Margaret gave Willow a handkerchief filled with shards from the icebox to rest on her hand during dinner, but Willow wasn’t sure it did much. Sure the shooting pain lessened, but the feeling of intense cold was almost worse. And the way it kept flickering to intense heat, as if her skin wasn’t sure what to make of the ice. But she kept the ice pack on anyway because it was such a kind gesture, and she didn’t know what to do instead.

“You should go to the hospital tomorrow,” Bryan told her between mouthfuls of sweet cornbread and chipped ham. “They’ll be able to set you right.”

“Yeah, of course,” Willow said, and glanced at Leopold. He was giving her a meaningful look. After what she’d told him about that nurse, he clearly wasn’t enthused about the prospect of leaving her in the care of the medical establishment a second time. She wasn’t sure she was either.

After eating even more than usual, Willow thanked Bryan and Margaret profusely and retreated to her cramped room with Leopold where she shut the door quickly behind them. Leopold began pacing immediately.

“We could take it to the Dean. I’m sure this isn’t above board.”

“No shit it’s not above board,” Willow said. “Both of them are lying here, but does it stop at them, or does it go higher up. And why me?”

“Yeah, that’s a good question,” he said, and stopped. “I mean, you do have those really strange readings—”

“Thanks for that,” Willow said flatly.

“—maybe that made you a target. Or it could be because you’re from a smaller town?”

“Plenty of other students from small towns,” she said, and scratched at her arm where the burning, prickling sensation ended. “I just wish this would—”

Wait. There was something there under her shirtsleeve. She raised the fabric and found a band of heavily inscripted copper wrapped around her forearm right above the wrist. She’d seen it before when she awoke, but the pain made it hard to concentrate on anything else. Already she was getting used to the sensation, or it was going away. She wasn’t sure which.

“What’s that,” Leopold leaned in. The small oil-lamp on her side-table wasn’t bright enough to make out the symbols. Leopold cast magelight quickly and the bright-yellow light bobbed above their heads.

“It’s the same band from the experiment earlier today. It made my arm go numb, but that was on my left arm. Why’s it here?”

“Are you sure it’s the same one,” Leopold said, and Willow shook her head.

“No. I don’t know. I can’t read any of these inscriptions. It could be something completely different.”

“It could be why your hand is so weak, why you’re in pain,” Leopold said, and swallowed hard.

“Should I take it off,” Willow asked. He stared at the band for a long while, trying to read the inscriptions and obviously failing.

“Yes.”

There was an obvious seam in the band and it wasn’t difficult to bend the metal back. It wrapped around onto itself and it took her a moment to unravel it with the tips of her fingers, but it finally snapped off and landed on the bed.

Sensation rushed back into her hand; which was strange because she could already feel her hand. She felt her fingers where they should be but the sensation was overlayed on the much stronger burning and tingling. The phantom feeling seemed to make the burning even stronger somehow, as if it reminded her of what level it was normal for her to experience sensation on.

Willow grunted and clenched her right hand into a fist. Moving her fingers set off a cascade of pain which shot up her hand to where the band had been. She screamed as her fingers spasmed; the sensation like her muscles being fed through a meat grinder.

“Gods,” Leopold said, and fumbled with the band. He hurriedly fit it around her wrist again and when the metal made smooth contact all the way around, the secondary sensation disappeared completely. The relief was almost euphoric as only the tingling burning was present again. Whatever had happened to her muscles began to subside.

Willow leaned back onto the headboard of her bed and sighed at the disappearance of the grating pain. There were tears in her eyes, which she awkwardly wiped away with her left palm.

“There’s something weird going on here,” Leopold said. “They did something to you, something that that band’s keeping back. What was it they said?”

“Something about my spine. Healing the nerves,” Willow laughed. “Ridiculous.”

But Leopold was looking hard at her, at her neck.

“It is ridiculous, right?”

“I mean… I haven’t heard of such a thing. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be. That doesn’t even mean its unheard of, just that I’m an ignorant first-year student. Maybe its all more normal than we thought—”

Willow cut him off with a shake of her head. “No, it’s not normal at all. He said I was the only one, the only one who survived the Wasting. That’s not normal, and if its not a lie, then I don’t know what it means. Who else can we ask? Who else do you trust?”

Leopold drew inward in thought for a moment before fixing her with his gaze. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I can really only think of one person who would know. Or, well, two people.”

“Oh, come on.”

