She gave me a pained smile and left. Ghosteater slid out behind her, leaving me alone in the quiet room. The carven strait sat on the floor, shining dully. It was a profoundly anticlimactic ending to ten days of wonder, terror, and pain.

Chapter 24

Cordus straightened up, closing his hand.

We were sitting in his office in our usual training spot. He’d spoken briefly to me the day before, then sent me to my room to rest and recover. Today, I was resuming my old schedule. Our lesson had gone as usual: I still couldn’t see workings.

He sat in silence for a time, then broached the subject I’d been dreading.

“As I understand it, you may have manifested a gift while in the isolate.”

Knowing the subject was unavoidable, I described all that had happened to me and what I’d apparently done.

Cordus didn’t seem shocked by my having incinerated a vast stretch of land and everything that lived there, but he did ask a number of very detailed questions. At last, he sat back and started some serious foot-tapping.

Eventually, I couldn’t stand the silence. “So, am I a fire-worker, like Lord Limu?”

“I think not, Miss Ryder. Based on your description, I believe you are a worker of light.”

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

“I did that with light?”

“Not the variety of light humans are capable of seeing.”

He got up, went a bookcase, and pulled out a volume.

“An explanation based on human science will be easiest for you, at this point.”

He paged through the book and then brought it to me, opened to a colorful diagram.

“The electromagnetic spectrum,” he said, sweeping his hand over the pages. “At the center are the wavelengths that human eyes can detect. Some creatures can see more broadly, of course.”

I nodded as though I’d known that.

“I suspect you produced a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy in these wavelengths,” he said, pointing to the infrared area of the spectrum. “Such a burst would ignite or incinerate flammable material, such as plants.”

Plants, bones, minis.

“Or people?” I said, looking up at him.

He looked back at me, expressionless. “People are indeed flammable, Miss Ryder.”

I sat there for some time, reading the diagram’s brief descriptions of infrared and other waves.

For once, Cordus was the one to break the silence. “With time, you may be able to produce energy across the entire spectrum.”

I looked up at him, then back down at the book. Microwaves. X-rays. Gamma rays.

“I don’t want this.”

I wasn’t sure where the words had come from. Some deep, instinctual place. They surfaced and demanded expression. I spoke them without thinking.

“You have no choice as to the nature of your abilities, Miss Ryder,” Cordus said softly. “When you have learned to control them, however, you will be able to choose how and when you employ them.”