The morning air in Dunwick tasted of coal and river water and the particular, acrid sweetness of a city that had been burning things since before the current century and had no plans to stop. The streets were already full, vendors muscling handcarts through gaps that weren't wide enough, factory workers moving in loose, grey-faced columns toward the mills, newsboys staking out their corners with the territorial precision of nesting birds.

  "So," Alice said, scanning the street for a vacant cab, her eyes performing the rapid, dismissive triage of someone who had spent a lifetime assessing vehicles and finding them wanting. "This brother. Thomas. He's coming this afternoon?"

  "Straight from the station," Florence confirmed, half-skipping to match Alice's stride. The navy dress was slightly too long and the hem caught her boot on every third step, a problem she was solving through a combination of determination and short, undignified hops. "He said he'd be done by mid-afternoon."

  "And what is he like? You've mentioned him approximately forty times since we met, but the details have been limited to his taste in pies and his willingness to fund examinations."

  Florence's expression did the thing it always did when she talked about Thomas, a softening, a warming, as though the subject itself were a fire she was sitting near.

  "He's wonderful," she said. Then, with the corrective instinct of someone who loved a person well enough to see them clearly: "He's also a disaster. He's brilliant, genuinely brilliant, and he picks things up faster than anyone I've ever met, but he has no sense of self-preservation and absolutely no awareness of his surroundings. He's the sort of person who could track a criminal across three districts and then walk into a lamppost because he was thinking about the case. He once forgot to eat for two days during an investigation and only noticed because he fainted in the filing room."

  "Charming. And this man is in law enforcement?"

  "He's a policeman." Florence said it with a mixture of pride and the particular, low-grade anxiety of a sibling who had spent years watching someone she loved do something dangerous and pretending she wasn't worried. "A beat cop, mostly. Patrols, reports, that sort of thing. He doesn't talk about the details much. I think he's trying not to frighten me."

  Alice whistled, a sharp, two-fingered note that cut through the street noise and brought a hansom cab swerving toward the curb with the trained obedience of a dog responding to its name. Florence flinched.

  "An oblivious policeman," Alice said, pulling the cab door open. The words carried a note of genuine, unguarded satisfaction, as though Florence had just informed her that the lock on a door she'd been worried about was, in fact, broken. "That is the very best kind."

  Florence climbed in first. Alice followed, settling into the worn leather of the bench with a posture that managed to convey ownership of the vehicle despite having rented it thirty seconds ago.

  "Government District," Alice told the driver through the hatch. "The Registry."

  The city changed as they moved deeper into it.

  The transition was not subtle. The narrow, cluttered streets of the residential quarter, where the buildings leaned toward each other like drunks sharing a confidence and the sky was a thin strip of grey between the rooflines, fell away, and in their place rose something deliberate. The avenues widened. The cobblestones gave way to paved granite, smooth and pale, and the buildings on either side grew taller and whiter and more certain of themselves, their facades carved from stone that had been chosen to communicate permanence rather than warmth.

  "That," Alice said, pointing through the window as the cab slowed, "is the Registry."

  It was a squat building with heavy columns and a flight of marble steps leading to a pair of brass-handled doors. It was not ugly, exactly, but it was aggressively unremarkable, designed to project stability and inspire precisely no emotion whatsoever. It looked like the kind of building that had been created by a committee whose brief was trustworthy and whose budget had not extended to interesting.

  "And that," Alice continued, her finger drifting to the right, "is the Headquarters of the Department of Arcane Affairs."

  The building next to the Registry was a different species entirely. It was tall, dark, constructed from black iron and stone that absorbed the morning light rather than reflecting it. Banners hung from the upper floors. Heavy fabric bearing the silver eye insignia, the emblem of the D.A.A., the motif that appeared on badges and warrants and, presumably, the last thing a number of rogue mages had ever seen. The architecture did not say trustworthy. The architecture said authority, and possibly compliance, and almost certainly do not test us.

