“Right,” Colin said, getting to his feet. “Now don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve had enough of spending my Saturday watching you sleep, and I am going to the pub. In the meantime, could you maybe try to get through a whole week without half killing yourself?”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “And thanks.”

  Colin left. Looking around, I saw that he’d left me some water to drink and changed Hobbes’s litter tray. Come to think of it, he must have kept on making and warming up fresh food all day long. He really was a good friend.

  Hobbes gave a plaintive meow, and I lifted him onto the bed. His pelvis was hurting him, and I carefully arranged him until he wasn’t in pain anymore. Then I lay back on my pillow with my hands behind my head and concentrated.

  Ever since I’d woken up, I’d been seeing faint shimmers of colour at the corners of my vision. I’d thought they’d go away as I woke up and recovered a little more fully, but they hadn’t. On a hunch, I quieted my thoughts and sensed.

  Colour sprang into the world. Pale gossamer threads were floating all around me, through the air and the walls and through the glass into the street outside. They ranged in colour from iridescent to silvery grey to a white that was so faint that it was hard to see.

  Essentia. I was seeing essentia.

  I stared down at my hand, channelling, and saw a shining white light well up at my palm. I’d never been able to see my personal essentia before.

  Why was I seeing it now?

  I puzzled over it for a while. Come to think of it, hadn’t I been doing that last night? That had been how I’d been able to see the flaws in that mending sigl. They hadn’t been hallucinations and I hadn’t gone crazy. The fact that the mending sigl worked proved it.

  But what did it mean?

  * * *

  —

  I went back to the church the next day.

  I’d meant to set out early, but by the time I’d woken up, infused essentia into Hobbes, and had some breakfast, it was later than I’d thought. I was moving more slowly than normal, and I kept having dizzy spells. Maybe I really had pushed myself too hard.

  By the time I reached the church, the bells were chiming and the service had started. I dawdled outside in the April sun, watching the bees buzz around the dandelions. Once the congregation began to filter out, I walked in.

  The priest was standing near the altar, speaking to a few of the worshippers who’d lingered after the service. “Ah,” he said as I walked up. “The boy with the cat. You know, you never did tell me your name.”

  “It’s Stephen. And you never told me yours.”

  “Father Hawke,” the priest replied. “Did you have any success?”

  “My cat’s alive,” I told him. Up close, I could see the church’s Well clearly. It shone with a clear, pale light, like pure water. I wondered if my own Well would be that beautiful.

  Father Hawke started to say something, then paused.

  “You told me last time that I didn’t know very much,” I said. “Do you know where I could find someone to help with that?”

  Father Hawke was looking at me with an odd expression.

  “Um,” I said. The women who’d been talking to Father Hawke were giving us curious looks. “Hello?”

  Father Hawke blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “What we were talking about last Saturday,” I said carefully. I didn’t want to say the word “drucraft” where we could be overheard. “I’m looking for a teacher.”

  “A teacher . . .” Father Hawke repeated absently, then shook his head slightly and seemed to come back down to earth. “Yes. Just a moment.” He disappeared through a door for a minute, leaving me to wait, then returned and handed me a business card. “Here.”

  The card had a name and a nearby address. “Thanks,” I told him.

  I took a last glance back on my way out. Father Hawke was still watching me, and there was a strange look on his face. I slipped out the door, then went home.

  * * *

  —

  It was midafternoon when I finally got back to my room. Hobbes was fed, watered, and treated, and was sleeping with his eyes tight shut; his fractures weren’t hurting and shouldn’t wake him. I’d talked to Ignas and reassured him that yes, I was okay, and yes, I’d stop starving myself, though I’d had to eat something in front of him to prove it. The dizzy spells kept coming, but I’d found they weren’t as bad if I sat down. Outside, the sun shone down upon Foxden Road. For the first time in a week, I had time to think.

  I lay down on my bed, opened my notebook to a blank page, and began to write.

  Problems

  My drucraft isn’t strong enough.

  My father is missing and I’ve got no idea how to find him.

  My mother is missing and I do know how to find her, but she doesn’t seem to care about finding me.

  Lucella’s my enemy and might at any point decide to come back and screw me over.

  Tobias is also my enemy and might also at any point decide to come back and screw me over.

  Charles Ashford might also become my enemy and decide to screw me over.

  If 4, 5, or 6 happen, I’m probably not strong enough to stop them.

  I’ve been fired.

  I’m going to run out of money.

  I still want to get revenge on Lucella/Tobias/Diesel/Scar/Lucella again/the Ashfords as a whole, and yes, I know expecting to get my own back against them is probably a pipe dream at this point, but seriously, fuck these people, especially Lucella.

  I set my pen down and studied the page. It was a pretty daunting list.

  Okay, let’s try to break this down.

