Tiger was summarily marched down to Teacher's Office. It had been a misunderstanding, of course. But Ms. Needa had no interest in hearing about slips of the tongue and certainly did not want to hear about his own struggles with the Outside. No amount of consolation was going to stop her. So, with the entire breakfast room watching, Ms. Needa yanked Tiger away and whisked him off, shouting, "How dare you! Disrespecting me in front of the entire class! How dare you!"
He sat in the Teacher's Office for some time, his ears burning, waiting for the punishment to come. The Teachers Office was not a large room—the walls were made of the same stuff as the rest of the halls, grey stoned and windowless, stocked with hastily stocked desks for work and a thin couch for visitors. A few of the other teachers looked down at their desks, buried too deep in their own work to see that Tiger was there. Tiger took a seat on the thin, uncomfortable couch as Ms. Needa spoke to someone outside—likely Mr. Rose. The crescendo of unintelligible shouting echoed through the halls.
When Ms. Needa finally calmed down, she opened the office door brusquely, barely looking Tiger in the eyes.
"Two weeks of night cleaning duty," she said, glowering. "Maybe some time mopping the floors will teach you about respect."
With that, she left in a huff, a flurry of footsteps following behind her.
Tiger was marched back to his first class, which happened where he took his an empty seat. His math teacher, Mr. Wei, gave a small, tight smile—more of a grimace, really—but did not acknowledge him. That day he learned about simple maths and the workings of languages and how very important it was that nobody ever, EVER go to the Outside.
None of it stuck. Tiger was too busy replaying the day over in his head for learning.
To add insult to injury, Tiger came back to his dorm that night to find that all of his things had been moved to another bed. Rollin, a quiet boy that normally slept close to the door, was unpacking his things onto his bed. When Tiger came in, he turned and gave a sheepish look.
"Mr. Rose suggested we switch…" Rollin said, embarrassed.
There was no fighting the new arrangement.
So Tiger took his new spot against the wall, where he only had the stones to stare at. Maybe the glider would come out again tonight… and if it did, he was going to miss it. He spent that night in a sleepless ache, wondering if the glider was out.
His punishment began the next day.
Every night for two weeks, he would go to the Office of the Custodian, where he would be handed a mop and a bucket and given a new part of the hall to clean. The School floor was a massive square, with four enormous halls making a kind of box of such proportions that it was easy to get lost. Running through and in-between these halls were dozens of smaller corridors, all leading to classrooms and meeting rooms and dining rooms. He had spent much of the last week cleaning these smaller corridors, and it would now be his duty to clean the immense Eastern Hall.
Halfway through his punishment, he had gone to the Custodian Office, dreading the boring evening to come, when he saw an unexpected addition to the night routine—Kyrie, with her own mop and bucket, looking absolutely miserable.
"Kyrie?" Tiger asked. "What are you doing here?"
Kyrie rolled her eyes, holding up the mop as though Tiger had never seen a mop before. "I'm going to pick god's nose. What does it look like?"
That got a laugh out of Tiger, even though he didn't really want to.
They first started mopping one of the yet uncleaned side corridors. Kyrie would empty a slopping flap of mop water, and Tiger would mop it up. After a while they fell into a routine, such as it was and, working together, the two of them surprisingly got quite a lot of the corridor done. They worked mostly in silence—Tiger had gotten used to cleaning after a week, but Kyrie was still sore with the sting of her recent punishment. She slapped the mop down with every chance she could, seething.
After the first hour of this, Tiger felt that he had to say something, even though he was sure it was just going to be more sarcasm.
"So what did you do?" Tiger asked.
Kyrie slammed down the mop with a wet slap. She was about to roll her eyes; instead her eyes peeled back in a flash of anger as she biting down on her lips.
"Drawing," she said, smiling through gritted teeth. "I am here because I was drawing."
Kyrie? The girl who held herself like the school was her own personal palace? An artist? Tiger couldn't help but laugh for real at that.
Kyrie's glare could have set a brick on fire.
"What's so funny?" she asked.
"Nothing," said Tiger. "It's just...I didn't think you would like art much."
"I don't like art," Kyrie said, her voice dripping and vicious. "I love it. Just because I haven't shared it with people like you dosen't mean it's not true. And now you know. Congratulations."
Tiger blinked.
"I don't understand. How can you get in trouble for liking art?"
"Of course you don't understand," shouted Kyrie. "Nobody in this school does! Look—we live in a place that shouldn't exist. Just—just look around you! These stones in the floor, the way they curve right into the walls. Stones don't bend this way!"
Tiger looked down at the floor—sure enough, the stones in the floor gently curved where they reached the walls. The more he looked at it, the more it made him dizzy. He blinked and looked away, and the floor started to look normal again.
"And the columns! They're beautiful, incredible pieces of work. Who carved them? Where could they get the marble to build columns that go up and down forever? 'Nobody knows, Kyrie! Stop asking.questions, Kyrie'!" she put on a mockery of a Teacher's voice that could have been Ms. Needa's.
"Who builds things like this? How is it possible? Nobody will tell me! The outer halls are so massive—who would build something like that for just a few hundred students? And the columns outside are so huge! And the stairs at the ends that don't go anywhere. This place is so strange and so beautiful and we don't learn about any of it!"
Kyrie flung her mop. It landed with a clatter down the far end of the hall.
With her rage spent, Kyrie leaned against a wall and slid down until she was nearly squatting on the floor. Perhaps it was the angle of the light from the Outside, but for a moment Tiger thought he saw tears. Tiger went over to her, leaning against the wall. He hadn't forgotten about her little quip at him earlier--'be grateful', he wanted to say. At least a part of him. But he didn't.
"All I did was start making drawings of the School," Kyrie said miserably. "I started drawing the columns and sketching the portraits in the hall. Ms. Needa found it and she—she ripped up my notebook!"
Tiger blinked. "Why would Ms. Needa care so much about a notebook of drawings?"
"I don't know," Kyrie said miserably. "'We should be focusing on our studies and not looking at the School. She never said anything like that before."
Kyrie looked up at Tiger, her eyes shining. "What did you get in trouble for?"
Tiger blew out a breath. "I… was looking Outside during Sleep hours and I saw something."
Suddenly, her eyes hardened "—that was you?!"
"Well, I was one of them, yeah, but I can't be the only one—"
"Tiger, are you crazy?!" Kyrie abruptly pulled herself up from the ground, pacing towards her bucket. That's crazy! You can't look Outside after Sleep hours—and you saw something?!"
"Oh, now you're going to criticize me? We're both in trouble here, you can't—"
"Wait, wait," Kyrie said, holding up a hand, "there is a huge difference between drawing pictures of the School and looking into the Outside!"
Tiger glowered. "Yeah? Oh, do tell me, Princess Kyrie! Do tell me the difference and show me the error of my ways!"
Kyrie's eyes narrowed.
"Don't call me that," she said.
"Well, how about you don't tell me what to do?" snapped Tiger. "Everyone is so afraid of the Outside here. Why? What's so bad about it? There's nothing out there but clouds and mist! Is it really so bad to look Outside?"
"YES!"
They glared at each other for a moment and whirling storm of an argument grew. But in the stormy silence between them, there was the quiet tapping of feet. Kyrie was the first to notice—behind Tiger there was a shadowy shape moving through the darkened halls.