He wasn't suspicious. The thought settled into Alice's mind with the slow, disbelieving weight of a coin sinking through water. He genuinely was not suspicious. He had been hit by his sister with the force of a battering ram, launched through a piece of furniture, and was currently standing in the wreckage cataloguing it as enthusiasm. There was no investigation happening behind those grey eyes. No quiet filing of anomalies for later review. Thomas Bannerman, Senior Inspector, had watched his sister break the laws of physics and concluded that she'd been eating well.

  He's an idiot, Alice thought, and then immediately revised the assessment, because it wasn't accurate. Thomas wasn't stupid. Stupidity was a general condition. What Thomas had was specific: a localised blind spot, a precise and total failure of pattern recognition that applied exclusively to the five-foot-three girl standing beside him. He could probably reconstruct a crime scene from a bootprint and a cigarette end. He simply could not see his sister clearly, because the image of her in his head had been fixed since she was small enough to lose her shoes in a river, and no amount of contradictory evidence was going to update it.

  It was, Alice decided, either the most dangerous or the most useful thing she had ever encountered. She filed it away and moved on.

  "Speaking of which," Alice said, and let her gaze drift, casually, as though it had only just occurred to her, to the silver insignia at Thomas's throat. "Florence mentioned you were in law enforcement. A policeman, I think she said. She may have used the words beat cop."

  The effect was remarkable.

  Thomas's head turned toward Florence with the slow, wounded precision of a man who had just been stabbed by someone he trusted. His mouth opened. It closed. It opened again.

  "A beat cop?"

  Florence became very interested in the strap of her satchel. "You said you worked for the law. In your letters. I just assumed—"

  "You assumed I was a beat cop." Thomas repeated the words as though they were a diagnosis. Something behind his sternum had been injured, and it was not the ribs. He drew himself up, spine straightening, shoulders squaring, chin lifting, and the transformation was so immediate and so total that Alice half expected to hear a trumpet fanfare.

  "Alice," Thomas said, and his voice had dropped by a full register, settling into the lower octave of a man who was about to recite his own credentials and wanted them to land with appropriate gravity. "I am a Senior Inspector of the Department of Arcane Affairs. I completed the progression from initiate to full Inspector in under three years, which is, and I want to be clear about this, a station record. The previous record was four years and eight months."

  "Thomas, that's incredible," Florence breathed, and her admiration was so immediate and so guileless that Alice watched Thomas's chest expand by a visible inch.

  "I lead the primary response unit for the Northern District," Thomas continued, warming to the subject in the way that only a man who had been called a beat cop by his own sister could. "When significant arcane events occur within the city, my team is the first deployed. I am, statistically speaking, one of the highest-rated field operatives currently serving."

  "Statistically speaking," Alice echoed. Her voice was perfectly level. "That's very impressive."

  She meant the flatness to serve as a wall, something Thomas's enthusiasm would hit and slide off. It didn't work. The man was armour-plated against subtlety when his professional pride was engaged.

  What Alice felt was not fear. It was the quiet, cold recalibration of someone who had just learned that the friendly dog was actually a wolf in a good mood. Senior Inspectors were not beat cops. Senior Inspectors investigated. Senior Inspectors asked questions, cross-referenced answers, and had the institutional authority to make a person's life very complicated very quickly. And Alice was currently standing within arm's reach of one, wearing a coat that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and violence, in possession of no identification whatsoever, radiating a pyromantic mana signature that any trained arcanist could taste on the air if they thought to look.

  She needed information. Specifically, she needed to know what the Department already knew.

  "It must be fascinating work," Alice said, and adjusted her expression: a slight widening of the eyes, a forward tilt of the posture, the body language of a girl who found authority interesting rather than threatening. "Hunting rogue mages, recovering dark artefacts. Have you had anything exciting recently?"

  The question was a fishing line, cast with the lightest possible touch. Thomas took the bait like a trout.

