"Florence?"

  The voice came from behind them.

  Florence's hand stopped halfway out of the satchel. The card sat between her fingers, undrawn. She didn't need to turn around to identify the speaker: the voice was filed in the part of her memory that predated conscious thought, stored alongside the smell of bread flour and the creak of the third stair from the top in the house on Barley Lane. It had read her to sleep for years. It had shouted at the Henley dog when it got into the vegetable patch. It had said I'll send for you when I'm settled, Flo, from the back of a mail coach two years ago, and she had believed it absolutely, because the voice had never once lied to her.

  She turned.

  Thomas Bannerman was standing just beyond the velvet rope, still wearing the heavy oiled-leather trench coat that Florence had assumed, from his letters, was standard constabulary issue. It was not. The coat was reinforced, high-collared, and fitted in a way that spoke of function over fashion. A silver insignia gleamed at his throat, an open eye, cast in metal, catching the gaslight.

  He looked older. Not by years, but by weight. The kind of weight that settled into the jaw and the posture and the flat, professional attentiveness of the eyes. He was scanning the room even now, even as his face broke into a grin, the habit running underneath the emotion like a current beneath ice.

  "Thomas!"

  The name left her chest before her brain had any say in the matter. It was not a word so much as a detonation. It was a sound made of two years of letters that couldn't hold her, six months of silence, and the sheer, stupid, overwhelming relief of seeing a face that meant safe.

  Her heart rate spiked. Adrenaline flooded the bloodstream in a hot, electric wave. Somewhere beneath her skin, in the deep architecture of muscle and nerve that Florence did not yet understand and could not yet feel, something ancient and alien registered the chemical surge, cross-referenced it against the body's sudden intent to move, and quietly provided assistance.

  Florence pushed off the flagstones.

  She did not run. Running was a human activity involving alternating footfalls and the controlled management of forward momentum. What Florence did was closer to what happened when a compressed spring was released in a confined space.

  The floorboards beneath her boots split with a sound like a rifle crack. The distance between the counter and the velvet rope, thirty feet of crowded hall, collapsed in a single, blurred instant. Students on either side flinched from a gust of displaced air they couldn't explain, envelopes fluttering, coat-tails lifting.

  Thomas had time to register the movement. He did not have time to do anything about it.

  Florence hit him in the sternum at a velocity that should not have been available to a girl who weighed nine stone and had never sprinted competitively in her life. The impact lifted him, six feet of Inspector in twenty pounds of reinforced leather, clean off his boots. They flew. There was a brief, graceless interval of tangled limbs and mutual airborne confusion before Thomas's back struck the polished floor, and they skidded, his coat shrieking against the wood, through a brass stanchion that buckled on impact and into a decorative potted fern that surrendered its contents with a wet, defeated thud.

  The Admissions Hall went silent.

  Not quiet. Silent. The specific, ringing silence that followed an event so far outside the expected parameters of a university foyer that four hundred brains needed a moment to reclassify what they had just witnessed.

  Thomas lay on his back in a drift of potting soil and shattered ceramic. The ceiling was high and vaulted and very far away, and he stared at it while his diaphragm tried to remember how to function. His combat training—a full year of drills, four years of fieldwork, one deeply unfortunate encounter with a feral ghoul in the sewers beneath the Iron Ward—was screaming at him. The impact had carried the force of a kinetic detonation. His ribs were ringing like struck bells. Every instinct he had was reaching for a mana signature, a spell residue, some trace of arcane force to explain why he had just been launched across a room by what appeared to be a girl.

  There was nothing. No mana. No residue. Just his sister, lying on top of him with her face buried in his coat, squeezing him with both arms as though she intended to fuse them at the molecular level.

  "I missed you," Florence said into his sternum. Her voice was muffled by leather and thick with the particular, unselfconscious emotion of someone who had not yet looked around to assess the damage. "I missed you so much."

  Thomas exhaled. It came out as a wheeze, which was the best his lungs could manage under the circumstances. He blinked. The combat alertness drained from his eyes, replaced by something softer and slightly dazed, and his gloved hand came up to rest on the back of her head with the automatic, unthinking tenderness of long habit.

  "Flo," he managed. "I—hkk—missed you too, kid."

  He paused. Drew what breath he could.

  "You've been eating your vegetables, haven't you."

