— End of first week. North Wing, Seventh Floor, F-Block.
The F-Rank Dormitory Block Was the Last Section of the North Wing's Seventh Floor
Not in terms of numbering—the doors ran sequentially from 7-A to 7-K and F was technically the middle—but in terms of every other metric that mattered. Furthest from the stairwell. Furthest from the morning sunlight, which reached the A-side windows by the sixth bell and reached the F-side by the eighth at best, filtered through the mountain wall's angle. The heating pipe that ran through the building's interior wall had a known gap in the F-block section, documented in the maintenance log that the groundskeeping office kept and apparently hadn't gotten around to fixing in the four years since it was first reported.
King had found the maintenance log in the corridor's shared utility cabinet on day two. He had read it while waiting for the washing room to open at the fifth bell. It was a thorough document.
He had also, in the same cabinet, found the repair log—the one that tracked work orders filed by residents and their completion status. There were eleven open work orders for the F-block section alone, some of them dating back three semesters.
He had read those too.
Then he had gone to breakfast and thought about it while eating porridge.
The F-rank dormitory block, he thought now, seven days in, sitting on the floor of the shared corridor with his back against the wall and the maintenance log open on his knee, is not poorly maintained because no one has noticed. It is poorly maintained because the people who live here are not expected to stay.
F-rank students. Labor Class designations—the ones who'd been given temporary exemptions for various reasons, or were in appeal processes, or were edge cases that the administrative system hadn't fully processed yet. Most of them would be reassigned within a semester. The rooms were sparse because no one invested in rooms that turned over fast. The heat pipe was broken because no one prioritized the comfort of people who weren't expected to be comfortable in this building for long.
He closed the maintenance log.
He put it back in the cabinet.
He looked down the corridor.
Eleven rooms. Seven occupied this semester.
He'd learned all of them by the end of day three, in the way he learned things—not by asking, but by being present, by listening to the sounds a corridor made when the people in it were existing in their natural way.
---
Room 7-A was Matsuda Tei.
Seventeen years old, from the western Lux border provinces. Common Talent—fire affinity, the most basic classification, bottom of the usable range. He hadn't failed the exam so much as been failed by it—Common Talent was technically above F-rank, but the specific sub-classification he'd tested had a mandatory note in the Labor assignment pathway that read insufficient combat application. He was here on a provisional enrollment that required him to demonstrate measurable combat progress by the semester's end or be reassigned.
He practiced fire mana in his room every morning from the fourth to the fifth bell. King could hear it through the shared wall—the careful, repetitive cycle of mana compression and release, the same pattern over and over, refining by millimeters.
He never left his room before the sixth bell. He ate breakfast alone, at a corner table, with his back to the wall.
---
Room 7-B was Lena Bao.
She was the girl from the Welcome Purge corridor. The one who'd been backed against the wall. She had tested E-rank—above F, but not by the margin that gave her access to the standard enrollment track, and her talent type—minor barrier affinity, a partial and unstable Unique that hadn't fully manifested—had put her in an evaluation category the intake office marked pending reassessment in twelve weeks.
She carried her barrier talent like it embarrassed her. King had seen her try to use it twice in passing—once in the courtyard, shielding herself from light rain, and once in the corridor, reflexively, when the heating pipe made its characteristic bang from the wall gap. The barrier flickered in and out like a candle in wind.
She didn't practice it where anyone could see.
She nodded to King in the mornings.
He nodded back.
---
Room 7-C was Dano Mika.
Dano was the one he'd heard laughing on the first night. He was also the one who'd dropped something heavy and cursed about it—both sounds had come from the same room, twenty minutes apart, which had told King before he'd met anyone that room 7-C contained a person who could find something funny and then immediately have a bad time without apparent connection between the two.
Dano was seventeen, from the Moravia border, and had tested at the lowest end of Rare Talent—earth affinity, very low output, the classification that the Registry's automated system described as viable for agricultural applications. He had not come to an Academy to do agricultural applications. He had come because his older sister was a C-rank combat mage and he had grown up watching her train and had decided he wanted that specific thing for himself, output be damned.
He was the only person in the F-block who ate breakfast with other people from other corridors, on the grounds that he had introduced himself to everyone on his floor by the second morning and refused to accept that classification determined whose table you sat at.
He had introduced himself to King by knocking on the door of 7-F on the second evening and saying: "I'm Dano. Are you the one who fixed the 7-F latch? Because I've been fighting the 7-C latch since I arrived and if you have a tool I would genuinely appreciate borrowing it."
King had lent him the tool.
Dano had returned it the next morning with a jar of the fruit preserve from the breakfast service—he'd apparently taken an extra one on his way out—and the information that the 7-E door hinge was also stiff and did King have anything for hinges.
He did not have anything for hinges. But he'd found the right weight of oil in the maintenance cabinet and they'd done the 7-E hinge together in about eight minutes, which was when King had met the occupant of 7-E.
---
Room 7-E was Cho Sorim.
