“But,” says Tair, pulling the pencil out of her mouth, and impatiently blows a stray twist out of her face. “But that presumes ill intent by definition, so then the whole thing will fall apart because she can’t sound like she’s accusing the Publica of a cover-up. The defense has to stay focused on the one officer as a bad actor.”
Sticking the pencil behind her ear, she slams the massive legal dictionary closed against her legs.
“Tair,” Ibdi answers wearily from across several beds. “Get outta my ward.”
She ignores them, flipping open on a sudden inspiration one of the many files she’s spread across the little corner of the clinic she’s claimed as her office.
Artemide was right. Jinni didn’t put her in the field, not right away. Instead, she’s got her doing legal support work for the other Watchers, and Tair isn’t naive enough not to know that this is a test. Not of skills or intelligence, but of temperament. The ability to look a lost cause in the face and give their case everything she’s got all the same. No amount of preparation or research can help someone who has actually committed a crime, no matter how petty the infraction or absurd the law broken. Which is a fucking shame because half these cases could be turned over easily with a well-placed argument—that is, of course, in the kind of world where Tair’s allowed to stand in court and argue a case at all.
She flicks that impossible wish away, and barely notices Ibdi until they’re towering right over her, arms folded across their chest. “We’ve got an apartment, you know. Quiet spot. Big table. No vomiting or amputations or—”
“Too quiet. I can’t get anything done. Anyway, you’re my best sounding board.”
“You’re annoying my patients.”
“You have no patients.”
It’s true. Amidst the shelves of medicinal herbs and cheap blankets, a single person currently occupies the beds of the clinic’s upstairs ward. And Mihrimo Jens—peeled from the stoop of a taberna to sleep off his drunken stupor for the third time this week—doesn’t count.
Then the door to the tiny ward slams open, and a small rush of people bearing a barely conscious body comes pouring in. Ibdi, consummate fucking professional that they are, doesn’t even bother gloating. They don’t bother with Tair at all. Game face on, they’ve got a medical emergency to tend to, immediately barking at people to back up as they stride down toward the milling throng at the other end of the ward.
Clocking bo staffs and a familiar face or two, Tair sets the files onto the bed and moves to follow Ibdi. There’s a dour air about them, but that’s no surprise. Even before joining their ranks, she’s always known the Watchers to be a fairly grim bunch, especially after returning from patrol. But as Tair approaches, she catches sight of the young man they’ve set on the bed nearest to the door, and lets out a small cry of dismay. Because it’s not a man at all.
It’s Oyeli, who looks like they’ve been run down by a stampede of horses, cut and bruised and bleeding and cradling an arm bent at a gut-lurching angle. Oyeli, who Tair has tutored for the last two years because the matron at the children’s home makes her charges work for their room and board instead of attending school. Oyeli, who registered for their universitas entrance exams just this morning.
“Get her out of here,” Ibdi says to no one in particular, barely glancing up as they methodically cut the ruined tunic from Oyeli’s battered chest.
Tair ignores them, shrugs off the calm hand that reaches out to rest on her shoulder.
“What happened?” she demands, glaring from face to stoic face, feeling anger rise as she meets each of their eyes and finds only pity there. Hysterical, they seem to say. Still too green for the field. Well, frag that—she never wanted to be put out in the field in the first place, but she certainly isn’t hysterical.
“What,” she repeats, calmly, “happened?”
“Guess the Publica thought they fit a profile,” says a brusque voice somewhere to her left, and Jinni’s eyes hold no pity in them as she meets Tair’s. “Someone reported a Kirnaval panhandler in the Universitas District this morning. Know a tune to that song?”
“They weren’t panhandling. They were registering for entrance exams.”
Jinni shrugs. “I know that. The Publica knows that, probably.”
And she feels her rage die. Jinni has opinions on folks who stand out. It makes her job harder. Luxana Universitas holds two places open for plebs every year, though they usually go to the highest bidder. Perfect grades or no, Oyeli’s chances were never high to start. But this isn’t Jinni’s fault any more than it is theirs, and misplaced anger is an agent of catastrophe. It was one of the first things Tair learned when she first left Breakwater, and no matter what else she feels about Griff and Pa’akal and Theo and the rest, she takes it with her as a promise to herself. That at the crux of catastrophe and change, rage brings the former and focus brings the latter, and that she will always choose change.
“Okay,” she says, willing herself back to stillness as she inhales deeply through her nose. Focus. Change. Actionable steps. “How can I help?”
