Chapter 38: Your Poems Are Excellent

Mel straightened, and she nearly tripped against her own leg, as she was still uncoordinated like I remembered, and I laughed.

I did not mean to laugh; the sound came out of me before my mind had finished assembling it, and the laugh was the laugh of a ten-year-old, light and unmarked.

The laugh kept going for slightly longer than the situation had earned, but the laugh was carrying more than my amusement; it also held my intense relief, and for a moment, I was ten years old, and whatever life I had lived that sent me to the Academy and on that expedition was a dream, and now I was awake.

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