Chương 14: The Mask

Earth's most powerful individuals rarely stay. They choose to leave - out of something closer to reverence than just ambition. A single serious conflict between high-grade individuals can erase entire ecosystems. Those who understand this, leave. Those who don't, are reminded. - From the memoirs of Chizda Leeman, 15th Principal of the Progenitor's Faction"Any belongings you need to collect before we begin?" Kara shook his head, even as he was led to a different room which looked like a dressing room.

Everything he had was on his person or in the bag, which was either a practical advantage or a comment on the last three years, depending on how you looked at it. Narak accepted this without remark.

"You've arrived a week into the new session. The first week is orientation, so you haven't missed anything substantive." He paused.

"Fortunate timing." One more point in Pranky's favour, Kara thought. Still trailing by several thousand, but the gap was theoretically closeable. Narak was looking at his interface with the faraway expression of someone navigating menus rather than the room. After a moment, a transfer request appeared on Kara's interface - map of the University, course books, syllabus, room key, access to the University store. He accepted it.

"I'll send across a thousand credits as a joining bonus. It won't last long, but there are plenty of ways to earn here. The only way to rise in this institution is through merit - that applies to resources as well." He said it without apology, which Kara appreciated more than softening would have been.

"One last thing before we get to the rules. Adam, whom you met earlier, heads the disciplinary committee." Kara absorbed this.

"What if someone deliberately provokes me?"

"Then it becomes your word against theirs, which is never easy to adjudicate." Narak held up a hand before Kara could respond to that.

"However - your concern about bias is addressed by a system that predates this administration. Every student here is issued a mask. That mask is your identity within the University. You choose an alias. You are known by that alias, not your name, not your face. The mask is linked to your interface and opens only at your command. Forced removal is recorded and punished severely. Unless you choose to reveal yourself to someone, they will not know who you are." Kara was quiet for a moment, turning this over.

"That's where Ghilim came from," he said, not quite to Narak. Narak said nothing, which was confirmation enough. He turned the question of an alias over for a while and kept coming back to Kara. It was a moniker his family had given him young, one that had never made it onto any record. A few people outside the family had known him by it growing up, but his circumstances had scattered them, and none had stuck around. There was no one left who would hear the name and remember the boy attached to it.

A depressing thought, but also a useful one at the moment. The only people who still knew him as Kara were the exact ones he wanted to be found by. The remaining resistance Kara had been carrying since he pressed the notification settled and released. He could move through this place without his name preceding him. He could search without advertising what he was searching for. He was used to being a loner; in a University full of masked aliases, a loner was unremarkable by definition.

"Your counsellor would be the one exception," Narak continued.

"One person who knows the face behind the mask, bound by the same confidentiality as the system itself. Given your circumstances, I imagine there are very few people here you would currently trust with that." He let the observation sit for a moment.

"Am I free to assume you'd be willing to extend that trust to me?" It was framed as a question. Kara considered it as one. Narak had moved quickly today, and he had moved with preparation - the ocean floor, the breadcrumbs about the dungeon cohort, the offer timed exactly so. That was calculation. But the calculation had also, at each step, pointed Kara toward something real rather than away from it. He nodded. Narak seemed, briefly, relieved.

"Good. Now - the mask. You can choose from the store or design your own. Imagine it, feed it to your interface, send it through. The store runs a uniqueness check and produces it." Kara opened the store. There were options that drew him - one with an elephant motif, another with wings along the sides - and the pull of both told him what he wanted before he had consciously decided. He closed the store and opened the design interface instead. He started with the stripes.

Deep orange and sharp black, the pattern he had memorised over three years of watching Tremble settle into corners with her usual serene grace. He had never been able to decide whether he found her intimidating or reassuring, and had eventually concluded the answer was both, and that this was probably the point. He laid the stripes across the mask's background and looked at them for a moment.

Then Bodo's tusks - curving up from the midpoint of the mask, broad at the base, tapering to a slight outward jut below the chin. He had spent three years next to something that weighed more than most buildings and moved with more gentleness than most people. The tusks belonged on this mask the way Bodo had belonged on that island - present, structural, impossible to imagine the place without. Kite's wings last.

Blue and deep yellow, spreading from the sides of the mask to cover the ears, the tips meeting at the back. He added them and looked at the whole thing for a moment on his interface display before sending it through. He was not adding anything for Pranky. This was a firm decision and he stood by it completely.

He was also not adding anything for his parents or his brother, which was a different kind of absence - protection rather than defiance, the acknowledgment that a connection displayed was a connection that could be used. He looked at the finished design for one more moment, then sent it to the store. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. The uniqueness check cleared. The order was placed. He told Narak, who looked at the door with calm expectation.

There was no reasonable way a physical item could be delivered in less than a minute. There was a knock on the door approximately forty-five seconds later. A drone entered, delivered the mask with the seriousness of something that understood the assignment, and left. Kara felt the slight settling sensation of his Fluid State skill absorbing the surprise before it could register as surprise, and felt a complicated mix of gratitude and mild exasperation at his own trait.

Narak was watching him closely, turning over something he had observed and could not yet explain.

"Remarkable composure. Is it a skill?" He raised a hand immediately.

