The Classroom Without a Number

Oren Beck’s cousin was not Oren Beck, and she was tired of surface people assuming all teachers were related.

Her name was Vesh. She had taught in Old Circuit until a housing chain had made the commute a joke she could not afford. She had gone down, not as exile, as geography.

The room had been storage. It still had a bolt-hole smell. She painted a square of wall white enough to take charcoal.

Nine children. Mixed. Some with papers. Some with the kind of names that did not stick on purpose.

“Today is fractions,” Vesh said. “Also which grate is a lie.”

A boy put up a hand.

“Is the lie on the test?”

“The lie is on the floor of node 4. If you step on it, the test is over.”

They laughed, then did not.

She taught the honest arithmetic of sharing water and the dishonest arithmetic of men who sold batteries by the half-cell. She taught them to write their names in a way that could be shown and a way that could not.

A woman at the door, not a parent, left a bag of chalk and did not come in. Protection, in this layer, sometimes looked like stationery.

Tam from the valve crew arrived late and sat on the back crate, too old, too useful, still hungry for a blackboard.

“You’re not enrolled,” Vesh said.

“Nothing is.”

She threw him a stub of charcoal.

After, she walked the children as far as the first public light. Not because the corridor was always dangerous. Because leaving them at the dark edge made her stomach do a calculation she refused to mark as normal.

At night she copied Old Circuit lesson plans onto the back of freight sheets, crossing out the bits about Civic Network hygiene modules.

In the margin she wrote: They already know how to search. Teach them what not to step on.

The room had no number.

The children had the wall.

In the underlevels that passed for a school board.