Florence stood at the window with a cup of tea and watched the morning arrive.

  It came slowly, the way mornings did in Dunwick—filtered through coal smoke and cloud cover until the light that reached the street was thin and grey and noncommittal, as if the sun itself wasn't entirely sure it wanted to be here. The rooftops of Baker Street emerged from the murk in stages: first the chimney pots, then the slate tiles, then the iron railings of the balconies below, each one beaded with the condensation of a city that sweated even in its sleep. In the distance, beyond the clutter of residential eaves, the spires of the Cathedral of the Eternal Lord caught whatever genuine sunlight existed above the haze, throwing it back in faint, golden needles that looked clean and impossibly far away.

  Florence took a sip. The tea was strong, bordering on punitive—Mrs. Gable brewed her morning pot with the conviction that flavour was a form of discipline—but it was hot, and the mug was warm in her hands, and the heat felt good against the chill that crept through the window glass.

  Two days. She had been in Dunwick for two days.

  It felt longer. It felt like a month, or a year, or the kind of elastic, dreamlike time that belonged to fevers and fairy tales. She had came on a carriage with a crumpled acceptance letter and a head full of plans, and in the forty-eight hours since, the world had seen fit to…

  She took another sip. Longer this time. She let the tannin sit on her tongue and focused on the bitterness.

  Best not to think about it.

  The good parts, then. She had met Alice—sharp, prickly, wonderful Alice, who spoke like a duchess and lied about turnip farming and had burned through the ropes in a bandit's shack to save both their lives. She had made it to the University. She had been registered, stamped, and officially declared a mage of the Empire, which still felt like a clerical error someone would correct at any moment. And Thomas had taken her on a tour of the city that had been, for a few golden hours, everything she had imagined Dunwick would be.

  The steak and kidney pie on Mulberry Lane. The Dunwick Tram rattling over the iron bridge while Thomas pointed out landmarks with the barely contained pride of a man showing off his firstborn. The Cathedral, vast and cool and smelling of old stone, where she had lit a candle for their parents and Thomas had stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder and said nothing, because he had always known when nothing was the right thing to say.

  Good parts. She held them in her mind like stones in a pocket—smooth, solid, something to grip when the current pulled.

  Then the evening had come, and the current had pulled very hard indeed.

  Florence set the mug on the windowsill and pressed her palm flat against the cold glass. Her reflection stared back, translucent and ghostly against the Dunwick skyline. She looked… fine. Better than fine. She had been thrown from a carriage by an explosion, dragged through a forest in the rain, and spent the previous evening kneeling in the wreckage of a bombed restaurant with her hands buried in a stranger's ruined leg—and there was not a mark on her. Not a bruise, not a scratch, not so much as a scuff. Her knees should have been raw from the rubble. Her palms should have been torn to ribbons from the glass. They weren't. The skin was smooth and unbroken, as though the last two days had happened to someone else and Florence had merely watched..

  The magic, probably. She flexed her fingers against the glass. Blood magic heals. The clerk at the Registry said sanguimancers were natural at hemorrhages. Maybe it works on yourself, too.

  It was a guess. Florence was aware that she was guessing at roughly ninety percent of everything related to her own abilities, and that the remaining ten percent was closer to blind hope. But the alternative was thinking too hard about what she could do and why, and that path led to the memory of a man's shoulder bursting open like a waterskin and the sound it had made, and she was not walking that path this morning. Not with her tea.

  She hoped Thomas was faring half as well.

  The thought tightened something in her chest. He had been limping badly when the constabulary wagons arrived at the Swan, his left ankle swollen to the size of a grapefruit beneath his boot. She had tried to help—had pressed her hands to the joint and felt something shift inside the tissue, a warmth that moved like a current, and the swelling had receded enough for him to stand. But the ligament was still torn. She had felt that too, somehow. A frayed thing, deep in the joint, that her magic could ease but not mend. He needed rest. He needed a surgeon. He needed a week off his feet at minimum.

  The Department of Arcane Affairs had sent a carriage for him at dawn.

  Florence's grip tightened on the mug.

