Poor World by Sherwood Smith

Seshe worried about most. But the signs of distress were there for those who knew her. Those fine, long fingers, so graceful in dance, now reminded Seshe of autumn twigs — stiff, brittle. The faint frown between her expressive brows, which at least were blond, so few noticed them.
    Seshe walked briskly along the dusty street, glad the punishing heat was gone for a few hours. She kept her face forward and her expression blank, but mentally she tallied each building, who was in it, and what she’d been able to glean of its schedule.
    One mild point in her favor: it seemed that all the senior Com people loathed trudging round at the end of each day to pick up the barracks leaders’ reports. Was it due to the heat and tiredness or was it the prospect of having to report to Alsaes? They talked about him a lot, his likes and dislikes, his words. Fear or fascination? The girls didn’t talk about Clair that way, but then Clair lived among them, and talked freely, and liked the girls to talk freely. She always answered questions, and she never ordered. Just asked. If the girls said no, that was that.
    Alsaes could be quite nasty to those who asked the wrong questions, so a lot of people second-guessed him. The leaders did talk about him a lot, discussing the littlest things he said and did as though they mattered terribly.
    Maybe they did. Everybody said that Alsaes enjoyed dealing out punishments. Seshe felt nothing but disgust, yet here she was on her way to Alsaes’s building, in hopes she’d overhear him talking.
    Not because she found him interesting. Just the opposite. He was a stupid, bullying adult with no vestige of interest in anything that mattered to Seshe — but how else would the girls find out anything important except by listening? Kessler never seemed to come around, except to watch some of the exercises in the practice courts. He and Dejain took large groups by magic transfer to some other place to perform training runs, and then he did stuff without the others seeing him. Seshe had overheard one of the tutors telling another that Kessler usually showed up after midnight to do his own practice work — and his energy wore out two or three of them before he’d decide that he’d had enough. The tutors were trying to catch up on their sleep in relays.
    It’s like piecing out a quilt, Seshe thought. Or a puzzle. All these strange bits of information, but if there was a way to put it all together into a plan of escape, she did not perceive it.
    If only I could find CJ and talk to her! Surely she’s learned a lot more, stuck there in Kessler’s command center.
    Where she’s also in the most danger. Poor CJ!
    It was just the sort of scrape she called her ‘bad luck’ (‘luck’ being a concept from CJ’s world that didn’t quite make sense), that being high on one villain’s hate list would net her a prime place in the snares of another villain!
    Reaching the last barracks, Seshe brought her attention back to her job.
    The tutor on duty handed her a sealed paper, which she slid in behind the others, and she continued on to the building at the corner of the street that led to the practice area. A sudden swirl of cool, dry wind kicked dust into her face. She sneezed as she stepped up onto the wooden porch.
    The door to Alsaes’ building was open. He called it his command center, and you were supposed to refer to it as a command center, but Seshe had noticed that in regular speech, the only time the words ‘command center’ were spoken was when Kessler’s name was in the same sentence. People tended to call Alsaes’s building by his name. Like, I have to take the letters to Alsaes , in a tone kind of like lifting a flower and discovering a slug.
    She stepped inside the crowded office, which contained a map dotted with colored markers, a table with neat piles of papers, and some weaponry stacked in a corner. She passed behind