“So?”

  “Well, you know. If a girl’s waiting outside your house, then . . .”

  I waited for Gabriel to finish.

  “You know,” Gabriel said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It means she wants to nob him,” Felix said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said.

  “It kind of does,” Kiran chipped in.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re saying any random girl you meet outside your house—”

  “After dark on a Friday night,” Felix added.

  “How does that matter?”

  “It totally matters,” Kiran said.

  “Okay, okay,” Felix said. “There’s an easy way to settle this, all right?” He turned to Gabriel. “Did you or did you not end up nobbing her?”

  Gabriel looked embarrassed. “Well . . .”

  “See?” Felix told me smugly.

  “Just because she’s standing in the street—” I said in annoyance.

  “I think the point Felix is making,” Colin said, “is that there’s some context here. She’s not some random girl in the street.”

  “And you have to make a move,” Gabriel added. “Or she’ll think you’re a melt.”

  “What?” Felix said, grinning at me. “You thought she was just there to talk?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  Felix tried to ruffle my hair, and I ducked away. “He’s so cute,” Felix said to the rest of the table.

  “Oh, piss off.”

  “So I had to let her in, right?” Gabriel said.

  “I know why you let her in,” Colin said.

  “So what should I do?”

  The argument went back and forth, split about fifty-fifty between giving Gabriel serious advice and mocking him. We all like Gabriel, but even Kiran, nice to a fault, has long since figured out that the reason for Gabriel’s problem is Gabriel. Still, he’s our friend.

  After a while the group divided, with Felix, Kiran, and Gabriel continuing the argument while Colin and I leant back on the bench. The pub was starting to get a few more people in with the evening crowd, though it was a long way from full. I was still on my second pint—I can afford to go to the pub, but only so long as I don’t drink much.

  “You all right?” Colin asked. “You’re a bit quiet.”

  “Trouble at work,” I said with a sigh.

  “Your boss?”

  “My boss’s boss.”

  “I thought she liked you.”

  “She does,” I admitted. “That’s the problem. She wants me to go to uni and join the Civil Service full-time.”

  “I mean,” Colin said. “You could.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and fell silent.

  Out of all our group, Colin is the one I’m closest to. His father’s from Hong Kong—when the Chinese took over in 1997, he saw the way the wind was blowing and got out early, ending up here in London, where he married an English girl. The two of them had some issues, and Colin’s mum moved out for a couple of years—they fixed things up eventually, but Colin had a hard time of it, and for a while he was a regular visitor around our house. We got pretty close, and we’ve stayed that way.

  But nowadays, it’s Colin who’s got his life together, and I’m the one who’s struggling. Colin’s in his third year doing science at Imperial College, staying in college housing in Whitechapel. Felix did a gap year and is supposed to be at uni too, though as far as I can see he mostly spends his time trying to hook up with Chinese girls on dating apps. Kiran’s midway through an electrician apprenticeship. And Gabriel . . . well, he’s Gabriel. All of us are growing up and finding our paths.

  Except me. For a while now I’ve felt as though I’m drifting, being left behind. Colin knows that, and that was the unspoken message behind his words. But he didn’t push, and I didn’t talk. We sat for another ten minutes before I finished my drink and headed home.

  * * *

  —

  I opened my front door to the sound of chatter and the roar of the TV. The noise was coming from the ground-floor bedroom that had once been the house’s lounge—Ignas and Matis must be watching football. I went through into the tiny communal kitchen, grabbed some food and a plate, then went upstairs.

  My house is an end-of-terrace two-thirds of the way up Foxden Road, next to an old school that’s been converted into flats, and it’s rented out by the room by a Jamaican landlord with a view to squeezing the maximum number of people in and the maximum amount of money out. The other tenants are a group of Lithuanians who work long shifts at the local garage and grocery store. I had trouble breaking the ice with them at first but got some unexpected help when it turned out that the house had a rodent problem. Once Hobbes realised how good a hunting ground it was, he went on a killing spree, and there were dead mice and rats outside the door every morning and evening for a fortnight. The Lithuanians decided that Hobbes was wonderful, and we’ve been friends ever since.

  Right now Hobbes was waiting at the top of the stairs; he meowed until I unlocked my bedroom door, then trotted in to head for his food bowl. I locked the door behind us, poured Hobbes some food, then sat on the bed to eat. My room doesn’t have much space, but then I don’t have much stuff. A bed, a wardrobe, a nightstand, one chair that’s usually piled with clothes. Everything is old and badly maintained—cracked furniture, peeling paint, crooked skirting. Though one of the skirting boards is crooked for a reason.

  Once I was done, I set the plate aside, then crouched down in the corner and pulled the skirting board free with a practised twist, revealing a dusty cubbyhole that held a faded envelope and a small wooden box. Hobbes watched with bright eyes as I opened the box to reveal two tiny spherical objects, each no bigger than a match head. They would have looked like ball bearings but for their colour—both were light blue, the colour of very pale turquoise. One rolled free in the box, but I’d glued the second onto a plastic ring. It looked a bit embarrassing, but it worked.