🜛

She couldn’t face Professor Brandeweiss at the front of the classroom, not after storming out of his office the previous day, so she camped out in front of his office door while he was out teaching the class she was supposed to be attending.

After an hour which crawled by, a bell in the towers above rang and students filled the main lobby at the end of the hall of offices. Professors began filtering in, closing doors as they disappeared back into their crannies to prepare for their next classes. Professor Brandeweiss was one of the last to come down the hall.

“Miss Willow,” he said, and stopped between her and the door. “I have to say I’m surprised to see you back here. I half-thought that you’d be back home on a caravan by now with how you left yesterday.”

“I can’t say I haven’t considered it,” Willow said. “Can we talk inside?”

Carl nodded and waved her in. The fold-out table was gone and the office was set up almost in the same way she’d seen it the first time they’d met after class. He motioned to a chair and closed the door.

“Professor—”

He cut her off with a shush and incanted a spell under his breath. The spell-form was tortuously complex but when he finished, its essence flowed into the door and along the walls in a rushing blue wave.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

“There, now we won’t be disturbed.”

“What was that?”

“A little privacy conjuration. Nobody will be able to hear what is said in this office as long as that door remains shut. I had one on yesterday, which faltered when you rushed out. I have to say, I was prepared to explain a great deal more when you’d awoken, but perhaps I approached the subject matter too obliquely.”

“I… perhaps,” Willow said. “I was overwhelmed. The things you were saying…”

Carl nodded. “Before we get into it, how is your hand doing?”

Willow looked at her right hand, turned it over weakly in her lap and clenched the fingers into a fist with little more strength than a newborn.

“It feels better. Last night it was burning, and ice didn’t help. I took the band off—”

Carl sucked in breath, but his eyes were riveted on her. “What happened?”

“It was excruciating. It felt like my hand was being torn apart.”

“I thought it might. If you gain nothing else from our meeting today, I implore you not to remove the band again until I instruct you to do so. The results of which may be… catastrophic.”

Ominous, but Willow didn’t want to pry into all the different ways she could permanently damage herself after whatever it was he’d done to her. She nodded.

“And now?”

“Now, I can barely feel the burn,” she said. “It’s sensitive, like my skin is raw, but it doesn’t hurt all the time anymore.”

“Good,” Carl said. “Your brain’s adjusting to the sensations coming from your body. I had hoped it would over time, but I was prepared to give you a hefty dose of analgesic upon your departure yesterday in case the pain was too much.”

“Huh, that would’ve helped,” Willow said, but Carl waved the comment away.

“No matter. You are incorporating the nervous input faster than I had hoped. I see you’ve learned how to move it?”

“Learned? I just move it like normal.”

“Hmm, interesting,” he said. “The psychokinesis must have taken root in the same portion of your brain which controls motor function. This is most fortunate.”

“That. Psychokinesis, you mentioned it yesterday. What do you mean?”

“Well before we go into that, I’d like to do a little test with you if that’s alright.”

“I’ve almost had it with tests.” Carl smiled.

“You’ve done this one before: I’d like you to push into a capacitor. Have you been keeping up with your exercises?”

“Um, I didn’t do them last night,” Willow said. “But I did yesterday morning.”

“Perfect, perfect. If you’ll just place your right hand on top of this capacitor.”

The crystal dome he pulled out from under his desk looked different than any other she’d seen before. There were thin copper lines circling around at different levels, coming together in concentric circles. It also looked heavier than the one she had at home.

Willow hesitantly put her right hand atop the dome and the cold crystal prickled her sensitive palm. Carl brought out a rolled blanket and laid it under her elbow.

“I want you to relax. Just try your best to completely loosen your arm, keeping your palm in contact with the capacitor. When you’re ready, try pushing into it.

Willow took a breath, felt her arm go slack, then visualized the essence in her body, but where she normally held a one-to-one image now her imagined right hand was completely missing, as if it had been chopped off.

“Um,” Willow said.

“You’re not seeing your hand in the visualization. Try to push through it anyway.”

“Okay,” she said, and attempted to push essence through her hand. She was used to her essence moving like molasses, but now it was as if that strange darkness was an impassable wall. There was no way for her to control the essence in her hand, or to move essence from the rest of her body into it.

“I… can’t,” Willow said, and opened her eyes again. Carl was focused on the display on the other side of the capacitor, and he hummed.

“The block is working then,” he said, and smiled.

