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Fear had coursed through me at the sensation. So I released her wrist. Cowardice, dressed as prudence. I dismissed her before the shaking became obvious, and I had told her nothing, because there was nothing I was willing to say.

I looked at my fingers on the pen now and found them steady, which was a relief. After taking a deep breath I began again.

Subject displays no classifiable aptitude. Recommend continued observation.

A tidy sentence, accurate enough to survive scrutiny and empty enough to be useful. My father would read it and file it and move on, and the machinery of the school would grind another few weeks before it turned its attention back to the girl with pink hair and no lineage and a hush inside her.

I should have stopped there.

Instead I opened my desk drawer. Not the first drawer, since that held official stationery, sealing wax, filing slips, and other sundry items. It was the drawer any inspection would open, and it was arranged so that any inspection would be bored by what it found, which was the entire purpose of a first drawer.

The second drawer was what I was after. I unlocked it.

Inside lay a plain folder with no mark on the tab, which was already a breach of several family practices. A record without a tab invited disorder. A private record invited self-indulgence, which my father considered the root of most moral and institutional decay. He had removed it from more than one relative over the years, gently, the way a man removed a splinter that had begun to fester.

I took out a fresh sheet or paper. On it, in my own hand, I wrote what had actually happened, everything that had happened. The hush that had fallen on the room. The rain on hot stone that belonged to no summer I had ever stood in, and the girl’s immunity to a pressure that had never once in my life failed me.

Then I stopped, and did a thing I had not done since I was a boy at a piano where my mother had made me practice until my fingers bled. I wrote down the three notes of the song.

I could still hear them, and that was the unbearable part. Not the memory of them, the way one remembered a fact, filed and cold. I heard them the way one heard a sound in the next room, present and continuing, a low humming in a woman’s voice, three notes falling and the third held, a lullaby’s worth of melody. I wrote the intervals down as carefully as a man copying a name he could not afford to spell wrong, because part of me felt like if I got them exactly right the paper might somehow tell me whose throat they had come from.

It didn’t.

I didn’t write about my fear. One had to retain standards.

When I finished, I read the page once, all the way through, the way I read everything, for the flaw in it.

The facts were useless, worse than useless, because they formed no conclusion I could defend before a committee, my father, or myself. If I submitted them, my father would call it fatigue, contamination, professional vanity, or all three, and he would not be entirely wrong, which was the trouble with him. Pelham would panic elegantly. The committee would move, in a single graceful motion, from curiosity to containment, and I had seen what containment looked like when it landed on someone with no family, bloodline, or money to shelter them.

So I placed the true account in the private folder and locked the drawer. And I looked over the official report one more time before I sent it through the proper channel, sealed with my own mark, exactly as instructed, perfectly on time.

Subject displays no classifiable aptitude. Recommend continued observation.

The ink had dried quickly. Lies often did.

TEN

Billie

By the end of the week, the table I had come to think of as mine, was no longer mine alone, and nobody had thought to ask me first. I could get used to being the outcast, that was fine, but I wasn’t sure what to do with people who seemed to want to be my friends.

The badly-lit table that had been ceded to me by silent social vote on my first night was too close to the draft from the side door, where the servers came and went, and one leg of the table wobbled if anyone shifted too fast. In other words, perfect. A place nobody wanted was almost the same as a place nobody could take from you.

Then Kit Wyndham sat down.

Then he sat down again.

By Friday, people had started calling it Wyndham’s table, which was both unfair and predictable, and the fact that I cared about either made me want to stab something with my spoon.

“You can’t keep sitting here,” I told him.

He looked around the bench with the slow theatrical care of a man checking for a posted ordinance. Overhead one of the floating candles guttered in the draft before steadying itself. “I can, though.”

“You’re drawing attention.”

“I’m Kit Wyndham. I draw attention by continuing to breathe. It’s one of my burdens.” He grinned at me as he tore his roll in half and used the smaller piece to point at me. “You’d be shocked how heavy it gets.”

“Go be burdened somewhere else.”