Whatever he was expecting, this isn’t it. The woman who stands in front of them is about a foot shorter than Theo, and at least twenty years older. High cheekbones, slightly curling black hair, a dusk-warm face dotted with beauty marks and lined by laughter and worry both. A strung necklace of white and purple shell around her neck. Something about a hand resting on each hip, however, and the shrewdness in her gaze gives Arran the impression of being surveyed by a very small, somewhat stout hawk.
She’s nothing at all like the hulking shadows that swarmed his imagination when Theo told him they were going to meet the Revenant queenpin herself, but still somehow he can’t help but feel like a badly behaved child, standing shoulder to shoulder here with Theo in this bizarre below-ground shelter, waiting for the elementary schoolmaster to decide his lunchtime fate.
Griff purses her lips, then says, “Theo. Go.”
“Let me exp—”
“You disobeyed a direct order,” says Griff, and her voice is hoarse and low and lilting, like the ocean against gravel sand.
“I didn’t,” Theo snaps. “I didn’t tell him a thing. He figured it out on his own.”
“Did he?” she asks, unreadable, attention lingering for a moment on Arran in a way that makes him feel distinctly naked. “Interesting.” And then she’s back on Theo. “Wait outside.”
They look like they want to protest again, but Arran catches their eye and shakes his head. Griff will never respect him so long as he lets others fight his battles. One last, lingering look, and Theo disappears again up the stairs and back out through what Arran had initially thought to be a cellar door.
If this is a cellar, it’s the strangest one he’s ever been in. Set deep in the earth at the bottom of a winding staircase, past a series of solid locked doors of not-concra and not-stone. And here, inside—a few mismatched pieces of furniture. A rickety wooden shelving unit stocked with meager supplies. And, strangest of all, solaric lighting overhead. He’s seen solarics before, of course—those prized lamps Dad kept in his study. Solarics are eccentric collector’s items, highly regulated by the Imperium. Not something you find in a place like this.
Arran would linger on this longer if it were anything but his life hanging in the balance.
“Here,” says Griff, gesturing to a folding wooden chair. “Sit.”
He does, and is aware of his heart hammering in his chest. Aware of the wooden chair and Griff’s plusher one, and the two blue mugs and pot of tazine sitting on the table. He’s not stupid, and he knows how this could go. He knows about Fagan and Enyo, reporting to her Fornia cell on the inner workings of the fort at Teec Nos Pos and Enyo’s father at the Ministerium of Defense. He knows about Griff and Theo, and that they’ve got their sights on this Iveroa Stone, whatever in the savage Quiet that actually is. The point is, if Griff really doesn’t want him here, he’ll never leave alive. He knows too much. And even if she decides to let him live, he still has a gamble of his own to make.
So he takes the opening gambit on himself. “You’re not what I expected.”
“No?” She pours, and doesn’t look up. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. I just thought you’d be . . . different.”
“Older?”
“Meaner. Scarier. Ugly face. Maybe a couple warts.”
Humor is a familiar friend for unknown ground, but he isn’t expecting Griff to honest-to-Terra laugh. Something in Arran’s solar plexus doubles on itself from the thrill of it, as the most wanted woman in Roma Sargassa hands him a cup of tazine. The drink smells of wild mint and almond. It’s thick and warm and tastes of spiced oats. It tastes familiar. Like something he might have had a hundred times before, only it’s really just been once. It’s the same as Theo’s tazine.
“So,” says Griff, setting her cup down. “Let’s be honest about this. I don’t want you here, and Theo knew that when they decided to bring you in all the same.”
“They must’ve known that once you met me in person, you wouldn’t be able to resist my winning qualities.”
“You’re funny. Theo didn’t tell me you were funny.”
He tips a salute. This might actually work.
Might.
Griff leans back and peers at him over steepled fingers, again leaving him with the distinct impression of being assessed. “So they’ve put me in a hard place here. I could kill you, but I try not to be in the business of murder when it’s avoidable.”
“And my father wasn’t?”
There it is. A suicidal move. Out in the open, and impossible to take back. For a long, drawn-out moment Arran just stares at her over his mug of tazine, knowing that if she owns up to it, their business here is done.
Theo said it wasn’t them. They said it wasn’t Griff’s way. They said that he was dead when they arrived at the Archives that first rainy morning of the hurricane. And he doesn’t think they’re lying to him, exactly, but he also knows enough to understand that Theo isn’t always privy to the big boss’s plans. So he needs to hear it from the woman herself.
There’s no way to read the expression on her face. Considerate, maybe, but mostly just blank. And then—“I didn’t kill your father, Arran.”
“The Intelligentia think you did.”
“The Intelligentia are poorly named.”
“Theo told me you were there, that morning. When he died.”
“And did they tell you he was already dead when we got there?” Griff’s voice lowers dangerously, and Arran’s spine meets the back of his chair. “Parcae,” she says. “An awful death. I was there, I admit that much. I was first on the scene. But I did not kill him. And I didn’t order his death, either. I wouldn’t have done that unless I had no other choice.”
