“This is bullshit,” someone cursed, and I shot them a look. They were so concerned with purity, but their mouths were like toilets up here.
“Why did their breath stink?” I asked, but the other students had already begun shuffling to the door and flying away. Only the guy who had been zapped, Truth, stayed.
“You’re Feather.” He held out a hand. “I’m Truth. Sorry this was your first class. It’s the worst one, so that’s good.”
“It only gets better?” I returned his grin when he nodded.
“Want to fly down to the Dining Hall? We can grab a juice.” He stood and unfolded his wings. They were really pretty up close, all shades of brown and gray.
“Sorry, my wings are purely decorative,” I said, unfolding them to show him what I meant. “You can go, though. I have a ride coming in a while.”
“Nah, I can wait with you. Nothing better to do.” His face was open, his expression guileless. Which sort of made sense.
“I like your wings,” I told him, as we moved to the open doorway, standing in it while Protectors flew past without noticing us.
“You’re the only one to say that,” he admitted. “Most people see the gray and think yuck, it’s smut.”
I lifted my arm. “Well, they’re going to think I’ve internalized my smut.”
He hissed as he saw the complex patterns underneath the surface smut on my skin. “That happened in… the gate?”
“I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” I hedged. No one had said that, but it seemed safer not to share that I’d been in the Abyss.
“That’s not true,” Truth accused, his face a little green. Did lies make him puke?
“Sorry,” I cringed, when he told me that very thing. “I guess you would know. My best birch is Sunny, the Light of Truth. She says it’s super awful when people lie around her.”
“Yeah, Sunny does the big picture stuff. She’s sort of my role model.” He ran a hand through his hair. “My name is Truth in the Smallest Detail, so I’m never going to live up to her.”
“That’s a cool name,” I said, making a mental note to tease Sunny later about being a role model. “What does it mean for you, like on a daily basis?”
He stepped closer, looking around. “Well, for one thing, it means people don’t have to lie for me to pick up on it. Likethe Guide who teaches this class? Everything they’ve taught so far this session isn’t necessarily untrue. But it’s skewed. The knowledge itself has been corrupted, if that makes sense.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m so relieved it’s not just me. All that crap they spouted, that’s not how it works on Earth.”
“How would you know?” His dark eyes were quizzical.
Should I tell this guy? He was a stranger, but it felt like I could trust him. And I had to start making friends up here. Especially if the Guides were somehow tainted. “I lived down there for four centuries before they found me,” I explained. His eyes went saucer wide. “Yeah, I was lost. By the time Gavriel ‘extracted’ me, I’d had to do a lot of things.”
“You killed people,” he murmured. “That’s what the Guides said at an Assembly. They said your crimes were unredeemable.”
“But you know that’s not true. There are no limits to grace.”
He took a shaky breath. “That—right there! That was truth, no detail wrong with the statement.” He rubbed his arms with both hands. “It feels so good when someone speaks truth like that. Almost no one does it anymore.”
I decided to ask the question I thought I’d save for Righteous, or Sunny. “The Guide’s breath smelled awful. They said that imbalance always shows on the outside here. Is that true?”
I knew his answer before he said it, though he spoke so quietly, his reply was almost impossible to hear. “No. From what I can tell, from the details I’ve put together, the Guides are almost all tainted. On theinside.”He chewed at his lip. “Prosperity is one of the worst, but Tradition? They’re the one that worries me most.”
“Why? Who is Tradition?”
Truth’s eyes grew even more troubled. “They’ve been running the Guides for thousands of years, and my older friends tell me High Angelus Gavriel just recently gave them more power than any Guide has ever had. I can feel down deepthat Tradition’s not being untruthful, that they honestly believe everything they’re doing and saying is right. Justified. But Tradition smells stale.”
“Weird.”
He nodded. “What’s weirder is that most of the Head Guides seem to smell fine to all the older Protectors. It’s just those of us, the younger ones, who even notice it anymore. There’s something off about Tradition. They may not be tainted, but they shouldn’t be trusted with all that power.”
“We have to tell the High Angeli,” I breathed, horrified. “They don’t know.”
