第5章 The Girl Who Knew Things

By the second month, Maya had learned two things about the academy. The first was that she was good at shadow-work, and everyone knew it. The second was that being good at shadow-work was the surest way to be alone. The other students had not been unkind. They had simply made room for her, the way you make room for a fire that is burning a little too high. They nodded to her in the corridors. They let her sit where she liked in the library. They moved their chairs a little further from hers at supper, a little more each week, and they did not sit with her, and Maya had begun to accept that this was the price of the gift, and that she would pay it quietly, and that no one would ever ask her about her mother again. She was in the library one evening, reading a book about the theory of folded light, when a small girl dropped into the chair across from her, put her chin on her hands, and said, "You're Maya Chen. You're the one who made the hall lamps go out last week." Maya looked up. The girl was small and quick, with dark hair that had escaped its braid and eyes that moved too fast to follow. She talked with her hands, the way some people did, as if her words needed her fingers to hold them up. "I didn't make them go out," Maya said. "They just. Did." "They went out because your shadow took the shape of a bird with a twelve-foot wingspan and ate the lamp light." The girl leaned forward, delighted. "That's what I heard. Three different people told me, and all three said the wingspan was different. I like the twelve-foot version best." "I didn't ask for any of that to happen." "Nobody ever asks." The girl held out her hand. "I'm Talia. I know things. That's the polite way of saying it. The impolite way is that I listen at doors, but listening at doors is just being interested in other people, and I'm very interested in you." Maya took her hand without meaning to. It was small and cold and quick, and it was the first hand anyone had offered her in weeks. "Why?" she asked. "Why what?" "Why are you interested in me? Everyone else walks around me like I'm a storm that hasn't decided where to land." Talia's smile faded, and for a moment the quickness went out of her, and she looked like a girl who had been listening at doors for a long time and had heard things she wished she had not. "Because your mother is the most interesting person in the history of this school," Talia said quietly, "and nobody will say her name out loud. And you're her daughter, and you've been here two months, and nobody has told you anything. That's not right. That's not fair. And I hate it when things aren't fair." Maya set down her book. She had not known, until that moment, how hungry she was for someone to say her mother's name. "Tell me," she said. "Everything." So Talia told her. She told her about the woman in the old records, the one the current students whispered about, the one whose name had been crossed out of the yearbooks with careful black ink. Mei Chen. The most powerful shadow-worker the academy had ever trained, and the most dangerous graduate it had ever produced. She had been a legend in her own time, a student who had done things in her third year that the masters could not do in their fiftieth. And then, one night, ten years ago, she had gone down into the Deep Shadow, the drowned country beneath the school, and she had not come back. "They say it was an accident," Talia said. "They say she was testing a boundary and it failed. But that's not what the old ones say." "What do the old ones say?" "The old ones say the Council sealed her record. The whole thing. Every Working, every note, every paper with her name on it. They voted to bury her, and they ordered everyone to forget her, and they made it stick." Talia's eyes were very dark. "You don't seal a record like that because someone had an accident. You seal a record because the truth is dangerous, and someone wants to make sure nobody finds it." The library had gone quiet around them. The lamps burned blue. Somewhere in the stacks, a book fell, and nobody picked it up. "How do you know all this?" Maya asked. "I told you." Talia smiled, and it was not a happy smile. "I listen at doors. And I'm very good at it. I can show you, if you want. I can show you where the records are kept, and how to get in, and how to get out again without anyone knowing you were ever there." Maya looked at her. She had been alone for two months, and here was a girl with a braid coming loose and a talent for knowing things, offering her the one thing she had not dared to ask for. "Why?" Maya asked again. "Because it's not fair," Talia said, "that you've been here two months and nobody has told you who your mother was. And because I think you're going to find out anyway, and I'd rather be with you when you do than be the one listening at the door when it happens." She stood up, and her shadow stood up with her, and it was a small quick shadow, and it did not look like it was afraid of anything. "Tomorrow night," Talia said. "After the lamps go down. I'll bring the maps." She was gone before Maya could answer, and Maya sat alone in the library with the blue lamps burning over the stacks, and she thought about a woman she barely remembered, a laugh, a scent of lavender, a name crossed out in careful black ink. And she thought that maybe the academy had not brought her here to teach her shadow-work at all. Maybe it had brought her here to finish something. ---