  Florence looked at the two buildings. She looked at the gap between them, which was approximately six feet of paved walkway.

  "They're neighbours," she said.

  "Neighbours is generous. They share a wall. If you fail the registration, or if something about your results raises a flag, they don't need to arrange transport. They open a door." Alice held her gaze. "A connecting door, Florence. Between the clerk who stamps your card and the department that investigates anomalous mages. That is the architectural equivalent of building a hospital next to a cemetery for efficiency."

  The cab stopped. Alice paid the driver. They stepped onto the curb.

  The fountain was in the centre of the small plaza between the two buildings, a stone basin with a bronze figure of a woman holding a set of scales, the water falling from each pan in thin, uneven streams. Alice positioned herself beside it and pulled Florence close by the elbow.

  "Last time," Alice said, her voice low, her mouth close to Florence's ear. "Spontaneous awakening. You had a fever. You noticed something small and strange, like blood moving on its own, a cut that closed too quickly. You don't know what it means. You have never been in a fight. You have never cast a spell. You have never seen anyone die. You are a girl from the countryside who is confused and a little frightened and has come to the Registry because she doesn't know what else to do."

  "Blank slate," Florence said.

  "Blank slate." Alice released her arm. "Go. I'll be here."

  Florence looked at the marble steps. They were wide, white, and very tall, and she felt very small at the bottom of them.

  She went up.

  The interior of the Registry smelled of dry paper and old ink and the faintly metallic tang of government. It was a large, open room, with high ceilings, pale walls, and rows of wooden counters behind which clerks sat in varying states of industriousness and ennui. The light came from tall windows set high in the walls, falling in broad, dusty shafts that illuminated the motes drifting through the air with a slowness that suggested even the dust in this building was required to follow protocol.

  Florence found the counter marked NEW REGISTRATIONS.

  The clerk behind it was a man who appeared to have been constructed from the same materials as the building—pale, dry, angular, his skin carrying the particular parchment quality of someone whose relationship with sunlight was historical rather than ongoing. His spectacles were thick enough to distort his eyes into something slightly aquatic, and his pen moved across the page in front of him with the autonomous rhythm of a hand that had been filling in forms since before Florence was born and fully intended to be filling in forms long after she was gone.

  He did not look up.

  "Name."

  "Florence." Her voice came out thin. She cleared her throat. "Florence Grace Bannerman."

  The pen scratched. "Age."

  "Seventeen."

  "Origin."

  "Briar's Crossing. Just outside Dunwick. The eastern county."

  The pen paused. The clerk looked up, peering over the tops of his spectacles with an expression that managed to convey, in a single glance, that he had heard every possible variation of the sentence he was about to hear and had been unimpressed by all of them.

  "Reason for registration."

  "Newly awakened, sir. It happened a few days ago."

  "The fever story, I assume." He said it the way a man might say rain again, or mutton for dinner—with the weary, bone-deep resignation of someone encountering the expected for the thousandth time. "Woke up hot. Something strange happened. Tea boiled, water moved, a draught came from nowhere. Something along those lines."

  Florence nodded, mute.

  The clerk sighed. He gestured to the brass stand at the end of the counter. Florence had been trying not to look at it, in the way people tried not to look at things they were afraid of, and the effort had made her aware of nothing else in the room.

  The Resonator sat on a cushion of dark velvet. It was a sphere of clear crystal, slightly larger than an apple, and it was pulsing, a faint, rhythmic white light that expanded and contracted at the tempo of a resting heartbeat. It looked alive. It looked like something that was waiting.

  "Hand on the glass," the clerk said. "Palm flat. Full contact. And for the love of the Eternal Lord, don't fidget. The last boy who fidgeted cracked a Resonator worth more than his parents' house."

  Florence reached out.

  Her fingers made contact with the surface, and the glass was cool, cooler than she expected, cooler than the room, carrying a chill that seemed to originate from somewhere deeper than temperature. She pressed her palm flat.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  For a second, nothing happened.

