Seeing her wavy hair swish and bounce around her shoulders as she led him was like standing in the sunlight again after a long winter. Kip didn’t want words. Once he opened his big mouth, he’d surely spoil everything. He just watched her walk, hiking up his own pants gracelessly as she strode ahead, purposefully, at home, at ease, in command of her environment.

“I think I’m lost,” Liv said. She looked to each side, down halls that looked exactly the same. She bit her lip.

Eyes locked on that full, slightly moist lip, Kip gulped.

“Kip?” she said. “No, never mind, of course you wouldn’t.”

She headed off again, and Kip followed. Liv had turned into a woman in the time she’d been away. She was as slender as he was fat. Her eyes large lucid brown, her skin smooth and clear where his was cursed with pimples around his neck and jaw as his beard was only just coming in. Thank Orholam, at least her chest was bigger than his.

Kip barely glanced there, though, and now as he followed her, he barely looked at her body. Her skirt did swoosh back and forth in a most pleasing manner as she walked, revealing slim, well-turned calves. But aside from a glance or two, or maybe three—Kip glanced again. Ah! Four. Aside from that, he didn’t look at her the way he’d look at some other beautiful woman. It just didn’t seem respectful.

Oops, five.

She stopped when they got into the lift. “I just realized,” she said, laughing at herself, “that I have no idea where I’m supposed to take you. Uh, tell you what. You can come to my room until I get this figured out. If you’re like I was after the Threshing, you’ll probably need to go straight to bed. Right?”

Kip wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed before, but he was tired. He felt as if someone had taken the bottle of his energy and shaken it all out. He nodded his head.

“Don’t feel like talking?” she asked, giving him a little grin. It was the kind of grin you gave a little child who’d missed nap time and was fighting to stay up to get dessert. But Kip couldn’t even summon the passion to despair at seeing that indulgent grin on her.

I’m cute to her. Cute. Ugh.

She set the counterweights on the lift, paused for a moment—she must have been surprised how much weight she needed to add to account for Kip—and added more. In moments, they were speeding up the tower, passing other students going both up and down. They stopped and stepped into a wide lobby area that dimpled out to one of the clear tubes that connected the central tower to all the others.

Kip looked at Liv, eyebrows up.

“My apartments are over in yellow. Yellow’s in the middle of the spectrum, so bichromes and polychromes include yellow more often than other colors, so the yellow tower has more bichrome apartments. They don’t have the space for those in the Prism’s Tower. Are you afraid of heights?”

“Not usually,” Kip said uneasily.

“Oh, so you can talk!”

“I can fall too,” he mumbled.

“You’ll be fine, I promise,” she said. She walked out into the tube. It was four paces across and enclosed with blue luxin so thin it was almost clear. The bottom of the walkway was thicker blue reinforced with thin bars of yellow. It looked impossibly thin. As Kip had seen from far, far below, the walkway attached to the Prism’s Tower only at two places: on the east side and here, on the west. After going straight out about halfway to the green tower that was directly west of the Prism’s Tower, this walkway met a great almost clear luxin circular walkway. From that circle, there were spokes out to each of the six towers.

Liv led Kip out to one of those intersections between circle and spokes, the point farthest from any support. She jumped up and down. “See, totally safe.” She laughed. “Now you try it.”

“I don’t know,” Kip said. If he could ever overcome his fear, the view from up here was magnificent. Of course, it was hard to look at mere magic towers when he had Liv right here. “Okay,” he said weakly. He didn’t want to let her down.

Of course, if I break this spindly walkway, I’ll be letting us both down. The quick way.

Trying to be a good sport, Kip hopped a little, landing as lightly as possible on his toes and absorbing all the shock in his knees.

“Oh, seriously,” Liv said.

Kip sighed and jumped so high he thought he was going to touch his head on the canopy. As he landed, he heard a loud crack.

He threw his hands out looking for something to grab, his heart seizing up. He was about to throw himself at the handrail when he saw Liv’s face.

She laughed and covered her mouth. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have. It’s kind of a tradition for new students, and the Prism wanted me to give you the whole experience.” Kip looked at her hands. They seemed to be clenched around something invisible. He tightened his eyes, and sure enough, she had a bar of superviolet luxin snapped in her hands.

Kip chuckled. It only sounded a little forced. “Give me the traditional mop, would you? I think I left a traditional puddle.”

She laughed. “Thanks for being a good sport. If it makes you feel better, I almost fainted when my magister did it with our whole class. Come on, it’s just a little farther now.”

They walked together around the spindly circle, then turned toward the yellow tower. The yellow tower had been at the back right when Kip had entered the Great Yard, so he hadn’t really seen it. Now it loomed both above and below.

“I think my eyes are full,” Kip said.

“What?”

“I’ve seen too many amazing things today. Either this is just not as impressive, or I’ve lost my ability to be amazed, because to me, this looks like a plain yellow tower. No flames, no jewels, no twisty movement.” The tower was luminous, but otherwise it looked like cloudy yellow glass, translucent, but not transparent. Maybe it was hard to see because the sun was going down beside the tower.

Liv smiled. He didn’t know how he’d forgotten her dimples. “The yellow is amazing because it’s made entirely of yellow luxin.”

“And the others aren’t,” Kip said, not understanding. He blinked. “I mean, they’re not made of their own colored luxin?”

“No, no, no. The others have magical façades built over traditional building materials. The yellow is made entirely of yellow.”

From his admittedly brief instruction with the Prism, Kip thought that yellow was used like magical lanolin or something—it nourished other luxin, but otherwise degraded back into light easily. “Uh, I thought yellow was kind of a bad choice for a building material, being unstable and all.” Kip was just remembering why he had been keeping his mouth shut. The more he talked with Liv, the more natural it would be for him to talk about home. And the more unnatural for him not to say anything about home. The moment they went there, he was going to have to tell Liv her father was dead, and the pleasant ease of being in her company would be shattered. She would go from this bright, glowing, dimpled young woman to a bereaved orphan.

“It is a bad choice,” Liv said. “That’s why this is so amazing.” She pulled him toward the tower’s entrance. Suddenly Kip didn’t know if he wanted to leave the solidity of the blue-yellow spindles.

Sure, a minute ago, I was worried to step out on these, and now I don’t want to leave.