“You aren’t doing anything?” I asked the man. I had to raise my voice for him to hear: the pub was cramped and noisy.

  “Is fine,” the Romanian man said in his thick accent. His name was Pavel, and he seemed the more willing to talk; the other was called Anton and was watching me suspiciously.

  “But you’re not channelling?”

  I got a pair of uncomprehending looks. Yeah, that was way too technical a word. Maybe if I focused on exactly how the essentia was moving—

  “Hey,” Anton said. He lifted his empty glass and gestured at me.

  I went to the bar, got two more beers, and went back to studying Pavel’s sigl.

  Pavel and Anton exchanged a few remarks in Romanian, then Pavel spoke to me. “Why you to do this work?”

  “What, finding Wells?” I said absently.

  “Yes. Locator.”

  “It’s better than my last job,” I told them. There was something about the sigl that seemed to make essentia trickle through it naturally, like water flowing downhill.

  Pavel snorted with laughter, then said something to Anton, who laughed too. “Shit,” Anton told me.

  “What?”

  “He says, is shit job,” Pavel explained.

  That made me look up. Those were exactly the words Felix had used. “What’s wrong with it?”

  That opened the floodgates. Anton began to talk fast in Romanian, with Pavel translating and adding thoughts of his own.

  Apparently Anton and Pavel had grown up in rural Romania, near a city called Oradea. They’d been vaguely aware of the drucraft world, but there weren’t any jobs, and a recruiter had told them he could get them places in London where they could work as locators for good money. When they’d got to England, though, they’d found out that the actual job the recruiter had signed them up for was at an Amazon warehouse near Bletchley. They’d skipped out and travelled to London, where they’d managed to find work with Linford’s, only to discover that hadn’t lived up to the promises, either. Both Anton and Pavel would spend days on end walking around London without more than a flicker from their finder’s stones, returning home after dark with nothing but aching feet. And most of the time, when they did find a Well, it would turn out to be claimed already.

  Even finding an unclaimed Well didn’t guarantee that they’d get paid, and that was when Anton got really bitter. He claimed he’d found a Well that should have been worth thousands, called it in to Linford’s, and been told that they’d check it out. He’d waited for hours, finally going home in the early hours of the morning. The next day Linford’s had told him that the Well had been empty.

  “Thieves,” Anton said vehemently. “All thieves!”

  I remembered what Maria had said about answering Well claims and finding them empty. “They’re always hoping we’ll pay them anyway. We don’t, of course.” At the time I hadn’t given it a second thought.

  At this point Pavel’s drink ran out, and I had to go to the bar for more beers. By the time I got back, Anton had calmed down a bit. “If Linford’s is so bad, why do you keep working for them?” I asked as I set the glasses down on the table.

  “Rest are just as bad,” Pavel said with a shrug.

  I went back to studying the sigl. I was starting to see how it worked: it was shaped so as to create a sort of vacuum that pulled on the surrounding area. Then once a few threads of Pavel’s personal essentia happened to flow in, it caused a feedback loop where the sigl pulled in more and more until it hit its maximum. That was why it had taken a few minutes to warm up. Although, if you could channel, you could just jump-start it . . .

  “Why you do locator?” Anton asked me.

  “You mean in general?”

  Anton fired off a few sentences in Romanian at Pavel, who translated. “You don’t have locator’s face.”

  I hesitated. It would be easy to pretend I didn’t understand, but the truth was, I kind of did. The people who work menial jobs in London have a specific look. No one talks about it, but everyone recognises it. It was how I’d been able to pick out Pavel and Anton.

  It was just as well that Pavel and Anton weren’t English, or they’d have noticed my accent the second I’d opened my mouth, and then they probably wouldn’t have been willing to speak to me at all. My dad’s accent is standard working class, but as I was growing up he always pushed me to speak with a more middle-class one. I didn’t understand why at the time, but looking back on it, maybe he was trying to prepare me for the Ashfords. I ended up with this hybrid accent that isn’t exactly one thing or the other. It’s not upper class, but I still got a lot of crap at school for being “posh.” There was a reason I took up boxing.

  “Is shit,” Anton told me again. “Get better job.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I protested. “And you can work your way up.”

  Pavel burst out laughing. He translated what I’d said to Anton, and Anton laughed too.

  I looked between them. “What?”

  “They tell you, you do well, you get promotion?” Pavel told me.

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “All lies,” Pavel said. “They say that to everyone. They say, you find enough Wells, then in six months, you get proper job. Regular hours, time off. So you work hard, do as they say, then in six months they say, oh, sorry, nothing they can do.”

  “But you can still make money,” I said.

  Pavel snorted and held up his finder’s stone. “You know how long these last?”

  “Uh,” I said, looking at the sigl in puzzlement. “Pretty much forever?”

  Pavel and Anton burst out laughing again.

  I looked between the two men. “What is it?”

  Pavel grinned at me. “Two years.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe less,” Pavel added.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What happens after a couple of years?”

