Juele was jostled from all sides as the other doors in the hallway opened, adding their throngs of students to the crush already in progress. Ahead of her were a few of the girls from her class. They'd seemed interesting, if not immediately friendly. She wormed her way politely as she could through the crowd, trying to keep an eye on the copper-bright head of the girl who had sat on her left. Juele ducked under the limb of a tree creeping from one side of the hall to the other and found herself directly behind the redhead.
"Remember me?" Juele said, clearing her throat tentatively. The small sound was lost in the echoing racket. The redhead must not have heard Juele. She addressed a remark to the small, thin girl on her right.
"What do you think about the exhibition, Bella?"
"Pathetic!" The other smoothed her long hair. It was so dramatically black that Juele suspected enhancement, be it dye, influence, or illusion. The shining tresses weren't styled, but looked stylish all the same. Juele did her best to catch up beside the two girls, hoping to join in the conversation. The art box beating a painful tattoo on her hip, she opened up her stride. No matter how quickly she walked, they kept at least a pace ahead of her, without any apparent effort. "An attention-getting device. The real sign of insecurity, dear Daline." The black-haired girl waved her hand, a graceful gesture denoting complete scorn.
Juele increased her pace to a run, just barely keeping up behind the others, who, though they were only ambling, were covering ground at a remarkable rate.
"Are you showing anything in the exhibition?" she asked the two ahead of her. They turned their heads about an eighth of the way around, almost acknowledging her, but stopped well short of eye contact. Juele addressed the redhaired girl directly. "I liked the illusion you made in class. You meant it to be Aspiration, didn't you?"
"Yes," Daline said. "Simplistic exercises," she sneered, turning to her friend. "One wonders why we're kept back doing busywork when we're capable of so much."
"Hmmph," the other agreed.
"How long have you been here?" Juele asked. Other young men and women came out of lecture rooms she passed, glided ahead of her, and struck up conversations with each other, forming a solid row of shoulders in front of Juele that spread from side to side of the corridor. "Er, excuse me." Juele ducked under elbows and between books and boxes, but never could break into the front row. Everyone seemed so much taller than she was. All she could see now were the smocks of the people clustered around her. She caught tantalizing bits of gossip from the students sailing ahead.
"Did you hear what They're doing?" "Yes, it sounded like nothing at all, but when They . . ." "Well, my dear, the silly old woman asked me what it all meant, and I told her . . ." "Sad, sad, sad, but what do you expect from townies?" Juele jumped up and down as she ran, trying to see the speakers. Suddenly, the whole mass came to a halt at the top of the stairs. The crowd seemed to thin slightly so Juele could see ahead of her. Poised beautifully with her hand on the banister was the black-haired girl.
"Oh—" she said, as if surprised at the huge following she had amassed. "Dinner at five thirty, all?" Her eyes brushed Juele's briefly. They didn't linger, but they didn't shut her out, either.
"Yes, of course." Juele shouted out her joyful assent with the rest. "I'll be there." No one paid attention to her, but she didn't mind. Any small step forward was welcome.
Juele trudged up the long stairs toward the Garrets, her heart lighter. If she'd had the breath, she would have been whistling. Symbolism was going to be fun. She was going to like Mr. Lightlow. He didn't let her off easy, but he showed appreciation for what she did do right. She'd take care to read her schedule in more detail. She never wanted to be late like that again. It was just too embarrassing.
The tower clock outside chimed five and a half times. Juele peered out one of the grimy windows in the stairwell. Almost time for dinner. What she wanted right now was to lie flat on her bed and rest for a moment before changing. A little privacy would do her a world of good.
When she opened the door at the top of the stairs, she pulled the long strap off her shoulder and started to swing her art box into the tiny room, then pulled up short. A girl was standing in the way. Juele yanked her arm back to avoid hitting her, and felt it wrench halfway out of its socket from the box's weight. She staggered backward, pulling herself up only in time not to fall down the stairs. Just to be awkward, the box had grown far beyond its normal size and transmuted into solid steel. Juele smiled shyly as she hauled the recalcitrant container screeching into the room by its strap, mentally promising it a thump on the lid later.
"Hi," she said to the stranger. "I'm Juele."
