Characterization Activity 2

Everyone was laughing at Noah because he had tripped and dropped his whole lunch tray. The popular kids waved Jamal over to their table. "Come sit with us," they said. "But not him." Jamal looked at his best friend Noah, sitting alone and red-faced. Then he picked up his tray and sat down right next to Noah. "I'm good here," Jamal said. He stayed with his friend and declined the invitation to join the cool table.

A young traveler came to a fork in the forest. One path was short but dark and full of steep cliffs. The other was long but easy to travel. The young traveler was in a hurry. "Which way is fastest?" he asked an old woman named Saba, who sat resting by the road. Saba had sat by that road for many, many years. "The short path is faster," she said, "but it could cost you a broken leg, or worse. The long path only costs you an afternoon. An afternoon is a small price to pay for getting there in one piece." The young man thought about her words. Then he thanked her and chose the long, safe path.

Felix stood at the ice cream counter and could not pick a flavor. "I'll have chocolate," he said. "No, wait, strawberry. Actually, mint." He tapped his chin and stared at the long list. "Maybe both? Or all three?" The line behind him kept getting longer. "Hmm," Felix said. He changed his mind again and again as time continued to pass.

The tavern door swung open and an old woman with a walking stick stepped in from the snow. The whole room went still. The bard stopped singing right in the middle of a word. A young knight jumped up so fast his chair tipped over. "It's her," someone whispered. "Ingrid of the North." The innkeeper waved away her coins and gave her the best seat by the fire. Two kids crept down the stairs just to peek at her. By the time her soup arrived, the bard was already making up a brand new song... a song about Ingrid.

Detective Browning's office told you all about him before he said one word. His pencils stood in a row from shortest to tallest. His case files were sorted by color. There was not a single fingerprint on his magnifying glass. His coat hung perfectly straight on its hook, without one wrinkle in it. Even the rug sat exactly in the middle of the floor. Visitors always noticed the same thing: nothing in that office was ever out of place, not even a paperclip.

Fatima washed dishes at her uncle's restaurant after school. Her hands were wrinkled from the hot water, but her mind was far away. Someday, she thought, my name will be on the front door. While she scrubbed, she watched the cooks. She memorized their moves. At home, she practiced slicing carrots until the pieces were thin as paper. In her notebook, she had already drawn her future restaurant, right down to the lamps. Fatima was starting at the bottom of the kitchen. She did not plan on staying there.

Visitors always stopped and stared in Grandma Alma's front hallway. Her hiking boots sat by the door. Her passport was so fat with stamps that it was hard to find a clean spot. A faded photo showed her waving from the top of a snowy mountain. Her backpack hung on a hook, patched in several places and dusted with red desert sand. On the shelf sat a cracked compass, a train ticket in another language, and one shark tooth on a string. Nothing in that hallway was shiny or new. Every single thing had clearly been somewhere.

It was the harvest feast and everyone in the village brought food to share. Bruno's own cellar was already stuffed full of bread and cheese. Still, when the food was set out, Bruno grabbed as much as he could. He pulled pies, loaves, and roasts onto his side of the table. He built a wall of bread around his plate. When a hungry little boy asked for one of his buns, Bruno said, "Mine. All of it is mine." He did not share a single crumb.

Professor Quinn ran the science lab on the space station. One morning, he spent ten minutes looking for his goggles. He checked every drawer. He searched under the table. He even asked the robot to help. The goggles were on top of his own head the whole time. Then he called the robot "Steve," even though the robot's name was Bo. "Now, what was I doing?" the professor asked, floating in the middle of the room. He could not remember for the life of him!

Backstage, the other kids paced and bit their nails before the big violin contest. Priscilla was not like that. She stood tall with her shoulders back. She gave her violin one calm tune and smiled to herself. Her hands were steady not shaky. When they called her name, she did not rush. She walked out slowly and easily, lifted her bow, and began to play.

When the class collected money for the field trip, everyone agreed Zelda should hold it. The younger kids told her their secrets, knowing she would never tell. When a wallet went missing, no one even glanced at Zelda. The teacher always left her in charge of the room. Zelda had not asked for any of this. People simply knew they could count on her.

