“Yeah.”

  “Not to point out the obvious,” Colin said, “but have you considered just staying away from all these people? I mean, I still think this drucraft job of yours sounds dodgy as hell, but it seems to be working out for you. Why not just stick with that?”

  “I don’t think I can stay away forever,” I told him.

  “All right, so what’s the problem? You don’t think you can take on these guys?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well . . . then maybe you shouldn’t be trying?”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Look, back when you were boxing, you were featherweight or something, right?”

  “Lightweight,” I said. “That’s one hundred thirty-two pounds and under. Featherweight is one hundred twenty-five and a half. Also, I couldn’t qualify for featherweight anymore, because that’s only for juniors—”

  “Okay, okay, I don’t actually care,” Colin said, waving his hand. “And it’s supposed to be really hard to beat someone from a higher weight class, right?”

  “Right. That’s why they have them.”

  “And those two bodybuilder guys who broke into your room, they’d be what class?”

  “Off the top of the scale. Superheavyweight.”

  “So doesn’t that mean you’re never going to beat them?”

  I was silent.

  “Well?” Colin asked.

  “I suppose,” I said, suddenly depressed. When Colin put it like that, it really did sound impossible. And I wasn’t even telling him the worst part. These people weren’t just bigger and stronger and richer than I was; they had more powerful sigls too.

  “You don’t need to look so down,” Colin said when I stayed silent.

  “What am I supposed to do, then?” I asked. “Give up?” I’d been working nonstop to get this far, and right now it felt as though I was no closer to my goal than when I’d started.

  “No, just maybe come up with a new angle or something?” Colin asked. “I mean, you keep talking about being strong enough, but just because you have to deal with these guys doesn’t mean you have to take them on in a boxing ring.”

  I thought about that for a second.

  “Also, you could try telling me the truth about what you’ve been up to,” Colin added.

  “I am telling the truth.”

  “Dude, you can’t lie for shit,” Colin told me. “Okay, maybe you’re not technically lying, but these stories you’ve been telling lately have holes big enough to drive a lorry through.”

  I looked away, embarrassed. There was a pause.

  “Okay, look, don’t stress about it,” Colin said at last. “Just promise me that next time you need help, you’ll tell me the real story, okay?”

  I hesitated a second. “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  I thought about Colin’s words on the walk home. Now that he’d pointed it out, it was obvious. I wasn’t going to win this with brute strength.

  Back when I’d first taken up boxing, brute strength had worked pretty well. The bullies at school hadn’t really cared about me; I’d just been an easy target because of my looks and accent. Once I’d proved that I was willing to fight, they’d backed off, and I’d even ended up making friends with a couple of them afterwards, which I’d found pretty funny.

  But things weren’t funny now. Last night had been a wake-up call. I’d been treating my drucraft as something that I could take my time over, and that wasn’t going to work anymore. If I was going to keep chasing after my father or drawing the attention of people from House Ashford, then things like this—finding myself alone on a dark night facing some big nasty guy with a strength sigl who wanted to do bad things to me—were going to keep happening. In fact, I had the unpleasant feeling that they might end up becoming the new normal.

  The next time this happened, I needed an answer, and it had to be a good one. “Beat the guy in a straight fight” wasn’t good enough. In fact, any answer that involved treating this like some sort of sports match wasn’t good enough.

  So what was?

  * * *

  —

  The next morning found me sitting on my bed, looking down at three sigls laid out in a row. The Mark 1, Mark 2, and Mark 3 enhancement sigls glinted in the morning light. To my eyes, an essentia construct hovered in the air just above them.

  The “supercharge” idea, I decided, wasn’t going to work. My initial plan had been to take the Mark 3 and modify it so that it could channel all its power into only the muscles I was using at one specific moment. The idea had been to multiply the sigl’s power five or ten times over. Now that I’d had the chance to study it in more detail, I was pretty sure that all that would accomplish would be to cripple me in the same way that the Mark 1 had, except that the injuries would be five or ten times worse.

  The problem was the regulator. With the regulator, the power from the sigl was spread throughout the body, causing most of it to be effectively wasted. But without the regulator, my body’s balance got destroyed, and my muscles would tear themselves apart.

  I sighed, then picked up the Mark 3, rolling it between my thumb and forefinger. Maybe there was some way to have the regulator work only part of the time? If I designed the sigl so that the regulator could be partially disabled, so that I could turn it off when I needed a burst of strength . . .

  On some level, I knew that this was the wrong track. I was still going for the “brute strength” approach, just in a slightly different way. Still, like Colin had said, I had to come up with something.

