Rook

spiritual condition to fill a filing cabinet. And that was only the beginning.
    From there I was sent across the lawn to the solidly built building that housed the department concerned with the students’ special features, those advantages that had led to their coming to the Estate in the first place. I walked past practice rooms where children sang little animals to death, lifted refrigerators above their heads, and had in-depth conversations with pine trees. I finally arrived at the office of the head of the department, who interviewed me for a good two hours on exactly what had happened when I fell out of the tree.
    This interview stands out in my memory as one of the most excruciating experiences of that entire excruciating day, and that includes the hurried visits to the bathroom. But we came out of it with the understanding that I thought I could repeat my little trick with touching people. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder what would have happened if I had decided I couldn’t do the trick again. Years later, I learned that the Estate’s approach to such situations is something along the lines of “birds that can sing and won’t sing must be made to sing.”
    I settled into the classes, the routine, and if I ached like hell for the first couple of weeks, well, that was the price of getting fit. These people knew exactly how far they could push their charges. This wasn’t some fanatical ballet school’s attempt to ensure the pupils never entered puberty or a cram school whose pupils were going to commit suicide if they didn’t get into the appropriate university. The Estate took a great deal of care not to push us too hard. After all, it was in the administrators’ best interests to produce excellent adult human beings, and putting undue pressure on our fragile bones and psyches wasn’t going to do that.
    That said, it turns out that children can handle a lot more pressure than is traditionally put on them.
    The battery of medical tests was a monthly thing, and standard for every pupil. The Estate was mad for unraveling the sources of the students’ unnatural abilities and was not discouraged by the almost complete failure to do so. One boy was linked to atmospheric phenomena in Iceland, but onsuch a deep and complex level that no one really understood how they were related. Another boy could only try to explain how he was tapping into the emotional state of every left-hander on the planet. It was a situation that led to widespread hair loss among the medical technicians as they tore at their scalps and suffered from stress-related shedding. Still, the staff took their readings, did their analyses, and stockpiled the information, vaguely hoping that future Checquy workers would have the technology or the insight to understand the data.
    I didn’t make friends. The first few weeks consisted of my frantically trying to adapt to the routine, the expectations. By the time I relaxed enough to notice those around me, I found it difficult to talk to them, and because they were constantly talking to one another, no one really noticed I wasn’t saying anything. I could never keep pace with them in the runs, not because I wasn’t fit (I became extremely fit) but because with their years of training, they were preternaturally athletic. In terms of academic achievement, I was in the top ten, but in the bottom half of the top ten. I was never really one of them.
    The work the instructors did with my abilities progressed, although not, I think, to their satisfaction. Training an individual with supernatural powers is a difficult gig to begin with. There is enormous variety in the types of abilities that manifest, and it is very hard to train someone to do something when you can’t actually do it yourself. At the very least, though, students at the Estate are taught from a very early age to be enthusiastic about their powers. They are encouraged to explore the boundaries of their abilities, and they want to learn.
    I, however, did not.
    I associated my powers with blood, pain, and doctors screaming and flailing about. I also understood that it was these powers that had led to my abruptly being taken away from my family. Combine that with a new wariness of other people, and you have a child who is extremely disinclined to touch people at all, let alone try to connect with their nervous systems.
    It was lucky, however, that although it had taken a great deal of pain and stress to activate my powers the