The room had that heavy air it always seemed to carry during trials, the kind that made people sit straighter even if no one asked them to.
There were a dozen sets of eyes on the screens, a dozen pens moving over paper, and at least one person who had decided his job today was to find something wrong, not because he disliked the boy but because every room seemed to need someone who poked holes in the story.
He leaned on the rail and said, almost lazily, that the boy's illusions were too invisible. They didn't flare, didn't shout, didn't twist the room in obvious ways.
"Hard to grade," he muttered. "How do you reward what you can't see?"
A man with gray dusting his temples, the kind of visitor who had been in and out of these rooms longer than most of the assistants had been alive, gave him a patient smile.
His voice carried the sort of calm that could stop people from panicking in worse places than this.
