The door shuts behind us and the click of it in the frame pops this fragile bubble, I can feel its residue on my skin.
Loch’s stance sharpens. He’s actively not looking at me, eyes downcast on the carpet.
“Do you want to sit?” He waves at the chair, the one behind the desk.
I shake my head. I want to touch him again.
But I stay where I am, rooted in the middle of the room, and Loch grunts like he’s decided something.
He crosses to the bookshelf.Thatbookshelf, the one with the hidden door I’m not supposed to know about.
I keep my face impassive.
He pushes on it. The door unlatches, and he shoves it open. “Here.”
I draw closer, shoes padding on the carpet. He’s staring at the joy meter in a trance. Like this thing is a nightmare and a dream all in one, and it has been, for him, the thing holding him back that will help him move forward.
He crowds in around it. The screen with readouts beeps as he hits a few buttons and a panel juts out of the side.
Coal and Dad put their hands on a similar one.
“Loch.” His name kicks out of me.
“Malachy and I did the power transfer years ago,” he says to the panel. The frosted glass is so harmless, a weird windowpane, nothing special. “But it never fully took. I told ya this. Transfers of power have to be joyful, and ours wasn’t. I think—” He reaches a hand out to the screen, flexes his fingers, recoils. “I think you were right. Since the original transfer never took, the transaction’s still in the joy meter. Lingering, incomplete. I think I could take it back.”
My gut swoops.
Isthiswhat he wanted to tell me? To show me? Not that he’s been stealing our magic.
But I squash down that hope. God, I shove it so far down it wriggles in the base of my stomach.
“Do you want your sisters here?” I ask. “Do you—”
“No.”
He looks to me, his eyes bloodshot, and his exhale shudders.
“Just you,” he whispers.
I’m humbled into silence when, in a quick snap of action, he presses his hand to the screen.
Nothing happens. Outwardly. Nothing happened outwardly for Coal, either; it seemed to be afeelinghe had. But I hold my breath, hold it and hold it until my lungs burn—
Loch lurches back, panting raggedly as he cradles his hand. His focus is on the joy meter as the screen slides back in, and he gapes, wonder mixed with disbelief.
“Did it…” I stammer. “Did it work?”
His response is small. Reedy. A voice spoken in the light after a storm. “Yeah.”
The air is heavy with the force of what this means for him. He turns to me and I already have my hands up, ready for him—
But he catches himself.
And that pause is the final press down on the hope in my belly.
I expect it to vanish. For grief to surge in. Or—oranger,even, something negative, something painful.
But Loch meets my eyes and I feel grief, yes, but not for me.
