Chapter 15
My fingers would not quite stop shaking.
I tucked them into my sleeves before the walls I kept imagining were watching me could get any ideas.
The room was cold in the dull, thorough way it had been cold since I arrived. The wool blanket sat at the foot of the bed. The basin waited in the corner.
I had one hand on my sleeve and one breath halfway in my chest when the basin lit.
So much for privacy.
Silver-white light moved under the water, bright enough to throw the rim’s shadow against the wall.
Words formed across the surface.
Verita.
Headmaster’s office.
Now.
No please.
No explanation.
No room for pretending I had been invited instead of ordered.
Quill, then. The next trial in an already trying day.
I sighed as the words dissolved into the water, then left Room 114 and took the south stair.
Halfway down, the Pull hit.
A struck match under rain.
Heat trapped close to the body.
The sharp, clean edge of effort held too long.
My hand closed on the stair rail before the rest of me had decided whether to stop.
Hale stood at the bottom of the south stair.
He looked as if he had come quickly and hated every visible sign of it. His shirt was tucked badly at one side. His sleeves were still down, but the fabric over his right forearm held a faint darkness where his Mark pressed against it from beneath.
My Mark answered.
Naturally, it chose that moment to be enthusiastic.
“Hale,” I said.
His eyes moved over me once, fast: wrist, shoulders, hands. The places a person checked when they were trying to decide whether someone had been hurt.
“Hello, Verita.”
“Did you run here?”
“I left the salle before the second hour began.”
I blinked in surprise.
Hale didn’t abandon a classroom full of students..
Until, apparently, me.
“Caswell saw too much,” he went on.
The words erased the joke I had been reaching for.
“Everyone saw too much.”
“Caswell matters more than everyone.”
He came up one step.
Just one.
The Pull sharpened anyway, sliding under my sleeve and through my wrist until the Mark seemed to wake beneath my skin.
“You felt it,” I said.
Hale’s hand tightened once on the stair rail.
“All the way from wherever you were.”
“Through two floors and half the south wing.”
I looked at the fabric over his forearm.
The darkness there had not faded.
“And you came?”
For a moment, he said nothing.
The corridor held too still around us.
“I came because I am out of better choices.”
That shouldn’t have disappointed me.
It did anyway.
“How romantic.”
“Astra.”
My name in his mouth pulled the air tighter between us.
My name in his mouth did not soften anything.
It steadied it. It made me want to run to him.
Which was a horrible feeling to have about a man you hardly knew.
“You need Juno before Quill gets you alone,” he said. “She’ll know what to do now.”
“And you?”
His gaze held mine too hard.
“I need you out of Caswell’s reach long enough for someone with authority to put words around what happened.”
For one second, I thought he might touch me. His hand shifted at his side, then stopped so completely I felt the stop more than the movement.
“You’re very disciplined, Instructor Hale,” I said because I wanted to touch him too and it was no easier for me to resist.
His eyes went to my mouth before he could stop them.
Discipline had limits, apparently, and mine were watching his fail by one breath.
Behind me, the corridor stayed empty.
Ahead of me, Juno waited.
“Go,” he said.
“Are you coming?”
He looked toward Juno’s corridor, then down the stair, then back at me.
“If I walk into Juno’s chamber with you now, Caswell gets exactly the kind of ammunition he wants.”
It annoyed me that he was right. Again.
“And if I ask you to come anyway?”
The question dug its nails into him and I could see the strain on his face.
“Then I will make a worse mistake than I already have by coming to you.”
My breath caught.
Hale swallowed once.
“And I will come anyway.”
Oh.
The Mark on my wrist pulled toward him, rain-dark and insistent, the same line the basin had shown the whole room. Hale felt it. I saw that too.
He stayed where he was.
So did I.
Neither of us moved first.
That felt like an answer, though I didn’t know to which question.
“I’ll go to Juno,” I whispered.
His chin dipped once.
“Go to Juno.”
I went to her.
I felt him stay behind me.
That was the cruelest part. Not that he followed.
That he didn’t, and I could feel what it cost him.
Juno’s door opened before I knocked. She stood beside the basin, one hand resting on the rim, her face turned toward me as if she had been listening to the building bring me down the hall.
“Quill summoned me,” I said. “Hale sent me here.”
For the first time since I’d met her, Juno looked surprised.
Only for a second.
Then she said, “Did he? A smarter man than I’d given him credit for.”
She glanced at my sleeve.
“Show me the Mark.”
“Everyone else has seen it today. I’d hate for you to feel left out.”
Her expression didn’t indicate that she found my wit amusing at all.
I pushed up my sleeve.
The Mark looked almost ordinary again. Four lines on my wrist, pale and difficult, arranged as if they had not just humiliated me in front of an entire practicum.
Juno studied it.
“Someone gave you the wrong instruction for your Mark,” she said. “Someone who knew exactly what to say.”
I sat back.
“Cosima,” I hissed.
The room seemed to get smaller around the chair.
