Chapter 176: 176: Academy Life Starts XXXIII

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John put the brush to it without ceremony. Short strokes. Angle changed twice to meet a lip the wrong builder had left in the mortar. Water. Air. Dry. He knelt to erase a little crescent his first pass had pretended not to see. He stood. He stepped back and let the room tell him if it had a complaint left.

The room had no complaint left.

He set the brush down very carefully, the way you set a tool you know will still be your friend tomorrow. He looked at the floor. Not at his work — at the floor. It was the floor again. It would take prints now and know what to do with them.

Fizz hovered slightly crooked, and then he landed and put one paw on the stone, very solemn. "You are forgiven," he said. "Do not do that again."

They washed the last rinse water to the big drain and watched it twirl the way boys will always watch water when they have earned the watching. John dried his hands. Fizz dried the walls like a gentle wind saying goodbye. John sealed the last lantern. Fizz wrote the last ledger line:

Room: clean.

Clean enough to eat off. We will not eat off it because the warden will call us rats. But we could. (Fizz wrote it.)

— John (Bad handwriting), Fizz (handsome handwriting)

Knuckles touched wood. Not the sloppy knock of boys. The short, certain rap of the person who owned this door during the hours the sun did not.

"Enter," John said.

Warden Lutch stepped inside. She did not need the pause this time. Her eyes went to the floor, to the drains, to the ledges, to the hooks, to the vents, to the lamps, to the ledger. She did the inspection so fast it looked slow.

Then she surprised the room: she took off one glove and ran her bare fingers along the gutter lip, the ledge, the inside of a lamp cage, the bracket of a hook. She looked at her own fingertips as if they were students and she was marking them. They were gray with honest stone and nothing else.

"You did it," she said.

Fizz’s ears twitched as if someone had rung a very small bell made of praise.

She did not smile. She did not have to. The way she stood changed. Respect makes even strict spines kinder.

"Very well," she said. "Ledger accurate. Tools returned with bristles. Hinges oiled without being asked." Her gaze cut to John. "You have a talent for being tedious in the right way. Keep it. The school runs on men who are tedious in the right way."

Fizz clapped once, softly, then folded his paws again because it felt like a church.

Warden Lutch replaced her glove. "Classes start today," she said. "You have five hours. Eat. Sleep a bit if you need to. Scrub your own hands as well as you scrubbed my floor. When you wake, walk like a student, not like a hero. Heroes talk too loud."

"Yes, Warden," John said.

She moved toward the door, then paused as if remembering something she did not like admitting. "Good luck," she said without turning. "Do not break any rules. If you must break a habit, break the ones that kept you out past curfew."

She left before they could answer, because answers to good luck are always clumsy.

The door clicked. The room was theirs again, but it felt wrong to keep it. They had reduced it to a job done. It needed to go back to being a room in a school that forgot it one hour and needed it the next.

John drew the bar, hung the keys on their nail, and closed the ledger. He touched the cover once, grateful to an object no one else would be grateful to.

Fizz flew a slow victory lap, then ruined the dignity of it by wobbling and almost falling asleep midair. He caught himself, groaned, and dropped onto John’s shoulder like a scarf from a very tired noble.

"We did it," he said into John’s collar.

"We did it," John answered.

"Say it again," Fizz mumbled. "But with more dessert in the voice."

"We did it," John said, and let the smallest, cleanest pride warm the words.

They stepped into the run. The world smelled like morning bread and wet grass again. The cat on the wall had brought a friend. Both sat very straight, pretending to be statues that always lived there, certainly not waiting for any sausage scraps that might fall out of a careless bag.

Fizz waved at them like a prince to his public. "No autographs," he said. "I am off duty."

John carried the buckets and the last two tired brush heads down to the quartermaster. The woman behind the counter took one look at their faces, made a note with a speed that said she usually wrote faster than boys spoke, and slid a small paper across the wood.

"Receipt," she said. "And a roll because it is still warm." She pushed the roll across as if it were nothing. It was not nothing. The butter smelled like singing.

Fizz bit the roll and almost cried. "We will name a square after you," he said, mouth full. "Quartermaster’s Corner. It will only accept the finest crumbs."

She grunted something that, in her language, meant: don’t be ridiculous and also thank you.

They took the long way around the yard, because sometimes the long way is what turns work back into life. A knot of first-years were reading the schedule boards and arguing over which "Foundations" was the "good" one (there is no good one).

Two second-years pretended not to be yawning as they changed the water in the herb beds. A proctor went by with a stack of blank slates and the expression of a man late to ten important things that refused to be equally important. Bells practiced their voices once and decided to wait for the hour.

Back at East House, the lobby was quiet in the way empty rooms in big buildings always are, as if the stone were listening for footsteps it expected and had not yet heard. John’s boots made the right kind of sound. Fizz’s tail made the right kind of glow.

In their room, Ray Flame was not there. His bed looked like a field that had argued with a storm and lost. Fizz took the liberty of straightening the blanket, then ruined the good deed by drawing a very small mushroom in the corner of the pillowcase with a look of profound innocence. "Art," he said. "For culture."

John took the egg out of his pocket long enough to feel its warmth through the cloth. The hum from the void tether sat steady, gentle as a sleeping cat’s purr.

[System: Hatch Progress: 30%.

Status: waiting.

Recommended inputs: high-grade mana stones or beast cores.]

"Later," he said under his breath. "I will look for an opportunity."

The system did not argue. It liked the plan.

He undressed without fuss, scrubbed his hands until the lye smell left and only the clean remained, and fell onto the mattress like a building deciding to become a blanket. Fizz climbed into the crook of his shoulder, made the little nest he always made out of air and pride, and exhaled one satisfied syllable.

"Victory."

John’s mouth moved. "Victory."

The window showed a slice of morning going from gray to honest blue. The clock in the hall downstairs promised five hours and meant four and a half. East House breathed the deep, even breath of a building between duties.

Warden Lutch wrote one last note in her book before she closed it:

Disposal: clean.

Student: John — reliable. (+ Points for completing a hard task.)

Spirit: Lord Fizz — loud but useful.

Then she set her quill down, flexed her fingers, and considered drinking her tea while it was still hot for once.

In room 2C, a young man and a spirit slept like workers, not like heroes. The last few nights had done what it was supposed to do. It had made them tired in a way that couldn’t be fixed by bread and rest. It had laid a clean floor under the next thing.

Classes would start today. A part of John’s journey will begin.

(End of Chapter Nine.)