What I Brought With Me

The stone was from Grandma Leti's garden. The one behind the house in El Paso where she grew tomatoes and chiles and sunflowers that got taller than the fence by July.

Wren had found it when she was nine, digging in the dirt while Grandma Leti told her about the time she'd crossed the border with twenty dollars and a suitcase that smelled like her mother's kitchen.

It was just a rock. Smooth, reddish-brown, about the size of a walnut. No saturation. No accumulated memory. No centuries of place-memory soaked into its crystalline structure, no echoes of significant events, no residue of creation or conflict or connection.

At Mudwick, Wren kept it in her pocket and let people think it was a token.

The lie happened accidentally.

First week of school. Everyone was comparing their tokens in the common room the way kids at normal schools compared phones or sneakers. Pulling objects out of pockets and pouches and little velvet bags, holding them up, explaining the provenance.

"This is from the Seneca Falls Convention site. My grandmother pulled it during the anniversary gathering. You can still feel the outrage in it." A girl held up a small brass button, and yeah, if Wren concentrated, she could feel something radiating from it. A buzz like static electricity, but warmer.

"Mine's from a Reconstruction-era schoolhouse in Georgia." A boy with careful hands unwrapped a shard of slate from a cloth. "First-generation freedmen. The determination in this thing could power a car."

They went around. Kid after kid, token after token. Family heirlooms passed down through generations of practitioners. Objects pulled from sites normal people would never see, saturated with so much accumulated experience that even Wren, who'd only been aware of her abilities for six months, could feel them humming in people's hands.

Wren's turn came. She pulled the stone from her pocket.

"What's that from?" someone asked.

"My grandmother's garden," Wren said. This was the truth.

"Oh, cool. Is she a practitioner? Is the garden a saturated site?"

And here was the fork in the road.

The moment where Wren could have said no, she's not a practitioner, she's a retired hotel maid from El Paso who grows chiles and tells stories about crossing the desert.

The moment where Wren could have said I'm first-gen, I'm here on scholarship, I have no family legacy, no ancestral tokens, no private portal access, no generational knowledge passed down through centuries of practice. The moment where she could have been honest and accepted whatever came with that honesty.

"She's been working the land for forty years," Wren said. "You'd be surprised what accumulates."

She let them fill in the rest.

Let them assume Grandma Leti was a folk practitioner, one of the rural ones who'd learned outside the official system. Let them imagine a garden in the desert where four decades of tending and growing and feeding people had built up layers of warm, nurturing saturation. A Hearthwing site, maybe. A place of connection and sustenance.

None of it was true. The garden was just a garden. The stone was just a stone. And Wren was just a girl from El Paso who'd started sensing things six months ago when she touched the wall of the old movie theater downtown and nearly passed out from the flood of decades-old emotions, the joy and the fear and the romance and the boredom of a thousand Saturday matinees hitting her like a truck.

Professor Cross had found her three weeks later. Scholarship offer. Full ride. An opportunity Wren's family couldn't afford to refuse and couldn't fully understand.

And now she was here, surrounded by kids whose families had been doing this for generations, pretending her grandmother's garden rock was anything other than what it was.

The problem with a lie is that it needs maintenance.

Wren was good at school. She'd always been good at school, the way kids from families without money learn to be good at school, because the alternative is staying exactly where you are forever and she'd known since she was ten that she didn't want that.

Not because El Paso was bad. It wasn't. She loved her city and her family and the particular way the light hit the mountains at sunset, turning everything copper and rose.

But she wanted more. She'd always wanted more, in a way that felt greedy sometimes and necessary other times, and Mudwick was more on a scale she hadn't imagined possible.

The classes pushed her. Sensing exercises that assumed a baseline of experience she didn't have. Drawing techniques that referenced concepts her classmates had grown up with and she was learning for the first time. Portal theory that casually mentioned historical sites the way her AP History class back home mentioned textbook chapters.

She kept up. Barely. Through the specific stubbornness that comes from knowing you can't afford to fall behind because there's no safety net underneath you.

But the token thing followed her.

Because at Mudwick, tokens weren't just collectibles. They were tools.

