Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee

Rae stays near the door, looking at the commercial projection open on the table.

Dean is the first to lose patience.

"If you came to interrupt another meeting without so much as knocking, I assume you have a better reason than curiosity."

Rae adjusts his glasses and enters the observatory with a calm so complete it seems to treat closed doors as a mere recommendation.

"Curiosity would be an acceptable reason. You rarely receive anyone here without trying to frighten them in the first five minutes, and Sands looks intact."

"Rae."

"I also see you’re talking about Silver Fang. A hundred thousand units in thirty days... that explains some conversations I’ve overheard these last few days."

Dean looks at me, and his look says everything. I close the projection with a wave of my hand.

"The negotiation doesn’t concern you," Dean says.

"Naturally. That’s why I was trying not to read it as I crossed the room."

Rae keeps walking, in no hurry at all. I already know him well enough to see that the delay is deliberate. There’s something he actually wants to say. If it were only about me, he’d have used the moment he came in.

And it seems Dean also notices Rae is buying time.

"Say what you came to say or leave."

Rae stops on the other side of the telescope and sets the documents he’s carrying on a side table.

"I heard you were here and came to speak with Sands. But, given the situation, part of the reason involves you too."

Dean’s irritation gives way to attention.

"What situation?"

Rae spends a few seconds looking at him. He’s enjoying this. Dean knows it too, and the hatred building in his expression says as much.

"You’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince everyone you know your pupil better than she knows herself. It might be worth paying attention when she does something that wasn’t in your plans."

Dean leaves the desk.

"What happened to Freya?"

The tone shifts.

Rae drops part of the provocation too.

"One of my informants saw her leaving the dorms a little while ago. She was carrying field gear, provisions, and baggage for several days. Another confirmed she headed toward the external transport sector."

Dean is already walking to the door.

"Where did she go?"

"By the available records, she didn’t board the ordinary lines."

Dean stops.

Rae finishes:

"But a porter saw her asking about the routes to the trenches."

The observatory seems to shrink around me.

Freya said goodbye to me not long ago. She smiled, thanked me, and headed for the dorms. Somewhere between the plaza and her room, she decided to pack her bags and leave.

My first reaction is to look for Dean in that decision.

The second is worse.

Maybe it’s me.

I told her the future. I said she would become a hero in the trenches, that she would reach a power few Divers ever touch, and that in the end she would die there. Freya is still looking for explanations for what I know, but the Low Tide Grove broke part of the security she found in those explanations.

She might be trying to answer the only way that still feels like hers.

Making the decision before the future decides for her.

The image of a carriage comes to mind. Freya was handed a road she didn’t know, and now she’s trying to grab the reins before she even knows where the turns are.

It’s exactly the kind of thing she would do.

Dean gathers a few objects from the table and opens an interface.

"When was she seen?"

"Not long before I came up. Maybe forty minutes."

"Was she alone?"

"As far as I know, yes."

Dean closes the screen and looks at me.

The negotiation has left his mind entirely.

"Sands, we’ll have to continue our conversation later. I need to deal with this."

I know I shouldn’t speak.

I speak anyway.

"I told you. She doesn’t mind staying. She just wants to be able to choose when to leave."

Dean stops by the door.

The look he throws over his shoulder would have put most cadets back in their seats.

Even so, he adds nothing. He knows I’m right.

Then he leaves.

I wait only until the door starts to close, then get up too.

The trenches are too soon for her.

Freya has Rank C, combat experience, and a talent that already outstrips most students in that Academy, but the place she’s heading to has rules no hunting field teaches. Getting strong doesn’t prepare someone for people who watch routes for weeks, groups that sell travelers’ information, and enemies who don’t appear in front of you holding a weapon.

Rank C is enough to start, but wisdom and cunning she doesn’t have yet.

And Dean has been piling up enemies for years.

As long as Freya stays inside the Academy, attacking his pupil means crossing an entire institution in a civilized city. In the trenches, it’s enough to find out where she sleeps.

I start toward the door.

A hand catches my forearm.

I look at Rae.

"Let go."

"I need two minutes."

"I don’t have two minutes right now."

He doesn’t grip hard, but he doesn’t let go either.

