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Vivienne’s own strike slammed back across the space between us with a pale green rim burning along its edge and took her off her feet. She went down hard enough to make the whole gallery ring like a struck bell.

Silence.

It was enormous, with a size and a weight to it that told me even though the others were supposed to be practicing as well, everyone had been watching us.

Vivienne sat on the polished floor with her hair loosened out of its perfect twist, one strand fallen across her pale face. My hands still hung in the air in front of me. I could see the green afterimage on my own fingers, already fading, like the ghost I kept after staring at a light.

Then Honora said, “She mimicked it.”

Not loud, but loud enough, and the word went through the room like cold smoke finding every crack.

Mimicked.

Mimicked.

Mimicked.

They sounded like a chorus of birds calling to one another.

I watched the story assemble itself in real time, faster than I could have argued with any single piece of it. Not defended or survived, not the plain animal fact of my body refusing to be knocked down. Mimicked, reached into what belonged to Vivienne and threw it back at her, a first-generation girl with no bloodline of her own and no name that traveled, reaching into someone else’s power like a hand into someone else’s pocket.

A boy near the glass took a step back from me, an actual step, as if I might be contagious. I almost took a step toward him out of spite.

Someone whispered, “That’s not allowed,” and someone else said, “It can’t be,” and neither of them was talking to me, which was worse than if they had been.

The professor finally remembered he had legs and started toward us, saying my name, saying “Miss Mallory” over and over again, saying words that had no shape. Above us, behind the glass of the observation gallery, figures that had been frozen suddenly began to move.

Then Cormac Vere came in through the side door. He did not hurry, and that was the obscene part. The room was still full of the ringing silence that came after something that should not be possible. Cormac walked into that silence in his long dark coat that he sometimes wore instead of robes and his black gloves as though the silence had only been holding the space until he arrived to take possession of it.

“Enough,” he said. “Quiet.”

He did not raise his voice. He lowered it. And that low, even pressure rolled out through the gallery and settled over every single person in it like a hand laid flat on the back of the neck. The professor stopped mid-stride and the whispering died leaving a quiet hush behind it. Honora’s mouth closed, and Vivienne’s hand froze halfway to Honora’s arm, halfway to being helped up. Even the figures behind the glass went still, as if some old rule had reached up through the floor and taken them by the shoulder.

Everyone in that gallery obeyed him, everyone except me. I felt the pressure arrive and slide straight off, useless as rain running off oil. It touched the place where obedience was supposed to live in me and found the door already closed, the same way the strike had found the same road already open.

Cormac’s eyes cut to mine, and he felt it slide off me. I saw him feel it.

He knew, but I froze like everyone else. Not willing to let them see that I wasn’t under his control the same way they were.

Then he turned his back to the glass. At the time I thought he was cutting off my only exit, planting himself between me and the door so the subject, aka. me, couldn’t bolt before it was analyzed.

He walked forward and stopped in front of me, too close, close enough that only the front row could catch what he said. “That,” he said, and the cold in his voice made the word go brittle at the edges, “was a category violation performed in front of the assessment gallery.”

My hands curled at my sides. “I don’t even understand what that means,” I hissed. “Besides, she hit me.”

“Miss Mallory performed within expected bounds.”

Vivienne, still on the floor, looked up at that, sharp. Even she hadn’t expected him to hand her the official version quite so fast, quite so cleanly.

I hated him then, simply and completely, the way I would have hated a building block I had stepped on while babysitting. Hating him was almost a relief, because hate had a handle and I could pick hate up and carry it. Fear was slippery and I could never quite grasp it enough to control it.

“Expected bounds,” I said. “And what I did wasn’t? When no one taught me what to do? How to react? You think I’ve ever been in a situation, let alone a class, like this before?”

His face did not change, not a muscle. “You will receive formal notice. Until then I suggest you compose yourself and refrain from putting your peers on the floor.”

“Right,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to interrupt the part where they put me there first.”

Something moved behind his eyes, gone before I could get a hand on it. “Miss Lane.”