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“No, I understand,” I said. “You’ve wanted a result for a while now. Well, you got one. Glad I could be useful.”

The words landed and I watched them land. Good. Let them.

Behind him, the figures behind the glass had begun to move again, drifting toward the stairs at the end of the gallery. Cormac shifted his weight, half a step sideways, and kept himself between me and their line of sight.

The notice came that night, cream paper slid under my door while I was pretending to sleep. My name ran across the front in dark, even ink, the letters formed by someone who had all the time in the world.

Formal Review: Category Interference / Unclassified Manifestation

There was a date and a time and the location listed, and that was it.

I set it in the center of my desk and sat and stared at it until the words came apart, until Review and Interference and Unclassified stopped being words and turned into shapes, ink on a page, nothing that could hurt me. It didn’t work

Kit

I should’ve been in the gallery, shouldn’t have skipped class no matter how trivial it seemed. That part would eat at me for a long time, I knew thanks to the lovely history I had of things eating away at me.

I heard it in a corridor, from a third-year with the bright, greedy face people got when they were carrying news that they knew others didn’t have yet. He caught my sleeve, actually put his hand on me to make me stop, which told me how badly he wanted to be the one to say it.

“Your first-gen,” he said. “Lane. Did you hear? She put Mallory flat on her arse. With Mallory’s own strike, mate. Green as rot, they’re saying. Mimicked her, right there in front of the assessment glass.”

Afterward I did not remember what I said to him. What stayed was his hand on my sleeve, and the word green, and the corridor going far away, all the noise of it sliding off to a distance. The world did that once before, went far away and quiet, and it was when I was ten and a door opened somewhere behind me and someone started screaming that the east wing was on fire.

Too late.

That was how it went. That was always how it went, with me. I was forever arriving too late to the one fire that actually mattered, showing up ready to burn the world down for someone after the moment I could have used it was already gone.

I looked down and there was a flame in my hand. I hadn’t called it, and that hadn’t happened in years, not since I was a boy. Fire that came when I didn’t ask for it was fire I hadn’t made peace with, and I had spent a very long time and a great deal of pride convincing everyone, myself included, that I had made peace with mine.

Gold crawled over my knuckles, close and hungry, licking up between my fingers, and for one clean second I wanted to let it grow. I wanted to stand in the middle of that corridor and let it climb until every polished stone in the place understood. If they touched her, if they put her on a floor and called it fairness, they would have to come through me, and I would be an inferno when they did.

The thought should have frightened me, and it didn’t. That was the part that frightened me later.

At the time I closed my hand around the fire and put it out, because the corridor was full of people, and Billie did not need one more incident with my name attached to it, one more story about the Wyndham boy losing his grip near the first-gen. Then I went to find her.

I didn’t run.

I wanted to.

But I couldn’t, not if I wanted to keep this from spreading far and wide. And whether Billie knew it or not, this incident would probably follow her for the rest of her life, so the last thing she needed was me running through the halls like a mad man trailing fire and smoke behind me as I went.

I had to get to her though. Had to make sure she was okay.

TWENTY

Billie

By midnight I gave up. I’d been staring at the ceiling since the notice had come through the door and still couldn’t sleep.

Review. The word sat there in the dark, taunting me. Institutions didn’t frighten me by shouting, because shouting I could brace for. They frightened me by scheduling, by writing my name on a folder and setting a date and then simply letting the date exist out there in the future, doing its work on me every hour until it arrived.

To try and distract myself, I had been counting the cracks on the ceiling, trying to will myself to forget about it and fall asleep. The problem was I kept getting different numbers and having to start over, which was just frustrating me even more.

Frustration made me toss and turn so much that I ended up getting out of bed and putting on my running shoes. The halls were colder at night, quieter but never empty.

As I made my way outside I heard the pipes ticking somewhere behind the walls as the heat let go and wood settled with small dry cracks like someone shifting their weight two rooms over. In the main part of campus, a bell marked an hour nobody needed to be marked, unless somebody was awake and counting.

When I finally made it outside I ran down the slope past the washhouses where the copper smell of the day’s work had cooled into wet metal and stone, and out across the grass toward the black line of the trees.