I shook it off. Maybe I was imagining things.

  At last Ivy came walking over. “Done the handover,” she told me. “I think we were in time. They don’t think the Well was touched.”

  I nodded.

  “Give me your number,” Ivy told me. “I’ll text you when the money comes through.”

  I held up my phone so that she could see the screen. “Fifty-fifty,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ivy said in an annoyed tone, typing into her own phone. “Not that you deserve it, after you tried to steal it.”

  “If I hadn’t tried to ‘steal’ it, you’d have been alone on that island when those raiders showed up,” I told her. “How do you think that would’ve ended?”

  Ivy made a scoffing noise but didn’t answer. Glancing over, I could see that the Mitsukuri people had finished fencing off the Well.

  All of a sudden, I just wanted to go home. I started to walk away.

  “Hey!” Ivy called after me.

  I paused and looked back.

  “What’s your name?” Ivy asked.

  I gave her a grin that I knew she’d be able to see. “Not your turn to ask a question.”

  For a moment I thought Ivy was going to stick out her tongue. I walked off into the darkness with a smile.

  CHAPTER 13

  I woke up next morning stiff and aching. My arms and side hurt, and inspecting myself in the bathroom mirror revealed big purple bruises in the places where I’d been hit by that iron-fist guy.

  I tried using my mending sigl, but it didn’t help. Apparently a sigl designed to stop you from dying from internal bleeding didn’t do much to heal bruises, which I suppose shouldn’t have been a surprise. I was in for a painful few days.

  But I still went downstairs in high spirits. I’d fought my first real drucraft battle. And my opponents hadn’t been pushovers, either—they’d been a small gang with weapons and sigls of their own. I’d won, and it felt good.

  As I ate breakfast, I replayed the fight in my mind. On the whole, I thought I’d done pretty well. With hindsight, I should have realised earlier that shadow-man had been a human being and not a monster, but it’s a lot easier to be calm and rational about that sort of thing when you’re not getting attacked in the darkness of a moonless night. And at least I’d only frozen rather than screaming. Mental note: next time you see Ivy, remember to make fun of her for screaming.

  The big thing I was lacking was defence. That battle had gone well, but a big part of that had been because those raiders had let me blind all four of them with my opening move. I could really use some sort of sigl that’d let me keep enemies at a distance. Or maybe something closer ranged, that I could use if I got tackled or grabbed . . .

  I went upstairs and spent a while leafing through the catalogue. As usual, most of the sigls that seemed like really good answers to my problem were incredibly expensive. Even more annoyingly, all the best defensive sigls seemed to be from my two weakest branches, Life or Motion.

  Still, I wouldn’t know if it was possible until I tried. As I headed out for the day’s search, I decided that the next time I found a Life or Motion Well, I’d keep it for myself.

  * * *

  —

  I’d been expecting to sit on that decision for a while, but life is unpredictable. As it turned out, I found a temporary Life Well that very same day.

  One nice thing about my new routine was that it was leaving me with a lot more energy. With my old jobs, the combination of work, errands, my commute, my drucraft, and all the other little things had meant that I was constantly short of time. Lack of time led to lack of sleep, which left me constantly stressed and tired. I was still working long hours, but the flexible schedule made it much more forgiving. Yes, my side and arms hurt, but I could just go easy on the searching for a few days and give myself time to recover. And instead of having to spend ten hours a day in the train and office, I could rest in my room with Hobbes, give my muscles a break, and do shaping practice instead.

  At the moment, my shaping practice was focused towards making a new type of Life sigl. While my victory on Saturday night had raised my spirits, it had also made me think back to the fight that I’d lost against Diesel and Scar and the strength sigls they’d been using. I’d gone through the catalogue, trying to figure out what they’d been using, and the closest match I could find was a model called Ajax, one of a broader category of Life sigls described as “enhancement.” I had access to a Life Well now, so in theory I should be able to make my own. The question was how.

  I started with my mending sigl, since it was the one example of a working Life sigl that I had access to. As far as I could tell, it worked by strengthening a particular bodily system, which in this case must be the one that handled blood clotting. Or maybe the one that managed the body’s internal organs . . . or healing in general . . .

  . . . actually, I had no idea. In fact, the more I looked at the sigl, the more I realised that I didn’t understand how it worked at all, which was pretty bizarre given that I’d been the one who’d, you know, made it. I had a vague general idea of the shape of the essentia flow and how it was transformed, but the longer I studied the design, the more little details I noticed whose purpose I didn’t really understand. It made me wonder yet again exactly what had happened the night I’d shaped it. How could it have seemed so straightforward back then, and so impossibly complicated now?

  But while I didn’t really understand how the sigl worked, I did think I understood it well enough to make a copy that would strengthen a different bodily system instead. I wasn’t sure which system it would end up affecting, but I was hoping I could figure that out by trial and error. But before I could give that a go, I heard back from Ivy.

  * * *

  —

  Ivy’s text popped up on my phone on Wednesday morning, just as I was finishing breakfast. The money’s come through, it read. How do you want to be paid?

