What, though?
Maybe he didn’t know, either. Maybe it was just hopeless, pointless desire, a drive to have something that wasn’t possible.
Whatever it was, he stepped backward, fleeing as he so often did to his room, leaving me there confused and surprisingly cold.
Which felt like a good representation of whatever I had with Knox.
Chapter Two
I rushed into the room listed on my schedule out of breath, a glance at the clock telling me I’d just made it in time.
Lateness didn’t go over well at Larkwood, and that hadn’t bothered me when I’d first arrived. At first, just moving from my room to class or work had seemed easy enough. The longer I spent here, however, the more filled my days became and the easier it was to end up late.
Especially now that the guards kept a much closer eye on me.
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?” Kit’s voice made me turn to find him standing in the room already. Of course he was there early—that was so like Kit.
He wore a suit, looking like any other instructor there. At least, he would if it weren’t for his entirely black eyes and the cuff on his wrist like all the other shades there.
And there was the fact that I’d glimpsed what he really looked like, and that sight never quite left me. Irecalled the deer skull, the large antlers, the thin, elongated limbs, the terrifyingly deep voice that called through an endless, empty darkness.
I shivered, unable to help it each time I remembered what I’d seen.
When he hadn’t moved, I swallowed and signed a response to him.“The guards searched me.”
Kit nodded, leaning against a desk along the wall of the room. “You should expect that. You made a nuisance of yourself, and the Warden took notice. Now you’re being watched closely.”
“Lucky me.”
“Well, if you don’t like that much scrutiny, perhaps you shouldn’t get caught with files you shouldn’t have.”
Which told me Kit knew exactly what had happened. Not that I thought it would have been some secret. Word traveled fast through Larkwood, and Kit had an ability to access information others wouldn’t.
“Does this mean I get yet another lecture?”
He didn’t glare—no, not Kit. He wasn’t the type to sink to something like that. While I didn’t know him that well, he was forever calm from what I’d seen.
Instead, he crossed his arms and tilted his head. “Who has been lecturing you, songbird?”
The nickname burned as it always did, like some joke everyone else found hilarious. Given I’d had my voice stolen, calling me ‘songbird’ just seemed cruel.
But I’d taken the advice I’d gotten to claim it as my own, to not fight against it. Not that it had helped yet. The name still sucked.
“No one,”I signed because it wasn’t like I could tell him that the other shades who were helping me come up with an escape plan liked to complain to me about, well, everything.
“You are a terrible liar,” he said but didn’t press the issue further. “It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had an evaluation. Have you been practicing on your own?”
I nodded. I took time each evening to work on controlling my powers, on how to twist sound waves to my advantage, how to block out sounds I didn’t need or want. It wasn’t easy, and the bags under my eyes spoke volumes about how much I’d sacrificed to work on it.
However, after getting thrown in solitary, after learning what I had, I realized how much I needed those powers. I couldn’t face off against Larkwood and the Warden if I had no skills of my own.
“Good,” Kit said. “Let’s work on that. I want to see what you’ve managed.”
I peered around the room and frowned.
“We’re not going outside for this,” he said. “You’ve proven you’re capable of causing large-scale destruction with your powers, but that isn’t always useful. It’s just as important to learn to control it on a small scale.” At my look, he sighed softly. “Blowing doors off a frame is effective, but sometimes it’s a better idea to just unlock a door.”
That made me go still at the fact that he wasfartoo close to the truth.