  His expression changed. The preening pride drained away, replaced by something heavier: the flat, professional sobriety of a man whose work followed him home.

  "Just yesterday, actually," Thomas said. "We were called out to the King's Road. My partner and I."

  Florence went rigid. Alice saw it in her periphery, the sudden lock of the shoulders, the cessation of all movement, and kept her own face perfectly, dangerously still.

  "Oh?" Alice said. "What happened?"

  "Kidnappings." Thomas's voice had settled into its professional register, the warmth banked, the words chosen with the economy of a man accustomed to giving briefings. "A bandit crew hit a carriage. The Jackal's outfit. They've been working that stretch of road for months, but this wasn't a standard robbery. They took passengers. People. Then vanished."

  He paused. His jaw tightened.

  "One of the missing, we think they were a student. Supposed to start here at the University this term. We found an acceptance letter in the mud near the wreckage." He shook his head. "The rain had destroyed the ink, couldn't read the name, couldn't identify the owner. But the seal was clear. University of Dunwick, Faculty of Medicine."

  The air in Alice's lungs turned to glass.

  Thomas looked at Florence. He placed a hand on her shoulder, heavy, warm, the hand of a man who needed to feel the solidity of someone he loved, and his voice lost the briefing cadence entirely.

  "When you told me you'd lost your letter, Flo, I won't lie, my heart stopped for a second. Just for a second. I thought—" He caught himself. Shook his head. "It doesn't matter. You're here. You dropped yours in a puddle or left it on a bench or whatever it is you do with important documents. You weren't on that road."

  He squeezed her shoulder.

  "I'm just glad you got here safe."

  Florence's face was the colour of candle wax. She managed a nod. It was a small, tight motion, the nod of a person whose throat had closed around every word that wanted to come out and was holding them there by force.

  Alice did not nod. Alice did not move. She was performing a series of calculations at a speed that would have impressed a bookmaker.

  He found the letter. Her letter. In the wreckage of the carriage she was riding in. The facts arranged themselves in a neat line, each one pointing at the next like dominoes. He knows a student was taken. He knows the letter belonged to a medical student. His sister is a medical student who arrived in Dunwick yesterday without her acceptance letter, claiming it was lost.

  And he thinks it's a coincidence.

  Alice looked at Thomas. She looked at the badge. She looked at the silver eye, symbol of the Empire's foremost investigative body, pinned to the coat of a man who was currently failing to connect three dots that a moderately attentive child could have joined with a crayon.

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  The laugh tried to come. She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste iron and held it there, drowning it behind her teeth.

  His deductive reasoning has a Florence-shaped hole in it, Alice thought. Pray to the Ceaseless Lord that it's limited to her, because if this is how he handles all his cases, the criminal underworld can sleep soundly.

  "That's terrible," Alice said. Her voice was steady. "I hope you find them."

  "We will," Thomas said, and the confidence was absolute, the unshakeable certainty of a man who had never failed to close a case and saw no reason to start now. "The Department doesn't drop leads."

  Alice believed him. That was the problem.

  The back office door groaned open.

  The clerk emerged as though the stairs had personally wronged him. His face was the colour of a beetroot, his spectacles had migrated to the tip of his nose, and he was carrying, or rather, being carried by, a book the size of a paving slab. The Ledger was bound in cracked leather, reinforced at the corners with brass, and thick enough to stop a musket ball. He reached the counter and dropped it.

  The impact shook the inkwells. A queue of students three rows back flinched.

  "Ledger," the clerk announced, wheezing in a way that suggested the three flights of stairs had taken a personal toll. He braced both hands on the counter, recovered his breath, and began turning pages with the licked-thumb efficiency of a man who wanted this over with.

  "Bannerman," he muttered, scanning columns of dense script. "Bannerman, Bannerman, Banner—"

  His finger stopped.

  "Bannerman, Florence. Briar's Crossing. Faculty of Medicine."

  He looked up. The disappointment on his face was sincere, the expression of a man who had climbed three flights of stairs hoping for the satisfaction of turning someone away and had been denied even that.

