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“Show-off,” said another, laughing too loud.

The instructor’s gaze sharpened. She looked at Kit, not me. Of course she did. Kit Wyndham losing his grip on a flame and catching it again was a story the yard already owned. The provisional girl with her hand on his shoulder was a stray detail, and details got edited out of stories that were easier without them.

Kit didn’t move. His breathing had gone uneven, and his eyes went to my face, then my hand, which was still on his shoulder, then my face again.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Your fire.”

“That wasn’t my fire.”

“It very clearly was.”

I began to move but he caught my wrist before I could step back. Not hard. Not to hurt. Just enough to keep me where I stood. The contact sent a thin echo of the hum through my palm and his whole expression changed. “Tell me you felt that,” he said. Not to me. Past me.

I followed his gaze.

Linden stood at the rail, book forgotten in one hand, all his quiet gone sharp at the edges. He looked from Kit’s fingers around my wrist to my face to the empty air where the fire had been. He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

“Lane! Get back to your seat! What were you thinking?” The instructor barked and the yard started to move again, everyone hungry to get back to noise, to sweat, to anything that meant they hadn’t just watched a first-generation nobody do a thing there was no category for.

Kit’s hand loosened, but he didn’t let go. He leaned in, and for once there was no flirt in him, no performance, no easy shield. “What are you?” he asked, low.

I looked down at his fingers on my wrist, and then from him to Linden’s silent face, and finally at the dirt under my boots where I’d landed without ever choosing to move. My palm still hummed.

“I don’t know,” I said.

And that was the first honest answer I had given anyone at Æscholt.

ELEVEN

Billie

For the second session, Cormac Vere moved his chair back, and not by much, which was how I knew it was intentional. A man like Cormac did not do accidental inches.

The chair sat across the same bare table in the same cold little room. But the gap between us had grown by the width of a hand or two. I noticed the gap before I noticed him, which he would have found interesting if I’d been foolish enough to say so.

I’d counted everything on the way in, still unnerved from what happened with Kit in the yards. Down the practice-hall corridor, four doors on the right, three on the left, one of them a service closet with a lock so old it barely qualified. Then the turn and the short cold passage that smelled of damp mortar, and then his door, which was the last on the left.

Cormac was already there, naturally, dark coat on and gloves fitted. His black notebook lay open beside his elbow with the spine cracked flat so it would lie obedient under his hand. The lamps burned with narrow yellow flames that made the whole room smell of hot oil and old stone, and under it, faint, the wet mineral smell of a cleaner someone had used once upon a time. This time there was a third lamp sitting on the table directly between the two chairs.

“Miss Lane,” he said as I entered.

“Adept Vere.”

His eyes flicked once to my wrist. My skin remembered, the hum seeming to come alive on my skin once more.

I hated that, hated the small warm echo, the way my body kept a private record no notebook had authorized and no report would ever get its hands on. The first session was two days gone. That was long enough for the mark of his glove to fade, except there had never been a mark, only the memory of the room going quiet.

“Same as last time,” he said. “You attempt. I document.”

“Efficiently.”

He watched me a moment before he answered. “Yes.”

I sat slowly, because slow was still mine, though I suspected he had probably documented that too. Subject delays compliance to preserve perceived agency. Something clean and awful like that, in that precise hand of his. I could almost see the sentence lying on the page waiting for me to make it true.

He began with the room again. “Close your eyes.”