“You can’t. No case here, we sent them off. Which is lucky for you. I’m sure you’ve got your hands full as it is.”
“Um.” Tair slides slightly to the left, obscuring the mess of paperwork and law texts sprawled across the empty bed at the end of the ward. Jinni raises a brow, but doesn’t give any other indication at having seen it.
“Lucky you’re here,” she says instead. “I’ve got someone downstairs asking around for you.”
Well, that can’t be good. Her only friends are, as a general rule, all fellow Sisters. People with the clearance to just walk upstairs and find her if they need. Apart from that, she can only imagine Pa’akal back with another missive, or an agent of Breakwater who’s tracked her down, or . . . surely not another go-between demanding she turn over the Stone? They’re not supposed to meet for another four days.
“Oh, yeah?” she asks, in a voice she desperately hopes passes as casual, heart thumping inconveniently loud.
“Yeah,” says Jinni, turning back to the bed where Ibdi is now pressing their fingers gently along Oyeli’s side to check for broken ribs. “Found her wandering around updistrict picking fights with the Publica. Someone called Theodora ring a bell?”
• • •
There’s only one explanation for this, Tair reasons from outside the door to the second ward five minutes later, cruiseboard tucked under her arm. A thousand alternate scenarios had run through her mind on the brief jaunt down the stairs to get here, each more unlikely than the next.
Stupid. She’d been stupid to think that Pa’akal would be the end of it. Whatever Griff wants from her, assurances that she hasn’t been tattling on them to the Kleioses or no, Theo Nix is just about the last person she wants to talk to about it. Not after what she said to them five years ago, stuffing her bag with rations in her hurry to get away.
I don’t want this. I’m done following orders without knowing the reason why. Maybe you’re happy to trade one master for another, but I left for a reason.
Theo had punched her in the face.
She takes a deep breath, then another, pushes the door to the second ward open, and then goes very still. Because the young woman sitting on the edge of a neatly made bed, ankle elevated and wrapped with a compress, is most definitely not Theodora Nix.
It takes all of three seconds for her to look up, and Tair—caught, trapped in the squeaking doorframe—feels a hot flush rippling down her skin even as she wonders if she’s been turned to stone. No part of her body feels entirely real, because this is it.
This is how it ends.
This is how everything she’s built comes crashing down.
Dimly, stupidly, she wonders if Jinni and Pio and the rest will be able to make sense of her case notes without her there to explain them.
“Hi,” says Selah, quietly, and Tair lets the door close behind her. She doesn’t know what else to do. Every corner of her subconscious mind screams with instinct she has to clamp down hard on because those instincts are badmadwrong.
No one else is there. Either it’s a quiet night at the clinic on the whole, or this is all some kind of setup. The dramatic staged conclusion to Selah’s wild gull chase to track down her errant verna. The climactic scene where she gets to vent her fury and sorrow and frustration before dragging Tair back to Breakwater or sending her off to the Institute Civitatem for reeducation. But no, that’s not the Selah she knows. Dramatic, yes, but never cruel. Then again, five years can change a person. They’ve certainly changed her.
Suddenly she feels very tired.
She sits down.
“Hi,” she responds, and laughs.
She can’t help it. It bursts out of her like spit-up, a burbling giggle so unlike herself because how is this happening? Selah—here—with some sort of anxiety and joy written across her face like she wants Tair to reassure her that it’s okay that she’s here that she’s won that they’ve won that Tair’s lost. And she slams the bony backside of her knuckles against her mouth because it’s ridiculous to be smiling and then she decides she doesn’t actually care. She might not get to decide much of anything for a while after this.
Selah’s still looking at her, like she’s concerned for her maybe, but honestly that’s fair. “How—how are you?” she asks tentatively, her long neck thin and brown, and Tair laughs again.
“Good,” she says, and they could be out on a meridiem date. “How are you?”
“I twisted my ankle.”
“I can see that.” There’s a tear in her trousers where skin peeks through at the knee.
“I was trying to help someone . . .” Selah trails off, and Tair wonders if she’s looking for some kind of congratulations. “A boy. The Publica attacked him. They brought him in with me but I haven’t seen—”
“Not a boy.”
Selah flushes. “Sorry, a man—”
“Not a man.” And at her look of confusion Tair tries not to be too annoyed. Thremid is considered too backwater Sargassan to be recognized by the Romans and their rigid sense of gender binary, but that’s no excuse for ignorance when Selah has full access to a first-rate font of global knowledge. Thremed live undefined outside gender roles and concepts, and outside of the Arborem and Pantheon Park, they’re as common as the brick foundations of the city.
