Page 55

"I can manipulate living tissue. Muscle, nerves, organs, blood vessels, bone, skin. I can repair damage, change how something functions, interrupt signals, alter structure." My fingers curled slightly against my sleeves. "If it's alive, I can usually feel enough of it to understand what I'm working with."

"Usually?"

"Rift creatures can be strange. Some are altered enough that their biology doesn't behave the way it should. I'd need contact or time to understand something unfamiliar. Some Rift animals are made purely from rift magic and I can't do anything with them."

He nodded once. "That's useful."

I breathed out slowly. "But that's not the limit."

"I assumed not."

Ashter had stayed curled as smoke around my wrist instead of taking his usual place sprawled somewhere nearby. He always seemed to know before I did when a conversation was going to matter. Thinking about him still brought back a Menagerie chamber that had smelled of burnt vegetation, blood and something sharp enough that I'd tasted it whenever I breathed.

"There are things I can do that I won't."

Corian's voice remained even. "Such as?"

Warmth spilled from my wrist before I'd decided to answer, smoke pouring free and climbing my arm until a thin, solid weight settled at the base of my throat, cool against my pulse and holding there, steady, the way he did when something in me needed anchoring before I'd admitted I needed it.

I didn't say anything about it. I didn't have to.

Corian's eyes moved to him, then to me, then back to Ashter, and stayed there a beat longer than a passing glance required. He didn't ask. He didn't need to, and that was almost worse, being read that easily by someone still learning the shape of me.

"Create life."

The room went quiet enough that I could hear the lamp crystal ticking as it cooled.

I expected a question.

It didn't come.

I forced myself to continue anyway. "Not healing. Not keeping something alive when it would otherwise die. I mean creating it. Building something that wasn't there before, combining biological structures because I can, changing a creature so fundamentally that it becomes something else."

My breath caught, struggling to find the next words.

"I did it once."

Corian's gaze moved, to the smoke, and stayed there a moment too long to be casual. He didn't ask.

"Ashter."

I ran my thumb lightly over the warm smoke. "I love him. I don't regret that he exists. But he shouldn't have been created from a loss of control. They called it training. It wasn't. They gave me living organisms and kept changing what they wanted until..." I swallowed and shook my head. "It doesn't matter. Ashter happened. Afterward they wanted me to do it again."

Corian went very still.

"I refused."

His hand closed once at his side, then stilled.

I continued before his anger became something I had to deal with. "At first they treated it like I was upset because the exercise had gone wrong. Then they decided I needed time. When I still refused, they argued. Masters, Council representatives, assessors. Different versions of the same conversation for months."

"What did they want you to create?"

"Anything."

The word sat between us.

"A controlled organism. A modified Rift species. Something designed for a specific purpose. Sometimes they dressed it up as research. Sometimes defense." I shook my head. "It didn't matter."