The young woman smiled back, just as shyly. "My name is Mayrona." Taller than Juele and very slightly built, with a worry line in the middle of her forehead, Mayrona was dressed in a pale blue smock whose color and cut really didn't suit her well. Though her other features were small, her eyes were large and dark, with a look that suggested she might start like a deer if Juele moved too quickly. She might have been about twenty. "I . . ."
"I . . ." Juele began at the same moment, and they both laughed. "You first."
Mayrona sighed. "I was really hoping for a room of my own."
"Me, too," Juele admitted, as Mayrona backed up a pace to let her step inside. The room seemed even smaller than it had in the afternoon. They had to edge around one another so Juele could get to her bed. "I guess they're short on decent quarters—oops, no offense," she said, quickly, turning on her heel toward her roommate.
Mayrona had a pleasant, but worried little smile on her face. "None taken."
Juele was relieved. They were getting off to a good start. Then she looked around. Her pretty colors were gone! The décor had returned to dowdy paint and faded curtains. Juele felt huffy. Maybe the other girl liked living in squalor, but Juele was accustomed to something better. She beat down the furious words before they escaped from her mouth. She was resolved to try and make the best of it. The two of them had to live together, for however long it took the School to solve its obvious housing shortage.
"I . . . guess you didn't like the changes I made this afternoon," Juele said, very casually, though she wondered if steam was coming out of her ears from the pressure of her thoughts. "I'm so very sorry. I guess you have your own ideas. I should have waited to ask."
"Did you try?" Mayrona looked genuinely surprised. She threw up her hands. "Oh, it doesn't help. Anything you do disappears in a minute. I've been attempting to put nice curtains in that window for a month. I drew the nicest illusion you ever saw—white cambric with pulled-thread embroidery, and a shiny brass rod—and the left panel vanished before I had even finished the right half."
Juele, who had managed to decorate the entire room in next to no time, did a quick mental summing up of her roommate's abilities, for all the other girl was several years older. She shook her head sympathetically. "Is it against the rules?" she asked gently, ashamed of having been sharp.
"No," Mayrona said, with a sigh. She plumped down on her thin cot and picked up her teddy bear. It snuggled into her arms. She put her cheek down on its head. "Not officially. The administration doesn't care at all. As far as they're concerned, you could use influence to bring in a swimming pool, so long as it's an aesthetic swimming pool."
"Influence is not my strong suit," Juele admitted, opening her footlocker to put away the art box and take out her dinner dress. She peered at the folded heaps of underthings in the chest. Hadn't she left the dress on the top? She stacked the underwear on the bed, followed by her good cloak, which had been on the bottom of the chest—she was sure of it—and almost everything she owned before she discovered her nice dress on the bottom. No, not quite at the very bottom, Juele had to admit, when she lifted it out. Underneath it was one lonely pair of socks. Patiently, Juele repacked everything into the chest. It had the same pawky sense of humor as her art box. She slipped off her day smock, blouse, and skirt, and folded them neatly away.
"Nor mine," Mayrona said. "It's the School. Itself. It wants us to live like this, so we'll appreciate beauty when we see it. It's hard to fight it."
"We'll beat it," Juele said, with determination, pulling her good dress on over her head and reaching around to fasten the buttons. "Are you coming to dinner?"
"Thank you, but I can't. I have a late study period for shadow at six. Extra credit for tomorrow's class."
"I'm taking shadow tomorrow, too," Juele said, pleased. "We could study together."
"Oh, I would like that," Mayrona said, with an eager smile. Juele felt a tingle of pleasure—she was making her first friend. "What hour?"
Juele reached for the paper that was never far away from her hand, and read the list. "It's my noon class."
"Really?" Mayrona's eyebrows went up, and her big eyes widened. "You're an advanced student, aren't you?"
"No, this is my first day," Juele said, torn between pride and dismay.
"You must be. Shadows are so short at high noon. That's the hour they teach the real refinements. It's much easier to work with shadows when they're longer, at other times of day. At least," Mayrona said, with humorous self-deprecation, "that's what they tell me. My class is first hour. Just after sunrise. Life study is my real favorite."
"We can still study together," Juele said, hopefully. She was determined not to lose her chance at making a friend.
"I'd like that," Mayrona said. She had a sweet, wistful smile. "Are you dining with anyone?"
"Some of the people I met in symbology," Juele said.
Mayrona made a face. It reflected Juele's own doubts about her fellow students, but if she wasn't willing to put herself out to make friends, she'd never succeed.
