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“Describe the absence.”

“I said cold, not absence.” I corrected before I continued, “But it just feels like a pocket where the heat isn’t reaching.”

The pen stopped, and I watched it stop and felt nothing, or the flat gray thing in my mind that had learned to stand in for nothing. After a moment he moved on to the next question because there was nothing in my answer for him to write down as difficult. I had made sure of that. The last thing I wanted to be right now was difficult as difficult would get me more attention, more scrutiny, more chances to screw up. Flat and correct and helpful was a shape that gave them exactly the data the file asked for and not one gram of the girl. If I could keep it up long enough to figure out what I was, or what I could do, then I’d call that a win.

I counted under the flat surface because I was more afraid than I was letting either of us see. One breath. Two. Three to the next question. I gave that room the smoothest, deadest, most cooperative hour of my life.

“That’s the hour,” I said, before he could be the one to dismiss me. I stood and gathered my notebook and left him sitting there with a full page of my nothing.

When I left the room I was surprised to find Kit at the top of the stairs, fire crawling lazy over his knuckles. He’d been avoiding me since the incident where they accused me of mimicking Vivienne’s power. He hadn’t just avoided me though, he’d practically disappeared. He’d only been seen in classes and training, never anywhere else. I suspected that he felt guilty because if he’d been in class he and I would have paired up and Vivienne wouldn’t have had the chance to try and put me on my ass.

“Since week one,” he said, his voice filled with bitterness.

“Put it out.”

“He’s been filing reports on you since week one.” The flame brightened as he said it, gold licking up between his fingers. “I heard. The whole thing. He touched you and took readings and wrote it all down, and now they want to use it to decide whether you get to stay.”

“Kit.” I put a hand near his, not on it, near it, close enough for the heat to sting. “Put the fire out before you hand them a reason.”

He looked down at his own hand as if he’d forgotten it was attached to him and as if the flame had grown there on its own while he wasn’t paying attention, which, with Kit, was entirely possible.

The fire died. “I want to put him through a wall,” he said. “And I want to be precise about this. Not metaphorically. Physically. I want to make a Vere-shaped dent in the actual stone.” The growl in his voice would have been almost comforting if it wasn’t also making my whole body tingly.

“Don’t.”

“You should be angrier.” He searched my face, looking for something that he didn’t find. “Billie. He reported on you to a committee one week at a time and you’re standing here telling me to put out a candle.”

“I am handling it.” I had to make my jaw unclench to get the words out, which he noticed, because Kit noticed the wrong things at the worst times.

“You’re doing the flat thing.”

My throat closed.

I hated him for having a name for it. I also, in a way I refused to look at directly, loved him a little for it, because being seen and being loved had gotten tangled up in me a long time ago and I’d never managed to separate the threads. Both of those were unacceptable, so I said the only thing I could, “I said I’m handling it.”

He stepped back like I’d shoved him, though I hadn’t, and that was somehow worse than if I had. We walked together for a while before Kit made some excuse and peeled off, probably to go and let his fire blaze somewhere more acceptable.

I went back to the library because I needed a place where anger could turn into something productive like research, which was the only useful thing anger had ever once done for me. Linden was still in the low gallery, sitting in the lamplight with his personal book and the ivy leaning down the stone toward him like it wanted to be near him too.

I sat and told him everything. I’d skirted around it the first time, and he let me because that man had more secrets than most, so he wasn’t about to poke at mine. But this time I told him all about Edie, the cards, the whole file and the scoring and the year-end clock ticking down toward remand.

He did not look surprised. That hurt more than I’d braced for. Instead there was only recognition, quiet and immediate, a man being handed a fact he’d already filed.

“You knew,” I said.

His silence answered before he could.

“Not about Edie. Fine. But the rest of it. The watching. The reports. The first-gen files. You knew.”

“I knew the pattern,” he said.

“And wrote it down.”

“Yes.”

The record was everything. Of course he had it in a book somewhere, my whole slow ruin, catalogued in whatever survived when the Fenwick archive didn’t burn. I almost laughed, but it would have come out with an edge I didn’t mean, so I pressed my lips shut and let it die in my chest with everything else.

“I handed you my secret for free,” I said. “I chose to. I told you that meant something.”