The F-Class Awakening

The Ceremony Hall smelled like floor wax and fear.

Evan Vale stood near the back of the line with his arms crossed, watching three hundred eighteen-year-olds try not to look terrified. He was doing the same thing. Around age eleven he'd figured out that the trick wasn't hiding it. The trick was looking bored.

"You're doing the face," Yuna said beside him.

"I don't have a face."

"You have the one where you find the ceiling fascinating so nobody will ask you anything." She nudged him with her elbow. "It's a ceiling, Evan."

He looked down at her. Yuna Park was two inches shorter than him and had been seeing straight through him since they were seven. Today her hair was pinned up with a screwdriver.

"You brought a screwdriver."

"I brought a screwdriver to your Awakening. Mine's this afternoon, and I'm not blinking." She said it lightly. She meant about sixty percent of it. "I'm skipping a shift at the depot for this, so you'd better get something good."

Every kid in Halcyon ended up on this floor the year they turned eighteen. A Registry proctor pressed a metal needle to your palm, and whatever ability had been asleep inside you woke up. Then the Registry ranked it, from F at the bottom to SSS at the top, and posted your rank on a board for the whole hall to read.

It took about a minute. It decided the rest of your life.

Above the platform, the Registry's sigil hung in cold white light: a circle crossed by nine lines, one for every rank. Evan had been looking at that sigil his whole life. On forms. On the sides of buses. On the door of the building where his mother used to work.

"Next," a clerk called.

A girl walked up. Sixteen seconds later she came back down with her hand over her mouth and her friends lifting her off her feet. B-CLASS, the board said. The crowd made the sound crowds make.

Evan watched her face and thought, So that's what it looks like.

He wasn't jealous. It was worse than jealous. He was doing math.

C-Class and above got free tuition, housing priority, and a career the Registry would help you start. D-Class got a small monthly credit and a shrug. E and F got nothing. You finished school, found work that didn't need a gift, and joined the eighty percent of the city that had made peace with being ordinary.

His mother had made peace with it. She'd worked for the Registry once. Then the Registry let her go, and her body had never quite worked right since. Evan had watched her live with that for six years, in a two-room flat in the Narrows with a window that faced the fog, calling the nerve pain in her hands just weather.

F-Class wasn't only the bottom rank. F meant no stipend, no tuition, no way out of the Narrows. F meant the rest of his life would look exactly like hers.

He'd told Yuna he didn't care what he got. He'd told himself too, and that had almost worked. But somewhere in the last few months he'd started wanting it anyway: a real ability, even a small one. Proof that the last eighteen years had been leading somewhere.

"Vale, Evan," the clerk read.

Yuna squeezed his wrist once, hard, and let go.

*  *  *

The platform was hotter than it looked. Some kind of heating in the floor, pushed up through the stone, so that standing on it felt like standing too close to a stove.

The proctor was a man in his fifties with grey at his temples and a badge that read REGISTRY PROCTOR — ANDEL. He didn't look at Evan. He looked at his clipboard.

"Dominant hand."

Evan held out his left.

The Needle was a sliver of dull metal no longer than a finger, resting in a cradle of black glass. The proctor pressed it to Evan's palm without ceremony.

"Breathe out."

Evan breathed out.

The Needle went cold. Then it went in. Not into his skin, nothing so crude, but into the part of him that had been waiting eighteen years to be opened. And it asked him a question he had no words for.

That was the part nobody warned you about. You felt it. Something in his chest turned over and made room.

Behind the proctor, the board hesitated.

Every result that morning had appeared instantly. This one took a full second, as though the board had to think about it. Then:

VALE, EVAN.

CLASS: F.

ABILITY: CONNECTION.

The crowd laughed.

It wasn't cruel, exactly, which was almost worse. It was the laugh of people who had just watched someone be told he was nothing, and who were mostly laughing out of relief that it hadn't been them. It rolled across the Hall and broke against the platform.

Evan's stomach dropped through the floor. His ears were burning. His face did nothing at all.

He'd had six years of practice at letting things not reach him, and for once he hated how good he was at it.

"Congratulations," the proctor said, flat. "You're cleared to leave."

"What does it do?"

The proctor finally looked up. "What?"

"Connection. What does it do?"

"Officially?" He said it like he was reading a label off a tin. "It links objects. You touch two things, and they stay stuck together for a few seconds. It's used in shipping. Sometimes locksmithing. There's a card in your packet with approved jobs."

"Shipping."

"Shipping's honest work, son."

"I know it is." Evan said it without heat, which he'd found worked better than heat. "But when the Needle went in, it asked me something. Is it supposed to do that?"

