Gloria jerked her hand away from the lighter's flame with a squeak of pain. She jammed her singed thumb into her mouth and spoke around it: "I don't think I'm very good at this game."

  "You're actually advancing far more rapidly than I would have expected," Pema explained. He smiled patiently, and re-ignited the lighter.

  "I'm not lasting any more than a couple seconds."

  "Yes. But even a few moments of control signifies a good grasp of the basics. Again."

  "Really?" Gloria frowned. She glanced around, a little self-conscious.

  The two were sitting just outside a cafe on one of Minneapolis's more crowded, narrow streets. People were so close, walking by, shopping, eating crepes and sipping at foam-art lattes at the tables sprinkled around her.

  "Can't we do this somewhere private?"

  "More difficult than learning mastery over your Qi," Pema explained, for maybe the sixth time, "is learning mastery over yourself."

  "Oh, Pema, I don't know what that means."

  "You need to be able to perform around distractions." Pema followed her gaze, studied the people around them. His eyes lingered on some for a few moments, glazed over as he doubtless absorbed some deeply private information about each of them. It was a good five seconds before his attention snapped back to her. "You're a self-conscious person, Gloria. You care so mightily about what these people see when they look at you. Public attention like this is a perfect first obstacle for you to overcome."

  Gloria thought about what she must look like right now, an exhausted-looking old woman burning herself over and over again with a lighter while a hairless old man nattered on about Qi. Any spectators would think her crazy.

  "And why should that matter so much, Gloria?" Pema said, cutting off her train of thought in that eerie manner of his. "If there's one thing the average person overestimates, it's the attention paid them by strangers. Go again."

  Gloria thought to argue, then anticipated the all-knowing expression of infinite patience the man would assume before cutting her objection off before it started. The thought sent a jolt of irritation up her spine, and she sighed and turned back to the lighter.

  She stuck her finger in the flame.

  For three seconds, four, five, the heat didn't register to her skin. Around her finger, still only hazily perceptible to her, the field of energy Pema kept calling Qi danced and flickered as it absorbed this heat, stored it for her use. With a delay of another second or two, the energy began to leak back out, dispersed across her body, almost as fast as she was absorbing it.

  "Remember," Pema said. "Anticipate the heat. Qi works as a preventative, not a reactionary measure. Your Qi can be primed to act faster than you can think. But for it to do this, it needs to know what you're afraid of. What you don't want to feel. Focus on how little you want to feel the flame."

  "Believe me, I am," Gloria whispered.

  Twelve seconds, thirteen, fourteen.

  "There you go. If you make it to fifty-five, we can move on to our next exercise." Pema was beaming.

  "Pema, please, I'm trying to concentrate-"

  "That's exactly the problem."

  She began to feel a phantom sensation of heat prickling her skin. Just faint enough that she wasn't sure if it was a placebo, something she was imagining.

  Thirty-eight, thirty-nine.

  "You're doing it!" Pema yelled. "Ha-haaaa!"

  Several heads turned to look at them, and immediately Gloria felt a flush of shame.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  With a sudden bite, the flame scalded her finger, and she yanked herself away from the heat again.

  "That was a nasty trick!" Gloria pouted, sucking her finger again.

  Pema shook his head, tutted. "You'll have to deal with much greater distractions than an over-exuberant old man, if you want to keep yourself safe. I thought you agreed that you'd follow any advice I-"

  Pema fell silent as, all around them, phones chirped and beeped.

  Gloria’s own phone buzzed in her purse. Curious, she retrieved it, saw the message displayed across the screen of the old Motorola she’d never felt the need to upgrade from.

  The text was a series of numbers, followed by a message in what seemed to be Chinese, mixed with some other language. Arabic?

  “Tibetan,” Pema said, a crooked smile on his face. He had that far-off look in his eyes again. “That’s certainly one way to get my attention.”

  All around them, people were frowning down at their phones, tutting to each other about spambots and wrong numbers, stowing them back in their pockets. Pema stood up.

  “Where are we going?” Gloria moved to follow, but he held up a hand.

