“It’s not just me,” Sonder said. “People in the Council are talking about you. The longer Luna stays with you, the harder it’ll be for her to find anyone else. If you really want to help her, you should find her another teacher.”
I looked back at Sonder and counted silently to ten, forcing myself back to calm. “Thank you for your honesty,” I said at last, my voice cold. “Allow me to retort. I’m quite sure you’re right—your friends on the Council don’t kill, not personally. They have people to do that for them. But the orders they pass down cause more deaths than I ever will. I would also note that you didn’t seem terribly bothered about my methods when it was your life on the line. Remember that little episode with Griff? If I hadn’t dealt with him and Onyx, exactly what do you think your chances would have been of getting out of that bubble alive?”
“You didn’t have to kill him! You could have found some other way!”
“It’s easy to say there’s another way when you’re not the one who has to find it.” Sonder started to answer and I spoke over him, my voice hard. “Shut up, Sonder. You had your say, now it’s my turn. I’d also like to point out that while you might not like the way I do things, the times in the past that you or Anne or Luna have been in trouble I’ve done a pretty good job of helping them. So you might want to ask yourself what’s more important to you: helping Anne, or your issues with me?”
Sonder stared at me. I turned to leave.
“Anne thinks the same thing, you know,” Sonder said just as I was turning the handle. I didn’t answer, and I banged the door behind me exactly as Luna had.
I went home, but I had trouble concentrating. Sonder’s words kept going around my head; I was angry at how unfair he was being, and afraid that he might be right. It was distracting me from trying to find Anne . . . not that there was much I could do in the first place, and that wasn’t making me feel any better either.
Novices and adepts think a diviner can find out anything, and I usually let them believe it—a slightly exaggerated reputation never hurts—but it just doesn’t work that way. Most “finding” uses of divination come down to a very long string of if-then conditions. You come up with an avenue of investigation, then you test it. If you don’t have anywhere to start, then divination just amounts to wild guessing, with about the same odds of success . . . and that was a problem because time was running out. I used to know an independent mage who specialised in missing-persons cases, and he told me about something he called the seventy-two-hour rule: if you don’t find someone within seventy-two hours, then odds are you won’t find them at all. Anne had been missing for nearly sixty.
I needed to do something, but I wasn’t sure what. Until Caldera got back in touch, there wasn’t much I could do to help with the search.
Every few minutes I found my thoughts drifting back to Sonder, coming up with more things to say, justifications, arguments. Then I found it blending into my feelings about Anne, imagining that I was arguing with her instead. I wanted to talk to one of them or both of them, try to explain, work something out. But Anne wasn’t there and Sonder wouldn’t listen, and I knew it was a stupid thing to do anyway. Anne and Sonder weren’t the problem, not really. The problem was . . .
My heart sank as I realised where the train of thought was heading. Yeah. That’s who I actually need to talk to, isn’t it?
I looked into the future to see whether Caldera was going to call soon, half-hoping for an excuse to stay home. She wasn’t and I set out.
For the second time in four days, I was back at the Institute of Education.
I was in the basement atrium, standing against one of the pillars. The lecture had just ended and students were streaming out, shouting and talking and checking their phones. None of them paid any attention to me. I searched their faces as they went past, boys and girls all with their school bags and middle-class clothes. They looked so young, and there was something dismaying about the thought. I was only ten years older than they were, less for the mature students, but it felt as though I had nothing in common with them at all.
Watching the sea of students—children—pulled my thoughts away, associations from point to point. Crowds of teenagers, faces, classrooms. It reminded me of childhood, and they weren’t good memories. Things were never really good at home when I was young, even before the divorce, and they were worse at school. I’d been an introverted kid, intelligent and sensitive and socially clumsy. Bad combination if you go to a British state school. I once read an article which made the argument that modern Western schools have a good deal in common with modern prisons, and I’ve always thought it was pretty accurate. With both schools and prisons, the ones running the system have a very simple set of priorities for their inmates: they want them to stay on the premises, they want them to stay healthy and watered and fed, and they want them not to be gratuitously violent in a way that’ll draw public attention. Beyond that, they don’t really care. There are plenty of teachers who do their best to help, but they’re swimming upstream and most of the time the kids end up creating their own society. It’s ruthless and cruel, and it is not fun to be at the bottom of it.
When my magic started developing, it only made things worse. Universal magic is the hardest of all the families for humans to use—it’s too abstract, too alien. When you’re a novice diviner your power comes in flashes; sometimes you just catch a glimpse of possibilities and sometimes you see all of them, every future at once, crashing into your mind like an ocean trying to fill a water bowl. It didn’t send me crazy, not quite, but I wasn’t exactly stable either and the fact that I had no idea what was happening to me didn’t help. Maybe if I’d had someone to talk to I might have tried to explain it, but there wasn’t anyone left by then, not really. My dad had lost custody, I didn’t get on with my mother, and my near-psychotic episodes had cut off the few friendships I’d had.
So I learnt to control my power. I learnt to focus my mind, block out the futures I didn’t want to see, direct my perception instead of taking in everything. I learnt to select futures, search out along those not-quite-visible strands of possibility, shut them off when it was too much and I needed time to recover. And I did it alone, because I had to. And it worked.
It didn’t make me any happier. My crude ability to see the future didn’t make me any friends—the opposite, if anything. I had knowledge, but there wasn’t anything I could do with it. I was left just as isolated, hating the people who’d ostracised me. Until one cold autumn day when Richard had stepped onto the schoolyard where I was standing, promising me everything I’d secretly wanted if I’d follow him and call him master. And I’d said yes.
Movement from inside the hall broke me out of my reverie. Nearly all of the students had disappeared up the stairs; only a few stragglers were left, one or two of them giving me curious glances now that I was the only person standing still in the atrium. A buzz of conversation from inside grew louder, then tailed off. A man appeared at the doors, white-haired, lecture notes tucked under one arm. He spotted me two steps into the room and came to a stop.
“Hey, Dad,” I said.
The inner courtyard of the Institute of Education was cold. It had been a long winter—we’d had flurries of snow as recently as a couple of weeks ago, even though it was April. My father and I sat on one of the benches, the cold of the wood creeping through my clothes. Students passed by in ones and twos, coats closed against the chill wind.
“I didn’t know you’d moved here,” I said.
“Here?” My father looked at me, confused.