  I kept at it all morning without much success. I did manage to figure out a way to temporarily stop the sigl’s regulator from working—there was a weird, very specific way you could channel your personal essentia into the sigl in order to suppress it. Unfortunately, as soon as I did, I ran straight back into the problems I’d had with the Mark 1. I was deliberately channelling only a thread of essentia through the sigl as a whole, in order to keep its enhancement down to the barest minimum, but even so, it made my body feel off balance and wrong. Not quite pain, but very unpleasant.

  Maybe if I trained with an unregulated sigl, I might be able to get used to it, enough to use it in a fight? No, that didn’t make sense—the whole problem was that it was too unpredictable to get used to. I might be able to control it, but that’d take way too much concentration. Particularly if I had to concentrate on shutting down the regulator at the same time . . .

  I stopped.

  Wait.

  I had a way to shut down a sigl’s regulator.

  I went back to practising, channelling into the sigl, making the sigl’s regulator go on, then off. Slowly, an evil smile started to spread across my face.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next few days were busy.

  First on the to-do list was another chat with Father Hawke. He confirmed that, yes, all enhancement sigls had regulators, and, yes, they worked pretty much exactly the same as mine. He also gave me a book of apologetics to read, which I knew I’d have to do by the next time we spoke. I still found it odd that Father Hawke seemed to care so much about making me do what amounted to theology homework, but I was starting to get used to it. And I had to admit it was a nice change to deal with someone in the drucraft world who was willing to help without either charging extortionate amounts of money or trying to stab me in the back.

  Next was design. To suppress the regulator on my own sigl, I had to touch it, which obviously wasn’t practical in combat. But thinking back over what Maria had told me, I realised that if I could do this without a sigl, then it had to be a Primal effect, which meant that I should be able to make it a lot more powerful by turning it into a Primal sigl. And come to think of it, I’d found a Primal Well last month . . .

  And so the following Monday, I found myself standing in a nature reserve outside London, looking down at the palm of my hand. Resting there was a tiny sphere of grey, the colour of thick cloud. The nature reserve was near Cobham, a sleepy little village in Surrey that I’d visited back in April in the hope that a less populated spot might make for a better hunting ground. As things turned out, it hadn’t, but I’d managed to find one Well all the same. It had been very weak, its reserves right on the edge of being unable to make a sigl at all, but it had been enough.

  Normally I tested my sigls at home, but I’d been waiting for this one for what felt like forever and I wanted to try it out straightaway. Of course, the only way to give it a proper test was to use it on an enhancement sigl that was actually working . . . which meant testing it on myself. I walked through the May wildflowers, buttercups forming little dots of gold against the grass, and ducked under the branches of a sweet chestnut tree that would hide me from any passersby. Then I put on my enhancement sigl and got to work.

  I had to be very slow and careful, but after an hour I knew that I’d done it. Every time I aimed the stream of essentia at my own enhancement sigl, its regulator node stopped working. Crucially, though, the rest of the sigl kept working, meaning that it would send unregulated energy into my body’s muscles in exactly the same way that the Mark 1 had. The range wasn’t huge—maybe thirty feet—but I could probably extend that with practice. And given that it was completely invisible, most people wouldn’t even be able to tell I was using it.

  As far as weapons went, it was ridiculously specific. It was completely useless against every possible opponent except one who was using a strength-enhancing Life sigl. But weirdly, the fact that it was useless against 99.9 percent of people actually made me feel better. No normal person would carry a weapon like this . . . which meant that no one would be expecting it.

  I set off for home with a spring in my step.

  * * *

  —

  From that point on, it felt as though the tide had turned.

  I went back to my training and my practice with a new energy. Whereas before I’d thought in terms of escaping or running away, now I thought in terms of fighting to win. The fight in Hampstead had taught me an important lesson: a weak weapon could be worse than none at all. My slam sigl had been a help in the battle at Victoria Park, but it had turned into a liability as soon as I ran up against someone really dangerous. This one was another story. For the first time, I felt as though I had something that let me face my enemies on even terms.

  But I still wasn’t going back to Hampstead. My new sigl might let me take on opponents like that boy, but only so long as I had the advantage of surprise—as soon as he figured out what was going on, he could just take his strength sigl off, at which point my new weapon would be useless. It was a good trick, but it wasn’t enough.

  The fact was, right now, I just wasn’t punching at a high enough weight. To go up against enemies like that boy, or Scar and Diesel, I needed more than one good trick. I needed lots of good tricks, and that meant more sigls, which meant work and time. And that meant that, for now, I was going to have to put my search for my father, as well as any plans I had for the Ashfords, on hold. I wasn’t happy about it, but at the moment my priority had to be getting stronger.

  I just hoped I’d have long enough to do it.

  * * *

  —

  I took Hobbes back to the vet to check on his progress. The news was good, and I was told I could start gradually allowing him more freedom of movement, which led me into my new project—figuring out how to make a sigl for someone else. I didn’t know how, but I knew someone who did: Maria. Her entire job revolved around supplying sigls to rich people, and I was pretty sure she’d understand the process well enough to explain it to me.

