The barracks stretched the full length of the building, rows of bunks on both sides, an aisle down the middle. Lamps hung from the overhead beams at uneven intervals, some bright, some already failing, and the noise filled the space wall to wall.

  Someone had found cards. A group at the foot of the nearest row had a game going on an overturned crate, slapping hands down and arguing about rules that most of them were inventing as they went. A pair came through the washroom door trailing steam, hair flat and wet against their skulls, navigating the aisle with the careful walk of people whose legs had opinions about stairs now. One of them dropped onto his bunk and pulled the blanket up without unlacing his boots.

  A group of women had claimed the far corner. Not by announcement. The bunks down there were theirs and nobody had contested it. The one from the mess hall was in the middle of it. Dark braids, tanned skin, the same coiled energy she'd had on the bench. Voice that carried even when she kept it low. She was talking and the rest were leaning in and whatever she was saying had the group pulled tight. She'd walked away from Coin's table that afternoon with her opinions and turned them into currency.

  The skinny kid was on an upper bunk near the wall. Book open on his knees, face angled down. His eyes weren't moving across the page. He was holding it the way a person holds something when they want a reason not to be looked at. The shaking in his arms had stopped but his shoulders stayed bunched up around his neck.

  Red-beard was already out in the row behind Coin. Flat on his back, one arm hanging off the side, boots still on. Snoring. The bunk frame groaned every time he shifted. The trainees on either side had their blankets pulled high and their backs turned.

  And the duelist was still going.

  The embroidered collar was gone since dinner, replaced by a loose shirt with the sleeves pushed back. He was on the edge of someone else's bunk, weight off-center, one foot on the floor. Talking to two trainees on the mattress across from him. His voice stayed low enough that it didn't carry past the conversation, but his posture carried past it fine. Shoulders open. Spine straight. Taking up more of the bunk edge than he needed.

  A laugh from him and the people around him would follow. When someone talked he'd lean toward them, full attention, and they'd talk longer than they meant to. A touch on a shoulder, a gesture across the room, and someone new would come over, stepping into the space he'd opened without noticing he'd opened it. Ground given to make room for them. Generous. Controlled.

  Then he moved on. Crossed the aisle with his weight low, balanced, the easy stride of someone who knew where his feet were at all times. The card game got him next — standing behind one of the players, watching a hand play out, saying something that got the table grinning. His back was to the open aisle the whole time and he'd picked a spot where the bunk frame covered his left side.

  He never stayed long. A few minutes with one group, enough to leave a mark, then on to the next before the welcome could cool. Every cluster he landed in shifted to make room for him without being asked.

  By the time the lamps started guttering he'd moved through every group in the room except the women's corner and the sleeping red-beard. The barracks had a shape to it now. He hadn't stood in the center of the room once, but every cluster he'd touched was angled slightly toward wherever he'd gone next.

  A woman came out of the instructor's office at the far end of the hall. She crossed the room without hurrying, eyes forward, and found her bunk. A few heads tracked her. Nobody said anything.

  The office door stayed open.

  "Julian."

  The duelist stood up from wherever he'd landed and walked to the office with the same confidence he'd worn all night.

  He stopped at a bunk near the women's corner. The blonde from the mess hall was sitting cross-legged on the mattress with a short blade across her knees and a whetstone working the edge in slow, even strokes. Green cloak folded beside her. Eyes on her work.

  He said something. Coin couldn't hear it from across the room but the lean was there, the angle, the same posture he'd been running all night. One hand resting on the bunk frame above her, body tilted in, giving her his full attention the way he'd given everybody his full attention for the last hour.

  She didn't look up. The whetstone kept moving. He said something else.

  She looked up.

  "Did you practice that in the mirror?"

  It carried. Not because she raised her voice. Because the room had gone quiet at the wrong moment and the words found the gap and filled it.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The duelist's smile held for a beat. Then it didn't. The mask slipped, and what was behind it was sharp and cold. Then he straightened up off the bunk frame and turned toward the office without a word. Nothing about him looked any different. Nobody else had seen it. He recovered and kept moving, and the office door closed behind him.

  The blonde went back to her blade.

  Coin sat on the bottom bunk and processed.

  DISPLAY: REJECTED.

  RESPONSE: EFFICIENT.

  He'd been moving through the barracks all evening like he owned the spaces he walked into. Every bunk edge, every conversation, every group he'd touched had bent around him. And the blonde hadn't bent. She'd sat there on her bunk with her blade and her whetstone and she'd let him come all the way to her and then she'd sent him off with a cut that didn't need a knife.

  Coin respected the efficiency.

  But him. He was something to think about. Moving through a room like that, opening people up, inserting himself into their space, making them comfortable with it. Coin had watched it from the outside like watching someone test locks. Trying handles. Finding the ones that opened easy. Working the ones that stuck. Mapping the whole building in one pass.

