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“So does whatever you’re doing.” His grip on my elbow didn’t tighten, but it didn’t let go either. “Who carries you, Billie, while you carry both of us. I want a name.”

I didn’t have one, and that was the whole problem, and we both heard the silence where the name should have been, and something in his quiet face tipped toward a decision I couldn’t read.

“There’s no one,” he said, his gaze going soft as he watched me.

And if I was honest with myself that nearly undid me right then and there, but instead I found myself saying, “I don’t need carrying.”

“That isn’t what I asked.” He held my eyes. “I asked who does it. And the answer is no one, and you’ve decided that’s normal, and it isn’t, and I’m the only person in this building who seems to have noticed, and I don’t know yet what I’m going to do about it.” Then he let go of my elbow and said nothing more, which was worse.

What he did about it turned up outside my door two nights later.

I nearly put my foot in it. A cup, set down on the stone in the place the corridor lamp didn’t reach, still warm enough that the steam was going up off it into the cold. There was no note, because there wouldn’t have been. Nobody had knocked either, and knocking was for being let in, and whoever left it hadn’t wanted in.

I sat down on the floor of that corridor in my pajamas with my back against my own door and drank it, and it was over-steeped and too hot and I had never in my life been more careful with a cup of tea. I thought about a man going down through the sleeping halls in the dark to make it, finding everything by feel because a light was a thing somebody could see from a window. I thought about him standing on the other side of the wood with the warmth of it going up into his hands, listening, and deciding not to knock.

In the morning I carried the empty cup down to the badly-lit table and set it in the middle between the three of us and said nothing about it at all. Kit asked whose it was. Linden didn’t look up from his plate, and I didn’t answer him, and something went across that table that didn’t need a word attached to it.

The information for the trial was posted for everyone to see two days before, pinned in the corridor outside the practicum hall, the running order and the examiners and the adjudicator of record. I read it the way I read everything, fast, off a list, looking for my own name first. I found my own name, and then I found his, in the column at the bottom, neat and final in the institutional hand.

Adjudicator: Cormac Vere.

THIRTY-ONE

Billie

As I walked up to the trial area I resented the fact that it was taking place in the same gallery where I’d put Vivienne on her ass. It just didn’t seem right to me, like it should take place somewhere with a blank slate, not somewhere that I’d already used my power and gotten in trouble for using it, too.

Kit stood just outside the doors on the lower floor. He didn’t seem able to make himself cross the threshold, and I couldn’t blame him.

I glanced up through the doors at the gallery where the audience was sitting, and boy, oh, boy, was there an audience. It seemed like the world and his wife had squeezed themselves into the gallery, which just made me even more frustrated with Æscholt than before. The trial didn’t need to be a spectacle, and yet they’d allowed, or maybe even encouraged, it to be one.

After slowing my steps and watching Kit stand there frozen for almost a full minute I went over to him. I’d never seen him falter, not once since I arrived at this insane school, and that was the thing that told me how bad it was.

There was no joking, no steady banter coming from him, not even that mischievous grin that seemed to be plastered to his face as a default expression. It was all just blank. He was lost in his own head and in his memories.

He may as well have been that ten-year-old boy again watching his family home burn down with his father inside. This wasn’t him being afraid. This was the bottom dropping out.

I couldn’t stand it.

“Kit,” I called softly.

He didn’t hear me. His eyes were on the column of white standing up out of the middle of the floor. “Kit. Look at me.”

I glanced inside and saw that the examiners were watching from a dais that had been set to one side. And Cormac was at the highest spot in the middle, the adjudicator’s post, in his long dark coat with the official record open flat in front of him and a pen already in his hand.

Every single person was waiting to watch Kit Wyndham walk into the fire, but he couldn’t move.

When they saw me a murmur started up in the gallery, the sound loud but low. It was the type of sound that could only be made by a crowd of people all whispering to one another about what a failure the Wyndham boy had turned out to be coalescing with the first-gen girl with no discernible power. I hated it and Kit’s shoulders hunched over so he was almost curled in on himself as the whispering got louder, even through the glass of the gallery.

I did the only thing I could think of to do. I stepped between him and the column of light, between him and everyone else in that room, positioning myself close enough to him that he couldn’t see anything else without purposefully looking around me.

When I pressed my hand to his chest his heart fluttered against my fingertips like a bird in a box, fast and stupid and trapped.

“Endure it,” I said, low and close, just for him. “Endure it, and I’ll kiss you after. And I’ll mean it.”

Kit’s head came up from where it had been hanging slightly, his eyes wrong and glassed-over. His gaze sharpened on me as I spoke.

“Now.” His voice cracked clean in half on the one word, no charm left to glue the halves. “Now. So I have something to hold onto.”