My grandmother said one word.
“Again.”
The Oracle read the line again.
The line did not change.
After that, suppression stopped being a lesson and became the shape of my life.
Never brighten at meals.
Never answer in corridors.
Never visibly respond to any girl whose Mark came too near mine.
I came to Zenith Hall already trained to survive the thing I had been told would find me.
Then Astra Verita arrived small, angry, underfed, and unimpressed by all the pomp and grandeur.
She should have made it easier. A nobody, easy to dismiss, with no understanding of the games the Council played with lives they couldn’t control.
She made it worse.
She asked too many questions in hallways where anyone could overhear. She stared too long at dangerous doors. She noticed when a room wanted her frightened and seemed determined to prove she was the opposite, even when she should be.
And worst of all, when her Mark reached, mine failed to warn me.
It recognized her.
Worse.
If felt relieved to have found her.
The thing I had been trained to survive reached for me, and some hidden, starved part of my Mark answered as if it had been waiting its whole life to be allowed home.
The leather strip slipped from my fingers.
My Mark brightened under the sleeve, heat moving along the old lines with a terrible ease.
Suppression held.
Barely.
I breathed through my teeth until the light under the linen thinned.
Above me, the pull vanished.
Covered.
Held under someone else’s command.
Someone had told her to remove her hand from the basin.
Someone had seen enough.
Caswell, probably.
Caswell knew how to stop just after the damage became useful without creating too big of a scene.
