Four hundred pounds on the bar. I put it down clean, controlled. The scorch mark on the ceiling is new.
The conductor sits on the bench beside me because that's where it lives when I train. I don't want it in my hands, the training's meant to be without the channel, the whole point is to hold it longer before I need the outlet. The mark on the back of my hand pulses low, the way it does even when I'm six blocks away from anywhere she might be standing. Calibrated to burnnear Callister House. Even Fulmen Hall counts, apparently, if the bond happens to spike.
The bond doesn't spike. I'm alone. I pick up the bar again.
The thing about the mark is it didn't count on me already knowing what a leash feels like. I grew up reading weather, reading the room, reading the kind of air that means everyone in it has already decided something about you and is watching to see when you'll figure it out. Nyxhaven's a more expensive version of that, that's all. The Tempest students who train here during daylight hours have opinions about me that they don't say in my presence because they're not idiots. I've heard them in the corridors:the probation students, the ones who ran, Knox who lost control of a whole summer's worth of storms.I've heard the Ossuary Sisters' version:Catalina's accountability, necessary containment, not a punishment.I've heard the junior Tempest girls who've decided the whole thing is interesting in a way they can't put language to. They all stop talking when I walk in.
I know that silence. It's the one people use when they think the unstable thing has ears.
The current runs up through my hands and out my knuckles, sparking off the bar, and I set it down before it can get anywhere it shouldn't. I press my palms flat on the bench and wait for it to settle.
Callum holds where I break.I've thought that three times today, which is three more times than I'd like. He doesn't break—he calculates, he plans, he comes out of Catalina's office without a cracked mirror to his name and holds his face still while they carve the mark into him, and then goes and teaches his shadow seminar like nothing is wrong. What's under that I don't know. What I know is that we're both watching her, and he's watching me watch her, and neither of us is saying it, and the not-saying is its own kind of noise.
I've thrown lightning at the man. He's stood in it. We've called it a draw and moved on, twice now, and the thing under the draw keeps accumulating. One of these nights a draw won't be enough.
The mark pulses.
I know it before I can name it: the warmth goes through my chest from the inside, and it has nothing to do with the weather. I set the bar down and don't look up until I've done it right.
She's in the doorway.
Rain-wet, both of us—I made this rain an hour ago, it's still coming down outside, and she didn't take a longer route or wait for it to stop. She's just wet. Her hair's dark and damp, a droplet hanging off the end of one curl, and she's holding a paper cup the rain has more or less dismantled on the walk over.
"You walked here," I say.
She holds up the destroyed cup. "I was going to bring you bad coffee."
"In the rain."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time." She looks at the rain on the windows, rethinks that. "I thought it would stop."
I made the rain. I know it won't stop until I stop it. I don't tell her that. "Was it good coffee before?"
"No." She looks at the cup. "Genuinely bad before the rain. The kitchen at Callister has one of those drip machines from 1994. Brittany's spelled it to stay at seventy degrees for some reason no one has asked about."
I don't smile. But I hold the straight face a little longer than necessary, which comes out to the same thing.
She's looking at me now—at the scorch mark on the ceiling, the crack running diagonal across the mirror, the place where I've clearly been standing long enough that the floor is damp and the weights on the bar are stacked the way a man stacks themwhen he keeps going back to the same lift because it's the only thing behaving.
She doesn't ask if I'm okay. Smart.
"Come in and close the door," I say.
She does. The weight room door clicks shut and the air changes—pressure dropping, charge settling differently, the small room adjusting around one more person. This is the first time she's been in here. I hadn't planned on it. I hadn't planned on her crossing campus in the rain at three in the morning, which says something about her, not about me.
"I couldn't sleep," she says. "I felt—" She stops.
"Yeah." I know. The bond's been running hot all day, spiking every time one of the others reached for her in the sessions, burning low in between. Six hours of it in the back of my chest while I pretended to hold my magic together through two seminars and a practice session and now three hours of weight work that isn't helping.
"I thought I should?—"
"Everly." She stops. "You don't have to explain."
She nods. "Okay."
The rain hits the windows. I'm still sitting on the bench. She's three feet away and the bond is right there in the close air between us, the way it always is now—not quiet, not the distant low-level hum it was when we were all pretending in different time zones. Ten weeks in a car does something to a thing like this.
I reach out and take her by the wrist—not rough, just decided—and pull her in close. Not onto my lap, not yet. Just close enough that the rain on her hair is the air I'm breathing. The mark gives its low warning pulse. I'm half a campus away from any boundary it could enforce. It can pulse all it wants.
