Recaps shouldn’t turn my stomach anymore, but they still did. Watching myself on that screen was like having a million ants crawl underneath my skin, and not just any ants, but the fire ant variety that liked to bite. And the feeling was that much worse now that I knew Elliot Mason was sitting in the front row. I rolled my neck from side to side in an attempt to dispel the feeling as I watched myself spot the Butterfly and exit my seat at the theater.

Did I really wrinkle my face like that when I was thinking? It made my already turned-up nose look even more piglike. Charming. And man, did the back of my hair look stupid in those tight bouncy ringlets. I ran my palm over my smooth blond strands and caught myself wrinkling my nose in the exact way I’d just found obnoxious. I rubbed it with the back of my hand, grateful that for simulations at least I didn’t have to actually curl my hair or wear the dress. If I ever got to do an actual mission, I’d have to do all that. The prep would be real, and the bite marks the Butterfly on-screen was so nicely carving into my arm wouldn’t magically disappear when the simulation ended. Treebaun paused the screen on the image of a wide-eyed John Wilkes Booth and turned back to the class.

“Cadet Fitz missed this particular simulation by one second. Who here knows how she could have saved herself that second?”

Just like I knew it would, a slim brown hand in the front row shot into the air.

“Cadet Mason again,” said Treebaun.

“Had she used the alternate staircase, she would have arrived in plenty of time to apprehend her Butterfly,” said Cadet Mason, and I could just picture the smug look on his stupid face as he said it. Treebaun changed the screen to a diagram of Ford’s Theatre and did a quick overview of all the ways the top balcony could have been accessed before turning on my repercussion track.

The repercussion track was different every time, depending on how badly you’d screwed up, and really, as my mom liked to point out, it was just a bunch of guesswork. Its purpose was to show the Glitcher what their actions could cause in the future.