“Well, I guess I’ve got a Gift, but it isn’t one they’ve ever seen before,” she said. “They said the closest thing to it is how a Healer can sense when you’ve got a muscle or bone that’s under stress and damaged, except my version works with things that aren’t alive. Built things, as far as I know, but I’ve never been out of Haven, so I don’t know if I could tell if there was a hillside that might have an avalanche or something.”

Her little brother Tory’s mouth made a little “o” shape, though he didn’t say anything. Perry asked the important question.

“You’re going to train in it, right?” He grinned. His Gift was unusual, but not unheard of: an exceptionally strong version of Animal Mindspeech. That might have been what allowed him to bond to his partner, the giant kyree currently acting as a back-brace for him. The kyree nodded sagely.

“Rood rain,” he mouthed, meaning “should train,” of course. All of them understood Larral the kyree as easily as they understood each other.

“They seem to think the Healers can come up with something,” she said, and accepted a slice of bread and cheese from her mother. Then, once it was in her hands, she realized she was starving, and she ate it so fast it was gone before Amily had gotten done passing out the snack to the rest of the group. “They also want to put me in the Artificers,” she continued, feeling suddenly gleeful as Perry whistled.

“You mean they’re going to make a slot for you?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of them doing that before!”

“I have, but it isn’t done often,” Mama replied. “You have to have something quite special to bypass the queue to get in, but I suppose a Gift that allows you to tell when a bridge is dangerous would certainly qualify.”

“That’s a lot of math,” Trey said doubtfully. Kat hit his shoulder.

“You trying to say you think she can’t do it?” Kat demanded, as her oldest brother rubbed his shoulder.

“Not so hard!” he protested. “I’m just saying I couldn’t do it, is all!”

“I’m not bad at math,” Abi said slowly. “I just didn’t see much use for it before. It’s not as if anyone was going to invite me into the Artificers.”

“Well, now they have,” Niko pointed out. “Do you think you can do it?”

She pondered that a while. “They said math is a matter of practice. So if you idiots can manage to practice hard enough in six months to hit the bull’s-eye nine out of ten, I expect I can practice enough to do math well.”