  “You go to them and buy new one.”

  I tried to find out from Pavel why his finder’s stone would break, but he didn’t really know. All he knew was that after maybe eighteen months or so, the finder’s stones you got from Linford’s would stop working. Linford’s would buy them back, but not for much.

  We talked for another hour (and for three more rounds of drinks), but I didn’t learn much else. Pavel and Anton mostly wanted to complain about Linford’s, though when I asked, they said that they’d heard bad things about all the other drucraft corporations as well. Mostly they emphasised how insecure the job was. A few locators did strike it rich, but for most it was all they could do to eke out a living. Pavel and Anton had survived this long by working together with some other Romanians from their region—everyone chipped in and supported each other. Solo locators didn’t have that safety net, and as a result they usually didn’t last long. Sooner or later something would go wrong, and they’d disappear.

  Pavel had some parting words as we said our goodbyes. “You should get out,” he told me. “Being locator is tough, tough, tough. You’re young, you’re English. Find something better.”

  * * *

  —

  I had a lot to think about on the way home.

  I’d got what I came for. I was pretty sure I understood how that sigl of Pavel’s worked—the key was to create an essentia vacuum in its core, and once that was set up, it should be self-sustaining. I’d have to experiment, but I thought I could see how to make it work.

  But mostly what I was thinking about on the bus ride back wasn’t about sigls; it was about Pavel and Anton. They’d both taken for granted that finding Wells was a terrible job, and now that I’d actually had a chance to study those sigls of theirs, I could see why. Those finder’s stones that Linford’s sold them were streamlined, but to my eyes they looked cheaply produced and crude as hell. They’d pick up a Well, but you’d have to get really close, maybe twenty feet or so. I could spot even the weakest of Wells from three times that range. Three times the range meant a circle with nine times the area, which meant I could cover as much ground in an hour as Pavel or Anton could with a full day’s work.

  And then on top of that, I had my essentia sight. Which not only let me find Wells more easily, but also meant that once I did find a Well, I could make use of it in a way that other people couldn’t. Maria had made it sound as though being a manifester wasn’t particularly useful, and now that I saw the kinds of tools that most locators were working with, I could see why. If I had to find Wells the way that Pavel and Anton did, it’d take me so long that by the time I finally found one, I’d probably have to sell it just to keep my head above water.

  The only kind of people who would get a lot of use out of being a manifester would be the ones who were rich enough and connected enough that they had access to as many Wells as they wanted. People like the Ashfords. Which would explain why they could afford to put so much value on drucraft skill.

  I finally understood why Lucella had turned on me the way she had. Not that it did me much good.

  Except . . . no, that wasn’t true. I’d learned something important. This ability of mine was more than a way to make money—it gave me the potential to grow stronger than anyone would expect, maybe even stronger than the Ashfords. But to do that, I needed time: time to develop my shaping skills, and time to build up an armoury of sigls that would let me face them on even terms.

  But how long did I have?

  * * *

  —

  When I got home, I went online to research what Pavel had said about sigl life spans. It was puzzling because I was sure I remembered my dad saying something about sigls being passed down by parents to their children, which didn’t make any sense if the things only lasted a couple of years. My first few searches got me nothing useful, but I persisted.

  In the end, it was a throwaway phrase from the catalogue that put me on the right track. It turned out that there were two ways of making a sigl. The old-fashioned way, the one I’d been using, was to make “solid” sigls, and those could last practically forever. But most sigls sold nowadays were “threaded,” with parts of the sigl’s interior replaced with empty space. Threaded sigls used less essentia than solid sigls, but the price for that was a shorter life span. A much shorter life span. The companies that sold threaded sigls were vague on exactly how short, but I could make a guess by looking at the warranties for the sigls that Linford’s sold. They were for one to three years.

  Oh, and it turned out Pavel had been telling the truth about promotions as well. I’d found an anonymous forum for locators called the Back Alley, and it turned out they had an entire thread on the subject. The complaints ran to pages, but the general conclusion was: don’t hold your breath. Drucraft corporations filled their higher ranks by recruiting graduates from prestigious universities, not by promoting workers on zero-hours contracts.

  Putting it all together, the whole thing made me see that interview I’d had with Maria in a very different light. If I’d followed her advice and got a finder’s stone, I’d have ended up paying thousands for some piece of junk that would have lasted barely long enough to get out of warranty before breaking and forcing me to go back and buy a new one. And given that those finder’s stones were pretty terrible at finding Wells in the first place, the cost of that sigl could easily have ended up being most of my take-home pay.

  It also put a different spin on Maria’s eagerness to sell me on the job. Back when Kiran had been working as a taxi driver for a ride-hailing company, one of the things he’d mentioned was that the company was always trying to push as many drivers onto the streets as they could. The company wanted a fleet of cars circling 24/7 so that as soon as a customer pinged the app, one would roll up in seconds. But for that to work, there had to be more drivers than customers. And drivers didn’t get paid for the time they spent waiting.

