Page 72 of Darkest Magic

This was becoming a habit, and habit, in a Vere, was another word for evidence. I set the pen nib to the paper and waited for the sentence that had always come before, the clean procedural sentence that made the day fit inside a file.

Nothing came.

The candle guttered and I sat with my own steady hand refusing to move. My mind was a different matter entirely. I couldn’t stop thinking enough to get the sentence out, and that was the problem.

Rain on hot stone. A girl’s laugh.

I may have never heard her laugh, but I knew without a doubt that it wasn’t Sybilla Lane’s laugh. I had always paid close attention to voices, because that was nearly the whole of my discipline, and it was not hers. It was not any voice I could place among the hundreds I had catalogued. And yet the sound lived in me with the flat certainty of recognition. I could practically see the key in the lock in my mind even when the door it should open had been plastered over and painted to match the wall.

I reached for the memory it belonged to. There should have been an index, because there was always an index. My own mind was the single place I was raised to own entirely, mapped and labelled and kept, the one archive no one else was ever permitted to touch.

Instead I found a wall that was smooth and recent, mine and not mine. Behind it the laugh went on for less than a breath, bright and quick and alive, and then the wall gave me back nothing but its own blank face. The key in the lock disappeared, fading into the wall, like it was never there. I picked up the pen.

Subject channelled contained flame. Direct reading inconclusive. Instrument fatigue. Recommend continued observation.

Every word of it was a lie except the last three. I did recommend continued observation.

I simply no longer knew why I was observing. Was it for me or my family or the school? Was I being a selfish prick wanting to observe Billie the way I did? All I knew was that she was the key to the missing memory and what a fascinating key she was.

TWENTY-THREE

Billie

A boy in a charcoal robe with a prefect pin had come to fetch me at second bell. He introduced himself and explained why he was there and then hadn’t said a single word since, he just walked half a step ahead with his hands folded behind his back, and my anxiety had spiked so hard that I started counting everything. Fourteen doors, two staircases, and one long gallery hung with portraits of men who had apparently all decided to be painted looking slightly to the left of a person, so that even the dead here would not quite meet my stare.

The prefect stopped in front of a set of heavy double doors, waiting for me to be in place before he pushed one of them open. I walked into a room built to make a person understand exactly how small they were. They sat me at a table long enough to make distance into a legal principle. Someone had pulled the chair out for me, which I hated because it told me where I was expected to be without anyone having to explicitly say it aloud.

Pelham was already in the center seat across from me, sitting straight like he had a spine made of iron. Two people, professors most likely, I didn’t know sat to his left, a man with a signet ring and a woman with a face like a movie villain, her eyeliner winged and sharp enough to cut someone.

The severe woman who had been at my first meeting with Pelham, the one who had stared out of the window for the most part, sat to his right. And at the far end, gloved hands folded on the polished wood, face completely blank, was Cormac Vere.

I didn’t look at him for long because I hated that he was there, judging me, when he was supposed to have been helping me figure all of this out. My file sat in front of Pelham, and it was thick, and they wanted me to see that it was thick.

Then, because some rule at this place required cruelty to wear fairness as a hat, Pelham set two fingers on a thick file and slid it to the front of the table they were all sitting at. The prefect appeared out of nowhere and rushed to bring it to my table.

When it was on the polished oak in front of me Pelham sniffed quietly before he said, “You have the right to review the relevant record before formal recommendation,” he said.

Their mistake.

Did they think the heft of it would frighten me? Did they think a poor girl faced with a thick folder of important paper would go small and grateful and quiet? I had been reading terrifying paperwork since I was eight years old. Hospital bills with itemized cruelty. Lease agreements where the teeth were always in the second-to-last clause. Utility notices, final notices, notices about the notices. Every scholarship form ever printed, which taught me before anything else that the fine print was where they kept the part that wasn’t free.

I opened the file like it owed me money. The last thing I was going to do was rush through this just because they wanted this over and done with.

The gallery incident sat on top, which didn’t surprise me. Category interference, mimicry, unclassified manifestation. A stack of witness statements, and near the top one from Vivienne Mallory, written in language so clean and correct it practically curtsied on the page. She had described me the way a person would describe a stain to an insurance company, precise and regretful and devastating. There was even a sentence in there about how she had at first assumed my differences to be cultural, given my background, which was a knife tucked so neatly inside words of kindness that I almost admired it.

The man with the signet ring was watching me read it. I could feel him waiting for my face to do something, flinch or flush or crumple, some small tribute he could take back to whoever had sent him. I gave him a page-turn instead and moved past the witness statements. The page beneath stopped my hands.

Calder Branch Intake.

Contractor of record: Edith Mercer. Paid flag.

Subject unaware of program.

The room went fuzzy at the edges, the way it had done in the reading room back home when she opened the gray box with the cards.

Ms. Mercer.

Not Ms. Mercer with the green cardigan and the loose thread at the cuff. Not the woman who had saved the good books behind the desk because she knew I hated missing them, who’d never once charged me late fees, who had let me hide in the back room the summer the air conditioner died and my mother was too proud to ask a soul for help.