Selah’s missing, and Arran’s not sure what the worst part about that is.
It might have been the moment Linet came to tell him that Selah had disappeared from her office, and the floor dropped out from under him. It might have been her once-stoic face, now a wild mix of worry and insistence and fear, as she begged him in quiet tones not to tell Naevia just yet, to please just give her a few hours, she can bring Selah back.
“My children,” she had said, not looking at him. “They’re at the Institute Civitatem.”
So maybe the worst part is how quickly the words “Yes, of course” and “I’ll help” had come tumbling out of his mouth. Or maybe it might be knowing his sister too well, knowing that Selah probably just gave her guard the slip, and is running around the city on a lark with no idea or care for the alarm she’s caused.
It might be the possibility that she isn’t.
Whoever killed Dad left no demands. No credo. Not even a message claiming credit after the fact. Just some arcane blood ritual whose meaning is either lost to the Quiet or just too obscure for the average Sargassan to make sense of. So until they know who the assassin is and what they want, Selah is always going to be in danger. And now she’s missing, and the weight of a small boulder seems to have taken up residence at the pit of Arran’s stomach, the tight alarm of his lungs threatening a panic attack at any moment.
It’s ridiculous, the guilt. The churning of his stomach that says he should have gone after Dad’s killer himself. There are no leads, nothing from the Intelligentia aside from the predictable announcement that the Revenants are suspect number one. No obvious clue where to start. Still, it’s there, something angry rising in his gut the other night, as he stood behind Selah while Terra’s priestesses set Dad’s rotting body to ash. He’d stood there, the heavy stone of grief overtaking anything else even if just for that moment. He’d stood there, and Selah reached back to grab his hand. She didn’t look back—couldn’t, even if she’d wanted to. The pyre demanded witness. But she had reached back to hold his hand, and as the priestess’s wailing song rose and echoed about the catacombs, grief had given way to something else. Something harder to define, but within it was the absolute certainty that whoever murdered their father could not have his sister, too.
And now she’s gone anyway.
They part ways almost immediately, with Linet off to the western gates to head off anyone who might be trying to smuggle Selah out of the city. Arran finds himself veering east before he can really make a conscious decision about it, jostling through the crowd toward the Boardwalk. He knows his sister, knows her moods, and knows where she would go to be alone.
But Selah isn’t walking the north-end beach or the stone breakwater, or sitting inside any of the Boardwalk javs. Nor is she at the Purgatory Chasm overhang or the abandoned Amphitheater Messalina, where she and her friends from Laurium threw parties in their superior. He changes tack, racing through the Arborem with as much decorum as he can muster, ignoring the scandalized looks thrown his way. But Selah isn’t at the Swan and Sailor taberna, or at the Topiary Gardens, or even with Kasari Ederan when he tracks her down to a private open-air bathhouse in Ecclesmur of all places.
A few hours past meridiem, Arran doubles back to the Universitas District, and by now he’s beginning to feel well and truly panicked. There’s nothing else for it. He’ll have to go to the Senate, have to tell Naevia what’s happened so she can call in the Cohorts. She’ll be absolutely furious with him, but he can deal with that. Selah’s safety is more important. And Linet . . .
His heart sinks at the thought of the sentry and her children. The Institute Civitatem has borrowed her out to Breakwater, and they hold the power to assign her children anywhere at all for however long they choose. They could sell their contracts outright. With a mark this black on her record, would she ever be allowed to see them again?
That’s not on you, a treacherous voice that sounds disconcertingly like his own whispers in the back of his mind, and he’s out of breath somehow despite standing perfectly still. Go to Naevia now or put it off until later, Linet’s fate is set. You can’t save everyone. But act now and there might still be time to save Selah.
Arran pushes a frustrated palm through his sweaty curls in an attempt to steady himself, to shove out the pounding of his heart in his ears, to stave off the way his vision is suddenly going fuzzy around the edges. He is not having a panic attack right now. He isn’t. He just has to make a decision, damn it. Right. Okay. Focus.
Feeling slightly ill, Arran turns around and walks straight into Theodora Arlot.
“Shit!”
“Ow.”
“Sorry!”
“Oh, it’s you.”
Arran tries not to take too much offense to that.
Theo had still been there when he climbed back into bed in the early hours of the morning the night of Dad’s viewing, but she certainly hadn’t been when he woke up the next day. He hasn’t heard so much as a word from her since. Too embarrassed at having slept with the Kleios familia accident to give him the time of day. He gets it. It’s far from the first time it’s happened. Except that this time, he’d been stupid enough to think . . .