Tair, however, says none of this.
She’s suddenly very tired again, and aware of the energy in the ward in a way she hadn’t been sure she would remember. But the body knows. The body remembers. Remembers how to anticipate change. Remembers how not to fill the space, as if doing that would mean filling herself with too much to hope for. Remembers to be small. Remembers how to walk into a room and immediately case it, determine who’s there and how to put them at ease and walk the line of least danger. Remembers to discard that particular ineffable thing she once knew to carry only in private.
So she doesn’t laugh and she doesn’t say anything impertinent and she doesn’t look at Selah because the veil of a good dream is being lifted and she’s returning to the waking world. The body remembers.
It remembers more than that.
“Why?” Selah asks, quiet.
She does this. Asks things. Wants to get inside her like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like she doesn’t have to be invited in.
One syllable, a simple enough question. Loaded, certainly, but Tair doesn’t need to meet her gaze or ask for clarification to know the full weight of its meaning. She doesn’t answer, either. She just shrugs, gaze fixed on one of the larger freckles of her own left hand, because her tongue is still too heavy and unpracticed for anything but the truth. And the truth isn’t small.
The silence drags on, and Tair wishes that Selah would just say whatever’s on her mind and be done with it. She’ll have to sit there and listen to it either way, stubbornly ignoring the way her heart is doubling over on itself, and she can sense Selah’s restlessness, her frustration and her hurt and betrayal. She wishes she’d just spit it out already.
But instead Selah says this: “Jinni said this clinic is run by the . . . Sisters of the First?”
Now it’s not just her heart but her stomach that lurches while two universes collide. Abruptly, she finds her voice.
“They don’t know who I am,” she tells her quickly, urgently, the full implication of Selah’s words crashing down. She knows Jinni, by name. She knows the Sisters, by name. “Not really. They didn’t know they were harboring a fuga. They do good work here. You can’t—Please don’t turn them in.”
She expects this to be met by anger or disappointment or even some measure of satisfaction. Instead, Selah looks vaguely sick.
“I wouldn’t,” she says, horrified, reaching across the space between beds to take Tair’s hands in hers. Tair doesn’t pull them away, a sudden hot familiar pulse shooting up from where skin meets skin, but neither does she make any motion to grasp Selah’s in return. In spite or perhaps because of this, Selah squeezes them tighter. “Tair, I would never. You know I wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know that. You’d be within your rights. You own me.”
So then it’s Selah who releases her hands like a shock of static pulsed through them, and maybe she takes some degree of rotten enjoyment in that.
“I don’t own—” she begins, but Tair cuts her off, all thoughts of self-preservation out the window after the fashion they tend to go when Selah’s involved. That, she had forgotten.
“Your father died,” she says, and there’s no heat in it. It’s just true. “You’re paterfamilias. You inherited me. You own me—fine, whatever, you own my contract, it’s the same thing. And if things hadn’t gone tits up I would have been your client and you still would’ve fucking owned me, all niceties aside. So can we stop debating semantics?” And off her stunned face—“Oh, I’m sorry, did that hurt your feelings?”
Tair gets the distinct impression that Selah’s fighting to swallow the first response that comes to mind, and patiently waits for the second.
“Do you . . .” Selah starts. “Have you always felt that way?”
“No,” she responds, because she’s probably getting dumped at the Institute Civitatem as soon as they leave this place anyway. She might as well get it out now. “No, I haven’t. Things were supposed to be different for me, you know? I was a verna. I was an apprentice. I was going to be a client, and a citizen. And I wouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission after that, not for anything.”
Selah shifts slightly on the squeaking bed, uncomfortable. Good.
“We both were,” she points out, and although she isn’t eighteen anymore, Tair remembers that, too. We’ll go where we want, and eat what we want, and say what we want. And no one can stop us.
“And wasn’t that such a polite little lie. So respectable. You wanted to know the reason I left,” she says, standing again because she can and Selah can’t, ankle busted as it is, and the lack of space between them is too much. “It’s because I played by the rules. I did everything I was supposed to. And it still wasn’t enough. So I decided I was done.”
