Page 27

The food is good.

I hadn't even mentioned the food.

The blacked-out lines should have shocked me more than they did. Instead, they felt unpleasantly familiar. Marion had spent my entire life telling me stories about my mother with pieces missing, and now someone else had decided which parts of my own life I was permitted to speak about. Everyone seemed to have a different name for the silence. Marion called it protection. Ironmoor called it procedure.

Either way, I was the one left with the blanks.

That night, I lay awake with the release form resting on the blanket beside me and a pen from my rucksack in my hand.

Signing it would have been easy.

I could leave in the morning. I could hide the iron cuff under a watch strap and go back to Marion's kitchen with its yellow tiles, the kettle on the stove, and my own bed upstairs. I would never have to stand in front of a gallery full of beautiful strangers while they laughed at me again. I could return to being ordinary.

I had been ordinary all my life. I knew how to do that.

I uncapped the pen and held it over the signature line.

For several minutes, I stayed there, waiting for myself to move. Eventually my fingers began to ache from holding the pen so tightly.

I capped it again.

Then I slid the form beneath my pillow and told myself I would sign it in the morning.

When morning came, there was a rose outside my door.

It lay across the top step of the landing, a single dark red bloom with petals so deep in color they were nearly black around the edges. There was no card and no note. The stem had been cut cleanly, but whoever had prepared it had left every thorn in place.

I stood in the doorway in my socks, holding the rose carefully between two fingers.

My first thought was that someone was making fun of me.

The Stray gets a rose. Very funny.

Except a joke would have been left somewhere public. Whoever wanted to humiliate me would have made sure there was an audience.

This had been placed outside my room in the dark, on a staircase almost nobody bothered to climb.

Whoever had left it there had thought about me while I wasn't around. Not about the Hollow. Not about the Stray. About me.

I had no idea who had done it or why, and that bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

I put the rose in the chipped jug on the washstand and added a little water.

It wasn't a good enough reason to stay at Ironmoor.

It was, however, enough of a reason not to leave that morning.

I also discovered that being registered as a Hollow did not excuse me from Shift Control classes if I chose to remain. Ironmoor required every Hollow to make three supervised attempts before the school would treat the Beastglass result as final. My Council registration was a separate issue and would remain pending until the Proving.

I couldn't decide whether that was reassuring or simply another layer of bureaucracy designed to make failure official.

My first Shift Control lesson took place that afternoon in a walled yard behind the kitchens. The yard was open to the sky and covered in carefully raked sand. Wooden privacy screens stood along one wall beside a row of hooks and a stack of gray robes.

"Robes on, clothes off," said Mistress Fenwick.

She was a small woman with cropped brindled hair, quick hazel eyes, a hooked nose, and a face that seemed permanently alert.

"Your clothes will not come with you when you shift," she continued. "You can learn that lesson the expensive way or the cheap way. I recommend the cheap way."