  I swallowed my food, picked up my phone, and typed a response. Shall we meet up somewhere?

  Ivy’s response came back almost immediately. What for?

  Me: To sort out the details.

  Ivy: Or you could just send me your bank details and I could pay you directly. You know that online banking exists, right?

  Me: Well, yes. But it’s nice to talk face to face.

  Ivy: I don’t see why. It’s not like I know you.

  Me: We just met each other on Saturday night.

  Ivy: I’ve met you. That doesn’t mean I KNOW you.

  I rolled my eyes, put my plate in the sink, then resumed texting.

  Me: Okay, fine, send the money online. What do you need, the account number?

  Ivy: And the sort code.

  Me: Done.

  I sent the data, then brought up the banking app on my phone and waited. Somewhat to my surprise, I got an activity pop-up almost immediately. On the screen was a notification saying C/R: BACS: £2,400.00.

  Me: Got it. Thank you.

  Ivy: You’re welcome.

  Me: Do you want to meet up again?

  Ivy: Why?

  I thought for a bit.

  Me: Honestly? Hunting for Wells is kind of a lonely job and it’d be nice to have someone to talk to. You’re the first other locator I’ve met and you seem to have some idea of what you’re doing. I’d like the company and we might be able to help each other.

  There was a minute’s pause before the “. . .” indicator appeared, indicating that Ivy was typing another message.

  Ivy: How do I know you’re not just trying to take advantage of me?

  Me: Well, I haven’t so far.

  Ivy: The first time we met, you threatened to attack me and tried to steal my Well.

  Me: It wasn’t “your” Well. I found it before you did.

  Ivy: I’ve only got your word for that.

  I started to type a long message about how I’d known exactly where that Well was and what kind of essentia was in it, which should prove that I was telling the truth, and anyway if I’d actually wanted to screw Ivy over, I could have just . . .

  . . . no. I held down the Delete key until the whole message had disappeared.

  Me: Why is it so hard for you to believe that I mean what I say?

  There was another pause, then the “. . .” indicator appeared again. It disappeared and reappeared several times, as though Ivy was deleting her words and starting again. When her message appeared, it was a short one for how long it had taken to write.

  Ivy: I have to be careful.

  Me: Well, so do I.

  Ivy: You’re a boy.

  Me: Honestly doesn’t help as much as you’d think.

  Ivy: You’re still a lot safer than I am.

  I thought about pointing out that being a boy made me more likely to get beaten up or stabbed, not less, but something told me that Ivy probably wasn’t interested in hearing that. Instead I tried to put myself in her shoes. Why was she being so cautious?

  Well, we had kind of got off on the wrong foot.

  Me: Look, I’m sorry about how I came across when we first met. I wasn’t trying to threaten you.

  Ivy: Could have fooled me.

  Me: I said I was sorry. Anyway, for all I knew, I was the one in danger from you.

  Ivy: How would you be in any danger from me?

  Me: You could have had a couple of guys hanging around just out of sight waiting to attack me as soon as you gave the word.

  Ivy: That doesn’t sound very likely.

  Me: You’d be surprised.

  Ivy: Fine. Apology accepted, I guess. But you’d better not do that again.

  I leant against the wall with a smile and kept on typing.

  Me: Besides, you were the one trying to sound like you were about ten years older.

  Ivy: I was not.

  Me: Then how come your voice went up as soon as you stepped into the light?

  Ivy: You’re imagining it.

  Me: If you say so.

  Ivy: Honestly. If I’d known you were the kind to get scared that easily, I wouldn’t have been so worried in the first place.

  My smile faded.

  Me: What do you mean?

  Ivy: You see a girl on her own in the middle of the night, and the first thing you think of is that she’s got a couple of men waiting to attack you?

  Me: Turns out it does actually happen.

  Ivy: If you say so.

  I stared at the screen. Maybe I was imagining it, but that last line seemed to carry a sort of amused contempt. All of a sudden I didn’t want to talk to Ivy anymore. I stuffed the phone into my pocket and headed upstairs.

  I spent a couple of hours working on sigl designs, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Ivy’s last few messages kept going around in my head, and the more I thought about them, the more they bothered me. Lucella’s attack had taught me a harsh lesson: at any moment she or one of the other Ashfords could decide to come back and do something horrible, and if they did, I’d be hard-pressed to stop them. I felt very alone and very vulnerable, and a part of me had been hoping that Ivy might be someone that I could talk to about all of this.

  Instead, Ivy had proved Lucella right. Lucella might be my enemy, but despite that—in fact, maybe because of that—she’d given me the hard truth instead of the comforting lie. People like Lucella really could do things like this to people like me and then casually walk away. And if I tried to tell anyone, they’d either think I was making it up, or they wouldn’t care.

  I really was on my own.

  Hobbes stirred against my leg. I looked over at him, smiled, and scratched his head. Hobbes purred, snuggled down against me, and went back to sleep.

