THE TAMER WHO REWROTE EVOLUTION

Chapter 6

The figure in the gray coat was gone before Dean Okoye reached the window. "Lights," she snapped. "Now."

The Great Hall flooded with white light. Outside, the courtyard sat empty under the moon. No footprints. No shadow. Only a single dead leaf turning slowly on the stone.

"I saw two of them," Sera said. "So did I," said the Dean.

"Then why does it look like nobody was ever there?"

The Dean didn't answer. Her knuckles were pale around her staff.

Behind them, Ethan was still kneeling by the stone, one hand pressed to his chest. Wick had crawled into his collar and gone dark, like a candle someone had pinched out.

"Professor Brandt," the Dean said quietly. "Take Mr. Cole back to the infirmary. Say nothing to anyone. Not the staff, not the proctors."

"And Miss Linden?" The Dean looked at Sera for a long, tired moment. "Miss Linden and I need to talk." The Dean's office smelled like black tea and old paper. Sera stood in front of the desk with her arms folded. Rime, her Frost Wolf, sat beside her leg and watched the Dean with calm blue eyes. The room was warm, but Sera had not taken off her jacket.

"Sit," the Dean said. "I'd rather stand." "Of course you would." The Dean lowered herself into her chair. "Miss Linden, I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to hear all of it before you say anything." Sera's jaw tightened. "That's not a good start." "It's the only honest one I have."

The Dean opened a drawer and took out a thin folder with a silver seal pressed into the cover. Sera knew that seal. She had seen it twice in her life. Once on a letter. Once in a car that drove away with her brother inside. Her stomach went cold. "No," she said. "You haven't heard it yet." "I don't need to." Sera's voice came out flat, perfectly calm, and she hated how calm it was. "That's a Concord folder."

"It is."

"Why is it on your desk?" "Because every S-rank talent in the country gets one, on the day the stone reads them." The Dean's voice was gentle. "Yours arrived the same afternoon as the ceremony. I wasn't supposed to tell you about it until spring." "What does it say?"

"It says that Seraphina Linden, Rank S, Frost Wolf, Legendary, has been placed on the Early Placement Track." "Meaning?" "Meaning that when you graduate, you won't be choosing a guild. A guild will be chosen for you."

Sera laughed. It was a short, sharp sound, like glass breaking.

"A guild," she said. "You mean the Concord." "I mean what the paper says." "It says it nicely." "It does." Rime shifted against Sera's leg. The wolf's ears were flat. Sera stared at the folder. It looked so small. It should have been bigger, she thought. A thing like that should be heavy and black and have teeth. Instead it was just paper, clean and thin, and it had already decided the next fifty years of her life.

"Did you know?" 

she asked. "When you called me up to the stone? When I put my hand on it?" "I knew what the stone might read."

"And you let me." "I couldn't stop it." The Dean's voice cracked, just a little. "Nobody can. That's the whole trouble." Sera turned away.

She walked to the window and pressed her scarred palm against the cold glass. Her breath fogged a small circle.

"Do you know what they said to me?" she said. "After the ceremony? Every single teacher?" "I can guess."

"'You're going to do great things, Sera.' 'The whole country is counting on you.' 'You were born for this.'" She said the words in a bright, hollow voice, one after another, like beads on a string. "I've heard that sentence forty times since morning."

"It's meant kindly." "My brother heard it too." The Dean said nothing. "He was born for it, too," Sera said. "Everyone said so. They said it so often he started to believe it. And then one day, a car came, and a man in a gray coat said congratulations, and Elias walked out of the house with a smile on his face."

Her fingers curled against the glass. "He came back eleven months later. He didn't know the name of his own dog." "Sera." "His beast looked at him like a stranger. It wouldn't go near him. And he just sat there, on the couch, staring at the wall, and my mother kept saying, 'He's resting, he's only resting,' and I was nine years old and I knew she was lying."

The room was very quiet. "So no," Sera said, and turned around. "I am not born for anything. I don't care what the stone says. I don't care what the verse says. I don't care how many people look at me like I'm a sword someone forgot to pick up." "Then what do you want?" the Dean asked. Sera opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

It was the strangest thing. She had known the answer for nine years. Free Elias. Burn the Concord. Make them pay. The words had been sitting in her mouth like stones since she was a child. But the Dean had not asked what she was fighting for. She had asked what Sera wanted.

And Sera did not know.

She found herself on the roof an hour later, with no memory of climbing the stairs. The night air was cold and clean. Haven City spread out below her in rings of yellow light, with the dark scar of the sealed Rift in the center. Rime leaned against her side, warm as a furnace in all that frost.

"I know," Sera told him. "I'm being dramatic." The wolf licked her hand. "Don't be nice to me. I'm not in the mood."

Rime sat down on her foot. She almost smiled. "You're up late." Sera spun around. Kaida Voss sat on the edge of the water tank near the stairwell, one boot swinging, a cup of something steaming in her hand. Her fire hound lay curled beside her, smoke rising lazily from its nose