Something crossed the proctor's face. Fast. Almost nothing.

"It didn't ask you anything," he said. "It's a piece of metal." But his eyes went to the board, and then back to the Needle, and he added, more quietly, "The reading lagged. We'll run it again."

"Again?"

"Hold still."

He pressed the Needle into Evan's palm a second time, harder.

And the question came again.

This time Evan was ready for it. He'd spent eighteen years being asked what he wanted from life and answering nothing, thanks, and he was suddenly, stupidly angry about it. He was tired of being read. So when the Needle asked, he didn't wait.

He reached back and took hold.

For one second Evan was standing on the platform in the Ceremony Hall, and he was also somewhere else. A whole life poured into his head, too fast, like a glass of water being refilled while it was still full.

A dry sandwich, half eaten, on top of a folded form. A mortgage. A daughter's recital he was going to miss. A wife named Ilse. A bad back. And underneath all of it, coiled like a wire under wallpaper, one thought repeating:

He isn't supposed to be in this room.

It was the proctor's life. Evan understood that a heartbeat later, and the understanding was terrifying, because he wasn't standing next to the man. He was standing inside him.

He let go. He didn't decide to. His body did it for him. He staggered half a step and caught the rail.

The proctor had gone white.

On the board, the result had printed. F-CLASS sat there exactly as before, unchanged, insultingly identical. And underneath it, in a font Evan had never seen on a Registry board in his life:

ANOMALY: 0-A.

DO NOT RE-TEST.

The Hall went quiet the way a room goes quiet when someone drops a plate.

In eighteen years of watching results go up on that board, Evan had never once seen it print a second line.

"Sir —"

"Step down," the proctor said.

"What's 0-A?"

"I said step down."

Evan didn't move. His hand was shaking on the rail and he hated that everyone could see it.

The proctor glanced up. Not at the board. At the gallery above them, the narrow balcony where the Registry kept its observers. Evan followed his eyes without meaning to.

A woman stood at the rail in a grey coat. Not a student. Not a parent. She was watching Evan the way you'd watch a fire you'd started, and when his eyes met hers she didn't look away and she didn't smile.

Then she turned and walked out through the far arch, and the doors closed behind her without a sound.

"Evan." The proctor's voice was low. "Look at me."

Evan looked.

The man had taken the printed slip off the tray. He read it again, as if hoping it would say something else. Then he tore it down the middle and put one half in his jacket.

He held the other half out.

"Take it."

"Why?"

"Because I have a pension and you don't." He pushed it into Evan's hand. "Don't show it to anyone. Don't ask anyone about it. And don't go to the Archive."

"The Archive?"

"Go home, Evan Vale," the proctor said. "And don't do anything interesting."

*  *  *

Yuna was waiting at the bottom of the steps with her arms crossed.

"F," she said.

"F."

"They laughed."

"They did."

"I'm going to fight all of them."

"Please don't."

"I'll fight three of them." She fell into step beside him, and after a second she hooked her arm through his and held on. Neither of them mentioned it. The fog was rolling in off the water the way it did every afternoon, greying out the long street, softening the Registry Tower at the center of the city until it looked like something drawn in pencil.

Evan didn't tell her about the second line.

He wasn't sure why. Something in the proctor's face had made it feel like the kind of secret that could get somebody hurt.

"So," Yuna said eventually. "Shipping."

"Shipping's honest work."

"Don't do the voice."

"I'm not doing a voice."

They walked two more blocks. The tannery smell came up from the Narrows, familiar and ugly, and Evan slowed at the corner where their routes split.

"Yuna. When you get yours today." He looked straight ahead. "Whatever it says. It's not a verdict on you. It's a filing system."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You know what your problem is?" she said. "You say something like that, and it sounds fine, and then you go home and don't eat for two days." She let go of his arm. "Come by the depot tonight. I'll get you something."

She went one way. He went the other.

In the entry hall of his building, where the mail was kept, Evan finally unfolded the half-slip and looked at it properly.

VALE, EVAN.

CLASS: F.

ANOMALY: 0-A.

DO NOT RE-TEST.

Nothing else. No explanation, no filing number, no date.

He turned it over. The back was blank except for one line along the bottom edge, printed so faintly he had to tilt it toward the last of the daylight to read it.

Referred: ARCHIVE — THREAD 1743.

The proctor had told him not to go to the Archive. The slip said someone had already sent him there.

Evan stood in the entry hall with the fog pressing against the glass, holding a piece of paper that officially said he was nobody, and that had frightened a man with a pension.

He spent the next week telling himself it didn't matter.

That lasted until a girl he had never met walked into Pier Nine and described the way he went through doors.

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