"Whoa, it's already dinner time! I thought maybe five seconds had passed since we started talking, seven at most. Maybe we should have a practice session then? Show me what you've learned here."

  Ortahn looked around his cell helplessly.

  "There are no cubes or stones here," he said, but noticing the look on Esh's face, he hurried to add, "To lift. With my hands."

  "But this is a school of magic..." Esh said with an almost existential sense of grievance.

  "...for men," Ortahn finished for her grimly. "Here they teach history and 'etiquette,' but not technique. Male magic is an instinct, a primitive bang on a pot, as Tulila said. Without language, without theory, and without a system."

  "Because theory is impossible, or because it isn't studied?" Esh asked thoughtfully, but Ortahn heard it not as a question, but as a message. "Or is it simply hidden?" She flipped her notebook to the end and showed her teacher a tangled drawing, riddled with corrections. "A map of the school. We are somewhere here. And here... is the school archive." The girl pointed to some incomprehensible scribbles and asked a silent question with her eyes.

  "It's a pity we won't be allowed to visit it," Ortahn answered with vexation.

  "Only if we ask permission. But if we do everything quietly, no permission will be needed. So why ask?" A deviloidish glint shone in Esh's eyes. The same glint used to visit Viya's eyes.

  Ortahn felt his heart jump in his chest, releasing a mixture of fear and wild curiosity into his body.

  "Your logical arguments won't work on a teacher if we get caught."

  "Think of the limitless possibilities instead of a pathetic 'if.' I've sketched the homunculi's patrol routes; they never change. But just in case," she shook a small pouch on her belt with a cunning smile, "these old metal models have weak joints. If dust gets in there, they'll just stop. It's a good thing I'm a cleaner and I protect my iron friends from such troubles. Well, they don't pay me enough to completely eliminate them. But what can you do? Such is the price of double-saving."

  Ortahn thought for a moment. What was he even doing? Obeying the rules of a system that was uneven to him, or becoming stronger to repay Esh for her presence in his life? Phrased that way, the answer burst into his mind without waiting politely for consideration. The rules were the cage. Knowledge was the key. Which Esh had just handed him.

  They decided to act without delay, under the patronage of their only ally—the night that had crept into The Scar. Taut was waiting for them in the corridor, monotonously rubbing the wall with his own clothes.

  "Taut, you're tired. Go to sleep," Esh commanded in a whisper.

  The man obediently lowered himself to the floor, right where he stood. His eyes remained open, but his gaze was fixed on the void of the ceiling, and his body went limp, ceasing to react to anything.

  "Alright, we won't even try to go to his room tonight. Alright. Next to Ortahn," Esh muttered to herself, memorizing the spot where she had left her porter.

  Ortahn leaned over him, peering into the empty face.

  "What's wrong with him?"

  "I don't know," Esh replied, a weary sadness in her voice. "He was called Number Seventy-Three, but I don't like calling him that. Taut is better. In Zazaran, it means 'Echo.'"

  Ortahn didn't ask whether Taut was an "Echo" because he repeated others, or because he was only a pale reverberation of a person. The guesstimate was enough. Esh pulled Ortahn by the hand, and they moved on through the winding corridors, submerged in a dim, blue twilight.

  "The homunculi," Esh whispered, breaking the oppressive silence. "Tell me about them."

  "During a risky infiltration of a forbidden zone?" Ortahn asked, surprised, but also kept his voice low.

  "Why waste learning time? We're infiltrating with our feet. Your mouth and my ears are free," Esh explained imperturbably.

  "A dangerous woman," Ortahn thought with a mixture of admiration and slight anxiety.

  Arguing instead of giving a lecture made no sense (and walking in silence would only fray his nerves), so he began to whisper, consulting his memory.

  "They are artificially grown living organisms. They go through all stages of development at an accelerated rate, even the all-metal or all-stone ones."

  "I've heard of honey ones. You know, made of honeycomb and honey," Esh put in, checking their journey against her map.

  "From the Ultarr canton? I'm not surprised. I feel like that canton has always been a haven for madwomen."

  "Maybe all the cantons were originally asylums for the mad? And the normal ones stayed on the ground," the girl suggested playfully.

  "Even though homunculi are a fusion of living or non-living matter with residual magic, they are not considered alive. They have no will, not even the most complex ones that are almost indistinguishable from us. They don't learn, don't feel, don't remember."

  Esh bit her lip and said quietly, not taking her eyes off the darkness ahead, "So they don't even know they have no freedom of choice."