Well. It doesn’t matter now.
Almost immediately, though, Theo backtracks. “Oh, not like that. Sorry. I didn’t mean—I just wasn’t expecting to see you . . . uh. Here.”
“I can see that.”
Out and about on what he can only assume is her day off from work, Theo presents a far cry from the polished young politico he met three nights ago. Her once-loose hair has been coiled into dozens of tiny buns, and she’s traded in her neat mourning dress for a cheap olive-green duskra and heavy work boots. It’s remarkable, the way she slips between worlds like this with easy confidence. Though Arran might be more inclined to appreciate this if he weren’t in the middle of a Selah-induced crisis.
Theo bites her lip, one corner of her mouth tugging upward slightly in a sheepish grin, and says, “Hey, listen, about the other n—”
“Sorry, I don’t really have time to talk right now,” he says, and pushes past her. He knows he’s being rude, but he’s still having trouble coming up for breath and he’s running short on time. Despite having spent the last three days thinking about Theo and wondering where exactly he’d gotten it wrong, this is definitely not the moment to pile on another rejection.
“Wait, hold up—Arran.” She grabs him by the wrist, though he yanks it back out of her grasp just as fast.
“I don’t have time for this,” he tells her, a little more aggressively than he means to, but the pounding in his head has yet to fully subside. “I’m sorry, but. My little sister’s gone and I don’t know where she is and I’ve wasted hours looking for her because I didn’t want to get her Quiet-damned sentry in trouble and now she will be anyway, so if you don’t mind? I have to go destroy a family because my own couldn’t fucking keep it together.”
Theo blinks at him.
He flushes, but before he can turn on his heel and get the savage Quiet out of there, she asks, “Your sister’s . . . gone?”
“Missing, yeah.”
“Selah?”
“Only got the one.”
“Okay, then,” she says, suddenly all business. “Let’s go.”
“You don’t have to come with me to the Senate,” he tells her, annoyed. Even if it were any of her business, he’d prefer Theo of all people not to see this. Although maybe having a witness isn’t such a bad idea. Just in case Naevia ends up murdering him.
She shakes her head. “We’re not going to the Senate.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“No, you’re not,” she says. “Honestly, I didn’t really understand half of what you just said, but it sounds like Senator Kleios finding out about this puts more than just your pride at risk. So I’m helping you search.”
“I’ve been looking for her all day. I can’t find her anywhere.”
“Sure you can’t. But that’s because you didn’t have me.”
Having Theo Arlot, it turns out, means having access to places he never would have considered searching. Arran’s confusion as she leads him along the narrow jetties running parallel to the Kirnaval’s waterways turns to outright gaping when she stops at the door of what’s clearly a brothel, then steps confidently inside.
Furtive, he looks around at the main parlor, dark sunlight fighting through the gauzy curtains, empty of life this early in the afternoon but steeped in a liberal heavy perfume that fails to mask the unmistakable scents of poppam and various bodily fluids. This isn’t exactly the kind of place that Selah would go, a thought he’s about to share out loud when a reedy voice from somewhere behind them abruptly snaps, “Out!”
The voice, it turns out, belongs to a sallow-faced, pockmarked, middle-aged man with badly dyed black hair that only serves to make him look ill. Watery eyes narrowed at the pair of them, he stands arms akimbo in the doorframe, back to the little entrance hall, as though preparing for war. “Out,” he snaps again, eyes fixed on Theo. “I’ve told you, Nix, I have warned you. I run a business, not a social hour.”
Far from being taken aback by this less than friendly welcome, Theo smiles and says, “Of course not. I only need to borrow Wes for a minute. Five tops.” And with that she neatly places two bronze ceres on the wooden side table between them.
The proprietor snatches up the coins, weighing them in his palm momentarily before telling her with a sneer, “It’s off-hours. He’s sleeping.”
“So wake him up.” She shrugs, and tosses him a third ceres. “I’m a paying customer, Vorndran.”
Satisfied with his cut, the man called Vorndran tosses her a final glare of deepest dislike before disappearing back down the hallway, calling out behind him, “You know the room.”
“Stay here,” Theo tells Arran quietly, and before he can argue, or ask why Vorndran called her Nix, or demand to know what on earth she’s up to in a Kirnaval brothel of all places, she’s disappeared up the stairs and into the depths of the crumbling building. Slowly, he takes a seat on the edge of a fraying couch, and tries not to think about where its various stains came from, and tries instead to make some sense of what’s happening here. Because he’s been in places like this before.
