Chapter 104: The System Left Her Ceiling Blank And They Were Going To Force One

The classification request came on academy letterhead with a Council seal pressed into the bottom corner, and Joan stole it to read it to Soren standing in the doorway of the shared room.

"They’re itemizing you," she said.

"I know."

She held the page where the hall light hit it. "I filled out forms like this for nine years."

The wolf was under the bed.

Selah was on the cot edge with her boots off and frost on the floor in a thin ring. Mona was somewhere in the wall, audible, a small digging sound.

Joan started reading.

It was a Subject Asset and Risk Classification, which Soren knew from the novel forum.

Asset and Risk.

The Bureau used it on fused tamers in the Western Territories.

It took a person and broke them into their attachments, then put each attachment in one of two columns.

Asset, meaning a thing that made the subject useful and therefore worth keeping aimed.

Risk, meaning a thing that made the subject vulnerable and therefore worth pulling.

The genius of it, the part Soren had hated reading on a couch on Earth, was that the same bond went in both columns depending on who held the pen.

A wolf that fights for you is an asset.

A wolf you’d die to protect is a risk.

Joan read his pack down the form one line at a time.

"Primordial linkage, designation Yara slash Grimm. Logged asset, combat. Logged risk, leverage."

She didn’t look up.

"They’ve got the highest number on her. Ninety-one. They put the highest number in the risk column."

"Of course they did."

"Bridge linkage, Selah Young, eighty-four. Asset and risk." Her finger went down.

"Standard linkage, Maren, eighty-two. Asset and risk. Indirect linkage, Dani Sloan, thirty-eight, flagged cross-class, jurisdiction unclear, hold for review."

Selah’s ring of frost widened a finger’s width on the floor.

"They don’t get to put us in columns," Maren said from the doorway, where she’d come up behind Joan without anybody hearing, ears back.

"They already did," Joan said. "I’m reading you the columns."

◆◆◆◆

He let her finish because stopping her wouldn’t unwrite it.

The page existed.

The only useful thing now was to know exactly which math they’d done.

Mona’s line was on it.

Logged as a homing linkage, terrain, with a second notation he made Joan read twice: signature anomaly, see Council monitor field log.

There it was.

The notebook three rows up fed this form.

The cold patch had a column here now, in writing he could read, on letterhead, asset-and-risk like everything else, except the risk box for Mona had a question mark in it instead of a word, because nobody upstairs could read the cold patch either.

He almost smiled at that.

They’d put a question mark in their own form.

The unreadable thing was unreadable to them too.

Then Joan got to the last line and stopped.

"What?" he asked.

"Elective linkage." She turned the page so the hall light caught it.

"Subject Joan Sawyer. No beast vector. No bond signature. Cap undesignated."

"Flag for review. Undesignated linkages cannot be classified asset or risk. Recommend resolution of designation prior to assessment."

Here was what that meant.

Every other bond had a number.

A number is a thing you can put in a column, weigh, threaten, pull.

The Council hated his pack but they understood it, line by line, asset and risk, because the Heart had given every linkage a value and a value is a handle.

Joan didn’t have a value.

The Heart had drawn her a line by hand when she walked in by choice, no beast, no vector, cap a question mark, designation pending.

The system itself had left her ceiling blank because an elective linkage, a bond made of pure decision, didn’t have a mechanic the Heart knew how to bound.

The Council couldn’t classify what the system couldn’t measure.

So they were going to make him resolve it.

Recommend resolution of designation prior to assessment.

They wanted the question mark turned into a number before they’d file the rest of the form, because an undesignated linkage in the middle of his pack was a hole in their map.

Which meant Joan’s bond, the one with no handle, the one nobody could weigh, was now the single most dangerous thing in the room.

Not because it was weak.

Because it was unmeasured, and they would force it to become measured, and the forcing was the attack.

"They want a number on me." Joan folded the page along its old crease.

"And the only way to get one is to define what an elective linkage even is. What’s the ceiling on a thing somebody chose with no beast attached."

"Nobody knows."

"You saw the question mark same as I did."

She finally stepped into the room.

"So they’ll define it for us if we don’t define it first. And whatever number they pick, they’ll pick the one that puts me in the risk column."

Selah’s frost reached the leg of the cot and started up it. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

The wolf under the bed had gone very still.

[DING! — Classification request acknowledged. Six linkages returned valid asset/risk values. One linkage returned NULL. Elective linkage (designation: Joan Sawyer) remains unmeasured. The system measures. It does not prescribe. No ceiling can be reported for a bond the framework did not build.]

He read the last line three times.

No ceiling can be reported for a bond the framework did not build.

The Heart was telling him, in its flat after-the-fact way, that it had no idea what Joan was worth, and it wasn’t going to invent one.

Which left the inventing to him or to the Council.

"Don’t answer it," Maren said. "Just don’t fill it out."

"If we don’t fill it out, they fill it out," Joan said. "That’s the whole trap."

Soren looked at the folded page in her hand.

"Give me the form," he said.

Joan didn’t give him the form.

"Soren."

She held it against her chest, where the crease was.

"Whatever you write in that box, it’s a number on me forever. You sure you want to be the one holding that pen instead of them?"