"Don't answer that. Thinking aloud." He crossed to Kara.

"Here - let me help with the fitting." He didn't need the help, but he accepted it. The mask settled against his face with a solidity that felt less like wearing something and more like completing a circuit. He followed Narak to the mirror and looked. The stripes. The tusks. The wings covering his ears, their tips meeting behind his head. And his own expression moving underneath all of it, the mask rendering it without flattening it - he raised an eyebrow and the mask raised it with him.

He stared at this for longer than was probably dignified.

"The pattern looks familiar," Narak said, almost to himself, frowning at the reflection.

"I can't place it." He let it go.

"You're ready. Down the hall to the far end, last door on the right, stairs to the ground floor. We'll find occasions to check in. Stay out of trouble and have a good time."

"Thank you, Mr. Tamba. I'll try not to make you regret it." Narak smiled at that - something real in it, as well as something that looked faintly like concern, which Kara suspected was directed less at his behaviour and more at what was waiting for him. He didn't ask about it. He had enough for now. He left. Narak stood in the dressing room for a while after the boy had gone, thinking about what he had just done. It was a gamble, as most significant decisions were.

The boy carried an epic skill and a unique skill and a name that University 11 had recently attached an enormous amount of negative attention to, and Narak had just made himself personally responsible for him, in a council where the majority of members had political reasons to be hostile to anything associated with that name. He had done this knowingly.

He had done this because the alternatives were worse - handing the boy to another institution, or leaving him unprotected in one that had already demonstrated its appetite for convenient narratives. He was also, if he was being honest, growing quite fond of him even in the little time since they had met.

Humble in a way that was not performance - he had seen the boy register the University's scale and be visibly affected by it, and then two minutes later climb the appendages as though he had been doing exactly this for years, in a place that made these structures seem modest. That combination did not come by very often. The mask had been interesting. The design was not random - there was something in it that nagged at him, the way a misplaced reference nagged, just outside the reach of context.

He would think about it later. He was moving toward the door when the knock came. His secretary had a pattern he recognised, three short and then a pause. This was single and even, a knock that simply observed etiquette and carried no doubt about being received. He opened it and went very still. He had seen her once before.

Three years ago, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, when he had been summoned without explanation along with every other Area Council Head, to witness something that had taken him several weeks to fully process. Droban - the legendary Droban, peak S-grade, a name that appeared in recent history with a frequency that bordered on mythology - being dressed down by a woman none of them had recognised. That day, Narak had learned that the grade ladder extended further than S, and that the extension was not theoretical.

She was tall, lithe, in a bodysuit so dark it felt like staring into the abyss. Where her skin was visible, it shifted colour depending on the angle. Her hair was cut short. She had no aura, which at her level meant the aura had folded back into itself and become something else, something that didn't announce itself because it didn't need to. The Earth Overseer. Narak became extremely aware of the fact that he was standing in a dressing room.

"Welcome, Esteemed Overseer. Please - sit. Allow me to arrange refreshments-" She raised one hand and he stopped. She let her gaze travel around the room, slow and searching, then moved inside and seated herself on one of the couches as if she had been there before and found it acceptable enough. He activated his calming skill before he said anything else, because without it he was not confident in the words that would come out.

"To what do I owe the pleasure, my Lady?"

"You did well," she said. Three words, delivered without elaboration or warmth, as a simple statement of fact. He processed them, trying his best to figure out what she meant, and then it struck him - the mask pattern. The stripes. The tusks. The wings. He had been trying to place it as an aesthetic reference and it wasn't that at all. He understood, suddenly and completely, that the boy had not chosen that design from imagination.

"He is an extraordinary young man," Narak said carefully.

"What happened with his brother is regrettable. I intend to pursue the truth of that matter, and to ensure that no harm comes to the boy in the meantime."

"There is no need for that." Her voice was level and certain.

"Protecting him from challenges will only limit him. He will face his path. If he is injured along it, it was meant to be. If he dies, he was not equal to it." She held Narak's eyes, making sure he understood.

"Do not coddle him. His brother's situation is his to resolve or not. What I ask of you is that he not be harmed or unreasonably impeded by those he could not reasonably be expected to handle at his level. Beyond that, stay out of his way." She gave him one more look, a final check that the message had landed, and left. Narak stood where he was. The silence in the dressing room was very loud.

He thought about what she had said - the cold precision of it, the complete absence of sentiment about injury or death, the narrowness of what she was actually asking of him. Something basic. Simply the removal of unfair obstacles outside of the boy's control, and otherwise: nothing. Let him find his own way. He thought about what that implied about what the boy was capable of, in someone's estimation.

He thought about the political cover that a single visit from the Earth Overseer had just quietly extended over him. Earlier he wasn't too sure if he could go against Adam and the rest of the Council Members by himself considering that most of them had the backing of the factions while he did not. But now… He could now see why even the mighty Task Force had backed off. He wouldn't have to fear going up against anyone, probably in the entire Universe. He started laughing.

It came out strange - too high, slightly uneven, pressure escaping past the point of any dignified exit. He sat down on the couch where the Overseer had been sitting and laughed until the strangeness passed through and left something cleaner behind. Relief, mostly. Relief at the political cover. Relief at having made the right gamble without knowing the full odds.