I pulled out the sigl, still hanging by its thread and Blu Tack, then very carefully channelled the tiniest thread into it that I could. The green tendrils of Life essentia twined out from the sigl and into my arm, sinking into my muscles. I kept the flow to the barest minimum and didn’t make any sudden movements.

  Father Hawke studied the sigl as it glinted in the lights of the church. “Interesting.”

  I let the flow drop. “Can you see what’s wrong with it?”

  Father Hawke gave me a curious look. “See?”

  Oops. “I mean, tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  “Is it a mending sigl?”

  “Enhancement.”

  “How did you know how to make an enhancement sigl?”

  “Based it off my mending sigl.”

  “And who taught you how to make the mending sigl?”

  “You told me how one was supposed to work,” I told him. “I figured the rest out on my own.”

  Father Hawke studied me.

  “So . . .” I said. “Do you have any idea what the problem is? I’ve been trying to figure out what I did wrong.”

  “Hmm?” Father Hawke said. “Oh, yes, the sigl. I should be able to solve your problem. However, I require something in exchange.”

  “How much?” I asked with a sigh. It seemed like it didn’t matter whether it was the Ashfords or Maria or Ivy; no one in the drucraft world ever did anything for free. At least I wasn’t broke anymore; as long as Father Hawke’s prices weren’t any worse than Maria’s, I should be able to afford—

  “Explain and answer the problem of pain.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Father Hawke took out a pen and a scrap of paper, wrote for a few seconds, then handed it to me. “This should give you somewhere to start.”

  “What’s the problem of pain?”

  “Read those books and find out.”

  I frowned. I couldn’t really understand what Father Hawke was trying to do. Still, if all I had to do was answer a question . . .

  “Can we do the sigl tomorrow, then?”

  Father Hawke picked up his book and returned to his reading. “That depends upon your answer.”

  * * *

  —

  I did some Internet searches, then came back next morning.

  “Okay,” I said. “So the problem of pain is asking how you can believe in God if there’s pain in the world.”

  “And?”

  I looked at Father Hawke in confusion.

  “You haven’t explained why this is a problem.”

  “I . . . don’t understand.”

  “The use of the term ‘problem,’ in this context, implies a contradiction,” Father Hawke explained. “The existence of pain and suffering may be unpleasant, but does not by itself contradict a belief in God.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what solution would you suggest?”

  “There . . . isn’t one?”

  Father Hawke gave me an unimpressed look.

  “Okay, there is one.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” Father Hawke said. “And I suggest you actually do the reading this time.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day was Sunday. I waited for the service to finish, then entered to find Father Hawke talking to some members of the congregation. Once there was a gap in the conversation, I moved in.

  “Okay,” I told Father Hawke. “So the problem of pain is three things. Firstly, God is supposed to be completely good; secondly, God is supposed to be all-powerful; and thirdly, there’s pain and suffering in the world. If God’s good, then he shouldn’t want people to suffer, and if he’s all-powerful, then he should be able to stop it anytime he wanted. So there’s your contradiction.”

  Father Hawke nodded. The two old Nigerian ladies he’d been talking to were watching curiously. “And what is your answer?” Father Hawke asked.

  “Well, if you’ve got a contradiction, then one of the things must be wrong,” I said. “And there’s obviously pain and suffering in the world. So either God isn’t all-powerful, or he isn’t all that good.”

  “Don’t blaspheme, young man,” one of the ladies said sternly.

  “You said I had to come up with an answer,” I pointed out to Father Hawke. “You didn’t say it couldn’t be a blasphemous one.”

  The old lady looked indignant, but Father Hawke raised his hand to forestall her. “True,” he said. “If, for example, one believes that God is the source of all good, and that an equal and opposing supernatural power is the source of all evil, then the problem of pain disappears and is replaced with other theological problems instead. However, I asked you to answer the problem, not avoid it.”

  “It’s still an answer.”

  “Yes. In the same way that a valid answer to your particular problem is ‘stop using that sigl.’ ”

  I threw up my hands, then turned and marched out. The two old ladies watched me go with satisfied expressions.

  * * *

  —

  The next day arrived.

  “All right,” I said. Father Hawke and I were alone in the church again. “So if you have a contradiction, you can resolve it in two ways. Either one of the things that contradict each other must be wrong, or they’re not actually a contradiction at all. Right?”

  Father Hawke nodded. “Continue.”

  “So according to Christian theology, God’s not just omnipotent, he also knows everything. Right?”

  “The term is ‘omniscient.’ Continue.”

  “So since God is omniscient, that means he knows the consequences of everything,” I said. “And since he’s good, that means that he’d only let them happen if the consequences were good ones.” I folded my arms. “So all three parts of the problem are true. There’s no contradiction.”

  “What about events that would seem to be purely evil, with no good consequences at all?”

  “Well, humans aren’t omniscient, and God is, right? So we just say that if anything is happening, then God must want it to happen, which means it must be for the best.”

  “All according to God’s plan?” Father Hawke asked. “Is that what you believe?”

