GATELESS

Chapter 2 - A Place in the Ranks

Chapter Two

A Place in the Ranks

The boy with the pillow looked over his shoulder, as though I might have asked somebody else.

"Me? South of Igalo. Not in it. Everyone asks which street, and then I have to explain there aren't any." He pulled at the cord securing the pillow to his pack. "My uncle repairs wheels. I helped. Mostly I held things while he told me I was holding them wrong."

"What's your name?"

"Oh. Tavin."

He offered his hand. I gave him the left one because my right forefinger had begun to swell. He looked at our hands, changed his, and gripped so firmly that I wondered whether this was part of the examination.

The girl beside him had been reading the board nailed to our post. She was about our age, with dark hair cut just below her ears and one cuff repaired in a different colour. She stood close enough to read the small writing without squinting.

"Three days," she said. "Do we get fed if we fail on the first?"

Tavin let go of me. "I hadn't thought of that."

"I had."

A fourth candidate stood on the other side of the post. He had pale hair, a narrow face and boots that had been cleaned around the seams. He was watching the practice rings rather than us. When someone struck a shield nearby, two fingers moved against his thigh.

"Iven," he said, without being asked. "And they won't starve you."

The girl turned from the board. "That wasn't what I asked."

Beyond them, a clerk was trying to make six people become four. Two men insisted they had been sent to the same post; one held a folded judgement with a red seal and kept offering it as if the paper would settle where his feet belonged. The clerk directed them towards a separate table. Men waiting there wore short lengths of cord around their wrists. Nobody had tied mine.

Tavin noticed me looking.

"Prison transfers," he said quietly. "My uncle said not to leave things lying about."

The girl lifted her sleeve. A cord lay against her wrist.

Tavin opened his mouth. She waited. He closed it again.

"Mara," she said. "You can keep the pillow."

I looked down before she caught me smiling.

A bell rang above the passage. Rask walked into the centre of the yard carrying no paper at all. He waited while two instructors moved the last wandering candidates into place, then began with the people at the back, who had apparently mistaken their distance from him for permission to talk.

We were applicants, he told us. We would remain applicants until told otherwise. We would sleep in the temporary quarters, report at every bell and leave our issued equipment where we were instructed to leave it. Anyone who needed medicine was to say so before collapsing. Anyone who concealed a weapon would go home without it.

A boy near the end of the line put a hand over his belt.

Rask watched him. The hand came away.

"Your groups share work. Your results belong to you. Helping somebody won't erase your failures. Letting somebody carry you won't hide them."

He pointed towards the stores. We moved before he had finished, then stopped because the first group had gone to the wrong door.

I knew the right door. I had carried grain through it yesterday.