Luce gasped out of habit, but she wasn't the only one. In fact, most of the students inched back nervously in their desks as Steven begin to twirl the shadow. He just reached his hands in and began wrenching faster and faster, seeming to wrestle with something. Soon the shadow was spinning around in front of him so quickly it went blurry, like the spokes of a turning wheel. A thick gust of mildewy wind was emitted from its core, blowing Luce's hair back from her face.
Steven manipulated the shadow, arms straining, from a messy, amorphous shape into a tight, black sphere, no bigger than a grapefruit.
"Class," he said, coolly bouncing the levitating ball of blackness a few inches above his ngers, "meet the subject of today's lesson."
Francesca stepped forward and transferred the shadow to her hands. In her heels, she was nearly as tall as Steven. And, Luce imagined, she was just as skilled at dealing with the shadows.
"You've all seen the Announcers at some point," she said, walking slowly along the half-moon of student desks so they could each get a better look. "And some of you," she said, eyeing Luce, "even have some experience working with them. But do you really know what they are? Do you know what they can do?"
Gossips, Luce thought, remembering what Daniel had told her the night of the battle. She was still too new to Shoreline to feel comfortable calling out the answer, but none of the other students seemed to know. Slowly she raised her hand.
Francesca cocked her head. "Luce."
"They carry messages," she said, growing surer as she spoke, thinking back to Daniel's assurance. "But they're harmless."
"Messengers, yes. But harmless?" Francesca glanced at Steven. Her tone betrayed nothing about whether Luce was right or wrong, which made Luce feel embarrassed.
The entire class was surprised when Francesca stepped back alongside Steven, took hold of one side of the shadow's border while he gripped the other, and gave it a rm tug. "We call this glimpsing," she said.
The shadow bulged and stretched out like a balloon being blown up. It made a thick glugging sound as its blackness distorted, showing colors more vivid than anything Luce had seen before. Deep chartreuse, glittering gold, marbleized swaths of pink and purple. A whole swirling world of color glowing brighter and more distinct behind a disappearing mesh of shadow. Steven and Francesca were still tugging, stepping backward slowly until the shadow was about the size and shape of a large projector screen. Then they stopped.
They gave no warning, no "What you are about to see," and after a horri ed moment, Luce knew why. There could be no preparation for this.
The tangle of colors separated, settled nally into a canvas of distinct shapes. They were looking at a city. An ancient stone-walled city ... on re. Overcrowded and polluted, consumed by angry ames. People cornered by the ames, their mouths dark emptinesses, raising their arms to the skies. And everywhere a shower of bright sparks and burning bits of re, a rain of deadly light landing everywhere and igniting everything it touched.
Luce could practically smell the rot and doom coming through the shadow screen. It was horri c to look at, but the strangest part, by far, was that there wasn't any sound. Other students around her were ducking their heads, as if they were trying to block out some wail, some screaming that to Luce was indistinguishable. There was nothing but clean silence as they watched more and more people die.
When she wasn't sure her stomach could take much more, the focus of the image shifted, sort of zoomed out, and Luce could see it from a distance. Not one but two cities were burning. A strange idea came to her, softly, like a memory she'd always had but hadn't thought of in a while. She knew what they were looking at: Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities in the Bible, two cities destroyed by God.
Then, like turning o a light switch, Steven and Francesca snapped their ngers and the image disappeared. The remnants of the shadow shattered into a small black cloud of ash that settled eventually on the oor of the classroom. Around Luce, the other students all seemed to be catching their breath. catching their breath.
Luce couldn't take her eyes o the place where the shadow had been. How had it done that? It was starting to congeal again, the pieces of dark pooling together, slowly returning to a more