  Florence sat up, still straddling his waist, still radiantly oblivious to the circle of stunned faces, the destroyed fern, and the brass stanchion lying bent at an angle that suggested it would not be returning to service. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  "I was so worried I wouldn't make it," she said, the words tumbling. "And then the letter. I lost the letter, Thomas, and the clerk wouldn't listen, and Alice tried to help but he was so rude, and—"

  "Easy," Thomas said, sitting up with a grunt that cost him more than he let show. Potting soil cascaded from his shoulder. He brushed it off with the resigned patience of a man who had learned, over a lifetime of Florence, that dignity was a negotiable commodity. "Easy. One thing at a time. Let me get vertical first."

  At the counter, Alice had not moved.

  She was standing precisely where Florence had left her, her satchel in one hand, her posture very still. The expression on her face was not shock. She had watched Florence absorb a shotgun blast less than twenty-four hours ago, and the capacity for surprise regarding Florence's body had been largely exhausted. What she was experiencing was closer to recalibration. The kind a navigator performed when the map turned out to be wrong and the coastline was not where it was supposed to be.

  Her eyes were not on Florence. They were on the insignia.

  The silver eye. Cast metal, polished, pinned to the collar with the quiet authority of something that did not need to be large to be understood. She knew that symbol. Every mage in the Empire knew that symbol. It was the crest of the Department of Arcane Affairs: the Inspectorate, the Nullification Corps, the grey-coated men and women who hunted rogue arcanists through the streets of the capital and whose jurisdiction ended only where the Emperor's patience did.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  A policeman, Florence had said in the carriage. He works for the law.

  Alice stared at the insignia. She stared at Thomas Bannerman, Senior Inspector, by the cut of the coat and the weight of the badge, hauling himself upright in a pile of broken pottery, brushing soil from his shoulders with one hand and steadying his sister with the other.

  A beat cop, Alice thought. She told me her brother was a beat cop.

  "You have got to be joking," she said, very quietly, to no one.

  Thomas gained his feet. He was taller standing than Alice had estimated from the floor. Broad through the shoulders, lean through the waist, with the posture of a man who had been drilled until good posture stopped being a choice and became a structural feature. He hauled Florence up beside him, checked his ribs with a quick, practised press of his fingers, habit, not concern, and adjusted his collar.

  He looked up. His eyes found Alice.

  They were grey. Sharp, attentive, and warmer than she'd expected from the uniform. He looked at her the way a man looked at a stranger his sister had brought home, curious, open, running an assessment that was more fraternal than professional.

  Alice composed herself. The alarm folded down into a pocket she could access later, and what she put on the surface was polished and pleasant and entirely under control.

  "Officer," she said, inclining her head. "It's good to finally meet you. Florence has told me a great deal."

  "Officer?" Thomas's grin widened, and it was a good grin, the easy, unforced warmth of a man who smiled with his whole face and didn't seem to know how disarming it was. "That's very formal. And who might you be?"

  "This is Alice," Florence said, materialising at Alice's elbow and seizing her arm with both hands, presenting her the way a child presented a drawing they were particularly proud of. "She's my friend. I met her on the journey here. She's been helping me with, well, with everything, really."

  "A friend already?" Thomas looked between them. Something in his expression eased, a tension Alice hadn't noticed until it released, the quiet worry of a brother who had spent six months imagining his shy, small-town sister adrift in a city of four million strangers. "That's—that's really good, Flo. I'm glad. You were always so quiet back home. I half expected to find you hiding in the reference section of the library with a packed lunch."

  "I'm not that bad," Florence protested, though her blush suggested he wasn't far off.

  "She's been very brave," Alice said, and meant it, which surprised her.

  Thomas beamed at this. Alice did not beam back. She was conducting a rapid internal audit of every piece of information she had shared in Florence's presence that might, if relayed to a Senior Inspector of the D.A.A., result in an inconvenient number of follow-up questions. The list was not short.

  She cleared her throat.

  "Actually, Officer," Alice began, leaning into the title because it created distance, and distance was what she needed. "We've run into a bit of a problem at the desk. Florence's acceptance letter was lost, and the gentleman behind the counter has been—" She paused, selecting the word with care. "—principled about the documentation requirements."

  "Lost?" Thomas turned to Florence. The grin didn't vanish, but it reorganised. The warmth remained, the approval departed. It was a particular expression, available only to older siblings: the face of a person who loved you completely and was disappointed in you specifically.

  "Florence." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "The acceptance letter."

  "I know."

  "The one document. The one piece of paper that I told you to guard with your life."

  "I know, Thomas."

  "Do you remember the shoes?"

  Florence closed her eyes. "Please don't bring up the shoes."

