Chapter 9 – The Brother

“Florence?”

The voice came from behind them.

Florence’s hand stopped halfway out of the satchel. The card sat between her fingers, undrawn. She didn’t need to turn around to identify the speaker: the voice was filed in the part of her memory that predated conscious thought, stored alongside the smell of bread flour and the creak of the third stair from the top in the house on Barley Lane. It had read her to sleep for years. It had shouted at the Henley dog when it got into the vegetable patch. It had said I’ll send for you when I’m settled, Flo, from the back of a mail coach two years ago, and she had believed it absolutely, because the voice had never once lied to her.

She turned.

Thomas Bannerman was standing just beyond the velvet rope, still wearing the heavy oiled-leather trench coat that Florence had assumed, from his letters, was standard constabulary issue. It was not. The coat was reinforced, high-collared, and fitted in a way that spoke of function over fashion. A silver insignia gleamed at his throat, an open eye, cast in metal, catching the gaslight.

He looked older. Not by years, but by weight. It had settled into his jaw, his posture, the flat attentiveness of his eyes. He was scanning the room even now, even as his face broke into a grin, the habit running underneath the emotion like a current beneath ice.

“Thomas!”

The name left her chest before her brain had any say in the matter. It was not a word so much as a detonation. It was a sound made of two years of letters that couldn’t hold her, six months of silence, and the sheer, stupid, overwhelming relief of seeing a face that meant safe.

Her heart rate spiked. Adrenaline flooded the bloodstream in a hot, electric wave. Somewhere beneath her skin, in the deep architecture of muscle and nerve that Florence did not yet understand and could not yet feel, something ancient and alien registered the chemical surge, cross-referenced it against the body’s sudden intent to move, and quietly provided assistance.

Florence pushed off the flagstones.

She did not run. Running was a human activity involving alternating footfalls and the controlled management of forward momentum. What Florence did was closer to what happened when a compressed spring was released in a confined space.

The floorboards beneath her boots split with a sound like a rifle crack. The distance between the counter and the velvet rope, thirty feet of crowded hall, collapsed in a single, blurred instant. Students on either side flinched from a gust of displaced air they couldn’t explain, envelopes fluttering, coat-tails lifting.

Thomas had time to register the movement. He did not have time to do anything about it.

Florence hit him in the sternum at a velocity that should not have been available to a girl who weighed nine stone and had never sprinted competitively in her life. The impact lifted him, six feet of Inspector in twenty pounds of reinforced leather, clean off his boots. They flew. There was a brief, graceless interval of tangled limbs and mutual airborne confusion before Thomas’s back struck the polished floor, and they skidded, his coat shrieking against the wood, through a brass stanchion that buckled on impact and into a decorative potted fern that surrendered its contents with a wet, defeated thud.

The Admissions Hall went silent.

Not quiet. Silent. Four hundred brains reclassifying what they had just witnessed/

Thomas lay on his back in a drift of potting soil and shattered ceramic. The ceiling was high and vaulted and very far away, and he stared at it while his diaphragm tried to remember how to function. His combat training—a full year of drills, four years of fieldwork, one deeply unfortunate encounter with a feral ghoul in the sewers beneath the Iron Ward—was screaming at him. The impact had carried the force of a kinetic detonation. His ribs were ringing like struck bells. Every instinct he had was reaching for a mana signature, a spell residue, some trace of arcane force to explain why he had just been launched across a room by what appeared to be a girl.

There was nothing. No mana. No residue. Just his sister, lying on top of him with her face buried in his coat, squeezing him with both arms as though she intended to fuse them at the molecular level.

“I missed you,” Florence said into his sternum. Her voice was muffled by leather. She hadn’t looked around yet to assess the damage. “I missed you so much.“

Thomas exhaled. It came out as a wheeze, which was the best his lungs could manage under the circumstances. He blinked. The combat alertness drained from his eyes, replaced by something softer and slightly dazed, and his gloved hand came up to rest on the back of her head with the automatic, unthinking tenderness of long habit.

“Flo,” he managed. “I—hkk—missed you too, kid.”

He paused. Drew what breath he could.

“You’ve been eating your vegetables, haven’t you.”

Florence sat up, still straddling his waist, still radiantly oblivious to the circle of stunned faces, the destroyed fern, and the brass stanchion lying bent at an angle that suggested it would not be returning to service. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“I was so worried I wouldn’t make it,” she said, the words tumbling. “And then the letter. I lost the letter, Thomas, and the clerk wouldn’t listen, and Alice tried to help but he was so rude, and—”

“Easy,” Thomas said, sitting up with a grunt that cost him more than he let show. Potting soil cascaded from his shoulder. He brushed it off with resigned patience. A lifetime of Florence had taught him that dignity was negotiable. “Easy. One thing at a time. Let me get vertical first.”

At the counter, Alice had not moved.

She was standing precisely where Florence had left her, her satchel in one hand, her posture very still. The expression on her face was not shock. She had watched Florence absorb a shotgun blast less than twenty-four hours ago, and the capacity for surprise regarding Florence’s body had been largely exhausted. What she was experiencing was closer to recalibration—a navigator discovering the coastline was not where the map said it should be.

Her eyes were not on Florence. They were on the insignia.

The silver eye. Cast metal, polished, pinned to the collar with the quiet authority of something that did not need to be large to be understood. She knew that symbol. Every mage in the Empire knew that symbol. It was the crest of the Department of Arcane Affairs: the Inspectorate, the Nullification Corps, the grey-coated men and women who hunted rogue arcanists through the streets of the capital and whose jurisdiction ended only where the Emperor’s patience did.

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A policeman, Florence had said in the carriage. He works for the law.

Alice stared at the insignia. She stared at Thomas Bannerman, Senior Inspector, by the cut of the coat and the weight of the badge, hauling himself upright in a pile of broken pottery, brushing soil from his shoulders with one hand and steadying his sister with the other.

A beat cop, Alice thought. She told me her brother was a beat cop.

“You have got to be joking,” she said, very quietly, to no one.

Thomas gained his feet. He was taller standing than Alice had estimated from the floor. Broad through the shoulders, lean through the waist, with the posture of someone who’d been drilled past choice into architecture. He hauled Florence up beside him, checked his ribs with a quick, practised press of his fingers, habit, not concern, and adjusted his collar.

He looked up. His eyes found Alice.

They were grey. Sharp, attentive, and warmer than she’d expected from the uniform. He looked at her the way a man looked at a stranger his sister had brought home, curious, open, running an assessment that was more fraternal than professional.

Alice composed herself. The alarm folded down into a pocket she could access later, and what she put on the surface was polished and pleasant and entirely under control.

“Officer,” she said, inclining her head. “It’s good to finally meet you. Florence has told me a great deal.”

“Officer?” Thomas’s grin widened, and it was a good grin, the easy, unforced warmth of a man who smiled with his whole face and didn’t seem to know how disarming it was. “That’s very formal. And who might you be?”

“This is Alice,” Florence said, materialising at Alice’s elbow and seizing her arm with both hands, presenting her the way a child presented a drawing they were particularly proud of. “She’s my friend. I met her on the journey here. She’s been helping me with, well, with everything, really.”

“A friend already?” Thomas looked between them. Something in his expression eased—a tension Alice hadn’t noticed until it released. Six months of imagining his sister alone in a city of four million. “That’s—that’s really good, Flo. I’m glad. You were always so quiet back home. I half expected to find you hiding in the reference section of the library with a packed lunch.”

“I’m not that bad,” Florence protested, though her blush suggested he wasn’t far off.