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“That’s not the same thing.”

He was already reaching for the notebook, gloved hands moving too precisely, the way hands move when their owner is making very sure they don’t shake. “For today, it is.”

“What just happened?”

“Nothing.”

Wrong answer. Not because it was false, though it was, but because he said it too quickly, and I had started trusting the speed of an answer more than the answer itself. He couldn’t convince me that something that took his commanding voice down to a rasp was nothing.

“What did you feel?”

His eyes came to mine, cold enough to frost the inside of the glass. “You are dismissed, Miss Lane.”

There it was. The door that I thought had started to open between us had just been shut and barred, with him standing on the far side of it pretending it had always been closed. I gathered my notebook. My wrist still hummed, a low sensation that had nothing to do with him now and everything to do with whatever he’d woken.

At the actual door, I turned back. Cormac stood by the table with one gloved hand curled into a fist at his side, looking not at me but at the fingers and thumb that had touched me, as if he could still see something there.

His notebook lay open on the table in front of him. He’d turned to a clean page at some point and left it that way. There wasn’t a single mark on it. He’d written twice in that hour and I’d watched him do it, and then somewhere in the back half of the session he had stopped, and whatever had happened when he took my wrist had gone into no record at all.

He looked up before I could look away, and for one second, we both knew I had seen. Then I left.

I made it halfway down the corridor before I stopped, put my back against the cold stone, and pressed my own hand around my own wrist, covering the place where the glove had been. The hum was fading.

And I hated that some part of me wanted it back.

NINE

Cormac

The report to my father was due by week’s end, and I had written the first line four times.

Subject presents— I crossed it out.

Miss Lane presents— No.

The provisional student— Worse.

The girl— Absolutely not.

I set the pen down before I did something more revealing than failure.

As an Adept and a Vere I got a whole suite of rooms to myself, which I appreciated. I liked how quiet these rooms were, which was why I had chosen them. North-facing, narrow windows, stone walls thick enough to discourage weather, voices, and most forms of feeling.

The fireplace was unlit, which didn’t bother me. The air smelled of ink, old paper, cold ash. There was a hint of leather in the air as well, as though my gloves, which were now resting on the stand beside the desk, laid straight, wanted to remind me of what had happened.

Everything in my life worth keeping was orderly, because it had to be. The alternative to order, in my family, wasn’t chaos. It was consequences.

The letter from my father sat to the left of the blank report, the cream paper folded once along the middle. He wasn’t worried about anyone reading it, and why should he be? He was one of the most powerful members of our community. No one would dare say anything or do anything that would upset him. But the words he’d written bothered me.

Evaluate. Document. Recommend.

Three words. He didn’t expressly tell me what to recommend, but I knew. Of course, there was no greeting and no inquiry after my health, which would have been more alarming than its absence. My father did not waste language on things that weren’t necessary.

The moment Pelham’s office sent the name across, I had understood the assignment. Sybilla Lane. First-generation, nineteen, provisional, fire event, no declared Order, no lineage. No place in the existing structure except as a question the structure had not consented to answer.

I’d watched her that first day, pink hair glowing around her head, curiosity and questions almost visibly bubbling up inside her until she’d asked Professor Sallow. The whole class had stared at her and Sallow had almost swallowed his tongue in his race to squash her questions back down.

Questions were dangerous. My family had spent centuries proving it, quietly, in the margins of other people’s histories. A question was a door, and a door left standing invited everyone who passed to wonder what lay behind it. We were not in the business of doors. We were in the business of walls that had never been doors, of rooms nobody recalled entering, of the smooth blank certainty that nothing had ever been otherwise. That was the whole of the work, and the whole of the peace it bought.