"Have fun," Mayrona said. With a sigh, she sat down in the shabby chair on her side of the room and opened a book with pages displaying various shades of darkness.
"Thanks," Juele said. "See you later."
Advanced shadow? Juele wondered, as she headed down the stairs toward the dinner hall. All right, then, how did she measure up with the other students? She'd never seen her assessment, that sort of thing being absolutely confidential. But the administration had chosen her classes for her. They must believe that she could handle the toughest of a tough course. She hoped so. After symbology that afternoon, she was feeling very humble.
A homey clattering and good smells came from a set of double doors opposite the entrance to the dining hall, which proved to be in the end of a side wall in the long room. As she passed inside, the smock over her shoulders turned into a more elegant open robe. Its fronts hung straight down as if weighted, and a tiny pattern of silk embroidery decorated its hems and sleeve ends. The hall clearly had an enforced dress code. Everyone else's costume was similarly transformed, although with varying ornamentation. Juele guessed that the people with elaborate designs were professors, or senior students at the very least. Passing along the aisle toward the far end, in gowns as majestic as royal robes, must be the chancellor and the other officials of the school. She could see near her only a couple of gowns as humble as her own.
The dining hall was an ancient, huge, dark room. She had an impression of a lofty ceiling, but the weak, yellow light couldn't seem to reach all the way up to the rafters. Around the walls hung paintings in ornately carved frames. All of the images were too dark for Juele to distinguish. She could see tiny bronze plaques underneath each one and wondered why the names had been written too small for anyone at floor level to read. Perhaps when she ascended to loftier status, such things would become accessible to her.
Juele surveyed the dark wooden tables and unpadded wooden benches that had been polished smooth by generations of smock-clad bottoms. At the remote end of the room, there was a dais. The single table upon it was surrounded by chairs with high, carved backs and colorful cushions. The lighting was also different for those in the most favored places. Globes of brilliant, diamond-white light hovered at the center and either end of the high table. The rest of the School would dine under gloomy, yellow glows like dying suns. Juele just knew it would make the food look awful.
She found a seat in the middle of a bench facing the dais between two groups of students who had come in together and were engaged in enthusiastic conversations. The group on her left was discussing sports; the group on her right, politics. The sports group, a hearty bunch, paid no more attention to her than they did to the uniformed servers putting down food in front of them. An energetic young man with broad shoulders and a toothy grin, erected an illusionary field right in the middle of the table to demonstrate his success of the day. The end zone was on top of Juele's plate. As she took forkfuls of strong-smelling fish mousse from around the goal, the young man, suddenly reduced to the size of her hand, evaded hundreds of monstrous opponents and at the very last moment dove for a tiny ball. Juele watched raptly, forgetting to eat, as he launched the ball through the goalposts. Thousands of invisible fans cheered. The next moment, he was beside her again, and his companions were slapping him on the back and laughing.
"Congratulations!" Juele said, offering the young man a smile when he glanced her way. "That was terrific!"
"Thanks," he said, grinning, and turned away to listen to a girl at the end of the table. Juele swallowed her next question, and, with a shrug, went back to her dinner.
The food appeared to vary depending upon whom it was served to. Juele watched plates of the same fish mousse she was eating turn into shrimp cocktails or lobster salad as they were put down before certain well-dressed students. They must be on a more expensive meal plan, she realized, taking another bite. Hers was modest, but positively lavish compared with a few of the others, who were dining on eel and carp.
During the soup course, she leaned over to listen to the group on her other side. A most earnest young man set his open hands so they were parallel to one another and kept leaning toward them as if he was concentrating all his energy and essence in the space between his palms. The others stared intently into that space, but Juele couldn't see anything there that made sense. Many nebulous forms floated around, and every time the murky colors or shapes changed, his listeners ahhed or oohed in a significant way.
"It's a conspiracy, you understand," he was saying. "Misdirection, malfeasance, categorical misrepresentation of a highly advanced degree that the public does not even suspect!"
"So how do you know about it?" Juele asked, curious.
The young man glanced warily at her over his shoulder and met her eyes for one brief, significant moment. "The sealed chamber . . . has leaks." The space between his hands showed a pinpoint of light in a murky field. Juele thought she saw the shadow of a man slip through.