Ollie the ogre was taller than the trees, with hands the size of wagons. But when he found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest, he scooped it up as softly as a cloud. He held it on one finger and carried it gently back home. He set it in the nest without bending a single twig. Ollie was huge and strong, but he was careful and kind with every small thing he touched.

Reese turned everything into a contest. She raced her brother to the mailbox every day and cheered when she claimed victory. She kept a list of how many board games she had won going all the way back to last year. When she lost a card game, she demanded a rematch right away. "Best two out of three," she said. "No, best three out of five." Reese could not stand to lose at anything, big or small.

Finn lived in a small fishing village by the sea. Every night he stared at the dark line where the ocean met the sky. He dreamed of sailing past it to see what was out there. He drew maps of lands that no one had ever found. He snuck down to the docks to watch the big ships leave, wishing he were on one. More than anything, Finn wanted to explore the whole wide world beyond his little village.

Jenna was the youngest pilot on the starship and she could not wait to fly. She skipped the safety checklist because it took too long. A red alarm beeped to warn her about a field of spinning asteroids, so she switched the alarm off and flew straight through it. "Shortcut," she said. The fuel light blinked, but she ignored it. She spun the ship in a loop so close to another vessel that both crews gasped. Jenna grinned the whole time. She never once stopped to think about what could go wrong.

A new girl stood frozen in the doorway, holding her backpack with both hands. Ryan watched her from his desk. He could tell exactly what she was feeling because he had felt it too on his own first day. Her mouth is probably dry, he thought. She doesn't know a single name. She wishes she could just disappear. Ryan remembered how scary that moment was for him. So he slid his bag off the empty chair to his left and waved her over with a friendly smile.

At the talent show, Hugo sat with his arms crossed, silently picking apart every act. That singer is flat, he thought. Painfully flat. When the magician pulled a coin from behind someone's ear, Hugo rolled his eyes. Saw that one coming a mile away. The dancers, he decided, were a half-second behind the music on every single step. Even the little kazoo player earned a silent thumbs-down. Not good enough. None of them. On the outside, Hugo clapped politely. On the inside, not one act passed his test.

The court was arguing loudly about whether to cut down the ancient forest for firewood. Then young Cyrus rose to speak. "A tree takes a hundred years to grow," he said softly, "but only an afternoon to fall. Trade the forest for one winter of fire, and we will be warm for a season and poor for a lifetime." He chose each word with care, painting a picture the whole room could see. As he spoke, the shouting faded to silence. By the time Cyrus sat down, the court had changed its mind, swayed by nothing more than the way he had put his words together.

They had laughed at Selene when she arrived at the royal ball in her old gray cloak. The queen had not even let her through the gate. Selene said nothing. She simply turned and walked back into the forest, wearing a small, cold smile. They will be sorry, she thought. Every single one of them. I will make this whole kingdom remember the night it laughed at me. She already knew exactly how she would pay them back. By the time she reached her tower, every step of her plan was in place.

The merchant always cheated his customers. Alan looked him over and smiled to himself. If he loves money so much, I will use that against him, he thought. He came up with a clever plan to trade a worthless brass button for a bag of gold, and it worked perfectly.

The whole cafeteria was laughing at Noah after he had tripped and sent his entire lunch tray clattering across the floor. Then a few kids from the popular table waved Jamal over. "Come sit with us," they called, "but leave him over there." Jamal glanced at Noah, his best friend since kindergarten, sitting alone with his face burning red. Without a word, Jamal picked up his own tray, walked past the popular table, and sat down right beside Noah. "I'm good right here, thanks," he said. Jamal declined the invitation to join the cool table and chose to support his friend.

A young traveler reached a fork deep in the forest. One path was short but plunged into a dark ravine lined with crumbling cliffs. The other wound the long way around, and it was slower but safer. However, the traveler was in a great hurry. "Which way is fastest?" he asked an old woman named Saba, who sat resting against a tree by the road. Saba had sat by that road for many, many years. Saba considered him for a long moment. "The short path is certainly faster," she said, "but it may cost you a broken leg, or your life. I have watched many a traveler rush into that ravine and never come out. The long path costs you only an afternoon, and an afternoon is a small price to pay for arriving in one piece." The young man turned her words over in his mind, thanked her, and set off down the long, safe road.