  Problems four, five, six, and seven were the same thing, really—they were all just different variations on “some arsehole from House Ashford decides to ruin my life.” It was hard to say which Ashford I should be most worried about. Lucella was probably the most likely to come after me, but also the most straightforward. Charles seemed the least likely to try anything, but by far the scariest if he did.

  Problems eight and nine were also basically the same thing. I’d gone through the messages on my phone to find a list of texts and missed calls from the temp agency. The last message, sent on Thursday, informed me in frosty tones that my placement at the Ministry of Defence had been cancelled, and not to call them back. I knew the agency wouldn’t be in any hurry to find me anything new.

  Problems three and ten I’d just have to ignore for the moment, not so much because I wanted to as because solving either one felt completely impossible. If my mother wasn’t interested in talking to me, then there wasn’t much I could do to change her mind, and launching some campaign of revenge on the Ashfords was so obviously stupid I wasn’t even going to think about it. I wasn’t happy about it, but for now both of those would just have to wait.

  Letting problems one and two wait, on the other hand, felt like a bad idea. My drucraft not being strong enough was starting to bite me, really hard. And as for my father, he’d told me to wait for him, but it had been three years. If he was going to come back on his own, it should have happened by now.

  All right, I decided. I picked up my pen, crossed off three and ten, drew circles around one and two, then drew bigger circles around four to seven and eight to nine. Then I sat back and looked at the four circles. Which was the most urgent?

  The Ashfords, I decided. I still didn’t know exactly how many enemies I had in that snake pit of a mansion, or what they were going to do next. Lucella, Tobias, and Charles had made it sound as though they were done with me for now, but even if I trusted them—which I didn’t—the key words were “for now.” To me, what the Ashford situation really felt like was a ticking clock. At any point in the future, someone from House Ashford could decide to come after me again, at which point I’d suddenly have another bunch of drucraft-enhanced goons like Diesel and Scar kicking down my door. How would that turn out?

  Badly. I’d been lucky last time, but I wouldn’t be lucky forever, and that meant I needed to find some way to defend myself. Sooner or later that invisible clock was going to run down, and when it did I had to be ready.

  The next most urgent problem was money, and while that wasn’t quite so immediately dangerous, it was inevitable in a way that the Ashfords weren’t. After all, I didn’t know that the Ashfords were going to come after me—they might just go back to ignoring me, the same way they’d ignored me for the previous twenty years. But if the number in my bank account dropped below zero, then the bank wasn’t going to ignore me. Neither was my landlord.

  The obvious answer was to go back to what I’d been doing. Find a new agency job, try to get my life back to the way it had been, and generally keep my head down and hope for the best. It might even work . . . for a while.

  Except that was exactly what I’d been doing wrong for the past three years. I’d been thinking in terms of “for a while,” and all the time my list of problems had just grown and grown. I needed some way to pay my bills, but whatever I did, it had to be something that helped solve my problems, instead of just putting them on hold.

  And last of all was my father. I still missed him as badly as ever, but nothing that had happened in the past couple of weeks had brought me any closer to finding him. In fact, if I believed Tobias and Lucella, none of this whole business with the Ashfords had anything to do with my father at all.

  But I didn’t believe them. It just didn’t make sense that my father could disappear without a trace, and then, by some totally random freak coincidence, someone tried to make me disappear almost three years later. There had to be some kind of link, and that meant that at least one of the Ashfords knew a lot more than they were telling me.

  But it’s one thing to know someone’s lying to you, and another to do something about it. And even if I could track down whoever had made my father disappear, what could I do about it? If they could do that to my father, they could do the same to me.

  I sighed, put my pen down, lay back on my bed, and stared up at the ceiling. What should I do?

  Colours shimmered at the edge of my vision. I cleared my mind, and they sprang into focus, wisps of silvery essentia swirling lazily in the air. I frowned at them, thinking.

  Maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. What did I have going for me?

  Drucraft.

  It was my one big advantage, the one thing I could do that everyone else couldn’t. It might be weak right now, but it had potential to be much more. Combat and defence sigls could help protect me against the Ashfords, and they could give me a fighting chance if I ran into my father’s enemies too. As for money . . . well, I’d seen the wealth in that mansion. If drucraft could make them that rich, there had to be some way I could earn a living from it.

  And drucraft gave me the possibility of something more: independence. Lucella, Tobias, and Charles had all offered me things I wanted—money, knowledge, family—but now that I looked back on it, it felt as though every time I’d accepted one of their offers, I’d got the short end of the stick. And as long as I kept on dealing with them on their terms, that was never going to change. They had all the power, which meant they got to set the rules.

  Maybe this was how rich people stayed on top. They didn’t run around doing things themselves—they made sure their position was better than everyone else’s, then got other people to do stuff for them.

  But if I could get my drucraft to the point where I had some power of my own, I could get away from that. I wouldn’t have to beg the Ashfords for table scraps, then sit around waiting while they decided whether to pay me what I was owed or just stab me in the back. I could accomplish things on my own. And if I ever found out what had happened to my father, I’d actually be able to do something about it.

