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free of distraction. The test administrator would be sitting slightly behind her; face-to-face examinations were to be avoided. Lindsay Thorpe would not see the inkblots until the moment the examiner laid them upon the table before her.
    The ground rules of the test were as guarded as the blots themselves. Any question she asked would be met with a preformulated response. Lindsay would not know that
everything
she said about the blots, relevant or not, would be written down and scored. She would not know that her responses were being timed with a silent watch: the quicker her responses, the better. She would not know that she was supposed to see more than one thing in each card; seeing only one was suggestive of neurosis. And she wouldn’t know that—though the test administrator would deny it if asked—each card
did
in fact have a “normal” response. If you saw something original, and could justify it, you’d get points for creativity. But seeing something nobody else saw in an inkblot usually implied psychosis.
    Lash turned to the first blot. Below it, the administrator had recorded Lindsay’s responses verbatim.

    There were two steps to viewing each card: a free-association phase, where the subject stated his or her first impressions of the card, and an inquiry phase, where the examiner would ask the subject to justify their impressions. Lash noticed, from the arrow marked on the third free association, that Lindsay had on her own volition turned the card upside down and kept it that way. That was a sign of independent thinking: if you asked whether you could turn the card over, you got a lower score. Lash recognized this blot, and Lindsay had hit most of the typical responses: a mask, a bat. No doubt the examiner would have noted Lindsay’s reference to the devil, an extraneous remark that would need to be scored.
    The next sheet in the pile was the examiner’s scoring sheet for this first card:

    Lash quickly reviewed the way Lindsay’s four responses had been typed and scored. The examiner had done a thorough job. Despite the years since he’d last administered a Hirschfeldt test, the arcane codes came back to him:
B
stood for a response encompassing the whole blot;
D
for a response to a commonly noted detail. Human and animal forms, anatomy, nature, and the rest were all noted. In all four responses, Lindsay’s form factors had been marked
O
K: a good sign. She saw more images in the white spaces than usual, but not enough to cause any concern. In the “specials” category—where examiners listed deviant verbalizations and other no-nos—Lindsay received only one mark, MOR, for morbid content: no doubt for her characterization of the image as a “devil mask” and “scary.”
    He moved on to the second blot:

    Again, the examiner had carefully listed Lindsay’s responses.

    Again, Lash recognized this blot. Lindsay Thorpe’s responses were all within normal.
    Lash looked back idly at the blot. Suddenly, he stiffened. Completely unexpectedly, a series of associations flashed through his own mind as he stared: a quickly spreading sea of red across a white carpet; a dripping kitchen knife; the grinning mask of Edmund Wyre, handcuffed and in leg irons, as he was arraigned before a sea of shocked faces.
    God damn Roger Goodkind and his curiosity
, Lash thought as he put the blot quickly aside.
    He leafed brusquely through the other twenty-eight blots, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Lindsay was characterized as a well-adjusted, intelligent, creative, rather ambitious person. He knew this already. The faint hope that had again stirred within him began to fade.
    There was still one more item to examine. He turned to the structural summary page, where all Lindsay Thorpe’s scores were put through a series of ratios, frequency analyses, and other algebraic convolutions to determine particular personality traits. One of these sets of