Florence was not fine.

  She had been pacing the length of the attic room for eleven minutes. Alice had counted because counting was preferable to listening, and the floorboards were registering their objection with every pass. The pine was old, dry, warped by decades of Dunwick damp, and it groaned beneath Florence's boots with the arthritic protest of wood that had not been asked to bear this kind of treatment and resented the imposition.

  Step, step, turn. Step, step, turn. The pattern was metronomic. Florence moved the way people moved when the thing they were afraid of was inside them rather than in front of them. They moved fast and directionless, burning fuel for the sake of burning it.

  The morning light came through the single window in a narrow, dust-thickened column that bisected the room at an angle, catching the slow rotation of particles in the stale air. It fell across Alice's bed, across Alice's face, and across Alice's increasingly homicidal disposition.

  "I'm ruined," Florence said. She was gripping handfuls of her own hair with both fists, the knuckles white, the gesture somewhere between self-comfort and self-punishment. "I haven't even started and I'm already finished. They're going to turn me away at the door."

  From beneath a mound of patchwork quilts on the opposite bed, a sound emerged. It was not a word. It was the low, guttural vibration of a creature that had been buried alive and was considering its options.

  "Florence." Alice's voice was muffled by the pillow, thick with sleep and the particular menace of someone who had been woken before their body had authorised the transition. "If you cross this room one more time, I am going to set this mattress on fire. I want you to understand that I am not speaking figuratively. I will burn this bed, this room, and both of us, and I will consider it a mercy."

  "The letter, Alice." Florence stopped at the foot of Alice's bed, her hands falling to her sides, her eyes wide and bright with the specific shine that preceded tears. "The acceptance letter. It was in the satchel. It's gone. It's in a crater on the King's Road or it's in a swamp or it's in that cabin, and it doesn't matter which because it's not here."

  Alice pushed herself up on one elbow. Her hair, black, sharp-cut, and designed for precision, had spent the night conducting an experiment in alternative geometries, and the result bore no resemblance to the sleek, controlled line she normally presented to the world. She blinked at the daylight with the offended squint of someone who considered the sun a personal inconvenience.

  "The letter," Alice repeated. "You woke me for the letter."

  "Term starts next week. You have to present the acceptance letter to collect your student papers. Without it, I'm nobody. I'm a girl who wandered in off the street." Florence's voice was climbing, the words tumbling over each other in the particular rhythm of a panic that had been building all night and was now finding its stride. "Thomas paid for the tuition. He paid for the tutoring. Three attempts at the entrance examinations, Alice, and he funded every single one, and I lost the proof that any of it happened because I couldn't hold onto a bag—"

  She sat down on the edge of her own bed. The descent was sudden and graceless, less sitting and more the controlled collapse of someone whose legs had decided to stop participating. She pressed her hands over her face.

  "They'll send me home. I'll have to go back to Briar's Crossing and tell everyone that I failed because of paperwork."

  Alice regarded her.

  The girl sitting across from her was wearing a navy wool dress purchased late last night from a second-hand shop in the lower commercial district, paid for with silver taken from a dead man's belt. The dress was simple, respectable, and clean. The boots were new. It was the one indulgence Alice had insisted on, because you could survive bad clothing but you could not survive bad shoes. Florence looked, from the neck down, like a perfectly presentable young woman arriving in the city to begin her studies.

  From the neck up, she looked like she was attending her own funeral.

  "Florence." Alice swung her legs out of bed. The floor was cold. She ignored it. "Look at me."

  Florence's hands came down. Her eyes were red-rimmed, wet, and miserable.

  "You are not going back to Briar's Crossing," Alice said. "You are not going back to the bakery. You are not ruined. What you are is a person who has encountered the first law of institutions, which is that institutions do not trust the things they give you to carry."

  Florence blinked. "What?"

