A week after the Awakening, Evan was stacking crates on Pier Nine, and it was going about as well as he'd expected.The job came with the F-Class packet. Six pages, one of them a list of approved employments, all of them physical, none of them requiring what you might call a mind. He'd taken the pier because the night shift paid more, and because his mother slept badly, and there was no point lying awake in a flat that small listening to her not sleep.The work was simple. A crane lifted containers off the ships. A crew opened them. Evan and three other men moved what was inside onto pallets. Nine hours, three breaks, hand truck, no talking.In that week he had learned that Connection worked exactly the way the Registry said. Touch two things and they stuck together for about six seconds. That was all.He had tested it. Extensively. At three in the morning, out behind the pier, with a bent nail and a scrap of canvas and fog so thick he couldn't see his own hands.Nail to canvas: stuck

The Registry's official description of Connection was three hundred and forty words long, and Evan had read every one of them.He'd read them the week after the Awakening, sitting on the floor of his room with the pamphlet under the lamp. There's a particular kind of person who, when told he's worthless, goes and reads the fine print to check.Connection (Class F). The user creates a temporary link between two inanimate objects in physical contact. Linked objects remain joined for approximately six seconds. Links do not persist beyond that interval. Links do not transfer energy, mass, or properties. Links have no measurable effect on living tissue. The ability is of limited practical use and is not recommended for advancement.Not recommended for advancement.Evan had underlined that. He'd underlined a lot of things.Now it was half past two in the morning, four days after the drowned church, and he was standing in the back alley of Pier Nine with his coat over his head against the ra

Cassian Thorne was somewhere in his fifties and looked like a man who had spent thirty years indoors with a lamp.He stood on the landing with his hands folded in front of him and didn't try to come in. Evan pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the corridor in his undershirt, one shoulder against the wall. The flat was two rooms, his mother was asleep in one of them, and there was nowhere in his life for this to happen."It's one in the morning," Evan said."It's the only time your stairwell's empty." Cassian said it as a fact, without apology. "You touch the doorframe before you go through. Left, left, right on the stairs. I've been watching you do it since the shed came down.""Since the shed.""Since the shed." The man's eyes went to Evan's right shoulder, and the way he was holding it. "You're guarding the wrong side. The collarbone's healing fine, and everyone at the depot thinks that's what hurts. It isn't."Evan said nothing."You'd be better at this if you stopped doin

Serena lived above a shuttered printing house in East Halcyon, in a room with no bed.There was a mattress on the floor in one corner, a sink, a two-ring hob, and a chair she clearly never sat in. Nothing else. Every wall, floor to ceiling, was paper.Evan stood in the doorway with river water still in his collar and looked at it.Hundreds of pages. Tacked, taped, pinned with nails, overlapping three deep in places. Most in her handwriting, some in other people's. Lists. Rough pencil drawings, the fast kind you make in the dark. Lines ruled between sheets, and arrows, and along the whole far wall a strip of butcher's paper with a hand-drawn map and dates written along the bottom like a timeline."How long?" Evan said."Four years." Serena was at the sink, wringing out her coat. She said it with no self-consciousness at all, which was worse than if she'd been embarrassed. "Every fragment. Every time: the date, what I was doing, where I was standing, how long it lasted. I started after

The twentieth of Harvest came in with fog so thick that the ferry horns out in the estuary sounded as if they were being blown somewhere else entirely.Evan hadn't slept. He'd been counting for three weeks without admitting it, ever since a second line printed on a board in the Ceremony Hall. The way he finally noticed was that he lay awake through the small hours and found the number already in his head.Twenty-one days from the Awakening. Today was the day.He got up. He dressed. He made his mother tea and sat with her for half an hour while she talked about the neighbor's dog, and he listened to every word. At the end of it she looked at him and said, "What is it?""Nothing.""You've got your father's face on.""What face is that?""The one where you're about to do something and you've decided not to tell me." She put her cup down. "Evan.""I'm all right.""That's not what I asked."He looked at her: the thin wrists, the grey coming in, the way she sat like sitting cost money. He t