Kess reluctantly found Claire in her usual haunt—her side office on the inside of the infirmary. When she wasn’t treating someone, Claire usually had her nose in a book. Kess supposed that this was a good thing, but she wondered if Claire wouldn’t be so difficult to deal with if she had a little more human interaction.

  Kess just didn’t want to be the human doing the interacting.

  She wrinkled her nose at the antiseptic smell, sighed inwardly, and knocked on the side of the wall, leaning into the open door. “Do you have a minute?” she asked.

  Claire brought the book down, took one look at Kess, and was on her feet immediately. “What is it?”

  Kess leaned against the door, watching the blond woman for a moment, amused. She crossed her arms and tried to piece something together in her head. A small smile crawled its way onto her face. “Claire,” she said. “Are you…bored?”

  Claire sighed and slouched back into her chair, the picture of a petulant child. She waved her hand at Kess dismissively. “And here I thought you had something for me to do. You three go running off and recover hundreds of people, and not a single one of them even had a stubbed toe.” She threw her head back in frustration. “I’m bored out of my mind.”

  “In your profession, I’d imagine that’s a good thing,” Kess said, stifling a laugh. Claire sat back up, eyes flat as she surveyed Kess.

  “Why are you here?” Kess grimaced, letting her eyes fall to the ground. There was no love lost between the two of them, but Kess wondered if things would be different if she hadn’t been so determined to start them both off on the wrong foot. After all, ignoring her Fulminancy hadn’t made it go away.

  She chewed her lip, trying to find the words. “It’s like—it’s like I have burnout, but it’s different this time. I wake up hot, I go to sleep hot. Nothing helps, and it’s not getting better. But—“ She turned her attention inward, and felt her Fulminancy there, white-hot and pulsing. While certainly not full, there was none of the gaping emptiness that had been there after her first encounter with Rae. “The Fulminancy,” she finished. “It’s all still there. Have you ever heard of something like that?”

  Claire narrowed her eyes at Kess, her hand mindlessly reaching towards her stack of books. “No,” she said quietly. “No, I haven’t.” She cracked one open and began thumbing through the pages, blond curls disheveled. “Have you been using it?”

  “No,” Kess said. “Not since last night.”

  “You used quite a lot, Kess. I don’t know exactly how much, but enough that it would put most people completely out of commission.” Paper cracked as Claire kept flipping.

  “More than the first time?” Claire froze, meeting her eyes.

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  “Much more.” She returned to her flipping, and Kess replayed the night’s events in her mind. She had fought Rae for longer, sure, but with some of Rowan’s training under her belt, her actions were a little more controlled and refined than they had been the first time. And then there was the obvious question of how using even more power would leave her capable of completing an entire night’s work while the last time left her nearly dead.

  “What should I do?” Kess asked. Claire waved at her impatiently.

  “Hell if I know. But I would avoid it until I figure something out.” She dug around one of the desk drawers for a pen and began writing in a notebook. Kess sighed and turned to go, but Claire’s pen stopped, and the woman held her gaze again. “Kess, frankly, I don’t know what we’re dealing with here. But I do know that I’ve seen Fulminancy turn nasty. This is nothing the Uphill schools will teach you, nor is it anything most healers will say, but there’s something not quite right about the source of our powers.” She paused, frowning. “When it shows up in the volume you’ve got, I’d be very careful.”

  Kess nodded, her mood suddenly grim. She left Claire to her studies and climbed her way to the roof, her body burning and her mind like a ball of yarn she couldn’t untangle.

  The rooftop rain was cool, and though she knew she’d have another set of damp clothes, she stood in it anyway, sighing as the cool water trickled through her hair and down her back. It was strangely calming, but it was also a grim reminder of whatever brewed in her Fulminancy.

  Aside from the rain, the sky was calm, and no rumble of thunder or dancing tendril of lightning greeted her. In spite of the thousands of people in the city below and above her, she felt summarily alone for the first time in some time. She itched to use her Fulminancy to leap to taller buildings, but settled for looking out at the twisting alleyways and streets of the Downhill instead.

  She gripped the railing of the roof and wondered if somewhere, high above her in the shining lights Uphill, Oliver sat in a darkened crypt of a cell, wondering why she’d never come for him. The lights of the lavish buildings dwarfed the dimmer ones of the lower city, a sweeping city all its own. For a moment she considered leaping her way towards those lights, Claire’s warning be damned. Her rapid improvement at controlling her powers afforded her the opportunity to do things she’d never dreamt of before, but they didn’t give her the ability to read minds, or the ability to know where her brother was being kept—if he was being kept at all.

  Perhaps, when the time was right, she’d show herself to the world, consequences be damned. It was a thought that terrified Kess as much as elated her. Kess had never been able to see herself underneath her Fulminancy. She was drowned by it, awash in it, and, as a result, lost in it. Even the added strength, confidence, and tentative grasp of her powers did little to help her accept that new identity so easily.

  If anything, her new abilities settled over her, a thick cloak of responsibility. Rowan had been right that night on this same rooftop so long ago. She was a coward. Her powers were a gift, but she wielded them and used them as a curse. Draven, perhaps knowing on some level what Kess hid, had given all of his hopes to her—a woman who feared what she would become.

  I can’t be a leader for these people, she thought. I can’t help Rowan. I can’t even find my own brother.

  So she stood there, rain crawling its way down her skin and Fulminancy creeping its way up her body, wondering how she could possibly master her powers and become something else without destroying everything she already was in the process.

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