Sorim was small, precise, and had the contained energy of someone who had calculated exactly how much of themselves to show and had decided the answer was: very little, until proven otherwise. She'd tested Common Talent—water affinity, middle-of-range, exactly the classification that the exam system processed most efficiently because it was the most common. She was not supposed to be here. She was supposed to have been assigned directly to Labor Class and sent to one of the water management districts, which apparently had an ongoing need for low-level water mana workers to assist with civic irrigation.
She was here because she had filed an appeal.
The appeal was technically still being reviewed. She had filed it herself, without a lawyer or a family contact at the Registry, on the grounds that the exam's water affinity assessment did not account for her specific subtype—she had a lateral application she'd developed herself that didn't appear in the standard assessment parameters. The appeal had been accepted for review because the examiner who'd received it had found the technical argument sufficiently coherent that he couldn't immediately dismiss it.
She was living in the F-block on that appeal. She had been studying her own talent subtype application in the evenings, building the documentation she needed to support the next review stage.
She hadn't said any of this directly to King. He'd pieced it together over three days of corridor proximity and the particular way she organized her schedule around the times the library's academic archive section was open.
When he'd finished the 7-E hinge with Dano, she'd looked at the door, tested it once, looked at King, and said: "Thank you."
"The cabinet has oil," King said. "The maintenance log noted it needed attention."
"I know," she said. "I read the maintenance log too."
He had looked at her.
She had looked back, with the composed attention of someone meeting another careful reader for the first time.
"Cho Sorim," she said.
"King Von Deluxh," he said.
"The Pillar incident," she said.
"Yes."
She had nodded once and gone back inside. That had been the entirety of their first conversation, and somehow it had been enough to establish that they understood each other.
---
By the end of the first week, the seventh floor's F-block had a rhythm.
It hadn't been planned. No one had called a meeting or proposed a system. It had simply accumulated, the way shared spaces accumulated habits when the people in them were paying attention to the same things.
Dano knocked on three doors every morning to make sure everyone was awake for the first lecture. Not loudly—three moderate knocks, the kind that said I'm here, this is optional, I'm doing it anyway. Sorim had started leaving the door of the shared utility cabinet slightly open in the evenings when she finished with the academic archive, which was a signal that had developed from no agreed meaning into the shared understanding that it meant the corridor is quiet, it's a good time to study. Matsuda Tei had stopped eating breakfast alone by day four—not because anyone had asked him to, but because Dano had sat down across from him without asking and started talking, and Tei had found that harder to end than he'd expected.
Lena Bao, the girl from 7-B with the flickering barrier, had stopped nodding at King from a distance and started stopping to talk, briefly, in the corridor.
The conversations were never long. Usually something practical—the hot water timing in the washing room, the study hall hours, which lecturer posted their notes in advance on the shared board and which ones expected you to take your own. But they were regular. Consistent.
King noticed this.
He was, he realized, partly responsible for it—not deliberately, not through any organized effort, just through the way proximity worked when a person was present without particular agenda. He fixed things when they needed fixing and had what was needed to fix them. He was there when the corridor was quiet. He remembered what people had mentioned in passing and referenced it later in a way that said: I was listening when you said that.
He hadn't done any of this on purpose.
He just didn't know how to be in a space with people and not pay attention to them.
---
It was the sixth evening when he found the second scratch.
He'd been in the corridor utility cabinet looking for a specific weight of rag—the washing room's communal supply was running low and he'd been meaning to check the cabinet since Dano had mentioned it two days ago—and he'd moved the maintenance log to reach the lower shelf.
There, on the inside of the cabinet door, in the same frustrated handwriting that had scratched this latch is broken on the wall of 7-F, was a list.
Not a message. A list. Six items, in order, with a small box beside each one.
The 7-F latch needs fixing.
The 7-C latch needs fixing.
The 7-E door hinge squeaks.
The heating pipe bangs at night—gap in wall, fourth panel.
The corridor lamp third from the end flickers (mana cell is dying).
The water pressure in the washing room is wrong on cold setting.
The boxes beside the first three items had small checkmarks in them.
Not King's handwriting. Different pen, different hand, added at a different time.
He stood there, looking at the list.
Someone else had been here. Had noticed the same things. Had started fixing them, or at least tracking them, and had documented the progress.
Three boxes checked. Three items done before King arrived.
How long ago, he thought. Who was living here before us?
He looked at the three unchecked items.
The heating pipe gap. The flickering lamp. The washing room pressure.
He looked at them for a moment.
Three, he thought. Those are three things that would make this block more livable. And whoever started this list didn't get to finish it.
He wasn't going to finish it tonight.
He found the rags, went back to his room, took out the small flat tool, and sat at the desk.
He turned to a fresh page in his notebook—not the class notes one, the other one, the one he'd started keeping for things that didn't fit the class note format—and wrote down the three unchecked items.
Then he wrote: heating pipe gap—fourth panel. Need to check if access is from inside wall or external maintenance panel.
