Chapter 7
The next morning, the basin in my room woke me before the breakfast bell with the sound of water falling.
A drop hit the floor.
Then another.
And another.
I opened my eyes.
The small basin in the corner was full.
It hadn’t been full when I went to sleep.
The water stood perfectly still, black in the dark room, and on its surface were five words written in pale light.
Juno’s chamber. First session.
Then the bell rang.
The words broke.
The water went ordinary.
I sat up.
“No way,” I said, mostly to the idea that the basin could apparently convey messages now.
The room did not reply. Neither did the basin, though I was beginning to suspect that was a choice.
I dressed and considered washing my face, my the idea that the basin might be sentient dissuaded me for the time being.
Then I went to Juno’s office.
The upper east floor was too bright for so early in the morning. Small carved marks I hadn’t noticed the first day sat above the sconces. I didn’t know how to read them, but I knew money when it had been made decorative.
Before my knuckles reached it, the door to Juno’s chamber opened. Entirely of its own accord. Almost as unnerving as the basin.
Juno herself was across the room at her own basin already, palms not on the rim but at her sides. Long fingers. No rings. Raw nails.
“Verita,” she greeted.
“Astra,” I insisted, again.
Juno appeared not to register the correction. Again.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat in the same too-small wooden chair as yesterday.
She remained standing at the basin. A leather-bound book lay open on the small table beside her, and she wasn’t looking at it but hadn’t closed it either.
The book looked older than the chair. Older than the table. Possibly older than the academy.
“This is your first weekly session,” she said. “You and I will see each other at this hour every Thursday for as long as I remain your Oracle.”
“Which is as long as I remain here, right?”
Juno’s gaze lifted to mine, and I already knew she was going to skirt the question before she did it.
“Caswell’s protocol would call you in more often. I have not asked him to override mine.”
“Why not?”
“Because mine is slower.”
“That doesn’t sound like an advantage.”
“It is when speed is being used against you.”
I liked that answer less than I liked her avoidance.
Juno touched the open book beside the basin.
“Do you know the beginning of your Verse?”
“My what?”
Juno watched me for one beat.
“So no.”
“No.”
“The Council does.”
The room seemed to get colder around the basin.
Juno looked down at the page, then back at me.
“I will give you the first line. Only the first.”
“Why?”
“Because it belongs to you and the first line has always been meant to guide our paths.”
That shut me up. I could certainly use a little guidance and no one had been very forthcoming with it thus far.
Juno read quietly:
“When the unheld Mark wakes, what answers will not answer alone.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“It tells you not to believe anyone who insists your Mark should reach in only one direction.”
My wrist prickled under my sleeve.
“Now I will teach you how to read the Mark on your own wrist. I have been told you’ve been looking at it. Looking is not reading. I will teach you the difference.”
“Who told you I’ve been looking?”
“You looked at it in the dining hall yesterday after your meal with the Moreau girl. Three students reported it before lights-out. The reports are routine. They are also, in your case, on a list.”
I glanced down at my wrist, then back at Juno.
“I’m being reported on for looking at my own hand?”
“You are being reported on for everything.”
There wasn’t much to say to that.
Juno held out her hand.
“Raise your right hand.”
I raised it.
“To eye level.”
I brought it up farther.
“Look at the Mark—but do not look at the Mark.”
I rolled my eyes. “Excellent. We’ve reached the riddle portion of the class.”
Juno didn’t smile, but I was beginning to suspect she had never smiled in her entire life.
“Look at the air around it. A Mark leaves an absence as well as a shape. Most students never learn to read the absence.”
“And I do?”
“You don’t have time to learn only half of what your wrist is saying.”
“Ominous. Great.”
I sighed and looked at the air around my Mark.
For a long moment, I saw nothing.
Then the air around my wrist thinned.
Not over the Mark, but around it.
A pale shape showed itself in the space the lines did not touch.
The negative.
I went very still.
It had been there since the basin.
I had been carrying what the Mark was not.
“You see it.”
“I see it.”
“Describe it.”
“There’s a—a thinness. Around the lines. As if the lines are holding something in.”
“They are. A Mark of your shape holds multiple patterns at once. The lines you see are the surface. The negative around them is the second pattern.”
“Caswell didn’t mention that.”
“Caswell has not been authorized to teach it to you.”
“And you have?”
