The hansom cab smelled of pipe tobacco and old leather, which was an improvement over the last enclosed space they'd shared. The suspension was poor. Every cobblestone announced itself through the bench, and the wheels set up a rattling din against the stone that made conversation feel like something conducted across a battlefield.

  Alice sat by the window. The city was thickening around them. Terraced townhouses giving way to taller fa?ades with wrought-iron balconies and gas lamps standing dark in their brackets, waiting for dusk to justify them. The architecture had opinions about itself the deeper they went. Everything was corniced and columned and ostentatiously symmetrical, the kind of district that wanted you to know it had been designed by someone who charged by the hour.

  She glanced sideways.

  Florence was clutching her satchel with both hands, the knuckles bone-white, the tendons standing out along the backs of her wrists. The Imperial Magus Permit was tucked inside, Alice had watched her check three times since they'd left the Registry, but the girl's face had the fixed, inward look of someone rehearsing their own execution.

  "You're doing it again," Alice said.

  Florence startled. "Doing what?"

  "Thinking. Out loud, practically. I can hear the gears from here." Alice shifted against the squabs, drawing one knee up. "You're running the script, aren't you. Going over it line by line, word-perfect, making sure you've memorised the lie."

  Florence's sheepish silence was confirmation enough.

  "Stop that," Alice said. "Rehearsed lies are the worst kind. They come out flat and polished and they sound exactly like what they are. If you walk in there reciting a monologue, the first clerk with half a brain will smell it."

  "Then what am I supposed to do?"

  "Know the shape of it. Not the words." Alice tapped her temple. "The letter was lost. Your brother confirmed your acceptance. You're confused, you're anxious, and you need help. That's the truth of the feeling, even if the facts are different. Lean into the feeling. The words will take care of themselves."

  Florence exhaled through her nose, a slow, deliberate breath that fogged faintly in the cab's chill. She loosened her grip on the satchel by a fraction. "You're very good at this."

  "At what?"

  "Lying."

  Alice considered being offended and decided it wasn't worth the energy. "Thank you."

  The cab rattled through an intersection. A tram bell clanged somewhere to their left, sharp and brassy, and a knot of students in academic robes crossed the street ahead, forcing the driver to rein in. The pause filled the interior with the sounds of the city: cart wheels, a newsboy's shout, the low industrial hum that seemed to rise from the cobblestones themselves.

  Alice used the silence to redirect. The less Florence thought about the admissions office, the less likely she was to arrive looking like a woman about to confess to a murder.

  "The brother," Alice said, keeping her voice idle. "Thomas. He's the one paying for the University?"

  The effect was immediate. Florence's shoulders dropped an inch, her posture softening at the mention of the name the way a dog's ears lifted at the sound of its owner's voice.

  "He sends money every month," Florence said. "Has done since he got the position. He's—well, he's practically raised me. These last two years, anyway."

  Alice caught the seam in the sentence. These last two years. She could have let it pass. She didn't.

  "And the parents?"

  Florence looked down at her hands. She smoothed the fabric of her dress across her knees, pressing out wrinkles that didn't exist. It was the kind of gesture that bought time, not to decide whether to answer, but to decide how much of the answer to give air.

  "The fever," Florence said. "Two years ago. It moved through Briar's Crossing in about three weeks. By the time the physicians arrived from the city, half the village was already gone."

  She said it plainly. No tremor, no catch in the voice. It was the delivery of someone who had told this story before, and who had learned that the facts were easier to carry than the feelings around them.

  The cab's rattling filled the space where a response might have gone. Alice let it. She didn't reach for Florence's hand and she didn't offer the kind of soft, useless condolence that people produced when they wanted to feel better about someone else's grief. She watched the buildings slide past for a few seconds, then spoke.

  "That's why you want medicine."

  It wasn't a question. Florence answered it anyway.

  "I stood in a room and watched my mother die because nobody in the village knew what to do. The closest thing we had to a doctor was Mr. Treadwell, who set bones and pulled teeth and drank more than he prescribed." Florence's fingers stilled on her lap. "I won't do that again. Stand there. Knowing nothing. Doing nothing."

  Alice nodded. The motion was small, private, directed more at the window than at Florence.

  "Helplessness is an excellent engine," Alice said quietly. "It tends to outlast the nobler motivations."

  Florence was quiet for a moment. Then, with the particular stubbornness of someone who had decided to stop being the centre of attention, she turned the lens.

  "What about you?"

  Alice raised an eyebrow.

  "Your family," Florence pressed gently. "You mentioned stifling air and a small town, but Alice, you don't walk like someone who grew up in a small town. You don't talk like it either."

  Alice's reflection stared back at her from the cab window, a pale smudge against the moving city. She weighed her options. The turnip-farming fiction was rotting in the ditch where Florence's quiet amusement had left it, and after the firefight in the woods, the effort of maintaining a full fabrication seemed like a poor use of her remaining energy.

  She could give a piece of the truth. A small piece, carefully shaped.

  "You've probably worked most of it out already," Alice said, still addressing the window. "I wasn't raised on a farm. I was raised in a house with more rooms than people, more forks than anyone could reasonably need, and a staff whose primary function was to ensure I never had to do anything for myself."