  He straightened his spectacles. Cleared his throat. Adopted the flat, mechanical cadence of a speech delivered so many times it had worn grooves in his vocal cords.

  "Florence Bannerman, on behalf of the Crown and the Dean of Medicine, I confirm your acceptance into the University of Dunwick. You are hereby granted the rank of Student Initiate."

  He stamped a slip of paper with more force than the task required, paired it with a folded pamphlet from a stack at his elbow, and slid both across the counter.

  "Your temporary pass," he said. "However."

  The word landed like a door closing.

  "Since the University never received your housing confirmation slip, which was enclosed in the envelope you claim was lost, your dormitory reservation in Block C was automatically forfeited as of this morning. The block is now at full capacity."

  Florence's expression performed a rapid and painful journey from relief to confusion to comprehension.

  "You are designated as a Commuter," the clerk continued, unbothered. "You are responsible for securing your own lodging and arranging daily transport to the campus. Should a bed become available, you will be notified by post." He paused. "I would not hold my breath."

  He tapped the pamphlet.

  "This grants dawn-to-dusk access to the campus grounds, the main library, and the student commons for self-guided orientation. You are not to enter the faculty wing. You are not to disturb the upperclassmen. And you are not—" He leaned forward, and for the first time his voice carried something approaching genuine feeling. "—under any circumstances, to touch the specimens in the Anatomical Gardens. If you damage a specimen, the replacement cost will be added to your student account, and I promise you, Miss Bannerman, the University's taxidermist does not work cheap."

  He slammed the Ledger shut. The sound echoed off the vaulted ceiling.

  "Next."

  Wicker Street was grey and damp, and it was the most beautiful street Florence had ever stood on.

  The oak doors of the Admissions Hall swung shut behind them, cutting off the noise of the foyer, and Florence stopped on the top step and breathed. The air tasted of coal smoke and wet stone and the distant, mineral tang of the river, and none of it mattered, because the temporary pass was in her hand and it was real and it had her name on it and nobody was going to take it away.

  Her shoulders dropped. Something that had been clenched behind her ribs since dawn, since the carriage, since the road, since the moment the sky had torn open and the world had stopped making sense, loosened by a degree.

  "Thank the Eternal Lord," Florence said, pressing the pass against her chest with both hands. "I thought they were going to throw me out."

  "Not while I'm standing there, they're not," Thomas said, settling a heavy arm across her shoulders. The weight of it was familiar, the specific, blunt comfort of a brother who expressed affection through physical mass. "But Flo, I mean it. The paperwork. This city runs on paper. Lose the wrong document here and you might as well not exist."

  "I know. I'll be more careful. I promise."

  "You said that about the shoes."

  "Thomas."

  He grinned, checking his pocket watch with a flick of the wrist. "All right. The bureaucratic ordeal is behind us. The rest of the day belongs to us."

  He snapped the watch shut and began counting on his gloved fingers. "First, lunch. There's a chophouse on Mulberry Lane that does a steak and kidney pie that will make you forget every meal you've ever eaten. Then the grand tour. I'm taking you through the Cathedral District, St. Silas, the Riverwalk along the Thein, and we'll ride the tram—upper deck, obviously, you'll love it. Then dinner. Somewhere proper. White tablecloths, the works."

  He looked down at her, and the pride in his face was so uncomplicated, so entirely free of agenda, that Alice, standing a few feet behind them with her hands in her coat pockets, felt something she didn't care to examine shift in her chest.

  "I'd offer to put you up at my flat," Thomas added, "but it's barely large enough for me and my equipment. You'd be sleeping on a crate. Mrs. Gable's is better for now. But I'm looking at a bigger place. My lease is up next month. Once I've moved, you can come stay. Properly."

  "Mrs. Gable's is lovely," Florence said. "Really. She's been very kind."

  Thomas nodded, satisfied, and turned the full beam of his attention onto Alice.

