I yawned.
“I know, it’s awful. But we can’t choose the train schedules, I’m afraid. We’ll get you to bed soon enough. So, what are your interests, Mathilde?”
“What?” The question surprised me, like the one about ponies.
“I’ll keep you awake by talking to you. Unless you’d prefer to curl up in the back with your suitcase?”
Was that really an option, to curl up with my suitcase? “Oh—talking is fine.”
“In that case, what are your interests?”
What were my interests? Was it just my being sleepy that made my brain sluggish?
“I guess what I like best is playing with my friend Megs.”
“Where do you play?”
“In the woods outside the city.”
“You are from Lykkelig?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Sisters,” I said, a tight knot forming in my stomach. Not for thinking of them, but for having not thought of them until now. How had that happened?
“I grew up in a town up north, not as large as your city, but not too small, either.”
“And what do you do now?” I asked. Maybe it would be a clue as to what I was meant to do.
“You’ll find out in time.” She laughed. “As far as you know, I’m some sort of midnight cart-and-pony chauffeur.”
No aerials disturbed our ride. The train must have traveled northwest, deeper into Sofarende, farther from the border.
A large manor house rose up out of the gloomy darkness, surrounded by a wall at least one story high.
“Welcome to Faetre,” Miss Ibsen said.
—
Two soldiers stood at the gate.
“Miss Ibsen,” one greeted her. “Another one?”
“Another one!”
“We need more?” the other soldier teased.
“We do.”
“Won’t we be full to bursting?” They were like the soldiers on the train—not at all serious.
“Nonsense. There are still rooms to spare,” she answered as they waved her through.
If there were still rooms to spare, then why had the Examiner been so insistent that she didn’t want Megs to come?
“We don’t like the security to look too tight,” Miss Ibsen said. “Not from the air, anyway. There are more soldiers here than just them, don’t worry.”
Was that a reason not to worry? Or a reason to worry? Was this a known military base? A secret place?
I thought of a safer question as we pulled along the side of the impressive building: “How many rooms are there?”
“One hundred forty!”
“Really?”
“Originally, this was the summer house of a baron, and then it was a boarding school. It’s ours now.”
We rode to stables around the back. Another soldier handed me my suitcase as I hopped down from the cart, and took over the pony.
“Come along,” Miss Ibsen said to me. I followed her to the main entryway, which she opened with three different keys. She held the door open, and I stepped inside into the pitch-dark.
Miss Ibsen followed me inside, shut the door, and rebolted all the locks. Then she lit a match and a candle from the hallway table. “Best save my flashlight for when I’m outside.”
The tiny flame illuminated a large foyer with hallways and rooms leading off in several directions, and a grand staircase. The great windows to the front of the house had been covered with black curtains.
“So aerials can’t see us at night,” she explained. “Though we tend to have rather quiet nights around here. It’s just a precaution. This way.” She led me through the largest archway off the foyer. We walked toward a large, open living room, which also had black curtains over its two-story windows, though it was brighter because of a lit electric light on a side table. The room contained clusters of comfortable chairs around both low and high tables, and all the tables were set with board games. Miss Ibsen paused in the doorway.
A head of shoulder-length light brown hair peeked over the back of one of the sofas.
I followed Miss Ibsen around to the front of the sofa.
A girl my age was sitting there.
“Annevi!” Miss Ibsen said. “What are you doing up?”
“I had an idea.” She didn’t look up from her board game.
“You couldn’t think about it in your room?”
“I needed the board.”
I stiffened. What was the punishment for being out of your room at night?
“Solve anything?” Miss Ibsen asked, warm curiosity rather than sternness in her voice.
Annevi shook her head. Disappointment and slight frustration crossed her face. But not shame or fear.
“Try again in the morning. Maybe your mind will solve it in your sleep.”
Annevi nodded, though she didn’t seem sleepy. She stood, but kept her eyes on the board. She reached out and moved a couple of pieces.
“Come upstairs with us. This is Mathilde.”
“Hi,” Annevi said, though she didn’t even look at me. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see a new girl showing up at nearly dawn.
“The light, Annevi.”
Annevi switched off the electric light.
We proceeded upstairs, and up some more stairs to the third floor and a corridor lined with doors.
“Good night, Annevi. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
Annevi disappeared behind one of the doors.
“We’re putting you just a few doors down, along here.” Miss Ibsen opened another door on the opposite side.
I stepped into the tiny room and looked around.
I’d assumed I’d share sleeping quarters—if we slept inside at all—but there was a single, unoccupied bed; a desk; a window with its own heavy black curtain; and several bookshelves full of books.
Miss Ibsen snapped on the electric overhead light with a switch by the door. “Always make sure your curtain is pulled before putting on your lights at night.”
I nodded.
“There’s a washroom down the hall.”
I nodded again.
“Get some rest now.”
