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“Through you.” Sallow set the chalk down against the chalkboard. “There is a difference.”

“Yeah.” Kit’s voice had gone flat in a way I’d only heard it go once, when he described what happened to his father. “Yeah, I know there’s a difference.”

Kit believed, in the place under the charm, that he was a disaster other people survived. And they were going to put him alone in a fire and make him survive being the disaster, with no one in range to save and no one in range to hurt. It may have sounded like mercy, but it was the precise opposite, because the one thing he would never let him believe was that he was allowed to come out the other side of his own fire alive. He would burn himself alive before he allowed himself to come out of that trial unscathed.

He swallowed hard and covered it the way he covered everything, but the grin came up too wide. “Going first,” he said. “I’ll take that. First is the privilege of the most talented, everyone knows that, it’s why they always put the best one out front.”

“And me?” I said, because somebody had to ask, and asking was mine. “Where am I when he’s in there alone?”

“You are nowhere near it.” Sallow said it like the kindest line in the briefing. “The solo ordeal is solitary by design, Miss Lane. You will wait for your own part. No candidate enters another’s fire. The structure does not allow for it.” He came close to a smile.

“And if something goes wrong in there. Who goes in for him?”

“Nothing goes in. That is what alone means.” He gathered the chalk and the slate. “There is an adjudicator. There is a ward around the whole thing. The structure is sound. It has been sound for a very long time.”

“What’s the ward?”

He paused, and the pause was the answer before the words were. “A containment. The trial fire is sealed. If a candidate cannot complete the ordeal, the fire is brought down and the candidate is recovered, if recovery is possible. The ward is the mechanism by which we end a thing that should be ended.”

“If recovery is possible? You mean he could die?”

“I said what I said, Miss Lane.”

“You did.” I kept my voice as dry as his. “I notice when people say exactly what they said and not one word past it. It’s usually the words past it that matter the most.”

Beside me Linden had gone very still in the careful way he went still when he was filing something, and Kit hadn’t moved at all, which was the loudest thing in the room.

“The second movement.” I made myself sound bored about it. “The unified act. You said the braid has to hold. What happens to the strands if it doesn’t.”

“That,” Sallow said, “is not a question I am going to answer in a briefing.” And he turned back to the slate, which was the third time in ten minutes he’d ended a sentence by turning away from us, and I’d long since stopped believing a man like Sallow turned away from anything by accident. He turned away because he didn’t want to reveal anything with just his face.

I sat very still and tried to read the room. Sallow wouldn’t look at us, the pace of the fast-track, the kindness in Sallow’s voice when he told me I’d be nowhere near the fire they meant to put Kit alone inside.

The school had flagged an anomaly for the one rite where an anomaly could fail in public and legally, where a failed candidate was an acceptable loss and nobody had to sign anything ugly afterward. I read all of it, and behind my flat bored face I started to plan to help Kit. Sallow continued to talk, but I couldn’t listen since none of it mattered if Kit burned himself alive.

Kit found me after, on the cold steps where he’d told me about the fire that took his father. He sat next to me with his hands hanging between his knees and the night coming down, the building’s lights going off one by one behind us, and he didn’t reach for a single joke.

“It’s funny.” He rubbed a thumb over his knuckles where the flame usually went. “Everyone thinks the fire’s the hard part.” He turned a small flame over his knuckles, gold, slow, not for anyone, the kind he only made when he forgot to be watched. “The fire’s the easy part. I’ve been on fire since I was ten.” The little flame rolled across his hand before it went out. “The hard part is they want me to do it alone.”

“You won’t—” I caught it, bit it back, started over. “I doubt you’ve ever done anything alone in your life. You don’t know how. You’ll be terrible at it.”

That got the ghost of a real laugh out of him. “There she is.”

“I mean it. You’re the worst lone wolf I’ve ever met. You can’t even eat alone, you bring your plate to wherever I am.”

“That’s strategy. You always have the better bread.”

“It’s not a strategy. It’s that you don’t like the quiet, because the quiet is when the thing in your head gets loud,” I made it sound light, though I meant every word of it. “Alone is the one drill you’ve never run, Kit. That’s all this is. A drill you haven’t run.”

“Comforting.”

“I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m just trying to tell you it’s a drill you don’t have experience with, that’s all. And you survive drills.”

The laugh went out of him as fast as it had come, and he looked out at the dark yard, at the last of the lights going down. “My father was in a fire alone.” He said it to the dark yard and not to me. “Not a trial. Just a house, and a fire, and him. Everybody else got out. I got out. He stayed in for a reason I’ve never been able to make sense of, and the official version is the timbers, and the version I believe is that he didn’t think he was allowed to come out.” He turned his hand over, empty now, no flame in it. “And now they want me to stand in a fire alone and prove I’m allowed to come out of it. You see why that’s the part that’s funny.”

“It’s not funny.”

“No.” He nearly smiled. “It really isn’t.”