Arran’s never seen the appeal of brothels, even as an awkward teenager trying to keep up with Julian and his other childhood friends, following after them in a desperate bid to prove he was still worth spending time with. He’d have done anything, naive idiot that he was, but he’d been fifteen and in that house in Paleaside for all of five minutes before turning around and leaving. Maybe it would be one thing if prostitutes were servae, stripped of choice in a way that’s clear and easy to define. It would be simpler then to explain his disgust. Easier to rail against. But by and large the women, men, and thremed working in a place like this are citizens at the end of their rope. Forced into it by the invisible hand of a poverty the Imperium has the fragging nerve to call choice. Except that the other side of that choice is presenting yourself to the Institute Civitatem to be processed as a serva, and that’s no choice at all.
In the end, Theo doesn’t need a full five minutes upstairs with whoever Wes is. She comes clamoring back down the wooden staircase after barely three, wearing a broad look of relief across her dimpled face.
“What was that?” he asks when they step back into the dusty sunlight, the bustling throng of the Kirnaval enveloping them back into its tumult.
Theo cuts a path across a dangerously tilting plaza, hand firmly wrapped in his to keep from losing each other in the crowd. “She’s not being held for a bounty. At least, the rickets haven’t gone out, so we can effectively rule out that possibility. Which is good. That was the most likely scenario for unfriendlies.”
“Wha . . .” He gapes, and realizes he’s been doing rather a lot of that today, at least where Theo’s concerned. She sounds more like a member of the espionage legions than a politico. “How do you know that?”
“Vorndran’s an idiot. Wes doesn’t sleep,” she says, though that feels like a distinct non-answer. “Come on.”
Next, she leads him to an elderly woman sitting outside a makeshift shelter beneath a bridge in the Third Ward, then they hop a rickshaw to a clerk with a severe middle part who berates them soundly for daring to approach him while at work in the Financial Quarter prefect’s office. Both of them—including the clerk, in the end—consent to a hushed conversation with Theo, leaving her increasingly satisfied that Selah’s managed to avoid some grim fate. Evidently Arawakan pirates haven’t been seen in Luxana since before the hurricane, and there’s no word of grumblings loud enough from the colleges or guild halls to suspect a kidnapping for ransom. She may as well be speaking a foreign language.
But as the afternoon wears on, Arran finds his chest loosening as he becomes increasingly less terrified for his sister, and increasingly more intrigued by Theo’s inexplicable network of underground connections.
“One more box to check off, then I think it’ll be pretty safe to say Selah’s just out meeting her secret lover or something,” she tells him, nudging his shoulder with hers as they exit the alley behind the prefect’s office.
“Who are you?” Arran laughs, the once-idle wheels of curiosity in the back of his mind now working overtime. “Seriously, you’ve only been in town for a few months and you already know more about the . . . underbelly of the city than I ever have.”
“Well—” she shrugs, but gives him a knowing sort of smile, “I wouldn’t be much good at my job if I didn’t.”
Of all the answers he thinks she might have given, that most certainly isn’t among them. Arran blinks at her for a half second before his brain catches up with him. “Naevia . . . knows about all this.”
“Of course. Why do you think she hired me?”
“You said you were connected. Your dad’s patron—”
“I am connected. So is every kid trying to climb the ladder, and their connections are significantly more impressive than mine. But I also have my ear to the ground, and Senator Kleios is the kind of politician who values that more.”
Arran’s blatant confusion must be clearly written across his face, because she takes one look at him and laughs. “How much does she actually talk about her politics at home?” she asks, leading him sharply left down yet another twisting street toward what he thinks is vaguely back in the direction of the Kirnaval. It smells like garbage, and the sea.
“She’s popular with the plebs.”
“That’s true,” Theo says, nodding. “And as long as Senate floor sessions remain closed and plebs don’t know how their government actually works, she’ll stay that way.”
“Yeah, you’ve lost me.”
“Happy to explain, but you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
She stops in the middle of the cobblestone street and grins. “You won’t get me fired.”
Arran stops too, the warm glow of three days previous nudging its way back in. Something in that easy humor, and how she actually listens, and the way she knows she’s the smartest person in the room but won’t hold it over you. It’s enough, almost, to forget the way it abruptly ended.
He sticks out his hand. “Deal.”
She takes it.
“The Senate’s a sham. Completely for show,” she says conversationally and continues down the street, as though she weren’t casually spitting abject treason for anyone to hear. “Its power exists to the extent that the Imperium allows it to exist, but by and large any motions passed by the Senate are rigged from the start.”