  It seemed to me as though the locating business worked the same way. Linford’s wanted to have a swarm of locators combing the streets so that new Wells were snapped up as soon as they appeared. But there was no risk to Linford’s if they hired too many. They were the ones selling the finder’s stones, after all—they were turning a profit either way.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it felt as though all the risks of the locating job fell on the locators. If you ran into a gang of raiders who put you in hospital, you didn’t get compensation or sick pay. If you searched for days or weeks and never found a Well, then that wasn’t Linford’s problem. They only had to pay for results.

  And that was assuming Linford’s played by their own rules. Well registration was done in the corporation’s name, not your own. If someone like Pavel or Anton did hit the jackpot and find a Well worth £50,000 or £100,000, what was to stop Linford’s from coming up with some excuse not to pay them? They had lawyers and accountants; locators didn’t. And funnily enough, when I looked on the Back Alley, there were stories about exactly that.

  I came across other stories in the course of my research too. It seemed that drucraft corporations did a lot more than just sell sigls. They were involved with governments and politics, and had research projects and agendas of their own, and some of the rumours were pretty disturbing. Military corporations apparently had a history of Well raiding, using black-ops teams equipped with their own combat sigls to steal essentia from Wells owned by Houses or other corps. Medical corps had a reputation for developing their sigls using human experimentation. Some of it was legal, with controlled trials, but there were persistent rumours that the more high-risk tests were done on destitute people in secret facilities in Eastern Europe or Africa.

  The more I learned, the more cautious I became about the company I was working for. I knew I was going to keep working as a locator—I needed the money, and I didn’t have any better options. But I was very glad I hadn’t told Maria about my essentia sight.

  The whole experience had one final effect: it changed how I saw Wells. Before, if a Well flashed purple on the registry app, I’d seen it as someone else’s property. But the more that I learned about the drucraft world, the more it seemed as though the way the big corporations and Houses got their property was by taking it by bribery or by force.

  Bribery and force weren’t options for me. But in the course of my searching I was finding a steady trickle of claimed Wells. And some of those Wells, particularly the weaker ones, didn’t seem to have much security. In fact, in the case of the D-class Wells, “security” was often nothing more than a chain-link fence.

  I didn’t start raiding them. Yet. But from that point on, every time I found a Well that was claimed, I’d make a mental note of its location and quietly weigh up exactly how hard it would be to take it for myself.

  CHAPTER 15

  I sat on my bed cross-legged, looking down at my laptop, and at the small box next to it. On the laptop screen was an email from the detective agency; in the box was an enhancement sigl. Both were from this morning. Funny how you can work for weeks with nothing to show for it, then two things come along at once.

  The little glinting fragment of green in the box was my third try at an enhancement sigl. My first attempt, the one I now thought of as the Mark 1, had nearly put me in hospital. My second attempt was currently sitting in the box behind my skirting board, along with the rest of my cast-offs. Apparently I hadn’t understood continuous sigls as well as I’d thought, and I’d managed to shape it in such a way that neither channelling nor wearing it next to your skin would trigger the essentia flow, meaning that there was no way to activate it at all, which made it completely useless. Another Well’s worth of essentia wasted . . . but I did eventually figure out what I’d done wrong and incorporated those lessons into the Mark 3.

  And the Mark 3 worked perfectly. It was a functioning continuous sigl, with a working regulator. When I slipped the cord over my neck to let it rest against the bare skin of my chest, it would gradually start to pull in essentia, starting with only a thread but drawing in more and more until a steady stream was flowing into that tiny green gem. From there, Life essentia flowed back out, charging my muscles with power. No more regulation problems: the effect was perfectly even, making every muscle in my body proportionately stronger.

  Specifically, it made them about 15 percent stronger. I’d tried lifting weights, and then doing pull-ups, first with the sigl, then without. Whichever muscle group I tested, the number came out around the same. It had disappointed me a little at first—I’d had fantasies of being able to pick up people one-handed and throw them across the room like a superhero—but, then, this was from less than a month’s work.

  It would have been nice if I could just keep on making more and more enhancement sigls and stack them one on top of the other until I was invincible, but I could already see that it wasn’t going to work that way. Life sigls seemed much more essentia hungry than Light ones, and this one swallowed up between a third and a half of my essentia capacity all on its own. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before I’d have to work out some sort of budget.

  But although the enhancement sigl was a big deal, it was the email that my eyes kept coming back to.

  I reached for my laptop and double-clicked the file attached to the email, reading through it for the fourth time. The detective agency hadn’t been able to trace the men who’d followed me, but they had been able to trace the car. It had been leased by a company that was owned by another company, which after some twists and turns led to a third company calling itself Sardanapalus Holdings. The company’s owners were anonymous, but its correspondence addresses weren’t. The report finished by informing me that my retainer had run out and asking whether I’d like to pay for further investigation.