  Those two little spheres were called sigls. Most people would think they looked like toys. The truth was, they were probably worth more than everything else in this room put together.

  I slipped the ring onto my finger, sat cross-legged on the floor, and closed my eyes with a little sigh. This was the part of the day I looked forward to. Tomorrow I’d have to go back to moving box files around the MoD basement, but right now I had a few precious hours to spend on what I actually cared about.

  Drucraft.

  The first discipline of drucraft is sensing. Sensing is the foundation skill—you have to learn it before you can do anything else, which made my early training really frustrating since to begin with I was pretty bad at it. Back then, when I tried to practise, I’d do it by concentrating, like listening for a sound that’s slightly too high pitched, or trying to see something that’s a little too far away. But the harder I’d try, the more it would slip out of reach.

  It took me a long time to figure out that the trick isn’t to try harder; it is to get rid of distractions. You have to empty your mind of all the things that are crowding it. That tune that’s been going around in your head, the plans you’re making for tomorrow. Conversations that are bugging you, like the one with Pamela that I still hadn’t quite forgotten. I closed them off one after another, shrinking them to nothingness, leaving an empty circle in my mind where everything was quiet and calm. It used to take me a few minutes; nowadays I can do it almost instantly.

  Into that empty circle sprang an awareness. It wasn’t quite a sound or a pressure—more of a presence, something you’d been half-aware of but hadn’t been noticing. The strongest presence was the earth below, vast and diffuse and stretching away to the horizon, rising and falling with the curves of the land. That was very distant, though—much easier to sense were the currents within my room, following the lines of the walls and the furniture and swirling in the air. And easiest of all were the flows running through my own body.

  This presence, what I was sensing, is called essentia. My dad taught me that it makes up everything, a kind of universal energy. You can’t create it and you can’t destroy it, but with the right art—and the right tools—you can use it.

  When I first learned to sense essentia, it felt like a big indistinguishable mass. These days, the essentia in the air feels different from that in the walls or floor, and totally different from the essentia in Hobbes. The essentia flowing through me was the clearest of all—this was my personal essentia, and to me it felt comfortable, familiar, like a pair of old shoes.

  But what makes personal essentia really special is that you can control it.

  I focused my thoughts and sent a narrow flow down my right arm and into the sigl on my finger.

  Light bloomed in the small room. The tiny sigl lit up like a star, casting a pale blue glow over the walls and ceiling. Hobbes watched lazily from the bed, light reflecting from his slitted eyes.

  Channelling is the second of the drucraft disciplines. Your personal essentia is attuned to your body and mind, and with practice you can command it the same way you can your own muscles. Having it trickle into a sigl is a weird, slightly disturbing sensation, like feeling your own blood pumping out of your veins, and when I was starting out, I used to have this nagging fear that I’d somehow use too much and bleed myself to death. But as my personal essentia flowed out, ambient essentia from the air around me flowed in. As it seeped into my body, it attuned to me, taking on the resonance of my personal essentia until it was indistinguishable from that which I’d lost. An inward flow and an outward flow, perfectly balanced.

  I scaled the essentia flow up and down, dimming the glow until it was almost too faint to see before bringing it to maximum brightness in a flash. Bringing it to full power was easy—the sigl had a maximum capacity that it could handle, and once I went past that point, then any more would just overflow, like pouring water into a sink that was already full. But bringing it to exactly full power without going over the limit was actually quite hard, and I spent a while practising, trying to see how quickly I could make the flow snap from full to nothing to full again without letting any of it go to waste.

  I did some more exercises to wind down, channelling my personal essentia into various objects and pulling it back again before it could de-attune, and finally sending it flowing into Hobbes, setting up a kind of circuit where my essentia would flow into him while his would be drawn back into me. Hobbes put up with the indignity with a slight sneeze—he can definitely feel that trick, though he seems to tolerate it. Then it was time for shaping.

  Shaping is the third, last, and hardest of the disciplines. I’ve been practising drucraft since I was ten, but I didn’t manage to shape a sigl until I was almost nineteen. That had been a year and a half ago, and the sigl I’d created was the one resting in the box on my bed. After that had followed twelve months of waiting. Twelve slow, patient, frustrating months, until last September, when I’d created the sigl that was on my finger now.

  I reached out to the ambient essentia around me, trying to gather it. It was much harder than activating the sigl had been—the flows in the air weren’t attuned to me and wouldn’t respond to my thoughts. I had to shape my personal essentia into a kind of vortex, creating currents that would draw in the free essentia until it was concentrated enough that I could use my personal essentia to “paint” it into strands, as though the free essentia were ink and my personal essentia a calligraphy brush. Even with all my practice, it was like trying to catch smoke, and it took me several minutes of patient work before I could shape it into a construct that hovered above my palm, like a woven knot of invisible lines.

  An essentia construct is the first step towards creating a sigl, like a pencil sketch before a painting. I must have made thousands of constructs by now, but I still get a little glow of satisfaction from doing it well—I’ve come a long way since my father had to lead me through it step-by-step. If I wanted to turn this one into a sigl, the next step would be to shrink it, pulling in more and more essentia as the construct grew denser and denser to become the sigl’s core. Of course, if I tried that right now, it wouldn’t work. When you shape a sigl for real, you’re creating matter out of pure energy, and that takes an enormous amount of essentia. The only place you find that is at a Well.

