Partisan - Book II

The Second Trial

The field of competition has narrowed by one when the suns rise the next morning: someone has already dropped out. It's an individual sign up—a Roften border orphan someone calls Iseul, but Allayria can't recall her face.

Part of this is due to the current fog of sleep deprivation clouding around her brain: her rest the night before had been uneven. She had been in a nightshift, hair tied up in a haphazard, tumbling bun, when the knock had echoed across her shadowed room. Ruben had been standing outside, plate of food in hand, and he busted in without more than a greeting grunt, a bleary-eyed, slightly ruffled Lei stumbling in his tracks. The lieutenant had taken one look at the thin straps of her nightgown and turned beet red.

The Skill master wanted to go over all the candidates with them and when she asked about the next day's tests he had waved a hand at her.

"Mental acuity tests, and the like," he had said. "You will do wonderfully, I am sure. But I would like both of your impressions before I finalize the rest of this—"

Now, only a few hours later, Ruben directs them to rows of individual tables at the center of the training room. On each is a strange, metallic cube that has various grooves and crevices etched around a series of numbers and symbols. No one reaches for theirs, but they all have eyes on them, absorbing as much as they can before the test starts.

"Your task is to find a way to open the box," Ruben tells them. "Clear enough? Wonderful. Begin."

Cubes are snatched quickly off the desks but it becomes apparent that the task is not so simple. Allayria runs her hands around the grooves, searching for a hidden latch or switch, but finds nothing. The only one who appears to progress is one of the Solveig recruits—a lean, brown-haired non-Skiller who Allayria had heard called Peter. He seems to be in some kind of wordless communication with the cube: its secrets sing beneath his fingers, and he twists and turns it almost as if in a rehearsed duet.

Next to him, Durai's eyes keep darting over to Peter's cube, and his brow scrunches as he tries to keep up with the rapid, deft movements of the Solveigian's fingers.

"It should be noted," Ruben says suddenly, "that all cubes are unique. Looking at your neighbor's will not help you solve the problem."

But the first to break the cube isn't Peter—it's Caj, who literally breaks the cube, setting both ends of the mottled metal surface on the table in front of him. A sea of furious faces whip toward Ruben, but he only grins, indicating that Caj can leave.

"Do not forget the paper inside," he reminds the Smith-caller, who simply scoops the folded piece up and trudges outside.

While the others mumble in barely audible mutiny, Allayria fights to contain the wave of envy gripping her, because she really could slice this stupid box open and be done with it too, but there's no way to do that discretely.

"Think of it as a puzzle with different levers being pressed at different times to elicit a positive response. With often-used locks like this, there are always tell-tale signs of which levers get pressed."

Allayria's eyes fly open as the memory of the thief's words, spoken over a different box on a different day, washes over her.

I can't break this thing, but I can read it.

A smile, slow and serpentine, crawls across Allayria's face and she shuts her eyes once more, prodding all the grooves and hidden levers with her fingers as well as her mind.

She works it out eventually, much like she worked that safe in Morgalth, and even though Peter has italready figured out and leaves before she's finished, she feels a certain pride in the fact that she is third in finding a way in. But as she starts pressing all the buttons in the correct order she glances up, catching Ruben's gaze.