  Alice stood. She crossed to the cracked porcelain washbasin on the dresser, poured water from the chipped pitcher, and splashed her face. The water was the temperature of spite. She hissed through her teeth, reached for the rough towel hanging from the hook, and scrubbed until sensation returned.

  "Think," Alice said, her voice muffled by the towel. "The University of Dunwick is three hundred years old. It has survived wars, plagues, two changes of dynasty, and an incident in 1194 involving a fire in the theology department that nobody talks about. Do you honestly believe that an institution of that calibre and that age relies on individual pieces of paper carried by individual students across muddy, bandit-infested roads?"

  She lowered the towel. Her face was pink from the cold water, and her expression had settled into the particular configuration it adopted when she was about to dismantle a problem. It was sharp, focused, and faintly impatient with the problem for existing.

  "They have a ledger, Florence. A Master Ledger. A very large book in which a very dull man with excellent penmanship has written the name of every student who passed the entrance examinations. Your name is in that book. It has been in that book since the results were confirmed. The letter was a courtesy, a formality sent to inform you of something the University already knows. Losing it is an inconvenience. It is not a catastrophe."

  Florence was sitting very still. The tears had paused, suspended, the way weather sometimes paused between one kind of storm and another.

  "But if I walk in and say I lost it—"

  "You don't."

  "—they'll think I'm careless, or worse, they'll think I'm lying, because if I never received the letter then how would I know I'd been accepted, and they'll think I'm someone trying to—"

  "Florence." Alice held up one hand. "Stop. You're building a tower out of problems that don't exist yet. Sit there, breathe, and let me give you the answer before you invent six more questions."

  Florence sat. She breathed. The breathing was uneven, but it was breathing, and Alice accepted it as sufficient.

  "You tell them the truth," Alice said. "Most of it. You never received the official packet. The post from the countryside is unreliable. This is a fact that every clerk in every government building in Dunwick has experienced personally, and the envelope never arrived. However. Your brother, Thomas, who lives in the city and works for the government, checked the public results list posted at the University gates. He wrote to you with the good news. You came on his word."

  She paused, letting the shape of the story settle.

  "It puts the failure on the postal service, which bureaucrats love because it confirms their belief that every other branch of government is incompetent. It makes you look trusting, a girl who packed her bags on her brother's say-so, which is charming. It makes Thomas look responsible, which he presumably is. And it requires the clerk to do nothing more difficult than opening the ledger and confirming what they already know."

  Florence was staring at her. The panic was still there, but it had been joined by something else. It was a cautious, incredulous relief, the expression of someone watching a knot untangle that they had been certain was permanent.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  "That works," Florence said. Her voice was smaller now, but steadier. "The public results list. Thomas wrote to me. I never received the packet."

  "It works because it's simple, and it's mostly true, and you are a terrible liar, Florence, so the less fabrication involved, the better. Your face does things when you lie. Obvious things. We'll work on that later."

  Florence opened her mouth to protest, thought better of it, and closed it again. She picked up her boot and resumed lacing it, her fingers still trembling but moving with purpose now rather than agitation.

  "What about after?" Florence asked. "The Registry? You said last night that has to come first."

  Alice was dressing. She pulled on a high-collared black blouse that was plain, modest, and unremarkable. It was the kind of garment that existed to prevent people from forming an impression, and she buttoned it to the throat.

  "The Registry comes first," Alice confirmed. "Being an unregistered student is a clerical headache. Being an unregistered mage is a prison sentence. We handle the magic before we handle the enrolment."

  She stepped into a dark skirt, smoothed the front, and turned to examine the result in the small, foxed mirror above the dresser. The reflection that looked back at her was severe, colourless, and entirely forgettable. She looked like a governess between positions. Good.

  "Is it a test?" Florence asked. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with both boots laced, her hands clasped in her lap, the posture of a student preparing for an examination she hadn't revised for. "Will they make me cast something?"