  "Yes," Ortahn confirmed dryly.

  "And, despite having creatures for whom obedience is no issue, we still have male cattl—" Esh glanced quickly at Ortahn and looked away. "...human slaves."

  "Yes," Ortahn confirmed, not knowing what else to say. But to keep the conversation from lingering in such a grim state, he continued the lecture. "They are usually made in a humanoid form, but they can be any shape."

  "I collect non-humanoid forms," Esh confessed, patting a pocket that probably held another notebook with her sketched collection. "My favorite is a giant excavator on four legs, with an arm for a head."

  "And mine is the living crossroads on the eastern Rib," Ortahn confessed in return. He didn't collect types of homunculi, but like many, he admired unique specimens.

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  "That's horrifying! I would never set foot on it!" Esh snorted a little louder than her usual whisper.

  "That's all I know about them... Although, no," he suddenly remembered. "They're only called homunculi on Eden. In less traditionalist worlds, they're called synthets or synths. And on Celestra—biodroids. They, like us, also need to stand out."

  Lost in conversation, they didn't notice they had arrived at the archive. Ortahn only realized it was the archive because Esh pointed at it with her hand and said, "This is the archive." Its door looked like a smooth slab without handles or locks. If not for his friend's hint, he would have thought it was just a sealed-up opening in the wall.

  Ortahn ran his palm over the cold surface of the door and concluded, "The lock must be on the inside, and it can only be opened with female magic. In any case, that's the most logical option. So that all sorts of men and non-magesses can't get in here."

  He looked at the southerner, hoping she would notice the heavy irony in his voice, but Esh-Faya was lost in thought. She swore quietly in her own language, but then her eyes lit up again.

  "Then let's go to the storeroom!" she said decisively. "I saw a mag-pick there, just right for our case. We'll borrow it for a bit."

  Ortahn doubted it was really there for their case, but he nodded and followed the girl. The conversation faltered as Esh frowned, studying her map in the dim light. This continued until she turned it significantly and faced her friend with a frightened expression, her lips pressed inward.

  "How? It's your map," Ortahn whispered.

  Esh spun the notebook in her hands, showing its complete unevenness and the pages sticking out in all directions. Indeed, it was impossible to tell at a glance where the true "top" and "bottom" of this chaos were.

  As if to the sound of unheard laughter of failure, two homunculi emerged silently from around the corner. The humans froze, looking at them, and they at the humans. The iron blockheads' eyes flared with an alarming red light.

  "Good job! You've correctly identified the trespassers!" Esh stepped between Ortahn and the homunculi. She didn't manage to cover even 10% of his body, but the school patrol focused their gazes on her and cooled them to orange. "A surprise inspection of your effectiveness tonight," she continued, standing between them and wrapping her arms around their pelvises, where their main nodes were located. "And you girls passed with flying colors."

  The homunculi twitched their upper bodies, but their lower halves remained motionless. They looked at each other and, it seemed to Ortahn, extinguished their eyes with their usual fatalism.

  "That's that." Esh wiped her hands on her skirt and returned the empty dust pouch to her belt. "But you boys should watch out for wear and tear. Get yourselves fixed!" she tossed at her victims as she walked away.

  With the map oriented correctly, they found the storeroom without trouble. Among the many cabinets and piles of junk, Esh found an artifact that looked like a seal, but with an iron disc instead of a stamp. On the way out, she was carelessly tossing the pick, and it flew into the iron wall and got stuck. It seemed eager to open something, even if it was a wall. The pick was willing to slide on metal, but it only came off with Ortahn's effort.

  Soon, the disturbers of the night's peace were once again standing before the archive door. Ortahn began to run the impatient mag-pick over the door; something clicked and creaked in response from within. After several minutes of persistent rubbing, enough to cover an area three times the size of the door, something inside gave way, and the slab noisily retracted into its recess. The air that rushed out from the darkness was stale and dusty. The two exchanged a look and stepped inside.

  The room was smaller than the storeroom, but more spacious. There was no light here, only the dim glow from the corridor, but there wasn't much to illuminate anyway. A few dilapidated shelves held several battered tomes with titles like "The Basics of Male Obedience" or "The Disciplinary Charter of the S.C.A.R.," along with broken knowledge vessels and useless, cracked memory crystals. No diagrams, no ancient scrolls, no forbidden knowledge about the nature of magic. Just an old stack of reports on the "progress" of students and meager instructions for teachers that had been abandoned decades ago. Instead of a mysterious repository of knowledge, it was a wretched, abandoned storeroom.