  He could barely walk. He could barely stand. They saw his ankle. They saw him limping. And they sent a carriage anyway, because there was paperwork to file and witnesses to interview and the great machine of Imperial law enforcement did not pause for one man's torn ligament, even if that man had bled for it.

  A sharp, brittle crack split the silence.

  Florence looked down. A fracture had run through the ceramic handle of the mug, base to lip, clean and diagonal. Tea was seeping through, a thin trickle of brown running down her wrist and dripping onto the sill.

  She set it down very carefully, her heart hammering.

  That was Mrs. Gable's cup.

  She stared at the fractured handle, then at her hand. Her fingers didn't hurt. She hadn't squeezed particularly hard—or she hadn't thought she had. The ceramic was cheap, admittedly. But it had been intact when she picked it up, and now it wasn't, and the only variable between those two states was her grip.

  The magic again, she told herself, and wiped the tea from her wrist with her sleeve. I'll buy her a new one.

  She tucked the broken mug behind the curtain where it couldn't be seen and decided to worry about it later.

  Across the room, a shape stirred beneath a mountain of quilts.

  Florence had come in late the previous night. Well past midnight, the constabulary wagons still loading the wounded when she'd finally left the wreckage. She had climbed the stairs to the attic on legs that felt borrowed, expecting to find the room empty, or Alice reading by candlelight, or Alice absent entirely.

  What she had found was Alice face-down on the bed, fully clothed, boots on, dead to the world in the specific, boneless way of a body that had been pushed past every reasonable limit and had simply stopped accepting commands.

  Florence had stood in the doorway and looked at her.

  She had looked at the boots, caked with plaster dust and something darker. She had looked at the satchel on the floor beside the bed, bulging with shapes she couldn't identify. She had looked at Alice's hair, matted on one side, and the soot on her bare arms, and the general state of a girl who had clearly been through something that went well beyond a quiet evening.

  And she had looked at the dress.

  It was black. Fine-woven, fitted close through the bodice. Not the travelling coat and skirt Alice had been wearing when they parted ways outside the admissions hall that afternoon. This was something else entirely. Something new. The kind of garment that belonged in an evening wardrobe or a very expensive shop window.

  The kind of garment that had been underneath the tablecloth cloak, in the ruins of the Swan. Florence had watched her brother tackle the masked figure into a pile of overturned furniture, had seen them roll through the wreckage in a tangle of limbs and splintered wood, and when Thomas had grabbed for the hem and the white linen had torn free in his fist, the dark dress beneath had been unmistakable. High-collared. Fitted at the waist. The same silhouette now lying crumpled on Alice's bed, smelling of smoke and plaster dust.

  Florence had stood in the doorway for a long time.

  She probably has a reason. The thought had arrived with the quiet, stubborn certainty of something Florence needed to believe. She always has a reason. And Thomas did grab her first. He lunged. She was helping. She'd just saved those people.

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  But she hit him. She hit him in the jaw and she stomped on his ankle and she took his gun, and he's my brother, and she knows he's my brother, and she did it anyway.

  But she probably has a reason.

  Florence had crossed the room, pulled the spare blanket from the linen cupboard, and draped it over Alice's sleeping form. She had unlaced Alice's boots, because leaving them on seemed wrong, and set them neatly at the foot of the bed. Then she had changed into her nightgown, climbed into her own bed, and lain there in the dark, staring at the sloped ceiling, until sleep came and took the questions with it.

  Now, in the morning light, the questions were exactly where she had left them.

  She chose, once again, to leave them there.

  A horrible, guttural groan emerged from the mound of quilts.

  Florence crossed the room.

  Mrs. Gable had mentioned that Alice was bleeding from the lip when she came in. Florence had expected to find bruises this morning, swelling, the visible aftermath of whatever the previous night had contained. But Alice's face, half-buried in the pillow, looked clean. Pale, yes. Flushed with an unhealthy heat that pinkened her cheeks and sheened her forehead with perspiration. But the skin was unbroken. No split lip. No bruising anywhere Florence could see—and she had heard the fight, even from behind the table. The crack of fist on bone, the crash of bodies through furniture, the sounds of someone being hit hard and often. There should have been a mark. There should have been several.