  Okay, not completely on my own. I stroked Hobbes a little longer, then turned back to my notebook. There was work to be done.

  * * *

  —

  With the money from Ivy, I had enough of a buffer that I could finally take the first step towards searching for my dad. I spent a little while researching private detectives, then went to the firm that sounded the most trustworthy and told them what I wanted. The quote they gave me wasn’t cheap, but at least it was in the hundreds, instead of the thousands. I put some money down and was told that they should have a report in a week or two. In the meantime, I had a sigl to make.

  * * *

  —

  It was two days later.

  “Okay,” I said to Hobbes. “Enhancement sigl, mark one, test one.”

  I was standing in my room. As was traditional at this point, Hobbes had been moved up to the bed to watch. His fractures were healing, but he wasn’t yet up to jumping: fortunately he seemed to understand that, and now when he wanted to get up onto the bed, he just sat there and meowed insistently until I picked him up. My new sigl was around my neck, held by a piece of string and some Blu Tack.

  My new Life sigl was a little emerald teardrop. In the end I’d largely copied my mending sigl, reproducing the details of its design without fully understanding why they were there. I’d managed to identify the part of the sigl that caused the essentia that flowed out of it to affect blood coagulation; after some testing, I’d figured out a way to alter that so that it would strengthen and enhance a body’s muscles instead. The idea was that the essentia would flow only through my muscles, bypassing nerve and vein and bone. It should deliver its energy to my muscle fibres, and nowhere else.

  I hoped.

  “Okay,” I said again to Hobbes. “We ready?”

  “Mraa.”

  “Be patient, okay? This is delicate.”

  “Mrooooooow.”

  “I am not getting cold feet. I’m just . . . being careful.”

  “Mraow?”

  “Fine, all right! Now be quiet.”

  Hobbes watched me expectantly. I took a deep breath, and channelled.

  Warmth and energy flowed into me, spreading outwards from the sigl into my chest and body. Looking down, I could see the sigl pulling in free essentia and sending it into me in a flow of green. Slowly I increased the flow, scaling it up until it hit maximum. It took a lot more of my personal essentia than my Light sigls did.

  It also took steady concentration. Most of the enhancement sigls in the Exchange catalogue were described as “continuous,” which apparently meant that they were supposed to work automatically with no effort on the part of the user. I could already see that this sigl was very definitely not like that. Keeping it active wasn’t hard, but it did require constant attention.

  Still, concentration or not, it seemed to be working. Energy was radiating out through my body, and I did feel stronger. Let’s give this a try. I brought my arms up and drew back into a guard, intending to throw a few jabs to get the measure of my new strength.

  Everything went wrong very fast.

  My arms went up unevenly, the right arm coming up more quickly than it should have. I shifted to keep my balance, but my right leg moved with more power than I was expecting, making me stumble. I threw out my arm to catch myself.

  It felt wrong, really wrong. My arm went out at the wrong angle, bending further than it should, and pain stabbed at my arm and chest. I tried to compensate, and my other leg did something wrong, and I lost my balance. I twisted instinctively as I fell, trying to soften the blow, and agony flared in my chest and back. The pain was sudden and overwhelming, shattering my concentration and cutting off my essentia flow through the sigl.

  I hit the floor with a thump and lay gasping. I’d lost my breath, and I struggled to get air into my lungs as I lay sprawled out on my side. Pain stabbed from a dozen places across my body. Gradually I managed to get my breathing back, and eventually I was able to drag myself up to a sitting position. I pulled the sigl out from under my T-shirt to stare at it. What the hell?

  I hauled myself up to sit on the bed. Hobbes mrrowed at me and head-butted my leg; he’d been watching me with wide-eyed alarm, and I scratched his head as I pulled my thoughts together. What the hell had happened?

  Once I’d had a few minutes to recover (and to reassure Hobbes), I rose painfully to my feet. My chest and back really hurt, and after some testing and some quickly aborted attempts at stretches, my best guess was that I’d somehow pulled a dozen small muscles all over my chest and back. Not life threatening, but very, very painful. God damn it. I’d only just finished recovering from the last lot of injuries!

  I pulled off the sigl and held it up in front of me by its cord. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked the thing. This had never happened before. I’d had sigls fail to work, but nothing like this.

  The sigl hung there, glinting slightly in the light.

  I’ve got a sigl that lets me cripple myself, I thought sourly. Wonderful. With a sigh, I sat down to begin the long, slow work of figuring out what I’d done wrong.

  * * *

  —

  After four solid hours, I was no closer to solving the problem. In the end, out of sheer frustration, I decided to go back to the person who’d told me about Life sigls in the first place.

  “Stephen,” Father Hawke said in greeting. He was sitting in one of the pews of the church, reading from a battered old paperback. “Did you lose a fight?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said shortly. “Can you help me with something? I’ve made another Life sigl, and it doesn’t work. Or it does, but very badly.”

  Father Hawke closed his book, set it down on the pew, and turned towards me. Even sitting, he was almost as tall as I was. “Show me.”