“But?”

  “But . . . it is true that there are certain groups out there who watch for new Wells to appear and move on them before they can be secured. How likely that is depends on the Well’s rating. No one’s going to go chasing across London for the sake of a D-class, but once you get up to a C-plus or so . . . well, those are worth real money. From what I hear, it can get a little rough.”

  That didn’t sound very encouraging.

  Maria checked the slim watch on her wrist. “We’re almost out of time. Do you want me to begin registering you with Linford’s? You’ll need references and a background check, and the sooner you start on those, the better.”

  “Just one thing,” I said. “From how you were describing it, a finder’s stone is basically a visual aid for detecting essentia. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is there some way to do the same thing without one?”

  “There are some specialised sigls . . .”

  “Not with a sigl,” I said. “Or any other kind of tool. Just seeing essentia on your own.”

  “You’re really determined to avoid paying for a finder’s stone, aren’t you?” Maria said. “Sorry, no way around it. If you want to see essentia, you’ll need a sigl.”

  I looked at Maria, seeing the faint swirls of essentia in the air behind her, and nodded.

  “So do you want to register?” Maria asked.

  “Could you give me a reference?”

  “Maybe,” Maria said with a smile. “Now, shoo. You’ve had more than your two hours and I’ve got children to feed.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time I got home it was early evening, and the sky outside my window was darkening to a beautiful shade of dusky blue. I fed and treated Hobbes, who meowed at the attention. He was doing much better, which was a relief—after what Maria had told me, I was going to be a lot more careful about that infusion trick. Once I was done, I lay down on my bed with my hands behind my head and stared up at the ceiling.

  A locator, huh? The more I thought about the idea, the more I liked it. I already wanted to spend more time looking for Wells. It’d let me earn a living from something I needed to do anyway.

  I’d come a long way in the last two weeks. Between Maria, Father Hawke, Johanna, and Charles, I felt as though I was beginning to understand the drucraft world. But there was one big piece missing.

  I’d been vaguely wondering if seeing essentia the way I’d been doing over the last couple of days was a normal thing. Maybe it was something you just naturally developed once your sensing got good enough, and the stress and pain of that night had pushed me over the edge. But Maria seemed absolutely convinced that it was impossible. She might be wrong—well, she was wrong—but she obviously knew far more than I did. So what was going on?

  One thing was for sure: I wasn’t telling anyone about it. I still had a very vivid memory of what had happened the last time I’d revealed an ability that I wasn’t supposed to have, and until I knew a lot more I was going to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open. For now, I decided to get an early night. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

  CHAPTER 11

  I woke early the next morning. Once I’d had breakfast, I lifted Hobbes onto my bed, into a spot where I could keep an eye on him, then knelt down next to the loose skirting board and pulled it out. Yesterday I’d made a decision. Today I had to figure out how to put it into practice.

  I took out the envelope from the cubbyhole and sat down on my bed. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper that smelt of dust. I unfolded it and began to read.

  Stephen,

  Something’s happened and I’m going to have to disappear. I can’t tell you the details, but understand that I’m doing this for your protection, not because I want to.

  Men will come looking for me. Stay away. It’s me they want, not you.

  I’ll come back as soon as I can, but I don’t know when that’ll be. Until then, keep practising your drucraft.

  Love,

  Dad

  I finished reading and looked down at the handful of faded lines. Even scribbled as they were, they didn’t cover even half the page.

  My father had written those words in May, the same year I’d turned eighteen. That had been almost exactly three years ago. He’d said he’d come back as soon as he could. Should I keep waiting?

  No. It sounded like a big decision, but the truth was, it was something that had been at the back of my mind for a long time. I couldn’t keep sitting around hoping that things would get better on their own. If I wanted to solve my problems, I’d have to do it myself.

  But how?

  One of the things I’d tried in those first few months had been going to a detective agency. They’d looked for my father and found nothing. Lack of money had stopped me going further, but even then, I’d gotten the definite impression that it wasn’t going to help. Whoever these men coming after my father were, they were serious, and if they hadn’t been able to find him, a high street private detective probably wasn’t going to do better.

  But while I didn’t have any way of finding my dad, I might have a way to find the people looking for him. I still had the licence plate number of that white Ford, and a detective agency should be able to do something with that. But they wouldn’t do it for free . . . which brought me back to the next problem. Money.

