Chapter Eight: Six Days a Week

Training days at the Hall of Names begin before dawn and end well after dark, and within a week I understand why Instructor Perrin warned us, on that first morning, that some of us would not make it through the full term.

Mornings belong to theory — long hours in the tiered lecture hall learning the formal architecture of a compatibility reading, the history of the Assessment system since its founding two hundred and eleven years ago, the careful legal language of the Guild charter that governs what a Matcher may and may not do with what they learn inside another person's mind. Afternoons belong to practice — apprentices reading each other under close supervision, learning to find the faint currents of attachment, ambition, fear, and hope that apparently move through every person like weather, learning to tell the difference between a passing mood and a settled truth. Evenings belong to the Archive's outer rooms, the ones we do have clearance for, where we spend hours copying old Assessment summaries by hand as a memory exercise Instructor Perrin insists is the fastest way to learn the shape of two centuries of matches.

By the end of the first week, my hands ache from writing and my mind aches from holding still under other apprentices' hesitant, half-trained attempts at reading me, and I fall asleep each night in a narrow dormitory bed surrounded by three other exhausted girls I barely know yet, thinking not of Theo — I have learned already, in this place, that thinking of him too directly before sleep leaves a residue I can feel the instructors searching for the next morning — but of the shape of his absence instead, which is somehow easier to carry and no less constant.

I think of him at the docks, six days a week, sunrise to dark, the same brutal rhythm mirrored back at me from the other side of the city, and there is a strange, aching comfort in imagining our exhaustions running in parallel, even if we can't share a single hour of them together.

The first time I see him again, it isn't planned.

Second-year and first-year apprentices are permitted supervised trips into the city on Guild business — collecting materials for the Archive, delivering formal correspondence between the Hall and various civic offices, the kind of errand too mundane for a full Matcher's time but too sensitive for an ordinary courier. Three weeks into my training, I am assigned, along with two other first-years, to collect a delivery of preservation ink from a supplier near the harbor road.

I know, the moment Instructor Perrin reads out the assignment, exactly which street that supplier sits on, and exactly which loading yard it overlooks.

I tell myself, the whole walk down through the Third Ward with my two fellow apprentices — a quiet, serious boy named Aldous and a sharp-tongued girl named Marisol who has already decided, within three weeks, that she finds me tolerably interesting — that I will simply collect the ink, keep my eyes forward, and not look for him. I tell myself this with the same firm, useless conviction with which I have told myself many things over the past six years that I have then failed, immediately and completely, to actually do.

I see him before we even reach the supplier's door.

He's twenty feet away, hauling a crate onto a cart with two other dock workers, sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the cold, and for one unguarded half-second before either of us can stop it, our eyes meet across the loading yard, and something passes between us that I am certain, with sick, immediate horror, must be visible to anyone watching — six years of longing compressed into a single look neither of us manages to hide fast enough.

Marisol, beside me, follows my gaze without meaning to, the way anyone follows an unexpected pause in a companion's step, and I feel her attention catch, just slightly, on the dock worker I was looking at a half-second too long.

"Someone you know?" she asks, light, curious, entirely without malice — but the question lands in my chest like a struck bell all the same.

"No," I say, and I am appalled by how quickly the lie comes, how practiced it's become without my ever choosing that practice on purpose. "Just — startled by the noise. It's louder down here than I expected."

Theo, twenty feet away, has already turned back to his work, his face arranged into the same careful, unremarkable neutrality I am fighting to hold onto myself, and I understand, watching him lift another crate without so much as a glance back in my direction, that he has learned exactly the same discipline I have, in exactly the same brutal school of necessity. We do not look at each other again. We collect the ink. We walk back toward the Hall with Marisol chattering about some minor rivalry between two senior Matchers, and I answer her at what I hope are the right intervals, and the entire time, some part of my chest that I usually keep carefully locked away sits wide open and raw, aching with the specific, useless grief of having been so close to him and unable to so much as say his name.

