Tair’s newfound optimism lasts all of fifteen minutes, about the time it takes her and Selah to enter the Seven Dials prefect’s office, realize that the line snaking up to the clerk’s desk isn’t moving anywhere fast, and promptly cut to the front.
“Suicide,” she repeats, again, frozen to the spot.
“Yes. As I’ve said. A sorry affair.” The clerk shuffles his papers importantly, and doesn’t sound sorry in the least. “Now, if there’s nothing else that requires such immediate attention that you cannot wait your turn to be called upon, I really do insist you return to the back of the queue and wait your—”
“I’ve been waiting. Xochitl Ontiveros did not commit suicide.”
The prefect’s clerk—a prim, fussy thing too well maintained to actually live in the district where he serves—blinks up at her, clearly unused to being contradicted, then draws himself up. “I assure you, miss, she did.”
Tair, already braced against the tall desk, takes full advantage of her height to stick her face up to the narrow service window, landing it six inches from the clerk’s.
At her side, Selah’s hands sit squarely on her hips, lips pressed in a worried thin line. “Where’s her body now?” she asks, and her voice is soft but firm, and furious as she is, Tair does see what she’s doing. “We want to see her.”
It’s not a takeover. Just a gentle nudge. A reminder about what gets results.
“I don’t know where the body is,” he sniffs, barely sparing Selah a glance. “Not at this precise moment. Perhaps if you both were to wait over—”
“What is even the point of you?” Tair hisses, taking her cue from Selah, low and deadly calm even as her back straightens and her chin rises in haughty arrogance. She’s spent a lifetime watching entitled patrician women get what they want, and Selah’s not the only one who can put on a show. “Get me someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“I hardly think—”
“Get me. The prefect. Now.”
Danger lives in her eyes, somewhere to the left of primal, a hair’s breadth away now from the clerk’s nose, but it’s probably more that no one’s ever spoken to him this way before. Either way, the clerk winces back in fear, then slumps off his stool and disappears through the door behind his desk.
Tair is vibrating, trying to keep her anger in check until the facts have been laid out to ascertain, trying to ignore the way her hands are shaking.
It makes no sense.
Xochitl, who had people working to get her free. Xochitl, who still thought Diana and Miro were alive somewhere. Xochitl, who knew something.
It makes no sense.
An assassinated Historian. A stranger in the shadows, blackmailing Tair for the Iveroa Stone. An ancient atlas and a quiet piece of solaric technology, both bearing the same unknown code. A missing alchemical scientist, who might be the only person alive who could plumb the Stone’s depths. And her daughter, the only lead to her disappearance, now murdered.
It makes no sense.
It makes all the sense in the world, if you let it.
A light touch lands on her upper arm and she flinches away, buzzing too far out of her own body for it, but Selah isn’t offended. Brow set, hands back on her hips, she’s in this fight, too. Dimly, Tair is aware of the growing murmurs around the cramped and humid lobby—the long line of visitors and petitioners catching wind of their business here, turning from annoyance and frustration at having been cut in line, now buzzing with the shock and disbelief and that certain cold thrill as the gossip chain travels.
Xochitl Ontiveros, dead.
Ontiveros? Like that clavaspher player?
Supposed to be getting a trial next week!
Orators all said—
Killed herself, that’s what the clerk just said.
Bullshit.
It doesn’t take a genius. The murmurs are growing angry.
If the prefect of Seven Dials is at all alarmed to walk into his lobby and find the hostile shifting of a waking beast, he doesn’t show it. Maybe he doesn’t even realize yet. Disdain, that’s the first thing she sees on his face when he comes through the door, his clerk wilting behind him. Disdain, and that snappish, brutal gait like he has better places to be. He’s a bulldog, she can smell it, sent here to beat them down until they know their place.
Tair pushes away from the desk as he comes around to her side. She wastes no time.
“Xochitl.”
“Pardon?” So inquisitive, so polite, but everything from his looming stance to his pristine navy duskra says you gotta be out of your Quiet-cursed mind. Maybe she is. She’s here anyway. He’ll have to reckon with that.
“My defen—my friend,” she catches herself. She can’t be a Sister here. Definitely can’t be a Watcher. “Who killed her?”
The prefect raises a single brow. “I’m afraid,” he says, lip curling, and savage Quiet he is enjoying this, “that I don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about. If you’d like to report a crime, the Cohort Publica are right next door. Now, I presume you have seen the good people behind you patiently waiting their turn, but Gaius here tells me you see yourselves above such petty rules. Surely you don’t think yourselves better than your neighbors?”
“No, I—”
“And surely you don’t need a quarter prefect to take time from his very busy schedule to school you in basic manners and decency?”
“You don’t—”
“And surely you didn’t think that threatening said prefect’s clerk would get you what you wanted?”
“Xochitl Ontiveros,” Tair snaps, finds her in, since she can’t take the Iveroa Stone out of her bag and use it to smack the patronizing smirk off the prefect’s face instead. “She died in your custody last night. Less than a week before her trial. Surely you remember that?”
For a moment she thinks he isn’t going to answer. But then his pinched expression smooths out into one of understanding. “Ah, yes. Of course. A terrible tragedy.”
“Your clerk, he said it was suicide.”
“Yes.”
“Hung herself.”
“Nasty business.”
“So I assume that whoever just happened to leave a rope in Xochitl’s cell is being suspended without pay while a full inquiry is being launched.”
The packed lobby is, by now, anything but patient, and she has to raise her voice to be heard over the din. But the prefect’s smile is back, small and nasty in its approximation of solemn understanding. “The general public, I’m afraid, aren’t privy to the internal workings of the Cohorts or the prefecture,” he tells her. And then, snapping around to his clerk—“Would you please see to this commotion?”
