Read the First Chapter of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Grandest Game

The dream started the way it always did, with the flower. Seeing the calla lily in her hand filled Lyra with sickly sweet dread. She looked to her other hand—and the sad remains of a candy necklace. It held only three pieces of candy.

No.

On some level, Lyra knew she was nineteen, but in the dream, her hands were small—a child’s hands. The shadow looming over her was large.

And then came the whisper: “A Hawthorne did this.”

The shadow—her biological father—turned and walked away. Lyra couldn’t see his face. She heard footsteps going up the stairs. 

He has a gun. Lyra woke with a start, a breath trapped in her chest, her body rigid, and her head…on a desk. In the time it took for her vision to clear and the real world to slide firmly back into place in front of her, Lyra remembered that she was in class.

Except the lecture hall was almost empty.

“You have ten minutes left on the test.” The only other person in the room was a fifty-year-old man wearing a blazer.

Test? Lyra’s gaze darted to a clock on the wall. As she registered the time, her panic began to ebb.

“Might as well just take the zero at this point.” The professor scowled at her. “The rest of the class is already done. I suspect they didn’t spend last night partying.”

Because the only reason a girl who looks like me could be tired enough to fall asleep in class is because she was partying. Annoyance flared inside Lyra, banishing the last remnants of the dream’s dread. She looked down at the test. Multiple choice.

“I’ll see what I can get done in ten minutes.” Lyra fished a pen out of her backpack and began to read.

Most people could see images in their minds. For Lyra, there were only words and concepts and feelings. The only time she saw anything in her mind’s eye was when she dreamed. Luckily, not getting bogged down in mental imagery made her a very fast reader. And just as luckily, whoever had written this test had fallen into a predictable pattern, a familiar one.

To find the right answer, all a person had to do was decode the relationships between the options offered. Were two of them opposites? Did one of those opposites vary from the remaining choices only by nuance? Or were there two answers that sounded the same? Or one or more answers that seemed true but probably weren’t?

That was the thing about multiple-choice tests. You didn’t need to know anything about the material if you could break the code.

Lyra answered five questions in the first minute. Four the next. The more test bubbles she filled in, the more palpable the professor’s irritation with her grew.

“You’re wasting my time,” he said. “And yours.”

The old Lyra might have taken a tone like that to heart. Instead, she read faster. Spot the pattern, spot the answer. She finished with one minute to spare and handed the test in, knowing exactly what the professor saw when he looked at her: a girl with a body that said party to some people more than it had ever said dancer.

Not that she was a dancer, anymore.

Lyra grabbed her bag and turned to leave, and the professor stopped her. “Wait,” he ordered tersely. “I’ll grade it for you.” Teach you a lesson was what he meant.

Turning slowly back to face him gave Lyra time to school her features into a neutral expression.

After grading the first ten questions, the professor had marked only one of her answers incorrect. His eyebrows drew closer together as he continued grading, and that percentage held—then improved.

“Ninety-four.” He looked up from the test. “Not bad.”

Wait for it, Lyra thought.

“Just imagine what you could do if you put in a little more effort.”

“How would you know what kind of effort I put in?” Lyra asked.

Her voice was quiet, but she met his eyes head-on.

“You’re wearing pajamas, you haven’t brushed your hair, and you slept through most of the test.” He’d recast her, then, from the party girl to the sloth. “I’ve never even seen you in lecture,” the professor continued sternly.

Lyra shrugged. “That’s because I’m not in this class.” 

“You—” He stopped. He stared. “You’re…”

“I’m not in this class,” Lyra repeated. “I fell asleep in the prior lecture.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned and started up the aisle toward the exit. Her stride was long. Maybe it was graceful. Maybe she was, still.

The professor called after her. “How did you get a ninety-four percent on a test for a class you’re not even taking?”

Lyra kept walking, her back to the man, as she answered. “Trying to write trick questions backfires if the person taking the test knows how to look for tricks.

The Grandest Game will be released on July 30, but you can pre-order it right now. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB