Chương 25: Chapter 24: The Preferred Path

The fresh scorch mark on the cellar bench stayed there for four days. Elizabeth did not touch Lightning Needle again. She still went down to the chandlery on the second evening, carrying notes instead of electrical equipment, and Kellan glanced once at the empty firing lane before returning to the cabinet he was repairing. He did not remind her what had happened. He did not need to. Every time she reached for something with her right hand, the tenderness at the base of her index finger supplied the memory for him.

The first morning, she spent ten minutes testing the hand before dressing. Touch was intact across the palm. Her thumb obeyed normally. The index and middle fingers were slower when she tried to pick up a pin, and squeezing two coins together made the muscles in her forearm ache sooner than they should. By the second day the numbness had disappeared, although her grip still tired quickly and the burn remained sore beneath the dressing. Ruby noticed the bandage before Elizabeth had even unpacked her notes.

"What happened to your hand?"

"A private apparatus failed." Ruby's eyes narrowed.

"At home?"

"Yes." There was enough truth in the answer to make it easy to hold. Ruby had no reason to know that Elizabeth now had another place which, for practical purposes, counted as hers.

"You've been using 'private' a lot lately." Ruby reached across the bench.

"Give me your hand." Elizabeth did.

"Sensation is normal. Fine movement is nearly back to baseline, and there's no persistent weakness." Ruby turned the hand over anyway, pressing lightly against two fingers and watching Elizabeth's face rather than listening to the report.

"Your mother knows?"

"No."

"Of course she doesn't." Ruby let out a breath through her nose.

"I was hoping you'd surprise me." Elizabeth almost pointed out that Eleanor knowing would create more problems than it solved. Ruby looked tired enough that the explanation would only irritate her. After checking the dressing, Ruby released her.

"You're still coming tomorrow."

"To your presentation."

"Yes. I want at least one friendly face in the room when Professor Ven starts asking why I didn't make the samples twice as large with money I don't have."

"I'll be there." Ruby studied her for another second, then returned to arranging the alloy strips.

"Good. And try not to break anything important before then." Elizabeth helped her prepare the samples without commenting on which of them Ruby meant. Ruby had spent most of the previous evening predicting which part of the presentation would go wrong. None of her predictions survived the first ten minutes. Three members of the Materials faculty sat behind a narrow table while she demonstrated how apparently identical alloy strips failed at different rates after previous mana exposure.

The easy questions ended quickly. Professor Ven challenged the number of samples. Another professor wanted to know whether thermal stress had been separated cleanly enough from mana fatigue. The third returned twice to a control Ruby had nearly removed from the experiment weeks earlier. Ruby answered every question herself. Elizabeth had spent enough time working beside her to notice when she was nervous: the slightly faster speech, the way her thumb worried at the edge of her notes between questions.

Nobody else in the room seemed to care. By the end, Ruby had stopped touching the paper altogether. The panel called the work promising, refused to call it conclusive and granted her six weeks of supervised access to an advanced stress-testing workshop. Outside, Ruby read the authorisation twice.

"Promising," she said.

"You got the workshop."

"I heard them." She folded the sheet, immediately opened it again and frowned at the crease she had made.

"They could have said it was good."

"They gave you six weeks of expensive equipment." Ruby looked at the paper, then at Elizabeth.

"You're terrible at sympathy."

"I bought you tea."

"That helps." By the time they left the tea shop, Ruby had already planned three new alloy batches and complained about each professor separately. She kept the authorisation tucked inside her notebook where she could check it every few minutes without admitting she was doing so. The following night, Elizabeth went back to the chandlery with no live electrical components in her bag. Kellan was checking the new seals around the loading hatch.

He noticed what she had brought, or rather what she had not, and gave a small nod before going back to the latch. Elizabeth set two field indicators on the bench and opened the notes from the failed test. The shock had made one error impossible to ignore: she had been carrying a charge through a structure she did not yet understand, then discovering its weaknesses with her own nerves. This time she built only the route. The first weak mana thread collapsed before reaching a metre.

The second lasted longer, then curved towards a metal support on the right even though it carried almost no electrical charge. Kellan had stopped working again.

"That pull," he said.

"I know that." Elizabeth held the structure where it was.

"Before you release?"

"Sometimes. It doesn't feel like a direction exactly." He frowned, searching for the word.

"More like something catches hold and the skill wants to settle there."

"On the target?"

"If I'm lucky." She moved the support farther away and asked him to describe the feeling with different materials. Kellan hated the exercise. That became obvious within minutes, mostly because he kept rubbing his jaw while trying to turn years of instinct into sentences. Iron caught early. Dry timber felt vague. Wet cloth over metal still felt mostly like the metal beneath it. Moving targets required him to lead the shot because whatever he sensed followed more slowly than his eyes.