  "The river, Flo. You lost both shoes in the river. Both of them. I still don't understand how that's physically possible. One shoe, fine. An accident. But two shoes implies a series of decisions, each worse than the last—"

  "It was a fast river and the bank was muddy and I was ten—"

  "And now the letter." Thomas shook his head, but the scolding had already spent most of its force. His voice softened, as voices did when the speaker realised they were more relieved than angry. "All right. We'll sort it out. But we're having a conversation about organisational systems later. A real one. With diagrams."

  Florence said nothing. The urge to defend herself, to tell him about the bandits, the explosion, the shack, the fact that her letter had been vaporised along with a carriage and two horses in a meteorite strike that was actually an alien landing, was a physical pressure behind her teeth. She met Alice's gaze.

  Alice's eyes said no with a clarity that didn't require lips.

  Florence swallowed it. "I'm sorry," she said, and looked at her boots. "I wasn't careful enough."

  Thomas squeezed her shoulder. Then he turned toward the counter, and the brother left his face.

  What replaced it was professional. Not cruel, not cold, simply the removal of everything extraneous, the way a man cleared a desk before sitting down to serious work. He walked to the counter with the unhurried gait of someone who did not need to rush because the room would wait, and he placed his elbows on the wood, and the silver eye on his collar caught the gaslight and held it.

  The clerk was still sitting behind the counter. He had watched the entire sequence, the launch, the crash, the skid, the fern, with the paralysed expression of a man whose day had exceeded its operational parameters. He looked at Thomas the way a rabbit looked at a shadow.

  "Sir," Thomas said. His voice was not raised. It occupied the room by weight rather than volume, the kind of voice that had learned, through repetition and consequence, that it did not need to shout to be heard. "My name is Thomas Bannerman. Senior Inspector, Department of Arcane Affairs, Northern District."

  He reached into his coat and produced a leather wallet. He opened it on the counter. The badge inside was heavy, metal, and stamped with the same open eye that sat on his collar. It looked expensive in the way that authority always looked expensive, not in the materials, but in what it represented.

  "This is my sister," Thomas continued. "Florence Bannerman. I am prepared to vouch for her identity under oath, and I'm sure you'll find her name in whatever records you keep in the back."

  He smiled. The smile was polite, contained, and did not touch his eyes.

  "I would be very grateful if you would go and check."

  The clerk looked at the badge. He looked at the ruins of the potted fern. He looked at Thomas's face, which was still smiling in that way that technically involved the correct muscles but communicated something closer to a weather warning.

  "Right away, sir." The clerk was off his stool before the sentence was finished, his spectacles bouncing on his nose as he hurried toward the back office. "The Ledger—yes—just a moment—right away—"

  He disappeared through the door. The sound of his footsteps receded rapidly down what were presumably the three flights of stairs he had previously declared himself unwilling to descend.

  Thomas watched him go, then turned back to the girls with the satisfied expression of a man who had solved a problem and was now available for conversation.

  Alice had been waiting. The question had been assembling itself since the moment Florence's boots had cracked the floorboards, and the clerk's departure provided the opening.

  "So," she said. She kept her voice light, conversational, almost idle, the tone of someone making small talk while a kettle boiled. "You're not going to ask about that?"

  Thomas looked at her. "About what?"

  Alice gestured, a small, encompassing motion that took in the bent stanchion, the destroyed fern, the scuff marks on the floor that traced an unbroken line from the counter to the point of impact.

  "The greeting," Alice said. "She crossed thirty feet of open hall in less time than it takes to blink, hit you hard enough to put you on the floor, and slid you through a brass railing and a piece of furniture. You're wearing armour and you're still wincing when you breathe."

  She paused, giving the facts room to speak for themselves.

  "That doesn't strike you as... noteworthy?"

  Thomas rubbed his sternum. The wince was involuntary. He covered it by adjusting his coat, a gesture that would have been smooth if Alice hadn't been watching for it.

  "Florence has always been like that," he said, and the fondness in his voice was so genuine it almost derailed Alice's incredulity. "Physical, I mean. Enthusiastic. When I came back for the harvest festival, she was, what, thirteen? She took a running start from across the yard and nearly put me in the pig trough. The sow bit me. I still have the scar."

  He looked at Florence, who was standing a few feet away, examining a smudge on her sleeve with intense and sudden interest.

  "She's stronger than she looks. Always has been. Country living, fresh air, all that bread dough." He shrugged, a rolling, amiable motion that suggested the explanation was not only sufficient but obvious. "She doesn't know her own strength when she's excited. That's all."

  Alice stared at him.

  She looked at Florence. Florence offered a smile that was ninety per cent innocence and ten per cent desperate plea.

  She looked back at Thomas. Thomas was brushing a last crumb of soil from his cuff, perfectly content, already thinking about lunch.