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Linden’s hand was flat below the ribs to hold the skin steady, Kit’s at my shoulder, as Linden said, “Can you bring one of the lamps closer?”

Kit didn’t hesitate to obey and within a couple of seconds the bench held me and my new lamp friend. I tried to focus on that as Linden touched me. All of it was as clean and necessary as anything that had ever happened to me.

But I could not get my breathing to go right, though I wasn’t sure if they were breathing right either. We went on very carefully not looking at each other’s faces. A room built for getting mud off people was filling up with a thing none of us wanted to name inside it.

The difference between them was something I’d been collecting for weeks without knowing that was what I was doing. Linden’s hands were the ground, and they stayed where they landed and they took the weight and nothing in them moved unless he moved it. Kit’s were the fire, everywhere at once and too warm and gone again before I’d even realized where they’d been touching me in the first place.

Before sitting on that bench I’d have said a person would have a preference for one of those types of touches over the other. I sat there and realized that I preferred both, which made me think considerably less of myself.

Then my power activated.

It started in my hands the way it always started, the prickle across my palms and the small catch behind the wrists. I knew that sensation now based on how many times I’d channeled Kit’s fire. Only Linden hadn’t summoned his power, at least that I was aware of, and Kit held no flame, so there should have been nothing to route. It was just me, a bench, a lamp, a basin of water going cold, and two boys being kind to me.

The air at the edges of us went faintly green anyway.

The only thing was Linden touching me.

I felt it start to loop, out of me and into Linden where his hand sat below my ribs, and back, and out again into Kit who chose that moment to put his hand on my shoulder. Every point of contact went a shade warmer than anything that the room could account for. Linden’s hand stilled completely, and Kit’s breath caught, and I watched him as he decided not to look up.

I shut it down as best as I was able to, visualizing a door closing. I’d never shut anything so fast in my life, and I pulled it back into my chest. The green went out of the air, until the steam was only steam again.

“That was me.”

“I know,” Linden said.

Neither of them asked what it had been. I understood why, which was that the question had nothing in it anybody could fetch water for, and each of us badly wanted a thing to do with our hands. Only the thing I wanted to do with my hands had absolutely nothing to do with the injury on my ribs and everything to do with the two of them.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Billie

At the beginning of the week my sessions with Cormac had been canceled, but then on Thursday evening my schedule updated and the one on Friday had been written back in, which meant that I had to miss the announcement of the winning team for the scrimmages, not that I minded.

I walked the long corridor down to the cold room counting stairs out of habit, and somewhere around the ninth of the eleven step I realized that Cormac had figured out my tricks.

He would notice the injury if I wasn’t careful and it would turn into a whole thing. I decided that I’d sit straight and keep my robe shut and give him bored eyes and a flat voice. I’d just be a girl at a table answering questions about her conduct, and he’d write his three-times-a-week line about my cooperation and my mood and never know there was linen under the wool. I knew it was a bad plan while I was making it. I went over it anyway, checking it for the place where it would fail, the way I checked everything.

The problem was that it had already failed. Cormac Vere wasn’t a different problem from Kit and Linden, which was what I’d been telling myself all term. He was the same problem with more practice.

I took the plan in with me anyway, since it was all I had. It survived right up until I walked into the room.

He was already in his chair when I went in, the way he always was. I sat down across the table the careful way I sat down on everything now, lowering by degrees to keep the left side quiet, and he watched me do it and went still. Not the bored still he kept for the sessions but a different one.

“You’re favoring the left side,” he said.

“I’m sitting.”

“You’re sitting like a person who’s been hit and is pretending she hasn’t.” He set the pen down.

As I looked across at him and tried to reach for something clever to say I realized that his hands were bare on the table. No gloves. Long and pale and flat against the wood.

He hadn’t reached for the leather the way he reached for it every other minute of his life. He’d known I was coming and hadn’t put the gloves on. Hadn’t even made a move toward them. They sat folded at his elbow where he’d left them. His hands stayed where they were. My stomach did a slow turn I didn’t trust.

“Show me,” he said.

“No.”

“Miss Lane.” Quiet. “I am the one person in this building required to write down the state of you three times a week, and I would prefer to write something true.”