  Then she felt it.

  It began in her hand, a pulling sensation, gentle but insistent, as though something inside the sphere had reached through the glass and taken hold of a thread that ran from her palm to the centre of her chest. The pull travelled up her arm in a slow, cold wave, moving against the direction of her blood, settling into her ribs, her lungs, the space behind her sternum where she had never been aware of anything existing until something reached in and touched it.

  The sphere drew from her. Not painfully. Not violently. It was a sip, a single, measured intake, like a physician taking a sample. But what it took was not blood, and the vessel it drew from was not a vein. It felt like the glass was tasting something essential, something she had not known she possessed, and the absence of it, even for the fraction of a second the machine held it, left her feeling lighter in a way that had nothing to do with weight.

  The crystal flared.

  The white light did not turn orange. It did not turn blue or green or the pale, neutral grey that Florence had been hoping for, the colour of something boring, something unremarkable, something that would not require explanation.

  It turned red.

  Deep, rich, saturated crimson, the colour of blood that had just left the body, dark and vital and unmistakable. The light swirled inside the sphere like ink dropped into water, thick and viscous, curling against the glass in slow, heavy spirals that caught the dusty light from the windows and threw it back in shades of arterial scarlet.

  The clerk leaned forward.

  He adjusted his spectacles. He leaned closer. He looked at the sphere, then at Florence, then back at the sphere, and the professional boredom that had characterised his entire demeanour since she'd approached the counter underwent a visible recalibration.

  "Well now," he murmured. "That's not something you see every Monday."

  "Is it bad?" Florence pulled her hand back. The red light faded slowly, the crimson draining from the glass like water from a basin, leaving the sphere clear and pulsing its neutral white.

  "Bad? No." The clerk was already reaching for a stamp and a fresh card. "Rare." He pressed the stamp down with the decisive authority of a man exercising the only real power his position afforded him. "Sanguimancy. Blood affinity."

  He began to write. His handwriting, Florence noticed, was beautiful, precise, elegant, each letter formed with the care of someone who understood that the documents he produced would outlast him and considered this a form of legacy.

  "Usually runs in the old families," he continued, the pen moving without pause. "Hereditary lines, noble houses, the kind of bloodlines that keep genealogists employed. Occasionally it shows up as a mutation in common stock. No offence."

  "None taken," Florence said, which was not entirely true.

  "So what’s a girl from Briar's Crossing planning to do with blood magic? Joining the butchers' guild?"

  "I'm going to the University. To study medicine."

  The pen stopped. The clerk looked up, and something in his expression shifted—a softening, barely perceptible, the slight thaw of a man whose professional armour had been momentarily pierced by something he hadn't expected to find on a Monday morning.

  "A doctor." He regarded her for a moment. "Well. That makes a certain amount of sense. You'll have an advantage with haemorrhages that most surgeons would commit crimes for. If you can learn the control." He resumed writing. "Big if."

  He slid the card across the counter.

  The ink was still wet, gleaming under the overhead light. Florence read it, and each word landed with the weight of something that could not be taken back.

  NAME: Florence G. Bannerman TIER: 6 (Novice) AFFINITY: Sanguimancy (Primary) STATUS: Verified

  "You are now an authorised mage of the Empire," the clerk said. The words had the cadence of a sentence that had been spoken ten thousand times and would be spoken ten thousand more, rehearsed and automatic, but carrying, beneath the routine, the residual gravity of the thing it meant. "This card grants you the right to practise your craft freely, within the limits of Imperial law."

  He tapped the card with one bony finger.

  "However. Do not mistake freedom for anonymity. You are now in the Grid."

  "The Grid?"

  "The detection lattice. It runs beneath the city, physically, magically, and structurally. It senses mana the way a spider senses vibration in its web. Every spell you cast within the walls of Dunwick, no matter how small, is logged. Recorded. Tied to the signature that machine just read from your hand."

