He turned away from me. He drew his knees up to his chest and sat there in the chair curled up and taut. “Fuck you, Ariah, it was an honest mistake. Stop playing like you’re all spooked.”

What I had not told anyone then, not even Dirva, was that I was more shaper than mimic. One of the shapers in Ardijan plucked me from my classroom when I was young and felt me out. She told me I had it, the gift, but that training would be hard for me. There is not enough of me in me, she said. I didn’t know what she meant, and frankly I was glad for it because it meant I wouldn’t have to live a shaper’s life, so I pretended I only had streaks of it. I’d used what she said as a way to avoid the training, which let me pretend I was something I wasn’t even as the gift took advantage of me. The years have shown me what she meant, and I believe what she meant was that the way that gift works for me is that I am in danger of obliteration. Much of Semadran shaping is bound up in the walls, developing strategies to know what someone else is feeling without really feeling it yourself. And I can’t build those walls.

I tell you this because it explains what happened next. It explains a lot about me and Sorcha, I think, but specifically what happened next. Every fiber of my body was heightened. I was in a panic—I’d just broken a whole host of rules with him, and I think some stupid part of my mind fully believed my parents were about to run in and disown me. I panicked, and the gift leapt out of me, thirsty for knowledge, dying to understand the situation.

Sorcha was not looking at me, but I could tell. I could feel it, what he wanted, how I’d hurt him. I felt it with a clarity that I doubt he even had. And I cared about him enough to want to bring him some peace. The memories of what happened next are discrete, jagged things in no real order. I must have crossed the room, but I don’t remember doing it. I remember kissing him and knowing exactly how he wanted to be kissed. I remember letting him push me down to the floor, and then onto the mattress because that’s where he wanted to go. The next thing I remember is hesitance. Sorcha’s hesitance. “Are you sure you want to?” he asked. Pulled along by him, caught in his current, I said the last four words of his question precisely at the same time and in his voice.