"This sounds very exciting," she said, intrigued.
"Exciting! The safety of the free world is at stake!" said a serious young woman wearing round, black-rimmed glasses. She regarded Juele with a suspicious glare. Juele was taken aback. She was only asking questions, yet they treated her as if she was not only a stranger, but dangerous. The others huddled closer together, muttering darkly among themselves, "Trilateral, Marxist, Greenpeace, right-wingers, worldwide financial markets, brink of civil war." Juele, understanding none of the jargon, let her mind wander.
The door opened, and Juele looked up, hoping Mayrona might be arriving at last. Instead, the latecomers were teachers, prompting the students to rise in waves as they passed. Following the others' example, Juele sprang out of her seat. Mr. Lightlow passed, wearing a gown the color of intelligence with some kind of symbols on the sleeve. She smiled up at him, but he did not look her way. Behind him was a woman who appeared not to be wearing a robe at all. It wasn't that she was naked. Her clothes were invisible. Between her neck and her knees, there was nothing at all. Juele could see the wall quite clearly through her. She was delighted with the complexity of the moving illusion and wondered when she could take the woman's class.
Two instructors came in together wearing charcoal gray robes over their evening clothes. Juele guessed they must be shadow teachers. Behind them were three colleagues in bright peach, sky blue, and warm, buttercup yellow. Juele was curious what the various shades and symbols stood for. She started to ask her neighbors on the left about them, but found the political group had been replaced by another bunch of senior students, talking with animation, but in very low voices. She cleared her throat politely.
"Excuse me?" she began, shyly. They didn't appear to see her. "Hello? Can I ask you something?"
None of them acknowledged her. It was as if she was invisible, or not properly existing. She checked to make sure she was there, then waved a hand before the eyes of one young man. He kept talking without interruption. She wondered if she should draw attention to herself in some way, like creating a spotlight that shone down on her.
"May I ask . . ." she began again. One of the young women tossed back her long hair with one hand. Juele recognized the gesture. She had changed to dishwater blond, but Juele recognized her as Daline, the red-haired girl from symbology class. The brunette at the end of the table had had black hair earlier. Juele remembered that she was called Bella.
"Are you going to make a fool of yourself again?" Bella asked, with a superior smirk in her green eyes. She nudged the others. "Here's the child I was telling you about. Made an idiot of herself in front of Lightlow." She laughed contemptuously. Her companions exchanged sly looks.
"I didn't . . . !" Juele began. Defending herself was futile. Nothing she said could change their minds or their fatuous expressions. These people are jerks, she thought. She was rescued by the server, who reached down on her left to remove her plate and replaced it from the right with the main course. Juele smiled up at the uniformed woman, then immediately buried her attention in her food, pretending she had an appetite. Mayrona was the only nice person on this whole campus. Juele hoped that she wouldn't find she was more advanced than Mayrona in every subject. Her roommate would probably stop being so friendly if Juele constantly outshone her, but . . . but she would if she had to. Juele refused to be less competent than she knew herself to be. She shot a sideways glance at her classmates, now making comments about someone at the next table, and sighed. It could be a long, lonely term. She huddled over her plate. Illusions, usually unflattering portraits of other people, spun unhappily on the table amid their creators.
Juele caught a flash of gleaming white from far across the room. She looked up at the dais. Rutaro sat facing her at the high table. He was giving a vigorous explanation of something to a group of his dinner companions. So different from the languid gent who had shown her around the school. He was dressed in a fine suit of soft, dark gray, more modern than the one he had been wearing earlier, but he retained the floppy cravat. His features had altered to a slightly more patrician cast, as befitted his current situation. He wore a robe on his shoulders, but his was pure white, as were those of six others seated at the high table with him. Those must be the friends he spoke of, Juele thought, and studied them thoughtfully.
On Rutaro's left was a handsome, thin man with floppy, light brown hair. On his right was the one to whom Rutaro was giving his closest attention, a dark, truculent woman with a bow in her hair. The others had their backs to Juele. She could only see their faces when they turned to speak to one another. She saw a small-boned woman whose gracefully waving hands looked exquisite even from this distance. Beside her was a fiery, redhead woman who was taller than any but the handsome man and had an innate elegance that made Bella look like a ragbag. Helping the woman to sauce from a china dish was a quiet, thin man with short, blond hair. The last was a boy who appeared to be about Juele's age—fifteen years. Rutaro finished making his point, to the doubtful expression of his companion, and glanced up for a moment. Juele waved energetically, hoping he could see her.
