Kane rested his elbows on the table. “Can I watch you work for a bit?”
Zaria swallowed hard. She hadn’t counted on being monitored. But it wasn’t as though she was planning anything unsavory—not yet, at least. She could take this for what it was: the perfect opportunity to convince Kane he could trust her. When they finally carried out the heist, she would need his guard down as much as possible.
“I suppose.” She opened the jar of soulsteel and let the glittering powder sift through her fingers. Kane remained quiet, his eyes tracking her movements as she added the soulsteel to the flame, trying not to let her hands shake. When she took her knife out, he stilled.
“Don’t worry,” she said, bemused. “I’m not going to stab you.”
Kane let that one pass, watching as she pressed the tip into the skin of her arm. Blood welled, immediate and shining. It was only once she had let it drip into the flame that he said, “Why?”
“I don’t have a primateria source, do I?” Zaria wiped the excess blood away with her sleeve. “I use my own life energy.”
“I didn’t realize it required a blood debt.”
“Power demands payment.” She slid her gaze up to his, tracking the minute shifts in his expression from beneath her lashes. “I’m sure you know that.”
Kane tilted his head. A vein strained at his throat. “And that’s why alchemologists die so quickly, is it?”
Zaria recoiled from the blunt question. “The effects are difficult to predict. But yes. It’s an exchange of sorts.”
“What if you used someone else’s blood?”
“It wouldn’t work.”
“And why not?”
“Because,” Zaria said, indignant at his myriad questions, “you don’t just throw blood at a candle and thenboom, magic. There’s work to be done from within. You have to travel inside yourself and make it clear what you’re willing to give up. You have to know exactly what you want to do. Then, finally, you have to be able to picture how it happens.”
“Ah.” He rocked back on his heels. “Does it make you go mad?”
“You’re an idiot.” She did her best to ignore him as she withdrew into herself, casting about for focus. It was harder with Kane there, wondering what he would see in her face as she struggled to find that place where creation thrived.
Perhaps Kane sensed that, because a moment later he had averted his gaze, fixing it instead on a piece of parchment Zaria hadn’t seen him take out. She paused, her thoughts funneling back into the present as she tried to make out the design on the page before him.
“What is that?”
“Copy of the architectural blueprint for the Crystal Palace.”
“Where did you get it?”
Kane shot her a withering look. Zaria took that to imply he had obtained the blueprint through unsavory means.
“There’s no problem you can’t solve with theft, is there?”
He adjusted the collar of his shirt, a hint of humor playing at his lips. “I like to think not. Now, are you going to get started or continue trying to stall?”
“I’m not stalling,” she said. “You’re… distracting.”
“I suppose you’ll just have to ignore me.” Kane’s voice suggested he knew exactly how difficult that would be. “Surely the great Itzal Mendoza taught you the importance of focus.”
“He tried,” Zaria said, though her face burned. How could she explain that in order to do this properly, she needed to latch on to the type of focus that regular people didn’t seem to have?
“What does that mean?”
“I wasn’t always a great student.” The words were clipped. “I was all wrong in too many ways.” She cleared her throat. “Will you at least move aside?”
Instead of retreating from the worktable, though, Kane stepped closer to her. His expression had lost its casual disdain, and there was apprehension in the line of his mouth. “You seem all right to me.”
“You wouldn’t know right from wrong if it were presented to you by God himself.”