  So my list was wrong. I didn’t actually have ten problems. I just had one.

  I picked up my pen again and began crossing out the list line by line, starting from the bottom and going up. Once I got to my drucraft isn’t strong enough, I stopped, circled it a couple more times, then set down my pen and nodded to myself. One problem, one solution. Much better.

  It’s funny how a single decision can change your whole life. But now that I thought about it, I’d been building towards this for a while. What had happened yesterday had made me realise just how much of my time I’d been spending on things that didn’t matter. I didn’t really care about my job or going to college.

  What did I care about?

  I wanted the power to protect myself and Hobbes and live my life as I chose. I wanted to find my father and have a family again. And I wanted to develop my drucraft to be the best that it could be.

  The path to the first two lay through the third. So I’d dedicate myself to my drucraft. Simple.

  I sat back against the wall, stretched, and looked out through the window. I felt lighter, as if I’d cut myself loose from something that had been weighing me down for a very long time. The sunlight shone down onto Foxden Road, sycamore branches casting shadows that swayed in the breeze. Out there, a new path was waiting. I didn’t know whether it was the next step in my journey or the first, but for the first time in a long while, I was excited to find out.

  I walked out through the door and into a new chapter of my life.

  CHAPTER 10

  Well, I thought, this looks like the place.

  I was in Upton Park, a mile or so east of Plaistow. The house I was in front of was bigger than average for this street, with a side extension. The number on the door matched the one on the card Father Hawke had given me. Above the number was a name: Maria Noronha.

  I walked up to the house. Another dizzy spell made me pause; I could hear chatter from inside, children’s and women’s voices speaking a language I didn’t recognise. Once my head cleared, I rang the bell.

  The voices from inside tailed off. I heard footsteps approaching the door, then silence. Looking at the door, I saw that it had a peephole. I tried to look unthreatening.

  There was a pause, then the rattle of a chain. The door swung open.

  The woman standing in the doorway was in her thirties, small and pretty, with Indian looks, brown skin, and long black hair. Even though it was a Sunday afternoon, her clothes were neat and fashionable looking. She looked like a junior bank manager, or maybe a lawyer. “Hello?” she asked.

  “Hi. I’m looking for Maria Noronha?”

  “You’ve found her,” the woman told me. She spoke formally, with a slight accent. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Stephen Oakwood. Father Hawke sent me.”

  “Who—oh.” Maria sighed. “That man is so annoying. I hope he’s not giving out my home address to everyone who walks in.” Maria gave me an appraising glance. “Well, you don’t look like trouble. What can I do for you?”

  My looks come in handy sometimes. “I’m trying to find someone to teach me more about drucraft,” I said. “Could you help?”

  Maria looked puzzled. “I’m . . . not really a teacher. I’m an essentia analyst.”

  “A what?”

  “For Linford’s,” Maria explained. “It’s one of the big UK drucraft corporations. When customers are looking to buy a sigl package, they’re matched up with an essentia analyst. We do essentia readings, give them advice on sigl choice, instruct them in its use, coordinate with the shaper and the medical team, that kind of thing.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I thought for a second. “So if I wanted to learn the basics, who’d be a better person to go to?”

  “Drucrafters usually learn the basics from private tutors or in-house teachers.”

  “Would they teach someone like me?”

  “Probably not,” Maria admitted. “Maybe he did know what he was doing sending you here after all. All right. I’ll give you a reading and answer your questions. Payment in advance.”

  “Payment?”

  “My freelance rate is a hundred pounds an hour.”

  I stared at her. “A hundred pounds an hour?”

  “And a reading is two hours,” Maria added. “It’s not very high by professional standards.”

  “I’d have to work ten hours to be paid that much!”

  “Well, that tells you something about how much your time is worth compared to how much my time is worth.”

  “I can’t afford that much,” I told her. Well, technically I could, but that was nearly as much money as I could save in a month!

  “You get what you pay for.”

  I tried to bargain and got nowhere. I wanted to just walk away, but I was uncomfortably aware of how many blunders I’d already made through not knowing basic information. I had to learn this stuff from somewhere.

  “Fine,” I said at last with bad grace. “I’ll get the money.”

  Maria looked quite unconcerned. She could obviously tell that I didn’t have any better options. “Come around and knock on the side door when you do.”

  * * *

  —

  “Here,” I said twenty minutes later, holding up a slim wad of notes.

  The side door to Maria’s house led into a one-room extension with windows looking out onto a well-tended garden. There were a couch, a desk, a faded armchair, and—for some reason—posters on the wall with anatomy diagrams of the human eye.

  Maria held out her hand for the money, but I didn’t give it to her. “Not yet,” I said.

  “I did say ‘in advance.’ ”

  “I’ll tell you what I need,” I said. “Then if you can help me, I’ll pay you. You can start the two hours from there.”