3.
Baghra is a fright to the eyes of a child, the oven of her hut casting wild firelight over her wiry limbs, the hollows of her bones, the pallid color of her skin.
"Try harder, girl," she snaps, and whacks Genya with her stick. "Try harder."
Genya sniffs, her throat constricting. She cannot heal deep wounds, or slow a heartbeat, or all but boil a man's blood in his veins. She can smooth scars, she can repair imperfections, but the higher callings of a Corporalnik are lost to her, slipping from her grasp like an elusive thread at the edge of a garment she has only begun to understand.
"Make yourself useful, girl!" sneers Baghra. "Don't you want to find your place here? Don't you want to know where you belong in the Little Palace?"
More trials. Genya cannot shape metal with her hands, or sense the calls of assorted chemicals, or imagine new contraptions that only a Fabrikator would consider possible. Occasionally she makes a dent in the metal, curves the edge, folds a loose shard - but she is no Durast.
"Try harder, girl!" Baghra demands, and lashes out with her stick again.
Only then does Genya begin to cry, because she is an imperfect Grisha, a child now abandoned, and all she can do is heal the cut Baghra's stick leaves on her back.
"Don't you want to succeed, girl?"
Genya Safin chokes on her tears. "I want to be perfect," she says.
