Page 9 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Men and women roughly my age and into their mid and late twenties wore suits and dark skirts and knee-high boots.

They carried books and bags and strange backpacks made of feathers.

One threw a ball of green fire at another and laughed when the other turned it into a bird and it flew away.

Translucent, light animals hung around each of them, and I saw one of the students scolding hers, a finger held up as she spoke.

Scenes melted one into the next, a view of a bridge with strange, temple-like buildings beyond, a white stone mansion, a hall filled with enormous statues, wings with gold hinges that looked larger than me, more students, this time wearing what looked like costumes, drinking from flasks and dancing wildly.

I heard laughter, saw half-naked people chanting around a bonfire in the dark, a stone tower filled with men and women wearing more of those feathery wings.

The view from the top was dizzying, terrifying, but beautiful.

I saw a sharp, angular face I vaguely recognized, a man with white, spiky hair staring directly over my head, gold eyes flashing, and?

More, louder murmuring rose on both sides.

That time, it was too loud to ignore.

I flinched, and lost my focus.

“Okay, I believe that is enough of that,” the man in front of me said.

The smile grew more audible in his voice.

“Thank you very much for that, Miss Shadow. Most illuminating. Most, most instructive, that was… and quite beautiful, if you don’t mind my saying.

You may have more than a bit of seer-talent in you. ”

I opened my eyes, and immediately glanced to my left, where I’d heard the largest number of voices.

I hadn’t been imagining things.

I could see them now.

A line of people stood there, looking a lot like an audience.

They seemed to be there just for me, although I noticed my test inspector studiously ignored them.

My eyes scanned over their colorful, dated-but-not-dated clothes, their odd hairstyles and eye colors, their quill pens and strange cameras, until the man in front of me politely cleared his throat.

My eyes jerked back to his.

“Are you ready to move on, my dear?” he asked kindly. “You’ll need to keep your eyes open for this one.”

I hesitated, tempted to ask what just happened, whether he’d seen the same things I had, and if so, what they meant.

Something in the man’s serious expression warned me away from doing that.

I glanced above his head anyway, but the glass ball had vanished.

When I aimed my eyes back down, the inspector appeared to be waiting for me, patiently, and I nodded once, quickly. His smiled widened, and an instant later, a long, broken line of odd symbols appeared in the air over him.

They looked like the symbols on Ankha’s kitchen clock.

They also looked like the symbols I’d seen on clothing here, and on the slip of paper the woman handed me earlier. I remembered the research I’d done on Ankha’s clock, how some of those symbols were just like things I’d found in books, only inverted, or sometimes inverted and written backwards.

I now desperately wanted to know what they meant.

“See if you can read this,” the man said, that calm patience back in his voice.

I blinked.

I stared at the symbols. A mild panic set in. I had no idea what language I was even looking at. I’d never learned to read hieroglyphs of any kind, certainly not Ancient Egyptian written backwards and mirrored.

For a long-feeling few seconds, my throat constricted as I stared up, watching the symbols rotate three-dimensionally in the dark space.

I remembered that everything up until now had meant doing things not because I’d been taught, but because I’d felt my way through.

Every test involved using that tension and heat in my chest.

I decided it couldn’t hurt to try the same thing again.

I focused that buzzy, intense spot inside me on the symbols.

My eyes fell out of focus. My breathing slowed.

Something deep inside me began to relax.

I felt the precise instant when it all clicked, when that heat and intensity connected to the foreign pictographs. I watched the gold, three-dimensional symbols turn liquid as they dispersed, changed shape, then changed number, all without seeming to use up any more material.

Again, I heard gasps.

I nearly lost focus. That time, I managed to pull it back, to keep most of my attention focused on what I was doing.

“Can you please read me the passage aloud, Miss Shadow?” the inspector asked, still polite, but with another hint of delight infusing his words.

I cleared my throat.

“It is, like most things, merely the conduit of magic,” I read carefully.

“Like any conduit, neither more nor less… yet also both more and less. Powerful in endless possibility. We, the erect ones, pride ourselves as the first, as its only masters. Yet even the smallest bird and the largest water animal shares its understandings. They use it to call and to find and to see and to laugh, while we use it to divide and deceive…”

The man nodded encouragingly, his smile sliding wider.

I frowned.

There was more. There had to be more. It definitely felt like I wasn’t finished, but that was the entire passage he’d given me. Had I botched the translation somehow?

The silence between us grew tense.

On either side of me, I felt people watching, waiting, their breaths held.

“Is it a riddle?” I asked the man finally.

He gave me a conspiratorial smile.

“Do you know the answer?” he asked back.

I hesitated, then blurted out the first thought that popped in my head.

“Is it language?” I asked.

He clapped his hands, and murmurs rose on either side. That time, I heard disbelief, even skepticism in those muttered words.

“Very well done, Miss Shadow… very well done!” The man with the oddly sharp beard beamed at me. “That was quite masterfully handled, I must say!”

I noticed movement in the corner of my eye, and glanced down at the papers on the table in front of him.

Pictographs and hieroglyphs now covered two of the three sheets.

I swore I saw English written there, too.

