“Give me your wrist again.”
I did.
“You cannot hide a Mark from a basin,” she said. “You may be able to keep a room from reading everything around it.”
“May be able to?”
“I am not in the habit of lying to improve morale, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“No one around here is it seems.”
“Look at the negative.”
I looked at it. It looked exactly the same as I had a moment ago.
“Now pull it inward.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“Find the outside edge,” Juno said. “Do not look at the line. Look where the air stops being empty. When you feel the edge, breathe in and draw it toward the Mark.”
“You could have led with that.”
The first time, nothing happened.
The second time, the lines on my wrist sharpened and the negative flared so hard Juno’s fingers tightened around my palm.
“Wrong,” she said.
“I gathered.”
“Again.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you and Jonas Hale have a lot in common?”
“Do it again.”
The third time, I found the edge of the negative.
It was not a thing I could have explained. It was the difference between staring at a locked door and finding the seam where the wood met the frame. I took hold of that seam with whatever part of me had learned to look at air, and I pulled.
The negative folded closer to the Mark.
Not gone, but tucked away.
The air around my wrist settled.
The Mark looked less changed than it had a moment before.
It was a lie, but a small one. More like an omission.
Juno let out a breath she had not meant me to hear.
“There.”
It wanted to come undone as soon as I noticed it had worked, which didn’t fill me with confidence.
“Will it hold?”
