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       CHAPTER 5

      Rin stumbled out the courtyard door. Jun’s words echoed over and over in her head. She was suddenly dizzy; her legs wobbled and her vision went temporarily black. She slid down against the stone wall, hugging her knees to her chest while blood pumped furiously in her ears.

      Then the pressure in her chest bubbled up and she cried for the first time since orientation, sobbing with her face pressed into her hands so that no one could hear.

      She cried from the pain. She cried from the embarrassment. But mostly she cried because those two long years of studying for the Keju hadn’t meant a thing. She was years behind her peers at Sinegard. She had no martial arts experience, much less an inherited art—even one that looked as stupid as Nezha’s. She hadn’t trained since childhood, like Venka. She wasn’t brilliant, didn’t have an eidetic memory like Kitay.

      And the worst thing was, now she had no way to make up for it. Without Jun’s tutelage, frustrating though it was, Rin knew she didn’t have a chance of making it past the Trials. No master would choose to take on an apprentice who couldn’t fight. Sinegard was primarily a military academy. If she couldn’t hold her own on the battlefield, then what was the point?

      Jun’s punishment was as good as an expulsion. She was done. It was over. She’d be back in Tikany within a year.

      But Nezha attacked first.

      The more she considered this, the faster her despair crystallized into anger. Nezha had tried to kill her. She had acted only in self-defense. Why had she been thrown out of the class, when Nezha had gotten off with little more than a slap on the wrist?

      But it was so clear why. Nezha was a Sinegardian noble, the son of a Warlord, and she was a country girl with no connections and no status. Expelling Nezha would have been troublesome and politically contentious. He mattered. She did not.

      No—they couldn’t just do this to her. They might think they could sweep her away like rubbish, but she didn’t have to lie down and take it. She had come from nothing. She wasn’t going back to nothing.

      The courtyard doors opened as class let out. Her classmates hurried past her, pretending they didn’t see her. Only Kitay hung behind.

      “Jun will come around,” he said.

      Rin took his proffered hand and stood up in silence. She wiped at her face with her sleeve and sniffed.

      “I mean it,” Kitay said. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “He only suspended Nezha for a week.”

      She shrugged his hand off violently, still wiping furiously at her eyes. “That’s because Nezha was born with a gold ingot in his mouth. Nezha got off because his father’s got half the faculty here by their balls. Nezha’s from Sinegard, so Nezha’s special, Nezha belongs here.”

      “Come on, you belong here too, you passed the Keju—”

      “The Keju doesn’t mean anything,” Rin said scathingly. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”

      “Rin, that’s not true.”

      “It is!” She slammed her fist against the wall. “But they’re not going to get rid of me like this. Not this easily. I won’t let them. I won’t.”

      She swayed suddenly. Her vision pulsed black and then cleared.

      “Great Tortoise,” said Kitay. “Are you all right?”

      She whirled on him. “What are you talking about?”

      “You’re sweating.”

      Sweating? She wasn’t sweating. “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice sounded inordinately loud; it rang in her ears. Was she shouting?

      “Rin, calm down.”

      “I’m calm! I’m extremely calm!”

      She was far from fucking calm. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to scream at someone. Anger pulsed through her like a wave of heat.

      Then her stomach erupted with a pain like she had been stabbed. She gasped sharply and clutched at her midriff. She felt as if someone were sliding a jagged stone through her innards.

      Kitay grasped at her shoulders. “Rin? Rin?”

      She felt the sudden urge to vomit. Had Nezha’s blows given her internal damage?

      Oh, fantastic, she thought. Now you’re humiliated and injured, too. Wait until they watch you limp into class; Nezha’s going to love that.

      She shoved Kitay away. “I don’t need—Leave me alone!”

      “But you’re—”

      “I’m fine!”

      Rin awoke that night to a deeply confusing sticky sensation.

      Her sleeping pants felt cold, the way her pants had felt when she’d been little and peed in her sleep. But her legs were too sticky to be covered in urine. Heart pounding, she scrambled out of her bunk and lit a lamp with shaking fingers.

      She glanced down at herself and almost shrieked out loud. The soft candlelight illuminated pools of crimson everywhere. She was covered in an enormous amount of blood.

      She fought to still her panic, to force her drowsy mind to think rationally. She felt no acute pain, only a deep discomfort and great irritation. She hadn’t been stabbed. She hadn’t somehow ejected all of her inner organs. A fresh flow of blood trickled down her leg that moment, and she traced it to the source with soaked fingers.

      Then she was just confused.

      Going back to sleep was out of the question. She wiped herself off with the parts of the sheet that weren’t soaked in blood, jammed a piece of cloth between her legs, and ran out of the dormitory to get to the infirmary before the rest of the campus woke.

      Rin reached the infirmary in a sweaty, bloody mess, halfway to a nervous breakdown. The physician on call took one look at her and called his female assistant over. “One of those situations,” he said.

      “Of course.” The assistant looked like she was trying hard not to laugh. Rin did not see anything remotely funny about the situation.

      The assistant took Rin behind a curtain, handed her a change of clothes and a towel, and then sat her down with a detailed diagram of the female body.

      It was a testament, perhaps, to the lack of sexual education in Tikany that Rin didn’t learn about menstruation until that morning. Over the next fifteen minutes, the physician’s assistant explained in detail the changes going on in Rin’s body, pointing to various places on the diagram and making some very vivid gestures with her hands.

      “So you’re not dying, sweetheart, your body is just shedding your uterine lining.”

      Rin’s jaw had been hanging open for a solid minute.

      “What the fuck?”

      She returned to the bunks with a deeply uncomfortable girdle strapped under her pants and a sock filled with heated uncooked rice grains. She placed the sock on her lower torso to dull the aching pain, but the cramping was so bad that she couldn’t crawl out of bed before classes started.

      “Do you want me to get someone?” Niang asked.

      “No,” Rin mumbled. “I’m fine. Just go.”

      She