  "Lord, no. If they asked unregistered mages to demonstrate in a government office, there wouldn't be a government office." Alice turned from the mirror. "They use a device. A Resonator. It's a sphere, usually glass or polished quartz, about the size of a large apple. You sit down. You put your hand on it. And it reads you."

  "Reads me how?"

  "It draws a small amount of mana from your core. You might feel it as a pulling sensation, a coolness, or something like having a sip of water taken from a cup you're holding. The device interprets the frequency and produces a result. Colour, mostly. Pyromancers turn it orange. Hydromancers, blue. So on."

  Florence was looking at her hands again. She turned them over, studying the palms, as though she might find the answer written there if she looked hard enough.

  "So it tells them what I am," Florence said.

  "It tells them your affinity. The discipline your mana gravitates toward naturally." Alice sat on the edge of her own bed, facing Florence, and something in her posture shifted—the arch impatience softening into something closer to instruction, the tone of someone who had grown up surrounded by this knowledge and was now translating it for an audience of one. "Magic isn't a set of boxes, Florence. It's not fire in one drawer and water in another. Technically, any mage can cast any spell. If I spent fifty years studying, I could probably learn to mend a bone or move a river. But I'd be dreadful at it. The mana cost would be enormous, the control would be poor, and the result would embarrass everyone involved."

  She held up her right hand. Between her fingers, a flame appeared. It was small, bright, steady, and the size of a candle's tip. It burned without fuel, without smoke, casting warm light across the space between the two beds and throwing Alice's shadow up the sloped wall behind her.

  "Fire is where my mana wants to go. It's the path of least resistance. Think of it as handedness. You can write with either, but one of them produces your actual handwriting and the other produces a crime against penmanship."

  She closed her fist. The flame vanished.

  "The Resonator identifies which hand is yours. Most mages have one affinity. Some develop a secondary aptitude later, once they've built enough depth, but a true dual primary is so rare it's essentially theoretical. People who claim to have two are usually lying, and the people who believe them are usually paying for the privilege."

  Alice looked at Florence. Her gaze was steady, direct, carrying a weight that the conversational tone did not.

  "Which brings us to the headache. You displayed two distinct disciplines in that cabin. The skin was physical reinforcement, some form of hardening that I can't easily classify. And the blood. That's sanguimancy." She let the word sit for a moment. "Those are not the same discipline. They are not even in the same family. If the Resonator picks up both, the clerk is going to have questions, and the kind of people who answer questions about anomalous mages carry badges and have institutional authority to make your life very complicated."

  Florence's hands had tightened in her lap. "What do I do?"

  "You sit down. You put your hand on the glass. And you pray that whatever happened in that cabin was messy enough that the Resonator only catches one thread." Alice paused. "If it catches the blood, and it probably will since sanguimancy tends to present strongly, then you're a blood mage, and that's your story. The reinforcement doesn't exist. It didn't happen. You have never, at any point, done anything unusual with your skin. Understood?"

  Florence nodded. The nod was small and tight, the motion of someone adding another secret to a stack that was already taller than she was comfortable carrying.

  "What about you?" Florence asked. "Don't you need to register?"

  "I was registered when I was six." Alice said it without inflection, a fact delivered with the same weight as a street address or a shoe size. "My biometrics and mana signature are in the Imperial archives. As long as I don't set anything on fire that can be traced to a named individual, I'm just another face."

  She reached for her satchel and checked its contents with a quick, practised hand. She felt the weight of the revolver beneath the spare scarf, the pouch of coins, and the ammunition, and then slung it over her shoulder.

  "Up," she said, crossing to Florence and reaching down to adjust the collar of the navy dress, buttoning it to the chin. The motion was brisk, impersonal, the gesture of someone preparing a presentation rather than comforting a friend. She tugged the fabric straight, checked the line of the shoulders, frowned at a crease near the cuff, and smoothed it flat with her thumb. "Fix your hair. You look like you slept in a hedge."

  "I slept in a boarding house."

  "The distinction is narrower than you'd think. Come on. We have clerks to charm and you need the practice."