  It wasn’t, but it was the best argument I’d been able to come up with. “It’s a valid answer.”

  Father Hawke nodded. “If your cat had died last month, and someone had told you that it was all part of God’s plan, how would you have responded?”

  I felt as if I’d been slapped. “That’s not fair!”

  “As questions go, I’d say it’s extremely fair.”

  I hesitated, torn between the convenient answer and the truth. “I’d probably have punched them,” I admitted.

  “Then I would say that your argument needs work.”

  “Why are you making this so difficult?” I said in frustration. “Whose side are you even on?”

  “Come back tomorrow,” Father Hawke said. “And I suggest you read those books a little more thoroughly.”

  * * *

  —

  Next day.

  “. . . so the reason that it isn’t a contradiction is the existence of free will,” I was saying. “You can have people who are free to act according to their own choices, and you can have people who never do anything evil, but you can’t have both.”

  “But you’ve already conceded that God is omnipotent,” Father Hawke said. “If so, surely he can do both those things.”

  “No, because that’s mixing up two different meanings of ‘omnipotent,’ ” I said. “There are things that we can’t do because we’re not powerful enough, like ‘lift up this building,’ and there are things that we can’t do because they’re self-contradictory, like ‘draw a square circle.’ Something that doesn’t make sense doesn’t make any more sense if you put ‘God can’ at the beginning of it.”

  “However, God could still counteract the effects of evil choices,” Father Hawke pointed out. “This would allow for free will while still preventing suffering.”

  “Yes, but the only way he could keep on doing that would be by preventing almost everything. Because every time someone took an action that led to some consequence, there’d be some other action they could have taken instead that would have led to a better consequence. So every single thing that anyone ever did would end up getting overridden, and you wouldn’t have any freedom at all.”

  “Would it not be possible for God to simply arrange the world such that everyone was equally happy and provided for?”

  “No, because once you’ve got a fixed world, then there’s no way it can ever suit everyone equally,” I said. “If something’s lying on the ground exactly where I want it, then it can’t be lying on the ground exactly where you want it. The world we act in has to be permanent, or none of our choices matter, but if we’re free to choose in a permanent world, then we can use those choices and the things in that world to hurt each other. Which is why when there’s a fight, it’s the stronger guy who wins, not the one who’s more virtuous.”

  “You lifted that from C. S. Lewis,” Father Hawke said.

  “You were the one who put that book on my reading list,” I told him. “If you didn’t want me to use it . . .”

  Father Hawke smiled slightly. “Take out your sigl.”

  Finally, I thought. I’d been carrying that Life sigl to and from this church for four days straight. I took it out of my pocket and held it out to Father Hawke. “So whenever I try to activate it—” I began.

  “Your sigl is missing a regulator,” Father Hawke stated.

  I paused. “A what?”

  “A constituent part of a sigl designed to spread its essentia flow evenly across the body,” Father Hawke explained. “Mending sigls don’t use them, because the whole point of a healing effect is that you want its effect to be concentrated at the location of the injury. An enhancement sigl, by contrast, needs to affect all parts of the body equally. Otherwise the sigl expends all of its energy on the closest parts of the body, or those that the essentia happens to flow to first, with the result that nearer and smaller muscles will be boosted in an uneven way. Which means that as soon as you attempt any sudden movements, you’ll tear your own muscles in a dozen places at once. Quite painful, as I expect you’ve learned.”

  I stared at Father Hawke for a few seconds. “Did you know what was wrong from the start?”

  “I suspected.”

  “You could have told me this in two minutes, and instead you had me doing theology problems for four days?”

  “If you’d applied yourself properly, it would have taken you a day and a half at most,” Father Hawke said. “Hopefully you’ll perform better next time.”

  “Next time?”

  “I’d been under the impression that you would continue to develop your drucraft,” Father Hawke said. “The choice of whether to do so, of course, is yours.”

  I stared at Father Hawke for a minute, then turned and marched out. I didn’t quite slam the door, but I came close.

  As I left the church, I privately resolved that there wouldn’t be a next time. I wasn’t going back to Father Hawke for help. Or if I did, it’d only be after I’d tried my absolute best to fix the problem on my own.

  Come to think of it, maybe that was exactly what Father Hawke had wanted.

  It wasn’t until much later, after I’d had dinner and was about to go to bed, that it occurred to me to wonder why Father Hawke was going to all this trouble to teach me in the first place. But no particular answer came to mind, and in the end I decided I had bigger problems to worry about.

  CHAPTER 14

  I woke up the next morning to some good news. While Father Hawke had been keeping me busy, Linford’s had activated my account. I could finally register Wells.

  I’d found a weak Matter Well a couple of days ago, and I decided to try out my new status straightaway. I headed to the Well to check that it was still there, then called it in. There was no immediate response, and after hanging around the Well for an hour, I gave up and went home.

  But the next morning I got an email saying that the Well had been verified. Even more surprisingly, I got a message only a few hours later telling me that payment had been made. I checked my bank account and, sure enough, there was a payment of £220 from Linford’s. I had a source of income again.