  There was nothing. She looked like a girl with a bad fever and not much else.

  "Florence?"

  The voice was a croak. Alice's eyes had opened—barely, the lids peeling apart with the reluctant, gummed quality of someone who had been unconscious rather than asleep. Her pupils contracted against the daylight, and the reaction was instantaneous.

  "Gaaah—"

  She threw an arm over her face, recoiling from the window's pale wash of light as if Florence had aimed a lantern at her. She rolled sideways, burying her face in the pillow, and the groan that followed was theatrical in its misery.

  "Good morning," Florence said.

  "Shut the curtain," Alice rasped into the pillow. "Shut it or I will set it on fire and solve the problem permanently."

  "It's nearly nine. The sun's been up for hours."

  Florence reached over and tugged the thin curtain across the window. The room dimmed to a grey half-light. Alice remained face-down for several seconds, breathing heavily, before she slowly—with the careful, testing movements of someone taking inventory—rolled onto her back.

  Florence watched her.

  Alice's hands moved beneath the blanket. Slow. Methodical. She pressed her fingers to her ribs, first the left side, then the right. She touched her jaw, running her thumb along the hinge. She flexed her wrists, rotating them in small circles. She pressed two fingers to her kneecap and held them there.

  Her brow furrowed. Something shifted behind her eyes—not confusion, exactly, but a close relative. She lifted the edge of the blanket and looked down at herself, at the black dress and the skin beneath it, and her lips parted.

  "They're gon—"

  The whisper cut off. Alice's gaze flicked to Florence, sharp and sudden, and whatever she had been about to say retreated behind the gates.

  "How are you feeling?" Florence asked.

  Alice stared at her for a beat. Then she let the blanket drop and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.

  "I'm… fine?" The word came out as a question, aimed more at herself than at Florence. She lay still for a moment, taking stock of something internal, something Florence couldn't see. "Mana sickness. I overdid it last night. Used too much, too fast. My core is throwing a tantrum about it."

  She sounded like she was reciting from a textbook. Knowing Alice, she probably was.

  "My head is splitting, my limbs feel like they're full of wet sand, and I'm fairly certain I could heat a kettle just by holding it." She dropped her hands from her eyes and stared at the sloped ceiling with the hollow, defeated expression of a woman contemplating a very long day. "Florence."

  "Yes?"

  "Help me out of this thing. I'm marinating in my own sweat and it is genuinely revolting."

  Florence leaned closer. Alice wasn't exaggerating about the heat. The air around her had a faint, dry shimmer, the bedsheets damp in a way that went beyond ordinary body temperature. The fabric was warm to the touch when Florence pulled the blanket back. Warm the way a stone was warm after sitting in the sun.

  "I bought a set of cotton pyjamas yesterday," Florence said, already crossing to the dresser. "When Thomas took me shopping. We should be roughly the same size."

  She retrieved the folded pyjamas—plain, cream-coloured cotton, nothing fancy—and the basin of water she had set on the dresser an hour ago, when she'd first come up from the kitchen. She'd carried it up on the general principle that sick people needed washing and Alice was unlikely to manage the stairs.

  "Can you sit up?"

  Alice attempted it. The process took longer than it should have, her arms shaking as she levered herself upright, and by the time she was vertical she was breathing like she'd run a sprint. She sat on the edge of the bed, stockinged feet on the pine floorboards, and looked down at the black dress with the blank resignation of a woman who did not have the energy to operate buttons.

  "Turn around," Alice said.

  Florence turned around. Fabric rustled. A muttered curse. More rustling. Then a defeated silence.

  "I can't get the—there's a clasp at the back. At the neck."

  Florence turned back and stepped behind her. She found the small hook-and-eye at the top of the bodice and worked it free, then moved down the row of buttons beneath, unfastening each one with steady fingers. The fabric parted and heat rolled off Alice's skin in a wave that made Florence pull her hands back.

  "You're burning up."

  "Yes," Alice said, in a tone that suggested this was not news.