“Don’t you think that’s overly—”
“The Imperium may feel far off across the ocean in Roma, but they’re here. They’ve got their fingers in us. All those Imperium officials swarming the Plaza Capitolio on any given day are just the messenger hawks bringing senators their instructions.”
If he were anyone else, he’d say she sounds cracked. Like a conspiracy theorist. A pseudohistorian. One of those oddball fringe pamphlets that gets printed now and again, distributed for a brief time before the blackbags shut it down. By now, though, Arran knows better. Back in Teec Nos Pos, this sort of talk was just daily conversation when Fagan and Enyo were involved, holding court at the far end of camp, safely out of earshot from the prefect and legates. And there’s something in the matter-of-factness of her words, the way she doesn’t so much as hesitate in her stride, that gives him pause. In Theodora Arlot, Arran’s beginning to get the sense he knows what he’s dealing with.
So he raises a brow and says, “That sounds . . . simplistic.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. The college system is definitely corrupt, I agree. But the Atticus College has Naevia on at least five different committees in addition to her day-to-day. Ethics panels. Project boards. I’m sure you know more about it than I do. That’s a lot of pointless busywork for someone sitting around waiting for orders.”
“Yeah, it would be,” Theo grants him, barely breaking her stride, “if the colleges didn’t represent what’s really important to the senators.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“The colleges—all their committees and foreign relation bureaus . . . well, they’re social clubs, aren’t they? Birds of a feather with the same outside business interests, all jostling for the Imperium’s favor, trying to make sure they come out on top.”
“Let’s say that’s true,” he grants her, the way he might have over a pint of hops in a Fornia taberna. “Why have elections at all, then? Or a Senate? It’d be way less effort for the Imperium to just set Cato Palmar up as dictator.”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t want to give him any ideas, though, would they? And anyway, the illusion of self-governance is a powerful thing. It keeps us happy. We’re a lot bigger than Roma. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. And we’re pretty far away. Putting down a rebellion over here wouldn’t be much fun for them, so it’s just a whole lot easier if we think there’s nothing to rebel against in the first place.”
Yes. Arran knows exactly what he’s dealing with. He backs off. “Well, that’s cheerful.”
Theo shrugs. You asked.
“So what does that have to do with you and Naevia?”
“Well,” she starts, “if being a senator and staying a senator isn’t about actually shaping the world for the better, then naturally it’s about shaping the world to your own advantage.” She stops outside a large, nondescript building and turns to face him, the low October sun glinting off her black hair. “That’s all politics are, really. That’s the game. And Senator Kleios found a different way to play it. She doesn’t bother with bribes to stay in power. She makes the masses think she’s listening to them, that she’s on the Senate floor every day fighting for them. But in order to do that, she needs to actually speak their language.”
“And that’s where you come in. To translate.”
“Ding ding. Not to mention, bringing a pleb into a senior-tracked role is a good publicity stunt. Endears her to voters.”
He knows something about that. Arran remembers the moment he himself realized the cachet he lends to Naevia’s public persona by the simple fact of just existing. He remembers wondering if it was something that Naevia herself was even aware of. Looking back now, he wonders how he could have been so naive.
Theo, maybe mistaking his disquiet for silent disapproval, is quick to add, “Don’t take all of this the wrong way. I like your stepmother. She’s a brilliant woman, and she knows how to use optics to her advantage. I’m learning a lot from her.”
“Is that why you left?” he asks suddenly. It comes out without meaning to. He wasn’t going to push it, wasn’t going to bring it up unless she did. But it’s out there now, and he can’t take it back. “The other night, you left before I woke up. Afraid of what she’d think?”
She barely bats an eye. “More or less,” she says, smiling ruefully as she leans against the gray stone wall. “I was afraid for my job, honestly. I hadn’t intended to . . . I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly realized how it was going to look to her and kinda spun out. Savage Quiet, you thought I was using you to get in her good graces when we first met. Of course she was going to think that I had, I don’t know . . .”
“Seduced me?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” says Arran, and he can feel his heart thumping away so hard he half expects it to burst right through his chest, though he’s suddenly very aware of his hands and not totally sure what to do with them. “So. You don’t, uh, regret it, then?”
Theo raises a single brow, looking at him as though he’s grown an extra head, and shifts incrementally closer to him. “No. Why, do you?”
“No,” he says, and his heart flips on itself. “Should we do it again sometime?”
“I’d like that.”
“Preferably with the, you know, talking part, too.”
“Well, yeah. I sort of assumed that was part of the package.”