’d ever stood in and had never once been handed someone else’s plan and told to hold it. Most honors students were the same. They had only ever let Fire lead because Fire was the thing people could see.

It wanted numbers, sometimes. Malcolm’s version, that more bodies meant more success, was half a lie that still got people paid. More bodies meant more hands on a host and more open places if the working went thin. Hunters asked for extra hands when the forecast was bad and the family paying didn’t want to spend a cousin. Liability was the right word for it, and they asked anyway, because a breach didn’t care how anyone counted risk.

Most of all it wanted whatever the team didn’t already have. Air for a line. Earth for a floor that stayed put. Water that could refuse to soothe. Dark that could hide a step. Light that could force a rider into view without lighting up the whole street. Licensed Holy, to pull a rider out and close the hole behind it. Unlicensed Holy wasn’t on any printed list. It was a rumor, and whoever caught it would own it. Past that, they took students who could read a spellbook well enough to recite a close they weren’t born with.

Then there was the part nobody printed, which got scored anyway. Your last name. Whether you’d had a rite or were clean. Whether you ate in the Tower. Whether a clip of you already existed, so the public story of the mission would have a face. Whether you were branded, which proved the school could lift people up and would make a dangerous sermon if you died on camera. Whether the state already held the deed on you, which made consent a formality. To a request form, Eva’s ward paper was convenient.

Weston’s yes or no sat over all of it on this campus.

He chaperoned. He graded. He had run a diagnostic in front of a bleacher and called it morale. A Hunter watching that footage was watching whether an Air frame survived purification heat and still ended on the cut, and that made it selection with a soundtrack. When interest came, it would not ask what Eva thought of her lessons. It would ask Weston whether the girl in the glasses could do it again with a host on the ground.

Malcolm thought uncommon meant special.

On a request form, it meant the missing piece is cheaper if she is already housed on eleven and cannot leave without a chaperone.

The field work that paid for a phone was the shallow end of the same river. Patrol for nothing. Keep your mouth shut. Get used to walking beside Fire. Get used to his name in the present tense. When a special request finally used her, the criteria would be the same. Only the street would change.

They selected for bodies that could close, stop, and be aimed. On the framed list outside the lecture hall, the word potential was printed in the smallest type.

* * *

Patrol ended. Second period began.

Malcolm’s words did not stay at the river bend. They came into the glass room and sat in the chair with her. A mage who could withstand those flames and still cast clean. She copied flask heights off the slate and unread scripts off the board, and none of it went in. The one sentence that mattered had already arrived: keep the Holy secret harder than before.

She was being advertised.

The phones were a network the hill never bothered to name. Ivy graduates were still attached to it, commissioned, in the field, watching a column of fire and a girl in glasses finish on the cut. Hunters she had never met. Houses she would never be introduced to. A clip with Beethoven under it and a caption instead of a request form, doing the request form’s work.

Weston had auditioned her on the dirt and called it morale.

Boost the first-years. Demonstrate translation. Path and edge. He had known what the footage would do. He had known honors would eat it and the feed would carry it off campus. She should have failed the test: leaked, cooked, closed late, given them a first-year mistake they could call potential instead of product. The real test had been whether she would fail on purpose. Survive the heat, end on the phrase, and the reputation wrote itself. Uncommon. Ready to be aimed.

Third period ended. Lunch.

She stayed in her seat.

The big table could bond without her. Steak could arrive for people who still had doors. Eva stared through the dark lenses at the empty slate and let the room be a room. No sky, no river, no Malcolm, only the fact of being listed somewhere she could not see.

Footsteps she already knew.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked, casually, like a man who had seen a hand go up.

Eva kept her eyes off his face. The glasses stayed on the slate.

“No.”

He didn’t leave. Casual was a posture. He stood where a teacher stood when a student had skipped lunch against the schedule.

“You skipped the table.”

“I ate yesterday.”

“That isn’t the rule.” Still easy. “Bonding is hours. Hours are the job.”

She let the silence sit. He was good at waiting through silence, and she was not going to decorate this one with Azrael or requests or the word audition.

“Malcolm talks,” Weston said, after the pause had done some work. Not a question. “Special assignments. Interest. He likes an audience.”

Eva’s jaw set behind the glass. “The audience is already bigger than him.”

“Yes.”

No apology in it. No denial. The morale speech had always had a second room.

He set a wrapped parcel on the desk, bread and meat, Tower kitchen cutting her a plate she had not walked to. It kept her in the chair and let him call that care.

“Watch it once,” he said. “Then stop watching it. If a request comes it comes through me. Until then you eat, you patrol, you keep your close clean.”

She looked at the food. She left it alone.

“I should have burned,” she said, very quiet.

Weston’s pause was shorter than kindness and longer than surprise.

“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

He left her the plate and the slate and the casual question, still hanging in the air as though it had been about lunch.

Eva stared through the lenses until the headache found its old excuse of light. She did not go to the long table, and she did not uncover the Holy, even in her own mouth.

Failing on purpose would have to wait for a street that was not already filming.

* * *

“I had more doors downstairs.”

She said it after a moment, still not uncovering the plate. Out there were the low hall, a library line, a bench, a table with no bonding hours. A door that opened if you had legs. Eleven had steak and a window and a guard who wanted a paper the headmaster owned.