  Florence looked at the card. The ink was drying. It looked less like a permit and more like a leash.

  "Every spell?"

  "In theory." The clerk removed his spectacles and cleaned them on his sleeve, a gesture that seemed less about the spectacles and more about giving himself a reason to look somewhere other than at the expression on her face. "In practice, we haven't the manpower to monitor every student who lights a candle or boils a kettle. The Grid watches for spikes. Unregistered signatures. Large-scale detonations. Anomalies. Think of it as a net with a very wide mesh. The small fish swim through. It's the large ones that get caught."

  He replaced his spectacles. His eyes, magnified behind the thick lenses, held hers with a directness that the rest of his manner had not prepared her for.

  "A word of advice, Miss Bannerman. Free of charge, which I assure you is not my habit." He lowered his voice, not conspiratorially, but with the quiet emphasis of a man who meant what he was about to say and wanted it heard. "Blood magic makes people nervous. It has a history—a long one, and not a gentle one—and the people who practise it have a reputation that you will inherit whether you've earned it or not. Keep your permit on you. Keep your nose clean. If the occultists at the University come knocking with invitations to midnight rituals and promises of hidden knowledge, you close the door. Stick to medicine. It's the only branch of sanguimancy that nobody has a reason to fear."

  Florence took the card. She held it carefully, the way she had held the acceptance letter, except this time the thing she was holding was real and present and warm from the clerk's hand.

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Don't thank me. I stamped a card. What you do with it is your problem." He was already reaching for the next blank form, his attention returning to the stack of paper that constituted his life's work. "Next."

  The sunlight outside was an assault after the muted grey of the Registry interior. Florence stood on the marble steps, blinking, the permit in her hand, her legs carrying a fine, persistent tremor that she could not entirely attribute to the stairs.

  Alice was sitting on the rim of the fountain. She had been watching the pigeons, and from the particular angle of her posture, shoulders drawn back, chin slightly lowered, eyes tracking the nearest bird with the focused intensity of a woman who had identified an adversary, she appeared to be losing.

  She stood as Florence approached.

  "Well?"

  Florence held out the card. Alice took it. Her eyes moved across the text in a single, rapid sweep, the trained reading speed of someone who had grown up in a household where documents were currency and the ability to parse them quickly was a survival skill.

  Her shoulders dropped. It was a small motion, an inch, perhaps less, but on Alice, whose posture was a permanent act of architectural defiance against the concept of relaxation, it was the equivalent of a long exhale.

  "Sanguimancy," she read. "Verified. Tier 6. One affinity." She turned the card over, checked the back—blank—and turned it back. "One affinity. Just the blood."

  "He said it was rare," Florence offered.

  "It is rare. And it's also exactly what we wanted." Alice handed the card back, and for a moment the relief sat openly on her face before the habitual architecture reassembled over it. "The reinforcement didn't register. Whatever your skin did in that cabin, the Resonator didn't see it."

  Florence looked at the card. One affinity. One line. Clean, simple, unremarkable in every way that mattered to a government clerk with a stamp and a quota.

  "That's good," Florence said. "Isn't it?"

  "It's very good. It means no flags, no secondary affinity on file, no clerk calling next door to report an anomalous reading." Alice paused. The relief was settling, and beneath it, something else was surfacing—a quieter thing, more cautious, the expression of a mind that had gotten the answer it wanted and was now troubled by the question of why it had gotten it. "It's also strange."

  "Strange how?"

  "Resonators don't miss things. They're calibrated to detect any mana-based signature above background noise, and what you did in that cabin was not background noise. A shotgun blast flattened against your chest. That's high-grade physical reinforcement. It should have left a signature."

  She tapped her chin, once, twice, then stopped, and the hand dropped to her side with the deliberate finality of someone choosing not to pull a thread.

  "But it didn't. And I am not going to walk you back in there and ask them to run it again so we can find out why. The paper is stamped. You are registered. You are legal. If the Resonator decided to be conveniently blind today, I am not in the business of correcting government equipment."