"Dean will mobilize half the contacts he has the moment he goes down these stairs. You running after him won’t make the teams move any faster."

"He won’t find her."

Rae tilts his head slightly.

"Does that confidence have anything to do with the strange information you seem to have about Freya?"

I pull my arm back, and this time he lets go.

"If you want to talk about that, you picked a bad time."

I’ve already reached the door when Rae speaks again.

"Rank C."

I stop out of irritation, not interest.

Rae has set the provocation aside. His eyes travel over me with sharper attention, as if confirming a suspicion that surfaced when he came in.

"You advanced today."

"A few hours ago. Now you know. I have to go."

"And you entered the Hadal Ranking before reaching Reef. Silver Fang showed up right after. Rahul Sharma is still interested in you and, by the look of it, you’ve just sat down with Dean to negotiate as an equal where it counts."

"Master Instructor Rae... I need—"

"I’ll give you a Rank S Water Strand."

My hand stays on the handle.

He got what he wanted. I hesitate for a moment and turn.

Rae isn’t smiling.

"Consider it a gesture of good faith."

For a few seconds, Freya slips from my mind.

A Rank S Water Strand isn’t the kind of item someone finds in a shop after saving up Scales. Even wealthy people need contacts, territory, deals, and luck to get their hands on one. A single Strand of that class can sustain rain over an entire region for hours and transform the life of whoever controls access to it.

I think of District 4.

My mother checking the stock before deciding what to cook. Lili, older, listening to conversations no child should have to understand. How many times a purchase had to wait because something else came first. How many days of peace could exist when water stopped being a sum done every morning.

A Rank S Water Strand would change that, even if only for a while.

For a time, my family could live without calculating the next day before the current one ended.

I look at Rae.

"What do you want in return?"

"Today? Nothing."

"You never do anything for nothing."

"I said good faith, Sands. Not charity."

He steps closer, leaving a comfortable distance between us.

"My relationship with Dean isn’t going to improve. Your position inside this Academy, on the other hand, is changing fast. I don’t need you to pick a side now, and it would be worthless if I tried to wring a promise out of you while your friend is running for the trenches. I just want you to remember who decided to invest before he needed to ask for anything."

That makes more sense.

Rae buys relationships early. He’d done it with me before, when I was worth much less. Now he’s willing to pay a price that can’t be measured in Scales alone.

I walk to Dean’s desk, take a piece of paper and an ink pen beside it, and write the number of my postal ID for private messages. It was a contact I rarely gave to anyone in Thirstfall. Until now, only Richard had it.

I share only that piece of data.

"Send it to my inbox."

Rae takes the information and reads the number.

"I expected you to negotiate."

"You called it good faith. If there’s a hidden contract, you chose the wrong name. When you want something from me, come and ask."

A small smile appears on his face.

"Fair."

I set the pen back in its place.

"Are you finished now?"

"For the moment. I imagine asking where you’re going would only waste another few seconds."

"Yes."

I leave the observatory before he finds another subject.

I go down through the library at a pace that makes some students step out of my way. By the second floor, I’ve already run through the Academy’s external routes. Dean is probably calling up guards, commercial contacts, stations, gates, and any informant who owes him favors.

He’ll search records.

Rae will search people. Dean owing him a favor is exactly what he needs most.

Both of them will start from the Freya they know today.

I know a different one.

The woman who would one day cross the trenches until she became a name known beyond her own district didn’t begin her story at the great posts, or on the more protected routes where Dean would probably send people to look.

There was a smaller place, away from the obvious accesses, that Camille mentioned to the authorities on that fateful day, giving it an importance that only made sense to someone who knew Freya’s future.

That was where she learned to live without anyone telling her which road to take.

If today’s Freya heard her own future and decided to take control of it, I know which place would feel right to start.

It unsettles me more than any Rank C creature we faced that afternoon. I’d spent days thinking about how to prove my memories were real without turning her life into a sequence of decisions dictated by what I knew.

The proof comes early, and I didn’t choose the conditions.

Dean can search every exit from the Academy. Rae can spread informants along the trench routes. Neither of them has the information guiding Freya right now.

I know where she’s going.

And in all of Thirstfall, no one but me would have a reason to look in that place.

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