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“By deciding what other people get to keep.”

“By preventing damage.”

“Those can be the same sentence read from two sides.”

Something in his eyes sharpened, and for a second he stopped looking like a tutor and started looking like the thing Kit had warned me about. Not cruel. Worse. Convinced. A man who had done a hard thing so many times he’d built a philosophy over the top of it.

Then the certainty faltered. Only a fraction. It was gone fast, but I caught it, because I have spent my whole life reading the quarter-second before someone hands you the official version of events.

“You disagree,” he said.

“I don’t know enough to disagree.”

“That never stopped you before.”

“True.” I leaned back. “But I know what it sounds like when someone uses the word harmless like that.”

The pen didn’t move, and the rain tapped against the window in a steady rhythm.

“Stand,” he said.

And the door in his face shut, and I knew I’d get nothing more out of him about his talent, his power, or whatever lived under those gloves.

I stood.

He ran me through another set of exercises, sharper this time. Reach for the lamp. Reach for the space between my palms. Reach for the place where heat became light in the flame. Words that would have sounded beautiful if they hadn’t been almost entirely useless.

“You’re describing feelings,” he said, after the third attempt gave him nothing he could use. “I want reports.”

“I don’t have reports. I have a hot lamp and a cold room and a headache building behind my left eye.”

“The headache is data.”

“The headache is a headache.”

“I need you to tell me these things. We have to note it regardless.”

“You note it. That’s your whole job.” My stomach had knotted somewhere in the last quarter hour, the low ugly clench I got when I was in trouble for something I had no control over. I breathed through it because the alternative was letting him see. “Ask me a real thing. I answer real things.”

“Hands around the lamp. Reach for the flame.”

So I did as he instructed and reached for the flame.

The prickle came, a warm line under my nails when my hands bracketed the lamp. The flame stayed steady between them and did not so much as flinch. For a half-second the thread pulled taut, and I felt the fire lean toward me the way it always did, the way it had in the yard when I put my hand on Kit’s shoulder and the gold went green at the rim.

I said nothing, but Cormac’s pen moved anyway. Of course it did.

At the end, he corrected my stance with a wooden pointer instead of his hand. The pointer tapped my elbow and my shoulder and the angle of my wrist, cool wood instead of black leather, with the distance preserved almost ostentatiously so that the not-touching was louder than the touching had been the week before. I looked at the pointer, then at him, and I knew that he knew what I was looking at.

“Again,” he said.

“You really don’t want to touch me.”

His face went cold. “I do not want to contaminate the reading.”

Contaminate.

The word landed in the middle of the room and showed us both what had been under the floorboards the whole time. My body went still. Not braced. Still.