Felix stood frozen at the ice cream counter, scratching his chin and deliberating. "I'll take chocolate," he announced. "No, wait, strawberry. Actually, make it mint." He tapped the counter and scanned the enormous list of flavors. "Or maybe two of them? Or, you know what, all three? Can we do a triple scoop? No wait." Behind him, the line stretched longer and longer but Felix barely noticed. "Hmm," he kept saying, drumming his fingers on the glass. He changed his mind again and again as time continued to pass.

The tavern door swung open, letting in a swirl of snow and an old woman leaning on a walking stick. The entire room went still. The bard, who had been entertaining by the fireplace, stopped singing in the middle of a word. A young knight shot to his feet so quickly that his chair clattered to the floor behind him. "It's her," someone whispered into the silence. "Ingrid of the North." The innkeeper waved away her coins and guided her to the best seat by the fire. Two children crept halfway down the staircase just to get a look at her, timidly peeking from behind the railing post. Strangers asked to shake her hand and a soldier begged her to sign the back of his shield. Before her soup had even cooled, the bard was inventing a brand new verse right there on the spot... a verse about Ingrid.

You could learn plenty about Detective Browning before he ever opened his mouth. His office did the talking. Pencils stood at attention in a tray, arranged from shortest to tallest. Case files lined his shelf in perfect color order. His magnifying glass gleamed without a single fingerprint on it. His coat hung knife-straight on its hook, and the rug sat precisely in the center of the floor. People came to that office to talk about mysteries and they left talking about the paperclips, which were sorted by size into labeled cups.

Every day after school, Fatima washed dishes in the back of her uncle's restaurant. Her hands stayed wrinkled from the hot water, but her mind was always somewhere else. Someday, she thought while scrubbing a plate, my name will be on the front door. She studied the cooks through the steam and observed every flip of their pans. At home she practiced slicing carrots until each piece came out thin as paper. Her notebook already held a drawing of her future restaurant, complete with the menu, the prices, and the lamps she wanted hanging over every table. Fatima was starting at the very bottom of the kitchen. She did not plan on staying there.

Grandma Alma's front hallway had a way of stopping visitors in their tracks. Her hiking boots waited by the door, scuffed to a soft gray. Her passport bulged with so many stamps that it was difficult to find a clean spot. A sun-faded photograph showed her waving from the windy top of some faraway mountain. Her backpack hung from a hook, patched in several places and dusted with fine red desert sand. Along the shelf sat a cracked compass, a train ticket printed in a language none of the grandchildren could read, and a single shark tooth on a string. Nothing in that hallway was shiny or new. Every object in it had clearly been somewhere. Most of them looked like they could tell stories.

It was the night of the harvest feast, when everyone in the village brought a dish to share with the rest. Bruno's own cellar was already crammed to the rafters with bread, cheese, and smoked fish, yet the moment the food hit the table, he began dragging it as much as he could toward himself. He claimed as many pies, loaves, and roasts as he could grab, and then he stacked the bread into a little wall around his plate so no one could reach across. When a hungry boy politely asked for a single one of his buns, Bruno pulled the basket closer. "Mine," he said. "Every last crumb is mine." He did not share a single crumb.

Professor Quinn ran the science lab aboard the space station, and he was a brilliant researcher when he could remember what he was doing. This morning he spent a full ten minutes hunting for his goggles. He pulled open every drawer, searched beneath the worktable, and even asked the cleaning robot to scan the floor, never once noticing that the goggles were sitting on top of his own head. A moment later he called the robot "Steve," though the little machine had gone by the name Bo for years. Then he drifted into the center of the room, blinked, and asked no one in particular, "Now, what was I doing again?" He could not remember for the life of him!

Backstage before the big violin competition, the other performers paced in tight circles and chewed their nails. Priscilla was different. She stood tall and with her shoulders squared. She gave her strings one slow, unhurried tune before lowering the instrument and smiling quietly to herself. Her hands rested easy and steady. Everyone around her trembled. When the announcer finally called her name, she did not hurry or fumble. She walked out at her own calm pace, settled the violin beneath her chin, raised her bow, and began.

