Chapter 13
By morning, the west door had become a place my mind kept walking to without me.
The fact that I didn’t go back to it to look for Delphine felt like cowardice.
It also felt like the most sensible thing I had done since arriving at Zenith Hall.
At ten-forty, the basin in my room filled.
Post-reading practicum. South attunement room. Eleven o’clock.
The water cleared before I could ask whether post-reading meant for people who had been read or people who hadn’t but had been made to watch friend disappear.
I went anyway because I was sure there would be repercussions if I didn’t.
The south attunement room was smaller than the first room where Juno had read my Mark and colder than it had any right to be.
A round basin sat in the center of the floor, sunk into a ring of pale stone.
A group of first-years stood around it, all of them passed cleanly, all of them trying not to look relieved about that where I could see.
Professor Caswell stood at the far side of the basin.
He looked dressed for procedure instead of teaching.
Cosima stood at his left with a Council page clipped to a board.
Caspian Ashford stood at the wall behind her, silent, but the Pull noticed him before I could stop it: cold marble, burnt sugar, the faint clean bite of linen.
My Mark shifted under my sleeve.
Caspian’s gaze moved to my wrist.
Cosima saw that.
Her pen touched the page.
“Post-reading practicum measures stability after basin exposure,” Caswell said. “Each student will place the marked hand at the rim. The basin will display the first response. You will hold until instructed to release.”
The students who had passed cleanly went first.
One by one, they put their hands to the rim. One by one, the basin answered with a single clean thread of light. Gold. Blue. Pale green. A line, a brief shimmer, then nothing.
Caswell nodded each of them away.
Cosima wrote.
Then Caswell looked at me.
“Verita.”
The room got quieter in the way rooms did when people wanted the right to say later that they had only been watching.
“I wasn’t read yesterday,” I said.
“Yes, and?”
“I was too unclean for the small lens. Clean enough for this?”
Cosima’s eyes shot up for a split second then returned to her page.
Caswell said, “You were present at the reading. That is sufficient for today.”
I wanted to push back, but everyone in the room was staring at me.
So I stepped to the basin.
“Marked hand,” Caswell said.
I set my left hand on the rim.
The stone was cold enough to make my fingers ache.
For a breath, nothing happened.
Then the basin brightened under my palm.
My Mark appeared in the water exactly as it lay on my wrist: four pale lines, steady and still.
A few students shifted behind me.
No gasp.
No whisper.
No one had been given anything interesting enough to be afraid of.
Caswell’s eyes shifted to Cosima, who came around the basin and stopped beside me.
“Find the center line,” she said quietly. “Hold it. Don’t let the others pull.”
It sounded like help.
That should have warned me.
I found the center line.
Or what I thought was the center.
I held it.
The water tightened around my hand.
The four pale lines bowed inward.
Then they snapped apart.
The water split.
Three new lines shot through the basin at once, bright enough to throw light against the faces around the room.
One went cold and bright toward Caspian.
One burned green-gold and pulled away from the room entirely.
The third went dark as rain on stone, thick enough to make my breath catch.
And they were not only mine to see.
They were in the water.
Visible.
A girl stumbled back from the rim.
Someone swore under their breath.
One of the boys made a warding in the air before remembering where he was and dropping his hand.
Cosima wrote.
The pen scratched loudly enough to make my teeth meet.
“Unstable branching response,” Caswell said.
The words were already trying to become a record.
Caspian stepped forward.
Cosima glared at him.
Whatever passed between them had the shape of an old command.
Stay. Do not intervene.
For half a breath, he did.
Then he came forward anyway.
“That’s enough.”
Caswell turned to him.
“Ashford?”
“The instruction was supplied by the senior observer. No one else received such instruction. The test is invalid.”
The room went silent.
Cosima’s pen stopped moving.
Caswell glanced at her.
Then at me.
Then at Caspian.
“You were instructed to observe, not interfere.”
“I observed,” Caspian said. “The record cannot assign the full instability to Verita’s lack of control.”
His voice stayed even, but his hands had curled at his sides.
Cosima’s face remained perfectly calm but a muscle in her jaw ticked.
That was how I knew he had hurt her by stepping forward.
I just didn’t know why.
Caswell looked back at me and said, “Remove your hand from the basin.”
I pulled my hand away.
The four lines vanished at once.
The water went dark.
My wrist looked ordinary again.
Caswell dismissed the practicum three minutes later without further discussion of the matter and strode out first as if he had somewhere important to be.
The students who had passed cleanly left first, moving carefully around me, as if whatever had happened in the basin might still be catching.
Cosima signed the Council page and passed me without speaking.
Then she was gone.
Caspian and I were alone in the room.
He stood near the wall, closer than he had been before.
Still too far to touch.
“I’m sorry about Cosima,” he said. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
“It did.”
His jaw tightened.
“I shouldn’t have spoken either.”
“No,” I said. “You should have done it sooner.”
He took it like a blow he had been expecting.
Then he looked at the basin.
“Did it hurt?”
“Which part?”
His eyes came back to mine.
For one second, he looked less like a prefect and more like a boy who knew exactly how many answers that question had.
Then he walked out the door.
I stayed where I was until I felt like I could breathe properly again.
Back in Room 114, I sat on the bed and held my wrist at eye level.
The Mark had moved. I’d felt it.
It had moved when Cosima told me to hold the line.
It had moved when the basin split.
It had moved when Caspian Ashford said, That’s enough.
Now the lines on my skin looked almost ordinary.
But the basin had shown what my wrist had been hiding.
Caspian had seen it.
Cosima had written it.
Caswell had named it.
Whatever the record said next, it couldn’t pretend nothing had happened.