An Unwavering Judgment

Seorin looked at her own hand at the starting line instead of the maze.

The box the director had sent still sat on her dormitory desk. Directional correction gear, for successors, usage log private. A note of three lines came with it. It said to use it for judgment that never wavers.

Judgment that never wavers. The director had used that phrase on Seorin since she was sixteen. At first it was praise. Now it was a standard.

With the gear, the maze got easy. And today's top score would become the gear's top score. The record would read Yu Seorin, and since the usage log was private, no one would check. That was the worst part. A victory no one could verify couldn't be revoked later either.

Seorin came carrying only the sheath.

"Applicant number one. Yu Seorin. Any auxiliary equipment to declare?"

"None."

Taeho checked her wrist and waist. His checking hand paused twice. He'd probably expected to find something.

"This will be recorded as an unequipped completion attempt. If you fail, there's no retry."

"I know."

"Student Yu Seorin." Taeho raised the stopwatch, then lowered it again. "The no retry clause disadvantages you. If you just declare the equipment, the clause changes."

"If I declare it, my record changes."

Taeho said nothing more. Instead he wrote two characters in the margin of the record sheet. Seorin couldn't read those two characters, but she'd learned yesterday what it meant to write something in the margin.

The maze read an applicant's first decision and moved its walls accordingly. Choose right, and right closed off. Choose left, and left closed off. So most people tried not to choose. They groped between the walls without choosing and lost time that way.

Seorin's method was the opposite.

When the start signal sounded, she didn't stop at the first fork.

"Discarding left."

She said it out loud. So the judges' stand would hear it, and so her own ears would hear it.

The left passage narrowed. The maze didn't block the side she discarded. It blocked the side she chose. So if she declared the discarded side first, the maze would block whatever remained, and the moment it blocked, she could see which direction the wall was coming from.

Watching the direction the wall pushed from, Seorin stepped back two paces to the right. The wall passed through the spot where she'd been standing.

Second fork. "Discarding center."

Third. "Discarding up."

The declarations weren't words aimed at the maze. They were words aimed at the judges' stand. If anyone later doubted this completion, there had to be a record of exactly what Seorin had discarded.

Discarding came at a cost. The decision anchor blade held a choice in place for you, but it collected a price the moment you let that choice go. After the third declaration, the inside of her right wrist ached. By the fourth, the ache had climbed to her elbow.

Seorin factored the pain into her calculations. She could endure it up to twelve times. There were nine maze sections. Three to spare. Three to spare meant she could afford one mistake, but not two.

At the sixth section, the wall came faster than expected. Seorin didn't change the direction she'd already declared. Changing it would double the price, and doubling the price meant she wouldn't make it to the ninth. She grazed past the wall with her shoulder. Her uniform tore at the shoulder seam.

A sound rose from the stands. Seorin didn't hear that sound as her own name. The audience didn't know what an unequipped completion meant. If they did, they'd be making noise at the ninth section, not now.

The seventh and eighth went according to plan. Two declarations, two prices paid. The pain that had started in her wrist now reached the back of her neck. Ten times. Eleven.

Passing through the eighth section, Seorin noticed her left leg was following slower than her calculations allowed. The price rose from the wrist, but in the end it was collected from the legs. The phrase about a successor never wavering had said nothing about legs.

Ninth section. Four walls moved at once.

"Discarding all."

The moment she said it, Seorin realized her own sentence was grammatically awkward. She knew her own habit of speaking more stiffly whenever her judgment wavered. Knowing it didn't mean she could fix it.

Discard all four directions and what remained was up and down. The maze only moved walls horizontally. Seorin tapped the floor grid twice with the sheath to find an empty square, stepped onto it, dropped half a level down, then climbed back up. The four walls blocked each other.

The finish line.

"Completion. One minute forty four seconds. Unequipped." Taeho's voice ran half a beat longer than usual. "Top score confirmed."

"Please include unequipped in the record notation."

"Already included." Taeho stopped the stopwatch. "I put it in before you asked."

Seorin didn't look at the scoreboard. She raised the sheath and looked inside it instead.

There was a crack. Two lines as of yesterday. Three today.

The crack inside the sheath wasn't listed in any regulation or maintenance guide. Seorin had filed it away as probable overuse damage. Whenever she reread that filed-away explanation, one part of it was always empty, but she didn't need to fill that empty part today.

She'd declared nine times today and paid the price eleven times, yet the crack had only grown by one line. The numbers didn't add up. Seorin noted the discrepancy and closed the sheath.

