But if I followed that path, there’d be a price. Between my job, my drucraft, all the problems that came with living alone, and spending enough time with my friends that I didn’t go crazy, I was already stretched. If I added a uni degree on top of that, something would have to go, and I had a feeling I knew what that something would have to be.

  It felt as though the “proper” choice, the one the world wanted me to take, was to give up my drucraft. Back when we’d been given careers advice at school, I’d heard a lot about following your passion, but the older I got, the more it felt to me as though there was another message under that, something harder and colder. As a kid, you’re allowed to do things for fun, but the more you grow up, the more you get pressured to spend your time doing things that’ll make you successful—the right A levels, the right course, the right activities on your CV. Everything to make money, to signal that you’re a good employee.

  Drucraft didn’t make me money, and it definitely didn’t make me look like a better employee. If my career was what I cared about, I might as well give it up.

  But I didn’t want to. Ever since I’d first pestered my dad into teaching me drucraft, it had been the one big secret I’d shared with him, the one thing we’d always done together. When he’d told me I showed talent, I’d thrown myself into it, practising every day after school without a break. I can still remember that smile of his when I got something right, the way his face would light up. He’d been so proud of me.

  In his letter my dad had told me to do three things, and one of them had been to keep practising my drucraft. I’d done as he’d asked, but it had been almost three years. I’d been practising and waiting for a really long time, and it felt as though I was being left behind.

  I sighed, then reached for the fence to climb back the way I’d come.

  * * *

  —

  I went for a run, looping north through Forest Gate. Back when I was doing boxing, I’d go running every day. I’m not in proper training anymore—between my job and my drucraft I can’t afford it—but I hate feeling unfit, so I try to squeeze in runs when I can.

  As I ran, I thought once again about how unfair the whole thing was. As a little kid, I’d dreamed of having magic powers. When I found out that drucraft was real and that I could use it, I’d been so excited. Except, surprise! You get to do magic, but the only thing you can use it for is to make a flashlight.

  I knew that there was more to it than that. From what I’d heard, the more powerful sigls could do all kinds of amazing things—turn you invisible, give you superhuman strength, make your body as strong as steel. But to make those sigls, you needed powerful Wells and the knowledge of how to use them. Which meant that right now, my big magical talent amounted to something that came packaged with your smartphone as a standard feature.

  I came out through the backstreets and rounded the north side of West Ham Park. Chestnut trees loomed up on the other side of the fence, the first pale green shoots beginning to sprout from bare branches. A city fox, caught in the middle of crossing the road, flicked his tail at me and vanished between two cars.

  I’ve always liked London at night. The noise and bustle of the day fades away, and in the quiet you can feel the presence of the city. It has its own nature, kind of like its own essentia—old, layered, and complex, man-made construction on top of millennia-old earth. Generation after generation of people, with the plants and animals of old Britain living with them side by side. It’s neat and chaotic and ancient and sprawling, and it’s my home.

  I passed Tanner Point and turned down Lettsom Walk, a little foot passage that runs alongside the railway lines connecting Plaistow to Upton Park. The walk runs straight as an arrow for a few hundred feet before twisting out of sight at the end. Up ahead, the white cranes and half-finished towers of the Plaistow construction site reached up into the night sky, red pinpoints gleaming in the dark. From the other side of the wall, I could hear the rumbling of an approaching train.

  A soft footfall sounded behind me.

  I twisted, suddenly alert. Plaistow isn’t a dangerous area, but it’s not exactly safe, either, and I’ve had to face down muggers before . . .

  But there were no muggers. Or anyone else. The walk stretched away, clearly lit in the streetlights. Empty.

  I looked around, frowning.

  The Underground train came blaring along on the other side of the wall, its roar echoing around the houses. By the time it had passed by and was fading into the distance, rattle and bang, rattle and bang, any sound of footsteps was long gone. I started walking again, glancing around at the silent buildings.

  There’s a footbridge towards the bottom of Lettsom Walk, a cage of metal and brick that links the walks on either side of the railway lines. I climbed the stairs, wondering if I was just jumpy today. Half a mile to the east, the red taillights of the train shone in the darkness as it pulled into Upton Park. The wires above the tracks whickered and clanged, still vibrating from the train’s passage. I reached the top of the steps and turned to cross.

  There was a girl standing at the far end.

  I paused, feeling that same echo of strangeness I’d felt this morning. The level part of the bridge is forty feet from end to end, and the girl was at the top of the far steps with one hand on the rail. She wasn’t crossing; she was just standing there.

  Most of the lights on the footbridge were burned out, leaving the girl’s face in shadow. I couldn’t make out her features, but she looked young. She didn’t react to my stare, and something about her stillness sent a ripple of unease through me. What was going on?

  I didn’t move. Neither did she.

  I shook myself and started forward, and as I moved, the girl did too. As we drew closer, I could see that she was young, maybe sixteen or so, small and light. She had fair skin and finely boned features, her head was covered with a furry hat, and she wore an elegant-looking long belted coat. But mostly what I noticed was that she was watching me, with a sort of curious, expectant look.

  I walked past without slowing. As we passed each other, I heard her murmur in a wry voice, “Better get stronger.”

  I stopped dead. Turning, I saw that the girl was still walking away. She didn’t look back, and as I stared after her she reached the other side of the bridge and disappeared down the steps I’d just climbed. Her footsteps rang out, their echoes fading.

  I kept staring. What did she mean by . . . ?

  Oh, screw this. I ran after her.

  I reached the end of the bridge and stopped. The girl wasn’t on the stairs. I jogged down a little further and leant out over the railing. From up here, halfway up the steps, I had a view up and down Lettsom Walk for more than a hundred feet in both directions.

  Empty.

  I stared down at the bare concrete. Where had she gone?

  There were houses and cars along the other side of the walk, as well as some hedges, all more than big enough to hide a small girl. But she’d been out of my sight for less than ten seconds. She couldn’t have moved that fast.

  Could she?

  I kept looking around, but nothing moved. At last I backed away, crossed the bridge a third time, and descended the steps on the far side. The walk beyond led to Plaistow Road and the way home. I kept checking over my shoulder for the rest of the journey back, but I didn’t see anything more.

  CHAPTER 2

  The car wasn’t there next morning.

  I fed Hobbes, let him out, and had breakfast, glancing out of the window as I did. No black minivans. No mysterious sixteen-year-old girls, either.

  Work went the same as usual, except that I passed Pamela in the corridor a couple of times, and each time it felt as though she had her eyes on me. She didn’t say or do anything, but it still left me with an uncomfortable feeling, and this time it had nothing to do with jobs or universities. It was for quite a different reason: my looks.

  Most people would say my looks are the most distinctive thing about me. I have wavy jet-black hair, large brown eyes, long eyelashes, and delicate, slightly feminine features; add it to my slim build, and when I was younger, I’d regularly get asked if I was a boy or a girl. As I grew I put on some muscle, but not much bulk, and even now, at twenty, I still was seen as a pretty boy rather than as a young man.

  My looks got me a fair bit of attention while I was in school. Sometimes it was the nice kind, with girls trying to dress me up or ask if I was going to be a model. Sometimes it was less nice: I had to field the “Are you gay?” question a lot, which would usually lead into even less friendly questions, which would keep escalating until I did something about it. Apparently I get it from my dad: when I asked him about it, he said that when he was younger, he’d looked just like me. (He also told me that no, I couldn’t be a model—male models needed to be five eleven, and I was probably going to top out at five eight, and I wasn’t missing anything anyway, because modelling was a horrible job.)

  It’s got its pluses and minuses. People tend to be nice to me, even when they don’t know me very well and I haven’t done anything to deserve it. On the other hand, I’ve had a few unpleasant experiences where I’ve agreed to something, only to discover much later that what I thought I was agreeing to and what the other person thought I was agreeing to were very different things. Last September, after I moved out of my aunt’s and back to Plaistow, I got a job at a bar in Hoxton. I hadn’t looked very closely at what kind of bar it was, and, with hindsight, the fact that the guy didn’t ask me for proof of age should have been a warning sign, but I had rent to pay and couldn’t afford to be picky. It was only once I started that I realised what I’d actually been hired for—my shifts mostly consisted of getting hit on by men (and the occasional woman) more than twice my age. Most were willing to take no for an answer, but a couple of nasty incidents taught me that something about my looks seemed to attract the predatory type. I got out as soon as I could.

  I didn’t really think that Pamela was one of those. And nothing she’d done had been over the line. But I kept my distance all the same.

  * * *

  —

  Fetching and carrying files is pretty mindless work, but there’s one thing you can say for it: it gives you a lot of time to think.

  All through that Thursday, as I moved box files around the basement, I kept thinking about that girl on the bridge. Her words had hit a nerve—I’d been feeling for a while now as though I wasn’t doing enough. My dad had told me to keep practising my drucraft, but while I’d gotten better, I hadn’t really gotten stronger.

  When my father disappeared, I didn’t just lose my remaining parent; I lost the only source of information about drucraft that I could trust. Without him I’d had to fall back on the Internet, and as it turns out, finding reliable information about drucraft online is really, really hard. Typing “drucraft” into a search engine takes you to pages with titles like “how to deal with friends or family members who spread conspiracy theories” and “our fact-checkers teach you how to spot misinformation.” Any drucraft-related content posted on social networks like Twitter or YouTube or Reddit gets deleted, and when you try to look up the authors, you find they’ve been banned for “violations of our terms of service.” Most sites won’t talk about the subject at all, and when you ask about it, you’ll get evasions or silence. It takes a lot of work to find people willing to talk, and even when you do, there’s no guarantee that anything they say will be true. Here are some of the things I’ve “learned” about drucraft over the past couple of years:

  There are lots of Wells out there, scattered all over the country. (Verdict: true.)

