第2章 First Day

Maya woke in a room that was not hers, under a ceiling that showed stars that were not the stars of her town. For a moment she lay still, letting the strangeness settle over her like a blanket. The room was small and simple, a narrow bed, a desk, a window that looked out on a garden of silver plants that swayed without wind. There was no alarm clock. There was no need for one; the light simply changed, the perpetual dusk of the academy brightening by a single degree, and Maya understood that this was morning. Her first class was with the silver-haired woman, whose name, she learned, was Seraphina. Before the lesson began, Seraphina led her on a short walk through the lower floors, and Maya learned her first rule of the academy: the building did not stay where you left it. Corridors that had been empty at midnight were busy with doors by morning. A staircase that led down led up, depending on who was standing on it. Seraphina walked without hesitation, and Maya understood that her teacher was not memorizing the layout; she was agreeing with it, the way a musician agrees with a song. "You will get lost," Seraphina said without turning. "Everyone does, at first. The academy does not think it is lost. It thinks you are simply taking the long way." The practice hall was a vast chamber at the heart of the mansion, its floor worn smooth by generations of feet, its walls lined with mirrors that seemed to hold the darkness a moment longer than they should. About a dozen students stood in a loose arc, and they turned to look at Maya with expressions that ranged from curiosity to open wariness. "Miss Chen," Seraphina said, "meet your fellow first-years. Cassian, Talia, Mei, and the rest." A boy with sharp features and sharper eyes gave Maya a nod that was almost a bow. "Cassian," he said. "You are the one whose mother was a legend." The words landed like a stone in still water. Maya felt every eye in the room on her. "I did not know she was a legend," she said carefully. "I barely knew her at all." Cassian's expression flickered, something almost like sympathy crossing his face. "Then you have a lot to learn," he said, "about her, and about what you are." Seraphina did not waste the morning on ceremony. She set them to the first exercise at once: stand in the center of the hall, close your eyes, and feel the shadow that hangs at the edge of every lit thing, the way darkness collects at the base of a candle flame. Maya stood with her eyes closed and felt nothing, then felt something, a coolness at the back of her neck like a held breath, and when she opened her eyes she could have sworn the shadows in the corner of the hall had moved. Lunch was taken in a dining hall that floated somewhere between the floors, and Maya sat with Talia and Mei, who were kind in the way of people who have already learned that the world is strange. Talia asked about her town. Mei asked about her mother. Maya answered both with as much honesty as she could manage, which was not much, because she realized she did not know the answer to either question. Talia had come to the academy from a city by the sea, and she spoke of the ocean the way Maya's father spoke of his garden, with the easy familiarity of someone who had grown up beside a thing too large to understand. Mei came from nowhere in particular, she said, which was, Maya would learn, the most specific answer anyone at the academy ever gave. Neither of them asked about the invitation, and Maya was grateful for that. The invitation was the one thing she could not explain, not even to herself. In the afternoon, Seraphina took Maya aside. The others filed out to their next lessons, and the hall grew quiet around them. "You are not ready to hear everything," Seraphina said. "But you should know this much. Your mother left the academy because she chose to. Not because it rejected her. There is a difference, and it matters. When you are ready, you will understand what she was protecting." "What was she protecting?" Maya asked. Seraphina smiled, a small, sad smile. "You, I think. Now go and rest. Tomorrow, we begin shadow-work in earnest." Maya walked back to her room through corridors that rearranged themselves when she was not looking, and she thought about her mother, and about a silver bracelet she had not worn in eleven years, and she wondered, for the first time in her life, what her mother had been running from. That evening she found the bracelet where she had packed it, at the bottom of her bag, wrapped in a handkerchief. It was a simple thing, tarnished at the clasp, with a small charm in the shape of a key. She had worn it as a child, taken it off after the funeral, and never put it on again. Now she held it in her palm and turned it over, and in the lamplight she noticed something she had never noticed before: the key charm was not solid. There was a seam running around its edge, a place where it could open. It would not open for her. She tried, gently, with her thumbnail, and the seam held fast, as if waiting for something she did not have. She set it down, picked it up again, turned it one more time, and only then put the bracelet back in the bag. But she did not wrap it in the handkerchief again. She left it on the desk, in the lamplight, where she could see it when she woke, a small silver question mark waiting for an answer she did not yet know how to give. She turned over and pulled the blanket up to her chin, but sleep would not come. The locket lay there on the desk, catching the lamplight, and she could feel it watching her the way a cat watches a bird—not moving, not blinking, just waiting. She thought about the woman in the library, the one with the ink-stained fingers and the smile that didn't reach her eyes. She thought about the key that was not a key, and the door that was not a door, and the way the shadows had leaned toward her when she had said her name aloud. She would find out tomorrow. She had decided that much. Tomorrow she would go back to the library, and she would ask the questions she had been too afraid to ask tonight. The locket could wait. The answer could not.