Constance turned, held her glowing cane over Lena’s stuttering heart. She could feel its rhythm—her own spell calling to her, begging to be possessed. “That’s right,” she said. “But I didn’t really understand what I was doing. How could I? I was so young, completely untrained. Spells that complicated take years to master—there are whole textbooks and treatises to explain their complexities, explore their possibilities. I had nothing but the spell itself and my own ability. I thought it was a spell to bring one person back from the dead, but it was bigger than that. I didn’t know it would create the storm cloud. I didn’t know it was a spell to create a necromancer. A spell I should have lodged inside my heart to grow alongside my magic. Instead, released into the wild, it found the nearest vessel: my mother’s butterfly.” Constance shook her head. “I thought it was a brooch, but it was also a receptacle. Who knows what she originally intended it for? And then…”

“The butterfly found me,” Lena said. “It chose me,” she added, her voice suddenly warm.

“Chose you?” Constance stepped closer and peered into the girl’s eyes, intrigued. “Yes…” Why had the spell chosen Lena, a small, ugly cryptling? Could it not have found its way back to its creator? She turned the idea over. No, it was chance. Constance simply hadn’t known how to cast the spell properly—but now she would fix her mistake.

“What?” the girl breathed. “What do you mean, yes?”

“It shouldn’t have been possible for it to lodge itself inside a person like that. Its willing creator, yes. An empty receptacle, yes.” She pulled the long velvet glove from her left hand, exposing the metal beneath and flexing its fingers, the perfect hinges and wheels whirring, clicking in the half-light. She heard the cryptling inhale sharply. “But a girl?” She shook her head slowly. “No, it doesn’t make a jot of sense.” She smiled beneath her mask. “But that’s what happened, nevertheless. I guess you must’ve been empty too. Broken somehow. There must have been a space for a spell, right here.”

Constance rested her cane over Lena’s heart, and the light on the end started to throb and grow brighter, whiter with every heartbeat. Faster and faster. “Perhaps it was because you were so unremarkable, so empty, that you were chosen,” she whispered. “But now…” She sent her magic flowing into the girl’s heart, searching for the spell. Yes, there it was—a pulse of cloud with its own flickering, rumbling beat, entangled in a prison of flesh and blood. She flexed her fingers again, flicked the cog on the side of her mask, and saw it. And then, ever so gently, she started to pull it. Lena gasped in pain and started to struggle against her bindings.