You could never tell how long you would spend at either Eltisley Hall or The Maze—it could be days, weeks, or longer. At one point, Patricia spent seven months in The Maze, until she managed to hide from the teachers and the other students and they all spent a week looking for her. But instead of going back to Eltisley Hall, she was led out into a yellow-grass field, where Kanot himself ushered Patricia and some other students into a great wooden airship, which was whale-shaped except it had more fins, with an interior that was covered with rococo nuts and berries.

Today, Kanot was a heavyset bespectacled African-American man with a Tennessee accent and a bomber jacket. “Here’s the idea,” he said when they were already over the Alps somewhere. “We drop each one of you guys in a small town, someplace where you don’t speak the language. No money, no supplies. And you find a person who needs healing, someone hurting real bad, and you heal ’em. Without them knowing you were ever there. Then we come get you.” Kanot offered to let the students out of this assignment in exchange for letting him hide some stuff in their bones, but nobody went for it. So instead, he started shoving kids one by one out of the airship’s hatch, which looked like the doorway of a French chateau, a few hundred feet up. No parachute.

Patricia managed to slow her descent so the impact just knocked the wind out of her. She staggered to her feet, in a field miles from anywhere. Then she wandered until nightfall, when she saw the lights of the town, behind her. The first few people she found seemed healthy enough, but then she noticed an old woman hunched over a bowl of soup in a small restaurant or bistro. The woman was coughing and her skin looked gray, and Patricia could glimpse an ochre scar poking out of the neck out of her yellow blouse. Perfect. Patricia crept toward the woman, only to get a faceful of soup and what sounded like accusations of thievery in some Slavic language. She ran.

A week later, Patricia was starving and running out of places to hide in this town, with its dingy white plaster walls and muddy roads. She could no longer talk to animals, and she had failed to master the skill of understanding human languages other than English. Plus, she could only heal a sick person with whom she’d built a certain rapport.