"Who are you waving at?" Cal asked.
"Rutaro."
"You know one of Them?" Daline asked, astonished. The other members of the clique stopped talking for a moment to stare.
"Well, sort of," Juele said, surprised by the look of respect on their faces. "Rutaro showed me around the campus this morning. I think he's supposed to be my student adviser."
Eyebrows all around the table raised high. Juele wondered what Rutaro and his friends meant to the School. If they were dining on the dais with the professors and the chancellor, they must hold a place of honor, but to shock the fashionable set, they had to be something really special.
"Well," Daline said, in a slightly thawed tone, "Maybe there's something redeemable in you after all." She looked at Juele out of the corner of her eye.
"Well, thanks," Juele said, indignantly. The others seemed amused. Juele held her tongue as she realized she was on the verge of snapping at them. These people will be your classmates for years to come, she told herself. You want them as friends, not enemies. Humbly, she looked down into her plate. Her half-eaten meal was swept away to the left, and a dish containing a narrow slip of pie replaced it. She took a bite. The sweetness of it hurt her teeth and gummed up her mouth.
"Hurry, or we'll be the last ones in at the coffeehouse," Bella told her group. "They always stare at latecomers." Juele looked up hopefully and met her eyes.
"Can I come, too?" she asked.
"We can't do a thing if you followed us," the girl said, grudgingly. "You might as well."
Juele felt an upwelling of happiness inside her. The last few bites of pie tasted like ambrosia.
Her companions had very peculiar manners, Juele thought, as she walked with them across campus, but she admired their style. Tagging along at the back of the group, she attempted to walk with the same airy swing as Bella, but her adolescent hips refused to coordinate with her knees. If she couldn't ape their gait, she could at least wear the same world-weary expression. Her lips folded together at the corners and pressed outward whenever she wasn't talking, and she let a genteelly scornful crease fall between her eyebrows. Already she felt superior to the way she had been earlier. And these people weren't so rude to her if she said nice things about them. Bella, in particular, liked to hear how clever she was. Fortunately for Juele, she had thought the older girl's work was clever and offered honest praise of it that made Bella purr. The green eyes slitted, and the points of her ears sharpened just a little bit.
The moment they left the dining hall, their robes reverted to smocks. Juele made hers look more like those of the clique's. She could not yet put her finger on what quality it was that made slightly beaten up garments seem so elegant, but whatever it was, she wanted it. They belonged more than she did. As they mounted the stairs to a building in the residence area, Juele tried the hip swing again. Her second attempt was better. Maybe all she needed was practice. In time, if she became similar enough, they should like her.
"What is this place?" Juele asked.
"The coffeehouse, dear," Bella said, in her most bored tone. In spite of her voice, she seemed anything but detached. Her eyes sparkled as she looked around her.
Juele didn't really see what was so wonderful about her surroundings. They had entered a hallway with a dimly lit, high, painted ceiling, but that was the last detail Juele could distinguish clearly. She had to pull in her elbows to keep from being crushed in the crowd. The smoky air was thick and tasted like the dregs of a cup of coffee: bitter, oily, dark, and tired. She kept her eye on Daline's fair hair as the girl pushed her way into the very heart of the mob.
Juele looked around her. Except for her classmates, she recognized no one. Faces swam up indistinctly out of the gloom and disappeared again. They seemed disembodied because nearly everyone in the room was wearing black under their smocks. For a moment, she lost track of Daline. Fighting her panic, she tried to cut through the miasma with a thread of influence, but it was at once swallowed up like a minnow in a pond full of pike. Something about the atmosphere in here was predatory and dangerous. Juele felt a little afraid of it as she edged further on into the room. It was very hot, and she felt her palms and forehead growing damp.
"Drink?" A rail-thin man with dark, bristling jaws and long, greasy hair underneath a black beret edged sideways toward her between two pale women in black. His eyes were half closed, as if his eyelids were too heavy to keep all the way open. He had a small, cylindrical glass half filled with amber liquid in each hand, and he extended one to her. A heady scent wafted toward her from the glass, teasing her nostrils.
