Conservation of Shadows - By Yoon Ha Lee Page 0,14

behind her sleeve at the mingling of smoke, perfume, and cheap vintages with bouquets obscured beyond recognition. She skirted puddles and shied from laughing men and women who swept by her with disdainful looks at her clothing. Student, their glances judged her, and poor at that.Both were true enough, and she was not Teris to challenge them in her turn.

As Kaela was about to pass the first festhall, she realized she had forgotten which one Teris had said she would be at, or whether, indeed, she might not drift among several in the course of the night. This only firmed her determination. Kaela sought her roomsister at the more reputable festhalls that mushroomed around the college. Even then, the noise from the doorways appalled her.

She found no sign of Teris’s bright hair amid the crowds. Men propositioned Kaela, or offered dances or drinks, but she refused them with polite phrases, unmoved by smiles or inviting eyes. Her training in sword-dancing helped her elude those who became more insistent before they could grab her arm or swing her close.

After a while, Kaela gave up and retraced her route, unwilling to check rowdier possibilities. She credited Teris with better taste. Obsessive about detail, she checked the festhalls in reverse order as she went. In the Spinning Rose, she found Teris Tascha at last.

The beat of hand-drums warned her of the sword-dance within, and her hands clenched in the folds of her coat. The rhythms, whose syncopation she analyzed instinctively, drew her toward the open entrance, the hushed voices, the lanterns blossoming in bold colors. She did not belong here, despite the invitation, but Teris—Teris was another matter.

Kaela edged into the Spinning Rose, and saw Teris with that bright-spun hair caught up in combs and beaded ribbons, blades gleaming in her hands. Across from Teris was the technician, likewise lithe, his motions timed to hers. Kaela was unable to remember his name, but here names didn’t matter. Teris and her lover did not see the watcher by the doorway, shaking and flushed wordless. Their gazes were locked upon each other, but what they saw, Kaela realized, was not each other, only the dance’s precise symmetries, the parabolic flight of flung blades, the coordination of movement with the drums’ insistent voices.

Enraptured by Teris’s laughing eyes and quickened breath, those choreographed geometries, Kaela almost stepped farther into the festhall, ready to meet the eyes of an unpartnered dancer and offer herself to the dance. The spinning blades, which would once have tightened her throat with dread, now reflected light into patterns that tugged at her hands, her feet, the pulse in her veins.

Then Kaela remembered that she had no blades of her own, because purchasing a brace would have meant committing herself to this bright, barbarous dance. If she walked a little closer and caught Teris’s attention with the plea in her eyes, Teris would smile at the technician and draw away from him to loan Kaela her blades for a dance or two with the unthinking generosity she had always shown. Teris wouldn’t mind; would, in fact, be delighted to see her roomsister join the dance at last. Kaela could not, however, bring herself to interrupt the pair, so splendidly matched, for her own brash pleasure. She left the festhall, and no one marked her departure.

Shaken, Kaela did not think to check the hour before she ventured back on campus. The street lights stretched shadows into spindly mockeries. Although no one shared the path with her, other shadows moved purposefully, undistorted by exigencies of distance and angle. Since she was halfway to her dormitory, she hastened rather than turning back.

Between one step and the next, a magistrate’s shade brushed her shadow. For a terrible, unblinking moment, she understood the principle by which Vorief’s framework could be used to kill from a distance, understood it in a visceral manner that her first-term reading of the treatise had failed to convey. What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?

The dead magistrate had made his choices, Kaela was given to understand, and those choices collapsed into the single sharp fact of his death, the face of unflinching truth. What would her shade reveal after her heartbeat stilled?

She saw her life flattened to an ink-blot, her own shadow beginning to peel into shapes she did not want to confront, and fled the rest of the way to her room. Her hands shook as she spread her sleeping