  Unsurprisingly, she did. Also unsurprisingly, she wasn’t willing to do it for free. I’d been expecting it this time and brought the cash with me.

  “All right,” Maria said once we were settled in her consulting room. “This should be easy for you to understand since you can shape sigls already. When you create a sigl, the initial construct is made out of your personal essentia. Then you layer the Well essentia on top of that, like flesh onto a skeleton. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “That construct is what’s used to make the sigl core,” Maria said. “We usually call it the kernel. When the construct is shrunk down and manifested, the threads of the construct become the kernel’s strands. Now, the key thing to understand is that even once they’re solidified, those strands are still made out of your personal essentia, and they still react to you. So when you channel into them, they conduct the essentia, and the whole thing works. Some people think of it like water flowing through cracks, others think of it as electricity going through a circuit, but either way, the important thing is that it’s your essentia in the kernel that makes it function. To anyone else, it’s just a piece of rock. This is called the Blood Limit, and it’s one of the most important restrictions in drucraft.”

  “Why is it called the Blood Limit?”

  “Because of the two ways around it,” Maria said. “First, you can use the sigl of a blood relative. Your personal essentia is a lot like your genetic code—it’s fixed at birth, and you get it from your parents. The more closely related you are to someone, the more likely the sigl will look at your essentia and say ‘close enough.’ ”

  “How closely related do you have to be?”

  “Closer the better. Parent, child, brother, or sister is best. Past that it depends on attunement ratio and a bit of luck, but that’s complicated and I won’t get into it now. The important part is that there’s a second way to get around the Blood Limit. Can you see what it is?”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Your sigls work for you because they’re made out of your personal essentia,” Maria said. “So if you want a sigl to work for someone else . . .”

  “You make it out of their personal essentia instead,” I finished.

  “Exactly.”

  “But how would that work? When you take someone’s personal essentia too far away from their body, it starts losing attunement. I suppose if they were right there . . .”

  “There’s an easier way to do it,” Maria said. “Bring a piece of their body.”

  I gave her a look.

  “Not like that,” Maria said with a laugh. “You use their blood. You can use other things too, but blood’s usually best. You use it as a focus for the shaping and draw out the essentia in the process.”

  I thought about it. It sounded difficult, and I said so.

  “It is,” Maria said with a nod. “And it gets harder the more of their essentia you use. The proportion of the sigl’s kernel that you shape out of the customer’s essentia is called its attunement ratio. If you mix them half-and-half, that’s an attunement ratio of one to one. The more of their essentia you use, the more effective the sigl will be, but the harder it’ll be to make.”

  “What’s the highest you can go?”

  “You’re ambitious, aren’t you?” Maria said. “Board standard is two to one. If you want professional grade, you can get custom sigls that go up to three or three point five. Even four to one, sometimes, although at that point you’re starting to run the risk of the whole thing failing.”

  “Huh,” I said. I wondered how far I could push it.

  “So how’s the locating going? Did you manage to get a finder’s stone?”

  She doesn’t know, I realised. Though maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Maria’s job was to deal with rich customers, not poor employees. “Not exactly.”

  “Did you not pass the credit check?”

  “No, I just didn’t apply, because finder’s stones are terrible,” I said bluntly. “Why did you tell me to get one?”

  Maria looked surprised. “Most of Linford’s Wells are discovered using finder’s stones.”

  “But their range is awful. Why not just get someone with good sensing skills?”

  “Do you know how long it takes to train someone up to that level?” Maria asked. “It’s years of work, all to develop a skill with no market value. Meanwhile, you can teach someone to use a finder’s stone in five minutes.”

  “A finder’s stone that’ll break in a year and a half.”

  “Threaded sigls are the industry standard.”

  “But those threaded sigls still cost around half the price of a solid one,” I pointed out. “Replacing your sigls every one and a half years doesn’t sound like a good deal.”

  “According to surveys, most locators only stay in the business for less than eighteen months before dropping out, anyway,” Maria said. “It can be a bit of a transitory sort of job.”

  Funny how you didn’t mention that part before. “You said before that locators can work their way up,” I said. “How would I do that?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not very involved in the locator side of the business. You’d have to talk to your supervisor.”

  I hadn’t even known I had a supervisor. All my contact with Linford’s had been through their app, and the one time I’d stuck around at the Well, the arriving team had told me to go away. “I don’t even know who that is.”

  “Unfortunately there’s not much I can do to help with that.”

  I was starting to cool on Maria. At our first meeting she’d seemed like a treasure trove of information, but the longer I spoke to her, the more I was starting to get the feeling that everything she told me seemed aimed to push me into a certain lane. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You’ve got twenty minutes left,” Maria said with a smile.