Torment by Lauren Kate Page A

far.”
    Steven laughed. “Well, Francesca and I thought to help you get used to it, we’d change gears from our usual Tuesday-morning student presentations—”
    From across the room, Shelby hooted, “Yes!” and Luce noticed that she had a stack of notecards on her desk and a big poster at her feet that read APPARITIONS AIN’T SO BAD . So Luce had just gotten her out of a presentation. That had to be worth something in roommate points.
    “What Steven means,” Francesca chimed in, “is that we’re going to play a game, as an icebreaker.” She slid down from her table and walked around the room, heels clicking as she distributed a sheet of paper to each student.
    Luce expected the chorus of groans that those words usually evoked from a classroom of teens. But these kids all seemed so agreeable and well-adjusted. They were actually just going to go with the flow.
    When she laid the sheet on Luce’s desk, Francesca said, “This should give you an idea of who some of your classmates are, and what goals we work toward in this class.”
    Luce looked down at the paper. Lines had been drawn on the page, dividing it into twenty boxes. Each box contained a phrase. It was a game she’d played before, once at summer camp in western Georgia as a little kid, and again a couple of times in her classes at Dover. The object was to go around the room and match a different student with each phrase. Mostly, she was relieved; there were definitely more embarrassing icebreakers out there. But when she looked more closely at the phrases—expecting normal things like “Has a pet turtle” or “Wants to go skydiving someday”—she was a little unnerved to see things like “Speaks more than eighteen languages” and “Has visited the outerworld.”
    It was about to be painfully obvious that Luce was the only non-Nephilim in the class. She thought back to the nervous waiter who had brought her and Shelby their breakfast. Maybe Luce would be more comfortable among the scholarship kids. Beaker Brady didn’t even know he’d dodged a bullet.
    “If no one has questions,” Steven said from the front of the room, “you’re welcome to begin.”
    “Go outside, enjoy yourselves,” Francesca added. “Take all the time you need.”
    Luce followed the rest of the students onto the deck. As they walked toward the railing, Jasmine leaned over Luce’s shoulder, pointing a green-lacquered fingernail at one of the boxes. “I have a relative who’s a full-blooded cherub,” she said. “Crazy old Uncle Carlos.”
    Luce nodded, like she knew what that meant, and jotted in Jasmine’s name.
    “Ooh, and I can levitate,” Dawn chirped, pointing to the top left corner of Luce’s page. “Not, like, a hundred percent of the time, but usually after I’ve had my coffee.”
    “Wow.” Luce tried not to stare—it didn’t seem like Dawn was making a joke. She could levitate?
    Trying not to show that she was feeling more and more inadequate, Luce searched the page for something, anything she knew anything about.
    Has experience summoning the Announcers .
    The shadows. Daniel had told her the proper name for them that last night at Sword & Cross. Though she’d never actually “summoned” them—they’d always just shown up—Luce did have some experience.
    “You can write me in there.” She pointed to the bottom left corner of the paper. Both Jasmine and Dawn looked up at her, a little awed but not disbelieving, before moving on to fill in the rest of their sheets. Luce’s heart slowed down a little. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad.
    In the next few minutes she met Lilith, a prim redhead who was one of three Nephilim triplets (“You can tell us apart by our vestigial tails,” she explained. “Mine’s curly”); Oliver, a deep-voiced, squat boy who had visited the outerworld on summer vacation last year (“So totally overrated I can’t even begin to tell you”); and Jack, who felt like he was on the cusp of being able to read