  Two hundred and twenty pounds wasn’t much—it wouldn’t even pay my rent for two weeks—but if you’ve never had to live with the pressure that comes with running out of money, it’s hard to explain just how big a relief it is to feel as though you’re pulling away from it. I’d spent most of the past year watching my balance hover around the mid-hundreds, knowing that it would only take one or two things going wrong to put me in the red. A sudden accident or a missed payslip, and all of a sudden you can’t pay a bill. Missing a bill means you get hit with penalty fees, which makes it harder to pay the next bill, which means even more punishment fees, which make it harder to pay the next bill, and so on. I’d survived this long by being obsessively careful to never let my bank account dip below zero, but the price for that had been constant low-level stress. No matter what I was doing or thinking, a part of my mind would always be worrying about money. That worry wasn’t gone, but now that I had both a source of income and a few months’ savings, I had more safety margin than I’d had in years. All of a sudden, I could take some of the mental resources I’d been spending on worrying about money, and use them for . . . well, anything else. It was like carrying a bunch of heavy rocks everywhere you went, and finally getting to dump some of them out.

  With my newly available time and attention, I set to work on my next project: learning how to make a continuous sigl.

  * * *

  —

  By this point I’d read the Exchange catalogue cover to cover multiple times, and one of the things I’d learned was that sigls were divided into two basic categories. First were triggered sigls, like the light sigl I’d started with. “Triggered” was a reference to how they were activated—you sent a flow of essentia through them, and they did whatever they were supposed to. No matter how basic or complex the design, all triggered sigls required you to be a channeller to make them work. Without the ability to sense your own personal essentia and channel it, a triggered sigl was just a shiny rock.

  Continuous sigls were different. They worked without any need for channelling or activation, so long as they were close enough to their bearer. You didn’t need to be a drucrafter or know anything or even do anything: you just had to pick the thing up, and as long as you kept it next to your skin, it would work.

  For me, the big advantage of continuous sigls would be that they didn’t require concentration. Channelling essentia was easy, but doing something else at the same time was hard. Channelling essentia into one sigl, while activating a second sigl, while also doing something physically demanding—defending myself in a fight, say—well, that was past “hard” and into “nearly impossible.”

  My experience with the Mark 1 enhancement sigl had also shown me the problems with triggered sigls. The pain from the torn muscles had broken my concentration and stopped me channelling. Which had worked in my favour that time, but if that had been a real enhancement sigl, having it cut out when I got hurt seemed like a recipe for disaster. If I wanted something that would keep working even if I got stunned or injured, I needed to learn to make continuous sigls. Fortunately, I had an idea about where to find one.

  * * *

  —

  Maria had told me about finder’s stones—continuous Light sigls that lit up in the presence of Wells. Linford’s sold them to its Well locators, meaning that if I could find a locator, I should be able to get a look at one. According to the Linford’s website, the company had an address in Aldgate. That seemed like a good place to start.

  One bus ride later, I was loitering outside my employer’s Aldgate office. I’d briefly considered just going in and asking for what I wanted, but the more I thought about it, the more I decided that Hey, can I reverse engineer your stuff? probably wasn’t going to go down well. Instead I blended with the afternoon crowds and watched for people coming in or out who looked like locators.

  After I’d been there for an hour, I spotted a pair of likely prospects: two men with Eastern European looks, dressed in run-down clothing. They disappeared into the office building, stayed for half an hour, then walked out and away down the main road.

  I intercepted them a hundred feet from the office. “Hi,” I said, trying my best to look friendly. “Can I ask you something?”

  The two men frowned at me suspiciously.

  “Are you locators?” I asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “I work for—” I began.

  The two men walked off down the street.

  “Hey!” I called, then hurried after them and started trying to talk them into helping me.

  It was a struggle. The two men—Romanians, as it turned out—did not want to talk to some strange kid who was making weird requests. In the end I remembered what had worked with Maria and just bribed them—I told them I’d pay for their drinks for as long as they’d talk to me.

  Once the two men were sitting in an Aldgate pub with pints of beer in front of them, their moods improved. But they still wouldn’t show me their sigls without a good explanation, which I had trouble providing due to the language barrier. In the end a translation app let me explain that I was a Linford’s locator as well. Once I’d proved to their satisfaction that I was employed by the same people that they were, they finally loosened up enough to show me what I needed.

  That is really weird, I thought as I stared at the finder’s stone. It was a small blue-white sphere that looked almost identical to my light sigls, set into an adjustable band that went around the man’s finger. A small thread of essentia was flowing from the man’s hand into the sigl, and the sigl was pulling in essentia from the surrounding air, though it wasn’t lighting up . . . presumably because there wasn’t enough to power it. The interesting thing was how it had happened. When the Romanian man had put the sigl on, nothing had changed at first, then essentia had started to flow into it in a tiny thread that had gradually grown stronger and stronger until it reached its maximum.