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Then she took the boy’s face in her two hands where the entire school watched her do it, but she never closed the distance. The air around the two of them went gold, then green, the color I had been unable to classify since the day they gave her to me.

She had it in her hands, free for the taking, and she didn’t take it. Once, in a cold room, I’d done that myself, with her injury under my hand and the whole of my family’s trade sitting available to me. I couldn’t close the burn, but I could’ve taken how she came by it out of her clean, so that she kept the mark and lost everything that put it there, and she would have thanked me for it. I didn’t , and I believed at the time that it was the hardest thing I would ever be asked to do.

It was not.

Not even close.

Billie didn’t kiss Kit and she did it in a gallery doorway in front of the entire school with a boy’s life on the other side of it.

I told myself I was observing a phenomenon for the record. I repeated it over and over again. My pulse was most definitely not at rest.

I looked down at the page. The line I was meant to enter concerned the candidate’s composure at the threshold, a simple line, a line a child of my house could make. I set the nib to the paper.

The candidate presented— I wrote it, and the sentence went wrong in my hand. The diction I’d owned since before I could properly hold a pen slid out from under me like a stair giving way in the dark. I struck it through, one clean line. The candidate— Wrong again. Struck through again.

Two strikes on an official record. A Vere does not strike twice. A Vere does not strike at all.

I watched my own hand make the marks and couldn’t stop making them. My hand would not make the smooth cold sentence the record required, the sentence a Vere made in his sleep. Some part of me that I had no file for, no label for, no word for, was watching her pour herself into another man through her two hands and the inch she would not close. That unknown part of me, and this went against years of training, was simply and quietly breaking.

A warder called the start. Billie stepped aside and Kit Wyndham walked in.

Fire took the boy.

I made myself look at the page and not the ring.

I finished the entry, because a Vere finishes. There was no way I would bring shame on my family by leaving the record open. It may have taken three attempts, but I finished it with steady handwriting even if the meaning was empty. A true sentence about a thing I hadn’t felt, and a lie of omission about the only thing I had.

After I set the pen down in its groove, I squared the page to the edge of the table. It was the same way my father squared everything, because the squaring was a thing my hands knew how to do when nothing else made sense.

I did not finish feeling it.

The call to stop the trial was mine. It had been mine since they put me in the chair, and I had rehearsed the words that morning, dressing in the dark, the way a man rehearses a thing he intends never to say. ‘Candidate compromised. Bring down the fire.’

Bringing the fire down on the Wyndham boy, who was one of the most powerful fire wielders in generations, would voice the trial. A void solo trial was a failed triad. A failed triad put Billie in danger of someone in my family having to visit her to do their job to the fullest extent of their capabilities, and put me in danger of never seeing her again, which was something that I apparently couldn’t tolerate even thinking about.

So I sat with my hand flat on the record and waited.

Billie

Kit walked into the column of white light alone and I had to watch. For the first while I stood there and kept my promise to no one and counted.

I had counted his steps to the column of light, six of them, and the warders that were protecting the audience, eight of them spaced evenly around the seal. If I ran for it, could I make it?

My heartbeat was no good to me going as fast as it was, so I counted my own breaths, forcing myself to breathe in for multiple counts, hold it and then breathe out for multiple counts as well. The counting was the only handhold I had on the side of the line they wanted me on.

The trial fire wasn’t like Kit’s fire, and I knew Kit’s fire. His was gold and alive and a little vain, a show-off’s fire the way he was a show-off, all flourish over a soft middle. This was something else, something older and paler, standing up out of the trial ground in a column I couldn’t look straight at. Nothing in it flickered or danced, just a hard standing brightness that made my eyes water.

The trial was simple, simple the way the cruelest things were always simple. His flame had to pass through him. He had to stand inside the worst thing that had ever happened to him and let it move through his body and come out the other side still himself.

For a while Kit held, and I could see him in there, a dark shape in all that white, arms out from his sides and head tipped back, holding. It ran through him and didn’t take him.

The gallery made the low approving sound a crowd made when a thing went the way the program said it should, a soft collective exhale that was almost warm. The sound of hundreds of people deciding they could relax.

Somewhere behind me one of the professors I’d never met said, “There. You see. They overstate these things.”

“It’s the first stage,” a man answered her, bored. “Wait for the second.”

I hated him for knowing that. I hated that the people watching had a program in their heads with stages in it. The stage where the boy I loved went to his knees was a line item they were waiting to tick. I let myself breathe. Did I love Kit?