She left, shutting the door, but she didn’t mention breakfast. Or seeing me in the morning. Or what to do if sirens sounded in the night.
Her footsteps faded away, and it was too late to ask; I’d wake everyone up by calling or running after her, and she’d been so careful to be quiet.
I left my door open and tiptoed to the washroom. I flipped the light switch and found three separate toilets behind their own doors, three bathing tubs behind pull curtains, and three sinks along the wall.
I went back to my room, turned out the lights, and lay down.
What kind of job was this, what kind of place, where you could get up in the middle of the night just to think about your board game and not get in trouble for being out of bed?
I stared into the darkness.
How would I ever get to sleep?
No Kammi and Tye, softly breathing, occasionally turning over.
They hadn’t even given me other girls sleeping near me that I could imagine were my sisters.
The night was eerily quiet.
I got up and opened my suitcase to find my nightclothes. Instead, I lifted out the handprints painting, and hugged it to my chest.
I LAY FLAT ON my stomach in bed.
It was still dark.
And quiet.
But a different sort of dark and quiet.
A bird chirped. A child laughed.
I stood and drew back the black curtain. Bright sunlight poured in. Blinking, squinting, I took in the yard below, the green woods around the house. Beyond that rolled dark, green hills and more woods until the alternating patches sloped into steep purple-gray mountains.
For sun that bright in winter, it must have been midday.
“Midday!”
I was late on my very first day!
I tried to straighten my cloth
es, which were rumpled from the train and then from sleeping in them. There wasn’t any hope of fixing my braids, so I just smoothed the loose strands behind my ears. No one was along the hallway to ask where to go. I spent a minute in the washroom, and then thundered down the nearest stairs, and the next set after that, and raced down the main staircase toward the grand foyer.
And there was the Examiner.
I froze on the steps. What could I say to apologize for oversleeping?
But she smiled and said, “Ah. Mathilde. Welcome to Faetre. Did you have a good rest?”
“I—uh—I…”
“Come on, it’s time for your haircut.”
“My what?”
“Haircut. Come on.”
Oh no! I hadn’t gotten my braids in order and now they were going to chop them off!
I scurried to keep up with her as she left the foyer and headed down a hallway lined with closed doors. She pushed one open.
There was Miss Ibsen, looking refreshed and not as if she had been up driving pony carts in the night. She sat at a desk, tapping something out on a typewriter.
“Mathilde, for her haircut,” the Examiner said.
“Oh!” she said, hopping up. “Mathilde! How was your sleep?”
“Good. Um…”
They both remained silent, waiting for me to continue.
“Why do I have to have my hair cut?”
“We feed you and wash your clothes, but we can’t be chasing after all of you to brush your hair every day. Short so you can take care of it yourself. No fuss, please,” the Examiner said.
Miss Ibsen set newspaper on the floor and placed a wooden chair over it. She got sharp silver scissors and a comb from her desk and stood by the chair.
No fuss.
It was like sitting another test.
I took a deep breath and sat down.
Miss Ibsen’s touch was more gentle even than Mother’s as she loosened my braids and combed my hair out straight. The scissors snipped loudly. I kept my head down, watching my blond tails collect on the floor.
After a time, Miss Ibsen set aside the scissors and pulled some of the hair from the top of my head over to one side, tying it there to keep it out of my eyes. She handed me a mirror.
“I think it looks nice,” she said.
My hair was cut just above my shoulders.
It didn’t look as blond with the ends cut off.
With the tails went the sun-bleached hours of summer.
A lump rose in my throat as I looked away from the mirror and down at the hair on the floor.
“Come, Mathilde,” the Examiner said, but she spoke more kindly than she had before.
I forced a weak smile at Miss Ibsen, who was smiling at me, and I scooted to keep up with the Examiner.
Maybe I was finally going to find out what this was all about. What the test had been for and why I’d come all this way. And had my hair chopped. My new job.
“You will rise and dress by eight every morning,” said the Examiner. “Eight to eight-thirty, there’s a brisk walk around the grounds; eighty-thirty, breakfast. Lunch at noon. Two to three is playtime outside, that’s mandatory, and very important. We need to keep this place looking like a school, and exercise keeps your mind sharp. Dinner at six, in your room by ten, lights out is up to you, though keep those curtains pulled. We expect you to rest well each night so that you are fresh for your daytime activities.”
Like playtime? Had we come here just to disguise this place as a school?
I was almost running to keep up as she continued along the hallway, but then she turned into the enormous living room.
It was full of kids.
Playing board games.
Shouting, laughing, arguing.
Moving pieces, setting them up a different way, going back to the way they were before. Walking between the boards to move pieces to other boards. Changing the moves other people had just made.
Answering telephones at stations along the walls. Calling out to others around a board game, who would move the pieces, argue some more.
Despite the noise, the room had an intensity of deep concentration.