A jagged sort of shout from outside. People are starting to gather. The clerk hurries off—next door, probably, to corral the district Publica captain—and the prefect tries to sweep away again to wherever that back door leads, but Selah gets there first. One hand resting firmly on the little swinging gate between the lobby and the space behind the clerk’s desk, she stands firmly in his way.
“Is that really what you want to do, girl?”
Selah just shrugs, and cocks her head around the prefect at Tair. Your move.
“Xochitl’s trial was next week,” Tair says, and every word is aimed precise and razor sharp. “She was mounting a strong defense. She wouldn’t have killed herself.”
The prefect turns back to face her, clearly still deciding if he cares to take on two half-grown women by himself. With people spilling out now from the building into the street beyond, shouts and yells and the patter of dozens of frenetic footfalls, no one from the Publica is coming this way to give him a hand anytime soon. All the same, he sneers.
“I know what you are, Watcher,” he says, all pretense of snide contrition gone. “And if that girl had so little faith in the defense you people concocted for her that she fell into despair and took her own life . . . well. Whose fault is that, really?”
Tair does not remember having ever been this angry. Her skin is on fire with it. When the boys from the beach cornered her in that Boardwalk alleyway, that had not been anger. That had been panic and fear as she lashed out, then a willful ejection of consciousness from her body until they were done with her. When Gil came to tell her the sentence handed down by the court magistrate, that had not been anger either but a numb acceptance. Eighteen years had taught her well not to feel, not to rage, to instead go inward to that place where no one could ever touch her. Where what was secret could never be taken away. Five years of hiding her body as well as her soul was not enough to undo those lessons. Turns out that a single prefect is.
“You motherfucking piece of shit.”
Vaguely, she’s aware of Selah behind the prefect, eyes wide in awe, half caught agape in terrified elation at her words. Mostly, though, she’s zoned in on the prefect himself, that little smile on a pasty white face as if to say, Yes, that’s what I thought. A savage, uncouth crim.
No. You have no idea who I am.
“Are you proud?” she’s asking, but she’s floating somewhere three feet above, every inch of blood and flesh and bone and sinew ringing with sound and fury. “Are you the big man now? Did they let you into their little club?”
Selah is dragging her away, dragging her toward the door.
“Bet they didn’t, did they? And after you were so nice, making sure the nasty little girl stayed quiet. Making sure she wouldn’t tattle on your big friends.”
The prefect watches her struggle, that condescending smirk a fat fly she could slap right off his face. Savage fucking Quiet, Selah is stronger than she looks.
“How’d it feel, huh? Trading in an innocent woman’s life for some pointless clout?”
“Tair.”
They’re at the door. Tair is screaming.
“It must have been the best moment of your pathetic life!”
Outside, the crowd is buzzing, shouting overhead, gathering and dispersing as the Publica move through with their batons and swords, reforming once they’ve passed. Xochitl Ontiveros, some say. Murdered. Not some riffraff from the Third Ward or Sinktown, this is one of their own. A good girl from a good part of town. They’re furious. Not as furious as her. She wants to march back inside, to take advantage of the Publica’s distraction as the crowd turns to punch the prefect right in his perfectly manicured face. But Selah throws her arms around her.
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“Selah, let me go.”
From the moment the prefect’s clerk told them about Xochitl’s fate, Selah has let her take the lead. Stayed out of her way. This is not the moment she wants to go back on that. Now that Tair’s anger has been unstoppered, there’s no putting it back in. She’s out for blood.
But Selah doesn’t budge. “Listen to me—listen to me,” she pants, straining to hold her back. “Xochitl’s dead, Tair. She’s dead. You can’t do anything more for her now.”
“Bet? I can make him pay. I can make him feel pain,” she growls, and means it.
“And get yourself caught? Sent to the Institute Civitatem? To reeducation?”
“Worth it.”
“No.”
Selah pulls her around the corner, away from the growing mob, down into the trash-strewn alley that runs alongside the prefect’s office. She pins her there against the wall, a surprisingly strong hand braced against each upper arm. It’s bruising. Urgent. Tender.
“Tair,” she breathes, an inch away, and Tair tries to focus on the anger, tries not to notice the way her heart flips double on itself to be this near to touch to smell and she wants to scream something hoarse and primal, it’s all too much and it hurts. Fire crackles beneath her skin.
“She wouldn’t want this—” A gasp pulls out from nowhere, deep within her chest, and Selah’s grip loosens on her arms. They leave white fingerprints in their wake. They leave a chasm. “Okay? Xochitl would—not—want—this.”
Tair is shaking, cold and bereft and sinking fast to that secret place she knows too well, curling inward to where no one can touch her. “You don’t know that,” she says, and it comes out half a sob. “We didn’t know her.”
“No, we didn’t. But I still know what she would want you to do.” And then—“You can’t save Xochitl. Okay? I’m sorry, but you can’t. But you can still find her mother. Her brother. You can still help them. You can still do that.”
“How do we do that now?” she asks, and hates how hopeless it comes out sounding. How empty. “Xochitl’s dead. She’s dead, and she’s the only person who knew anything.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Selah says, solemn. “We have to go see Cato Palmar.”
“Are you spinning out? He won’t tell you—”
“No, I know. But if he really is behind what happened to Miro . . . if there’s even the smallest chance that Miro’s still alive . . . Miro’s our best bet to lead us to Diana. And if he’s alive, then that means we need to go see the Consul.”