You needed them for exercises. You needed them for Drift practice. You needed them for the drawing work in Professor Aldridge's class, where you learned to access stored saturation from an object instead of from a site, and you were supposed to bring your own tokens, the ones with personal significance, the ones your family had collected from meaningful places.

Wren brought the stone.

Every time, the same stone. Her one token. Her grandmother's garden rock that held exactly nothing.

She'd pull it out during exercises and cup it in her hands and pretend to draw from it while actually drawing from whatever ambient saturation was in the room. Mudwick was so thick with accumulated experience that there was always something available if you knew how to access it. And Wren had gotten very good at the subtle art of pulling from the environment while looking like she was pulling from the stone.

Nobody noticed. Or if they noticed, they assumed Grandma Leti's garden token was just subtle. Folk tokens were like that, they said. Quieter. More personal. Not the flashy hum of a battlefield relic or the sharp buzz of a protest site. The gentle warmth of a tended garden.

Wren let them believe it. Every day, she let them believe it.

The person who almost caught her was Sasha.

They had Drawing Practice together on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Sasha Okonkwo was first-gen too, scholarship too, Nigerian-American parents with no magical background. She should have been Wren's natural ally. Instead, she was Wren's biggest threat, because Sasha was brilliant and analytical and she noticed things.

"Your draw signature is weird," Sasha told her one Thursday in October. They'd been partnered for a paired exercise, sitting across from each other in the practice room, supposed to be drawing from their personal tokens and projecting warmth to their partner.

Wren felt her stomach drop. "Weird how?"

"It doesn't match your token. When people draw from a Hearthwing-type source, the projection feels concentrated, directional, like heat from a stove. Yours feels diffuse. Ambient. Like you're pulling from the room instead of from the object."

"It's a folk token. They work differently."

Sasha looked at her. That look, the one Wren had come to dread, where Sasha's eyes went slightly unfocused as she processed information and tested it against what she already knew.

"Maybe," Sasha said. "I don't know much about folk practice. We should ask Aldridge."

"Let's not."

"Why?"

"Because it's personal. My grandmother's methods are her own. I don't want to put them under a microscope for institutional analysis."

This was a good answer. It was the kind of answer that invoked cultural sensitivity and respect for alternative traditions, both of which Mudwick's faculty talked about constantly even if the school itself was a monument to one particular tradition. Sasha, to her credit, backed off.

But she didn't stop watching.

November. The month Mudwick's walls felt thickest, when the accumulated saturation pressed in from every direction and the building seemed to breathe with the memories of a century of students.

Wren was in her room, alone, holding the stone.

Her roommate was at dinner. The hallway was quiet. For once, the building's constant hum faded enough that Wren could hear her own thoughts, and her thoughts were not great company.

She turned the stone over in her hands. Smooth on one side, slightly rough on the other where it had been lodged in the dirt. She'd washed it when she was nine but bits of Grandma Leti's garden soil still clung to the tiny crevices, the pale desert earth of El Paso baked into its surface.

She thought about her grandmother. About the garden. About Sunday afternoons pulling weeds in the dry heat while Grandma Leti talked about her childhood in Chihuahua, about the schoolteacher who'd given her first book, about the coyotes singing in the desert at night.

About the taste of the chiles she grew, the green ones that burned your mouth and made your eyes water and left a warmth in your chest that lasted for hours.

About the way Grandma Leti's hands looked in the dirt. Brown and weathered and strong, fingers working the soil with a tenderness Wren had never seen her show to anything else.

Not to Wren's mom, who she loved fiercely but argued with constantly. Not to Wren's aunts and uncles and cousins who filled the house on holidays. Only to the garden. Only to the earth she'd been tending for forty years.

Wren held the stone and wished, not for the first time, that her grandmother's love had been enough to saturate it. That forty years of care could do what centuries of history did for the old families' tokens. That the quiet devotion of one woman to one small patch of desert could accumulate the way battle and scholarship and creation accumulated, thick and readable and real.

The stone sat in her hand and held nothing.

The crack in the lie came during a drawing exercise in late November.

Professor Aldridge had them working with unfamiliar tokens. The idea was to demonstrate that you could draw from objects you didn't have a personal connection to, that the saturation was accessible to anyone with the right sensitivity and training.

