"You humans and your tedious moral considerations."

My mind drifts back to Raith, to the kiss, to the walls he keeps rebuilding between us. Whatever secret he's keeping, it's clearly eating him alive.

I touch my lips again, remembering the heat of his mouth on mine, the desperate hunger in his kiss. For a moment, everything was perfect—for one brief, shining instant, there were no secrets between us, no barriers. Just pure connection, raw and real.

And then he pulled away.

Whatever Raith is hiding, whatever danger he thinks he's protecting me from, I'm going to find out. Because now that I know what it feels like to be close to him, I'm not sure I can go back to keeping my distance.

Even if it burns me in the end.

19

Rector Voss paces his office with hands clasped behind his back as he watches me. He has four devices that remind me of the vessels used during the elemental trial. Each, he says, holds a great deal of elemental energy I should be able to draw from.

I pull water and fire at the same time as he instructed, try to sort of "twist" them together, and then I watch with satisfaction as steam hisses up from my fingertip. The power swirls within me, hot and cold battling for dominance until I force them to coexist like sworn enemies forced into a lover’s dance.

Voss smiles in a way instructors here rarely do. It's open approval.

The feeling is addictive, especially when I spent the last three years before coming to Confluence learning that absolutely nothing I ever did could win back the approval of my mother and sister.

The thought brings a fresh torrent of sadness to my mind I know could drown me if I let it. I hesitate a moment, then lift my eyes to Voss in a break between exercises. "Three years ago, I think I called a storm." I'm not sure why I'm admitting it, except that he might be one of the few people who could help me better understand what happened.

He pauses his pacing, then turns to face me, nodding. "Ah, yes. The four affinities often experience signs before they’re marked. Stories say unbound experienced far stronger events. Was this storm the first trace of power you felt before coming to Confluence?”

"No," I admit. I think back on a childhood full of unexplainable, odd moments that I tried my best to keep hidden.

Fires flaring. Sudden gusts of wind. Rumblings beneath the earth. And, of course, the storms…

When I could, I explained it all away, even to myself. Outside Confluence Academy, power and hints of magic were dangerous. Even a whisper of someone with power could mean masked Empire soldiers arriving at your door after dark. People with powers went missing, just like the offerings taken every year.

As far as any of us knew, they were all being taken for execution.