“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 doessymbol classification: unresolvedmean?”
“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.”
