The Scholarship Student's Terms

Professor Ma Eunha set the device on the desk and offered no explanation at all.

It was the first class of the lowest-tier section. The classroom held twelve desks and a thirteenth desk, and as Ma Eunha passed by the thirteenth desk, she didn't look at what was on it. The way she avoided looking wasn't natural.

It was a metal box. A rotating handle on one side, a gauge panel on the other. The gauge needle sat pinned to the far left.

"Fix it. Within this time." She started the stopwatch. Forty minutes.

"Where's the fault, exactly-"

"Finding that out is part of fixing it." Ma Eunha moved toward the door. "Oh, one thing. This device is newly made. No one has ever tried to do anything with it and given up."

The door closed.

Mirae asked first. "How's the score divided?"

"Recovery rate and diagnostic procedure, separately. The procedure score is worth more."

"Why is that worth more." Seorin asked.

"Something that's fixed isn't proof it can be fixed again next time. How you found it, that's the proof."

Doyun sat down in front of the box and understood what that sentence meant.

If there's no abandoned choice, there's nothing to reopen. His ability can't make something out of nothing. If someone had tried turning this handle and quit, he could reopen that quitting for thirty-three seconds. In this new device, that spot was empty.

Doyun tried resting his left hand on the box. It was a habit. There was no sensation at all. It was like touching a door with no doorknob.

"There's nothing."

"Nothing what?" Mirae asked.

"Nothing to open. I'm no help here."

Once he said it, Doyun noticed his own voice sounded strange. He was saying he couldn't help, but it came out sounding wronged. Being wronged had a premise underneath it. The premise that he should always be in the position of being useful.

Doyun understood then why Ma Eunha had chosen this device. It was a more precise test than a ban on using abilities. A ban means not using something you have. This meant having nothing to use.

Mirae didn't react to that. She had already opened her notepad.

"Then let's split up the possible causes. Three branches."

"Why three?" Garam asked.

"Power, transmission, display. If the gauge isn't moving, it's one of these three." Mirae drew lines. "If it's power, it's the handle. If it's transmission, it's the internal gears. If it's display, it's the gauge itself. Each has a different cost."

"Cost how?"

"Disassembly cost. Open the gauge first, four screws. Open the gears first, the whole case. The handle is six." Mirae wrote down the numbers. "We have forty minutes, so if we guess wrong and open twice, we won't finish."

Seorin grabbed the handle and turned it once. It turned with no resistance.

"It's spinning free."

"Then it's transmission." Mirae marked the chart. "Power is going in, but it's not transferring. Let's open the case."

"Wait." Garam pressed her ear to the side of the box. "Seorin, turn it again. Slowly."

Seorin turned it slowly.

Garam said nothing for twenty seconds. Doyun found those twenty seconds hard to sit through. During that time there was nothing he could do, and when there's nothing to do, he tries to say something anyway.

"Garam, do you hear something? Or is there no-"

"Wait."

Garam raised her palm. Not really a palm, just two fingers, and it wasn't meant as a refusal, but it cut Doyun's sentence off anyway.

"...Sorry."

Garam took another twenty seconds. Then she spoke.

"Two sounds. One's definitely the gear. The other sounds like it's playing together."

"Playing together?" Mirae asked back.

"Two notes overlapping so they sound like one. But right now the two are being forced together into one." Garam paused, searching for the word. "Like a wrong chord. They don't match, but it sounds like they do."

"What does that have to do with the breakdown." Seorin asked.

"It's like two gears pushing against each other in opposite directions. That's why it spins free. Not because one is broken."

Mirae's pen stopped.

"Garam. If you're right, we don't need to open the case. If the gears aren't broken but just assembled backward, all we need is to turn the adjustment screws."

"I could be wrong."

"I know. So I'll change the check order." Mirae rewrote the chart. "Two adjustment screws first. Two screws, three minutes. If it's wrong, we open the case then. Remaining time, twenty seven minutes."

"Yu Seorin, you turn it. Your hand's the steadiest."

"You have proof?"

"Earlier, when you turned the handle three times, your speed had the smallest variance." Mirae showed her the numbers she'd already written down.

Seorin turned the screw. Half a turn. One full turn.

The gauge needle moved. From the far left to the middle.

It stopped there.

"Halfway." Seorin said.

Mirae checked the clock. Eighteen minutes left.

"Halfway might be the best we get. The other half could be a different cause."

"Let's open it." Doyun said.

The words came out fast. He knew, even as he said it, that his old habit of throwing out conclusions first had shown up again.

