Selah takes the leather-bound tablet, its soft bindings worn and newly familiar beneath her fingers. She flips the cover open. Its surface is just as she remembers, dark and ominous and just reflective enough that she can make out her own murky profile in its depths. There’s a small circle carved at the bottom, another rune within—the eight-point Kleios sun, just the same as the one stamped on her patent of identity, or on the solaric lamps sitting in Dad’s office.
“This is irradium,” she says quietly, a little jolt at the realization. “Solaric technology.”
Tair nods. “It’s called the Iveroa Stone.”
That, at least, explains the sun. It belongs to the Kleios familia, but they did, after all, used to be Iveroas once upon a time.
She runs the pads of her fingers along the black, gleaming Stone, worrying her nails over the grooves at the edge. It’s a curiously cool and heavy thing, and Selah rests one hand beneath the soft and supple leather, runs a finger down to the sun etched at the very bottom, brilliant and delicate and fine. She’s all too aware of Tair, cross-legged on the rickety bed across from her, leaning forward into the space between them, and the air in the room goes thin and tense as it had been in the minutes before they achieved this uneasy truce.
Dad wanted her to have this, specifically. He made sure Gil kept it secret, the same as the old atlas now safely hidden away in her bedroom. He said that it was classified. There has to be a reason why.
So it isn’t instinct. Not exactly. If anything, it’s a recent muscle memory of black irradium just like this, those lamps in Dad’s study that he prized so deeply. She draws her pointer finger down until the pad catches in the little circle, secure and right and a perfect fit, somehow, just nestled in the center, and she lets it linger there for just a moment. Then she presses in.
Nothing happens.
Selah frowns and presses again, jams her pointer against the black stone. Nothing.
The air around them seems to slump.
Tair leans back with a disappointed huff, while Selah lets out a breath she wasn’t entirely aware that she was holding. Chewing at her lip in frustration, she flips the Stone over, but there’s nothing but battered leather. She doesn’t know what she expected to happen, exactly—the vibrance of solaric beams washing the little clinic ward in artificial sunlight, probably, for all that the Iveroa Stone bears no resemblance at all to the bulbs in Dad’s office. She flips it back over, irradium-side up.
“Give it up, Selah. It’s busted.”
Tair sticks out her hand, expectant, to take the Stone back. Selah ignores her. “Solarics can’t die,” she points out instead.
“Yeah, but they do need exposure to the sun to work. That thing’s probably been sitting in the dark for too long, ran out of whatever makes it tick.”
That is, to be fair, a good point. Selah idly flips the Stone over once again, the turning of it in her hands half curiosity, half a measure against frustration, but this time her thumb catches on something new at the base. There, impossibly small and etched into the thinnest side of the irradium stone, barely a quarter inch tall—a single word. Well, what looks like a word, anyway.
Squinting against the ward’s dull light, Selah can’t make out what it says. Or perhaps, more to the point, can’t make out what it means. As far as she can tell, it’s a string of some sort of glyphs, and certainly none that she recognizes or understands.
“These mean anything to you?” she asks, handing the Stone back over.
Tair smooths a thumb across the glyphs etched into the stone, staring hard. “No,” she admits at last. “Never seen anything like it before.”
“Well, there has to be something,” Selah says, frustration ripping from her center in waves she’d hardly realized were building there. “Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. Someone’s threatening you over this and we need to know why.”
“No. No, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all.” She didn’t quite realize how upset the idea makes her, not until this moment. Because she understands loss now, in a way she never could before, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to lose Tair for good this time. “Give me three days.”
Tair frowns. “What?”
“You have to hand over the Stone in four, right? If we can figure out what it does, why my dad gave it to me, why they want it before then . . . just give me a few days to poke around.”
“And what if you end up finding something that changes your mind?” Tair slides the Iveroa Stone back into her rucksack, quickly like Selah might grab it from her hands.
“If so,” Selah says, forcing herself to look into Tair’s eyes so she can see that she’s telling the truth, “then we decide how to move forward. Together.”
There’s a long, stretched-out moment in which Tair leans against the bedpost, critical gaze still landing hard and inscrutable on Selah in her red and gold duskra. An owl hoots faintly somewhere in the dark outside beyond.
At long last, she nods.
“Okay,” Tair says. “We can start tomorrow.”
“We?”
“We,” she confirms, and a treacherous burst of warmth spreads through Selah’s chest as a wry smile grows across Tair’s face. “You really think I’m letting the Stone out of my sight?”
• • •
It isn’t hard, getting back to Breakwater. Selah waves off Jinni Jordan’s offers to stay the night, knows Mima’s going to rain down Quietfury on her as it is for having snuck away again. Instead, she accepts the cheap wooden crutch the medic Ibdi offers and hobbles slowly out of Sinktown, awkward on her wrapped ankle. A straight shot north through the narrow end of the Regio Marina gets her into Seven Dials, and from there it’s easy enough to catch a litter back to the Arborem.