She can feel the tenor of her voice rising, and finds that she doesn’t much care. This anger is not pointless. It is not misguided. These are the lessons she had learned, long years and several lifetimes ago:
That she is the product of failure, last in a line of laziness and ingratitude and inability. That she, and she alone, is responsible for proving herself better than those who landed her at the bottom of the food chain. That if she is quiet and disciplined and polite, and keeps herself neat and clean and presentable, she can earn an apprenticeship. That if she applies herself in vigorous work and makes herself an asset and strives for no less than perfection, she can one day earn the freedoms of a client plebeian.
These are the lessons instilled in her through gentle words and harsher hands, and they are not the tools of survival and betterment she’d once been taught to believe by the stone-faced Mothers at the Servile Children’s Asylum or even by Gil Delena’s warm, approving smile.
Chains, all of them, cloaked in the lie of personal accountability. The tiniest slip and she was written off, because the truth is there is no difference. Vernae, servae, it didn’t really matter so long as patricians’ lives were easy and comfortable. She worked herself to perfection and still she wasn’t worth half the dignity and respect Selah takes for granted every day of her life.
“You know, the incredible thing,” she goes on, because now that she’s started it’s difficult to stop, “the amazing, awful thing I figured out after leaving . . . is that it’s more of the same out here. There’s freedom as a pleb, but it’s the freedom to work and fight and scrape your way to a better life, and yeah, you might manage to build some wealth, but you’ll never be patrician, and eventually someone down the line will mess up. Families keep cycling back down to rock bottom every couple generations, it’s just what happens. So even if things worked out the way they were supposed to, I was never special. I was just feeding the cycle.”
“That’s not true,” Selah sputters. “You deserved everything you worked for, you’re a fragging genius—”
“And that makes me better? Worth more?”
Selah opens her mouth to respond, then closes it just as abruptly.
“The Sisters of the First, this place . . . we fight back the best we can with education and food and housing and whatever else people need, but it’s not enough. The Imperium should be providing them with all of this, but they aren’t. Of course they aren’t. You people can only be tall when you’re standing on our necks, and one cog’s as good as the next as far as the great machine is concerned, right?”
It’s cruel, maybe, to mock Alexander Kleios’s oft-spoken words to his daughter when he’s so newly dead, but Tair can’t particularly bring herself to care. The man who owned her had been kind and soft-spoken, and her eyes are wide open.
If Selah takes offense, she makes no indication of it. Instead, she shifts, as if wanting to stand, to go to her, then realizing her twisted ankle can’t bear the weight. Tair doesn’t offer to help. Doesn’t notice the way she bites at her chapped lips.
Selah frowns at her foot for a long moment, then nods once sharply, evidently to herself. “I didn’t come here to bring you home,” she says, and gone is the soft, tentative voice she’s used since Tair walked through the door. It’s firm. Decided. Tair’s been expecting this, even before she decided to start yelling. She’s already resigned herself to several upcoming months of reeducation and half convinced herself that the horror stories she’s heard can’t possibly be true. What she isn’t expecting, however, is what Selah says next.
“What?”
She sits back down.
Selah shrugs, though her voice is strained. “Or leave. Do what you want, I don’t care. I mean, I do—of course I do—but I won’t tell anyone I’ve seen you and I won’t . . . visit . . . if you don’t want me to. If that’s how you feel.”
Tair gapes at her, certain this can’t be happening. “What’s the curb?”
“No curb,” says Selah, and now she’s the one who won’t meet Tair’s gaze, eyes locked firmly somewhere around her knees. “I just wanted to . . . see you. And ask what that is.”
She nods toward the frayed messenger bag set against Tair’s hip, the soft leather of the Iveroa Stone’s bindings just peeking out over the top. For the third time in an hour, Tair feels the floor drop out from under her.
“Just a book,” she says, shoving it down farther into the bag.
“Tair, you’re a terrible liar. I saw it.”
“Okay, fine. But I have no idea what it is. I’m just the middleman.”
The Stone had been exactly where the note had said it would be, looking exactly as described. A stone of deepest black and purest cut, two hands long and one hand wide, the depth of half a fingernail, and bound in old brown leather. It’s a curiosity, certainly, perhaps a relic of old Sargassa, before the Great Quiet. Tair doesn’t particularly care. She has other worries where the Stone’s concerned.
Only Selah’s looking at her now like she’s the one who’s lost the plot, and Tair has to hold back a slight laugh. “It was in your study,” she tells her. “Sitting on your desk. You’re telling me you don’t know what it is?”
“I’d only gotten it that night. I hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet.”