  "And you're coming with us," he said. It was not a question. It was an assumption, delivered with the natural authority of a man who organised the people around him without realising he was doing it. "You can't visit Dunwick and skip the pie. It's practically a legal requirement. My treat, call it a thank you for looking after Flo."

  Alice had been expecting this. She had been composing the refusal since the moment the admissions clerk had disappeared to fetch the Ledger, running the calculus in the background while the rest of her brain managed the conversation.

  The arithmetic was simple. Thomas was D.A.A. An afternoon in his company meant hours of proximity to a trained arcanist whose professional function was the identification and apprehension of unregistered mages. Alice's name was in the Registry. That much was true. But her physical permit had been incinerated in the explosion along with her luggage, her spare clothes, and every other piece of documentation that proved she was who she claimed to be.

  If Thomas sensed her mana, he would ask for papers. And if she went to the Registry to replace them, her name would ping the national grid, and her father's people would know where she was before the ink dried on the new card.

  She would rather eat glass.

  "That's very kind, Officer," Alice said, and stepped back, a half-step, enough to signal departure without making it abrupt. "But I'd only be intruding. You haven't seen each other in months. This should be family time."

  "Nonsense," Thomas said, waving a hand. "Florence would want you there. Wouldn't you, Flo?"

  "Please come, it won't be the same without you," Florence said, and she had turned to Alice with the expression of a person who did not yet understand that some invitations were declined for reasons that had nothing to do with desire. She caught Alice's hand. "Come with us. Please."

  Alice looked at Florence's hand around hers. She looked at Florence's face: open, hopeful, entirely unaware that she was asking Alice to spend an afternoon performing a high-wire act over a pit of institutional consequences.

  She looked at Thomas, who was smiling the easy, generous smile of a man who assumed the best of people because it had never cost him anything.

  "I'll pass," Alice said. She withdrew her hand from Florence's grip, gently, but completely. "Go. Be with your brother. Eat pie. Tell him about the University and the Cathedral and everything you've seen. I have things to sort out in the city, and they're easier done alone."

  "Are you sure?" Florence's face fell. It was not a dramatic collapse. Florence didn't operate that way. It was a small, quiet dimming, the light behind the eyes reducing by a degree, and it was worse than dramatics because it was real.

  "Positive." Alice managed a smile. It was not her best work, but it held. "I'll see you at Mrs. Gable's tonight. Go."

  She didn't leave room for a second appeal. She nodded to Thomas, "Officer," and turned, and walked into the crowd on Wicker Street without looking back. The mass of coats and hats and hurrying bodies swallowed her within seconds, and she let it, keeping her head down and her stride brisk, threading through the press of people with the practised ease of someone who had grown up navigating crowded spaces and knew how to make herself small.

  Behind her, on the steps of the Admissions Hall, Thomas watched her go. His hands were in his coat pockets, his head tilted at a slight angle, the unconscious posture of a man whose attention had snagged on something he couldn't quite name.

  The girl moved well. That was what caught him. Not fast, not obviously skilled, but well: an economy of movement, a spatial awareness that let her slide through gaps in the crowd without breaking stride or touching a shoulder. It was the kind of navigation that came from training, or from growing up in a place where space was contested and the ability to move through it without friction was a survival skill.

  It didn't match the story. A girl from the countryside, Florence's age, making friends on a carriage ride, that girl should have been bumping into people, stopping at shop windows, hesitating at crossings. This girl moved like the city was already mapped inside her head.

  Thomas frowned. The thought hovered for a moment, a bird circling a branch, looking for a place to land.

  Then Florence tugged his sleeve.

  "Thomas? The pie?"

  The thought scattered. Thomas looked down at his sister, and whatever had been forming behind his eyes dissolved in the warmth of her face.

  "Right," he said, and smiled, and steered her down the steps. "The pie. You're going to love it, Flo. The crust alone—"

  Their voices faded into the noise of Wicker Street.

  Alice didn't go back to the boarding house.