Arran should stop, he knows this. But he can’t help the challenge in his voice. “If you didn’t do it, then who did?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” Her voice is light again, but forcefully so. The finality of someone not used to having her status questioned nor her orders rebuked. It reminds him of Naevia.
Arran’s heart is still hammering in his chest, a million new questions running through his mind, but Griff is already moving on. “Now that we’ve cleared that up,” she says, picking up her tazine again. “It’s not you that I’m against, per se. I don’t even know you. But I fear for your distraction. Yours and Theo’s. But we’re beyond that now—you’re here, and I see no reason to kill a willing volunteer. So I have one question for you.” She peers at him across the small table, piercing gray eyes dark as a storm. “Why?”
It’s a fair question, but he swallows hard, because he never expected to get this far.
Why, indeed.
He’s not a radical—hadn’t been, anyway, until this last year or so when Fagan and Enyo stormed into his life and made him realize just what was possible. He’d never been allowed to be, before that. Never had Selah’s luxury of jumping in defense of what she believes is right. The only time he’d even come close was with his father, the very last time he saw him alive, when Dad was refusing to let him reenlist. But that had been personal.
I belong to the familia, but I don’t belong anywhere else.
How do you explain something that no words have been created for?
You belong to the Imperium. That’s what Dad had said. We all do. We live for the many, not for ourselves. I’ve taught you this, so I can’t see how this sudden streak of willful individualism is my fault.
At least verna have a future.
It was a truth they’d avoided for years. Dad’s face had stormed over.
You really think you’d have preferred that?
Maybe. No. I don’t know. I just—
The difference is more than a legal fiction, Arran. His voice had been terrible and rising as he had never heard it before. If you think I ever would have allowed that. . . . My son. My firstborn. In my own home—
You allowed his mother.
It had taken Arran less than an hour to pack up and leave.
So there was that. His first foray into admitting what he has always known to be true, and simply felt too small to do anything about. That his father was wrong. That under the Imperium, no one lives for the many. Patricians live for themselves, in this playground they’ve built over the course of three thousand years. Anyone else is just existing for their benefit. He knows this. He’s always known it. So he opens his mouth, and he tells her exactly that.
Griff says nothing, not at first. Then she stands, and Arran stiffens again, because he’s good at reading people, but this woman is impossible to get a handle on. This was a test, and he has no idea if he passed it.
But then she’s walking over to the corner of the small cellar, to a second door he’d briefly noticed when he first came in. She unlocks the door and pulls it open with a heavy creak. “Come with me.”
It’s another staircase. Going down. He takes a breath and follows, descending into the dark.
Winding and twisting left, then right, then left again, and Arran thinks that maybe other landings shoot off here and there, but he can’t see a godsdamn thing. He’s keeping balance with one hand solid against the concra wall, but from the steady pace of steps ahead of him he thinks that Griff must know this place like she knows the lines of her own hands. Finally, they come to a stop in front of another solid door, and he wonders if maybe this is where she kills him.
She knocks once, quiet but firm, and then twice more. A man’s voice answers, hushed and harried. “What do you want?” he asks. “Who is it?”
“A friend.”
The room within is dark, and cramped, and smells of burnt flesh and orange peel. Arran only just stops himself from gagging, eyes watering as they adjust to the scene at hand. Candles and incense account for the dim light and scent of citrus. Aside from him and Griff, three others occupy the room. A dark-skinned woman lies facedown on a long, sturdy table at the center, sweat and tears running in mingled salty tracks down her cheeks. A man sits by her side, her brother maybe, holding her hand. And the third . . .
Another man stands over the woman, deep in concentration, the searing-hot metal rod in his hand chiseling thin lines into the delicate flesh of her skin. The whole room seems to inhale as one as he lifts it away, before quickly dipping it into the jar of crimson red ink at his elbow, then tapping it neatly into the wound. He sings as he works, voice soft and low and rich, and somehow just for her. And in spite of the smell, in spite of the pain, Arran feels that he’s intruding on something very private. Something intimate. Something he hasn’t earned the right to see.
He glances at Griff, but her gaze is steady on the tattoo process before them, and he senses that he’s meant to watch. So he does. Watches the way the woman’s brother bends his head to murmur something in her ear, and she can’t help but smile through the pain. The way the tattooist seems to breathe in on the lift of the heated rod, beginning a new phrase or stanza of his song in tandem with a new line of burning ink. The way the woman’s breath synchronizes in with her tattooist’s, in then out, as though they could have been one being.
It’s only when the woman’s hand goes limp in her brother’s, finally passed out from the pain, when the tattooist glances up at them and nods, that Griff speaks.
“Ever seen a singer work before?” she asks Arran quietly.
“I—a what?”
“A singer. More than an artist. More than a medic. Someone who can guide you through the pain of the process. Ody here is one of the best.”