Some people were quiet. Reading, studying maps.
A few adults walked around the room, observing, asking questions.
But not giving direction or orders. They weren’t interfering at all.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Observe. Try things out. See what interests you. You may also read anything you see here or in your room. Lunch will be served shortly. You must be hungry.”
I was. Though I’d been so distracted I hadn’t noticed until she mentioned it.
Then she left me.
Okay.
I’d been instructed to observe. But not to stand frozen like a statue in the middle of the entryway.
I tiptoed in.
I spotted Annevi, sitting alone on her couch, staring at her board game, just as she had been last night. Her hair was cut like mine, I realized. She even had the same lock of hair pulled away from her eyes. So did all the other girls in the room.
How had these girls looked before? Had they had long hair like mine? Had it felt strange to them, too, to have it cut?
I ran my hand through mine, my fingers tingling as they met the fresh edges.
Annevi also ran her hands through her hair, gripping it near her scalp from time to time, but she wasn’t thinking about her hair. Just about her game.
I took the chair across from her.
“Hi, Mathilde.” She hadn’t looked up.
“Hi.”
I studied the board, too.
It wasn’t a game. It was a grid with a faint sort of map underneath. Little red ships sat on top.
“So what are you good at?” Annevi asked, not taking her eyes off the board.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Nothing.”
She looked up then, her green-brown eyes meeting mine.
“You have to be good at something.” She looked back down and slid one of the red ships over two places, paused, and slid it back. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not.”
She looked up again, a bit bewildered, as if I was playing stupid. Her gaze moved from me to a girl absorbed in a fat book of military history. “Fredericka can remember anything she reads. Anything.” Her gaze moved to a tall boy who seemed to be giving out directions at two or three board tables at once. “Tommy, he can hold multiple formations in his head at once and see the patterns they share.” She nodded toward a shorter, slightly chubby boy on a telephone. “Hamlin. Expert at languages. Fluent in seven, could learn a new one between now and dinnertime. He can take any incoming message and translate it, even in code.”
“He—”
“See her over there, the napping girl?”
“Yes, she—”
“Not napping. Deciphering. Reads the messages, a whole bunch of them, closes her eyes, sometimes for hours, but when she opens them—messages clear. Get it?”
“I—” I felt cold all the way through my stomach.
There must have been a mistake. I couldn’t even picture Megs fitting in here. These kids were all super-geniuses.
“What are…”
But Annevi was staring at the board again. I stared, too. What did she see? Or rather, it seemed that she wasn’t seeing something.
What could I see?
Nothing but little red ships. Sometimes a shape stood out, a triangle here or there.
But I didn’t even know what I was supposed to see.
“Are there…ships all traveling together in this formation?”
“No, no…it’s just three ships…shown over time.” Annevi rocked back and forth slightly. Her fingers gripped her hair tight along her scalp. Then she was still again.
We both went back to staring.
After several minutes, Annevi swept all the pieces off the board in one movement, sending them flying across the room.
I blinked and sat back. I looked around, but nobody else had reacted.
Annevi plopped back down and stared at the blank board.
Then she stood up, triumphant relief on her face, and shouted, “Tommy! Call downstairs! Check three-D! All of them in three-D!”
“Excellent, Annevi, excellent!” Tommy grabbed the nearest telephone, dialed, and said into it, “Annevi thinks she’s got them, check three-D. Okay. Okay.” He hung up and called to Annevi, “We should know in eight hours.”
She nodded and sank back onto her sofa, breathing as if she’d just run several miles.
One of the adults came over. “Well done, Annevi.”
“Can I have the next one?”
“Collect your ships from the floor, and then rest until lunch. Why don’t you show Mathilde the art room?”
Annevi crawled around, not paying any attention to where other people were stepping as she found her ships. I grabbed the ones near me and handed them to her when she came back.
“Come on,” Annevi said to me in a resigned sort of way. Once we were in the hallway, she said, “The proctors are big on ‘recreation’ around here. They seem to think it’s healthy to visit the art room. You can go there whenever you like, no one would stop you if you said you needed to go to the art room.”
She made it sound like going to the washroom. A necessity, and so private your decision to go there wasn’t to be questioned.
Annevi led me down a dark hallway away from where I’d gotten my hair cut, toward the other side of the house. She opened the door to a room with large windows, several tables, a paint-spattered sink, and shelves and shelves of art supplies. More than I’d ever seen.
“Go ahead, you can use anything you like.”
I took familiar things—white paper, paintbrushes, and watercolors—and filled a small jar with water from the sink. I sat at a table and started to paint back the summer: smooth green hills, bright trees…
Annevi took a bunch of blank newspaper and balled it up; then she mixed thick blue and white paint to make baby blue, and brushed it sloppily all over the newspaper ball.
I was staring at this mess when one of the proctors came in.