Page 56

Billie

Kit had been trying to help me find my Order for six days when I finally lost my temper. Of course, that was when the fire finally decided to listen to me again. I would have preferred a more dignified origin story, something with focus in it or some ancient instinct. Maybe one of the old books in the archive falling open to exactly the right page by candlelight. It had happened that way for the girls in the stories I’d checked out and returned by the due date. Instead I was standing in a dead-end practice nook off the training wing with my hand out, my patience entirely gone, and Kit telling me for the ninth time that my nothing was improving.

“It’s not improving,” I snapped. “It’s nothing. Nothing doesn’t have a growth curve.”

Kit leaned against the wall with a flame idling above his open palm, gold light sliding over the dense black ink on his forearm and making it look like it was moving, like something alive. “This nothing has attitude,” he said. “That’s progress. Six days ago your nothing was polite.”

“If you compliment the absence of my ability one more time, I’m going to throw something at your head.”

“Excellent. Force manifestation. I’ll note it.”

“I’ll use a brick.”

“Still data.”

“You sound like him,” I bit out.

We both knew who I was talking about. Cormac.

Kit hated it.

The trouble with provoking him at that moment was that the nook we were standing in was designed for solitary practice and as such wasn’t supposed to hold two people, so when he took a step toward me we were practically pressed against one another. It had felt strategic when we’d started, no one would look for us in there, but as he crowded me, or if he shifted his weight, the heat moved with him. Every time he smiled, I had to make a quick private decision about whether the warmth climbing my face was irritation or something less useful. I chose irritation on principle and I chose it hard, refusing to give anything else the time of day.

“Again,” he said, and I knew that my words had gotten to him, and if I was honest with myself I kind of regretted saying it, but it was too late now.

For six days Kit had coaxed and cajoled and invented small imaginary victories so that I would not walk out. The first day, in the training area by the washhouse I believed something had happened and so did Kit, but I hadn’t been able to replicate it since. Now I was just tired, the specific bone-deep tired of failing at a thing everyone else had done before they could even spell it. Being the new kid was exhausting.

The nook smelled of damp stone and the faint permanent scorch Kit left on any room he spent more than five minutes inside, the way some people left perfume. We’d moved in here because it was raining out and the yard we’d been using was open to the sky and neither of us wanted to get drenched.

“No,” I breathed the word, letting my exhaustion bleed into it.

“Billie—”

“No. I’m done standing here while you invent confidence levels for empty air. There is nothing in my hands unless somebody else’s power goes wrong near me first, and even then I have no idea what I’m doing with it. That’s not something I can use or train, Kit. That’s being a magical accident report.”

He took a step back and leaned against the wall again. The flame over his palm dipped, and Kit’s face changed. Not pity. I’d have left if it had been pity and been out the door and down the corridor before he even opened his mouth to speak. This was quieter and made my chest go tight.

“You’re not an accident report,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what it feels like when people decide the worst thing ever happened to you is the truest thing about you.”

That shut me up. He hadn’t meant to say it, or maybe not all of it. I could tell by the way his mouth closed right after, like the words had slipped past a guard he usually kept posted. The little flame over his palm shivered and went bright and unsteady at its center.

The Wyndham Incident sat down in the nook between us for a second, uninvited, breathing smoke into a space that was already too small. Then Kit did what he always did when something true had been exposed. He grinned at it, right at it.

“Besides,” he said, a little too lightly, a little too fast, “if you’re an accident report, at least you’re a very attractive one. I think there might even be a class for that. Something with a subsection about being distracting.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Too soon?”

“Too everything.” I gestured, broadly, at the entire space between us, at the nook, at him, at all of it.

“Fair.”

The grin faded slower this time, and it didn’t snap off the way it usually did so much as cool. He pushed off the wall once more and stepped closer, his chest almost touching mine. “Hands,” he said.