Page 21 of Winterveil

Ever since she had arrived at Valeran, sleep had ceased to visit Giselle. She managed only a brief drowsing here and there, but then she would wake suddenly and shoot up in bed, heart clanging like a bell. And it would take her several minutes of labored breathing, of her eyes adjusting to the darkness and the strange surroundings, to remember where she was. Less than a hundred miles from home, according to the map on her tablet, but it might as well have been a world away.

The academy campus was the sort of place that Giselle had only seen on the glossy flyers outside the guidance counselor’s office: far-off universities that no one in Belle ever really imagined attending. Marble floors, gleaming oak fixtures, velvet drapes on all the windows. The massive amphitheater that looked straight out of ancient Rome. The lawns, and the elm trees that were tall enough to be half-obscured in the mist.

Her classes were excruciating. She had never heard the term cryptography before, much less symmetric-key algorithm or substitution cipher. Rote memorization was the only thing saving her; Giselle could reproduce exactly what her professors shared on the projectors or the chalkboards. But soon assignments would be due, tests would be scheduled, and she would be completely ruined.

Worst of all were the students. Admittedly, Giselle was used to attracting attention, whether on the pageant stage or in the halls of Belle High, even just in the aisles of Kroger, where she had once been approached in a single shopping trip by two different gangly, blushing teenage boys. She knew how to deflect that kind of attention, how to ignore it or brush it off.

But the stares she got here were perplexed and suspicious, often paired with a sneer or a smirk. She could understand: These were not people for whom the highlight of the year was the tractor pull at the county fair. They were people who dropped the names of senators and Silicon Valley start-ups into conversation as casually as if they were commenting on the weather. One boy in her cryptography class, with a devastatingly handsome, high-cheekboned face straight out of a Vogue spread, once asked her if she was putting on her accent as an ironic caricature of the American rural poor. Heat had erupted across her cheeks and she had fled the dining hall.

All the while she couldn’t help but wonder: What was the point? Was her learning about disk encryption supposed to help win the war, as Dr. Iver had suggested? And why was she better suited to the task than a school of exorbitantly wealthy, cosmopolitan geniuses?

By the end of the first week, Giselle had considered running. But as she circled the edge of the campus, examining the ten-foot walls topped with barbed wire and dodging the gazes of the armed guards, she quickly realized it was impossible. And even if she did manage to scale the walls and slip past the guards, what was waiting for her back in Belle? A jail cell and a town full of people who hated her? Surely she had even been barred from the pageant circuit, if not for the fraud charges, then for that stupid, illicit kiss.

She had never been much for praying, but on that seventh night, Giselle knelt beside the bed in her dorm room, clasped her hands, and closed her eyes. Yet when it came time to speak, she realized that she didn’t even know what to pray for.

She woke the next morning to the insistent vibrating of her tablet. Giselle fumbled to grab it off the bedside table. There was a message on the home screen from Dr. Iver himself.

Room 515 at 9 a.m. You have been withdrawn from your other classes.

It was so cryptic that her stomach lurched. At Valeran, there was no such thing as a good surprise.

Giselle put on her starched, uncomfortably crisp uniform and ran a brush through her hair. It was always slightly uncontrolled without the aid of mousse and dry shampoo, not that her looks mattered here. She slipped out of the girls’ dormitory and into the cool, hazy morning.

The fifth floor of the main building had a musty, disused feeling. The classrooms were empty, the narrow windows on the doors coated in a layer of dust. Her skin prickled. Maybe Dr. Iver planned to punish her after all.

But when she pushed open the door to 515, it was not Dr. Iver standing in the classroom. It was another man, younger and almost gaunt-looking in his leanness, with a head of wispy brown hair. As he stood in the faded light from the dusty window, his glasses flashed, for a moment obscuring his eyes.

“Oh,” Giselle started. “I’m sorry, I—”

“You don’t have the wrong room,” the man interrupted. “This is exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

His tone made her skin prickle again. “I don’t belong here at all.”

“Of course you do.” The man took a step toward her. “Ms. Buckley, yes?”

She nodded uneasily.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Professor Blanchard.” His smile made the taut skin of his face stretch. “Apologies that you were made to endure a week of classes well beneath you. Dr. Iver and I were getting our arrangements in order.”

A sudden quiver of frustration ran through her. Ever since Dr. Iver had sprung her from jail, she had been ordered from one place to the next, kept in a bewildered daze, all her questions unanswered. So she couldn’t help but reply, with venom in her voice, “Is there a single person at this school who will speak plainly?”

The corner of Professor Blanchard’s mouth curled farther upward. “Why don’t you start speaking plainly, Giselle? What did you do to end up here?”

“I don’t know,” she bit out. “Some strangers showed up at the jailhouse in Belle, unlocked my cell door, and brought me here. I didn’t do anything—”

“You did,” Professor Blanchard interrupted, his tone cool. “You were in that cell for a reason.”

“Well, yes.” She let out an exasperated breath. “I took some credit card numbers and I used them to buy things. Stupid things, like clothes. I bought nail polish for my little sisters, some food for our dogs. A jacket for—” Her face heated and she paused. “But the other students are here because they—they hacked into banks or stole million-dollar paintings . . .”

Professor Blanchard’s expression remained flat, almost serene. “And how did you take the numbers?”

Giselle’s chest tightened. She looked down at the floor.

“I just saw them,” she said quietly. “I only need to see a glimpse of something, once, and I’ll remember it forever. It’s always been this way. I’ll remember everything my teachers ever wrote on the chalkboard, or every page from a book I’ve read. It’s always there. It never goes away.”

There was something strangely freeing about confessing it so openly. She had never put it fully into words before.

“That’s right,” Professor Blanchard said, voice softening. “There’s a term for it. Eidetic memory. Total recall. But it’s always been an urban legend, a myth. Cognitive scientists who have tried to prove its existence have been unable to replicate their results. Everyone who has claimed to have had it has failed under scrutiny, been exposed as attention-seeking frauds. Even trained mnemonists—memory specialists—cannot do what you can. Naturally. With no training at all.”