Torval did not get worse over the years so much as he got more specific in his grievance, which was in some ways harder to navigate than simple meanness would have been. Simple meanness can be deflected or absorbed or waited out; specific grievance has a logic to it, and the logic was, by the time they were both eleven and twelve respectively, not entirely unjustifiable from where Torval stood, which was the thing about it that Luc found most difficult to dismiss.

  Torval was talented. He was a genuine Worldbearer with a Core Species of Basic Soldier Ants — not the same variety as Luc's, but related enough that Luc found the irony of it persistent and difficult to ignore — and his stability metrics were respectable, his combat adaptations developing along lines that the tribe's instructors considered promising, his social standing among their peers built on real aptitude rather than pure politics. He was not, in short, the kind of antagonist who was obviously wrong about his own capabilities, and this meant that his specific grievance — which was, when stripped to its essential form, that someone with Luc's origins and Luc's species should not be measurably ahead of him — had a particular quality of wounded logic to it that simple cruelty would not have had.

  The hair comments had mostly stopped after Fen's three mornings of visible presence, years ago, but the comments had evolved rather than disappeared, finding new purchase in things that were harder to address: remarks about Luc's origins delivered in company, suggestions that his advancement came from Maren's favoritism rather than his own work, the particular social maneuver of simply not including Luc in group activities in ways that were technically passive but cumulatively significant. Luc tracked these the way he tracked everything — systematically, without drama, noting patterns and outcomes without allowing himself to make the tracking emotional, because emotion in response to Torval felt like giving Torval something he didn't deserve.

  But the journal incident was harder to track without emotion.

  He had kept notes since he was eight, careful handwritten records of his world's development — not because Maren had asked him to, but because he had decided early that observation without record was useful but limited, that memory edited itself toward what you had already decided was important, and that writing forced precision in a way that memory did not. The journal lived in the training house, where he spent most of his days, in a specific corner of the shelf that he had chosen because the shelf was stable and the corner was sheltered from the moisture that came off the practice floor in winter. He had not hidden it because it had not occurred to him that it needed hiding.

  He found it on a Tuesday afternoon with three pages missing — torn, . The pages were his most recent structural diagrams, the ones he had spent two weeks developing, mapping the energy circulation improvements he had designed around the Law of Structure's activation and the specific tunnel configurations he had worked out to maximize the compound benefits of distribution density and law reinforcement.

  He stood in front of the shelf and held the journal and was very still.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  He was not angry. He catalogued this, as he catalogued most things, with the same quality of attention he brought to world maintenance — it was useful information that he was not angry, because anger would tell him something about the situation's nature, and its absence told him something different. What he felt was the structural sadness of having something carefully made be deliberately diminished — not the personal insult, which was almost beside the point, but the waste of it, the specific waste of effort that had been genuine and work that had been done well.

  He rebuilt the diagrams that night, at the table in the training house, from memory. They came back cleaner. This was the first thing he noticed — that the act of rebuilding forced a precision that the original drafting had not required, because he had to reconstruct each element from the reasoning that had produced it rather than from the previous drawing, and the reasoning was cleaner than the previous drawing had been. He worked until late, and Lira came and found him, as she had a habit of doing when she sensed something was wrong, though she was too young and too wise to have articulated the sensing as such. She was six years old and she sat beside him without asking why she was there, and after a while her head found his shoulder and she fell asleep.

  He kept drawing. The ants built their tunnels in the deep world. The pendant was warm against his chest. He thought about what it meant that the rebuilding was an improvement, and arrived at the conclusion that Torval had, inadvertently, been useful — which was exactly the kind of conclusion that would have infuriated Torval, which gave Luc a quiet, private satisfaction that he did not feel the need to share with anyone.

  Sven found out about it anyway, through the elaborate intelligence network that exists in all small communities and is fueled primarily by the fact that children talk more than adults expect them to.

  He came to the training house the next morning and stood in the doorway and looked at the journal and then at Luc with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is proceeding with it.

  "I'm going to talk to him," he said.

  "Sven," Luc said.

  "I said I'm going to talk to him," Sven repeated, which in his particular idiom meant that the decision was made and the conversation was about what he was telling Luc rather than asking him. "I'm going to use words. Mostly." He paused. "Primarily. In significant part."

  The conversation Sven had with Torval was not witnessed by Luc and was reported back only in summary, but the summary was specific enough to allow reconstruction. Sven had told Torval that whatever gap existed between Torval's advancement and Luc's was a problem with Torval's training, not with Luc's origins, and that the correct response to being behind someone was to close the gap through your own effort rather than to attempt to diminish the distance by making the person ahead of you smaller. He had made clear that future interference with Luc's property would have direct physical consequences, which Sven was both willing and prepared to provide. He had delivered this in the quiet, direct way that he delivered everything, without escalation or threat, in the same tone he would have used to explain training methodology, which made it more rather than less effective because there was nothing theatrical in it for Torval to push back against.

  Torval did not take the journal again. He did not stop his grievance — the grievance was too structural for a single conversation to change — but he redirected its expression to channels that did not involve Luc's property or his person, which was not resolution but was management, and management was enough for the time being.

  Luc looked at the final rebuilt diagram that evening, which was better than what had been taken, and thought about the specific logic of it: that the thing meant to diminish had produced improvement, that the structural sadness of the loss had been replaced by the structural satisfaction of the rebuild. He thought about this for a long time and arrived at a principle that he would not have words for until he was considerably older, but whose shape he recognized even then: the things that try to erase you are, if you are built correctly, more useful to you than the things that try to help you.

  He put the journal back on the shelf and went home for dinner.