Chapter 2 — Three Years of Straight F's
Dr. Krell arrived the way Dr. Krell arrived everywhere: like the building had personally disappointed him.
He was a tall, dry man with spectacles he didn't need and opinions he couldn't stop, and he had been the settlement's academic for thirty years, which in a settlement this size meant he had taught every living soul between the ages of six and sixteen, including Kael.
"Let me see it," Krell said, and Kael pulled his collar aside.
The doctor leaned in. Adjusted his spectacles. Leaned closer. His face did something complicated — the face of a man watching his least favourite subject become his most important one.
"Curse," Krell said.
"Curse," Kael agreed.
"In my settlement."
"In your bathtub, technically."
"In MY---" Krell pinched the bridge of his nose. "Kael Vance. Three years I taught you. Three years of straight F's. I told this settlement you would never amount to anything. I said it at meetings. I said it in WRITING." He jabbed a finger at the brand. "And now you've gone and become the single most significant human being of the last thousand years, out of what — spite?"
"I'd like to think it's spite," Kael said.
"It's not spite. It's a death sentence." Krell's voice dropped, and the room's temperature dropped with it. "The contract survival rate is zero point five percent, boy. Do you understand what that number means? It means out of every two hundred idiots who ever walked into a binding chamber with that brand, a hundred and ninety-nine came out as a memorial service."
"And the two-hundredth?"
"The two-hundredth was four hundred years ago and the records are half-legend."
Kael's mother made a small sound. His father put a hand on her shoulder.
'Right,' Kael thought. 'The scary number. I was really hoping he'd have a different scary number. A newer one. Maybe science had improved.'
"Science hasn't improved," Krell said, reading his face, because three years of F's teach a teacher exactly what a student's face is doing. "The Rite hasn't changed in a millennium. Your soul goes to the Shadowrealm. The beast that branded you decides whether to bind with you or eat you, and historically—" he folded his arms, "—historically, it eats."
The room was quiet.
Then the door opened, and Mira came in.
Mira Krell was the doctor's daughter, seventeen, quiet as snowfall, and the only person in the settlement under sixty that Kael could actually stand. She'd sat behind him in class for three years, slipping him answers he'd been too proud to copy. She had her mother's calm eyes and her father's unfortunate habit of saying exactly what she was thinking.
"I heard," she said. She looked at the brand. Then at Kael. "Are you scared?"
"Terrified," Kael said honestly.
"Good," she said. "You should be."
"Mira." Dr. Krell sighed.
"What? Everyone else is lying to him." She sat down across from Kael, folded her hands, and looked at him the way she used to look at exam questions. "You're going to die on that platform, probably. But probably isn't certainly. Zero point five isn't zero. Somebody walked out once." She tilted her head. "Why not you?"
"Because I'm me?"
"That's the F-student talking," she said. "I always hated him."
And Kael, who had not laughed since the shower, laughed. Once. It hurt. It helped.
---
That evening, Krell laid it out on the kitchen table like a general with bad news.
"The Rite happens at maturity's first full week," he said. "Yours is in seven days. The binding chamber in the woodland is old but functional — I've already sent word to the Gatewardens."
"The Gloomy Guses," Kael's father said, with the particular shudder the nickname carried.
"Gatewardens," Krell corrected, "are the priesthood who operate the rune-circle. They supervise the soul-transfer. They are neutral, ancient, and — yes — deeply depressing to look at. But they are the only reason anyone survives any contract at all."
He turned to Kael.
"Listen to me. For Drab and Talent brands, the Rite is a ceremony. A beast comes, it sniffs your soul, it binds, everyone has cake. For Prime, it's dangerous. For Curse—" he folded his hands. "There is no manual. There is only one piece of advice that has survived from the last Curse-brand account, four hundred years old, and I have spent my entire career hoping it was poetry."
He looked at Kael over his spectacles.
"'Do not bargain with what brands you. Do not run from what brands you. And whatever else you do — do not let it see that you are afraid.'"
Kael waited.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"That's the four-hundred-year-old wisdom? Don't show fear? Dr. Krell, I am afraid of DOGS. I am afraid of the OUTSIDE. I once lost a fight to a goose. A GOOSE, Dr. Krell. Fear is my whole personality!"
"Then," Krell said, standing, gathering his coat, "you have seven days to get a new one."
He left. Mira lingered in the doorway.
"Kael."
"Yeah?"
"The goose had it coming," she said. "Everyone knows that goose is a menace."
Then she was gone too, and Kael sat at the kitchen table with his parents, and the candle burned, and nobody said the thing they were all thinking, which was that seven days was no time at all, and a lifetime.
'Don't let it see that you're afraid,' Kael repeated to himself, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to his mother crying quietly on the other side of the wall.
'Great advice. Fantastic. I'll just become a completely different person by Thursday.'
He slept badly.
Somewhere beyond the sky, in a dead red-clouded wasteland that had not opened its gates to a human soul in a thousand years, something ancient opened one eye.
And smiled.