Page 42

I folded my arms. “This isn’t a method. You’re just guessing and going on vibes.”

“Methods are what people invent after somebody does the stupid version first. We’re pioneers.”

“We’re just unsupervised.”

“Best kind of pioneer.”

Kit moved forward, stepping closer to me as he held the flame between us. Heat brushed my face, not painful but familiar in a way I did not want to examine.

“Open your hand,” he said. “Don’t reach with your head. Reach the way you did in the yard.”

“I didn’t reach in the yard. I panicked.”

“Then panic again, but usefully.”

I opened my hand and nothing happened. I stared at my palm. Kit stared at my palm. The flame rolled lazily over his fingers, apparently bored by my entire bloodline.

“Again,” he said.

“That was nothing.”

“Confident nothing. Good first nothing.”

“How many nothings until we admit it’s actually nothing?”

“At least six. Science requires repetition.”

“Again, this isn’t science, you’re just going off your gut.”

“My gut is good at what it does,” he countered even though it barely made any sense. “Come on , Billie. You have to try.”

Try I did. But it was no use. No matter how much I tried, nothing happened. I opened my hand toward his flame, closed my eyes, trying to feel whatever I had felt when his fire bucked in the training yard, when my palm hit his shoulder and the world snapped into a circuit. But I couldn’t get there. All I got was heat and stone under my boots and Kit breathing too close, the soap smell from the washhouse, and my own irritation doing a lot of work. No hum. Nothing useful.

By the seventh try, my patience split.

“I can’t do this.”

Kit’s expression changed, not much but enough.

“Hey...”

“No, don’t hey me. There’s nothing here. Maybe the yard was you and everyone else was right to congratulate you on a good save.”

“Billie—”

“Maybe I walked through a fire because I’m a freak in exactly one useless direction. Maybe the cards hummed because the assessment was built to make me think they did. Maybe Cormac is right and I’m absence with a scholarship.”

The flame in Kit’s palm dipped and I hated that more than if he had laughed.

“He’s not right,” Kit said, sounding pissed.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know he shouldn’t have made you feel like that.” His tone was serious, much too serious for the Kit I knew and joked with and he seemed to realize it at the same time I did because he let the flame roll high on his knuckles and it engulfed his hand. I wanted to take a step back, but I was also fascinated by it. This was the closest I’d been to Kit’s fire, and though it was hot I could tell that it wouldn’t burn me. Why? I had no idea, but that was what my instincts were telling me, and I trusted them, for the most part.

“Hands,” he said a second later.

“No,” I said as I watched the flame but didn’t raise my own hands again.