“That was before your potential was understood.” His voice stayed easy. “You said no when I informed you of your transfer.”

“And?”

“And that is something a high-risk student does.” He said it the way a clerk reads a stamp aloud. Refusal read as flight. Air on a second-highest floor. A head through a window they had already imagined. “You will receive your credentials when you build trust with your classmates. As much as I love the company, they’re the ones you should be talking to.”

Love the company. Casual. The same mouth that had looked forward to tomorrow.

“Cut the crap.” Eva muttered it at the slate. “It makes you unattractive.”

Silence took a different shape.

It was not the classroom pause he used to make a flock lean. This one had been hit. She heard it land and kept her eyes down to spare herself the sight. Unattractive had been no flirt, only the smile, named: the morale, the wrapped lunch, the I love the company. Nice, laid over a lock on the door.

When he spoke again the ease had an edge that never raised its volume.

“Trust is still the key,” he said. “Whether you find me attractive is not on the form.” A breath. Almost a huff. “Eat. Go to the table tomorrow. Elizabeth will make it less painful if you let her.”

Eva’s mouth flattened. “That’s the crap.”

“That’s the school.” He tapped the desk once, two fingers, the same gesture he used on a wrong page. “High-risk stays inside until the we vouches. You don’t like the we. I noted it.”

He left the plate.

At the threshold he stopped, not turning all the way.

“For the record,” he said, milder than the stop, “failing on purpose in front of phones would have been worse than passing. They still would have circulated it. You just would have been the girl who cooked.”

Then he was gone.

Eva sat in the glass room with a lunch she had not wanted and a label she had not asked for. The word unattractive still hung in the air.

The long table stayed empty of her.

She ate three bites, because the next patrol would not care that she was high-risk. She left the rest as a small, useless no. The bread had gone stiff at the crust by the time she stopped looking at it.

* * *

The plate sat there, three bites gone, the rest cooling into a shape that looked like stubbornness and was only math.

She had said it out loud, and it would not settle. Low hall had been loud and thin-mattressed and permitted. Library. Tray. A walk if she finished before seven. Ren’s mouth. Pax’s cards she would not take. The sky as a thing you could stand under without a chaperone. Here she had steak, a pane on eleven, and a key that would appear once her classmates decided she was trustworthy. Classmates who filmed her. Classmates who called him Azrael because they got him on jobs. Classmates whose host smiled and made niceness current.

Trust with the we was the credential.

Drinking was the trust.

She would not drink.

So she would not get the door.

That was the first split. Stay herself and stay locked. Perform belonging and walk outside on a paper that carried her name because Elizabeth poured. Redline nice was a piece taken later; she had told Liora as much without preaching. She still felt the pinch in her own throat every time warmth arrived with a lift pass attached.

The second split was worse, because it had already happened.

She should have failed. Leaked. Cooked. Given them a first-year body they could pity and keep in cheap rooms. Instead she had matched so she would not burn, correct physics, correct close, and the phones had carried the correct thing off the hill to Hunters who put in requests for missing skillsets.

No clean refusal was left on that lawn. Pass and be product. Fail and be product with a scorch mark. The clip did not need her consent either way. Ivy graduates were still on the network, and men and women she had never stood in front of now had her glasses, her wind, his fire, and a caption.

So the Holy had to go deeper.

Advertised Air was already a listing. Advertised Holy would be a seizure. A requested apprentice with a clean close was useful. A requested apprentice who could empty a socket without the book was infrastructure, and every faction on this campus knew what to do with infrastructure. Hide and he pushed. She had felt that. Elizabeth had warned her and been right. Push was still cheaper than a Hunter she did not know arriving with a special request and a smile.

She had told him to cut the crap.

It makes you unattractive.

The line had landed. She had heard the silence change shape, and she had no name for that problem that was not dangerous. She had said it because I love the company was a nice coat over high-risk and a locked stair, and she was tired of it. Now he had a second tell, annoyance on the dirt and this. A man who filed loneliness and waited would keep a girl who insulted the coat on the same shelf. Whatever he did with it, it would not get her any peace.

High-risk.

She had said no to a transfer the headmaster had already written. No was how she had stayed a person since the fever took the chains off. No was how a ward got labeled a flight risk and put on the second-highest floor, with a window that tempted Air and a guard who would not open the door. They were not wrong that she could leave the hard way. Lift. Loud aura. Not far. She had already done the math with her head through the pane. They were wrong that sitting at Elizabeth’s table would make her safe. It would only make her easier to walk to the breach.

Interest soon, Malcolm had said.

She believed him.

She did not want to be a Demon Hunter. Graduation was a door that opened one way. Needed was not kept. Father had gone through a different official door and not come back. She had chosen Ivy so she would not vanish into that second stamp, and now Ivy was building her a third: apprentice, chaperoned, graded, aimed, paid enough for a phone so the cage could call itself opportunity.

She wanted the sky.

She wanted the secret to stay a secret.

She wanted a door that opened because her feet reached it.

She could not have all three in the same week.

Eva put the cover back over the plate.

Fourth period would come whether she resolved anything. Alchemy. Unread languages. Demonology she could almost follow. Malcolm in the morning with a feed. Weston tomorrow, looking forward to it.

She stared through the dark lenses at nothing and held the Holy where no request form could reach.

If they were going to advertise her, they would advertise the wrong girl.