The classification request ca 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 sowhere 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 tars in the Western Territories.
It took a person and broke them into their attachnts, then put each attachnt in one of two columns.
Asset, aning a thing that made the subject useful and therefore worth keeping aid.
Risk, aning 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 sa 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 ti.
"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 co 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. Recomnd resolution of designation prior to assessnt."
Here was what that ant.
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 chanic the Heart knew how to bound.
The Council couldn’t classify what the system couldn’t asure.
So they were going to make him resolve it.
Recomnd resolution of designation prior to assessnt.
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 ant 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 unasured, and they would force it to beco asured, and the forcing was the attack.
"They want a number on ." 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 sobody chose with no beast attached."
"Nobody knows."
"You saw the question mark sa 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 in the risk column."
Selah’s frost reached the leg of the cot and started up it.
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 unasured. The system asures. It does not prescribe. No ceiling can be reported for a bond the frawork did not build.]
He read the last line three tis.
No ceiling can be reported for a bond the frawork 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 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 forever. You sure you want to be the one holding that pen instead of them?"
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