Chapter 7 – Blood Affinity

The morning air in Dunwick tasted of coal and river water and the particular, acrid sweetness of a city that had been burning things since before the current century and had no plans to stop. The streets were already full, vendors muscling handcarts through gaps that weren’t wide enough, factory workers moving in loose, grey-faced columns toward the mills, newsboys staking out their corners with the territorial precision of nesting birds.

“So,” Alice said, scanning the street for a vacant cab, her eyes performing the rapid, dismissive triage of someone who had spent a lifetime assessing vehicles and finding them wanting. “This brother. Thomas. He’s coming this afternoon?”

“Straight from the station,” Florence confirmed, half-skipping to match Alice’s stride. The navy dress was slightly too long and the hem caught her boot on every third step, a problem she was solving through a combination of determination and short, undignified hops. “He said he’d be done by mid-afternoon.”

“And what is he like? You’ve mentioned him approximately forty times since we met, but the details have been limited to his taste in pies and his willingness to fund examinations.”

Florence’s expression did the thing it always did when she talked about Thomas, a softening, a warming, as though the subject itself were a fire she was sitting near.

“He’s wonderful,” she said. Then, with the corrective instinct of someone who loved a person well enough to see them clearly: “He’s also a disaster. He’s brilliant, genuinely brilliant, and he picks things up faster than anyone I’ve ever met, but he has no sense of self-preservation and absolutely no awareness of his surroundings. He’s the sort of person who could track a criminal across three districts and then walk into a lamppost because he was thinking about the case. He once forgot to eat for two days during an investigation and only noticed because he fainted in the filing room.”

“Charming. And this man is in law enforcement?”

“He’s a policeman.” Florence said it with a mixture of pride and the particular, low-grade anxiety of a sibling who had spent years watching someone she loved do something dangerous and pretending she wasn’t worried. “A beat cop, mostly. Patrols, reports, that sort of thing. He doesn’t talk about the details much. I think he’s trying not to frighten me.”

Alice whistled, a sharp, two-fingered note that cut through the street noise and brought a hansom cab swerving toward the curb with the trained obedience of a dog responding to its name. Florence flinched.

“An oblivious policeman,” Alice said, pulling the cab door open. The words carried a note of genuine, unguarded satisfaction, as though Florence had just informed her that the lock on a door she’d been worried about was, in fact, broken. “That is the very best kind.”

Florence climbed in first. Alice followed, settling into the worn leather of the bench with a posture that managed to convey ownership of the vehicle despite having rented it thirty seconds ago.

“Government District,” Alice told the driver through the hatch. “The Registry.”

The city changed as they moved deeper into it.

The transition was not subtle. The narrow, cluttered streets of the residential quarter, where the buildings leaned toward each other like drunks sharing a confidence and the sky was a thin strip of grey between the rooflines, fell away, and in their place rose something deliberate. The avenues widened. The cobblestones gave way to paved granite, smooth and pale, and the buildings on either side grew taller and whiter and more certain of themselves, their facades carved from stone that had been chosen to communicate permanence rather than warmth.

“That,” Alice said, pointing through the window as the cab slowed, “is the Registry.”

It was a squat building with heavy columns and a flight of marble steps leading to a pair of brass-handled doors. It was not ugly, exactly, but it was aggressively unremarkable, designed to project stability and inspire precisely no emotion whatsoever. It looked like the kind of building that had been created by a committee whose brief was trustworthy and whose budget had not extended to interesting.

“And that,” Alice continued, her finger drifting to the right, “is the Headquarters of the Department of Arcane Affairs.”

The building next to the Registry was a different species entirely. It was tall, dark, constructed from black iron and stone that absorbed the morning light rather than reflecting it. Banners hung from the upper floors. Heavy fabric bearing the silver eye insignia, the emblem of the D.A.A., the motif that appeared on badges and warrants and, presumably, the last thing a number of rogue mages had ever seen. The architecture did not say trustworthy. The architecture said authority, and possibly compliance, and almost certainly do not test us.

Florence looked at the two buildings. She looked at the gap between them, which was approximately six feet of paved walkway.

“They’re neighbours,” she said.

“Neighbours is generous. They share a wall. If you fail the registration, or if something about your results raises a flag, they don’t need to arrange transport. They open a door.” Alice held her gaze. “A connecting door, Florence. Between the clerk who stamps your card and the department that investigates anomalous mages. That is the architectural equivalent of building a hospital next to a cemetery for efficiency.”

The cab stopped. Alice paid the driver. They stepped onto the curb.

The fountain was in the centre of the small plaza between the two buildings, a stone basin with a bronze figure of a woman holding a set of scales, the water falling from each pan in thin, uneven streams. Alice positioned herself beside it and pulled Florence close by the elbow.

“Last time,” Alice said, her voice low, her mouth close to Florence’s ear. “Spontaneous awakening. You had a fever. You noticed something small and strange, like blood moving on its own, a cut that closed too quickly. You don’t know what it means. You have never been in a fight. You have never cast a spell. You have never seen anyone die. You are a girl from the countryside who is confused and a little frightened and has come to the Registry because she doesn’t know what else to do.”

