“And you want me to just sit and listen?”

  “I’m paying you to tell me things. Why would I pay someone to listen to me talk?”

  Maria looked amused. “I can see you don’t go to therapy.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. All right, I’ll be generous since this is your first time. My children have dinner at seven. You’ve got until then.” Maria clasped her hands in front of her and gave me an inquiring look. “So tell me about your situation.”

  “I’m a . . . well, I guess you could say I’m a new drucrafter.” I’d already thought about how I’d answer this. “My drucraft skills are pretty good, but I don’t know much about this world or how I fit into it. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to make a living.”

  “When you say your skills are good, do you mean you’re a channeller?”

  “A manifester,” I said. I’d mentally debated whether to admit this or not, but in the end, I’d decided to take the risk.

  But Maria only looked mildly interested. “Oh? Are you from a Noble House?”

  “Why?” I said guardedly.

  “I thought they were the only ones who trained up manifesters that young.” Maria shrugged. “Well, anyway. What types of channelling are you familiar with?”

  I gave Maria a fairly thorough answer, going through the exercises my father had taught me as well as the tricks I’d learned from Father Hawke. As I did, I watched Maria very carefully to see how she’d react. I remembered how Lucella had flown off the handle when I’d told her what I could do.

  As it turned out, though, what Maria was interested in was something quite different.

  “A white flame?” Maria had been sitting, relaxed, behind her desk; now she leant forward, suddenly intent. “Those enhanced infusions you did, it felt like burning a white flame?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Have you had any physical symptoms since then?” Maria’s voice was sharp. “Fainting, dizziness, exhaustion, nausea?”

  “Dizzy spells,” I admitted. “And I’ve been pretty tired. But I haven’t been getting much sleep, so I thought—”

  “Are the dizzy spells getting worse?”

  “I don’t think so?”

  “Dear God.” Maria slumped back in her chair. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.” She looked up at me. “Never do that trick again. Understand?”

  “Why not?”

  “That idiot of a priest. This is what happens when you have amateurs holding Wells . . . All right. Do you know the Five Limits of drucraft?”

  I shook my head.

  “The second limit is called the Primal Limit, and it says that humans can’t use drucraft from any of the branches on their own. You can transform free essentia into personal, but you can’t transform that personal essentia into anything else. Only a sigl can do that. A sigl does two things: it turns your own personal essentia into a spell effect, and it amplifies that effect by drawing on free essentia from your surroundings. Understand?”

  “. . . Yes.”

  “Now,” Maria said. “Primal drucraft is the exception. To make light you need a Light sigl, and to change something’s mass you need a Matter sigl, but you can perform Primal effects without a Primal sigl. It’ll be weaker, because you won’t have the sigl’s amplification, but you can do it. It’s why some people don’t think Primal drucraft really counts as its own branch, but anyway. One of those Primal effects is called “heart’s blood,” and it’s supposed to be a way to convert a part of your own self into essentia. People who’ve done it describe it exactly the way you did, burning their own life essence to make a white flame. It gives you a lot of personal essentia, very fast, and if you do it too much it kills you. If you go over a certain line, you drop dead, and nobody knows exactly where that line is.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So these dizzy spells . . .”

  “Soul sickness,” Maria said. “There’s no cure except bed rest and time. But if it hasn’t got any worse, you should be fine. Just don’t do it again!”

  I thought about that for a second. “I guess that was worth paying for.”

  “Well, I’m glad you think so. So now that I know you’re not going to drop dead on the floor of my consulting room, let’s get started and I’ll give you an essentia reading.”

  I handed over the money to Maria—I had to admit, she’d earned it. Maria opened up a desk drawer to reveal what looked like a collection of sigls in plastic housings, each of which had a cable attached. I’d been expecting her to ask me to channel or do some exercises, but all she did was ask me to take one of the sigls and hold it in my hand.

  “What’s it doing?” I asked curiously as I looked down at the sigl. It was pale blue and very small, and looked like one of my own Light sigls.

  Maria plugged the cable into a small handheld device. “It’s a measuring sigl.”

  I focused, seeing as I did that a tiny flow of essentia was being pulled through my hand into the sigl. “It’s pulling in my personal essentia?”

  “Oh, you can feel that?” Maria said. “They’re minimum-strength continuous sigls. No attunement, so they can’t actually do anything, but the reader lets me know how much of your essentia they would be using.” The device in her hand beeped, and she took the sigl away, replacing it with a pale red one. “Next, please.”

  Maria went through a series of sigls. The early ones all pulled only a thread of essentia. Later ones pulled more.

  “All right!” Maria said eventually, setting down the device. “All done.”

  “So what did that do?”

  “I was measuring your essentia capacity and affinities.”

  “Affinities?”