More symbols appeared on the third sheet as I watched, mixed with English like the others.

Unlike the woman with the scarlet quill, the man didn’t write with anything, or touch the paper himself.

The symbols arranged themselves seemingly on their own, rapidly filling over half the empty space.

“One more,” Forsooth said kindly. He held up a long and bony finger. “I want you to simply stand there, Miss Shadow, as relaxed and open as you can.”

I bit my lip nervously.

Out of nowhere, a flash went off from the dark.

I didn’t look over, but that time, the inspector did. His cheerful, warm expression changed to one that held real anger for the first time.

“No photos in here, Ms. Minx. Come now. You know better.”

I glanced over, unable to help it.

The woman with the orange quill gave a very insincere-looking apologetic simper to Forsooth, batting her eyelashes. She followed that up with a half-curtsey.

I forced myself to look back at the inspector without changing expression.

“Are you ready, Miss Shadow?” Forsooth asked kindly.

Panicking slightly, feeling for some reason that this would be the test that mattered more than the rest, I blurted out a question.

“Eyes open or closed?”

“Open is fine,” he assured me. “Closed is fine. You don’t have to do anything for this one, so whatever helps you to relax is perfectly fine.”

I nodded. After a slight hesitation, I closed my eyes.

I flashed back to the breathing exercises I’d gotten from a library book when I first moved to Southampton.

That first year, I had truly terrible, horrific dreams: filled with blinding flashes and blood-curdling screams, green and purple smoke, my parents’ footprints burned into the sidewalk, my father’s horror-stricken eyes, my mother’s outstretched hand.

In some of those dreams, my brother would be dead, too.

In desperation, after the worst of those nightmares, I asked the old librarian at our community library if she knew of anything that would make a person not dream.

The woman was nice enough not to laugh. She thought for a moment, then led me down an aisle I’d never explored in the nonfiction section. After skimming through titles with a finger, she’d handed me a thin, gold-covered book on meditation and breathing exercises.

For months after that, I would sit cross-legged on the floor of my room before I went to sleep.

The book explained in detail how to breathe, how to count inhales and exhales and the spaces in-between until the person doing it became entirely calm.

Over time, I gradually increased the count in those empty spaces, and slowed my exhales still more.

At some point, it must’ve been enough.

The dreams never went away, but they no longer woke me up screaming.

I never shed the habit of those concentration and breathing exercises, either.

I did it in class sometimes, before tests, or when I had to speak in front of a group.

I even did it a few times while I faced off against the worst of the neighborhood and schoolyard bullies.

It didn’t stop the fights happening, of course, but I’m convinced it improved my chances.

Now, like those other times, I fell back on what I knew.

I breathed in and out, counting each breath, counting the spaces between breaths, focusing on that tight, buzzy area in the middle of my chest. With that weight gone from around my head, my ability to concentrate felt different.

It felt easier here. It felt frighteningly easy.

I grew so relaxed and still, I completely forgot where I was. My hands opened, my breaths slowed even more. Somewhere in that, I grew aware of something fluttering around me.

It felt like millions of tiny feathers.

Or wings, maybe. Thousands of tiny wings.

The sensation loosened the remaining tightness in my chest. The dancing feathers morphed a few seconds later, turning into a warm, liquid sensation that swam over every inch of my skin. Soon it felt more like heated honey.

I stifled a gasp, biting my lip before I could stop myself, and another flash went off, making me conscious that I’d tilted my head back, and now held out my palms, extending them and my arms higher than my waist. My fingers remained perfectly still, but I felt so light, I could have been really floating.

I have no idea how long I stood like that.

I only know when it ended.

A third flash, seemingly from closer, made me jerk…

Then nearly lose my balance.

“That is quite enough, Ms. Minx,” the now-familiar voice of Forsooth said irritably. “I’m going to recommend that every member of your entourage be charged the maximum fine, each, for your blatant disregard of the rules.”

I opened my eyes. Forsooth aimed a finger at the female reporter.

“Oh, and expect those photos to be confiscated, Ms. Minx,” he added.

By then, I had fallen out of that strange, telescoping darkness and stillness.

I felt like I’d just woken up.

The realization made my face grow hot. I glimpsed figures now standing behind the inspector’s desk, watching and murmuring from behind their hands, leaning towards one another’s ears.

When I glanced around where I stood, I realized the onlookers had crept closer on all sides, and now circled me and Forsooth.

“Miss Shadow?” the inspector queried kindly.

My eyes jerked back to his.

“You’re all finished, Miss Shadow,” Forsooth said, smiling warmly. “Thank you so much for coming in. Your results will be communicated to you by the end of the day.”

His eyes shone, twinkled even. I puzzled at the knowing look there, and the subtle, friendly-seeming message behind it.

Then the round spotlight on the floor switched off.

The circle under my feet began to lower.

It happened so suddenly, I nearly stumbled, yet so smoothly that I didn’t. I barely had time for a last look at Forsooth’s face. Then I was staring into the curious and kind face of the bear crouched under Forsooth’s table, and saw it wave a friendly paw with curved claws at me as I dropped.

I raised a hand in a returning wave.

Then the bear disappeared, too.