Her eyes were on me again, still unreadable. “You can control your own dreamscape?”

“Not like a Dream Walker. Anyone, magical or otherwise, can do what I’m saying. It’s called a lucid dream. You control your dream, but you aren’t physically in it. You’re…wakeful dreaming.” I crossed an ankle over a knee. “I feel like you should know what I’m talking about. They have schools for what you do, right?”

Her eyes hardened, and a little tingle at the base of my spine said not to mess with her.

I had rarely listened to my gut feelings in the past—why would I now?

“The spirits you see, how transitionary are they?” she asked.

“I’m not sure what that means, like I said on the questionnaire. Do you mean how close to the Line are they?”

“How solid is the form of the spirit?”

“Oh. Completely solid. Like looking at you.”

Her eyes were like Chuck Norris’s fists. “Every spirit you see is as solid as a living person?”

“Yes.”

“How are you able to differentiate between the two?”

“In short, I just can. I can feel it, I guess. Sometimes there is a soft inner glow, sometimes a soft outer glow, but mostly…I just know. I’ve never really thought about how. No one taught me to do this stuff, I just…do it.”

Her look said she wasn’t impressed. In her head, she was certainly saying “I see” in a disbelieving sort of way.

“Do they talk to you, these spirits?” she asked.

And on she went, sometimes asking for a painful degree of explanation to a question I’d already answered. Finally, when her efforts were exhausted and her patience had worn thin, she gave me a crusty look and told me the mountebank would be in shortly.

A half-hour wasn’t shortly. By the time he strolled in, clearly without any sort of urgency, I was tapping my foot and wondering how Mordecai was getting on. I hoped he wouldn’t be done before me. They might just send him home without waiting. Which would’ve been fine, had I been positive he’d end up at home.

“Hello again, Alexis,” the mountebank said, his attempt at being chummy ruined by his lack of a cheery voice and eye contact. “Now, we’ll just connect you up and get a reading, and you’ll be all set.”

I was tempted to let them get what they wanted without hassle. Tempted, but not willing. Kieran was trying to put me in a box to use at his leisure. Besides which, the governing body kept more records on powerful magical people—and they also encouraged them to move into the magical zone. Even if I could afford it, I didn’t need a bunch of busybodies sneering at my weird magical traits.

So I settled in, squishing my magic into a little ball and shoving it way down deep, where even the strongest machines couldn’t read it. Tubes and bands and whirligigs in place, on went the machine.

It took three minutes for the mountebank’s face to droop into a grimace. Another minute for his brow to bunch. One more to peer down at the machine, then over at me.

Yup. That’s how it’s going to go. Your expectations, no matter how hard you try, will not be met. Good day, sir.

And he did try. He moved me from one machine to the other. Then back to the first. The tubes sucking strangely at my skin were checked. The headpiece altered. My vein slapped before another sample was taken.

All the while, he kept getting different results. If I were better at this, I could target one result and keep hitting that. That’d satisfy him. But alas, I was only human.

“Now, Alexis,” the mountebank said twenty minutes later with sweat standing on his brow and frustration in every line on his face. The no-nonsense nurse stood by the machine on the red wall, accusation clear in her stance. “Something is not adding up.” His smile was condescending. He pointed at the long sheet of perforated white paper in his left hand. “We’ve taken these readings three times. All are different, but all of them suggest a lower-powered magic.” His eyes flicked up, then back down. That was as close as he usually got to checking my expression. “And yet the type of magic you’ve described is indicative of someone with a substantial power level.”

“Huh.” I tapped my chin. “Conundrum. Maybe there’s a plate in my head that I’m unaware of? You know”—I snapped—“everyone always says my personality is electric. Maybe that is messing up the machine.”

The nurse’s lips tightened further. The mountebank shook his head, reading the printout again. He glanced at the machine. “I need to make a call. Nurse Jessub, come with me, please.”

She glared at me all the way out the door. We wouldn’t end up friends, she and I.

Fifteen minutes later, I was unsurprised to see the mountebank bring in a lanky man with a buzzcut, keen eyes, and a smile that said people did what he wanted if they wanted to keep their appendages. The nurse filed in after him with an expression that said, This is for your own good.

“Hello, Miss Price,” the new guy said, his hands behind his back and his smile oily. “I’m Rob Stevens.”

“Hi, Rob,” I said.

“I am an Authenticator. Do you know what that is?”

My heart sank and a bead of sweat ran down my back.

His smile spread. “I can see that you do. Yes, I can read the shades of truth within lies, and vice versa.”

I hadn’t reacted because of what he could do. He could figure out the problem all day long, but that didn’t mean they could get any closer to discerning the level of my magic. Not unless shock treatment had returned to medical practice (they never had given me an answer on that).

No, my problem was that magic like his was rare and prized. He could demand a good price for his work. The fact that they’d brought him in with me, paying him an arm and a leg for his services, meant Kieran was not messing around. He wanted proof of what I could do, and I was scared by the lengths he was willing to go to get it.

“I’ve heard Mountebank Iams is having some problems matching up your account of your magic with the readings of the machine.”

“I’ve been hearing the same thing,” I replied.

“Her connections are all correct, and when we—”

“It’s okay, Mountebank Iams, I’ll take it from here.” Rob glanced around the room, choosing the chair in front of the yellow wall. Once seated, he leaned back and crossed an ankle over a knee before entwining his fingers, getting comfortable. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

The mountebank stiffened and his jaw clenched. He’d just been chucked out of his own assessment room, and it galled. Despite the situation, it tickled me.

“Now,” Rob said when he were alone. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

I started with my impression of the bland waiting room, the spirit I’d seen in the office, and why and how I’d chosen my seat in this very room. Throughout our preliminary chat, I peppered in some white lies about arbitrary things, like the number I’d added onto eeny, meeny and how much I liked the nurse’s attitude. Talking about my magic came next, and there I didn’t lie at all. My mother always said that choosing to keep information to myself was okay, but outright lying would just land me in the stink.

By then, his smile had vanished and his body had tensed somewhat. He looked over at the machine in confusion. “Did they try another machine besides this one?”

“They tried all three.”

“Of course,” he said, blinking slowly. “Do you want to know my assessment?”

“No.”

He shook his head, looking confused. I’d been confusing a lot of people lately.

“Which means,” he said, as if the words had been drawn from him with a string, “you know vaguely what it is.”

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t give him an answer.

“You think that machine works just fine, don’t you, Miss Price?”

“Yes. I love your tone when you call me Miss Price, by the way. It’s soothing.”

The silence between us lingered. I could really get used to having a guy like him around. I sounded as sweet as can be, but we both knew I was being sarcastic.