When the class pooled its money for the spring field trip, no one argued about who should keep it safe. Everyone simply handed it to Zelda. The younger kids told her their secrets, certain she would carry them to the grave. One afternoon a wallet went missing from the coat closet, not a single person so much as glanced in Zelda's direction. Whenever the teacher had to step out, it was Zelda she left watching the room. Zelda had never once asked for any of it. People just knew, somehow, that she was someone they could count on.

Ollie the ogre stood taller than the oldest trees and his hands were each the size of a farm wagon. Yet when he came upon a baby bird that had tumbled from its nest, he gathered it up as softly as if he were lifting a soap bubble. Balancing the tiny thing on the tip of one enormous finger, he carried it slowly back to its branch and tucked it into the nest without snapping so much as a single twig. He stepped around the wildflowers rather than through them. For all his size and strength, Ollie handled every small and fragile thing with the greatest possible care.

Reese turned everything into a contest. She raced her little brother to the mailbox every single afternoon and pumped her fist triumphantly whenever she got there first. She kept a careful running tally of every board game she had won, a list that stretched all the way back to the previous spring. The moment she lost a casual round of cards, she was already demanding a rematch. "Best two out of three," she insisted, and when that went badly, "Best three out of five." It did not matter how small or silly the game was. Reese simply could not stand to lose.

Finn lived in a small fishing village perched at the edge of the sea. Every evening he found himself staring at the thin, dark line where the ocean met the sky, dreaming of the day he would sail past it to discover whatever lay beyond. He filled page after page with maps of lands no explorer had ever set foot on. He slipped down to the docks whenever he could to watch the great ships cast off, longing to be standing on one of their decks. More than anything else, Finn wanted to leave the harbor behind and explore everything past the horizon.

Jenna was the youngest pilot aboard the starship and patience was not her strong suit. She skipped the pre-flight safety checklist entirely, calling it a waste of time. When a red alarm warned her about a field of spinning asteroids dead ahead, she reached over and switched the alarm off, and then she flew straight into the field. "Shortcut," she announced. The low-fuel light blinked steadily and she ignored that too. For fun, she rolled the ship into a tight loop so near another vessel that both crews cried out. Through all of it, Jenna was grinning. She never paused to consider what might go wrong or who might get hurt.

A new girl stood frozen in the classroom doorway, gripping her backpack straps with both hands. From his desk, Ryan studied her for a moment, and he knew precisely what was running through her mind. He had stood in that exact spot on his own first day. Her mouth has gone dry, he thought. She doesn't know one name in this room and right now she would give anything to vanish. The memory of that feeling was still sharp for him. Without making a fuss, he lifted his bag off the empty chair beside him and waved her over with an easy smile.

At the talent show, Hugo sat with his arms folded, silently picking apart every single act. That singer is flat, he thought. Painfully flat. When the magician produced a coin from behind a volunteer's ear, Hugo only rolled his eyes. The dancers, in his private opinion, trailed the music by half a beat on every step. He found fault with the lighting, the costumes, and even the order of the program. Not good enough, he concluded about each performer in turn. None of them. Outwardly, Hugo applauded at all the right moments. Inwardly, not a single act came close to passing his test.

The court had been arguing for an hour about whether to cut down the ancient forest for firewood. Then young Cyrus rose to speak and the room quieted just enough to hear him. "A tree takes a hundred years to grow," he said, "but only a single afternoon to fall. Trade our forest for one winter of fire, and we will be warm for a season and poor for a lifetime." He chose every word with care, arranging them so that the whole court could picture exactly what he meant. The longer he spoke, the more the shouting drained out of the room. By the time he finished, the court had reversed its decision, persuaded by nothing but the way he had worded his statements.