There’s a large rotunda on the estate grounds, built white and tall and columned to imitate antiquity. It sits just off the peninsula, right up against the shoreline where high shale cliffs shoot down to the rocks below. On a clear day you can see for miles. Right now, there’s nothing but the all-encompassing dark, tiny pinpricks of light from Breakwater House shining up on the peninsula ahead. But she can’t bring herself to return to its suffocating walls. Not just yet.
The cigarette between her lips flares hot and bright in the black sea breeze.
Tair is alive. Tair is alive. Tair is alive.
There’s no reason this should surprise her this much, except that Selah had half begun to believe she’d been seeing things. That night in the Hazards, blood pumping, leg muscles seizing. She had been thinking about Tair all day. Her mind could have easily tricked her into seeing what she wanted to see.
But it didn’t. She knows now that it didn’t. She had the tangible proof, barely an hour ago, sitting mere inches away and bombarding her with all sorts of accusations of ownership and you people. Desecrating the sacred memory of an entire joint childhood, as though Selah hadn’t been there, too, hadn’t been there with her for every cruiseboard fall and every dressing down from Gil and the first time the two of them got supremely, spectacularly drunk off contraband whisky from Dad’s liquor cabinet—and she knows this isn’t fair. Tair can’t suddenly decide that no, this actually happened this way and that wasn’t actually okay, because Selah knows how it happened. She was there.
It’s not just the words. It’s the bitter taste enfolding them.
She’s never heard Tair sound like that. More than anything, this is the reason it hasn’t hit until now. The anger. The confusion. The way she would make it make sense if she could, how Tair is both still so herself yet someone else entirely. Loyal to a fault. Razor-focused in the meticulous choosing of her words. Still unable for the life of her to keep her thoughts off her face. All the familiar shadows Selah knows to look for, contained inside a woman who has long outgrown the girl she once was. Faded scars and grown-out hair is nothing compared to the black tattoos that now snake up along Tair’s arms, a challenge saying, Look at me. Look at the history etched in my skin. I am here. I exist. What do you know about the complicated and unpredictable agony of being alive?
Everything. She knows everything about it, because she was there, too. She was there the day she came between Tair and those boys on the beach, barreling into a delicate dance of power and ego without the slightest idea of how far that ripple effect would stretch. She’s put herself on trial every day since, trying to do better, trying to make up for the random chance of her own privilege. She isn’t the same person she was five years ago, either. And Tair hasn’t been here to see it. Tair left.
It’s unfair, that thought. She does know that. Tair doesn’t owe her anything, least of all a congratulations for doing the bare fragging minimum. It burns in her chest all the same, hot and thick, flaring and twisting and ugly and bursting to get out.
She takes another drag of the cigarette.
Selah hears them before she sees them, and she’s really not in the mood. Emerging from the dark, the day’s dust sits in Arran’s hair and clings to his boots, the real Theodora Arlot’s hand held loose in his. Vaguely, Selah thinks she probably shouldn’t be as surprised by that development as she is. Given the . . . well, everything else of the last few days, she’d completely forgotten about that. Or maybe just hadn’t assumed it had a shelf life longer than the one night. Arran’s never been the type for actual relationships.
He stops short at the sight of her. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“That,” she answers, and exhales a long furl of smoke, “is your job. Hi, Theo.”
“My lady,” Theo says, brows raised high. “You gave us a good scare.”
Arran, on the other hand, says nothing. He stomps straight up into the rotunda, grabs the cigarette from her mouth, and chucks it into the night. Up close, she realizes that he is vexed.
“What the frag, Arran?”
“Where have you been?”
It’s harsh, a bark, and Selah blinks because she doesn’t think Arran’s talked to her like this since she was about eight, trailing after him and Julian Aleida with plaintive appeals to please let her come, too. But she made a promise and she’s not going back on it, no matter how conflicted her feelings may be. She’s not going to tell anyone about Tair. Not even Arran.
“None of your business,” she mutters, and slides off the ledge.
“Actually,” he replies, “it is my business. It’s absolutely my business. Because I just spent all day looking for you.”
“Well, no one asked you to do that, so . . .”
His nostrils flare, and immediately she knows she’s made a mistake.
“Dad is dead, Selah.” Each word is low and clearly enunciated, as though he is speaking to a small child, as though this is somehow brand-new information. “Do I really need to spell that out for you? He’s dead, murdered, and we don’t know why. So when you go missing like that, people are going to worry.”
“I just needed some space, all right?” There’s a testiness growing beneath that flick of annoyance. A warning. Arran, of all people, isn’t someone who should be lecturing her about responsibility. Theo, she notices, has by now disappeared back into the night. Probably the smart move. Theo and Arran may have gotten themselves involved somehow, but this is family business. This is private.