  “How good you are with the different branches,” Maria explained. “You’ll have a much easier time working with essentia that matches your affinities, and a much harder time with essentia that doesn’t. The kinds of sigls you can buy from UK providers have enough attunement that they’ll work even through a bad affinity, but it still helps. And if you really are a manifester, then you’ll do much better working with your affinities instead of against them.” Maria glanced down at her notepad. “Now, if this was a proper fitting, I’d give you a full report, but since it’s not and we’re on a clock, I’ll just give you the short version. You have a strong affinity for Light, a weak affinity for Matter and Dimension, a weak disaffinity for Life, and a strong disaffinity for Motion.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “The Dimension affinity is a little unusual, but apart from that, it’s very standard, yes.”

  Maria’s manner was quite casual. I wasn’t ready to relax just yet, but it didn’t look as though she was going to react like Lucella. “So I’ll do better trying to manifest at Light, Matter, and Dimension Wells?”

  “Yes, but don’t get too caught up on it,” Maria said. “Your affinities are just starting points, and they’ll change over time. If you take another reading in a few years, they’ll probably all have shifted. Your essentia capacity, though—that stays the same.”

  “Essentia capacity?”

  “The rate at which your body converts ambient essentia into personal essentia, measured by the number of sigls at the Lorenz Ceiling that you can keep active at the same time,” Maria said. “Basically, it’s how many sigls you can use at once. It’s correlated with your skeletal mass. Average in this country is 2.4 for women and 2.8 for men.”

  “What’s mine?”

  “Just under 2.5.”

  “So . . . below average?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there some way to improve it?”

  “Not really,” Maria said. “You can raise it a tiny bit with practice, but given your channelling skill, you’ve probably done all that already. Think of it as like your height. After a certain age, you’re not getting any taller.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Does it matter very much?”

  “It doesn’t matter at all,” Maria said. “I mean, how often are you going to need to use two or three sigls at once?”

  I started to relax. I’d been worried that a low essentia capacity might make me weaker in a fight.

  “Unless you’re getting into a fight,” Maria added.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Let me guess,” Maria said with a smile. “You’re one of those boys who wanted to grow up to be a combat drucrafter.”

  “It’s not about what I want! There are—” I stopped. I didn’t want to tell her about the Ashfords. “There are reasons.”

  “Well, whatever they are, if you had ambitions about joining the Board security forces or something, you’ll probably have to give them up. I think their minimum for a combat drucrafter is 3.0.”

  I looked away in frustration. With the way Lucella had acted, I’d started to think that I might be something special. But it seemed as though the more people I talked to, the less impressive my abilities were turning out to be.

  “Why is this bothering you so much?” Maria asked.

  “It just doesn’t seem fair,” I said, not meeting her eyes. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, because it sounded so childish. It’s not enough that I’m poor and on the small side, I have to be weaker at drucraft too?

  “Of course it’s not fair,” Maria said. “Essentia capacity is mostly inherited, and nothing about inheritance is fair. Some people are taller, some people are stronger. You just have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You really are upset,” Maria said. “Look, if it makes you feel any better, my essentia capacity is 2.1. That’s about as far below average for women as yours is for men. I promise you, it hasn’t made my life worse in any way that’s mattered.”

  You didn’t have a couple of guys break into your bedroom ten days ago. I took a breath and got control of myself. “Is it going to make it harder for me to use drucraft?”

  “No, not at all,” Maria said. “Think of your essentia capacity as strength, and your drucraft skills as dexterity. Even if you were an essentia cripple—that’s what they call anyone with a capacity below 2.0—it wouldn’t affect your sensing, channelling, or shaping in any way.”

  Well, that was something. Okay, time to get down to what I’d really come here to ask. “Some people have been acting as though the fact that I can shape sigls is a really big deal,” I said. “Is it?”

  “That’s . . . actually quite a hard question to answer,” Maria said slowly. “It’s certainly unusual. It’s a very specialised skill, and most of the ones who can do it come from Noble Houses. Honestly, for most people, it just isn’t all that useful.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Less than five percent of the sigls in this country are made by manifesters,” Maria explained. “The rest are made by shapers, using limiters. I suppose you were thinking of making your own sigls? Because I’m afraid that isn’t really how things work anymore.”

  I looked at Maria, puzzled.

  “I’ll give you an example,” Maria said. “How many medical drucrafters do you think are manifesters?”

  “Some?”

  “None,” Maria said. “Or so close as to make no difference. The average medical drucrafter in this country is a doctor who went to medical school, then got a contract from one of the big medi-corps. Then he’ll start to specialise.” Maria gestured up at the posters on the wall. “Let’s say he focuses on glaucoma. He won’t know how to make a Life sigl that treats that, but he doesn’t need to. His sponsor will pay for him to go to India, where he’ll meet some nice essentia analyst like me who’ll work with shapers to make him his own set. By the time he finally goes into practice, he’ll have spent more than ten years learning everything there is to know about glaucomas and about using Life sigls to treat them. He’ll have a lot of debt, but he’ll be paid very well.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Now imagine you try to do that on your own,” Maria said. “You don’t have a Life Well to make sigls from. Even if you did, you wouldn’t know how to make the specialised sigls that medical drucrafters use. And even if you could get past that, you aren’t a doctor. It would take you years and years of work and a huge amount of money, and even after all that, you still wouldn’t be good enough.”

  I was silent.