  I took out my old laptop, brought up the calculator, and started budgeting. With the cheque from Charles Ashford, I had a little over £4,400 in the bank. The vet bill came to almost £1,600, not counting any return visits. £200 had gone to Maria. My rent was £540 per month—our landlord had put it up again. Add in travel, the electricity bill, the gas bill, council tax, phone payments, groceries . . .

  I had enough money for two months. Maybe three, if I ate cheaply, stopped going to the pub, and generally lived as frugally as I could . . . though that was assuming no disasters, emergencies, or anything else that would lead to extra expenses, which, given my last couple of weeks, was probably optimistic. After that I got into debt-and-overdraft territory, which scared me. There’s a reason credit card companies try to get you on the hook—once you fall into that pit, it’s hard to climb out.

  So for now, I could forget about hiring a private detective, or for that matter spending any money that I didn’t absolutely have to. I had about two months to get out of the red. Maria had told me that being a locator could earn me enough to do that. Was it true?

  I opened up my browser and went to the Linford’s website.

  The Linford’s site was big and confusing. The details of locating and Wells weren’t on the public part, but Maria had given me a guest log-in that allowed me low-level access. I navigated to the “Fees” section and found what I was looking for.

  FINDER’S FEES

  Well Strength (Faraday Scale)

  Well Class

  Light, Primal

  Matter, Motion, Dimension

  Life

  1

  D

  £190

  £220

  £250

  2

  D+

  £600

  £700

  £780

  3

  D+

  £1,200

  £1,300

  £1,500

  4

  C

  £1,900

  £2,200

  £2,500

  5

  C

  £2,800

  £3,200

  £3,600

  6

  C

  £3,800

  £4,300

  £4,900

  7

  C

  £4,900

  £5,600

  £6,300

  8

  C+

  £6,150

  £7,000

  £7,900

  9

  C+

  £7,500

  £8,500

  £9,600

  10

  C+

  £8,900

  £10,200

  £11,500

  The table kept going, with the fees scaling up to eye-popping amounts. A strength-20 Light Well would earn you £28,000. Strength-32 Wells, which was the point at which the class ticked up from B to B+, had finder’s fees of between £60,000 and £80,000. Even if I never found anything above the first few ranks, I’d only need to find one C-class Well per month to earn more than I had from my last job.

  It sounded amazing. Actually, it sounded a bit too amazing. Those numbers felt really high for a job that was just supposed to be a way to get your foot in the door. I clicked through to the section on finder’s stones.

  Just as Maria had said, finder’s stones were Light sigls that glowed in the presence of high concentrations of ambient essentia. And they weren’t cheap—even the most basic model cost £1,999. The website claimed you could pay nothing down if you passed the background and credit check, but that required signing up for monthly payments that added up to even more than buying the sigl outright. The whole thing gave me a bad feeling and I decided I’d rather trust my own sensing than pay thousands of pounds to Linford’s. Maria had made it sound as though relying on sensing was worse than using a finder’s stone, but I’d just have to manage.

  The good news was that I had a plan. To find my father, I needed money; to strengthen my drucraft, I needed sigls; to make a living as a locator, I needed finder’s fees. Finding Wells would let me solve all three problems at once.

  And I didn’t have to start from scratch, either. I’d found several Wells last week. At the time I’d ignored all of them except the Life ones, but I remembered where they were. It was time to get something back for all that hard work.

  * * *

  —

  “Motion,” I muttered. “Why did it have to be Motion?”

  Channelsea is one of the places in London where nobody goes. It’s a little enclave of riverside and mudflats, bounded by the Greenway on one side and railway lines on the other, and centred upon an old chemical plant that’s been rusting away for years. There are a lot of places in London like Channelsea, areas with no shops or houses or tourist attractions that most people never go into because there’s nothing there.

  At least, as far as they know.

  Right now I was standing in a jungle of plants and leaves and branches. I was less than fifty feet from the Channelsea River, but the undergrowth was so thick that you wouldn’t know it. Plants pressed in from all around, sycamore and lime trees blocking out the sun, while nettles, chickweed, and cow parsley clogged the ground. The place was secluded but noisy. The wind rushed in the trees, the sounds of the river echoed through the undergrowth, and every few minutes the air would shake to the sounds of a low-flying aeroplane or an Underground train from across the water. And at my feet, at the centre of the small clearing, was the Well.

