“If you’re looking for her, she’s gone,” Rowan called out from down the hall. At Kess’s door, Claire swore colorfully and dropped several small pieces of metal onto the floor. Rowan raised an eyebrow at her as she hurriedly gathered what he was fairly certain was a set of lock picking tools. She stuffed them into a pocket and marched past, her blond curls bouncing.

  “Why are you, of all people, covering for her?” she asked, stopping in front of the stairs.

  “We all have secrets to keep, Claire.” He nodded towards her. “For example, you’re a very skilled woman, but I never took lock picking to be one of your fortes.” She snatched a pouch out of her other pocket and stuffed the tools into it without looking at him.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have to pick them if people didn’t lock them.”

  “That’s the idea of a lock, Claire. You know—keeping people out?” Tools put away, Claire crossed her arms and looked up at Rowan. She was several inches taller than Kess, but Rowan still dwarfed her.

  “And what if she locks the door and just dies in there? How does that make me look?”

  “If she’s up to sneaking out, then she’s probably not going to die on you anytime soon,” Rowan said. And she nearly won a Stormclap game against one of the best Fulminant players Uphill a few nights ago, he thought. Clearly Kess was on the mend, though he still worried. He wasn’t thrilled at the idea of Kess sneaking out again, but if he had learned one thing during the time he’d spent with her in the last month, it was that Kess valued her freedom—sometimes to a ludicrous level.

  “What she did is unprecedented,” Claire argued. “I have no idea what burnout can do to a person with that much power in the long run.” They made their way slowly towards the staircase, the rain a dull drumbeat overhead.

  “She’s used them on several occasions since then,” Rowan said. “Nothing blew up.”

  Claire leaned against the staircase railing in a way that made Rowan wonder how strong it was. “These aren’t your brothers we’re talking about, Rowan. They have maybe an eighth of what she has.”

  “It’s the same principle, Claire. It’ll work. She’s already more comfortable with it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Claire said, meeting his eyes. “A woman terrified of her powers—that we can work with. She won’t use them except in dire situations. A woman with that much ability who doesn’t fear using it? That could get bad, fast.”

  Rowan frowned, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. “I don’t see how teaching someone control is a bad thing. It was eating her up inside.”

  “It wasn’t a bad thing when I thought she was normal,” Claire said, watching him.

  Rowan hesitated. “What do you mean, she’s not normal?”

  Claire’s eyes unfocused as she stared at the floor, her mind focused on a distant problem. “I’ve healed a lot of Fulminancers, Rowan. I used to work for a school that specialized in Fulminancers with blue and silver sash levels of power. Burnout was brutal, and normal. Some of the older ones became Seats, or at least candidates for those Seats, but a lot of them didn’t make it.”

  “Just…accidents? Or…” Rowan trailed off.

  Claire shook her head, pressing her lips together. “It wasn’t that, no. There’s something…unstable about Fulminancy when it gets to that level. Something that not even the most skilled Fulminant can control. It’s like…” she trailed off, scuffing her foot against the carpet. “It’s like it has a mind of its own.”

  Kess’s words drifted back into Rowan’s mind, along with that odd feeling of gratitude he’d felt from her Fulminancy. And now Claire implied the same thing, as she had in the kitchen that night with Eamon and Arlette. Perhaps he hadn’t paid enough attention to the Fulminancers in his life. Maybe what Kess was suggesting was normal.

  “And you’re saying that Kess’s power is like the ones you used to heal.”

  “Kess’s power is like if I piled all of those students together,” Claire said, holding his gaze. “What she did to protect Draven should have killed her—ten times over.”

  Rowan let out a breath, slowly. In the past few days, he’d run more experiments with his tiny light array, which he’d expanded to fill half the library. Arlette complained, but what Rowan learned from it had been invaluable. Rather than worrying about transferring power in the first place, he’d first simply tried Kess’s Fulminancy and compared it to Claire’s, alongside a few more average Fulminancers from around the manor.

  Kess’s did dwarf other Fulminancy in brightness and raw power, but hers also eclipsed the others’ in another way—instability. Kess’s lights were the first to blow, and when they did, they went spectacularly, destroying multiple nearby lights as collateral. He’d sent a letter immediately to Cashin—encrypted—asking for any Fulminancy used in future lights to be sent to him for further testing first. And he’d also instructed the man to find Fulminancers with known stability to recharge the current lights.

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  It was a stopgap measure that still left him with a very big problem—one he would need the Archives to solve. Still, Rowan wondered. If her Fulminancy has that effect on the lights, what is it doing to her? He met Claire’s eyes and saw the same worry there. Claire perhaps cared less for Kess, but she was a professional—she wanted a job done right.

  He watched Claire turn towards the railing, her arms draped across it. “So, what do you suggest we do?” he asked. She lifted her eyebrows.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Keep an eye on her, I suppose. Does your—“ She wiggled her fingers without looking at him. “—still work?”

  “For now, though it’s usually less reliable than this.” Claire sighed.

