Page 37

“No.”

His pen stopped. “No?”

“I want to know why.”

“Because I instructed you to.”

“That’s not a reason. It’s a command.”

His gaze lifted off the page. I’d meant to annoy him and I’d managed it, but under the irritation something else moved. Interest, maybe? The kind he’d have swallowed the pen before admitting to.

“Close your eyes,” he said, “because you overvalue your sight. You use it to control your environment. I am attempting to determine whether you possess any sensory access beyond the obvious.”

“See? A reason. Was that so hard.”

“Do not make me regret providing it.” He said it the way a long-suffering teacher said everything, even though he had barely said anything to me since I walked in.

I closed my eyes, and the room sharpened in pieces. The cold came up through the soles of my boots and the scrape of his pen across the paper filled my ears along with the hiss of the lamp’s small heat and the wind at the window. I felt the distance between us more clearly with my eyes shut, a line pulled tight across the table and held there. My chest went tight. I shouldn’t be able to feel anything like that, should I?

“Feel the room’s edge,” he said.

“I feel a wall.”

“Not the wall. The pressure of the wall.”

“It’s a wall. Its main pressure is being in the way.”

Pen scratch. “Again.”

So I tried again, and this time I stopped arguing with it and just sat with the wall a while, the cold coming off it, the flat fact of it standing where it stood. There was something there and it wasn’t pressure and it wasn’t nothing.

“It stops,” I said. “The room. It gets to the wall and it stops, and it’s…still.”

“Better,” he said. “Now the table.”

I put my attention on the table, which was easy because the table was directly under my hands and had been my one loyal companion in that room for two sessions running, cold and wooden, scored along one edge where somebody before me had dug at it with a fingernail, or a pen, or the slow patient panic of being measured. I wondered how many provisional girls had sat where I sat. I wondered if any of them had been allowed to keep the memory of it.

“The table’s a table,” I said, pushing thoughts of other provisional students away.

“Its density. Its resistance. The way it interrupts the room.”

“It interrupts the room by being a table.”

Another pen scratch. “Now the lamp.”

The lamp was different, and I hated that it was different, because it meant he was onto something. Around the lamp the air did a thing I had no word for. It leaned and gathered toward the flame the way people gathered toward a story, and under that, thinner than a hair, there was the small hungry pull I’d first felt in the Walkers’ hall, the one that had opened the fire around my body like it knew me.

I did not tell him that.

“Anything?” he asked.

“A lamp,” I said. “Hot. Distinctly lamp-shaped.” Lie. I couldn’t say why I lied to him, all I knew was that telling him what I felt from the lamp would make me vulnerable in a way I wasn’t used to.

His pen did not move, which probably meant that he didn’t believe me, which was fair, because I was lying. For twenty minutes he directed my attention to the wall, then the table, then the lamp and window, the gap under the door where the draft came in cold, the place where Cormac sat, a shape in the room too contained to be comfortable. Almost every attempt gave me either something ordinary or nothing at all, but once or twice there was that leaning hungry thread I refused to name aloud, and every nothing went into his notebook with maddening care.

“You’re writing an awful lot,” I said, “for a man watching me fail to feel furniture.”

“I told you last time. Absence has a shape.”