Farren Dast brought the calibration records eleven days after their dining hall conversation, which was twelve days faster than Kael had expected.
This revised his assessment of Farren upward by a measurable degree. Urgency implied genuine intellectual investment. Genuine intellectual investment, in Kael's experience, was the most valuable of all personality features.
They met in the library — neutral ground, chosen by Farren, which was itself a social signal that he'd processed the dining hall exchange and made an adjustment. He brought the two B-Rank flankers out of habit but positioned them at the entrance rather than at the table, which was another adjustment.
Seris appeared from behind a bookshelf three minutes after they sat down and took a chair at the adjacent table without being invited. Neither Kael nor Farren said anything about this.
The records were a leather-bound ledger, hand-copied from the original in the restricted archive, filled with dense rows of numbers: dates, calibration readings, maintenance notes. The sorting orb had been calibrated seven times in its one-hundred-and-thirty-year existence.
Kael read it in silence for nine minutes.
"There," he said, pointing to an entry dated forty years ago. "The artificer noted an anomalous resonance during recalibration — he logged it as instrument noise and corrected for it. But the correction he applied would have shifted the detection ceiling downward by approximately—" he did the calculation in the margin of his own notebook — "twelve percent of the original range."
"Meaning?" Farren asked.
"Meaning the orb was already undershooting its design specs forty years ago, and then someone manually compressed the range further." Kael flipped three pages. "Here — same artificer, five years later, notes that frequency-anomaly students have been 'increasingly rare' since the recalibration. He seems pleased. He interpreted it as the Academy's student quality improving."
Seris made a sound from the adjacent table.
"He was measuring the wrong thing," Kael said. "The students hadn't changed. The orb had. Students who previously would have registered at the upper range were now registering as zero."
The library was quiet. Dust moved in light from the high windows.
"How many?" Farren asked.
"Unknown without the full records. But if this has been running for forty years..." Kael did the math. "Potentially dozens of students over that period who were ranked F or withdrawn from consideration when they actually had the highest-frequency affinities the orb is theoretically capable of detecting."
"If that's true," Farren said slowly, "the Academy has been systematically misranking students for forty years."
"Yes."
"And the faculty would have known — the senior faculty who have been here long enough—"
"Unknown whether they knew the cause. Likely they noticed the pattern." Kael closed the ledger. "Which means either it's been an honest error sustained by institutional inertia, or it's not an honest error."
The three of them sat with this.
"You're suggesting the Academy might be deliberately suppressing certain affinity types," Seris said.
"I'm suggesting it's a possibility that should be investigated." Kael slid the ledger back to Farren. "Thank you for this. It confirms the theoretical derivation."
Farren was quiet for a moment. In his expression, a familiar sequence: the bright, slightly uncomfortable look of someone recalibrating expectations.
"Your own ranking," he said. "The F. You think—"
"I think my natural frequency falls outside the current detection range, yes," Kael said evenly.
"What element would that be?"
"Not one of the seven." He picked up his pen. "Something older."
He went back to writing. The conversation, for him, was complete.
Farren sat across from him for another moment, then began reading the ledger more carefully. Not because he was asked. Because he was, underneath the gold-bordered badge and the entitlement, actually curious.
Seris caught Kael's eye across the gap between their tables. He gave the smallest nod.
She gave no nod back, but she stayed.
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