  Ortahn tried to pick up a scrap of paper from the floor, but it crumbled to dust. A heaviness settled in his chest: their little rebellion against the rules had been met with a void. This was even more insulting than if they had been caught and punished. Then, there would have been hope that something was in here. Now, that hope had burned out before it could even ignite.

  "Useless. It means they never intended to teach us magic here," he finally said. His voice echoed the fullness of the room. "No-thing."

  Esh sneezed and tried to cheer him up with a joke. "There's good news: I have enough dust here for an army of homunculi."

  They were already turning to leave when sounds came from the corridor—distinct footsteps and suppressed, but furious, voices. Female voices.

  Esh darted to the door, but it was still hidden in the wall. Ortahn instinctively retreated deeper into the room, into the shadow behind the nearest toppled shelf, pressing himself against the cold wall. His heart was hammering somewhere in his throat. Esh rushed to him—sensibly, as he was the largest and, alas, the only cover in this self-made trap.

  "...you're crossing every line, Ildara-daughter-of-Sabra! And what's worse—protocol," came Tulila's voice, very close now.

  "You're raising them to be clever coldhearts, Tulila! They need to be broken and rebuilt, not studied!" a sharp, unfamiliar voice replied. "The results of my class speak for themselves."

  "If only those results had any practical application in real life, right? Then they might be something to be proud of."

  The voices were getting closer, and Ortahn practically became a coldheart himself, trying to stop all his vital processes. A trembling hand—Viya's, no, Esh's—grabbed his palm. Ortahn was busy trying to keep his own numerous drops of sweat from falling to the floor.

  "A broken man is a safe man. Perhaps you've forgotten that, far from civilization. Or maybe you saw some strange ideas out there," Ildara's tone towards Tulila was something Ortahn wouldn't have dreamed of in his worst nightmare.

  The two sorceresses came so close they should have noticed the open door, but their furious argument consumed all their attention.

  "So write another 'anonymous' denunciation about me," Tulila's voice became ominously sarcastic.

  "Liberal," Ildara threw out the strongest insult she knew.

  "You, jririviska (female baresteether), don't you insult me!" Tulila took it as the strongest insult. "You'd be better off spending your time developing your intellect instead of holding your tits in place in your 'panoramic window.' Or are you trying to have them fall out? In a closed school for men. Again, we return to the level of your intelligence."

  An ominous silence fell, broken only by the rustle of fabric.

  "Go on, do it! You'll see why I'm a high-rank," Tulila said with an almost cheerful challenge.

  It was hard for Ortahn to imagine, but he could find no other explanation, and so he imagined it. Ildara must have made a combat gesture at Tulila, and his teacher had responded in kind, but with a numerical advantage.

  "It's not for you to speak of beauty, Tulila-daughter-of-Ekhta. You yourself have become like a man with your 'girls': your clothes, your movements, your speech. A hideous androgynous style."

  "Kwate'malpe'Pandemoniumxia-im (your opinion is irrelevant to me, and it should go burn slowly in Pandemonium)."

  "There are those higher and stronger than you," Ildara noted with tension, but without her previous confidence.

  "But you are not one of them."

  "This door is open," the witch suddenly changed the subject, and Ortahn wouldn't have been surprised to find he now had gray hairs. "That Zazaran girl is a disgusting cleaner; the homunculi are constantly breaking down from dust."

  Esh squeezed his hand with a familiar intensity.

  "You can't leave homunculi without human supervision. Or the soul-deprived either."

  "'Human'?" With that one word, Ildara revealed her full opinion of the unblessed.

  "Just go to sleep, Ildara," Tulila said placatingly, but she couldn't resist a small parting jab. "You have hours of arranging your tits into your so-called decolletage in the morning. A lot of work."

  There were fast, angry footsteps. It seemed Ildara had decided to leave without saying goodbye. The shelves trembled slightly from a magical impulse, and a moment later, the archive door slammed shut with a powerful crash.

  In the ensuing darkness and silence, several eternities passed before they dared to breathe normally. Ortahn felt for the door. On its inner side was a complex labyrinth of iron patterns and numerous latches. But he had already opened them in a more difficult way, so the mechanism soon yielded, and the trespassers quickly escaped into the corridor.

  They walked without speaking, imagining apocalyptic scenarios of Ildara or Tulila looking into the archive and seeing them. Perhaps only Ortahn was thinking this way, because when they reached his room, Esh exhaled:

  "That was magnificent."