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“That’s all you have to say? Do you know how much— Never mind.” He shakes his head and gives a chuckle. “Darrow. It is so off Color. There will be raised eyebrows.”
I shrug to conceal my fear. “So I’ll butcher their gorydamn test and they’ll care less than a lick.”
“Spoken like a Gold.”
The next day, Matteo takes me by ship to the stables of Ishtar, not far from Yorkton. It’s a place by the sea, where green fields stretch over rolling hills. I’ve never been in so wide a place. I’ve never seen the land curve away from me. Never seen a true horizon or animals so terrifying as the beasts Matteo arranged for our lesson. They stomp and stamp and snort, flicking their tails and baring their monstrous yellow teeth. Horses. I’ve always been scared of horses, despite Eo’s story of Andromeda.
“They’re monsters,” I whisper to Matteo.
“Nevertheless,” he whispers back, “it is the gentleman’s way. You must ride well, lest you find yourself embarrassed in some formal situation.”
I look at the other Golds riding past. There are only three at the stables today, each accompanied by a servant like Matteo, Pinks and Browns.
“A situation like this one?” I hiss at him. “Fine. Fine.” I point to a massive black stallion with hooves that paw the ground. “I’ll take that beast.”
Matteo smiles. “This one is more your speed.”
Matteo gives me a pony. A big pony, but a pony. There is no social interaction here; the other riders trot past and tip their heads to say good day, but that is all. So their smiles are enough for me to know how ridiculous I look. I do not take to riding well. And I take to it even more poorly when my pony bolts as Matteo and I navigate a path into a copse of trees. Out the other side of the copse, I jump off the creature and land deftly in the grass. Someone laughs in the distance, a girl with long hair. She rides the stallion I pointed to earlier.
“Maybe you ought to stick to the city, Pixie,” she shouts at me, then kicks her horse away. I rise from my knee and watch her ride into the distance. Her hair spills out behind her, more golden than the setting sun.
15
THE TESTING
My test comes after two months of training my mind with Dancer. I do not memorize. I do not even really learn when with him. Instead, his training is designed to help my mind adapt to paradigm shifts. For instance, if a fish has 3,453 scales on its left side and 3,453 on its right side, which side of the fish has the most scales? The outside. They call it extrapolational thinking. It was how I knew that I should eat the scythe card when I first met Dancer. I am very good at it.
I find it ironic that Dancer and his friends can create a fake history for me, a fake family, a fake life, but they cannot fake my admittance test. So, three months after my training begins, I take the test in a bright room next to a noisy mouse of a Goldbrow girl who incessantly taps her stylus on a jade bracelet. She may be part of the test for all I know. When she’s not looking, I snatch the stylus from her fingers and hide it down my sleeve. I am a Helldiver of Lykos. So yes, I can steal a stupid girl’s stylus without her knowing anything about it. She gawks around as if magic has been done. Then she begins to whine. They don’t give her another stylus, so she runs out in tears. Afterward, the Penny Proctor looks at his datapad and rewinds a video from a nanoCamera. He looks at me and smiles. Such traits are apparently admirable.
A Golden razor blade of a girl disagrees and sneers “Cutter” in my ear as she slices past me in the hall outside. Matteo told me not to speak to anyone because I am not yet ready to socialize, so I barely bite back a very Red reply. Her words linger. Cutter. Cutthroat. Machiavellian. Ruthless. They all describe what she thinks of me. Funny thing is, most Golds would see the term as an accolade.
A musical voice addresses me.
“I think she actually just paid you a compliment. So don’t mind her. She’s pretty as a peach, but she’s all rotten inside. I took a bite once, if you catch my flow. Tasty, then putrid. Fantastic grab in there, by the by. I was about to rip that ninny’s eyes from her skull myself. Damnable tapping!”
The shining voice comes from a young man torn from Greek verse. Arrogance and beauty drip off of him. Impeccable breeding. I’ve never seen a smile so wide and white, skin so smooth and lustrous. He’s all I despise.
He claps me on the shoulder and grasps my hand in one of the several ways of semiformal introduction. I squeeze slightly. He has a firm grip too, but when he tries to establish dominance, I squeeze his hand till he jerks it back. A flash of worry in his eyes.
“By God, your hand is like a vise!” He chuckles. He calls himself Cassius very quickly, and I’m lucky he gives me little time to speak, because his brow wrinkles when I do. My accent is still not perfect.
“Darrow,” he repeats. “Well, that’s quite the off Color name. Ah …” He looks at his datapad, pulling up my personal history. “Well, you come from no one at all. A farplanet hayseed. No wonder Antonia sneered your way. But listen, I’ll forgive you for it if you tell me how you fared on the test.”
“Oh, you’ll forgive me?”
His brows knit together. “I’m trying to be kind here. We Bellonas aren’t reformers, but we know that good men can come from low origins. Work with me, mate.”
Because of the way he looks, I feel a need to provoke him.
“Well, I daresay I expected the test to be more difficult. I might have missed the one about the candle, but besides that …”
Cassius watches me with a forgiving grin. His lively eyes dance over my face as I wonder if his mother coils his hair with golden irons in the morning.
“With hands like yours, you must be a terror with the razor,” he says leadingly.
“I’m fair,” I lie. Matteo won’t let me touch the thing.
“Modesty! Were you raised by the Whitecowls, man? Never mind, I’m off to Agea after the physical tests. Join me? I hear the Carvers have done some splendid work with the new ladies at Temptation. And they just had gravfloors installed at Tryst; we can float about without gravBoots. What say you, man? Does that interest you?” He taps one of his wings and winks. “Plenty of peaches there. None of them rotten.”
