The problem was endurance. Sensing wasn’t difficult, but it did take effort, and by this point I’d been doing it eighteen hours a day for nearly a week without a break. Maintaining my concentration was getting harder and harder, and my focus was starting to slip. Each time that I caught myself doing it, I’d imagine Hobbes dying and use the spike of adrenaline to force myself to focus again. When that didn’t work, I imagined the casual way Lucella had ordered Hobbes’s death, and let the memory fan my anger into white-hot hatred. Hate and fear were the twin whips that drove me onward, keeping me on my feet when nothing else would.

  But while hate and fear spurred me, they also broke the state of inner calm that I needed to use my sensing. Each time that I used them to shock myself awake, it was a little harder to get back to the right frame of mind. I was going slower today than I had yesterday, and I knew that tomorrow I’d be slower still.

  I found one Well in the afternoon. It was full, but with the same heavy, earthy essentia that I’d sensed in one of the Wells I’d found on Tuesday. It was also sealed off, inside a tall, blocky building with barbed wire on its walls. A sign above the door said “LVS Services,” with a smaller notice saying that they were a subsidiary of “Maar Gruppe.” I went home to treat Hobbes, then dragged myself out again as the sun set, forcing myself to keep searching as evening turned into night.

  And then, just when I wasn’t expecting it, I found one.

  The Life Well was tucked away in a cluster of trees in Wanstead Park, next to a huge pond. The water was cold and dark, a chill breeze rolling off it and hissing through the branches overhead. The essentia inside was vital, powerful, alive . . . and untouched.

  But there wasn’t much of it. The Well was very weak.

  Over the past few days, I’d spent what few precious spare hours I had working out ideas for the priest’s mending sigl. I’d made and remade essentia constructs, trying to figure out how to make a healing sigl. The design that I’d come up with was my best guess, but it was still only a guess. I had no idea whether it would work.

  I took a deep breath and began.

  It felt wrong right from the start. I wasn’t used to working with Life essentia, and the techniques I’d learned from shaping Light sigls didn’t work in the way I expected. The essentia didn’t flow straight; it kept on trying to grow and branch on its own. I had to use a heavier hand than I’d wanted to, and by the time I’d finished with the construct stage, the construct felt threadbare and the Well reserves very small. I took a deep breath, started to shrink the construct, and prayed.

  The construct began to take shape, but I could see immediately that the Well’s essentia was running out too fast. I kept working, reinforcing the lines of the construct one by one, but the essentia was draining too quickly and I’d underestimated how much this sigl would need. Still, I was getting close. Just a little more and I could start to manifest . . .

  The essentia flow thinned, and the essentia construct flickered. It was only two-thirds of the way there. “Come on,” I whispered, and strained harder, pulling in all the essentia I could.

  The essentia flow continued to drop. The construct wavered. “Come on. Come on, come on.” It wasn’t over the critical point. If I tried to force it now, nothing would happen. “Just a little more. Just a little more—”

  The essentia dried up. The last strands were pulled in, and the flow stopped. The construct shook wildly. I tried desperately to force it through . . . and failed. The construct collapsed, the essentia pouring outwards, spreading out and sinking into the land around, the earth soaking it up like water.

  “No!” I shouted. I cast about, but there was nothing left. The Well was empty. It would take months to refill, if it refilled at all.

  I threw back my head and screamed. The sound echoed off the water of the pond, bounced back from the silent trees. I’d been so close! If only there had been a little more . . .

  And then the reality of it hit me. It had taken me six days to find this Well. To find a stronger one would probably take even longer. Hobbes wouldn’t survive six more days. He wouldn’t survive three.

  It was over.

  I broke down then. I’d been driving myself all week with the hope that if I pushed hard enough and desperately enough, I could keep Hobbes alive. It had all been a lie. He was going to die, and it was my fault.

  I curled up under the tree and cried myself to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  When I woke, it was the middle of the night. The sky was clear, and the spring chill had leached into my bones. Cold is worse when you’re hungry, and when I tried to get up my numbed feet made me fall over. I spent a while rubbing feeling back into my limbs before pulling myself upright.

  Despite the cold, I felt calm. I knew what I had to do. I was finding Wells too slowly, and it was because my sensing was too weak. I’d been straining and driving myself to look for Wells, but that was wrong. You didn’t get better at sensing by trying harder; you did it by removing distractions.

  I just hadn’t been taking it far enough.

  The sky stretched out above me, black and clear, stars twinkling through the London lights. A crescent moon shone down, framed by a pale aura. I stared into the void, looking inward. Over the past few days, I’d tried to keep my mind empty, but the thoughts and worries were still there. Hobbes, Lucella, Charles, my mother and father. I had to get rid of them all.

  I started with Lucella, the thoughts and memories a mass of images tinged with emotion, hate and anger and fear. Normally I’d try to banish that mass, move it to the edge of my mind, where it’d be less distracting. Instead, this time, I methodically gathered the thoughts and memories together, and crushed them. It was like taking a glass sculpture in your fist, and squeezing. The sculpture shattered into splinters, the splinters into razor-sharp shards. Pain stabbed through my mind, but I kept squeezing until there was nothing left but dust.