It is nearly an hour before I trust my own composure enough to fully exhale.

That night, lying awake in the dormitory long after my roommates' breathing has gone slow and even, I understand something I hadn't fully let myself understand before: that the cruelty of this arrangement isn't only the big, dramatic dangers — the grey coats, the citations, the folklore of the quarry. It's this. The small, grinding, daily cost of loving someone you're not allowed to look at properly in a public street. The particular loneliness of being twenty feet from the person who knows you best in the entire world and having to perform, convincingly, the exact blankness of a stranger.

I think of my mother, folding my shirts into a travel case, saying you look like someone who said goodbye to something last night — and I understand, with a clarity that keeps me awake long past when exhaustion should have claimed me, that the goodbye I said that night wasn't a single event. It's this. It's every day, over and over, a hundred small goodbyes disguised as ordinary composure, and I don't yet know how many more of them I have the strength to keep performing before something in me cracks in a way I can't hide from a Matcher's hands.

A letter finds its way to me eight days later, folded inside the spine of an ink ledger left, with deliberate casualness, on the counter of the very supplier we visited — I understand, reading it, that Theo must have guessed I'd be sent back eventually, and simply waited, with the same patient, practiced hope we've both learned to live inside.

Twenty feet was the hardest twenty feet of my entire life. I wanted to cross it so badly my hands shook for an hour after. I know we can't. I know what it would cost both of us if we did. But I need you to know that not looking at you properly was the loneliest thing I have ever done, and I would still do it again tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until you're free of that place, because the alternative is losing you to a mistake instead of to time, and I would rather lose an hour of your face than lose you entirely. Tell me you're eating. Tell me you're sleeping, even if it's a lie, because I need something to hold onto that isn't true and isn't fear. Always you. Always, even from twenty feet, even from a whole city away.

I read it in the reading room's outer alcove during my next supervised errand, my back to the room, my face schooled into the careful blankness I have gotten disturbingly good at, and I do not cry, though it costs me something considerable not to. I write back that same evening, on a scrap of paper I burn the moment I've copied it clean, telling him about the dormitory, about Marisol's dry humor, about the strange comfort of falling asleep to the sound of other people breathing in the dark, all the small ordinary details I know he's starving for as much as I'm starving for his. I do not tell him about the baseline reading, about the twenty seconds, about Vane's careful, watchful attention. Some fears, I have decided, are mine to carry alone, at least until I understand them well enough to carry them without frightening him more than the distance already does.

Marisol corners me three days after the loading yard, in the narrow gap between two shelves in the outer Archive, where we've been sent together to refile a stack of decade-old correspondence.

"You're allowed to tell me it's none of my business," she says, without preamble, sliding a bound ledger back into place with more care than the task strictly requires. "But you looked at that dock worker like he was the only solid thing in a room full of smoke, and I've been in this building three weeks longer than you, and I know exactly what that particular look costs a person in here, because I've seen it get someone dismissed before."

My whole body goes cold and still at once. "I don't know what you mean."

"I'm not going to say anything," she says, before I can finish the sentence, holding my gaze steadily, and there's something in her expression that isn't threat at all — something closer, unexpectedly, to solidarity. "I've got my own reasons for being careful in this building, Wren. I'm not interested in making anyone else's careful harder than it already is." She turns back to the shelf, sliding another ledger into place, and adds, almost too quietly to catch, "Just — be more careful than you were in that loading yard. Instructor Perrin misses very little. And I don't think I'm the only one who noticed."

I don't sleep well that night either, turning her words over and over — I don't think I'm the only one who noticed — until they've worn a groove into my thoughts as deep as any Matcher's rehearsed question. I think of the grey coat outside the reading room. I think of Vane's careful pause about my twenty-second reading. I think of a file somewhere in this vast building that might already hold more about me than I've allowed myself to imagine, and I understand, lying awake in the dark with three strangers breathing steadily around me, that the twenty feet of distance I kept in that loading yard may not have been nearly enough distance at all.