  “Drucraft isn’t about lone practitioners these days,” Maria explained. “It’s a globalised economy.”

  “But if I just wanted to learn medical drucraft, I could start with simpler things,” I argued. “Like . . . a mending sigl.”

  “Even a mending sigl, which is just about the most basic medical sigl out there, is still a very complicated piece of shaping,” Maria said. “People use limiters for a reason. There’s no way you’d be able to make one on your own without training.”

  But I did, I thought but didn’t say. “Could I get training as a shaper?”

  Maria hesitated. “We do offer training contracts to potential shapers, but there aren’t many places and there’s a lot of competition. Unless you’ve got a really strong academic record, I think you’ll have a difficult time.”

  “But I already know how to shape sigls.”

  “I’m afraid the bottleneck in sigl production isn’t shapers,” Maria said. “There are maybe twelve thousand Wells in this country of D-class and higher, and they only produce so much essentia per year. You can’t get more essentia, but you can always get more people.”

  I sat and digested that. “So you’re saying I have this really rare ability, but it’s not actually particularly useful for anything.”

  “I mean, it’s a nice thing to have on your CV,” Maria said with a smile. “But I think you’d be better off focusing on something more practical.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, there is one career in the drucraft world that I think could work quite well for you,” Maria said. “Locating.”

  “Locating what?”

  “Wells. There are around five thousand permanent Wells in the United Kingdom. They can grow or shrink, and there’s a fair bit of turnover among the weaker ones, but for the most part they’re a fixed asset. But most Wells aren’t permanent—they’re temporary. A permanent Well is like a fruit tree; it produces year after year. Temporary Wells are like . . . hmm, like wild mushrooms. They pop up in different places, and after you harvest them, you have to go somewhere else to find a new one.

  “Locators are the mushroom pickers. They travel around, looking for Wells, and when they find them, they call them in to whichever sigl provider they work for. Then the provider sends out a team to drain it or to secure it, depending on how strong the Well is. The locator gets paid a finder’s fee depending on the Well’s class, and the fees for the stronger Wells can get pretty high. And you don’t need a degree.”

  I thought about that for a second. “What’s the catch?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If a job doesn’t need any qualifications, that usually means it’s really bad.”

  Maria laughed. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I can see where you’re coming from. Locating isn’t a bad job, but there are some hurdles. First, you’ll need a finder’s stone. It’s a continuous Light sigl made in such a way that it only activates in the presence of ambient essentia. The closer you get to a powerful concentration of essentia, like a Well, the brighter it glows. Sort of like playing ‘hot and cold.’ ”

  “How do you get a finder’s stone?”

  “Linford’s can provide you with one.”

  “For free?”

  Maria gave me a pitying look.

  “Right,” I said sourly. “So before you can earn money, you have to have money.”

  “Welcome to how the world works,” Maria said. “But it’s not as bad as you’re making it sound. Corporations will ‘stake’ you with a finder’s stone. Linford’s offers all of the sigls in its locating line with no money down, so long as you sign on with them and have a good enough credit score. Then once you’re earning finder’s fees, you pay back the cost of the finder’s stone in monthly instalments.”

  “Mm,” I said. I’d learned to be wary of the words “no money down.” “What if you can sense Wells without a finder’s stone?”

  “We offer no-stake contracts too. But if you want to get anywhere as a locator, you need a finder’s stone.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re a lot more reliable,” Maria said. “Sensing isn’t taught very much these days, apart from the basic level that you need to channel. Drucraft organisations used to do it for religious reasons, but nowadays you can just get a finder’s stone and skip it.”

  I frowned.

  “Look, if you really do want to make a living in the drucraft world, becoming a locator is the best way to get on the ladder,” Maria said. “It’s long hours, and you’ll have to get used to pushing through dry spells, but you can earn a lot if you work hard. And there’s a lot of room for working your way up. I know for a fact that some of the shapers at Linford’s got their start as freelance locators. You just have to prove yourself first.”

  “Okay,” I said. I couldn’t help but feel that Maria was pushing this job just a little bit harder than she should be. “Is there a shortage of locators right now or something?”

  “Definitely,” Maria said with a nod. “With everything that’s been happening in the past couple of years, demand for essentia has shot up and supply hasn’t. There’s more and more pressure to find temporary Wells as soon as possible.”

  “And there aren’t any . . . problems?”

  Maria hesitated. “I don’t want to put you off . . .”

  I gave her a look.

  “As I said, essentia’s a limited resource. That means competition.”

  “What kind of competition?”

  “Signing on with a recognised sigl provider gives you access to the Well Registry,” Maria said. “That lets you check to see if a Well’s been claimed, and claim it in the name of your sponsor if it hasn’t. Once a Well’s claimed, then that should be that. In practice . . . it’s very common that we’ll respond to a claim, and when our site officer arrives, there’s nothing there. Either there’s no sign of a Well at all, or it’s been recently drained. Usually the locator tries to tell us that the Well was full when he got there, but someone else stole it.” Maria shrugged. “They’re always hoping we’ll pay them anyway. We don’t, of course.”