  Florence leaned forward slightly. The satchel loosened in her lap. "You're gentry."

  "I'm a daughter," Alice corrected. "That's the operative word. My mother sits on the boards of a dozen charitable foundations. My father employs—well, a lot of people. He has interests. My younger brother is being groomed to inherit, and frankly he'll do a better job of it than I would have."

  She paused. Something shifted in her voice, not softer, exactly, but less guarded. The architecture of the sentence changed, the bricks laid with a little less mortar.

  "They're good people. Genuinely. My mother is kind in a way that costs her real effort, and my father is—" A beat. "—eccentric. Unpredictable. But he means well, most of the time, and they were both far better parents than I had any right to expect."

  Florence studied Alice's profile. The gaslight from the street caught the sharp line of her jaw, the slight tension at the corner of her mouth.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "Then why are you making that face?" Florence asked.

  Alice turned. "What face?"

  "That one." Florence pointed. "Like you've bitten into something sour and you're deciding whether to spit it out or swallow it."

  Alice felt the annoyance arrive, a small, hot flare behind her sternum, and realised, with some dismay, that the annoyance was not at Florence but at herself, for letting whatever expression that was reach her face unchaperoned. She smoothed it away, straightening in her seat.

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "All right."

  Florence's voice was light. Agreeable. She folded her hands and waited.

  The silence did its work.

  "We had a fight," Alice said, after a stretch that was slightly too long to be dignified. "A real one. The kind where things come out that have been building for years, and once they're in the air you can't stuff them back. Nobody hit anybody. It was worse than that."

  "So you left."

  "In the middle of the night. Took what would fit in a bag and walked out the front door." Alice examined her thumbnail with unnecessary attention. "There's a certain clarity that arrives at three in the morning when you've just said the worst thing you've ever said to someone who loves you. The clarity says: go now, because if you're still here when the sun comes up, you'll apologise, and then nothing will change, and you'll spend the rest of your life in a beautiful cage being slowly suffocated by people who think they're holding you gently."

  She stopped. The cab rattled. She became aware that she had said considerably more than she'd intended to, and that Florence was looking at her with the quiet, undramatic attention of someone who understood what it cost.

  Alice cleared her throat. "Anyway."

  Florence had the grace not to push. She let the word settle, then asked the practical question instead.

  "So what happens now? After the University. Once I'm sorted. Where will you go?"

  Alice opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed it, looked at her boots, and discovered, with some irritation, that she did not have an answer.

  Her plan had consisted of two steps. Step one: leave. Step two: don't get found. Both had been executed, after a fashion. Beyond that, the future was a blank page, and Alice Westmere had never been particularly good at blank pages. She preferred pages that someone else had written on, so she could find the errors.

  "I'll work it out," she said, and the shrug she offered tried for nonchalance but arrived at something more honest. "The city is large. I have coin now, courtesy of our late host in the woods. I know a few places. I'll find something that doesn't require a curtsey."

  Florence drew a breath, the kind that preceded an offer. "You could—"

  The cab lurched. The brakes bit with a shriek of iron on iron, and both girls swayed against the jolt. A fist thumped twice against the roof.

  "Wicker Street!" the driver called down. "Admissions Hall. Close as I'm getting, ladies. Road's choked from here."

  Alice grabbed her satchel. Whatever had been softening in her face over the last ten minutes locked back down, the drawbridge rising, the mechanism clean and practised.

  "Right," she said, and pushed the door open. "Shoulders back. You're a registered mage of the Empire, walking into a university that accepted you. Everything else is paperwork."

  She stepped down onto the pavement and held the door.

  Florence climbed out after her. The noise of the street hit them both: the press of bodies, the clatter of wheels, a hundred conversations tangling in the air. The Admissions Hall loomed at the end of the block, a heavy-browed granite building with columns that seemed designed to make people feel small on approach.

  It was working.

  The foyer was a cathedral of anxiety.

  The ceiling was high and indifferent, the kind of vaulted space that swallowed individual voices and returned them as a collective murmur. Hundreds of prospective students filled the hall, a shuffling, wool-coated mass clutching envelopes and numbered slips, arranged into queues that snaked across the flagstones with no apparent logic. The air smelled of wet coats, cheap ink, and the specific nervous perspiration of young people whose futures hinged on the contents of a folder.

  Florence stood at the edge of it and felt the scale of the room press down on her like a physical weight.

  "Don't stop moving," Alice murmured from behind her, a hand briefly touching the small of Florence's back. "If you stop, you'll think. If you think, you'll panic. Walk."

  They joined the queue. It moved in fits. Thirty seconds of shuffling, two minutes of stillness, another shuffle. Florence could feel her pulse in her fingertips where they gripped the satchel strap. The lie sat in her chest like a stone.

  The letter was lost. Thomas confirmed it. I'm confused, but hopeful.

  The queue delivered them, eventually, to a high wooden counter that bore the scars of a thousand anxious fingernails. Behind it sat a clerk who appeared to have been assembled from leftover parts, a pinched face, wire spectacles perched crookedly on a nose that could have opened letters, and the watery, colourless eyes of a man who had processed ten thousand students and liked none of them.