“No,” he admits. “But I don’t see why you’d bother doing it this way. It looks excruciating.”
“Sometimes a little pain is the price you pay for avoiding more. You haven’t spotted it?”
This time, Griff’s already looking back at him when he glances her way, smiling in that vaguely knowing way, and his stomach flips. She nods him toward the woman on the table, and now that Arran knows to look for it, everything about this place makes sense.
The brand at the base of the woman’s spine is tiny—barely noticeable, really. An encircled X with three dots below. Long since healed, it bumps up along the skin of her lower back, the customary place for such a marking. But sitting just above is a second brand, slightly larger this time, and definitely uglier—a crude, geometric eye.
Arran doesn’t know who these sigils belong to, but he knows as well as anyone what they mean—that she’s been contracted more than once in her lifetime, bad news to begin with, and should she try to run away the Publica will know exactly where to return her. Ear cuffs are easy to take off, if you have the right tools. Brands less so. But while the singer Ody hasn’t made it down to her lower back yet, Arran can only imagine that the cauterizing effect of the burning ink will be enough to do away with the history etched in her skin.
“It’s not a bad precaution for plebs, either,” says Griff, as though he were shouting his thoughts instead. “Harder to get nabbed off the street when you’re covered in something that says you already belong to yourself. Makes you a bad target for Publica looking to turn a couple ceres on the side.”
“So,” he says, quiet, “this is where servae go to disappear.”
“Vernae, too. Your friend Tair was on that table a few years ago.”
“She—she was?”
“Of course she was.”
Arran feels ill. He had always liked Tair. She’d been Selah’s friend. Gil’s apprentice. His own schoolmate for a handful of years. He had known, on an intellectual sort of level, that Breakwater’s servae staff must bear the familia sigil. But he hadn’t known that she, a verna, was branded. He certainly wasn’t. The thought is sickening, but he has to let himself sit in it. The idea of the Kleios sigil—that eight-point sun, so cleanly sealed on his identification card, the proud, rich lineage of all that knowledge and history and his father—burnt into the flesh of his own skin . . .
And then he remembers something else. White linen sheets and the bronze length of their bare back, warm to the touch as he drew his fingers along ridged paths of abstract aqua.
“Theo,” he says. “Theo’s been here, too.”
“Mm. Took them ages to agree to go underground again. Would’ve taken me longer. Nine years down there, it’s a wonder they’re so damn cheerful all the time.”
“Underground?” He frowns. “Wh—”
“That’s not my story to tell.”
“Then why are you telling me any of this?”
“You asked.”
The woman on the table, Ody the singer bent in dedication over his work. Tair. Theo.
“Because,” she says, ripping her gaze from Ody and his charge to level Arran with steady dark eyes, and the gravel in her voice is more like grit, “if you’re really with us, there’s a cost. You can’t be fighting for yourself. Or for Theo. Or for me. This is bigger than any one person, and if you don’t commit and fight just as hard as that woman on that table is fighting right now, then you’re useless to everyone.”
It’s not unkind, somehow, and he does understand. Cogs in the great machine. We live for the many, not ourselves. Dad taught him how to do that.
And here’s the thing. Arran had come down here with every intention of bargaining his way into this fight, but he had one final concession for Griff to make.
Leave Selah out of it.
The instinct screaming out to protect his little sister hasn’t shut up since Theo first said her name. Selah’s twenty-two, paterfamilias, the Imperial Historian. Irrelevant. She’s still a kid, basically, and Arran isn’t letting her anywhere near the danger inherent wherever the Revenants go. Because he knows her. He knows the maddening combination of justice, ego, and loyalty that drives her every action, more often than not without waiting to think the consequences through. Her forays into equal-opportunity education at Luxana Universitas and the Imperial Archives are child’s play compared to what Theo and Griff want her to do, and given half the chance, he knows that she’ll say yes.
They want access to the Archives? He has that. He can get whatever they need. This Iveroa Stone, whatever it is, he can find where Selah’s stashed it and take it for the Revenants himself. She never has to be involved.
That was the plan, anyway.
Standing here, next to Ody the singer, with Griff’s shrewd gaze upon him and her words ringing in his ears, he realizes now how selfish that plan was. The words die before they have the chance to reach his lips.
“Well,” Griff says. “Now that you can make an informed decision, I believe the options were clear?”
They certainly were. Join the Revenants and maybe die, or turn her down and definitely die. Arran breathes in, then out, and it’s not about hedging his bets, because he wants this. He’s wanted this since the day he realized the meaning behind Fagan’s scrawled missives littered in code at the bottom of the bunk’s wastebasket. Since the first time Julian Aleida pretended not to know who he was. Since the moment he learned his mother killed herself rather than raise an unwanted child. He wants to do this because this is right, and he’s not afraid of death.
At least now he has a reason to live first.
“Good,” says Griff, grasping his hand in hers. It’s warm and calloused, and there’s a strange grim light in the depths of her eyes as they seem to search across his face. Despite himself, Arran shivers.