“Hands out where we can see them,” ordered the male proctor, walking
to the front of the line. “Sleeves must remain rolled up past the elbow. From
this point forward, you do not speak to one another. If you have to urinate,
raise your hand. We have a bucket in the back of the room.”
“What if I have to shit?” a boy asked.
The proctor gave him a long look.
“It’s a twelve-hour test,” the boy said defensively.
The proctor shrugged. “Try to be quiet.”
Rin had been too nervous to eat anything that morning. Even the thought
of food made her nauseated. Her bladder and intestines were empty. Only
her mind was full, crammed with an insane number of mathematical
formulas and poems and treatises and historical dates to be spilled out on
the test booklet. She was ready.
The examination room fit a hundred students. The desks were arranged in
neat rows of ten. On each desk sat a heavy exam booklet, an inkwell, and a
writing brush.
Most of the other provinces of Nikan had to section off entire town halls
to accommodate the thousands of students who attempted the exam each
year. But Tikany township in Rooster Province was a village of farmers and
peasants. Tikany’s families needed hands to work the fields more than they
did university-educated brats. Tikany only ever used the one classroom.
Rin filed into the room along with the other students and took her
assigned seat. She wondered how the examinees looked from above: neat
squares of black hair, uniform blue smocks, and brown wooden tables. She
imagined them multiplied across identical classrooms throughout the
country right now, all watching the water clock with nervous anticipation.
Rin’s teeth chattered madly in a staccato that she thought everyone could
surely hear, and it wasn’t just from the cold. She clamped her jaw shut, but
the shuddering just spread down her limbs to her hands and knees. The
writing brush shook in her grasp, dribbling black droplets across the table.
She tightened her grip and wrote her full name across the booklet’s cover
page. Fang Runin.
She wasn’t the only one who was nervous. Already there were sounds of
retching over the bucket in the back of the room.
She squeezed her wrist, fingers closing over pale burn scars, and inhaled.
Focus.
In the corner, a water clock rang softly.
