The pack treated the notebook like a tournament bracket by the second day.

Maren wanted to know how you beat it.

Selah wanted to know who’d read it.

Hansel, who wasn’t in the pack but shared classes, wanted to know if being on the list got you expelled, because Hansel’s tuition was still a coin flip and he did not need a Council line item with his name near it.

It was Class Z math.

The class had spent the whole tournament learning to count survival in front of a Vasquez who wanted them dissolved, so the class counted everything now as a thing you either won or lost.

Dani sat at the back through all of it and didn’t count it that way.

She was technically cross-enrolled for a credit she didn’t need, an administrative overlap she used to secure a seat that wasn’t hers.

Soren noticed because Dani noticing things was the whole reason she existed on the map.

He’d put her there himself, line by line, a person who logged the room so somebody would know.

She wasn’t logging the room today. She was logging the monitor.

◆◆◆◆

"You’re not worried," he said.

Soren took the seat next to her, which he didn’t usually do, because the monitor was three rows up writing down who sat next to whom and he wanted that on her page.

"I’m worried," Dani said. "I’m not in the bracket."

"There’s no bracket."

"There’s a bracket."

She tipped her head at Maren, at Selah, at the way the two of them had their heads together over the drill schedule plotting something.

"They think Class Z is on the line again, same as the tournament. Dissolve the class, scatter the pack, win or lose..."

"It’s not the same as the tournament."

"But it’s not their class on the line either, not really but they’re going to fight it like it’s the class because it is a thing you can stand in a room and defend."

She had a notebook of her own that was smaller than the monitor’s, from a real student, soft at the corners.

He looked at it.

"You’re keeping a second record," he said.

"Someone tracks the pack," Dani said. "Nobody tracks the one holding the record."

She’d said the line before.

Weeks ago, the day the cold patch wouldn’t take heat and her moth read Mona as a gap.

It had been the day Dani stopped being only the person who recorded and started being a line on the map herself.

Soren remembered the exact shape of it because he’d written her up to two right after.

She was saying it again on purpose. Pointing it at the woman three rows up.

"She tracks us," Dani said. "But who tracks her?"

◆◆◆◆

Here was the thing about Dani that the class kept getting wrong, and that the monitor would get wrong too, which was the only edge they had.

When Vasquez Sr. built the tournament to dissolve Class Z, Dani had a different class and a different floor and a quota that had nothing to do with whether Soren’s people lived or got scattered.

If Class Z dissolved tomorrow, Dani went back to her own roster, kept her own seat and lost nothing the academy could put on a form.

That was the gap the monitor’s notebook would never close, because the monitor was Council and the Council itemized.

The moth understood it before Dani did.

It had moved to Soren’s collar for good a week ago and stayed there, off Dani’s shoulder, and Dani had let it go without a word because the moth going to him wasn’t the moth leaving her.

It was the bridge being the bridge.

Soren felt the bond hum at his throat, thin and steady, /100 now where it used to be /60, and the number was 38 and it had earned every point of that by being a frequency she chose to keep open.

"What’s in the counter-log?" he asked.

Dani turned it so he could see one line.

’She lit the room before she came in like me. I never told anyone I do that.’

He read it twice.

"You light the room before you come in," he said.

"Low. So people clock me without looking up." Dani capped her pen.

"It’s a kindness, you do it so the room knows you’re there and doesn’t have to brace."

"And she does it?"

"She does it out loud." Dani looked mad. "Same trick but she turned it into a threat. I didn’t know you could do that with it."

◆◆◆◆

That was the whole class, for Soren and the way these things worked now.

Not a fight.

Not a ding that moved a number more than a point.

A girl who logged people for kindness, watching a woman log people for leverage, and writing down the difference in a soft-cornered notebook the Council didn’t know existed.

Behavior first, always.

The monitor wrote her leverage in the open, in handwriting Soren couldn’t read, in Council grey at the front of the room.

Dani wrote the counter in the back, small, where nobody upstairs was looking.

[DING! — Indirect linkage stable. Dani Sloan 38/100. Purpose registered: subject has commenced independent observation of the resident Council element. No directive issued.]

No directive issued.

The system was confirming, again, after the fact, that nobody had told Dani to do this.

She’d done it because three rows up a woman was using Dani’s own kindness as a weapon, and Dani Sloan was not going to let that go uncounted.

He didn’t move her number up for it.

The point didn’t earn a point.

Loyalty that’s already chosen doesn’t climb, it just holds.

"Don’t let her see the book," he said.

"She won’t." Dani slid it into her bag, soft corner first.

"I’ve been hiding logs from people with more clearance than her since before you got here."

He looked at her.

"What?" Dani asked.

"Nothing." He stood. The moth came with him, at the collar, because it lived there now. "Keep counting her."

"I was going to anyway."

Three rows up, the monitor wrote something down, longer than her usual stroke.

Soren would have given a lot to know whether the line was about him standing, or Dani sitting, or the soft-cornered notebook she’d already put away.

He couldn’t read the handwriting.

That was going to be the whole problem.