Page 48

“That’s air.”

“Then begin with air.”

“I thought using sight was crude.”

“Your commentary remains optional.”

“Historically untrue.”

The corner of his mouth almost moved, though only almost. I had started keeping score of the almosts, which was probably the most alarming thing about my time in that room. I focused on the flame and refused to let myself be distracted by the man across the table watching me with an intensity that made my skin want to break out in goosebumps.

At first there was nothing but heat and the faint tremor of my own fingers, which I hated and could not stop. Then below all of that came something thinner, a little line of tension strung between the flame and my skin. It was not a pull exactly, more like a thread I could only feel when I stopped trying to grab it, the way a name came back the second I quit reaching for it.

The prickle woke under my fingernails, and I kept my face blank. Cormac leaned forward, only a few degrees and barely a shift. A week ago he’d sat there like a man enduring weather, while today he sat like a man hunting.

“Again,” he said.

“I haven’t stopped.”

“Then hold it.”

When the thread vanished the prickle went with it, and his pen finally moved, down toward the page and then not quite onto it.

“Was that failure or data?” I asked.

“Both.”

“Efficient.”

“Again.”

We repeated the dance of my hands around the flame for a half an hour. Flame and prickle, there and gone, over and over again. Each time Cormac shifted forward before he seemed to know he was doing it. Some part of him leaned toward the thing the rest of him had decided to keep at arm’s length. Every time it vanished, his face closed a little harder, like I was disappointing him, or worse, hurting his feelings. I shouldn’t care about his feelings at all, and yet, I hated seeing that expression on his face.

“Describe it,” he said, on the sixth or seventh attempt.

I was quiet for a moment, debating how much I wanted to share with him. “A thread,” I said finally. “Between the flame and my hands. I can feel it when I stop trying to feel it.”

“Reach along it.”

“Toward the fire?”

“Toward whatever the fire answers to.”

Whatever the fire answers to? His words made a pit form in my stomach. What if it answered to something dangerous? But I reminded myself that it was just a lamp in a school that was built around magic much more powerful than whatever I could, or couldn’t, do.

I reached and for a second the thread went bright, not visibly, that would have been too easy, but something in me could sense the brightness, the strength of the thread. The prickle started and ran all the way to my elbow, warm and alive and mine. The lamp flame stretched toward my palms. Then I flinched, because I felt how far the thread went and how little of it I could see, and it vanished.

“You stopped,” Cormac said.

“It got bigger than me.”

His pen hovered, and then to my surprise he didn’t write. He looked at the space between my hands where the flame had leaned, and something crossed his face that I didn’t have a name for, at least not yet.

“Try without looking,” he said.

When I closed my eyes the flame became heat, and the heat became a point in the dark, not bright but present. My hands bracketed it while the room gathered itself around that small center the way a room did with my eyes shut. There was cold stone, wind at the glass, and Cormac’s careful breathing.

Then something else moved under it, something that was not mine. A smell.