"No, thanks," Juele said, looking at the liquid with alarm. Would he insist that she took it? To these people, liquor might be some kind of treat or entertainment and behave as such, possibly to become caviar or television in the next wave of influence, but to her it represented a frightening adult thing. If she accepted it, it might become a tax demand or something else that she felt unready to handle.
"Oh," the man said, flatly. "You're temperate. How dreary." He slipped away into the smoke. Juele thought that she must have flunked a test of some kind.
"There you are," Bella said, appearing suddenly by her side. She thrust a tall glass into Juele's hand. "Here. This is innocent enough for a tot like you. You've got to try and act like you fit in."
Juele accepted it with a look of gratitude for the older girl. She pushed aside the tiny paper umbrella and sniffed the bright orange liquid in the glass. It smelled like fruit juice. Harmless enough. She took a gulp and found the liquid very sweet, almost syrupy, and gently warm in her belly.
"Thank you," she said. Bella eyed her with bored impatience.
"Try not to be so small town," the girl said, and disappeared back into the mass.
Juele clutched the glass. Among the intense, black-clad people gathered here, she had never felt so unprepared. What was she supposed to do here?
"Three dimensions are so limiting," said a man's voice that rose abruptly over the hubbub. Curious, Juele made toward it, keeping the glass close to her so it wouldn't spill.
"Abandoning dimensions is to draw more attention to the bounds of your work, rather than to the work itself," said a woman's voice. Juele edged her way closer to listen. The speaker, dressed in black like the others in her circle, but wearing a deep-gold smock on her shoulders, put the thick white mug she was holding into one hand and drew a nebulous figure on the air. Juele peered closely, trying to see what it was. The woman turned her head to stare at Juele, and Juele withdrew hastily. She took a sip from her orange drink.
"I can't be bothered by worrying about the limits of other people's perceptions," said the man. He was short and stocky, definitely taking up three dimensions himself. He grasped for the woman's illusion and drew it out in several directions at once. Parts of the misty whiteness disappeared. Some wisps would reappear in other places at different intervals, and others changed shape and color where they were. Juele wondered how he had done that. Surreptitiously, she drew a wisp of white smoke out of the noisome fog that surrounded them, then tried to detach pieces of the being of the illusion while making it still the same illusion. It was surprisingly difficult, made even more so by the fact she could only use one hand.
Silence fell. She looked up. The man and woman were staring at her. With a guilty start Juele let the mist evaporate. She backed away, and the circle closed. Juele turned away and went to wander the room.
Everyone there talked in hushed, intent voices, in small groups wreathed by the smoke that seemed to rise out of the very floor. Juele dipped in and out of various conversations. Some of the chatter was interesting, but much of it was obscure or over her head, in some cases literally, the talkers bobbing up near the painted ceiling. Many of the others were huddled in twos and threes around low tables lit by a single dim candle in a dark orange shade. Juele only glimpsed the faces, thrown into deep, sinister shadows by the dancing flame. Occasionally someone pushed by her, a man or woman in stark black, carrying a tray of glasses or coffee cups.
Now that she was over her initial nervousness, she was grateful to Bella and Daline for letting her come. In her fantasies about the School of Light, she had pictured this kind of gathering, where people talked about Art and Higher Concepts, and discussed Beautiful Thoughts. She sipped her drink and listened for a while, then moved on through the fog to the next group. People drew small illusions in the air that danced on the fumes and faded away as they talked. Waves of influence, both Sleeper-induced and driven by those present, changed the floor plan and people's appearance, yet always left the atmosphere obscured so that Juele couldn't see anyone but the people who were immediately around her. It was so dark that she slipped between two couples and walked straight into a wall without seeing it.
Her head rang. She fumbled for the glass, hoping she hadn't spilled it. Someone grabbed her arm and turned her around. Juele cried out in surprise.
"Shh! Don't make a fool of us," Bella hissed, leaning close to her as the crowd pressed about them again. Her dress had turned black, and her dark eye makeup stood out stark on her pale face. Daline and the others were behind her.
"I'm not!" Juele exclaimed, louder than she had intended. Everyone else abandoned their illusions and conversations to look at them. Her head felt rubbery. Was it the air, the drink, or the overwhelming pressure of influence in the room? She saw a ledge and put the glass down. Whatever was in it was affecting her head. "I'm sorry. It was an accident."