The three of them looked at him. Doyun sorted out belatedly what he'd just said. He'd meant opening the case, but when he said it, his hand was resting on his left glove.

"Open which one?" Mirae asked.

Doyun answered honestly.

"...I was thinking of both."

If the device had no abandoned choice in it, one could be made. All he had to do was get someone to turn this handle, then have them quit. If a moment of quitting existed, a spot to reopen would exist too. Doyun had already thought of that method twenty seconds into the third stretch of silence.

Mirae went quiet. It wasn't the silence of calculating something. It was the silence of making a judgment.

"That's a violation of the terms. Inducing it without disclosure counts as use too."

"I didn't do it."

"If you had, I'd have stopped you." Mirae didn't put her pen down. "Saying it isn't stopped. Saying it is good."

"If it's good, why are you rereading the terms?"

"Good is good, and the record is the record." Mirae circled the second line of the terms. "The method you just described isn't in the terms. Inducing someone else to give up isn't written down. I'll add it."

"So the terms grow just because I said it?"

"They grow because you told us. If you hadn't said it, we wouldn't have known."

Doyun understood the math. Being honest had cost him one more layer of surveillance. And yet it didn't feel like a loss. If it had been a loss, he wouldn't say it next time, and if he didn't say it next time, that would be the time he actually did it.

Garam pressed her palm to the desk then.

"There was no hitch just now. What Doyun said, it's true."

"Is that supposed to be comforting?" Seorin asked.

"Not comfort. A record."

Of the eighteen minutes, the three of them used eleven. Mirae checked the contacts on the back of the gauge, Seorin found the second adjustment point on the gear, and Garam confirmed the direction by sound.

The order the three of them worked in wasn't Doyun's order. If it had been up to him, he'd have set all three going at once. Mirae had them go one at a time. She said doing it one at a time let them know exactly which step went wrong.

It was slow. And when they were looking for the second adjustment point, that slowness paid off. Seorin had gotten the first candidate wrong, and because they knew exactly where the mistake was, they went straight to the second candidate.

Doyun held the screws steady, laid the parts out in order, and wrote down the numbers Mirae called out.

That was what he did. While writing, he held back three times from speaking first. Holding back wasn't worth any points.

In the final three minutes, the needle climbed one more notch. Somewhere between half and a little past half.

Ma Eunha came in. She looked at the gauge, at the parts laid out, at Mirae's chart.

"Who split the cause into three branches."

"Park Mirae."

"Who said the direction was reversed."

"Yi Garam." Garam answered. She said her own name herself.

"Points go to the diagnostic procedure. Recovery rate is fifty five percent, that's a deduction." Ma Eunha folded the chart. "Han Doyun."

"Yes."

"This device can't be opened with your ability. Did you know that?"

"I knew within five minutes."

"What did you do for the other thirty five?"

Doyun chose his answer. There were two answers that would sound good, and one that was accurate.

"I waited. The waiting took a long time."

Ma Eunha's expression changed for the first time. Not a smile, but the face of someone who needed to write something down.

"I'll note that too."

After the professor left, the four of them went to put the device back in its place. That was when the needle moved.

No one had touched the handle, but the needle drifted slightly to the right.

"Who touched it?" Seorin asked.

No one had.

Mirae checked the direction the needle pointed. The gauge had no compass markings, but when the box was turned, the needle turned with it. It was pointing at a direction.

Garam turned her body to follow that direction. The classroom door, the hallway, and the back of the third floor.

"It's toward the thirteenth seat."

Doyun stepped closer to the box. The needle moved one more notch.

He stepped back. The needle returned.

Mirae had him repeat those two motions three times. All three times were the same.

"It's reacting to the student's seal." Mirae wrote it down. "The glove."

"It might not be the seal. It could just be the hand." Seorin said.

"There's a way to tell." Mirae looked at Doyun. "Try your right hand."

Doyun placed his right hand on the box. The needle didn't move.

He placed his left hand. It moved.

"It's the left hand." Mirae wrote it in two lines. "Whether it's the seal or the ability, we still can't tell. Releasing the clasp would tell us, but that needs authorization."

"Should we apply for it?" Doyun asked.

"If we apply, we'd have to write about this device." Mirae stopped her pen. "Which means we'd also have to write that it's pointing at the thirteenth seat."

The four of them made no decision on the spot. Garam pressed her ear to the side of the box one last time.

"No chord sound right now. Just one note."

"Is that the fixed side?"

"I don't know. It's like it needs one more from somewhere else before it becomes a chord."