Kess had died before. She remembered that steady pull on her soul, as if something was pulling her away from everything she knew. She remembered the dead as they surrounded her, beckoning. She remembered blood trickling away from lockets, and a storm that comforted as much as it raged. She also remembered a searing heat churning through her body, burning her inside and out—a fire unable to be quenched. This time was no different. Only thoughts of her family gave her a tenuous grasp on reality—or what family she was left with, anyway.

  This time, thoughts of her family meant Draven. At some point her parents and her aunt and uncle joined the mix, and the laughter was no longer welcoming and jovial, but a manic chorus of off-pitch whining as their images swirled into darkness, leaving Oliver. Oliver morphed into Draven’s corpse, hanging from a rope, his eyes glassy and a pile of bodies below his feet, while the bodies echoed in Draven’s voice, “A Mariel of the people.”

  Pain and something heavy on her chest brought her out of her own personal purgatory. She was on fire, but a vibration spread throughout her body, racking every muscle with pain. She heard someone gasp, then devolve into coughing, and realized, distantly, that it was her. Swearing erupted beside her, and Kess opened her eyes to someone she very much did not want to see.

  Claire sat there, a book in hand, her sharp eyes focused on Kess. “Well, I can’t say I expected that,” she said, watching Kess curiously.

  “How long?” Kess croaked, leaning back into the pillows.

  “A few days,” Claire said. “You’re welcome again, by the way. At least you’re interesting. Apparently, you’re able to not only siphon off my Fulminancy while unconscious, but in large enough quantities that you sped up the process.” She shook her head, shutting her book. “I don’t know how you did it, but you can thank me by giving answers.”

  “I don’t know how I did it either,” Kess replied, sitting up on the pillows with a wince. Her chest was heavy, and just sitting up had made her rasp with effort. Claire handed her a drink—something chilled and sweet—and as she took a sip, she immediately she felt somewhat human again.

  “Has it ever happened before?” Claire asked.

  “Burnout? Yes. I don’t know about the other part,” Kess said. She’d always figured that something had kept her alive that night years ago, but she’d been unconscious for most of it.

  “I’ve never seen burnout so strong before,” Claire said, stacking the book on a pile. “You should be dead.”

  “Maybe you should have left me that way.” Kess stared into the cup. She hadn’t intended to die, exactly, but she’d known it was a very real possibility when facing her Shadow. Injured and already at her limits with her Fulminancy, she hadn’t expected to make it out of the fight alive. She would have been able to track me down anyway, Kess realized. Even if I’d run. At least I tried to protect Draven. Her thoughts darkened again. It didn’t seem fair that she was alive while Drav rotted in the streets.

  “Trust me, it was tempting. But I like a challenge.” Claire leaned back in her chair, hazel eyes dangerous but sparkling with mirth at the same time. Kess found it hard to see the humor in any of it, but she didn’t miss the dark circles under Claire’s eyes, or the way her normally well kept curls were disheveled, even pulled back away from her face. This healing had cost her something.

  “Thank you,” Kess said into the cup. Claire turned her head away from Kess, staring at the door to the room.

  “I like to think of it as an intellectual challenge,” she said, crossing her arms. “I’ve learned more in a few days of trying to keep you alive than I did in years of what passes for school in the damned Uphill. I have to make sure I’ve got this right, especially with you, or it’ll blow the next time you use it. Which—by the way, don’t try anything like that again.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  They sat in awkward silence for a few minutes, with Kess still trying to process the events of several nights ago, and Claire attempting to bore a hole in the wall with her gaze. When Claire spoke again, her voice was as gentle as Kess had ever heard it.

  “Rowan brought your friend back.”

  “Draven,” Kess said, leaning back. Claire nodded.

  “He’s safe in a warehouse right now, and when we have a chance, Arlette knows a way out of the city where you can bury him in peace.” Her mouth twisted into a scowl. “I’m not sure you’ll be up to it soon, though.”

  “It’s that bad?” Kess asked. Claire shrugged, eyes still focused on the wall.

  “Who can say? Maybe you’ll surprise me again.”

  Something in Kess unknotted. Rowan had brought him back. Draven wouldn’t be left to rot in the city streets, a reminder of all that she had failed to do.

  “Oh.” Claire sat up and dug around in a nearby drawer. She emerged with something that glinted gold in the light and handed it to Kess. “Here, I found this in your arm. You have the same one on your cloak, so I figured you might want it back.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Kess took what she now realized was a Stormclap pin from Claire’s hands and stared at it as the woman disappeared into a back room. In the bright light of the ward—mercifully cast by lanterns—it was hard to miss its similarities to the pin that belonged to Oliver’s Stormclap board. Kess turned, wincing at how every action seemed to take a monumental amount of effort, and found her other pin nearby, on top of her washed and folded cloak on the nightstand.

