Noxia Shade's Arc

Chapter 11 of 15

The seventh gate opened onto a low room with a riveted vault door set into the far wall. The spymaster waited beside it, hands folded. Noxia stepped in with the notebook under her arm and her boot back on. He watched her face the way a man watches a lock for tumblers. She kept it still. Her wrist itched under a wrapped bandage that hid no wound. Inside the layers she had folded a scrap of her teacher's handwriting, pressed against the skin. The weight of it pulled at her mouth. She felt her jaw want to drop, her eyes want to fill. She thought of the sand hoverer and the begging her teacher had done for her, not for herself, and her chin began to move. She slid a hand into her coat pocket and closed her fingers around a small carved figure — a midnight cat with lime-green spots, a parting gift she had never explained to anyone. The carved spine bit her palm. The pain pulled her face flat again. She met the spymaster's eyes and held them until he was the one who looked away, toward the vault. "Your assignments live behind that door," he said. He turned the handle. "You'll draw your first tomorrow." Noxia nodded once, even, empty. The grief stayed buried under the wrap, under the carving, under the skin. He had looked for it and found nothing. The eighth gate was hers.