  Then I moved on to the next one.

  I went through everything that was distracting me: worries, memories, images, plans. As the shards of each one sliced across my thoughts, my mind became clearer, sharper. As the void within grew bigger, so did the void without, the night sky getting larger and larger. At some point it flipped, and I wasn’t looking up into the sky, but down. The blackness hung beneath me, and all that was holding me up was the clutter in my mind. Each time I destroyed another piece, I slipped a little deeper.

  The stars burned with a cold fire, infinitely far and within arm’s reach. I could see colours in the endless dark. No, not dark, it had its own colour, all colours. I was almost falling. Only one thing was holding me back. I reached out to crush that too, then realised what it was. Hobbes.

  I paused. The stars blazed. The strand linking me to Hobbes was the last thing holding me back. Just a little more, and I’d be able to walk among them.

  No, I decided. Slowly, inch by inch, I drew myself back. The connection to Hobbes became a tether that I pulled myself along, hand over hand, until I blinked and found myself on the ground again, staring up at the sky.

  I looked around with new eyes. Currents of essentia flowed through the earth, followed the lines of the streets, traced patterns through the sky. I picked out the ones that I needed and began walking south, watching the colours shift lazily in the dark.

  The city was quiet, the only noise the occasional rush of a passing car. Charles Ashford loomed up out of the night, a giant twice my size. He told me to go west, to use the Wells there to shape a sigl that would bring death in the form of a golden mace. I told him that wasn’t what I needed, and he grew angry and changed into my mother, who walked by my side for a while. She had no face, only a black plane, but she spoke without words, talking of webs and shadows. I tried to keep up but with so many more legs she could move faster than I could, and eventually she outdistanced me and disappeared beyond the lights.

  The last person I met was my father and he didn’t say anything at all, just walked the rest of the way along with me. At some point I realised that he’d drawn a sword; he held the blade in one hand and the scabbard in the other, offering them to me. I touched the sword and made it disappear; he nodded, then pointed with the scabbard to the south.

  I blinked. I was alone on an empty street. Where my father had pointed were the black railings of West Ham Park. Green trails of essentia curved into the park, disappearing into the night. I climbed the fence—my body felt very light—and dropped down into the darkness on the other side.

  The Life Well was in the northeast corner, hidden in the middle of the greenhouses. It was sheltered and enclosed, a concentration of emerald light, trails of essentia drifting lazily to converge at its heart. I must have walked past the place a hundred times without ever sensing it. I settled down and got to work.

  It went much faster this time. The essentia construct took form before me, a pattern of glowing green threads. Now that I could see it, I realised that the design I’d been using wouldn’t work. I reached out with my finger, tracing lines in the air, reshaping the construct into something denser and more complex. More channels, so that the essentia could flow more smoothly. A focusing array, so that the flow leaving the sigl would be concentrated on a single part of the body. Once I was done, I leant back and studied the construct before giving a nod. There.

  I started to pull in essentia from the Well. The construct flared and brightened, its lines glowing with emerald light. Essentia poured into the pattern above my palm, growing brighter and brighter, denser and denser. It felt as if it needed more help, and I drew upon my own personal essentia more heavily, feeling it burning inside me like a white flame.

  I don’t know exactly how long it took. It could have been minutes, or hours. But when it was done, I was left kneeling between the greenhouse tables, staring down at a tiny spark of green cupped in my palm.

  I blinked and looked up to see that the sky was turning grey. Dawn was breaking. I squeezed under the greenhouse fence, crossed the park, and climbed the gates, my precious cargo wrapped carefully in my pocket. Then I went home.

  I let myself in with my key. Hobbes’s spirit was wandering around my room, and I shooed him back into his body before settling down. Now that I studied it more closely, the sigl looked like a tiny sphere of emerald, a little bigger than my other two, pale green with a wavy pattern at its centre. I channelled through it and saw Life essentia flow into Hobbes’s body.

  It was difficult. Hobbes’s body was quite close to death, and I knew that if I pushed too hard, I’d kill him. The only feedback I had was the sense of his own essentia, and I used it as a guide, pushing harder when what I was doing seemed to be working, easing off when it felt as though the strain was too much. A couple of times his spirit tried to leave and I told him that I needed him to stay, until he finally seemed to accept it and it merged with his body again and stayed that way.

  When I was done, Hobbes wasn’t in pain anymore, but his breathing was still very shallow and weak. Once again I fanned the essentia inside me into a white flame, burning something that couldn’t be seen or felt, and poured heat and life into Hobbes’s body until he was breathing easily again.

  At some point my father had come in and started talking to me. “. . . hey,” he was saying. “Hey. Can you hear me?”

  “I need to heal Hobbes,” I told him.

  “Jesus, dude, you look like you’ve been through a famine. When’s the last time you ate?”

  “Monday, I think,” I told him. “I couldn’t eat before, I needed to reach the stars. It’s fine now.”

  “Reach the—you know what, just stay there.” My father disappeared. I kept adding small flows of essentia to Hobbes while I waited for him to return. I was really tired.

