“The notice said school. Chance. Future. Mandatory. It left out the Mark and the basin and the part where water crawls onto your skin.”
“Ah. The basin. Juno sent word after your reading. That is why I’m here.”
That made my wrist feel colder.
“What did she tell you?”
“That your Mark did not behave.”
This time I did tug at my sleeve.
“I will not enter your room,” Quill said. “I do not need to. I have come to tell you that the reading you did this morning will be the mostimportant reading of your life. Juno may guide you. Caswell may test you. But when the school determines what is to be done with a girl like you, the authority will be mine.”
“A girl like me?”
The briefest pause.
“An unsettled girl.”
He inclined his head and turnedaround.
Over his shoulder he said, “The bell at six rings whether you have slept or not.”
Then he was gone before I could ask him what, exactly, I was supposed to do when the bell rang.
3
By the time the building went quiet, I was hungry enough to remember the east kitchen.
The girl with box braids had said the bread in the east kitchen was better, so that became my destination.
I put on my boots and went looking.
The halls outside Room 114 had gone mostly quiet. I followed the colder corridor east, past three locked classroom doors, a narrow stair, and a window that looked out on the quad without offering any useful waythrough it.
At the next turn, I saw them.
Four students stood near the end of the corridor, where the main hall split toward the classrooms and the service passage. At the center was the boy from the dining hall. The one who looked like he expected me to lick his boots.
He saw me and stared at me with same expression, but now without a table between us, without bread to distract myself with, without a wall at my back.
He didn’t move for the first breath. He moved for the second. By the third he was walking toward me, and his friends were walking with him. They had apparently decided—at some signal I couldn’t read—that I was now on their schedule.
I lifted my chin and refused to look away because I knew angry men.
Men at the shop. Men in apartment hallways. Men who wanted someone smaller nearby when the day had gone badly.
He wasn’t that kind of angry, though. His was cleaner. Better dressed. Trained into a posture of disdain.
He stopped four feet away.
The cold of marble came off him in waves. The taste at the back of my throat was sugar—burnt sugar, like a scented candle when its wick had gone too long.
I swallowed.
The taste did not go away, which seemed unfair, since I hadn’t invited any part of him into my mouth.
“Verita,” he said, like he had read it off a list.
