“Who are you?”
“What do you want?”
“Where do you come from?”
He closed his mind, closed his mouth stubbornly on the answers, but in the dark between times, visions leaked and flooded his brain. A tumbled shore of sand and shale.
Green hil s cradling the water like a cup. A broken castle on the cliffs, its ancient towers glazed with light.
Danger.
His heart hammered. His head pounded with impending doom. The wave was coming. He had to save them. He had to save.
“Who?”
A man with eyes like rain, a girl with hair like straw, a dog.
.
Their images spun away, snatched by the rising and fal ing sea. He couldn’t save them. He could no longer save himself. His strength was gone, everything was gone, smashed, drowned, vanished beneath the waves.
He did not answer.
“Of course he doesn’t answer. I’d be surprised if he can even hear you.”
That voice. He recognized that voice. Fucking Axton.
His lips drew back in a snarl, but he did not speak. Didn’t open his eyes. Let them think he was asleep or drugged or dead.
“It’s his shields.”
“It’s the drugs.”
“—danger with concussion,” the woman was saying.
The doctor, he remembered. Marian? Miriam.
“Appropriate dosage for a human.”
“Wel, he’s not human, is he?” snapped the first speaker.
He was listening now, but the words had no more meaning than the tol ing of a buoy.
Not human.
Not human?
“Tel me something I don’t know.”
“Wel,” the doctor said slowly, “his toes are webbed.”
For an instant, he couldn’t breathe. Something flashed in his brain, stronger than recognition, more elusive than memory.
And then the footsteps faded. The light behind his closed lids ebbed away.
He lay with the sound of the sea’s long retreat echoing in his head, his thoughts raucous and meaningless as the cries of seabirds over something that has died.
He wasn’t dead yet.
But he might as wel be. He felt like a diver plunged unexpectedly into the water, unable to distinguish up from down, past from present, dreams from reality.
He needed answers. Help. A weapon. They’d taken his knife.
Something hard — a loose slat, a broken coil — poked his shoulder blades.
If they were going to lock him up, he thought with a sudden flash of clarity, they might at least have provided a comfortable mattress.
The lump at his back gave him a focus. He could fashion a tool from wood or wire. A shank. It took several tries, but eventual y he managed to rol onto his side. Panting, F o r g o t t e n s e a 7 1
he jammed his hand between the frame and the mattress and touched.
Not a slat. A knife. His knife, shaped to his palm.
Lara. He felt her presence as keenly as the blade. Her touch, lingering on the handle. Her energy, vibrating through his fingertips. Her breath, in him. He saw her, her eyes large and gray beneath dark winged brows.
He clung to her image like hope, like the spar, fighting to keep his head above water. He had his weapon. Now al he needed was answers.
And a way out.
The whispers of her disgrace were up before she was.
Lara heard the stutter of conversation when she entered the vaulted dining hal the next morning, a sudden drop in noise level fol owed by a rustle like wind through corn. She stood with her breakfast tray at the end of the serving line while the younger students craned to get a look at her and the other proctors careful y avoided her eyes.
Her stomach sank.
The teachers took the first two meals of the day in the faculty dining room, leaving the proctors to monitor the students. A few proctors patrol ed the tables or ate with favorites from their floors, but most grabbed this chance to sit together. Lara carried her tray to join them at the round tables at the end of the hal. One or two people col ected their trays and left without a word.
Heat rushed to her cheeks.
It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Breakfast service was nearly over. She was late, that was al.
She saw Gideon sitting with his girlfriend Ariel. The young Guardian looked heavy-eyed and grim, as if he hadn’t slept any better than she had.
She offered him a quick, sympathetic smile. “Hi, Gideon.”
He barely nodded in reply, his attention fixed on his plate.
Ariel glared at her and whispered something to the girl on her other side.
Lara’s smile faltered before she looked away.
She found two members of her cohort, David and Jacob, sitting together at an otherwise empty table. They were deep in a discussion about restoration glass, but as she approached, Jacob thrust a booted foot under the table, pushing out a chair for her. Grateful y, she sat. David speared a piece of pineapple from her plate, waving it around on the end of his fork as he argued about ways to duplicate the color effects of arsenic.
“Fluorspar doesn’t produce the same fire,” he insisted.
“But it’s more consistent,” Jacob said. “Not to mention legal.”
Buffered by their undemanding company, she began to relax. The buzz of conversation, the clatter of plates and glassware, mingled with the swirl of steam from the serving line, rising in the vaulted, sunlit room. This was her reality.
This was her life. Last night was like a wonderful, terrible, moonlit dream.
Memory unfurled inside her like a bird beating to get out.
The long lines of Justin’s body on the cel ar steps. His mouth, salty and warm. The surge of power and freedom and lust she’d felt when she was with him. In him.
Taking a deep breath, she reached for her orange juice.
She’d done everything she could to help Justin. Maybe it would be enough.
A shadow fel over her fruit plate.
“Leave him alone.” Ariel stood flanked by her friend beside their table, her pretty face contorted. “Haven’t you done enough already?”
Lara lowered her juice glass. “Excuse me?”
“I can’t believe you have the guts to even speak to him after what you did.”
Speak to . Gideon, Lara realized. Ariel was talking about Gideon.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You got him in trouble with Zayin because you failed as Seeker.”
Lara glanced at Gideon, already walking with his tray toward the bus line, his back stiff, his face turned away. “Is that what he told you?”
“He didn’t have to. Al the lower cohorts are saying you didn’t come back with a new student last night.”
Ariel’s friend nodded. David hunched his shoulders, apparently fascinated by the congealing eggs on his plate.
“They’re kids.” Lara kept her voice even with effort.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about. And neither do you.”
“Real y?” Ariel set her hands on her hips. “Then why did Master Zayin pul Gideon off lampwork?”
Lampwork — crafting beads with a torch from colored glass rods — was a coveted apprenticeship. The beads were imbued with power as wel as color, used not only for jewelry but for charms.
Lara bit her lip. If Gideon had been dismissed from spel work, no wonder he was upset. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s probably only temporary.”
“You two better watch out,” Ariel said to David and Jacob.
“If Zayin finds out you’re hanging around with her, you could be reassigned, too.”
Jacob pushed back his chair. “That’s crap. Zayin’s not going to stop us from taming fire because your boyfriend screwed up.”