Page 22 of Winterveil

Giselle just shook her head. “How do you know I’m not one of them? A fraud?”

“Good point!” Professor Blanchard smiled gleefully. Giselle flinched. “I’ve devised a number of tests that will prove your abilities are genuine. That’s why you’re here today.”

“Tests?”

Professor Blanchard nodded. “We have to definitively prove your claims, of course, but this data will also be helpful in giving me a sense of where to start with your training.”

Training? Before she could ask, Professor Blanchard darted behind the teacher’s desk, his movements jittery and electric. He removed a tablet from the top drawer, as well as a small plastic case.

“Here,” he said, holding it out to her. “Put these on.”

She glanced down. Inside the transparent case were two metal disks. “What are they?”

“They’re called nodes,” he replied. “When you place them on your temples, they monitor the neural impulses from your brain and feed them to my tablet.”

“So, like mind reading?” Giselle gritted her teeth.

“If you care to be so fanciful about it.” Professor Blanchard shrugged. “Put them on.”

A mutinous feeling rose in her, but Giselle tamped it down. She opened the case. It took her a few shaky moments to successfully unwrap the nodes from their microfiber cloth, fix the adhesive strips to her temples, and then press on the nodes. The metal was cold.

“Good,” Professor Blanchard said. He gestured toward one of the student desks. “You may sit down, if you wish.”

Giselle lowered herself stiffly into the chair.

“Now,” said Professor Blanchard, reaching into the top drawer and removing a second tablet, “I want you to look at this image here. I’ll give you no more than a second. And then you can reproduce it for me with these.”

Along with the tablet, he pulled out two more items: a sketch pad and a set of colored pencils. Giselle couldn’t stifle a laugh.

“Am I in second grade?”

“Did your second-grade teachers have multiple doctorates in various fields of neuroscience and technology?”

That silenced her. Professor Blanchard passed her the pencils and the sketch pad and set the tablet on her desk, face down.

“Flip it over,” he said, “look at the image, and then begin.”

Giselle reached for the tablet. Not a moment after she had turned it over did Professor Blanchard snatch it out of her hands, wearing a giddy smirk.

I’m glad you’re enjoying this, she thought, her stomach smoldering. She wondered if he actually wanted her to fail. If he was pulling some elaborate ruse on the vapid little hick who, surely, couldn’t have truly believed that she belonged here. That she was going to—in some vague, inconceivable fashion—help America win the war.

The thought filled her with a perverse sort of determination. Giselle picked up a pencil.

Drawing had always come naturally to her. Of course if she could see something in perfect detail she could re-create it perfectly, too. But it had never brought out the kind of passion in her that real artists seemed to feel. She had only done it because her sisters had begged her to draw their favorite characters or portraits of their dogs. The act of drawing wasn’t creative. All she could do was reproduce what she had seen before. There was no imagination involved.

The photograph on the tablet showed what looked like the downtown area of a major city, not that Giselle had ever seen anything like it outside movies or television. The streets were slick, as if with recent rain, and the vivid sunset cast the glass facades of the skyscrapers all in gold. It was beautiful, in an artificial way. She hadn’t thought she could ever find something like a city beautiful. The only thing that was strange was how absent it was of life. No people, not even a solitary pigeon.

Her pencil scratched across the page. The number of windows on the buildings, the lines on the crosswalk, the precise orange shade of the sky—she remembered it all.

Giselle didn’t know how much time had passed, only that she felt breathless when she finally looked up. “Here,” she said, thrusting the paper at Professor Blanchard. “I’m done.”

He took the page from her, pinching it carefully between his finger and thumb. But once he set the drawing on his desk, he didn’t look at it again. He only stared in consummate focus at his tablet screen, and Giselle felt suddenly aware of how she was seated like an experiment in front of him, the nodes prickling on her temples.

Slowly, an expression of awe overtook Professor Blanchard’s face.

“Perfect,” he murmured.

Giselle felt more irritation than pride. “And this little elementary school art project, this is going to help America win the war?”