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“Ah.” Signy gave a single nod—a respectful and gratifyingly brief way of skipping over the Oh, you were an orphan moment Cora had experienced many, many, many times. “I see. And Maisie is . . . ?”

“One of my aunts, yeah.”

Signy’s face still betrayed little, but Cora could’ve sworn she looked a touch less tense. “What did you two discuss?”

“She mentioned a new kid who’d come in with a lot of health problems, but he was doing a lot better. I kinda picked up that this kid had enough chronic stuff going on that he would’ve had trouble getting approved for anything past comfort care, and I asked her how she’d wrangled that, and she danced around it, but I told her, look, I have a friend who could really use that kind of help, and if you know somebody, I promise I won’t tell, and eventually, she . . . well, she gave me an address.”

“She trusts you,” Signy said. It was more of a question than an observation.

“Yeah,” Cora said. “And I trust her.”

“You trust her, and yet you lied to her about the fact that you need help. Not a friend. Am I right?”

“I . . .” Cora tilted her head in admission. “Yeah. I didn’t want her to worry, y’know? She’s old and . . . she has enough to worry about.”

Signy studied her, shrewdly, almost uncomfortably. “I don’t do business with people who aren’t honest with me,” she said.

Cora took a breath. She softened her voice, and did her best to look as earnest as she felt inside. She needed this to work. “Listen. I know you don’t know me, and I know I’m asking something—like we said, dangerous, but—”

“I’m glad you know that,” Signy interrupted. “Because there are two kinds of people who would walk into a shop they don’t know and ask what you just asked: stupid, or desperate. I’ll be polite and assume it’s the latter.”

Cora blinked. “Thanks, I guess.”

Signy took another sip of tea. She swallowed. She thought. She thought more. She sighed. “What’s your trouble?”

This should have felt like victory, but Cora hadn’t told anyone about her trouble—not her friends, not Aunt Maisie, not even Twig. She hadn’t said the words out loud yet, and they stuck in her windpipe like a mouthful of grit. She wrapped them in detachment, forced them out with a shrug. “I have mindbleed,” she said.

There. It was real now.

Signy stared at her. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Aren’t you too young for that?”

Cora wet her lips. She shifted her gaze away from Signy’s stare and toward the berry-shaped jar, for the simple reason that it was there. “‘Low chance’ doesn’t mean ‘no chance,’” she said.

Signy set her cup down. “Surely, as a pilot, you have access to doctors experienced in treating that.”

“Yeah, sure, but then I’d lose my license,” Cora said. “I’d lose my job.”

Signy frowned. “I thought mindbleed is curable.”

“It’s manageable,” Cora said. “Five hundred milligrams of tritheragen every day keeps it under wraps. Or so I read.”

“But?”

“But—once you get prescribed that, you can’t fly anymore, even if your, um, symptoms mellow out.”

“Why?”

“They don’t want to risk it.”

“Risk what?”

“Something they can’t control for one hundred percent. You know. Kinda like printing medicine.”

The shopkeeper pulled her lips together, and for a second, Cora thought she’d fucked up. But Signy let the quip slide. “Are your . . . symptoms interfering with your ability to fly?” she asked. “Because if they are, then I’m sorry, but it sounds like you shouldn’t be flying.”