“You could have been kidnapped, or killed, or worse—”
“Fragging ice,” she snaps. “You sound like Mima. You’re all crowding me. All the time. I can’t hear myself think. I can’t even breathe—”
“You are so unbelievably selfish.”
Selah laughs. There’s no humor in it. But the irony is too good. “Oh, right,” she says, leaning against the rotunda pillar because her ankle hurts, dammit. “So when I do it, I’m being selfish, but when you take off for two weeks without so much as a goodbye, we’re all supposed to nod and understand and ‘give you the space you need.’ Right. Got it. That’s totally fair.”
“Fuck what’s fair.” Arran’s voice echoes around the rotunda, and Selah takes a shocked, unintended step backward. “If I take off, no one gives a shit and you know it. But you . . . savage Quiet, you have no concept of accountability—”
“Get off my dick, Arran.”
“—and you have no idea what you almost did tonight.”
“And what was that? Keep you from getting laid?”
He looks like he could slap her. Good. She’s done with people standing around pelting her with unfounded accusations of what a terrible person she is, when all she’s done for years is try to do better by them.
But he doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even look at her. And vexed off as she is, Selah thinks she understands.
Once, when she was twelve and Arran sixteen, they had gone to the cliffs overlooking Purgatory Chasm. Tair hadn’t been allowed to come. Summer was in its first, glorious hour, and the Arborem’s teens had turned out in full. Arran had broken off from her immediately to go sit with Julian and the other boys, even though Mima had asked him to watch her. But Selah hadn’t cared. She was twelve. She didn’t need a nanny. She’d spent the day with her friends, drinking cold fizz and challenging each other to handstand competitions and trading taunts with the Boardwalk kids over across on the public side of the chasm. Then Cassia, her then-best friend when Tair couldn’t be there, had suggested they make their way down the sloping rock face toward the open water’s edge. Selah had done her one better.
She hadn’t thought that the jump down into the chasm would be so short, or the water within so shallow. Dark blood blossomed in generous ripples from her ruined shins as screams rang out from the teenagers high above, echoing down along the narrow crevice in the earth to where she flailed in searing pain. And then nothing. Darkness. The next thing she knew, Arran was hauling her up the sloping rock face, and then he was yelling at her like he had never yelled at her before, tears indistinguishable from salt water.
That night, huddled together beneath his heavy blankets, he admitted to her he’d thought she was dead. That Mima would blame him for not watching her. That she’d think he had done it on purpose.
So she understands that this isn’t anger. Not really.
“You’re not responsible for me,” she tells him, still hot, because he’s her big brother and she loves him for it, but she’s an adult now and he is overreacting. “I understand why you went looking, but that was your choice. Not mine.”
Arran still won’t look at her. He works the muscle in his jaw, shakes his head like he’s holding back what he wants to say, and Selah wishes he’d just say it so they can be done with this already. Savage Quiet curse her ankle for not letting her walk away.
The corner of his lip curls, and it’s not a smile. “You had a sentry.”
“What?”
“Linet. Your sentry.”
“Yes. I know. What about her?”
“Linet, who we borrowed from the Institute Civitatem.”
“I know.”
A growl of frustration escapes Arran, almost disbelieving. Selah doesn’t think that’s entirely fair—of the two of them, she’s not the one talking in cryptic circles, and for the life of her she can’t see where this is going.
“If something happens to you,” he asks, “what do you think happens to her?” The slow, deliberate way in which he’s speaking to her—like she’s a child, like she’s stupid—makes her want to scream. All the more so because he isn’t wrong. Not in theory, anyway. Selah’s actions still ripple, the same as they did for Tair, and she knows this.
“Well, nothing did happen to me,” she says, because even if it did, she has the power now to protect the people under her roof. Linet will be perfectly fine.
“Yes, but if—”
“I know.”
“You can’t be this irresponsible. You’re head of the familia now, that means—”
“Yes. I am. I am head of the familia.” He has to stop, she needs him to stop. Arran isn’t Gil, and he’s not their father, and she knows, she does, she knows it better than any of them could ever comprehend. “I know what it means,” she hisses. “So stop lecturing me. You don’t get to do that anymore. I’m paterfamilias, and you’re a fragging client. I’m in charge. Not you. Me.”
She regrets it the second she says it. The petulant little sister that never really went away came back to rear her bratty head, to grasp at whatever she could to make him stop. But what she had grasped was ugly, and true, and there’s no way to take those words back. No way to undo the way that Arran pulls back from her as though just seeing her now for the first time—struck dumb for that one awful, dragging moment before the shock and hurt is neatly put away behind a smooth, blank canvas.
Raw guilt curdles in her spleen. “I didn’t mean . . .”
But he shakes his head. Don’t.
There are shouts coming down from Breakwater House now. Flickers of lamplight growing closer. Someone—someones—are coming this way.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he says, throwing her one last look. “You’re in charge. So act like it.”