“No. I am doing it anyway.”
That woke me up more effectively than the basin had.
“Why?”
“I am teaching it because the alternative is worse than being asked to stop.”
“What’s the alternative?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I asked anyway because if there was one thing no one had ever managed to teach me, it was how to keep my mouth shut.
“Caswell’s classes will make your Mark answer. If you cannot read the negative, you will show the Council things you don’t know you are showing, and which you don’t want them to know.”
“Fantastic.”
“I would rather you see first.”
“And not tell anyone who taught me?”
“Not Caspian Ashford if he asks. Not Hale if he asks. Not the Verraine girl.”
“Cosima.”
“Yes, Cosima.”
“Why does Cosima know more than I do, anyway?”
“Cosima has been here three years. She has reasons of her own and methods of her own. I do not tell my students one another’s reasons or methods.”
It wasn’t exactly a satisfying answer, but I saw her point. I didn’t want her talking to Cosima about me, either.
“All right.”
“Lower your hand. Look at the basin.”
I did as she said.
The basin held water that hadn’t been there yesterday. Or maybe it had been there last time too, settled into a shape I hadn’t known how to see. Today it sat slightly above the rim, held by the same tension but higher.
She placed the leather-bound book on the rim of the basin.
“This is a ledger the school keeps and does not advertise.”
“Those are always the most interesting books.”
“It is older than the school’s current cosmology. Most Oracles do not have access to it. I have access because my advisor’s advisor’s advisor was its keeper in his time. The school assumes the ledger is sealed in the pre-founding stacks.”
She beckoned.
“Lean over. Look at this entry.”
I did.
The entry was dated 23 years ago.
The handwriting was formal, the hand the school’s records of that decade had been kept in. The entry had a name: Selene Verita. The school’s symbol classification next to the name was unresolved. The notation of withdrawal was voluntary.
I read the name. Then I blinked and read it again.
Juno watched me, her expression unreadable.
“You know the name,” she said.
“I know the name.”
“Whose name is it?”
“My mother’s. You knew her.”
“I knew her. I have not said her name aloud in seventeen years. I will not say it again at this volume.”
“Because of the room?”
“Because of what listens to rooms.”
“What does symbol classification: unresolved mean?”
“It is an old way of writing what your Mark is. It is also an old way of writing what your mother’s Mark was.”
“What was my mother’s Mark?”
“It was the same shape as yours. The Council called it unresolved in the records of that decade because the Council preferred not to write the current word.”
“What current word?”
She didn’t answer.
Instead, she turned to another page. This one held a different hand, a different year, a different girl.
The name on the entry had been crossed through.
Above the crossing was a small symbol cut into the page itself with the point of a knife or brooch—small, hand-cut, the circle deeper than the lines that met at it.
I had seen the same symbol yesterday on the doorframe of Room 107.
“This is Sadie.”
Juno didn’t ask who had told me the name and I didn’t volunteer it.
“Sadie Corwin,” she said.
“And the symbol?”
“Her Mark. The same one you saw on the door of Room 107.”
“Who cuts it?”
“The girl whose name is being recorded under it.”
“She cuts it herself?”
“When she can.”
I didn’t wan’t to think about what that meant for the ones who couldn’t.
“My mother’s entry doesn’t have one.”
“Selene’s entry doesn’t have one. Your mother left carefully. She did not want to leave a trail for the next girl like her to follow.”
“The next girl?”
“You.”
The word sat between us.
Juno closed the ledger and placed her palm on the cover.
“You will not tell anyone what you saw in this book. Not Hale. Not Cosima. Not Delphine Moreau. Not Caspian Ashford. Not Kieran Marsh. Not even me, if Caswell is in the room.”
“Why not?”
“Because if Caswell is in the room, I cannot be the same person as I am when we are alone together.”
I understood that better than I wanted to.
“The book does not exist,” Juno said. “It exists only when you and I are alone in this chamber. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
She lifted her hand from the cover and said, “Go to lunch.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but I could tell from the expression on Juno’s face that class was over.
So I left her chambers and started making my way to the dining hall because there was nowhere else to go except back to my room. And there was nothing to do in my room besides think about how my mother had been recorded in a book that did not exist.
By the time I reached the dining hall, it was before lunch but after breakfast and the room had only two students at it. One was Delphine. The other I didn’t know.