She passed around a collection of tokens from the school's teaching supply. A coin from a Civil War battlefield. A piece of chalk from a one-room schoolhouse in Mississippi. A small glass bottle that had come from an artist's studio in Paris.

Each student was supposed to handle the token, draw from it, and describe what they felt.

Wren held the coin. She felt the hum of old violence, the particular cold that came with places where people had fought and died. She drew from it carefully, the way she'd been taught, letting the saturation flow into her hands and up her arms and settle in her chest like a held breath.

"Good," Aldridge said. "What do you feel?"

"Fear. Determination. Something underneath both that I can't name. Like gravity, but emotional."

"The weight of consequence. People fighting for something that mattered beyond their own survival. That's advanced sensing, Wren. Well done."

The praise should have felt good. Instead it felt like evidence. Because Wren had just demonstrated that she could draw expertly from an unfamiliar token, which meant her technique was solid, which meant that if she could draw from this coin she'd never touched before, her personal token should be singing with power after weeks of daily handling.

Unless there was nothing in it to draw from.

She glanced at Sasha. Sasha was watching her with an expression that wasn't accusation. It was recognition. The look of someone who'd done the math and arrived at an answer they hadn't expected.

After class, Sasha fell into step beside her in the hallway.

"Your grandmother's not a practitioner, is she."

Wren kept walking. "I don't want to talk about this."

"Your stone doesn't have saturation. You've been drawing from ambient sources the whole time and making it look like it's coming from the token."

"Sasha."

"I'm not going to tell anyone." Sasha's voice was quiet and steady. Not judging. "I just want you to know that I know. And that it's okay."

Wren stopped walking. Students flowed around them like water around rocks. The hallway's accumulated saturation pressed against Wren's awareness, layers of students who'd walked this same path for a hundred years, rushing to class, dreading exams, carrying secrets of their own.

"It's not okay," Wren said. "Everyone here has family legacies and ancestral tokens and connections going back generations. I have a rock from my grandma's garden and a scholarship that basically says 'we found you interesting, please perform.'"

"I have a scholarship too."

"Yeah, but you're brilliant. You're the best analytical reader in our year. You belong here because you're genuinely exceptional."

"And you don't?"

Wren didn't answer. The honest answer was complicated and ugly and she didn't have the energy to make it presentable.

Sasha reached into her pocket and pulled out a small wooden bead, dark with age and polished smooth by handling. "This is my token. My mom gave it to me when I left for Mudwick. She found it in a craft store in Queens. It has zero saturation. My parents don't even know what saturation is."

Wren stared at the bead.

"I do the same thing you do," Sasha said. "Pull from the environment. Redirect it through the bead so it looks like I'm drawing from a personal object. I figured out the technique in the first week because I was too embarrassed to admit I didn't have a real token."

"You never told anyone?"

"Who would I tell? The legacy kids who've been collecting tokens since they were in diapers? The professors who hand out blank tokens for students who 'need practice' like it's the magical equivalent of remedial reading?"

Wren almost laughed. It came out as something closer to a cough, half amusement and half the sudden release of pressure she'd been carrying for months.

"We're not the only ones," Sasha said. "There are at least four other scholarship students doing the same thing. I've been watching."

"Of course you have."

"It's what I do." Sasha put the bead back in her pocket. "You want to know a secret? The ambient draw technique we taught ourselves? It's actually harder than drawing from a token. We're working with unanchored saturation, filtering it through our own focus, and projecting it in a way that mimics token-based drawing. That's three steps where everyone else has one."

"So we're better than them."

"We're more resourceful than them. Which in the long run might be the same thing."

That night, Wren sat on her bed with the stone in her hand.

It was still just a rock. Still held nothing she could draw from. But she turned it over and over in her fingers and felt the smooth side and the rough side and the tiny crevices where El Paso's desert earth had settled in, and she thought about her grandmother kneeling in the garden with dirt under her fingernails and the sun turning her brown skin darker.

The stone didn't hold saturation. But it held Wren's memory. And those were different things, and maybe both of them mattered.

She fell asleep with it on her nightstand, next to the phone where a text from her mom waited, sent at 11 p.m. El Paso time.

Grandma says the tomatoes miss you. So do we. Te quiero, mija.

Wren read it in the morning. Then she put the stone in her pocket and went to class.