They had laughed at Selene the moment she arrived at the royal ball in her old gray cloak, and the queen had not even allowed her through the gate. Selene said nothing at all. She simply turned and walked back into the forest, a small and frozen smile on her lips. They will be sorry, she thought as the gates clanged shut behind her. Every last one of them. I will make this entire kingdom remember the night it dared to laugh at me. She already knew, in precise detail, exactly how she would pay them back. By the time she reached her tower, every single step of her plan had clicked into place.

The merchant was famous for cheating every customer who walked through his door. Alan studied him quietly from across the market, turning an idea over in his mind. A man this greedy will believe anything, as long as he thinks he is getting rich, he thought. So Alan polished an ordinary brass button until it gleamed and whispered that it was a magic coin that doubled any gold kept beside it. The merchant's eyes lit up, and he eagerly traded a heavy purse of real gold for the worthless button. Alan tipped his hat and strolled away, pleased with how easily his little scheme had worked.

The entire cafeteria had erupted in laughter at Noah, who had just tripped and scattered his lunch tray across the floor in a spectacular crash. Then a handful of kids from the popular table beckoned Jamal over. "Come sit with us," they called, "but leave him over there." Jamal looked at Noah, his closest friend since kindergarten, sitting alone with his face flaming red, covered in splats of school lunch. Without a moment's deliberation, Jamal collected his own tray, walked straight past the popular table, and sat beside Noah. "I'm good right here, thanks," he said simply. Jamal declined the invitation to join the cool table and chose to support his friend.

A young traveler reached a fork deep within the forest. One path ran short but pitched straight down into a dark ravine lined with crumbling cliffs. The other path wound the long way around and it was slower but safer. However, the traveler was in a desperate hurry. "Which way is fastest?" he asked an old woman named Saba, who sat resting against a tree beside the road. Saba regarded him for a long, unhurried moment. "The short path is faster, beyond a doubt," she said, "but it may cost you a broken leg, or your very life. I have watched more than one hurried traveler vanish into that ravine for good. The long path costs you no more than an afternoon, and an afternoon, young one, is a small price to pay for arriving in one piece." The traveler weighed her words in silence, thanked her sincerely, and set off down the long and certain road.

Felix stood paralyzed at the ice cream counter, utterly incapable of settling on a flavor. "I'll have chocolate," he announced. "No, wait, strawberry. Actually, make it mint." He scratched his chin and scanned the enormous menu of flavors while he made a loud humming noise to himself. "Hmmm... Maybe I could get two flavors? Or, you know what, why not all three? Can you do a triple scoop? No wait." Behind him the line stretched longer and longer, though Felix scarcely seemed to register it. "Hmm," he murmured again and again, drumming his fingers against the glass case. Much to the chagrin of the employee behind the counter, Felix changed his mind again and again as time continued to pass.

The tavern door swung open, admitting a swirl of snow and an old woman who leaned on a worn walking stick. The entire room fell still. The bard, who had been entertaining enthusiastically by the fireplace, stopped singing mid-word, his hand frozen above the strings. A young knight rose so abruptly that his chair clattered to the stones behind him. "It's her," someone whispered into the hush. "Ingrid of the North." The innkeeper waved away her coins as though they were an insult and escorted her to the best seat beside the fire. Two children crept halfway down the staircase for a glimpse of her, peeking eagerly from behind a post. Strangers lined up to shake her hand and a soldier begged her to sign the back of his shield. Before her soup had even cooled, the bard was composing a brand new verse on the spot, a verse about Ingrid of the North.

One could learn a great deal about Detective Browning before he ever spoke a word because his office did the introductions for him. Pencils stood at attention in a tray, graduated from shortest to tallest. Case files lined the shelf in order of color, every label facing outward at the same angle. His magnifying glass gleamed without a single fingerprint on it. His coat hung knife-straight from its hook, and the rug lay exactly in the center of the floor. Clients arrived at that office to discuss their mysteries and they tended to leave discussing the paperclips, which were sorted by size into labeled cups.

Every afternoon, Fatima washed dishes in the back of her uncle's restaurant, her hands permanently wrinkled from the scalding water. But while she worked, her mind drifted somewhere else entirely. Someday, she thought, scrubbing another food-crusted plate, my name will be on the front door. As she worked, she studied the cooks through the steam, observing the angle of every pan flip and the timing of every pinch of salt. At home she practiced her knife work on bags of carrots until each slice fell away thin as paper. Her notebook already contained a complete blueprint of her future restaurant: the menu, the prices, the music, even the brass lamps she intended to hang above every table. Fatima was starting at the very bottom of the kitchen. She did not plan on staying there.