  She held the two of them up to the light, comparing them. It was only then that she realized they weren’t just similar—they were the same pins, from the same Stormclap set. Oliver had that board handmade, she remembered. He couldn’t find a generic one in stock anywhere. He’d been proud of the craftsmanship that went into the board and had spent quite some time pointing out the delicate carvings in the pins themselves. Kess had paid little attention, as panicked as she was about the location and the board to boot.

  Her stomach sank as she realized the implication of the extra pin. Someone on the Council had found her destroyed home.

  And someone Uphill knew of her connection to Oliver.

  Kess spent the next several days sleeping and trying to understand Claire. The odd woman was always in a hurry and out of sorts, though the stress of healing Kess might have been the cause of that. She also spent just as much time fussing over the plants in her ward as she did Kess. Though she could barely walk, Kess wanted nothing more than to return to her own room. It became a goal of sorts, and Claire, as usual, stood in the way. Finally, tired of fighting with and complaining at the woman, Kess tried another tactic.

  She asked about the plants.

  “Clouds, Kess, do you need a book or something? I already told you what this one was.”

  Kess wasn’t about to ask for the book she’d been reading before all of this—a trashy romance novel Rowan had caught her with—so she kept her mouth shut. “But why bother with plants when you can just heal?” she asked. Claire scowled at the stout little plant she was tending, its leaves a fleshy, thick variety that Kess itched to touch.

  “Fulminancy still feels like cheating,” she said quietly.

  “How is it cheating?” Kess asked. “You trained with it, same as an herbalist would have to.”

  “Kess,” Claire said, uncharacteristically solemn. “Have you ever gone to an herbalist for heals?” Kess watched Claire work and wished that the sterile ward had something a little more interesting to look at. At least the plants made for some variety.

  “Most of the time I skipped them entirely,” she said, thinking back to her injuries from fights gone awry.

  “Why?” Claire said, not leaving her work.

  “Well, because I’d heal up just as fast on my own.”

  Claire met her eyes then, a knowing look on her face. “You probably don’t have any Fulminant heals to compare it with, but herbalists would have to train a lifetime to achieve what I could do with a human body as a Fulminant apprentice. I can do a sloppier job, be a worse doctor, simply because of my Fulminancy.” She nodded at Kess’s leg, where a red line was still visible on her skin. “That was infected, by the way. An herbalist would have been able to save that if you’d gone to them early. If you showed up at their doorstep that bad, you would have lost the leg.”

  Kess ignored the chiding in Claire’s tone. “It still doesn’t seem like cheating,” she said. “Not if you were born with it.”

  “And you, Kess? Would you fight with your Fulminancy just because you were born with it?”

  “Fighting is different,” Kess replied, frowning. “There’s a code of honor to it—an agreement that you and your opponent are on the same footing.”

  Claire snorted and returned to her plant. “Ah yes, fair footing—a fundamental tenet of human warfare for centuries.” Kess rolled her eyes, but she thought Claire was missing the point. Ring fighting was agreed upon combat—not the bloody no-rules version of combat that street fighting or warfare was. They were two completely different things. Regardless, there was a lot to respect about a woman who was willing to learn to do things the hard way, even when she’d been given the easy way. It was a lot like a large man learning a martial art and its intricacies without relying on his inherent strength to let him coast through matches.

  Kess leaned back again, then caught another plant she hadn’t noticed—beautiful red and gold flowers erupting from a pot in the corner of the room. These were better taken care of than some of the other plants, which grew wild branches or sprouted in odd spots.

  “What are the flowers for?” she asked. Claire looked up, glanced at the flowers, and looked a little sad.

  “They’re not for anything medical,” she said quietly.

  “Then why keep them?”

  Claire watched the flowers for a few moments, something distant in her gaze. “My job involves a lot of bloodshed,” she said, voice still quiet. “Not everyone is lucky like you. I’ve had to tell parents of a child’s death. I’ve watched children lose both their parents. I’ve watched people say their final goodbyes.” Lightning snapped near the window, and wind buffeted the frame. “One of the first things they teach you,” Claire continued, “is that you can’t save everyone. It’s still a hard lesson to learn, even now.

  “I find that even if those flowers do nothing to save a life, I like to keep them around, anyway. Maybe they’ll give me courage when I feel like giving in to despair. Maybe they’ll help my patients see a brighter day. I keep them because they remind me of more beautiful times, Kess.”

  Claire turned back to her work, her face slightly pink. Perhaps she wasn’t used to such emotional outbursts. She’d obviously been wrong about Claire; Claire was more similar to Kess than she’d imagined. Maybe that’s why she’d found it so hard to get along with the woman at first—besides her own prejudices.

  “Claire, I—“

  Claire waved her off. “Don’t apologize to me again. Apologies are just words.” She looked up and met Kess’s eyes. “If you’re truly sorry, then be better.”

  Kess swallowed and looked away again. Be better. She’d been running and hiding for so long she wasn’t entirely sure it was possible. How could she undo a lifetime of prejudice? How could she learn to trust herself when her poor judgment had caused the deaths of so many close to her? How could she ultimately become Fulminant without losing herself in the process? It was something she’d have to figure out the hard way.

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