  “If the person who just reached out to me is who I think it is, you might be safer at a nice, distant remove.” Pema paused again, then shook his head, clearing mental cobwebs before turning his attention back to her. “Stay here. Practice with the lighter on your own. It would be a quite auspicious sign if you managed to get yourself over fifty-five seconds while I’m gone.”

  “How long will that be?” Gloria looked around, already feeling vulnerable.

  “Not long. A quick meeting. I’ll be back before dusk, surely.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  Pema laughed heartily at that. “I will be. Don’t waste your energy worrying for this old man. Focus on your studies. I’ll see you soon.”

  And with that he walked off down the road, just one of the dozens of pedestrians making their way down the thoroughfare. Gloria frowned as he disappeared from sight, fidgeted with the lighter. She briefly toyed with the idea of tossing the thing, buying a coffee, maybe taking a walk.

  But that vulnerable, exposed feeling was gnawing at her. And the only way to banish the feeling was to get stronger. Gloria would very much like not to have to rely on the whims of a decidedly absentminded old man for her own safety.

  So she flicked the lighter on, and started again.

  About ninety minutes and a half-dozen mild burns later, she managed to keep her finger in the flame for over eighty seconds, before getting startled out of it by the blare of a passing police car’s siren. She dropped the lighter to the table with a clatter and clapped to herself, allowed herself a single cheer under her breath. Her heart surged a little with pride.

  She realized, with a pang of self-pity, that it must have been well over a decade since she’d felt such a sense of accomplishment. It had been so long since she’d had any sort of test or obstacle to overcome.

  She decided, to stave off that depressing thought, she would go inside and buy herself a dessert. A reward for passing her test.

  When she stood to enter, she noticed, in the dim reflection of the cafe’s windows, a glint of light shimmering from just beneath the bob of hair above her right ear. Her breath caught, her hand darted up to cover the skin, and she hurried inside, made a beeline for the bathroom.

  How long had she been glowing?

  She burst into the bathroom, yanked her hair out of the way. In the mirror, her head canted at an awkward angle, she examined the patch of skin just above her ear that, yes, seemed to be glowing. She was doing it again, the thing Pema had said she’d done just after being bombed at home.

  She tried to shut the glow off, to mentally wrangle the portion of Qi, or magic, or whatever surrounding that part of her body, and command it to stop. It didn’t work.

  She wished, thought, demanded, envisioned, pleaded, as forcefully as she could she could manage within the confines of her own thoughts. Nothing happened. The light remained.

  Gloria began to sweat, just a little. A nasty nervous habit of hers. Pema had mentioned something about how her power had “leaked” out while she had glowed last time, how it was essentially a beacon for those who might want to do her harm. She cursed himself for not asking him for some way to contact him, for a phone number to text in an emergency.

  He probably didn’t have a phone, she realized.

  Gloria pulled some paper towels from the dispenser, bunched them up, stuck them behind her ear and fixed them there as best as she could. A quick examination confirmed that the light, at least, was obscured enough not to draw stares.

  She crept back out from the bathroom, sidled to the front of the cafe, eyes scanning the crowd, anxious for any suspicious glances or obviously dangerous people among them. She realized almost immediately that she had no idea what that hypothetical person would look like. Some sort of hitman? What did they wear? Would they look obviously magical? Would her senses alert her to their presence, the way she was often vaguely aware of Pema’s own aura, when he was close?

  She felt foolish. Nobody was looking at her. Nobody was bum-rushing the cafe to have at her. No hidden bombs were exploding, no concealed guns firing. Outside, the pedestrians were just as anonymous and nondescript as they had been ten minutes ago. Nothing struck her as odd.

  Nothing except-

  She froze, mid-scan, as her eyes found the woman standing in the park across the street. She was half-obscured by a tree, but from what Gloria could see, the woman was huge. Far taller than nearly any woman she’d ever seen. Maybe more than any man.

  The woman seemed to notice her attention, met her gaze with the one black eye poking out from behind the tree’s trunk. She raised a spindly, parchment-white hand, and gave her a dainty wave.

  At the woman’s feet, in a ring all around her, all of the grass was dead.