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That was fear.

I wrote it down in my own notebook that night, because one of us had to keep a real record and it was plainly not going to be him.

Vere said the rain. He heard or smelled or felt something when I touched the flame. He wrote nothing. He had no answer for why.

Then, because the sentence had been sitting in my throat since I left that cold little room and I couldn’t swallow it any longer, I wrote the last line and underlined it.

I don’t think the notebook is the only record. I want to find the other one.

FIFTEEN

Billie

The Wyndham Incident had been referred to in class multiple times and had never been explained. I’d assumed that it was something to do with fire since that was Kit’s power, but I wasn’t sure.

When Professor Sallow said it the next day my ears perked up. He said it like he was talking about the weather, like it was a fact everyone had already agreed on and nobody needed to feel anything about. He didn’t say it like there was someone who had been directly involved in it sitting three rows ahead of me with both hands suddenly gone still on the desk.

The lecture hall smelled of chalk dust and cold slate and the wet-wool damp that came off two hundred robes on a rainy morning. It was containment theory, which at Æscholt meant half the room was bored to the edge of sleep and the other half was pretending very hard not to be afraid.

Sallow had drawn a series of circles on the board in that pale bloodless light of his, nested one inside the other like a target. He explained with enormous satisfaction that power released without containment did not simply spend itself and go quiet.

“It sought,” he said, “and it fed and multiplied on whatever answered it.” He let that sit because he was good at letting things sit, and it was the only teaching method he seemed to trust.

“We have all read the standard case,” he said, tapping the innermost circle with one dry knuckle. “The Wyndham Incident remains a useful study in late-manifesting elemental overwhelm. Though I imagine Mr. Wyndham could correct the footnotes for us, if he felt so inclined.”

The room turned, because that was the thing about a room full of people raised on other people’s pain and suffering as lessons. They knew exactly where to look. All their gazes swung toward the third row like a field of flowers finding the sun, hungry but polite about it, wanting the show without having to admit that they wanted it.

Kit did not move or shy away.

That was the first thing I noticed. Kit, who performed reaction the way the rest of us breathed, who could make a raised eyebrow into a small theatrical event, gave them nothing. He was lounging low in his seat with his chin propped on one hand. That lazy insolent mouth curved like the entire lecture had been arranged for his private entertainment and he was deciding whether to be generous about the reviews.

“Couldn’t possibly improve on the scholarship, Professor,” he said. His voice came out easy, unhurried, pitched to carry. “Though if anyone wants the dramatic version, I do voices.”

The room laughed, of course it did, because that was the trick. Kit handed them a charming disaster and let them keep it. He was the beautiful fire boy, old tragedy filed down and buffed and turned to sparkle before it could get close enough to ask anyone for an actual feeling.

Sallow smiled the thin dry smile of a man who had wanted a flinch and would settle for a laugh and moved on to the next circle. Nobody else seemed to notice that Kit’s other hand, the one below the desk where the room could not spend it, had curled into a fist so tight that the knuckles had blanched.

I noticed.

Unfortunately, noticing had started to come with responsibilities, which was new. I stood up when the bell rang and went looking for him, because after class, Kit disappeared. Not dramatically, because he was never going to give them a dramatic exit. That would have admitted the lecture had cost him something.

He simply failed to be where he would normally be. There was no Kit at my elbow with some unbearable comment about my hair or my hem or the way I took notes like I was building a legal case. There was no Kit in the corridor pretending he had just happened to be leaning there, and none at the long table with a stolen roll or apple already halfway to his mouth.

Still, I waited until I was done with lunch to be sure that the absence was really there. It was, and it was large enough that Pippa noticed it too and started talking faster to cover the hole he’d left, filling the air with the afternoon schedule and something about the washhouses. I let her talk it out before I got up and went in search of him. I found him on the outside steps behind the lecture hall.

He sat halfway down them with his elbows on his knees and one hand open and loose between them and the other holding up his head. A small flame rolled slowly across his palm, and it was not a trick flame, not the tidy show-fire he made under desks to annoy Sallow and impress girls who wanted to be impressed. What he held was a private and restless little thing that turned over on itself and went nowhere.

“Go away,” he said, without looking up.

“No.”

“Strong counterargument.”

“I learned from the worst.”

The corner of his mouth twitched in what was almost a smile, but couldn’t quite form. I took that as permission enough and dropped down onto the stair so I was sitting next to him.

The stone of the steps was cold enough that it seeped through my robe and skirt almost immediately, which meant that he had to be almost numb from it by that point since it seemed like he’d been out there for the whole of the lunch period. The bell rang signaling the end of lunch, but neither of us moved.