Troy found him at the bad coffee cart, which had become their office.
"I have a weird one for you," Troy said, and sat down without ordering, which meant it was real.
"How weird?"
"Theology weird."
"I’m going to need the coffee for that."
◆◆◆◆
"My family reads a lot of old material," Troy said. "Hero-line stuff. Summoning doctrine. Boring, mostly, but I grew up with it in the walls."
"And?"
"And I’ve been thinking about your evaluation. C to B, no asterisk, class of one. The board couldn’t score you." He turned his cup. "So I went looking for what you actually are, in the old texts. Where a person like you comes from."
"A person like me."
"An outside candidate. Someone the world didn’t grow. Someone it got handed."
Soren kept his face on the coffee. "That’s a strange thing to research about a classmate."
"You’re a strange thing to have as a classmate."
"Here’s the part I can’t get past," Troy said. "The doctrine’s clear on one thing. You can’t summon an outside soul into this world on its own. The world won’t hold it. It’s foreign, it doesn’t have a root, it slides off."
"Okay."
"Unless something on this side holds the door. An anchor. A native power big enough to pin the foreign soul in place while it takes." Troy looked at him. "The texts are very specific. No anchor, no summoning. Every outside candidate in every record had one. A god opened the door and kept it open."
Soren drank his coffee.
He’d never once, in a year, asked how he got here.
He’d asked why him. He’d asked what for.
He’d built a whole count around who was moving him now.
He had somehow never turned around and asked the first question, the door question, the one Troy had just walked up and set on the table between two cups of terrible coffee.
Who opened the door.
Who held it while the world tried to spit him out.
"You’ve gone quiet," Troy said.
"I’m thinking."
"That’s the quiet I meant."
"How solid is the doctrine," Soren said. "On the anchor. Is it real mechanics or old-book poetry?"
"My family doesn’t keep poetry. It keeps liabilities." Troy shrugged. "If the doctrine’s wrong, a lot of very careful people have been careful about nothing for a long time. I’d bet on the doctrine."
"So there’s a god behind me."
"There’s a god behind you. There’s no version where there isn’t." Troy watched him. "That’s not the part bothering you, though. You already knew there was a voice. I can see it on you."
"You can’t see anything on me."
"I couldn’t, first year. You were a locked room." Troy almost smiled. "You got a little more readable once you decided you’d already won. That’s the tell. Winners get sloppy about their faces."
"Noted. I’ll relock."
"Too late. I’ve seen the inside now."
◆◆◆◆
Soren went back, in his head, to the first thing.
The summoning room. The circle.
Opening his eyes into a stranger’s body on a cold stone floor. And before the eyes, before the body, the thing he’d carried a year without examining because you don’t examine the sound of your own arrival.
The voice.
There’d been a voice. In the dark past the circle. Warm and vast and aware of him, the one that had reached into a foreign soul and held it down until it rooted.
The same voice, in the register he couldn’t place, that had said one word in a dream on the last night of first year.
Soon.
He set the coffee down very carefully.
"Kane."
Troy was watching him now, and there was no triumph in it, which was the whole difference between this Troy and the one from first year.
"I’m not building a case. I’m not reporting anything. There’s nobody to report to anymore, and I’m past wanting to."
"I know."
"I’m asking as the one other person who read the same book you did and ended up in it."
Troy leaned back.
"You know everything about this world. You’ve known every trap in it since day one. So answer me one thing you should’ve asked yourself a year ago."
Soren already knew the question.
He let Troy ask it anyway.
"Who anchored you?" Troy said.
"Some god opened the door for you and held it. That’s not optional, that’s mechanics. Every outside soul has one."
He spread his hands.
"So who’s yours? Who’s the god standing behind you that you’ve never once mentioned?"
Soren did not answer, because the answer had a shape now and the shape was standing in his room in the darkest corner every night with red eyes open, and he was not going to say it out loud at a coffee cart before he’d checked it twice.
"I don’t know," he said, which was true, technically, because knowing and confirming were different columns.
Troy studied him.
"You do, though," Troy said. "You’ve got that look. The one you had in the tournament right before you did the thing nobody saw coming."
"I have a suspicion. Not a confirmation."
"What’s the difference to a guy like you?"
"About one conversation." Soren picked the coffee back up. "And I’m not having it at a coffee cart."
Troy let it go, which was the other new thing about him.
They drank in silence, and the campus moved past them, second-years now, both of them, on the far side of a year that had rewritten the entire board.
"For what it’s worth," Troy said, standing to go, "whoever your anchor is, they wanted you here badly. Anchoring’s expensive. The texts say it costs the god something enormous. Nobody holds a door like that for a stranger."
He dropped a coin on the cart for the coffee.
"They only do it for someone they’ve already decided they can’t live without."
He walked off.
Soren sat with the two empty cups and the sentence Troy had left on the table.
Nobody holds a door like that for a stranger.
He thought about a wolf who’d found him in a dream before he’d ever entered the classroom.
’I found you. I finally found you, master. I’ve been waiting for you a very long time.’
He’d read that, on night one, as a bond forming.
He was starting to think he’d read it wrong.
Not a bond forming.
A door being held.
He got up, left the cups, and walked back toward the housing block where the darkest corner of his room was waiting with its red eyes and its year of sentences that arrived a half-step ahead of his thoughts.
He ran it on the walk.
He had exactly one bond that predated everything.
One that found him in a dream before the classroom. One that had, on night one, at 100% compatibility, made the system say out loud that a thing had happened which should not have been possible.
The count had never liked that reading. Compatibility that high wasn’t found.
It was built.
He wasn’t going to ask her tonight.
He had a suspicion, not a confirmation, and the two lived in different columns, and a man who counts does not collapse them on a hunch and a coffee-cart theology lesson.
But the question was ripe now. He could feel it. It had a door in it, and a voice, and a word, and one more push would open all three at once.
Soon, said the dream, from its shelf.
For once, Soren agreed with it.