  Different types of Wells draw upon different branches of essentia, and different countries are much better or worse for finding Wells of particular branches. (Verdict: not sure, but sounds plausible.)

  New Wells are discovered with something called a “finder’s stone.” (Verdict: false. I’d found my Well on my own.)

  To make a sigl, you need something called a “limiter” that’s powered by human blood. (Verdict: definitely false. I’d made my two sigls on my own, no blood involved.)

  It’s easy to say “get stronger,” but that’s pretty hard when you don’t have any good idea of how people get stronger. The one thing that I was sure would help was getting more powerful sigls. But how?

  The obvious way was to find more Wells. I’d spent a while last autumn trying to do exactly that, and I’d actually managed to find three, but none had resulted in a sigl. The first two Wells, out towards Upton Park, had both been weaker than my one on Foxden Road, and when I’d tried to use them, it hadn’t worked. It hadn’t been for nothing—those two failed shapings taught me some useful lessons—but it did seem that sigls needed a certain minimum amount of essentia, and if a Well wasn’t over that limit, you weren’t getting a sigl out of it.

  The third Well was over that limit, but it was occupied. It was an old church in West Ham, and when I found it in October, someone had obviously just used it since most of its essentia had been drained already. It might have filled up since, but I was wary of getting too close. My dad had warned me that drucrafters were territorial, and you could get into a lot of trouble trespassing on a Well that wasn’t yours.

  But there obviously were other Wells out there—lots, if I’d been able to find four without even leaving my neighbourhood—so I should be able to find some if I kept at it. The problem was time. I spent eight hours a day at the MoD, the better part of two hours travelling there and back, another hour or two on drucraft. And then there were the little things. Calling the agency to sort out the latest error in my payslip. Going to the bank to get a document. Prowling around the supermarket looking for special offers. Having to stay home because the landlord had told us to let someone in. Chasing down the one person in the department who’d sign my time sheet. All the tiny annoying problems that people with better jobs and better lives probably don’t have to deal with but which seemed to eat up whatever free time I had left. Hunting for Wells was a slow process, and I was stretched thin already.

  There was another option. One thing that I’d learned from my research was that most people with sigls didn’t make them; they bought them. And when the conversation turned to buying sigls, the same name kept coming up: the Exchange.

  The Exchange is in Belgravia, a London district between Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, and I finally managed to track the place down last year. I’d known right from the start that I wouldn’t be able to afford a sigl—my bank balance for the last few months had hovered between £500 and £1,000, which in London is a month’s living expenses at most. But even if I wasn’t going to buy anything, I liked the idea of getting a look at what was on sale. One of the problems I’d been running into more and more over the past six months had been that I wasn’t sure exactly what was and wasn’t possible. If I could see what sorts of sigls other people had been able to make, it might give me a better idea of what I could do on my own.

  But it turned out that none of that mattered because they wouldn’t even let me in. I’d tried twice, and both times I’d been stopped at the door. Apparently the kinds of people who belong in these places have a specific look, and I don’t have it. If I could make that invisibility sigl, I might be able to sneak inside . . . but I’d only be able to sneak inside if it worked . . . and to know if it would work, I needed a better idea of what sigls could do . . . and to get a better idea of what sigls could do, I needed to get in.

  So while finding more Wells didn’t seem very realistic, the “buying sigls” plan seemed even worse. What did that leave?

  Nothing.

  * * *

  —

  I had to stay late at work, and it was past seven when I came out of Plaistow station, walked down the hill, and turned off the side street leading to Foxden Road. The sun was setting in the western sky, its rays igniting the clouds in brilliant scarlet and gold. Cherry blossom petals were scattered on the pavement, and the temperature was dropping fast with the coming evening, the chill cutting through my fleece and making me shiver. A crow was perched on the telephone wires, watching as I passed below.

  There was a girl waiting outside my front gate.

  My mind flashed instantly to last night, but as the girl turned to face me I saw that she wasn’t the same one who’d passed me on the bridge. This girl was about as old as I was, with fair skin and shoulder-length ash-blond hair. Her movements were quick and confident, and she looked me up and down in a self-assured sort of way.

  “Well,” she said at last. “You’re better looking than I expected.”

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  I opened my mouth to ask what she was doing outside my house, when another memory from yesterday jogged loose: Gabriel talking about why that girl had been waiting outside his house on a Friday night. Well, today was a Thursday, and it was technically evening, not night, but . . .

  “Do you know who I am?” the girl asked.

  “Um,” I said. “No?”

  “Guess,” the girl said with a smile.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Oh, come on. Here, I’ll give you a hint. It’s to do with your family. Your well-connected family.”

  That made me stop. Wait. Did she know something about my father?

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Lucella Ashford,” the girl said, and waited expectantly.

  I looked at her. The girl—Lucella—looked back at me.