Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

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 mat, and in the darkness, she laced her fingers together to still them. Only shadows, she told herself over and over as she sought sleep. Only shadows.
    Kaela did not mention the Spinning Rose to her roomsister that day or the next or the next after that, even during sword-dancing practice. She reread When Shadows Walk into the World. She performed flawlessly on her next exam, which concerned the comparative history of execution and exile, although after she handed it in, she could not recall any of the questions, much less her responses. And, Teris told her one morning, she began talking in her sleep.
    “What have I been saying?” Kaela demanded.
    “Mathematical things,” Teris said, and recited some of them back to her.
    She relaxed, then wondered why she had been tense. “Oh, that. I’ve been trying to reformulate Brien’s notation. I swear there’s something going on with those definitions, if I could just see what he was doing. The entelechy framework didn’t exist while he lived, so that third postulate must have seemed necessary to him. Why is it so hard to figure out how to derive it?” She swallowed. “I haven’t been keeping you up, have I?” Kaela slept deeply, so Teris’s comings and goings rarely woke her, but the reverse was not true.
    Teris, in the process of unpinning her hair to brush it out before breakfast, paused and shook her head. The tangles were almost copper in the lamplight. “No. I’m just worried about you. I can’t say I understand your research, but