Grandma Alma's front hallway had a way of stopping visitors mid-sentence. Her hiking boots waited beside the door, scuffed to a soft gray and recently resoled. Her passport bulged with so many stamps that it was difficult to find a clean spot to apply a new stamp. A sun-faded photograph showed her waving from the windblown summit of some distant mountain, her hair escaping in every direction. Her backpack hung from a hook, patched in several places and still dusted with a fine red sand from some foreign vista. Along the shelf sat a cracked compass, a train ticket printed in a language none of her grandchildren could read, and a single shark tooth strung on a leather cord. Nothing in that hallway was shiny or new and every object had plainly been somewhere. Most of them looked capable of telling stories.

It was the night of the harvest feast, the one evening each year when every family in the village carried a dish to the square and laid it out for all to share. Bruno's own cellar was already crammed to the rafters with bread, wheels of cheese, and barrels of smoked fish, and yet the instant the platters touched the table, he set about dragging as much as he could toward his end of the table. He claimed as many pies, loaves, and roasts as he could, and then, for good measure, he arranged the bread into a low wall around his plate so that no other hand could reach across. When a hungry boy asked politely for a single bun, Bruno only drew the basket nearer. "Mine," he announced. "Every last crumb of it is mine." He did not share a single crumb.

Professor Quinn ran the science lab aboard the orbital station, and he was, by every measure, a brilliant researcher, provided he could recall what he had set out to do. One morning he devoted a full ten minutes to the search for his missing goggles. He yanked open every drawer, peered beneath the worktable, and even instructed the cleaning robot to scan the floor grid by grid, all the while failing to notice that the goggles were resting comfortably on top of his own head. Shortly after, he addressed the robot as "Steve," despite the fact that the little machine had been named Bo for many years now. At last he drifted to the middle of the room, blinked twice at the array of half-finished experiments around him, and inquired of no one at all, "Now... what was it I was doing?" The thought had already escaped him entirely and he could not remember for the life of him!

Backstage before the championship recital, the other young musicians paced in tight, anxious circles and chewed their fingernails. Priscilla carried herself altogether differently. She stood tall, her shoulders squared and loose at once. She gave her strings a single slow, unhurried tuning before lowering the instrument to smile quietly at nothing in particular. While the hands of the other players around her shook, hers lay easy and still. When the announcer at last called her name, she neither rushed nor fumbled with her sheet music. She just crossed to center stage at her own unbothered pace, settled the violin beneath her chin, lifted the bow, and began to play as though the room belonged to her.

When the class pooled its money for the spring field trip, no debate broke out over who ought to safeguard it. The envelope simply made its way, by unspoken agreement, into Zelda's hands. The younger students confided their secrets in Zelda, confident that she would carry them to the grave. One afternoon a wallet vanished from the coat closet and not one person so much as turned to look in Zelda's direction. Whenever the teacher was called away, it was Zelda she left in charge of the room. Zelda had never asked for any of this responsibility. The people around her had simply arrived, each on their own, at the same conclusion: Zelda was someone you could count on.

Ollie the ogre stood taller than the most ancient trees in the valley, and each of his hands was the size of a loaded farm wagon. Yet when he discovered a baby bird that had tumbled from its nest into the grass, he gathered the creature up as gently as if he were cradling a soap bubble. Balancing the tiny, trembling thing upon the tip of one colossal finger, he carried it slowly back to its branch and settled it into the nest without snapping so much as a single twig. On his way, he stepped carefully around the wildflowers. For all his towering size and tremendous strength, Ollie treated every small and breakable thing in the world with the most deliberate, tender care.