“Blank slate,” Florence said.

“Blank slate.” Alice released her arm. “Go. I’ll be here.”

Florence looked at the marble steps. They were wide, white, and very tall, and she felt very small at the bottom of them.

She went up.

The interior of the Registry smelled of dry paper and old ink and the faintly metallic tang of government. It was a large, open room, with high ceilings, pale walls, and rows of wooden counters behind which clerks sat in varying states of industriousness and ennui. The light came from tall windows set high in the walls, falling in broad, dusty shafts that illuminated the motes drifting through the air with a slowness that suggested even the dust in this building was required to follow protocol.

Florence found the counter marked NEW REGISTRATIONS.

The clerk behind it was a man who appeared to have been constructed from the same materials as the building—pale, dry, angular, his skin carrying the particular parchment quality of someone whose relationship with sunlight was historical rather than ongoing. His spectacles were thick enough to distort his eyes into something slightly aquatic, and his pen moved across the page in front of him with the autonomous rhythm of a hand that had been filling in forms since before Florence was born and fully intended to be filling in forms long after she was gone.

He did not look up.

“Name.”

“Florence.” Her voice came out thin. She cleared her throat. “Florence Grace Bannerman.”

The pen scratched. “Age.”

“Seventeen.”

“Origin.”

“Briar’s Crossing. Just outside Dunwick. The eastern county.”

The pen paused. The clerk looked up, peering over the tops of his spectacles with an expression that managed to convey, in a single glance, that he had heard every possible variation of the sentence he was about to hear and had been unimpressed by all of them.

“Reason for registration.”

“Newly awakened, sir. It happened a few days ago.”

“The fever story, I assume.” He said it the way a man might say rain again, or mutton for dinner—with the weary, bone-deep resignation of someone encountering the expected for the thousandth time. “Woke up hot. Something strange happened. Tea boiled, water moved, a draught came from nowhere. Something along those lines.”

Florence nodded, mute.

The clerk sighed. He gestured to the brass stand at the end of the counter. Florence had been trying not to look at it, in the way people tried not to look at things they were afraid of, and the effort had made her aware of nothing else in the room.

The Resonator sat on a cushion of dark velvet. It was a sphere of clear crystal, slightly larger than an apple, and it was pulsing, a faint, rhythmic white light that expanded and contracted at the tempo of a resting heartbeat. It looked alive. It looked like something that was waiting.

“Hand on the glass,” the clerk said. “Palm flat. Full contact. And for the love of the Eternal Lord, don’t fidget. The last boy who fidgeted cracked a Resonator worth more than his parents’ house.”

Florence reached out.

Her fingers made contact with the surface, and the glass was cool, cooler than she expected, cooler than the room, carrying a chill that seemed to originate from somewhere deeper than temperature. She pressed her palm flat.

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For a second, nothing happened.

Then she felt it.

It began in her hand, a pulling sensation, gentle but insistent, as though something inside the sphere had reached through the glass and taken hold of a thread that ran from her palm to the centre of her chest. The pull travelled up her arm in a slow, cold wave, moving against the direction of her blood, settling into her ribs, her lungs, the space behind her sternum where she had never been aware of anything existing until something reached in and touched it.

The sphere drew from her. Not painfully. Not violently. It was a sip, a single, measured intake, like a physician taking a sample. But what it took was not blood, and the vessel it drew from was not a vein. It felt like the glass was tasting something essential, something she had not known she possessed, and the absence of it, even for the fraction of a second the machine held it, left her feeling lighter in a way that had nothing to do with weight.

The crystal flared.

The white light did not turn orange. It did not turn blue or green or the pale, neutral grey that Florence had been hoping for, the colour of something boring, something unremarkable, something that would not require explanation.

It turned red.

Deep, rich, saturated crimson, the colour of blood that had just left the body, dark and vital and unmistakable. The light swirled inside the sphere like ink dropped into water, thick and viscous, curling against the glass in slow, heavy spirals that caught the dusty light from the windows and threw it back in shades of arterial scarlet.

The clerk leaned forward.

He adjusted his spectacles. He leaned closer. He looked at the sphere, then at Florence, then back at the sphere, and the professional boredom that had characterised his entire demeanour since she’d approached the counter underwent a visible recalibration.

“Well now,” he murmured. “That’s not something you see every Monday.”

“Is it bad?” Florence pulled her hand back. The red light faded slowly, the crimson draining from the glass like water from a basin, leaving the sphere clear and pulsing its neutral white.

“Bad? No.” The clerk was already reaching for a stamp and a fresh card. “Rare.” He pressed the stamp down with the decisive authority of a man exercising the only real power his position afforded him. “Sanguimancy. Blood affinity.”

He began to write. His handwriting, Florence noticed, was beautiful, precise, elegant, each letter formed with the care of someone who understood that the documents he produced would outlast him and considered this a form of legacy.

“Usually runs in the old families,” he continued, the pen moving without pause. “Hereditary lines, noble houses, the kind of bloodlines that keep genealogists employed. Occasionally it shows up as a mutation in common stock. No offence.”