“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.