  I’d found this place by pure luck. I’d been passing Channelsea House last Sunday when an old memory had come back to me of exploring with Colin, and I’d turned off the Greenway to follow the riverside path, pushing through the overgrowth until the rusting shapes of the gasholders had appeared on the other side of the river. Then I’d squeezed through a break in the wire-mesh gate set into the concrete barrier that ran alongside the path, and found the Well in the little patch of unused ground between the barrier and the old chemical plant.

  The essentia in this Well was very different from mine. It gleamed pale yellow in my sight, swirling like a whirlpool, currents and eddies forming and changing and branching off. It definitely wasn’t a Light or a Life Well, and it didn’t look like the Primal one I’d seen at Father Hawke’s church, either. That left Dimension, Matter, and Motion. My instincts told me that it was Motion. Which, according to Maria, was the branch I was worst at.

  It was a bit annoying, because having taken another look through the catalogue, I was getting the feeling that Motion might be the best out of all the branches for self-defence. Motion sigls could generate attacks of blunt kinetic force, as well as heat-based effects that could burn or freeze. There were even knife- or sword-type effects that created a razor-thin blade that could slice straight through things, though those sounded horrendously lethal and had warnings plastered all over them. Best of all, there were movement sigls that let you jump long distances, levitate, or fly.

  But I was getting ahead of myself. Most of the really exciting Motion sigls had carat weights of 1.5 and up, which according to the catalogue needed a Well class of at least C+. I wasn’t sure exactly how strong this Well was, but I had the feeling that it was probably a D, or a D+ at the very most.

  I had thought of just waiting until my registration at Linford’s was done and trying to sell it to them. But Linford’s only paid £220 for D-class Motion Wells, and while that wasn’t nothing, I had the feeling that a new sigl would be more helpful than an extra couple of hundred pounds. And there was always the chance that this Well might be a permanent one, in which case I could keep coming back year after year.

  I settled down with my back against a tree, pulled the catalogue out of my backpack, and opened it up to the “Motion” section.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, I closed the catalogue with a sigh. Based on the options in the catalogue, I’d narrowed my choices down to three: slam, jump, and mighty blow.

  Motion sigls all seemed to revolve around kinetic energy, either generating it, redirecting it, or neutralising it. I’d picked these three sigls because they seemed to be the simplest—all of them converted essentia into kinetic energy to do something very straightforward. Slam was a short-range blast of compressed air, mighty blow was designed to enhance a punch or kick, and jump created a kinetic thrust that could either fling you through the air or accelerate you into a sprint. And with carat weights of 0.3 to 0.5 for the low-end models, all three were effects that even a D-class Well could stretch to.

  There was still the slight problem that I didn’t actually know how to make any of those sigls. I was pretty confident in my ability to make light sigls by now, and I’d somehow managed to make a mending sigl on my first try, but for all I knew, that could have been a one-off. Realistically, there was a pretty good chance I was going to screw this up.

  So with that in mind, I decided to stay away from jump and mighty blow. Both sigls were designed to enhance the wielder’s own body by boosting a punch, a kick, or a leap, and it felt to me as though messing that up could lead to really bad consequences—if I applied the force to the wrong spot, I’d end up dislocating my own limbs. Slam, on the other hand, sounded relatively safe. From the description it didn’t seem to have the power to hit very hard, so even if the worst happened, I shouldn’t be able to seriously injure myself. There was still the “strong disaffinity for Motion” problem . . . but what did that really mean, anyway?

  I put away my catalogue and got up to find out.

  * * *

  —

  Forty-five minutes later, I’d found out. “Strong disaffinity for Motion” meant that the essentia in the Well hated me.

  Sweat dripped from my forehead, and I shook my head quickly to fling it away. The essentia construct above my palm shimmered and started to unravel again, and I quickly twined my personal essentia through it to hold it together.

  When I’d made my light sigls, I’d done it slowly and carefully, not moving on to the next step until each part of the construct was exactly right. I’d tried to do the same with this one, and it wasn’t working, because the essentia wouldn’t stay still. It wasn’t like sketching in pencil, it was like wrestling a dozen angry snakes, and whenever I got one part of the construct right, another part would start to unravel and change.

  The good news was that my new ability to see essentia was making a huge difference. Back when we were fourteen or so, Colin had gone through an electronics phase and talked the rest of us into scrounging up the materials to make circuits. Felix and Gabriel had given up quickly, Kiran had taken to it really well, but for my part I’d struggled—I could understand the theory, but I had trouble putting it together. It was only once I tried soldering the things myself that it clicked. You could see the way the current would flow through the circuit, and figure out how the whole thing would work from there.