  The stairs descended through the house in a narrow, creaking cascade that announced their passage to every floor they passed. The boards were old. They were older, Alice suspected, than most of the furniture and possibly some of the walls, and they protested each footfall with a vocabulary of groans and pops that made stealth a physical impossibility.

  The smell changed as they descended. The attic had been stale air and cold stone and the faint, dusty sweetness of old quilts. The ground floor was different. The ground floor was alive with floor wax and fried bacon and the warm, yeasty ghost of bread that had been baked recently and often. Beneath all of it was the clean, herbal note of dried lavender, tucked into corners and hung in small bunches from the door frames.

  Mrs. Gable appeared in the parlour doorway like a figure from a cuckoo clock. Round, aproned, precisely timed. She was built along the general lines of a teapot, with the centre of gravity to match, and she moved through her own house with the proprietary bustle of a woman who had opinions about dust and was not afraid to act on them.

  "Out so early, dears?" She was drying her hands on her apron, a process that appeared to be ongoing and possibly permanent. "You'll want breakfast before you go. I've got bacon on and there's porridge if you want it. The bread's yesterday's but it toasts well enough."

  "We really should—" Alice began.

  "Sit down, sit down. Five minutes won't kill your schedule. You're students, not soldiers."

  Alice opened her mouth to clarify that they were, in fact, neither, and that their schedule was dictated by the operating hours of a government Registry and the continued absence of law enforcement, and closed it again. Mrs. Gable had already disappeared into the kitchen, and the sound of plates being laid suggested that the discussion was over.

  They sat. The kitchen was small, warm, and clean in the way that only relentless, daily effort could produce. The bacon was good. The porridge was better, thick, salted, with a pat of butter melting into the centre. Florence ate with the concentrated, silent focus of someone who hadn't had a proper meal since a pie cart on the outskirts of the city the night before, and the food did more for her composure than Alice's logic had.

  "Florence, love," Mrs. Gable said, refilling the teapot with the casual efficiency of a woman for whom the preparation of tea was a background process that ran without conscious supervision. "When you see that brother of yours, you tell him Mrs. Gable says hello. And tell him he still owes me the rest of that story about the horse on Thimble Street. He left me on a cliffhanger last month and I've been stewing ever since."

  Florence smiled. It was the first expression that had reached her eyes since she'd woken up, and it transformed her face—the anxiety receding, the warmth surfacing, the girl from Briar's Crossing momentarily visible beneath the girl who had killed a man twelve hours ago.

  "He's coming by this afternoon," Florence said. "I'll tell him."

  "See that you do. I won't be fobbed off." Mrs. Gable turned her attention to Alice with the pleasant, unblinking directness of a woman who had been taking the measure of young people for longer than either of them had been alive. "And you, dear? Settling in all right? The attic's not much, but it's dry and the bed's honest."

  Alice, who had been in the process of calculating the fastest route from the table to the front door, recalibrated.

  "The room is perfectly adequate, Mrs. Gable. Thank you."

  "Adequate." Mrs. Gable repeated the word with the faint, knowing smile of a woman who had heard the word adequate used in that particular tone before and understood exactly what kind of household had produced it. "Well. That's something."

  Alice felt the back of her neck warm. She stood, collected her satchel, and delivered a nod that was polite in the way a period was polite. It ended the sentence.

  "We should go," Alice said, holding the front door open for Florence. "Thank you for breakfast."

  "Any time, dear. Any time."

  The door closed behind them. Baker Street opened ahead with cobblestones, cart traffic, and the distant clatter of the city waking up. The air smelled of coal smoke and damp stone and the particular, indefinable compound of ten thousand lives being lived in close proximity.

  Florence took a breath. She squared her shoulders inside the navy dress, tugged the collar straight, and looked at Alice.

  "Registry first," she said.

  "Registry first," Alice confirmed.

  They stepped off the curb and into the current of the city.