  This particular construct was a project that I’d been working on since January. The idea was that instead of creating light, this sigl would redirect it, projecting a field that light would bend around. The result should be like a kind of invisibility sphere—as long as the sigl was active, no one outside the sphere’s radius would be able to see in.

  Or at least, that was the plan. The truth was, I had absolutely no idea if it was going to work. I had a pretty good understanding of how to make light sigls by now, but this was something totally different and much more complicated. Since I couldn’t actually see the construct, I had to work by feel, which in practice meant dismissing the thing and re-creating it from scratch over and over again.

  I had the feeling that I was going about this the wrong way. My father had made it sound as though professional shapers could make sigls pretty easily, so there had to be some trick I was missing. But without anyone to learn from, I had to figure it all out from first principles, which meant a whole lot of guesswork. For all I knew, if I went ahead and shaped this sigl, it’d do nothing at all.

  That had been what had happened on my first try, three years ago. I’d practised and practised, but even so, when the time came to make the sigl, I failed and the essentia was wasted. I’d been close to tears, but my dad had laughed it off. He told me that everyone screws up their first time, that I’d done better and got closer than most. It had cheered me up, and I’d thrown myself into my practice, determined to get it right next time.

  And then, when I’d finally managed it, he wasn’t there . . .

  I came out of my thoughts with a start. My room was dark; the sun had set while I’d been practising. Outside, the last traces of light were fading from the sky. Hobbes rose, stretched, and padded to the door, looking at me expectantly.

  I let the construct unravel, then changed into my running clothes and went downstairs, slipping outside and closing the door as Hobbes trotted off across the street. I looked around for any sign of that car from this morning, but it was gone. Maybe it really had been nothing.

  If you go around the corner of my road and turn left, you come into a little alley. To the left are gardens, honeysuckle and ivy spilling over fences made of wooden slats, while to the right are the back entrances of the shops that front onto Plaistow Road. Gravel crunched under my feet as I weaved around the rubbish bins; red and grey tiled roofs rose up all around, TV aerials and satellite dishes silhouetted against a dusky blue sky. Above and to the right was a block of flats, bikes stored out on the metal balconies. Lights shone from the windows, but it was a cold March evening and no one stepped out onto their balcony to see me go by.

  The alley ended in a set of sheds. I climbed onto a recycling bin and pulled myself up, corrugated iron creaking under my feet as I crossed the flat roofs. The clouds and rain from earlier had passed away, and the sky was clear all the way to the horizon, fading from azure to a grey blue that mixed with the city’s glow. I reached the end of the sheds and dropped down into a little open space closed off by garden fences and a brick wall on the far side. The ground had once been solid concrete, but dandelions and ryegrass had burrowed in and split it with their roots, turning it into a riot of growth. A wild cherry tree rose in one corner, still young but with new leaves pushing towards the sky.

  Most people who saw my room on Foxden Road would think I was staying there because it was cheap. They’d be half-right, but only half. The main reason I was living here was this Well.

  Wells are gathering points, places where essentia collects and pools, and the essentia here was so concentrated that I could sense it without even trying. It did feel like a well, a reservoir of energy and life and potential. It was tempting to use those reserves, to shape them into a new sigl, but I knew better. Three years ago, after I’d messed up my first try at a sigl, my dad had warned me that I should only use Wells that were full; this was a weak one, and it would take a full year to recharge. I’d got impatient and tried to use it early. The shaping had failed, the sigl hadn’t formed, and I’d wasted five months of the Well’s charge. It had been a painful lesson, but it had stuck.

  Right now this Well was about a quarter full, and I knew from experience that it charged fastest in the spring and summer. By around September, I’d be able to use it to shape a sigl. And I had a lot of ideas for sigls. There was the invisibility sphere that I’d just practised creating. Or there was that idea I’d had for a darkness effect. From the basic starting point of something that generated light, I could see how you could branch off in a dozen different directions. I still didn’t have a good feel for what was and wasn’t possible, but there might be ways around that. With time and practice, I should have a good chance of getting one of my ideas to work by the autumn, and then . . .

  . . . and then what?

  I came back to earth with a bump. Yes, I could make another sigl. I might even be able to make one that worked. But what would I do with it? I had a lot of ideas for sigls, but none of them would put food on the table or pay my rent. Or find my dad.

  I thought back to the conversations I’d had with Pamela and Colin. My friends were all going to university and getting jobs, while I was doing . . . what? I’d been practising drucraft for most of my life, and what did I have to show for it?

  For a while now I’d felt as though I was being pulled between two worlds. In one world were my friends and my job; in the other were my drucraft and my sigls and this Well. I’d been trying to keep a foot in both, and it was getting harder and harder. Maybe I should do as my teachers at school had said, and what Pamela and Colin were nudging me to do now. Get a degree, start working on a career. It’d be hard and it’d mean going into debt, but I could do it.