  He did not look up.

  "Name and letter." The quill dipped. The ink pot clicked against the wood.

  "Florence Bannerman," she said. Her voice held. She was quietly proud of that. "And I—I'm afraid I don't have the letter, sir."

  The quill stopped.

  The clerk raised his eyes. They travelled from Florence's face to her hands to the conspicuously absent envelope, and the expression that assembled itself on his features was not anger, nor surprise, but the bone-deep weariness of a man who had heard this particular excuse four times already today and it was not yet noon.

  "No letter," he repeated.

  "It was lost," Florence said. "In the post. My brother lives in the city. He checked the public notices and wrote to tell me I'd been accepted. I came as soon as I could."

  The clerk set the quill down with the slow, deliberate precision of a man putting down a weapon he was choosing not to use. He sighed. The sigh involved his entire torso and seemed to age him by a year.

  "Miss Bannerman. This is the admissions queue. For students in possession of an admissions letter. If you have a grievance with the Imperial Post, the complaints office is on Hartley Row, three blocks east, and I am sure they will be fascinated."

  "Sir, if you could just check the Master Ledger. My name will be in the records—"

  The clerk laughed. It was a short, dry sound, entirely devoid of mirth, the laugh of a man who found human optimism personally offensive.

  "The Master Ledger," he said, "is a forty-pound volume maintained by the Dean of Records in the lower archives. You are asking me to abandon my post, descend three flights of stairs, locate your name among four thousand entries, and haul the thing back up here. Because the postman ate your homework."

  "It isn't homework, it's my acceptance—"

  "And even if I did." The clerk leaned forward, his spectacles sliding down the bridge of his nose. "Even if I cracked that book and found your name written in the Dean's own hand, how exactly am I to verify that you are the Florence Bannerman listed? You have no letter. No identification. No proof of any kind that you are who you claim to be, rather than, say, a tavern girl who overheard a name and fancied a free education."

  Florence opened her mouth. Nothing useful came out.

  Behind her, the temperature in the immediate vicinity seemed to rise by several degrees.

  "I'm sorry," Alice said, stepping around Florence's shoulder with the precise, unhurried movement of someone who had decided that politeness was a resource she could no longer afford. "I must have misheard. Did you just call her a tavern girl?"

  The clerk's eyes shifted to Alice. He took in the straight posture, the sharp green gaze, the cut of the coat, and arrived at his assessment in under a second. Trouble.

  "And you are?"

  "Impatient." Alice placed both hands on the counter. Her fingers were splayed, the gesture casual, but her voice had dropped into the clipped, precise register of someone accustomed to being listened to. "She's given you her name. She's given you a perfectly reasonable explanation for the missing letter. Your job, and I'm making an assumption here, so correct me if you're actually employed as a doorstop, is to check the records. So check them. Or fetch someone who will."

  "Young lady—"

  "I'm not asking you to enjoy it. I'm asking you to do it."

  The clerk's expression hardened. He drew himself up in his chair, summoning the full authority of his counter and his ink pot and his little brass nameplate.

  "I don't answer to you," he said, each word placed with the care of a man building a wall. "And I don't leave my post on the demands of every girl who wanders in off the street with a hard-luck story and an attitude. You want the Ledger? Bring me identification. Official documentation. Or bring me someone who can vouch for her. Until then—" He picked up his quill, already looking past them to the queue. "—next."

  "Alice." Florence caught her arm. She could feel the tension in Alice's forearm, the heat of her skin through the sleeve. Alice was two sentences from saying something that would get them both escorted out by the men in grey coats standing by the doors. "Alice. Stop."

  Alice's jaw worked. For a moment, Florence thought she would shake the hand off and press the attack anyway. Then something in her exhaled, not her lungs, but whatever mechanism drove the fury, and she took a half-step back, ceding the counter.

  Florence turned to the clerk. Her heart was hammering hard enough that she could feel it in the roof of her mouth, but the panic had burned through some barrier and what was on the other side was steadier than she expected.

  "You said identification," Florence said. "Official documentation."

  The clerk was already writing. He didn't look up.

  Florence reached into her satchel. Her fingers found the crisp edge of the card, the one she'd received less than an hour ago, the ink still sharp, the Registry seal embossed in the heavy stock.

  "I have my Imperial Magus Permit," Florence said.

  The quill paused.

  "Issued this morning," Florence continued. "It has my full name, my description, my affinity, and the seal of the Imperial Registry. That's government identification. That's official."

  The clerk looked up. His expression had rearranged itself. The contempt was still there. It was structural, load-bearing, probably present at birth, but it had been joined by something else. A flicker of reassessment. The kind a man performed when the scullery maid he'd been dismissing turned out to be holding a card he hadn't expected.

  "You're a registered mage," he said.

  "Tier 6." Florence held the card between two fingers, not quite offering it, not quite withdrawing it. "If I show you this, will you check the Ledger?"

  The clerk stared at the card. He stared at Florence. He opened his mouth to respond.

  "Florence?"

  The voice came from behind them.