Most Islite children had no memory of their Testing. Of course, for those who failed the Test, that was because they were dead. For those who passed it, it had left no impression on them—and of course, it didn’t hurt that the Test was applied when children were only a few days old, and most were too young to have any sort of real memory.

Myn Oana was different. She remembered her Testing. It was a very vague memory, but there was something there. She remembered pain and a loud noise—her own wailing, she assumed, once she had heard the story of her Testing. She had demanded to know, and so had been reluctantly told at eight years old, before most children even knew that the Testing existed. (When a child was due to be born, any other children in the family were usually sent away to stay with other relatives or, if none could be found, with the priest, for a few days. The Testing wasn’t something a child should see.) Myn Oana had had an abnormal reaction to her Testing. That explained why the priest seemed to treat her differently, and why the other mothers usually herded their children away from her when she wanted to play. It wasn’t just because of the scar on her cheek, the disfigurement she had had to live with her entire life: it was what it symbolized.

The children who passed the Test only cried a little, and their cut cheeks bled red blood and healed up within days, the way children always did. The children who failed the Test cried in a shrieking, awful voice, bled thick, black mucus, and shriveled from the inside out, dying a horrible, wracking death. Myn Oana, her mother had explained to her in a shaking, hesitant voice, had done neither. She’d shrieked in awful pain, and the cut on her cheek had smoked and shriveled at the edges, but she had bled real red blood, and she had not died. The priest had stood there speechless for a moment, unable to decide what to do, what to say about this strange child. Finally, he had come to the conclusion that she was not a demon (like the children who failed the Test), since she had not died, and she should be brought up like a normal Islite child.

Of course, nothing could be normal about Myn Oana’s life after that. She had no siblings (she wondered, when she was old enough, if her parents feared that they carried some tainted blood that would cause any children of theirs to react strangely to the Testing) and very few friends. She went to school with all the others, but almost every time she made a friend, that friend would come back the next day fearful of her, having been warned by his or her parents that the scar on Myn Oana’s cheek was from her Testing, and that she had not failed it, but she had not passed it either.

She was too wise, even at eight years old, to ask what the Test was. She knew that she would be told when she was old enough and her mother would be too afraid to tell her when she was too young. She found out when she was twelve years old and had bled for the first time (normal blood, her mother told her with relief, though she was frightened when she saw the thick, dark brown stuff that had come from her secret place—many girls bled that way the first time, and at least it was not black and mucus-like). That meant that it was time for her to be confirmed as a woman, of fertile and marriageable age, and making her an adult in Islite society meant not only telling her but showing her what the Test was.