Reese turned everything in her life into a contest. She raced her younger brother to the mailbox each afternoon and pumped a triumphant fist whenever she beat him there. She maintained a meticulous running tally of every board game she had ever won, a record reaching back several years. The instant that she lost a casual hand of cards, she was already negotiating the terms of a rematch. "Best two out of three," she would insist, and when that turned against her, "Fine, best three out of five." The stakes were irrelevant and the games often trivial, yet it made no difference to Reese. Losing, at anything whatsoever, was simply not something that she could tolerate.

Finn lived in a small fishing village at the very edge of the sea. Each evening, without quite deciding to, he found himself staring at the thin dark seam where the ocean met the sky, lost in dreams of the day that he would finally sail clear past it to discover whatever waited beyond. He filled page after page with maps of coastlines no explorer had ever charted and islands that existed, so far, only in his imagination. Whenever he could slip away, he hurried down to the docks to watch the great ships cast off their lines, longing to be standing on one of those decks as it pointed toward the open water. More than anything the world could offer him, Finn longed to leave the safe little harbor behind and see, with his own eyes, everything that lay past the horizon.

Jenna was the youngest pilot aboard the starship and patience had never been among her virtues. She skipped the pre-flight checklist altogether, dismissing it as a waste of time. When a red alarm warned of a field of tumbling asteroids dead ahead, she simply reached over, silenced the alarm, and steered directly into the debris. "Shortcut," she announced. Then, when the low-fuel indicator blinked in steady protest, she ignored that as well. For her own amusement she rolled the ship into a loop so tight and so near another vessel that both crews cried out at once. Through every second of it, Jenna was grinning. Not once did she pause to weigh what might go wrong or who besides herself might pay for it.

A new girl stood frozen in the classroom doorway, gripping the straps of her backpack with both hands. From his desk, Ryan watched her for a moment and understood, with uncomfortable precision, exactly what was moving through her mind. He had occupied that very spot on his own first day. Her mouth has gone dry, he thought. She doesn't know a single name in this room and at this moment she would trade almost anything simply to disappear. The memory of that particular dread had never quite faded for him. So, without drawing any attention to it, he lifted his bag off the empty chair beside him and waved her over with an easy smile.

At the talent show, Hugo sat with his arms folded, silently dismantling every act in turn. That singer is flat, he thought. Painfully flat. When the magician produced a coin from behind a volunteer's ear, Hugo merely rolled his eyes. The dancers, by his private assessment, trailed the music by half a beat at every step. He located a flaw in the lighting, another in the costumes, and a third in the very order of the program. Not good enough, he concluded of each performer in turn, none of them. Outwardly, Hugo applauded at all the appropriate moments. Inwardly, not one act came within reach of passing his test.

The court had been arguing for the better part of an hour about whether to fell the ancient forest for firewood. Then young Cyrus rose and the room stilled just enough to let his voice through. "A tree takes a hundred years to grow," he said, "but only a single afternoon to fall. If we trade our forest for one winter of warmth, then we will be comfortable for a season and impoverished for a lifetime." He selected each word with deliberate care and arranged them so precisely that the entire court could see exactly what he described. The longer he spoke, the more the anger seemed to drain from the hall. By the time he resumed his seat, the court had reversed itself entirely, won over by nothing more than the way he had assembled his statements.

They had laughed at Selene the moment she arrived at the royal ball in her threadbare gray cloak, and the queen had not even permitted her through the gate. Selene said nothing at all. She simply turned and walked back into the forest, a small, frozen smile resting on her lips. They will be sorry, she thought as the iron gates clanged shut behind her, every last one of them. I will make this entire kingdom remember the night it dared to laugh at me. She already knew, in exact detail, how she meant to pay them back. By the time she reached her tower, every step of her plan had clicked silently into place.

The merchant was famous throughout the market for cheating every customer foolish enough to trust him. Alan said nothing at first. He simply watched, letting an idea take shape in his mind. A man this greedy will swallow any story, so long as he believes it will make him richer, Alan thought to himself. So he polished an ordinary brass button until it shone like treasure and then he let it slip that it was a rare magic coin, one that doubled any gold left beside it overnight. The merchant practically tripped over himself to make the trade, handing over a heavy purse of real gold for a button worth nothing at all. Alan tipped his hat, wished him a profitable evening, and strolled off before the man could think twice about it.