Every right-hand page of the handbook, from the first week on, carries one small drawing in its lower corner. On its own each is easy to miss — a figure in the margin of a page of notes, or beside the week’s puzzle. Riffle the pages under a thumb and they move.
A boy arrives first, as a scatter of dots that thickens, page by page, into a silhouette. He raises his arms. Above his head a birdcage gathers out of the same faint grain until it is drawn in full, held up to the sky.
Each drawing is small enough to sit beneath a page of notes without crowding it, and quiet enough to be passed over — until a trainee, idly turning pages, catches one moving.
Then a bird leaves it. Another follows, and another, each one a grey ghost before it settles into black — until a line of them climbs away from the cage, up and out across the corner of the page.
By the last pages the boy still holds the cage up high, and the birds have reached the very edge of the corner, as if one more page would see them gone.
Nothing in the handbook points to it. It was drawn to be found, a frame at a time, by anyone in the habit of turning pages — a small reward for that habit, and a picture of what the course is for: an open door, and somewhere to fly.