  My father showed up again with a steaming bowl. The smell made my mouth water, and I suddenly realised just how hungry I was. “Here,” my dad said, handing it to me. “Eat slowly.”

  I took a bite. It tasted amazing. “Wow,” I said. “What is this?”

  “It’s plain white rice. Don’t eat too fast or you’ll throw up.”

  “Okay.” I looked at my father’s features and blinked. “Why do you look Chinese?”

  “Because I was born that way, you dickhead.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re Colin.” Now that I focused on his face, I could see that it was him. “That actually makes much more sense.”

  “Yes,” Colin said patiently. “Yes, it does. Now how about you get some sleep?”

  “You’re made of essentia too, you know. I just couldn’t see it before.”

  “Uh-huh. Take your shoes off.”

  “Hobbes’ll need food and water,” I told Colin, swinging my legs onto the bed.

  “I’ll handle it. Now go to sleep.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. I put my head down and was out like a light.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up a couple of times during the day. Both times there was a bowl of rice sitting by my bed, and I’d eat a little, check to see that Hobbes was okay, and fall asleep again.

  When I woke up for the third and last time, it was late afternoon. Colin was sprawled in the chair, one leg crossed ankle to knee, reading on his phone. “Well, that took long enough,” he said, looking up. “Have you been skipping sleep as well?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. The rice bowl beside my bed had been refilled again, but I was feeling full. “So what are you doing here?”

  “What the bloody hell do you think?” Colin said. “We’ve been trying to figure out if you’re alive or dead! You didn’t answer your messages, and you didn’t show up on Wednesday. After Kiran called half a dozen times, we decided someone was going to have to come around. I came by yesterday and that Ignas guy told me you’d been in and out at crazy times all week, looking worse and worse. Left him my number, and he called at the crack of dawn.”

  “Oh,” I said. I suppose that kind of thing does happen when you just stop answering your phone.

  “So, I have to ask,” Colin said. “Have you gone insane?”

  “I did, but I came back. Is Hobbes okay?”

  “See for yourself.”

  I peered over the bed to see Hobbes lying on the floor. He looked as though he’d tried to get onto the bed but hadn’t been able to manage the jump with his broken legs. But his ears were pricked up and his eyes open, and as I looked down at him, I knew instantly that he was feeling better. Hobbes looked up at me and gave a companionable sort of “mrow,” and the sound of his voice sent a warm rush of relief through my chest.

  “Okay,” Colin said. “I think it’s time you told me what the hell’s been going on.”

  “Um. What do you think it looks like?”

  Colin gave me a deadpan look. “Stephen, I have absolutely no fucking clue what this looks like.”

  “. . . Okay, that’s fair.”

  “Kiran thinks you’ve joined a cult, Felix thinks you’re on the run from debt collectors, Gabriel’s just happy he’s now only the second-most dysfunctional one, and I thought you’d finally found a girlfriend,” Colin said. “At least until I saw you. You definitely haven’t found a girlfriend.”

  “Not a girlfriend, a girl,” I said seriously. “I met her ten days ago.”

  “Wasn’t that the crazy one?”

  “No, Lucella was nine days ago. This was the girl on the bridge. I think she’s sixteen or something.”

  “Sixteen?”

  “I told you, she’s a girl, not my girlfriend. Now will you listen?”

  Colin leant back with a long-suffering look. I sat up cross-legged on the bed and began to explain. “She told me I needed to get stronger.” Ever since I’d woken up today, everything seemed much simpler. “I should have just listened to her from the start, but instead I got distracted by everything that was happening. A lot of those things were ones I did have to deal with, but I wasn’t thinking about them the right way, and that was why everything kept going wrong. I didn’t actually have a plan, I was just kind of reacting to everything that happened.”

  “How about you have some more to eat?”

  “I’m too full, I’d just throw up. So when I went to talk to Charles? That’s what I mean about not thinking about it the right way. I went to him because Tobias told me to and because I couldn’t come up with any better ideas. But since I didn’t have any real power of my own, Charles didn’t actually have to give me anything he didn’t want to, and I couldn’t do anything when Lucella went for me afterwards.”

  “Stephen, I have literally no clue what you are talking about.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You know how you’ve been not-so-subtly hinting for a while that I should get my life together?”

  “I was trying to be subtle.”

  “The problem is I’ve been trying to do too many things,” I said. “I’ve been doing all the things I feel I’m supposed to do, and I don’t actually have time to do all of them, so I’ve been doing them all badly.”

  “No man can serve two masters?”

  “Yeah, that. Anyway, I’m going to focus on my drucraft from now on.”

  “That weird hobby you used to do with your dad? Oh, nearly forgot.” He dug something out of his pocket. “Here’s your green shiny thing. What is it, costume jewellery?”

  “It’s a sigl,” I told him, accepting it. “I used it to heal Hobbes.”

  Colin looked at me.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  “Sorry, dude,” Colin said. “And . . . maybe sleep on it before you quit your day job, all right? So you’re not making life-changing decisions when you’re sleep deprived and hallucinating?”

  “All right.”