Page 28

Cormac went still, only for a second. But I knew the difference between a man unimpressed and a man recalculating, because I had spent half my childhood watching clerks and landlords and school secretaries and tired nurses decide whether my mother’s voice meant we could be safely ignored. He had reached for something he expected to work, and it had failed. It made me want to grin at him, but I restrained myself. I wondered how often, if ever, he’d failed at whatever it was he’d been trying to do.

His face shuttered. “Stand.”

The next forty minutes were an inventory of failure. Mine this time.

“Hands up. Palms open,” he ordered.

I turned my palms to the ceiling. The lamplight sat on them, warm and useless.

“Now down.”

I turned them over. Nothing changed except my patience.

“Reach for the edge of the room.”

“With what?”

“With attention.” He did not look up from the notebook. “Most people have some. You will have to locate yours before you can spend it.”

I attempted to do what he asked, whatever reaching meant. I aimed the whole of my focus at the cold seam where the wall met the floor, the way I’d point a flashlight, and got back the ordinary information a wall gave a person. Stone, distance, the coldness coming off it.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Continue. Face the window.”

I faced the window. Gray sky, narrower than a coffin.

“The wall.”

I faced the wall.

“Close your eyes. Reach for the weight of the table.”

I closed my eyes and reached for a table I already knew the exact size of, because I’d been sitting at it, and got precisely as far as a person got reaching for furniture in the dark.

“The flame in the lamp. There is heat there. Pressure. Find it.”

I took a step toward the lamp that was closest.

“Not like that, just with your attention,” he corrected.

I watched it, directed everything I could toward it, but the flame did not so much as flicker in my direction. I thought of a burning hallway and the fire that had surrounded me that had bowed away from my skin like it knew me, and how this cold little candle wouldn’t give me the time of day, and I nearly laughed at the injustice of it.

“Now me,” he said. “My presence. Reach for that. With your attention only.” He added the last bit hastily as though I might reach out and grab him.

I opened my eyes. He was three feet away, gloved and grim and entirely visible.

I did all of it, because I was not too proud to try when I’d been backed into a corner. I tried until my head began to pound.

“Feel for me,” he said.

“I can see you.”

“Seeing is not perception.”

“It often helps,” I replied, more snark leaking in around the edges of the exhaustion.

“Not enough, apparently.”