A woman beside the basin.
She wore the same kind of belt as the woman from yesterday. A dark Mark ran along her forearm.
She didn’t hide it.
When I came in, she bowed her head.
“Verita.”
“Astra, please.”
She didn’t smile or acknowledge the correction, but she took her hand off her knee and gestured me toward a small wooden chair beside the basin. The chair had been built for a body smaller than mine.
I sat in it anyway.
“My name is Juno,” she said. “I am your Oracle.”
“My what?”
“Oracle.”
She said it like it was an office. Like registrar, or guidance counselor, or something. I’d never heard of a school oracle, and I told her so.
She ignored my comment.
“I will be your Oracle for the rest of this year, and probably longer. Most students have years to prepare for Zenith. You had three days.”
“Two and a couple hours,” I said. “If we’re being generous.”
She didn’t seem amused by that either.
“The first reading will take less than ten minutes. You will see things you have not seen before. Some of them will make your body do things it has never done. Most are harmless. My job today is to read your Mark and keep you stable.”
“Stable?” I echoed.
“Stable,” she repeated. “It is a word with more weight than I will give it now. We will use it more in the coming weeks.”
She rested her hand on the rim of the basin.
“Do you know what a Mark is?”
“I know people have them.”
“But do you understand what theyare?”
I shook my head.
“A Mark is the shape your Fate takes when the basin reads it. Some are inherited. Some are not. Some settle early. Some change with age, training, injury, grief, desire. Most students arrive with a family record of what their Mark is expected to become.”
“And I didn’t. Because I have no family.”
Juno’s eyes moved to my face.
Only for a moment.
“Correct,” she said. “You arrived with no record the school is willing to use.”
That was the first thing she had said that sounded like the kind of problem I was used to dealing with.
