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“It does.”

“Just not enough for you to lift a hand.”

“If I had spoken,” he said, very low, and his hand went flat on the untitled book the way a man put his hand on something he was afraid would be taken, “there would be a Fenwick in the file within the week, and a blank space where the archive used to be, and no one left who remembers there were others at all. That is not an excuse.”

“People aren’t a ledger you balance by keeping quiet,” I said, trying to keep the sadness from my voice.

“I know.”

“Then say something.”

“To who?” He looked up, and there was something raw under the calm, worn thin at last. “Every ear in this school reports to someone else. You know that. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve known it since the beginning.”

He was right, but being right did not make it better. Not at that moment. So I left.

When I got back to my room I decided to write Edie a letter. The feelings I’d had festering in my chest since reading my file needed to go somewhere and she was one of the people I was the most frustrated with and hurt by, so she could bear the brunt of my anger.

I changed out of my robe and uniform into some of my own clothes, ones I hardly ever wore these days as there was no time to lounge about. Once I was in my comfy sweater and pajama pants I sat on the floor of my room and balanced the notebook on my knee. It was the same way I’d sat on the floor of the library on Calder Street a hundred times, and for a while I just held the pen and let my mind wander. I thought about the orange cleaner she used every afternoon on the checkout desk, and how it had smelled like the one clean, reliable thing in my whole childhood.

I told her I’d seen the contractor line and that the word paid was still sitting in my mouth like a pill I couldn’t swallow. I asked her whether she’d understood what the cards were, whether all those years of saved books and kindness were just a long slow setting of the hook, or whether she’d been another tool used the same as me. I got as far as one clean question, the only one that mattered.

Did you know what they would do with me?

Then I stopped, because there was no right answer, nothing that would give me back what had been tainted, so I folded the letter in half and then in half again and pushed it down to the bottom of my duffel, under my mother’s sewing kit, next to the note that said just in case. Between Edie and Cormac I was starting to think that trust was an overrated concept. Maybe it would be better if I didn’t rely on anyone at all.

TWENTY-FIVE

Billie

The next day in class I could feel people looking at me and I had no doubt that my meeting had been discussed far and wide. They probably even knew the result and were just waiting for the clock to run out. The worst was when I could feel Kit or Linden glancing at me. Our fragile relationships had shifted and part of it was my fault because I didn’t trust them as much as I used to and I wasn’t sure how to, or if I wanted to, get back to the way it had been.

So I sat and listened even more intently than usual in class. Professor Sallow was going over bonds. He taught the concept of bonds like chemistry or physics, but it wasn’t that at all, and that was the first thing about it that made me sit up.

Everything else at Æscholt got taught like scripture. There was no questioning, only the rules and the powers. The taxonomy was handed down whole. The Orders recited like the names of saints. Who was I to question the way things were and had, apparently, always been done?

Today Sallow was actually drawing the diagrams, not just using the light power he seemed to have, which I thought was strange, but no one had bothered to explain to me if there were any limits to power or if someone could use it too frequently and suffer consequences because of it. Maybe it got harder to use power as someone got older? I honestly had no idea, though I was probably the only one.

The first diagram was two dots and a line, then a third dot pulling the line into a triangle. He talked about load and tension and current like a man explaining a bridge to people who’d been told their whole lives that bridges were a kind of prayer.

The hall smelled of chalk dust and under it the wet wool of two hundred students who’d come in out of drizzle. I sat where I always sat, back row on the end nearest the rear door.

My gaze snapped up from my notes when Sallow said, “Bonds between power users are for life.” He pointed to the diagram as he talked, tapping the two dots. “Two is unstable. Two powers and nothing between them. They have only each other to carry the current, and the current wants to move. So a pair runs hot. It burns through. It tears.” He let the chalk hover. “A bond of two cannot last. There is nothing in it to hold the load. Frequently, they feed off one another and wear each other out.”

When he tapped the third dot, the triangle sat there on the slate looking settled, solid, even to me.

“Three is the best stable geometry.” He said it the way he said all his best lines, slow, like he was letting us in on the architecture of the world. “Two powers, and a third point that holds them in tension. That gives the current somewhere to go that isn’t straight through either of them. A triad, coalesced through a shared trial, sealed for life.”

An excited murmur went through the room and I felt like I was missing part of what he was talking about.

He set the chalk down and dusted his hands. “Three is not a tradition, children. I know you have been raised to hear it as one.” A dry pause, while a few of the legacy kids shifted because he’d caught them out. “Three is the smallest shape that does not collapse under its own weight. It is the magic number because it is the only number that holds.”

Around me pencils moved, two hundred people writing down a thing they already believed, the way someone copied out a prayer they’d said since they were small. I’d watched a whole church do that once at my gran’s funeral, mouths moving on words nobody in the room had chosen in a hundred years, just saying them because they were expected. This was the same, a room full of people certain of a thing they had never once tested because nobody they trusted had ever tested it in front of them.

I wrote it down too, and under it, smaller, the question I’d been wondering the whole morning. Then I put my hand up and asked it out loud.

“Has a bond ever taken more?” I asked. “Ever. In any record.”

“No.”