"Be quiet," Bella said, furiously throwing up a wall of illusionary smoke around them that stifled her voice. "People will notice you. The wrong way."
"Ah, there you are!"
The curtain of smoke parted, and Rutaro appeared. Her companions hastened to make way for him, standing back as far as they could with awe on their faces. His white smock had lost none of the glamour it had had in the dining hall. It glistened like a pearl in the gloom. Juele studied the embroidery on the sleeves and hem. It changed constantly from one set of complex patterns to another, or was it just her muzzy-headedness that made her think so? The dinner suit under the smock was flawless, and Juele let out a little sigh of satisfaction for something that looked so right. Rutaro smiled at the small sound. His large, dark eyes were sharp, even in the half-light. The others regarded him with awe, but he only spoke to Juele.
"I hope you are getting along well," he said, with a charming little half-bow. Juele's classmates behind her nodded their heads violently up and down, willing her to say yes. She wanted to please them.
"Yes," she said, obligingly. Her classmates relaxed.
"Good," he said. "I was telling my friend Mara about you." He put out a hand behind him, and the woman with the bow in her hair who had been sitting near him at dinner squeezed in. She had on the same kind of white smock he did, over an old-fashioned yellow dress that came down to her knees and was somewhat too tight, as if she'd outgrown it, but kept wearing it anyhow. "I was telling her about the artists sketching the fountain this afternoon, and how impressed you seemed by it. You remember."
He held up a hand, and in it was a perfect little image of a fountain with blue, scalloped bowls and an upright pipe like an open lily. Juele studied it, and wrinkled her brows.
"That's not exactly the way it was," Juele said, eagerly. The others gasped, but Rutaro paid no attention. She put out both hands and willed the image of the fountain as she remembered it into being on her open palms. There was so little light in here that she had to concentrate hard, but color pooled on her hands, and she molded it. The top of the fountain had looked more like an elaborate candlestick, with scrolled details spiraling all the way around it to the base. She thought she got it just right, and nodded, looking up at Rutaro for approval.
"I think it was like this." She looked at Mara over the tossing plumes of water. "It really was beautiful. It looked so real, and then a woman walked right through it!" She did her best to reproduce the teacher in green passing through the carved pool.
"Not a fluke," Mara said to Rutaro. "All right."
"I told you, dear," he said, closing his palm on his own illusion. The fountain folded up and vanished. Mara nodded curtly and sidled through a group clad all in black, who made themselves thinner to open the way for her.
Rutaro smiled paternally at Juele. "Come to us tomorrow. There are some more people I'd like you to meet."
"I'd love to," Juele said. "Where do I . . . ?" He ignored her question, as usual, and strode off. What a man for a dramatic exit. Juele looked after him to see where he was going, but the crowd closed behind him. He hadn't forgotten her. She was glad. The other people in the Salon turned away and went back to their whispered conversations. The excitement was over. Juele started to let the little illusion on her hands fade, but Daline grabbed her wrist.
"Not so fast. I want to see," she said. She stared at the fountain and looked puzzled. "What's so wonderful about that?" she asked Bella, who also leaned in close to see for herself.
"Who knows, with Them," Bella said, with a wary look over her shoulder to see if anyone else was listening. "I mean, it's representational, and all. Hardly cutting edge."
"Is that really bad?" Juele asked, worriedly. "He seemed to like it."
Bella and Daline looked at one another. "I suppose not," Daline said, exasperated. "If he liked it."
"She did, too," Bella pointed out, with an eye on Juele. "You could tell."
"What you see isn't necessarily what is, darling. You know that."
"Would I dare to second-guess one of Them? Do I look stupid?"
"I suppose not," Daline said. She nibbled on a scarlet-varnished fingernail and considered Juele thoughtfully.
Juele glanced in the direction Rutaro had disappeared. "Where am I supposed to go to meet them?"
"We'll show you," Bella said. "That's easy. Anyone can find the Ivory Tower, but not just anyone can get in. But seeing that he specifically asked you . . ."
"Thank you," Juele said, ignoring the young woman's insulting tone. "That's very nice of you."
Bella shrugged, as if ashamed to be caught doing anything nice, but her attitude was marginally less distant than it had been. "We're going into town tomorrow morning."
"Into Mnemosyne? Can I come with you?" Juele asked at once.
"If you're there at the gate when we're going," Bella said.