I find Dovik waiting in the penthouse when I return. The exhaustion on his face mirrors that which is in my soul. His is worse.

  The man drums his fingers on the countertop in the middle of the kitchen while I look back at him. Twice, he opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out. When he starts for the third time, only to stop himself, I toss the storage ring across the small kitchen for him to catch.

  “It was the same people,” I tell him. “The ones who stole from us. They were the ones who blew up the street.”

  Dovik stares down at the ring in his hand, his ring. His eyes flicker back and forth as he sorts through the contents of the item. When he finds what I did, he grunts, his hand balling into a fist, ready to throw the ring down onto the countertop before he relaxes and lets it fall from his fingers. The ring pings as it bounces off the stone of the island, twirling in the air before slowly rattling still.

  “All to steal,” Dovik mutters to himself, shaking his head. “More than a dozen dead just to steal.”

  There, sitting tucked away inside the ring, are twelve sets of enchanted armor and twelve golems built to hold the equipment. The authorities who investigated the explosion in Booktown had no explanation for why someone would blow up that part of town, or at least not any that they bothered to share with either of us. The equipment that had been inside the building as part of the upcoming golem fighting tournament had been written off as a loss. The explosion that sundered that part of town had been so massive that it almost annihilated the building itself; any items inside weren’t expected to have survived. Half an hour ago, I discovered that wasn’t the case.

  “This is my fault,” I tell him. His head snaps up, ready to tell me how I am wrong, but I speak over him. “They stole this power from me, stole it right out of this place. We went after them, we recovered some of it, but I didn’t want to press past that. Dealing with gangs and thieves is not why I came to this city. It isn’t why we came to this city. I didn’t want to deal with it, and now multiple people are dead because of it.”

  “They killed those people, Charlene. Not you,” he says.

  “They killed them with my power, with my fire. I might as well have done it myself.”

  “If that is true, then I am as much to blame,” he says. “I didn’t want to pursue it either.”

  “It is different,” I tell him. “There is something dangerous about my power, Dovik. Something wild and untamed, even by me. I use fire, that is my element, that is how I channel all of the power that I have accumulated. I’ve always been aware that once the flames leave my hands, I don’t have control over them any longer. I have tried to be careful because of that in the past, but now I have seen what it looks like if I wasn’t careful. The thieves weren’t careful. They didn’t mean to blow up the street, I am sure of that.

  “When I tracked them down, I found the one with that ring covered in bandages. It was the same man that I saw push the detonation switch. They probably wanted to just blow up that single building to mask their robbery. Instead, several people died, and more lost their livelihoods. The fire is me, Dovik; it is what I make, it is a part of my soul. I killed those people just as much as those idiots did.”

  I can see the desire to refute my words on his face. Instead of instantly fighting me, he pauses, taking a long breath and considering. “There is a lot of responsibility that can come with our abilities. That is one thing that has always been drilled into my head. Responsibility is something you take, and if you want to take this, then I won’t try to talk you out of it. I don’t agree, but you don’t need me to. With all that said, what did you do, Charlene?”

  The words should stick in my throat. They should be hard to mutter, let alone say. Speaking to them should bring tears to my eyes and make guilt harden into a stone inside my stomach. None of that happens. The words come easily, a simple statement of fact, devoid of any attached emotion.

  “I dropped their building on them,” I say. “None survived. They had four more of my affixes in that ring. Once they discovered how brutally effective the one they used was, I couldn’t take the chance that they would find a use for the rest. I have no desire to agonize over what to do or not do while they turn my own power into terror on this city. They are gone now, and it is done.”

  “Death is a harsh thing to deal out,” Dovik says. He doesn’t look at me and instead spins the ring on the countertop as a distraction.

  “Have you ever killed someone, Dovik?” I ask. I don’t know where the question comes from, but it makes him stop.

  Once more, the ring on the countertop rattles to stillness. “I have,” he says after a long moment.

  “Did they deserve it?”

  “I don’t believe in deserving,” he says. “No one deserves anything. No one is owed anything by the world, and they don’t owe the world anything. Killing is deciding whether or not the world is better with a particular person in it. If people agree with you, it is just. If they don’t, it is unjust.” His eyes scan the countertop, looking for words there that simply aren’t. “I don’t think many would disagree with what you did.”

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  “But you do?”

  “Why didn’t you bring me, Charlene?” he asks.

  I don’t have an answer for him. As I lay there, unable to feel, unable to move or speak, it brought back so much darkness. I had been trapped inside my body as assuredly as I had inside my personal hell below Danfalla, and the only thing I could think about was getting back at the people who put me there. Responsibility, that was a good excuse, something that I thought of only after the decision to excise all those responsible for trapping me inside my own body had been made. It was a good rationale, one that seems to have convinced Dovik, and one that I can almost convince myself with. But I know I am not as noble as that. Deep down, I am still the selfish girl who wanted power because she thought it would make her pretty. Before I had the capacity to rip apart a city with the magic flowing out of me, I never considered the implications of it.

