As much as I don’t want his help, I don’t see any other way around it. A woman like Ara could easily find the cracks in my story, and then I’ll be truly finished. “Thanks, that would—that would be very helpful.”

I can see that Maven’s dress uniform is gone, replaced by casual clothes built for form and function. It calms me a little, to see at least someone looking so informal. But I can’t let anything about him soothe me. He’s one of them. I can’t forget that.

“Are you done for the day?” he says, his face clearing to reveal an eager smile. “I could show you around if you want?”

“No.” The word comes out quickly and his smile fades. His frown unsettles me as much as his smile. “I have Lessons next,” I add, hoping to soften the blow. Why I care about his feelings, I don’t exactly know. “Your mother loves her schedules.”

He nods, looking a little better. “She does indeed. Well, I won’t keep you.”

He takes my hand gently. The cold I felt on his skin before is gone, replaced with a delightful heat. Before I get a chance to pull away, he leaves me standing there alone.

Lucas gives me a moment to collect myself before noting, “You know, we’d get there much faster if you actually moved.”

“Shut up, Lucas.”

THIRTEEN

My next instructor waits for me in a room cluttered from floor to ceiling with more books than I’ve ever seen, more books than I ever thought existed. They look old and completely priceless. Despite my aversion to school and books of any kind, I feel a pull to them. But the titles and pages are written in a language I don’t understand, a jumble of symbols I could never hope to decipher.

Just as intriguing as the books are the maps along the wall, of the kingdom and other lands, old and new. Framed against the far wall, behind a pane of glass, is a vast, colorful map pieced together from separate sheets of paper. It’s at least twice as tall as me and dominates the room. Faded and ripped, it’s a tangled knot of red lines and blue coasts, green forests and yellow cities. This is the old world, the before world, with old names and old borders we no longer have any use for.

“It’s strange to look at the world as it once was,” the instructor says, appearing out of the book stacks. His yellow robes, stained and faded by age, make him look like a human piece of paper. “Can you find where we are?”

The sheer size of the map makes me gulp but, like everything else, I’m sure this is a test. “I can try.”

Norta is the northeast. The Stilts is on the Capital River, and the river goes to the sea. After a minute of pained searching, I finally find the river and the inlet near my village. “There,” I say, pointing just north, where I suppose Summerton might be.

He nods, happy to know I’m not a total fool. “Do you recognize anything else?”

But like the books, the map is written in the unknown language. “I can’t read it.”

“I didn’t ask if you could read it,” he replies, still pleasant. “Besides, words can lie. See beyond them.”

With a shrug, I force myself to look again. I was never a good student in school, and this man is going to find that out soon enough. But to my surprise, I like this game. Searching the map, looking for features I recognize. “That might be Harbor Bay,” I finally murmur, circling the area around a hooked cape.

“Correct,” he says, his face folding into a smile. The wrinkles around his eyes deepen with the action, showing his age. “This is Delphie now,” he adds, pointing to a city farther south. “And Archeon is here.”

He puts his finger over the Capital River, a few miles north of what looks like the largest city on the map, in the entire country of the before world. The Ruins. I’ve heard the name, in whispers between the older kids, and from my brother Shade. The Ash City, the Wreckage, he called it. A tremor runs down my spine at the thought of such a place, still covered in smoke and shadow from a war more than a thousand years ago. Will this world ever be like that, if our war doesn’t end?

The instructor stands back to let me think. He has a very strange idea of teaching; it’ll probably end with a four-hour game of me staring at a wall.

But suddenly, I’m very aware of the buzz in this room. Or lack thereof. This entire day I’ve felt the electrical weight of cameras, so much that I’ve stopped noticing. Until now, when I don’t feel it at all. It’s gone. I can feel the lights still pulsing with electricity, but no cameras. No eyes. Elara cannot see me here.

“Why isn’t anyone watching us?”