Chương 31: “School Play”

June got a part in the school play. Not the lead, she didn't want the lead, she wanted the witch, and she got the witch, and she came home and told Vorrath about it. The play was in three weeks. She practiced in her room and was, Vorrath noted, genuinely good. She did the witch's lines with a low voice she didn't use normally, a thing she'd borrowed from somewhere, and when she turned to look at her imaginary audience there was something in her face that was not quite June and was not quite not-June.

He watched her practice every night. He had opinions. He could not voice them. This was frustrating in a new and strange way. On the second week she stopped in the middle of a speech and looked at him.

"Am I doing it right?" He glowed once. She squinted.

"That felt like a yes but a complicated yes." This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. He glowed twice. He had been developing a secondary signal. She was the only living thing in three thousand years to have negotiated a communication system with him and she did it in two months without discussing it.

"The voice?" Two glows. She tried it lower. He glowed once. She tried it slower. One glow. She tried both and paused and he glowed once, bright, which meant yes, that, exactly that. She grinned. The gap in her teeth had started to fill in, he had noticed. New tooth coming through, a bit crooked though. She had not noticed yet.

The night of the play Lauren took half a day off work, which Vorrath knew cost her, and she sat in the third row with her coat on her lap and her phone recording and when June walked out in her witch costume and delivered the first line in exactly the right voice, Lauren's face did something odd and private that she immediately put away before anyone could see it. Vorrath saw it. He was in the pencil case in June's bag backstage.

He had bent his awareness through the wall to the third row and he saw it and he kept it, the way he kept things, in a place he didn't examine. System: Bond Strength: 83%. You watched every rehearsal. You developed a two-signal system. You bent your awareness through a wall to watch her mother's face during the first line. We're just listing facts. These are just facts.