Dalliance wasn’t good at drawing.

  The class’s task the following day had sounded simple enough: sketch and label all the different major cities on the shard. Dallance knew that the Empire held a good hundred million souls, but as he sketched, he discovered that he knew where perhaps only fifteen thousand of them lived.

  As the sketch continued and grew more and more detailed, the amount he didn't know became increasingly embarrassing. Eventually, he set his pen down.

  "What's your final score, Mr. Rather?" Mister Best asked.

  Dalliance had been able to identify the province and city name for only four cities. He had some idea of where another six might be, but not which was which.

  It wasn’t as though Da had ever emphasized civics. In fact, other than religion and farming, his father hadn’t really emphasized any sort of learning at all.

  You have to stack Wit first, or Charm, or Spirit, Dalliance thought, the bitter irony of Mister Best's lesson still settling in a day later. Best if you stack it really high . . . Some bullshit.

  He knew his father had at least one social skill for bartering. It wasn't an unforeseeable conclusion that his father had at least a 4 in Wit, because he'd had a 4 when he’d last tried deflecting the man, when Dalliance had last checked. Given his Tier, a 4 in Wit was probably one of his dump stats, so maybe it was Charm. Dalliance meditated on the irony of being a disagreeable asshole with high Charm skill.

  Everyone assumed Cadence Rather was C-Tier. What if he was D-Tier? The math made more sense then.

  Dalliance shook his head, pushing the thought away. It didn't matter, anyway. Even if he figured out what his father had been thinking, he could never trust him again.

  His knee wouldn’t stop jumping. Mister Best’s glance notwithstanding.

  As they drew, Mister Best droned on, a familiar river of information about the logistical challenges of the Second Imperial Expansion, which had given rise to all the cities Dalliance couldn’t locate, despite having read the chapter repeatedly. Mister Best didn’t even crack the textbook, but nevertheless knew the names of the quartermasters, the tonnage of grain shipped, and the precise number of mules lost to swamp fever.

  Dalliance’s mind began to wander.

  He had been practicing [Introspection], just as Topaz and his father had, for entirely different reasons, advised. The act itself was simple: sitting quietly and focusing his will inward, asking a question of his own System. How does [Prediction] work? he asked himself for perhaps the hundredth time. The skill was a black box. He fed it intent, and it produced a result—ghostly images of future actions. But what was the mechanism? Was it telepathy, reading surface thoughts? What was the actual foundation of the images he was seeing?

  Nothing. His skill had been ticking steadily upwards, but there wasn’t any additional benefit from the examination.

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  Nothing new to see here.

  His gaze drifted to Mister Best at the front of the room. The teacher was gesturing with a piece of chalk, his voice rising and falling in a lecture-hall cadence. A stray, impatient thought surfaced in Dalliance’s mind: I wonder if he's going to go all the way to dinner-time again.

  The two thoughts collided. When will this class end? That was a future event. An intended action. Could he . . . could he find out?

  Subtly, he focused his will. He didn’t target Mister Best’s body, his physical form. He targeted the lecture itself, the man’s intent to speak. He used [Prediction].

  The result wasn’t a single, clear image. It was a sensory deluge, an overwhelming storm of possibilities that flooded his mind. He saw multiple, ghostly lessons playing out simultaneously over the real one. One ghostly Mister Best was writing an equation for grain consumption on the board. Another was launching into a historical anecdote about a famously corrupt quartermaster. A third was turning to the clock and announcing that class wouldn’t be over for half an hour, sit DOWN, Master Lackey.

  The sound was new. Beneath the chaotic overlay of images, he could hear the echoes of the prediction. It was a faint, a tinny rendering of his teacher's voice in miniature. Altogether, they made for a chaotic jumble, but he could hear them.

  He pushed through the noise, his mind latching onto one of the ghostly images—the one where Mister Best was telling the anecdote about the quartermaster. As he focused his intent on that single "thread," the corresponding ghostly voice became fractionally clearer, the others fading into background noise. He could just make out the words

  "—which is why, of course, Quartermaster Glum was later found floating face-down in the Imperial Reservoir."

  This was amazing.

  The real Mister Best was telling them a somewhat sanitized version—but apparently he’d considered doing otherwise. Eventually, the skill ended, snapping Dalliance back to reality, breathless, his heart hammering. Mister Best was still talking.

  Dalliance could predict conversations.

  The implications were staggering. This was a new, and dangerous, toy.