Chapter 8 – Admissions Hall

The hansom cab smelled of pipe tobacco and old leather, which was an improvement over the last enclosed space they’d shared. The suspension was poor. Every cobblestone announced itself through the bench, and the wheels set up a rattling din against the stone that made conversation feel like something conducted across a battlefield.

Alice sat by the window. The city was thickening around them. Terraced townhouses giving way to taller façades with wrought-iron balconies and gas lamps standing dark in their brackets, waiting for dusk to justify them. The architecture had opinions about itself the deeper they went. Everything was corniced and columned and ostentatiously symmetrical, the kind of district that wanted you to know it had been designed by someone who charged by the hour.

She glanced sideways.

Florence was clutching her satchel with both hands, the knuckles bone-white, the tendons standing out along the backs of her wrists. The Imperial Magus Permit was tucked inside, Alice had watched her check three times since they’d left the Registry, but the girl’s face had the fixed, inward look of someone rehearsing their own execution.

“You’re doing it again,” Alice said.

Florence startled. “Doing what?”

“You’re running the script, aren’t you. Going over it line by line, word-perfect, making sure you’ve memorised the lie.”

“Stop that,” Alice said.

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Know the shape of it. Not the words.” Alice tapped her temple. “The letter was lost. Your brother confirmed your acceptance. You’re confused, you’re anxious, and you need help. That’s the truth of the feeling, even if the facts are different. Lean into the feeling. The words will take care of themselves.”

Florence exhaled through her nose, a slow, deliberate breath that fogged faintly in the cab’s chill. She loosened her grip on the satchel by a fraction. “You’re very good at this.”

“At what?”

“Lying.”

Alice considered being offended and decided it wasn’t worth the energy. “Thank you.”

The cab rattled through an intersection. A tram bell clanged somewhere to their left, sharp and brassy, and a knot of students in academic robes crossed the street ahead, forcing the driver to rein in. The pause filled the interior with the sounds of the city: cart wheels, a newsboy’s shout, the low industrial hum that seemed to rise from the cobblestones themselves.

Alice used the silence to redirect. The less Florence thought about the admissions office, the less likely she was to arrive looking like a woman about to confess to a murder.

“The brother,” Alice said, keeping her voice idle. “Thomas. He’s the one paying for the University?”

The effect was immediate. Florence’s shoulders dropped an inch, her posture softening at the mention of the name the way a dog’s ears lifted at the sound of its owner’s voice.

“He sends money every month,” Florence said. “Has done since he got the position. He’s—well, he’s practically raised me. These last two years, anyway.”

These last two years. She could have let it pass. She didn’t.

“And the parents?”

Florence looked down at her hands. She smoothed the fabric of her dress across her knees, pressing out wrinkles that didn’t exist. It was the kind of gesture that bought time, not to decide whether to answer, but to decide how much of the answer to give air.

“The fever,” Florence said. “Two years ago. It moved through Briar’s Crossing in about three weeks. By the time the physicians arrived from the city, half the village was already gone.”

She said it plainly. No tremor, no catch in the voice. She had told this story before, and had learned that the facts were easier to carry than the feelings around them.

The cab’s rattling filled the space where a response might have gone. Alice let it. She didn’t reach for Florence’s hand and she didn’t offer the kind of soft, useless condolence that people produced when they wanted to feel better about someone else’s grief. She watched the buildings slide past for a few seconds, then spoke.

“That’s why you want medicine.”

It wasn’t a question. Florence answered it anyway.

“I stood in a room and watched my mother die because nobody in the village knew what to do. The closest thing we had to a doctor was Mr. Treadwell, who set bones and pulled teeth and drank more than he prescribed.” Florence’s fingers stilled on her lap. “I won’t do that again. Stand there. Knowing nothing. Doing nothing.”

Alice nodded. The motion was small, private, directed more at the window than at Florence.

“Helplessness is an excellent engine,” Alice said quietly. “It tends to outlast the nobler motivations.”

Florence was quiet for a moment. Then she turned the lens.

“What about you?”

Alice raised an eyebrow.

“Your family,” Florence pressed gently. “You mentioned stifling air and a small town, but Alice, you don’t walk like someone who grew up in a small town. You don’t talk like it either.”

Alice’s reflection stared back at her from the cab window, a pale smudge against the moving city. She weighed her options. The turnip-farming fiction was rotting in the ditch where Florence’s quiet amusement had left it, and after the firefight in the woods, the effort of maintaining a full fabrication seemed like a poor use of her remaining energy.

She could give a piece of the truth. A small piece, carefully shaped.

“You’ve probably worked most of it out already,” Alice said, still addressing the window. “I wasn’t raised on a farm. I was raised in a house with more rooms than people, more forks than anyone could reasonably need, and a staff whose primary function was to ensure I never had to do anything for myself.”

Florence leaned forward slightly. The satchel loosened in her lap. “You’re gentry.”

“I’m a daughter,” Alice corrected. “That’s the operative word. My mother sits on the boards of a dozen charitable foundations. My father employs—well, a lot of people. He has interests. My younger brother is being groomed to inherit, and frankly he’ll do a better job of it than I would have.”

She paused. Something shifted in her voice, not softer, exactly, but less guarded. The architecture of the sentence changed, the bricks laid with a little less mortar.

“They’re good people. Genuinely. My mother is kind in a way that costs her real effort, and my father is—” A beat. “—eccentric. Unpredictable. But he means well, most of the time, and they were both far better parents than I had any right to expect.”

Florence studied Alice’s profile. The gaslight from the street caught the sharp line of her jaw, the slight tension at the corner of her mouth.

“Then why are you making that face?” Florence asked.

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Alice turned. “What face?”

“That one.” Florence pointed. “Like you’ve bitten into something sour and you’re deciding whether to spit it out or swallow it.”

Alice felt the annoyance arrive, a small, hot flare behind her sternum, and realised, with some dismay, that the annoyance was not at Florence but at herself, for letting whatever expression that was reach her face unchaperoned. She smoothed it away, straightening in her seat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“All right.”

Florence’s voice was light. Agreeable. She folded her hands and waited.

The silence did its work.

“We had a fight,” Alice said, after a stretch that was slightly too long to be dignified. “A real one. The kind where things come out that have been building for years, and once they’re in the air you can’t stuff them back. Nobody hit anybody. It was worse than that.”

“So you left.”

“In the middle of the night. Took what would fit in a bag and walked out the front door.” Alice examined her thumbnail with unnecessary attention. “There’s a certain clarity that arrives at three in the morning when you’ve just said the worst thing you’ve ever said to someone who loves you. The clarity says: go now, because if you’re still here when the sun comes up, you’ll apologise, and then nothing will change, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a beautiful cage being slowly suffocated by people who think they’re holding you gently.“

She stopped. The cab rattled. She became aware that she had said considerably more than she’d intended to, and that Florence was looking at her the way people looked when they understood what something cost and had the sense not to say so.

Alice cleared her throat. “Anyway.”

Florence had the grace not to push. She let the word settle, then asked the practical question instead.

“So what happens now? After the University. Once I’m sorted. Where will you go?”