At least he didn’t respond to it. Mostly he just asked her the same questions in slightly different ways. As the days passed, she noticed the repetition. I could see the questions were beginning to annoy her a little, though it helped that the asker was so attractive.

The fact that she remembered the questions she’d been asked earlier suggested to me that her mind and memory were working normally. I said as much to Cordus and got his version of “uh-huh” in response — “Your assessment is apt, Miss Ryder.”

I also spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Tiffany, which always left me feeling like a heel. I could tell that Ben was having trouble keeping things together. I thought about telling her about Callie, so that there’d be someone in Dorf she could talk to about her abilities. But that would mean exposing her to another person in Cordus’s organization, and I didn’t want to attract more attention to her and her sisters than I had to. I also wasn’t sure Callie’s religiously inflected understanding of things would be a net gain for Tiff. It might just confuse her more. Lastly, fingering Callie as a Nolander would be breaking the rules.

I tried to phone Ben a couple times. He seemed to be screening my calls. I couldn’t blame him, but it hurt.

So that was my personal time — mixed at best. The rest of my schedule pretty much sucked.

The lessons with Cordus were increasingly frustrating. I still couldn’t see any workings, and he only let me try a few times each day. Instead, we spent most of each half-hour working on Baasha, which turned out to be about a million times harder than French.

It just didn’t feel like I was making any progress, even though being a student was the one thing I’d always done well.

Plus, Cordus disturbed me. Every day I half expected him to pull his mind-control trick and take advantage of me. The thought of that scared me sick, and I was always knotted up with anxiety before entering his office in the morning. But once inside, I regularly found myself staring at him, my fears forgotten.

My fascination with him was distressing. I suspected he was a monster inside a pretty shell, and I didn’t want to find him attractive.

The physical fitness program was a total bummer. Gwen was in charge of that part of my day, and she was a fiend when it came to working out. She made me jog, lift weights, and try out various complicated machines that simulated rowing, skiing, and other forms of torture. It was unrelenting. I was sore all the time.