“Is that what this band is,” Willow asked. “Is it the same one from the test yesterday?”

“Ah, I never got to explain it to you,” he said, and gently pushed up her sleeve. “This band is a creation of my own design, based on essence insulators in high-density inscriptions. What it does is quite simple: when formed into a circle, no essence can pass through that enclosed space. When I wrapped it around your arm yesterday and it went numb, that was in itself a secondary test I was performing. I was in effect seeing if my hypothesis was true, if indeed you controlled and received sensation from your body through magic alone.”

“But I can feel my hand now,” Willow said. “Well, in a way.”

“That is due to the surgery my colleague Annabelle performed while you were unconscious yesterday. She restored the connection between your hand and your brain, thus whenever this band is on your wrist you are controlling your hand through your mundane nervous system alone.”

“Now,” he said, and he lifted up the very edge of the band with the tip of his finger. “I want you to close your eyes and visualize again. Be ready to push into the capacitor when you see the essence in your hand, but be warned: do not under any circumstances move your hand. To do so will result in nearly unbearable pain.”

“Right,” Willow said, remembering the excruciating agony of the previous night. She might as well not mention to him that she’d already experienced said pain.

“And… now,” he said, and at the moment she felt the band lift from her wrist her hand appeared again in her visualization. She pushed, as she always had before, as she had a million times in her life, but something new happened this time: the essence in her hand shot out so quickly the limb almost disappeared in her visualization again. The essence in her arm was still sluggish, but as it crossed the unmarked point in her wrist where she felt things differently, it too flashed out of her body at insane speed.

She felt the band go back around her wrist and she opened her eyes. The capacitor under her hand was glowing a dull red which looked to be some sort of warning and Willow removed her hand from the warm surface.

“What was that? What happened?”

Carl was smiling. “Something beyond even my wildest imaginings. This is a twenty-five em capacitor, and you’ve overcharged it to twenty-seven em.”

“I pushed two em in just now,” Willow asked, amazed. Carl shook his head.

“No. It was empty when we started. You just flash-charged it to twenty-seven em. I don’t think a rummeter in the Arcanum could chart the force with which you ejected your essence. These results are far above my expectations.”

“But… what does it mean?”

“Mean? Well, first off, under no circumstances take that band off, especially when casting spells. You’ve been training these last five years to push against the natural resistance of having hundreds of psychokinetic spells blocking the flow of your essence, and with that resistance removed you have the potential to cause terrible damage with even the simplest of effects. You have to learn how to do the opposite now: learn how to shoot low, how to feather your power so you don’t blind those around you with magelight or set the school on fire with a summoning.”

“Is this real,” Willow whispered, suddenly confronted with the opposite of what she’d heard her entire life. That her disability had somehow given her a gift, instead of bestowing curse after curse?

“This is real, Willow. This is very real, but I must also entreat you: do not speak of what you are or what you can do to anyone else. We will work together to hide it, to help you fit in, and to pass your probation, but you must not let anyone else gain knowledge of how different you are. You haven’t told anyone in the last day, have you?”

The image of Leopold, of Margaret and Bryan came to her head.

“No,” she said. “Not a soul.”

🜛

After leaving the Arcanum through the main gate, Willow hooked a right and hobbled down the street to the crossing at the corner. The wood of her cane chafed painfully on her sensitive right hand, but the sensation meant everything to her. It meant not being a failure. It meant a chance at a real life, a normal life. It meant more healing in the future, after she could control herself.

Leopold waited in a shadowed doorway at the corner and catching sight of her he started forward. She shook her head and motioned into the alley, where he retreated.

She turned into the alley as well and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. A quick look back showed that Carl hadn’t followed her out, or at least if he had she didn’t see him.

“Gods Willow, I’ve been waiting forever,” Leopold said. “You have no idea what its like not knowing if you’re even going to come out or not. I was a bare hour from going to the constable.”

“No need, not anymore,” Willow said and lifted her sleeve. “He explained it, explained it all really. It’s… almost fantastic. Unreal. I never would’ve believed him if he hadn’t showed me.”

“Showed you what,” Leopold asked, but Willow pulled her sleeve down in response, hiding the nullification band.

“Not here. Let’s go back to the house, I’ll explain everything there. You’re not going to believe me, but I’ll explain it anyway.”

“Try me,” Leopold said, and they started off.

At the mouth of the alley, a pebble skidded as if being crushed under an invisible shoe.