  Florence helped her peel the dress forward off her shoulders. The fabric clung—not from fit but from the sheer dampness of it, the cotton of the underlayer dark with perspiration. As the dress came away, Florence's fingers brushed the back of Alice's arm and she flinched.

  "Alice, this isn't just warm. This feels like a clothes iron."

  "Flattering comparison."

  "I'm serious." Florence pressed the back of her hand to Alice's forehead. The heat was startling, aggressive, the kind of temperature that would have sent Mrs. Gable running for a cold compress and a physician. It didn't hurt, though. It should have—skin this hot should have stung on contact—but her hand sat flat against Alice's brow and felt nothing worse than a stone left in the sun. She didn't wonder why. "Should I fetch a doctor?"

  "No." Alice caught her wrist—gently, but with emphasis. "No doctors. It's not an illness. It's the mana."

  Florence wrung out the cloth in the basin and pressed it to the back of Alice's neck. The water hissed. Not metaphorically—it hissed, a faint sibilance, the sound of moisture meeting a surface considerably hotter than it had any right to be. A thin curl of steam rose from the cloth and dissolved in the grey air of the attic.

  They both looked at it.

  Florence looked at Alice.

  Alice was smiling.

  It was a strange, private expression—not happy, exactly, but something adjacent. Satisfied. Or awed. It sat oddly on her face, given that she was half-undressed, soaked in sweat, and apparently running at a temperature that could scald damp cotton, but it was genuine in a way that Alice's expressions rarely were.

  "What?" Florence asked, wringing the cloth out again.

  "Nothing." Alice bit her lip, but the smile persisted, stubborn and bright. "It's just—this is good. The heat. It means the core is saturating. When a mage pushes the limits of their reserves—really empties the well—the core compensates by expanding its capacity afterward. Like a muscle that tears and rebuilds bigger. Right now my body is rebuilding, and the excess energy has to vent somewhere, so it's coming out as heat."

  She flexed her fingers, watching the air above them ripple faintly.

  "If I'm right—and I can feel it—by tomorrow, when the saturation settles, I'll be at the top of Tier Six. Possibly knocking on the door of Five." The smile widened into something incandescent, her glassy eyes catching light they had no business catching. "I've been trying to hit that ceiling for ten years, Florence. Ten years of drills and theory and staring at candles until my eyes bled. And one spectacularly awful night in this city might have done it."

  Florence listened. She understood roughly a third of it and cared about somewhat less—not because it wasn't important, but because Alice was sitting in front of her shivering and radiating heat like a coal grate, and the theory of magical advancement could wait until the patient was no longer steaming.

  "That's wonderful," Florence said, and meant it. "Lean forward."

  She worked the damp cloth across Alice's shoulders and down her arms, quick and methodical, the way she had watched her mother wash her father during the fever years ago, before the fever had stopped being something you washed away. Alice's skin was dry to the touch despite the heat, the sweat evaporating almost as fast as it formed. The basin was cooling fast, surrendering its warmth to the effort.

  She helped Alice into the pyjamas. The cotton was crisp, freshly folded, and the moment it settled against Alice's skin Florence watched the fabric go slack—the collar wilting, the pressed creases in the cuffs flattening smooth, the whole garment softening as though someone had passed an iron over it in one long stroke.

  "There," Florence said, stepping back. "You look almost human."

  "Generous of you."

  Alice sat propped against the wall at the head of the bed, her damp hair pushed back from her face, looking simultaneously fragile and luminous. Her cheeks were flushed with the mana burn, her eyes glassy, and the faint shimmer around her hands had not abated.

  She drew a breath. The giddiness receded, and something more careful took its place.

  "I should explain," Alice said, her voice taking on the measured cadence of someone assembling a justification. "Last night, I—"

  "I'll be right back," Florence said.

  She was out the door and down the stairs before Alice could finish the sentence. Not because she didn't want to hear it. She did. Eventually. When Alice was fed and resting and the words could come out steady, and when Florence herself had decided how she felt about what those words were going to be. But Alice was sick, and sick people needed food before they needed explanations, and Florence Bannerman had her priorities in order.