  She plucked the card from Florence's hand, tucked it into the breast pocket of Florence's dress, and patted it flat.

  "Keep it on you. At all times. That card is your proof of existence in this city. Lose it and you're a ghost, and ghosts get arrested."

  Florence pressed her hand over the pocket. She could feel the card beneath the fabric, thin and stiff, carrying a weight that had nothing to do with paper.

  "University?" she said.

  "University." Alice was already scanning the street for a cab. "But this time, you give the address."

  A hansom cab appeared at the far end of the avenue, its driver slouched on the box, the horse moving with the resigned, mechanical plod of an animal that had made this circuit a thousand times and had stopped expecting the route to change.

  Alice stepped to the curb and raised her hand. The cab angled toward them. She opened the door, held it, and gestured Florence forward.

  Florence straightened. She tugged the collar of the navy dress, squared her shoulders, and turned to the driver.

  "The University District," she said. Her voice was clear. "Admissions Hall. Wicker Street."

  The driver flicked the reins. The cab lurched forward, pulling away from the curb, the iron-shod wheels ringing against the granite as it swung into the avenue and joined the current of the city's traffic.

  Neither girl looked back.

  Neither girl saw the heavy iron doors of the D.A.A. headquarters swing open behind them.

  Thomas Bannerman stepped into the late morning light and immediately regretted not bringing his hat.

  The sun was higher than he expected, a bright, assertive disc that sat above the Government District roofline and made the white granite of the surrounding buildings glare in a way that punished unshielded eyes. He squinted, reached up, loosened the high collar of his leather trench coat. The silver insignia on his lapel caught the light and threw it back in a brief, sharp flash.

  He stood on the steps for a moment. The plaza was busy, with clerks crossing between buildings, a constable directing a delivery cart, and a pair of women climbing into a cab at the far end of the avenue. Routine. The machinery of the district turning over, the gears meshing, the city doing what the city did.

  Six months.

  The thought arrived with a warmth that his professional posture was not designed to contain. Six months of letters. Hers were long and detailed and full of questions about the city, while his were shorter and less frequent and full of answers that he worried were inadequate. She would be at Mrs. Gable's by now. Probably pacing. Probably panicking about something she had no reason to panic about, because Florence's gift was competence and Florence's curse was the inability to believe in it.

  He smiled. It happened on its own, bypassing the usual filters, the expression of a man who had spent the morning reading reports about missing travellers and terrorist cells and was now allowing himself five seconds of something uncomplicated.

  She's going to love it here. She's going to hate the smog and love everything else. She'll have the campus memorised in a week and friends in two and she'll be telling me about professors I've never heard of and using words I don't understand, and it'll be the best thing that's happened to me since the promotion.

  He adjusted his gloves. Stepped down to the pavement.

  A flicker of something passed through him—a tightness, brief, located somewhere behind his sternum. Not pain. Not premonition. Just the residual unease of a man who had spent the morning standing over a crater on the King's Road, holding a ruined acceptance letter in his gloved hands, thinking about odds and coincidences and the particular cruelty of roads that led to cities full of people who never arrived.

  He shook his head. Physically dispelled it. The odds were nothing. Hundreds of students. Dozens of carriages. Florence was fine. Florence was at Mrs. Gable's, drinking tea and worrying about her uniform fittings, and the unease was just the tax his profession levied on every good feeling it allowed him to have.

  He flagged a cab. The driver straightened at the sight of the insignia.

  "Where to, sir?"

  "Baker Street," Thomas said, stepping in. "Mrs. Gable's Boarding House."

  The door closed. The cab pulled away, turning east, heading toward the residential quarter where his sister was waiting.

  Behind him, the plaza settled back into its routine. The fountain murmured. The clerks crossed and recrossed. The granite gleamed in the sun. And in the space where two girls had stood five minutes ago, there was nothing but pavement, and pigeons, and the faint, lingering warmth of a morning that had already moved on.