Then: lamp mana cell—standard cell type, should be in maintenance cabinet or need to requisition from groundskeeping.
Then: washing room cold pressure—valve access is probably under the floor panel in the back left corner. Check tomorrow.
He put the pen down.
He looked at the list.
This was, he thought, what a place looked like when people had been in it long enough to learn it and care about it and try to make it better before they left. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just—a list, inside a cabinet door, checkboxes, the evidence that someone had been paying attention.
They were here too, he thought. They noticed the same things. They got three done.
He was going to get the other three.
Not because the corridor would be meaningfully different—the lamp and the pipe and the water pressure were inconveniences, not crises, and the people living here were managing fine. But because someone had started the list, and unfinished things had a particular weight to them that he'd been learning to feel clearly now that he was small enough to feel things clearly.
He put the notebook away.
He lay back on the bed. The springs creaked. He'd grown used to that.
Through the wall, from 7-E, he could hear Sorim writing—the specific rhythm of someone working through a technical argument, the pen moving in short focused bursts and then pausing while the brain caught up. From 7-C, Dano had music playing quietly from somewhere—a small instrument, the particular tinny sound of an inexpensive travel version, something with strings.
From 7-A, at the other end of the block, the sound of mana cycling. Matsuda Tei, still practicing at the ninth bell.
He practices until the ninth bell, King thought. He's been here a week and he practices until the ninth bell.
He listened to the mana cycling—the careful, repetitive compression-and-release that you could hear because Tei's walls were thin and the sound of mana work had a physical resonance in treated stone. The pattern was clean. Consistent. Getting cleaner, King thought, than it had been on day one, the way things got cleaner when someone practiced them with genuine commitment.
He wants this, King thought. He came here because he wanted this exact thing, and the system told him his output was insufficient, and he is practicing until the ninth bell anyway.
Something about that sat quietly in his chest in a way that didn't have a name yet but felt, he was beginning to recognize, like a specific kind of caring about a specific kind of person.
He looked at the ceiling.
From the corridor, muffled through the door, he heard Dano's door open and close. Then footsteps to the shared cabinet. A pause. The cabinet closing. Then footsteps back.
Then a knock on King's door. Two, not three—Dano's morning knock was three, so this was something else.
King got up. Opened the door.
Dano was standing in the corridor holding a small clay pot—the fruit preserve from the breakfast service. He'd apparently been stockpiling them, because King was fairly sure this was not the same one from day two.
"I found a second list," Dano said. He was looking at King with the expression of someone who had also opened the cabinet door and noticed the checkboxes.
"I know," King said.
"You'd already found it."
"Tonight."
Dano looked at the pot in his hand. He looked at King. "I can help with the lamp," he said. "My earth affinity is useless for most things, but I can shape stone. If the lamp fitting is set in the wall socket, I can widen the housing to get to the mana cell without the specific tool the maintenance manual says you need."
King looked at him.
"All right," King said.
"Tomorrow?" Dano said.
"Tomorrow," King agreed.
Dano held out the preserve pot. "Peace offering," he said. "For waking you up."
"You didn't wake me," King said.
"For potentially waking you up," Dano said.
King took the pot.
"Good night," King said.
"Good night," Dano said, and went back to his room.
King closed the door. He set the fruit preserve on the desk beside the notebook. He stood there for a moment, looking at both of them.
Then he sat back down on the bed.
The springs creaked.
Through the wall, Sorim was still writing. Dano's music had started back up—quieter now, one string being plucked slowly and deliberately, like he was learning a new part. From 7-A, the mana cycling had finally stopped.
The corridor was settling down for the night.
Good, he thought.
He lay back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of six people he hadn't known a week ago, making their small ordinary sounds in their small ordinary rooms, occupying a corridor that the building didn't particularly care about, in a dormitory block that existed for people the institution considered temporary.
We're fixing the list, he thought. Dano and me. Tomorrow, the lamp.
The week after that, the pipe.
And then the washing room.
He was quiet for a while.
There will probably be a new list, he thought. After this one. There is always a new list.
He thought about that.
He found that he didn't mind.
---
The maintenance log for the North Wing's seventh floor F-block, as of week one's end, read:
Work orders on file: 11.
Work orders completed by maintenance staff this semester: 0.
Work orders completed by residents: 3 (historical, previous occupant, unattributed).
Work orders completed by current occupants this week: 4.
The lamp third from the end of the corridor had a new mana cell.
The 7-F latch opened cleanly.
The 7-C latch opened cleanly.
The 7-E door hinge was silent.
The heating pipe would bang once more—tomorrow night, the fourth panel, when the temperature dropped fast after sunset—and then it wouldn't anymore.
Nobody had filed a work order for any of it.
Nobody had told the maintenance staff.
It had simply been done, the way things got done when people who shared a space decided the space was worth taking care of.
The scratch on the wall of 7-F that said this latch is broken was still there.
The latch was not.