Nova
I’ve been looking at his face for five hours.
I didn’t want to. I didn’t have a choice.
When you’re on your knees with your hands tied behind your back and nowhere else to be, you end up memorizing things you’d rather not.
Like the pause before each question. The way his mouth moves when he’s deciding how much to reveal. The smile that means nothing at all.
My knees stopped hurting a while ago.
He’s asking about my parents again. He keeps circling back to my parents like eventually I’ll crack open and hand him something. What I remember. What they told me. Whether they mentioned — and here the pause — certain things. Certain places.
I don’t fill the pause.
Why would I tell him anything. They’ve taken everything. I have nothing left to trade and nothing left to protect and no reason on earth to give this man a single word.
And some of it I genuinely don’t know. I was eleven. I have fragments. A smell. A light in a room I can’t fully picture anymore. I don’t know what’s real and what I built to survive it.
I’m not going to explain that to him.
He asks another question. I hear him talking but I’m not even trying to make out the words.
I think about them.
The way I was drawn to them from that first moment. Standing in that doorway looking at Locke for the first time and forgetting how breathing worked. Not because of what he looked like, but there was that too. But because something in me knew before my brain had any say in it at all.
Rane talking too much at dinner and somehow it was the most comfortable sound I’d ever been inside.
Vaelor’s hands. How careful they always were. How he never once made it feel like charity.
Beckett in the hallway, not asking for anything. Or when I took that single step toward him before I decided to. And that quiet — I didn’t know you could feel quiet inside your own head. I didn’t know it was something a person could give you.
Kyron’s arms carrying me down a street and never wanting him to put me down.
Trey’s mouth. The weeks I spent not thinking about it and then the moment I stopped pretending and thought about nothing else.
All of it. The pull toward all of them, from the very first day, before I had any idea what it was. Before I understood what I was walking into.
I understand now.
“Answer me.”
His voice, sharp. Close.
I jerk.
He’s leaned forward. Right in my face, and I didn’t hear him move. His composure has a crack in it. Small, but it’s the first one I’ve seen.
I look at him. Look back at the wall.
He sits back. Smooths his jacket. I’m pretty sure I can see the wheels turning inside his head at this point.
“The marks,” he says. The words sound calm but there’s impatience underneath.
“The men in your cluster — their House marks don’t change.
That is not something that happens. That has never happened in four centuries of documented bonds.
” His jaw tightens. “You’re doing something to them.
Consciously or not. And I need you to tell me what. ”
I think about Rane’s wrist. My mark there, no longer dream.
“The phoenix.” He tries a different angle. Leaning back. Casual, almost like he’s not coming apart on the inside. “I know what you are. I have a very detailed account. I’m not asking you to tell me something I don’t know — I’m asking you to confirm it. That’s all. Just confirm it.”
I breathe through my nose.
“Your parents.” And again with the parents… “They came to someone when you were a baby. Looking for answers. They were frightened and they loved you and they made choices trying to protect you.” He pauses. “I wonder if you know what those choices cost.”
Nothing and screw him for thinking he can hold them over my head like that.
“How did you find the Hollow.” He’s procedural now.
The questions coming faster. “Who told you it existed. How did you get there. What are they building. Who helped you.” Each question tight against the last. “What do you know about the marks. What do you know about what you are. Why did your cluster form the way it did. Who has been helping you.”
I blink. Once. Each time his face gets too close.
He stands up abruptly.
Walks to the far wall. Stands there for a moment with his back to me.
When he turns around the composure is mostly back. Sort of.
“Do you know how long we have maintained this system.” His voice is different now. Something underneath it that wasn’t there before. “How much work. How much — management. Separating Houses. Controlling proximity. Ensuring that certain configurations never —” He stops. Jaw tight.
Starts again.
“Your cluster should not exist.” Not the way Silas said it with contempt and disgust. This is something else.
Genuine. Almost bewildered. “A cross-House cluster of this size — this composition — we have spent generations ensuring it was not possible. Two Houses at most. Controlled. Documented. Never —” He stops again.
He’s just told me something.
He knows he’s just told me something.
The mask comes back down. Smooth and immediate.
But I know he’s said too much.
“Perhaps some time alone will change your mind about talking.”
He’s at the door.
“I’d think very carefully about continuing this act of defiance.”
He leaves.
I sit on the floor in the too-clean room with my knees gone numb and my wrists burning.
He spent generations making sure a cluster like ours couldn’t happen.
He failed.
I’m not sure it matters anymore.