That was when a sound rose from outside the maze.

"Excuse me! Coming through!" someone shouted.

Han Doyun was carrying someone on his back.

Seorin read the situation in three seconds. An applicant who'd failed in an outer maze section had gotten wedged against a wall. The safety personnel were coming from the opposite side. Han Doyun had given up his own section. On his left hand, the lock was still only half filled. It meant he hadn't used his ability.

Yesterday in the reenactment room, he'd been one second late to the end signal. Today he hadn't opened it at all. Seorin didn't read that difference as growth. Anyone could hold back with a sealed hand.

Carrying someone without using it was slow. Slow meant losing his ranking. He passed by having already lost it.

"Applicant number twelve. Section incomplete." The judge wrote it down. "Disqualified."

"What about the rescue?" Doyun asked. His breathing was uneven. The kid he'd carried was bleeding from the leg, and Doyun's left hand stayed locked.

"It will be recorded."

"Just record it, not as a score." Doyun said that first. His face already knew he had no standing to ask for points.

"A rescue isn't grounds for deduction. It's not a score either," the judge said.

The judge turned a page in the record sheet and started writing something in the box below Seorin's name. Seorin watched that hand.

"What are you writing right now?"

"An outer rescue occurred during the top scorer's run. Recording it under the same entry."

"Separate them."

The judge looked up. "Why?"

"My completion is mine, and that person's rescue is his," Seorin said, pointing at her own scoreboard. "If you combine them, someone else's good deed attaches to my record. And my ranking attaches to his record. Both get cheapened."

"...Administratively it's one box."

"Make a box," Seorin said. "If you don't, I'll file an appeal."

"Student Yu Seorin, this treatment favors your own score. Are you opposing it knowingly?"

"If what's favorable comes before what's accurate, someone will tamper with my score the same way next time."

Taeho took the record sheet from behind and drew a line in the margin, splitting the box in two. Upper box: Yu Seorin, unequipped completion, one minute forty four seconds. Lower box: Han Doyun, one outer rescue, section incomplete.

After handing the kid he'd carried over to the safety personnel, Doyun looked at that record sheet.

"Should I say thanks?"

"Don't," Seorin cut him off.

"Then what am I supposed to say?"

"Nothing. I wasn't taking your side. I fixed a record that was wrong."

Doyun stayed quiet for a moment. Then he asked something unexpected.

"So why didn't you use the gear?"

Seorin hadn't expected that question. Answers come out short for questions you didn't expect.

"Because then it wouldn't be my judgment anymore."

"...I see." Doyun looked at his own record box. "I won yesterday using someone else's judgment."

"That's not right either," Seorin said. "You didn't use someone else's judgment. You erased it. Those are different crimes."

Doyun's hand moved toward the edge of his left glove, then stopped.

Seorin didn't take that as an admission. Self deprecation that sounds like an admission is the speech pattern of someone about to do the same thing again.

She pulled out a sheet of paper from inside her jacket. A finals evaluation application. The name box was already filled in. The opponent box was already filled in too.

Han Doyun.

"Tomorrow afternoon. Face me."

"You know I'm on probation right now," Doyun said, picking up the application.

"I know. So there's one more condition." Seorin laid the application over his record sheet. "Next time, drop the idea of beating my refusal first. Don't try to win. Plan around not being able to win."

"That's the condition?" Doyun asked.

"That's the condition for the match." She pressed a finger on the application. "If you can't keep it, even if you win, I'll file an appeal against the record."

Seorin turned around. The torn shoulder of her uniform gapped wider with every step.

Behind her, Doyun called out once more.

"Yu Seorin."

She stopped. People who call your name are usually about to ask for something.

"Can I put your completion in my record?"

"Why would you put it in yours?"

"To leave behind what I saw today. That you won without using the gear." Doyun held up his own record sheet. "If I don't write it down, I'm afraid I'll remember this later as just a matter of ability matchups."

Seorin considered the request for three seconds. It wasn't a trap, and it wasn't flattery either. It was a request from someone trying to fix his own memory in place ahead of time.

"Write it. But I'll decide the wording."

"Tell me," Doyun said, taking out a pen.

"Yu Seorin, unequipped completion, top score. Don't attach anything after that."

Back in the dormitory, she pushed the director's box under her desk without opening it. She took out only the note and put it in the drawer. She didn't throw it away. Not having declared it discarded meant it wasn't discarded yet.

Then she looked inside the sheath again. Three lines.

She calculated how many times she'd need to discard in tomorrow's finals, and the calculation came out past twelve.