“Selah—”
“No, really. Gil had only just given it to me. From my dad. He . . . he wanted me to have it.” It sits between them, heavy, and Tair refuses to let herself feel bad about this. Then Selah musters herself. “If you’re the middleman, who hired you?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly hired . . . More like blackmailed.”
“No idea. They use go-betweens. Always different. But they know me. Who I was. Who I am.”
“What do they want it for?”
“Well, if I have no idea what it is, I can’t really know that either, can I?”
“Terra, I forgot you’re annoying.”
“Not as annoying as you.”
“Rude.”
“Reality drop.”
Selah flashes her a wicked grin, and the dam breaks. For a moment Tair is seventeen again, dancing on a crowded beach with steelstring music and moonmasks and a warm shared pulse between their bodies pressed together. But it passes quickly. Neither of them are young anymore.
Selah holds out her hand, palm open. Expectant. Tair stares.
“I did mention the part about blackmail, right?” Maybe she should be treading more carefully here, but somehow the solid compartment she’d managed to store Selah in with Them for so long has been cracked wide open. “I’m not giving it back.”
“What’s he got on you? This blackmailer.”
“Just my life and liberty.” She doesn’t mention her time—however brief—spent with the Revenants. “Other people’s, too. I’m supposed to hand it over in four days.”
Tair takes a steadying breath, looks Selah square in the eyes as she hasn’t the entire time they’ve been sitting here. She has to realize how serious this is. “Whoever this is, whoever’s blackmailing me. They know who I am.” She leans forward into the space between the two beds until she can see the gold flecks in Selah’s eyes. She smells like salt and road dust. She smells like tazine. “They knew I could get into Breakwater without being seen. That I could get this for them. They know who I am. And if I don’t give them whatever this thing is, they’re going to expose me as a fuga, and that is going to destroy this place and everything these people have built. And it’ll be my fault.”
It’s a leap of faith, because Tair doesn’t trust Selah with the whole truth. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But now that she’s here in front of her, and the animal instincts of fear and defeat and anger have passed over, Tair can remember who Selah is. The girl who runs barefoot in the streets. The girl who loves her brother. One of them, but not yet one of Them.
She’s closer now, but she can still come back.
Selah can’t know about Una, who spirited her away from Breakwater in the early hours of the morning as the fog crept in off the sea. She can’t know about Griff and Pa’akal and Theo and Izara, who hid her and trained her and counted her as one of their own for two months, until she opened her eyes and realized that the bad taste in her mouth wasn’t the violence or the creed that came with being a Revenant, but the blind obedience where their leader was concerned. Selah can’t know about any of that, or the link Tair creates between the Sisters of the First and the enemies of the state she left behind. How one word in the right ear and both the Revenants and the Sisters would be finished.
So, no, Selah can’t know these things, but maybe she doesn’t have to. Tair doesn’t trust Selah anymore, but she remembers who she is. The person who needs to save everyone else. She’s counting on that.
It takes a moment, a long stretched-out thing in which all those heavy truths sit between them:
One. Selah still holds the power here, could still change her mind.
But two. Selah still loves her.
Tair can see it, has seen it since the moment she stepped foot in the second ward. Proprietary, she had first thought, before Selah opened her mouth and reminded her who she is. Theirs is a history of stolen whispers and secret jokes and girlhood friendship grown into an all-encompassing ache. At seventeen Tair had thought that this could work—that she would rise in the world and neither would ever marry if they couldn’t cross caste lines and they could make this work. This, too, had been a polite, respectable sort of lie.
She deserves more.
Selah may not understand that. But she loves her, and Tair knows it. She uses it.
“Okay,” says Selah, as she knew she would. Only then—“Can I at least look at it?”
“Because I’m smart. And you’re brilliant. And between the two of us, I bet we can figure out what it is. Maybe even who’s blackmailing you. If you hand this over blindly, that won’t stop them coming back around the next time they need something from you.”
Tair hesitates, but she can’t drown out the voice in the back of her mind telling her that Selah’s probably right. And while she hasn’t spent much time looking at it, just wanting to hand it over and be done with this whole mess, she can’t deny there’s a part of her that’s been drowning in curiosity. The black stone is a mystery—as is its purpose, if it even has one. Aside from the perfect cut and the fact that some time ago someone thought to bind it in soft leather, the simple fact is that it’s otherwise unremarkable. It just doesn’t do anything.
Slowly, carefully, she slips the Stone from her bag.