"Amateur. Everyone thinks they can draw. But so few can."
When Veronica returned to her cabin, she found the painting of the boy with the ball sitting on the bed. She could have sworn she'd put it back on the nightstand after looking at it that morning, seeing if the symbols had become any clearer. She'd at first been reluctant to do so—her nightmares had been strange and disturbing, of temple ceremonies and threads of lives twisting and elongating to a delicate, mad thinness that she couldn't explain. But what could a child with a ball have to do with such odd nocturnal visions? So, she'd picked him up, looked at the ball, and noted that the sun continued to bring out the symbols, now resembling curlicues more than smudges.
The child's face changed, too. Whereas the boy's eyes had seeme