  “Too many mysteries. I don’t like mysteries.” She turned her head towards him. “You could have at least followed her.”

  Rowan shook his head, pushing off the wall. “She was gone long before I showed up. I assumed she was asleep, but Tio told me about an open window on the third floor.”

  “So why are you here?” Claire asked, eying him.

  “Because I need your help.”

  Rowan had reached a dead end with the rest of his research. It was clear that all varieties of Fulminancy were becoming more unstable, though Kess’s at a much faster rate than anyone else’s. His only plan, unfortunately, hinged on figuring out a way to transfer Fulminancy. If that didn’t work, he wasn’t sure what he’d do. Still, it was a place to start. But what if there was no way to transfer Fulminancy? If Rowan managed to get into the Archives, but his hunch was wrong, he wouldn’t have long to right his mistakes. So instead, he went back to one of his oldest and dearest research topics—unlocking his own Fulminancy.

  He’d at least confirmed with Claire that something slept inside of him. It wasn’t Fulminancy exactly, but there was enough of whatever it was for her to agree to help him research a way to ‘unlock’ it, so to speak.

  Claire had grown up the child of two cities—a red sash Downhill Fulminant healer taken from her well-off home and forced into employment with Uphill entities. It made her just as experienced with the intricacies of Fulminancy than the very doctors who’d ignored him Uphill.

  Unfortunately, her experience didn’t mean she had any knowledge about oddities like Rowan, a fact she made plain not long into their time spent sitting in the tiny manor library, medical texts strewn across a table before them.

  “As far as history is concerned, Rowan, you don’t exist.” Rowan rubbed his eyes, fighting off a headache.

  “And neither does Kess, for that matter.” Claire nodded solemnly, then chucked a book to the floor with a thump.

  “These Archives you’re trying to get into had better have something more than we’ve got here, or you’re wasting a lot of time and effort. My best guess is that you might have a nerve or something blocked, but it’s complete speculation at this point—which is saying a lot, given that I can pretty much map out every section of your body with Fulminancy.”

  “And nothing’s off?”

  Claire shook her head. “Not besides your abnormally thick skull.”

  Rowan sighed, leaning back in his chair. The rain was quieter down here on the bottom levels, but still steady. He wondered if Kess had made her way back to the manor yet, and fought a twinge of worry. She could take care of herself—he hoped.

  He turned back to the page he had been studying and frowned, catching a word he hadn’t seen before.

  “Claire,” he said, flipping through his book. “Why do these older books have mention of something called a Vice?”

  Claire leaned back in her chair, balancing it on two legs. “It’s something that used to come up in older medical cases,” she said, frowning. “Whenever someone has burnout, we follow a different protocol, depending on how their body reacts to it. Some people’s body temperature skyrockets—like Kess—other people freeze half to death. Some people suffer from dehydration or intense muscle pain or degradation. The trick is to get their body back to equilibrium, then send your own Fulminancy their way—it’s how I dealt with Kess.”

  She stopped wiggling the chair, holding it still while she looked at the ceiling. “Hundreds of years ago, those specialized symptoms were much stronger, and would sometimes extend to when Fulminancy was used in normal quantities. They called those symptoms a Vice, but what happens to Fulminancers now isn’t defined enough for medical texts, so they leave it out.”

  “Why would Vices just disappear?” Rowan asked, fighting the urge to steady Claire’s chair.

  “No one really knows,” she replied. “The official story is that Fulminancy is neater and more refined these days, and with that refinement, we suffer from fewer drawbacks than we used to. But powers like yours and Kess’s would suggest that it might not be as refined as they think. If outliers are still popping up, then we’ve hardly reached some state of equilibrium with Fulminancy.”

  “Claire,” Rowan said, thoughtful. “Have you ever thought it odd that we’re never taught how Fulminancy came about in the first place? Were we always like this? Did it evolve from something else? Why is everyone’s Fulminancy so similar—yet different enough that some people can heal with it and others level cities?”

  Claire shrugged. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the details of it. You either heal with it or you blow shit up—depending on your talents, I suppose.”

  Rowan smiled despite himself. He shut his book and sighed, rubbing his eyes again. “Thank you again, Claire,” he said. She plopped her chair back onto the ground and started gathering up their books.

  “I wasn’t much help, but at least you weren’t sitting in here alone again. Too much of that and you’ll take over the entire library with that mess.” She jerked her head towards his lights as she stacked several tomes on a nearby shelf.

  He and Claire shut the library door behind them and were turning to make their way towards the front staircase when Kess burst through the back kitchen door, soaking wet, bloody, and shivering. Rowan darted forward, but not before Claire reached the woman. She wordlessly guided her back into the kitchen and onto a stool, her hazel eyes sharp as she looked Kess over.

  Kess took a minute to gulp down air, her face pale. A single arc of Fulminancy crawled down her sleeve, and her clothes had an acrid, burnt smell that cut through the rain. She talked as Claire divested her of her cloak.

  “Do we have a way to hide a bunch of people?” she asked breathlessly.

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