Page 6 of Darkest Magic

“Open it,” I said.

She closed her eyes for half a second, and then she opened the box. Inside were cards.

That disappointed me so badly I almost got angry. There were forty or so, blank-faced, cut from some thick cream stock, with no symbols and no writing, nothing but cards stacked in neat rows, some slightly larger than others and some with edges worn soft as if they’d been handled too often.

Next to the cream cards were a set of white cards with words printed on them in a script that I couldn’t read before Ms. Mercer picked them up.

“First, I’ll ask you some questions,” she said, reading now, her voice flatter in a way that told me she was afraid to put herself into the words. “There are no wrong answers.”

“There are always wrong answers.”

“The assessment is not measuring correctness.”

“What is it measuring?”

She glanced at the sheet. “Response pattern.”

Of course it was. The questions were worse than the cards.

“A friend asks you to keep a secret that will hurt someone else. What do you owe the secret, and what do you owe the harm?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She looked at the card and turned it face down on the table moving on to the next one.

“You are given a door out of everything you have ever wanted to escape, but walking through it means leaving people who need you. How far do you go?”

“As far as I need to.” I didn’t know where the answer came from but it was the only one that made sense in my mind. She turned the card face down on the table on top of the first card.

“A house is burning. A stranger is inside. Your own exit is closing. What do you do?”

The question made my throat close so completely I just sat there with my hands under the table until Ms. Mercer marked something down anyway, because apparently not answering was an answer in its own way. She took that card and placed it face down on top of the others.

There were a few more questions and the stack of face down cards grew, but I couldn’t focus on anything except the unmarked cards that still sat in the box.

“Sort them,” she read from the last card in her hands. “There are no rules or categories. However feels right.”

“That’s not a test.”

“I know.”

I reached for the first card, and it was warm. Not physically, because the room was too cold and the card had been in the box. But the second my fingers touched it, something hummed against them, low and almost pleasant, a little current of recognition that ran up my hand and disappeared at the wrist.

I dropped it.

Ms. Mercer stopped breathing.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She stared at the card on the table as if it had spoken.

I picked up another and got nothing. Another, and there was a faint prickle. Another, and this one was cold, but not temperature, absence again, the same thing I had felt in the hallway where the fire had forgotten me.

The sorting happened without my permission. My hands knew where each card belonged before I did. Heavy ones went to the left and warm ones near the top, and the empty ones stacked up in a line that made no sense until it did, until the blank faces seemed less blank, until the whole table had become a map I could not read but could feel under my palms.

By the time I finished, Ms. Mercer’s eyes were wide.

“That’s enough,” she said.