“After the poltergeist touched me, I started having the same dream—at least, I thought it was a dream.” I emptied some water over his shoulder. “I dreamed of a field of flowers. The further I ran through the field, the darker it became. Every night I would go a little further, until one day I was at the very edge and I jumped, and then I was falling.” I set to work on the wound. “I was falling into the æther, falling out of my body. I woke up in the ambulance. My father said I’d sleepwalked into the living room, then just stopped breathing. They said I must have fallen into a coma.”

“But you survived.”

“Yes. And I wasn’t brain damaged. Brain hypoxia is a risk of my . . . condition,” I said. I didn’t like telling him about myself, but I supposed it was better that he knew. If he forced me into the æther for too long without life support, my brain would end up damaged beyond repair. “I was lucky.”

Warden watched as I cleaned his shoulder wound. “That would suggest to me that you do not enter the æther very often, for safety,” he said, “but you seem familiar with it.”

“Instinct.” I looked away from his eyes. “Your fever won’t break without medicine.”

In a sense I wasn’t lying. My gift was instinctive, but I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been nurtured and trained by a mime-lord who’d kept me wired on life support.

“The poltergeist,” he said. “Did it leave scars?”

I took off one glove and held out my left hand. He looked down at the marks. I let him. It was unusual for a developing voyant to be so violently exposed to the æther.

“I guess there was already a break in me, something that let the æther in,” I said. “The ’geist just . . . flayed me open.”

“Is that how you see it?” he said. “The æther invading you?”

“How do you see it?”

“I make no comment on my own opinion. But many clairvoyants see themselves as invading the æther, not the other way around. They see it as disturbing the dead.” He didn’t wait for a response. “I have seen this happen before. Children are vulnerable to sudden changes in their clairvoyance. If they are exposed to the æther before their aura has properly developed, it can become unstable.”

I pulled my hand back. “I’m not unstable.”

“Your gift is.”

I couldn’t argue. I’d already killed with my spirit. If that wasn’t unstable, I didn’t know what was.