A nearby edge could tug the spell off-line before release.

"Any better word than tug?" Elizabeth asked.

"No."

"You're certain?"

"I was trained to hit people, not write poetry about it." That made her laugh. Kellan looked relieved to be done explaining himself. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Elizabeth stopped forcing the entire path into existence at once. Instead she built it in short sections, each one forming ahead of the last and surviving only long enough to support the next. The pattern crawled forward in an uneven series of steps.

It looked clumsy compared with Kellan's skill, but late that evening a pale thread finally touched the iron plate on the far side of the room. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Kellan came closer and looked along the faint line.

"Well. That's different."

"It reached the correct target."

"Without trying to kill you."

"That too." She heard the satisfaction in her own voice and did not bother hiding it. For the next three nights, they changed one thing at a time. Distance. Target material. Nearby metal. A plate moved slowly along a marked track. Kellan began shifting clamps and tools out of the way before Elizabeth asked, occasionally telling her that something would interfere long before her instruments confirmed it. On the fourth night, they allowed a charge back into the system. It was tiny.

The first prepared path carried it halfway across the room before failing harmlessly. Elizabeth reset the equipment, altered the spacing and tried again. The meter jumped when the charge reached the grounded plate. Kellan looked at it, then at her.

"That one made it." Elizabeth laughed. The sound came out sharper than she expected, carrying across the cellar, and for a second she simply stood there looking at the needle on the meter. The route was slow, wasteful and nearly useless against anything that moved quickly. It had still carried electricity across open air to the target she chose, and when it ended, nothing came back through her arm. She repeated the same trial once. The meter moved again. Then she shut the apparatus down.

Kellan had already glanced at the healing burn.

"You're stopping?"

"Yes."

"After two?"

"I know what variable I'm changing next. Another identical trial tonight gives me very little." Kellan glanced at her hand once more.

"All right." Elizabeth began entering the results into Research Log. She had nearly finished when she realised Kellan was still standing by the target instead of clearing the equipment.

"What?" He picked at a dark mark on the iron plate with one thumbnail.

"When you can do this properly, what happens to me?" Elizabeth looked up. Kellan kept his eyes on the plate.

"You wanted the lightning. You wanted someone who could go into the city without attracting the attention you do. You wanted somebody who knew how to bargain and keep this place running. Suppose you stop needing those things one by one."

"I still need most of them now."

"I know." He finally looked at her.

"I'm asking about later." Elizabeth closed the Log. Kellan had stopped picking at the plate.

"If your usefulness changes, I'll decide what to do then." His mouth tightened.

"And if it runs out?" She nearly answered too quickly. Instead she looked at the dark line around his throat.

"I don't know." Kellan snorted once, but the sound died halfway through. He turned away and began stacking the target plates. Elizabeth watched him fit one against the wall.

"If the binding disappeared tomorrow, where would you go?" He kept working. She assumed he would leave the question unanswered until he said, "North."

"Why?" Another plate went against the wall. This one he adjusted twice before letting go.

"My sister was near the grain road when I deserted. Years ago." Elizabeth had never heard him mention family.

"You haven't contacted her since?"

"The army knew who she was." His hands stopped on the next plate.

"I wasn't going to send them a letter telling them exactly where to look if they wanted leverage."

"Do you know whether she's alive?"

"No." He put the plate down harder than the others. Elizabeth left the next question alone for a few seconds, then said, "You would still look for her."

"If I ever get to decide what risks are mine to take." Elizabeth rubbed her thumb across the small burn left by the discharge. Kellan had checked her pulse with one hand while cursing her with the other. Tonight he had spent half the session moving metal out of her way before she noticed it herself.

"You could make escaping easier by caring less whether I hurt myself," she said. Kellan stared at her, then covered his face with both hands.

"Christ, Elizabeth. I want the binding gone. I don't want you dead on the floor. Why would those be the same decision?" She opened her mouth. He kept going.

"You bought me. I hate that. Some days I hate you for it. Then you put your hand next to a bad spell and I still don't want to watch it burn because you're eleven and apparently nobody taught you when to stop." He looked away, jaw working.

"People don't line up neatly just because it would make your notes easier." Elizabeth said nothing. The pump dripped once behind them, then again. Kellan shifted his weight and finally pointed towards the far plate.

"Your route's still wrong, by the way." She glanced back at the equipment.

"It worked twice."

"Slowly. You're dragging the thing all the way there." Kellan raised his hand and mimed the first part of a cast without using mana.

"Mine doesn't feel like that. Sometimes it catches halfway. Sometimes sooner. Once it does, the rest goes fast."

"Catches what?"

"If I knew, we'd have saved ourselves a few burns." Elizabeth reopened the Log, crossed out the heading she had written for the successful route and started a new page. At the top she wrote one word: catches.