  And the blonde's lock didn't open.

  Good for her.

  Coin looked around the barracks from the bottom bunk. The room was settling. Card game winding down, voices getting lower, people pulling blankets up and turning toward the wall. The lamps that were still going threw long shadows across the aisle. Outside the window, the orange glow from the fires in the distance sat low against the dark. Coin noted it and came back to the room.

  Bottom bunk. Coin had a bottom bunk.

  This was not an accident. Bottom bunks were for the people who walked in and took them. Top bunks were for the people who walked in and got what was left. That was the whole system. Nobody assigned it. Nobody drew lots. A room full of strangers sorted itself in the time it took to drop a bag on a mattress, and when it was done the bottom bunks had the people who belonged on bottom bunks and the top bunks had everybody else.

  And not a bunk by the washroom, either. The bunks nearest the washroom door got the traffic, the noise, the smell of whatever came through that door at all hours. Coin's bunk was mid-row, set back from the aisle, with sightlines in both directions and no foot traffic coming past unless someone had a reason to be there.

  The skinny kid was on a top bunk. Made sense. Red-beard had a bottom. Also made sense. The duelist had a bottom bunk — Coin had marked that early, noted the position, filed it. The blonde had a bottom bunk too.

  The people who mattered were on the bottom. The people who didn't were stacked above them. The barracks was sorting itself the way every room sorted itself when you put too many people in it and let them figure it out. Hierarchy. Territory. Lines that nobody drew but everybody could see.

  Coin's bunk was Coin's bunk. The space around it was Coin's space. The towel hung on the edge was a marker, not a towel. The gap between Coin's bunk and the next one over was a perimeter, not a gap. Nobody had come into that perimeter all evening. Nobody had sat on Coin's bunk. Nobody had leaned on Coin's bunk frame or dropped a bag on Coin's mattress or put their boots where Coin's towel was.

  This could mean respect. This could mean they were giving Coin a wide berth because Coin had earned a reputation in the mess hall and in the yard. This could mean Coin's presence commanded the space naturally, the way a bottom bunk occupant's presence should command the space around their bunk.

  PERIMETER: RESPECTED.

  It could also mean nobody wanted to be near the coin that gave unsolicited eating advice to strangers.

  But that seemed less likely.

  The bunk above Coin creaked. Someone was up there. Coin hadn't paid attention to who. That was an oversight. The person directly above Coin was the most strategically relevant neighbor in the room. They shared a structure. Their movements affected Coin's ceiling. Their weight distribution, their sleep habits, their tendency to hang limbs off the side of the bed into Coin's space below. All of it mattered.

  Coin needed to get that situation squared away. Not tonight. Tonight was for observation. But soon. Whoever was up there needed to understand the arrangement. Bottom bunk sets the terms. Top bunk respects the terms. That was how it worked in every barracks Coin had ever been in, and Coin had been in more barracks than anyone in this building had been alive.

  Not that Coin had slept in any of them. Coin didn't sleep. But Coin had been carried into barracks, tossed into barracks, smuggled into barracks, dropped into barracks by accident and by intention across a span of time that would make these trainees go quiet if they knew the number. The dynamics were always the same. You found your spot. You held your spot. You made the people around your spot very aware of whose spot it was.

  And if someone tested that?

  Coin had been used as a bludgeon. More than once. Coin had been loaded into a sling and put through a man's shield at distance. Coin had been pressed edge-first into a throat. Coin had been heated in a fire and dropped into places that made strong men scream. Coin had been gripped in a fist and driven into a jaw and Coin had felt the teeth give. Coin had been the last thing people saw and the last thing people felt and Coin had never once lost that exchange.

  Coin was small. Coin was aware of being small. But Coin had been small in rooms full of large people before and the large people were dead now and Coin was still here, sitting on a bottom bunk, with a towel marking the perimeter, in a barracks full of trainees who thought the hardest thing in the room was the red-bearded man who snored like a cart dragging over gravel.

  They were mistaken.

  OCCUPANT ABOVE: UNIDENTIFIED.

  CONCERN: NONE.

  The bunk creaked again. Whoever was up there shifted, and the whole frame rocked.

  Coin made a note.

  The room kept winding down around Coin's silent inventory. Boots hitting the floor. Blankets pulled up. Someone blew out a lamp and the shadows in that section thickened. Red-beard's snoring had found a rhythm, steady and deep, and the trainees near him had either surrendered to it or were learning how. The card game packed up. The crate stayed where it was.

  Coin sat on the bottom bunk with the towel on the edge and a list of historical violence that stretched back further than the stonework of this building and waited.

  The office door opened.

  "Coin."