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help us keep the Lenses straight. They’re not intended to make things look different.”
    “I just… thought the glasses would do something.”
    “They do,” Grandpa Smedry said. “They show you things that you need to see. It’s just subtle, lad. Wear them for a while – let your eyes get used to them.”
    “All right….” I glanced over as Grandpa Smedry knelt to put the tray back inside the broken box. “What’s that book?”
    Grandpa Smedry looked up “Hmmm? This?” He picked up the small book, handing it to me. I opened to the first page. It was filled with scribbles, as if made by a child.
    “The Forgotten Language,” Grandpa Smedry said. “We’ve been trying to decipher it for centuries – your father worked on that book for a while, before you were born. He thought its secrets might lead him to the Sands of Rashid.”
    “This isn’t a language,” I said. “It’s just a bunch of scribbles.”
    “Well, any language you don’t understand would just look like scribbles, lad!”
    I flipped through the pages of the book. It was filled with completely random circles, zigzags, loop-dee-loops, and the like. There were no patterns. Some of the pages only had a couple marks on them; others were so black with ink that they looked like a child’s rendition of a tornado.
    “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. A language has to make patterns! There’s nothing like that in here.”
    “That’s the big secret, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, taking back the book. “Why do you think nobody, despite centuries of trying, has managed to break the code? The Incarna people – the ones who wrote in this language – held vast secrets. Unfortunately, nobody can read their records, and the Incarna disappeared many centuries ago.”
    I wrinkled my brow at the strange comments. Grandpa Smedry stood up, stepping away from the glass box. And, suddenly, the shattered front of the box melted and reformed its glassy surface.
    I stepped back in shock. Then I reached up, suspiciously pulling off my glasses. Yet the box still sat pristine, as if it hadn’t been broken in the first place.
    “Restore Glass,” Grandpa Smedry said, nodding toward the box. “Only an Oculator can break it. Once he moves too far away, however, it will re-form into its previous shape. Makes for wonderful safes. It’s even stronger than Builder’s Glass, if used right.”
    I slipped my Lenses back on.
    “Tell me, lad,” Grandpa Smedry said, laying a hand on my shoulder, “why did you burn down your foster parents’ kitchen?”
    I started. That wasn’t the question I’d been expecting. “How did you know about that?”
    “Why, I’m an Oculator, of course.”
    I just frowned.
    “So why?” he asked. “Why burn it down?”
    “It was an accident,” I replied.
    “Was it?”
    I looked away. Of course it was an accident, I thought, feeling a bit of shame. Why would I do something like that on purpose?
    Grandpa Smedry was studying me. “You have a Talent for breaking things,” he said. “Or so you have said. Yet lighting fire to a set of drapes and ruining a kitchen with smoke doesn’t seem like a use of that Talent. Particularly if you let the fire burn for a while before putting it out. That’s not breaking. That seems more like destroying.”
    “I don’t destroy,” I said quietly.
    “Why, then?” Grandpa Smedry said.
    I shrugged. What was he implying? Did he think I liked messing things up all the time? Did he think I liked being forced to move every few months? It seemed that every time I came to love someone, they decided that my Talent was just too much to handle.
    I felt a stab of loneliness but shoved it down.
    “Ah,” Grandpa Smedry said. “You won’t answer, I see. But I can still wonder, can’t I? Why would a boy do such damage to the homes of such kind people? It seems like a perversion of his Talent. Yes, indeed…”
    I said nothing. Grandpa Smedry just smiled at me, then straightened his bow tie and