  Even now, I am working on incredibly powerful enchantments without ever considering what might happen if someone else got their hands on them. I have never made a magical explosive. With my particular suite of abilities, I have never had a need to. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought about doing it, that I haven’t planned out how I would go about it. The possibility that someone could steal it and murder potentially hundreds with it never crossed my mind. What if the thieves had detonated their explosive near the parade, a place where hundreds of people had watched the passing marching band with gleeful smiles on their faces? Could I survive something like that happening, seeing my own power used to murder so many innocents? I don’t know, and I hope I never find out.

  “This was something for me to do,” I tell him.

  Dovik nods, lowering his head. He looks as if my words cut straight through his heart, but he banishes the emotion a second later. “What do you want to do with all of this equipment?” he asks.

  “We need to find a way to get it back to the owners,” I say. “I don’t want to keep it.”

  “That might be difficult,” he says, looking down at the ring. “I will take care of it. Don’t worry about it. You should probably still be resting. You were just blown up the other day. The university has cancelled classes for the next week, so take as long as you need to recuperate.”

  “I can handle that,” I say to him.

  “No,” he says. Dovik scoops up the ring, sliding it into his pocket. “I can handle this much, at least.” Without another word, he vanishes, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

  It is only when he is gone, when the empty silence of the room hits me, that I feel the hardness welling in my chest. I bite down on the feeling, failing to notice that I am biting down on my cheek as well until I start to taste iron. My hand keeps twitching, the nail of my thumb digging at the beds of my other fingers. I flee the kitchen, heading to the laboratory rather than my bedroom. There is no rest to be had, not now.

  Hours fly past as I dedicate myself solely to the task of creating the array that I will eventually engrave into the obsidianate boots that I had commissioned. Every time the planning refers back to what I can expand the boots to do, adding some kind of movement-enhancing ability, my mind turns to Jasper. Thinking about Jasper makes me think about what just happened, and we can’t have that. I end up snagging a blueprint from one of my advanced manuals on equipment enchantment, working to integrate that array into what I already have instead of dwelling.

  Eventually, the city is drowned in the silent blanket of night. Faeth never truly goes to sleep; there are people in the city who only ever experience it at night. Still, there is a quietude to the night that is absent in the day.

  Hours of focused concentration chip away at the emotions lingering in my mind. Focused monotony is a good antidote to the deep well of feeling that tries to make itself known. Eventually, I am not even distracting myself anymore. Eventually, I am simply being productive, and that is a wholly good thing. I start to understand why my father would always go to work outdoors for hours after he and my mother got into a big argument. Sometimes, the man would even go about picking up loose stones from the orchard in the dead of night.

  There is only so much that can be done with the planning of my future enchantment. As dawn starts to break over the great wall of Faeth, I find myself visiting the adventurer’s guild once more. After paying all of my debts, I have been left with little more than three thousand suns. I’m not broke by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not particularly wealthy either. There is always a need for more money, especially when I am continuing to make enchantments and not selling any of them. Selling more mana is an avenue I can pursue, but just now, culling some monsters is a more appealing path forward.

  I eschew fishing for a particular mana at the bottom of the city. The men and women sitting around the open hole leading to the continent far below the city spare me a glance as I enter the chamber, some even going so far as to say hello. The Nightmare is popular around here, mostly because they like to tease me with the name.

  With only a few returned greetings, I step off the ledge and allow myself to plummet through the hole in the center of the room. There is something freeing in the seconds I spend in freefall, feeling the air rush past me and tug at my hair as I tumble in an uncontrolled spin. For a second, I wonder to myself what might happen if I simply let it go on, if I don’t unfurl my wings and conquer the air.

  I would let down a lot of people out there. Dovik would probably blame himself. I don’t know Corinth well enough to say that he would, too, but I don’t think he would. Galea would die with me, unless the eye could be salvaged. Anything that actually killed me probably wouldn’t allow for that.

  They are sad thoughts, but they aren’t what pulls me from my melancholy just a few hundred feet above the ground. The thought that eventually makes me spread my wings and arrest the fall is the thought of those monsters getting away with whatever they are planning. It is the image of those gray eyes staring back at me in a burning city, the self-assuredness that he had felt all the way up until those final moments. He hadn’t been smiling at the end.

  The open fields of the unexplored and monster-infested continent spread out beneath me as I stand on the air, pushing my presence out to encompass what I can see, searching for prey.

  None of them will be smiling at the end. I guarantee it.

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