“Not surprising.”
“So she knew?”
“Or she suspected.”
I hated that answer because now I would drive myself mad trying to figure out which one it was.
“Juno, what am I?” I asked it plain.
For a moment, I thought Juno might refuse the question or reshape it into something safer.
“The Council calls it Untethered.”
“And what do you call it?”
Juno’s hand rested on the basin. “Star-Marked. Like the old cosmology.”
“And it means I don’t have a bond?”
She shook her head. “No. It means you are marked for multiple bonds. A Mark is supposed to pull one way,” Juno said. “One line. One answer. One approved bond the Council can witness, record, and manage.”
I looked at my wrist.
Four lines.
Three directions the basin had made visible.
“And mine pulls toward three.”
My mouth went dry.
I’d known it, somewhere inside me. Now I had to face it.
“Caspian,” I said.
Juno nodded.
“Kieran.”
“Yes.”
The third name sat in my throat like a lump I couldn’t swallow or spit out.
“Hale,” I finally said.
My Mark shifted under my skin, inward this time, as if it disliked being discussed and was sulking about it.
“Yes,” Juno said. “Not absence. Excess. A Mark the Council cannot reduce to one man without breaking something first.”
“That sounds like their problem.”
“They will try to make it yours.”
“They’ve made a strong start.”
Juno finally sat across from me.
“Your mother was also Untethered,” she said.
The air left the room.
Slowly. Like the walls had learned to breathe in and forgotten the rest of the work.
“Selene.”
“Yes.”
I had known. Some part of me had known from the moment my wrist took the Mark and the school began looking at me like a memory it regretted keeping.
Knowing didn’t make hearing it easier.
I pressed my thumb into the center of my palm until the pressure became something I could understand.
“The Council killed her,” I said.
Juno held my gaze.
“Yes.”
One word.
No cushion under it.
For a moment I wanted to be angry that she had said it so plainly. Then I wanted to be angry that no one else had.
I rubbed both hands over my face, then dropped them before she could tell me to stop touching my eyes like a child.
“And Delphine?”
Juno tensed.
That was the place she had hoped I would not step.
Too bad. I had been stepping wrong since I arrived.
“What happened to Delphine?” I pressed.
“Her Mark dimmed.”
“I saw that.”
“Then you saw the part they wanted witnessed.”
My stomach turned.
“Is she dead?”
Juno’s gaze moved to the basin.
“The school has not recorded her death.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I do not have access to what happens once a student is brought out through the west door.”
I stood because sitting still had become impossible.
“She sat across from me at lunch. She told me about her brother. She was scared, and everyone watched her get taken through that door like it was just another ordinary ceremony or something.”
“Astra.”
“Don’t say my name like I’m overreacting.”
Juno’s mouth closed.
Good.
I gripped the back of the chair.
“Is Delphine Untethered?”
“No.”
“Then why are you looking like that?”
“Because the pattern is.”
Juno’s voice went lower.
“A girl becomes inconvenient. Her room empties. Her letters stop leaving the gate. The school changes her name into a condition and sends her somewhere her family cannot follow the trail to.”
Delphine at the west door.
My mother’s name in a ledger that had called her absence voluntary.
My wrist in the basin, splitting itself into three bright accusations.
“So what happened to Delphine is what happened to my mother?”
“Not exactly,” Juno said. “But the same hands took hold.”
Weariness moved across Juno’s face and stayed there long enough for me to see it.
Old exhaustion.
The cost of silently and secretly fighting something.
I had the sudden, awful sense that she had been standing between girls and this room for longer than I had been alive.
“Why tell me this now?”
“Because Caswell has seen the branching. Cosima has recorded it. Caspian Ashford has contradicted a room in front of witnesses. The Council will not wait as long as it might have yesterday.”
My pulse moved strangely at Caspian’s name.
I ignored it badly.
“And Kieran? Hale?”
“Their names will become relevant faster than either of them would like. Hale’s might already be, if he sent you to me.”
“That isn’t comforting.”
“I’m not here to comfort you.” Juno’s eyes held mine. “Don’t give them a clean refusal until you know what they intend to do with it.”
My throat tightened.
“I thought refusal was the point.”
“Refusal is a tool. So is consent. So is silence. The Council has survived for centuries by pretending those words are simple.”
That made me angry because I wanted simple.
I wanted yes and no to mean what they meant in ordinary mouths.
I wanted my wrist to belong to me because it was attached to my body.
I wanted Delphine to have gone through the west door and come out somewhere with windows.
I wanted my mother to have left me more than other people’s careful omissions.
Juno stood.
The session was over, then. Apparently that was how Juno ended conversations: by shutting up and standing up.
I stood too and walked to the door. Before I reached it, she stopped me with my name.
“Astra.”
I turned.
“What?”
“Delphine is not a lesson.”
My chest pulled tight.
“I know that.”
“Good. Remember it when everyone else tries to turn her into one.”
The words hit harder than I wanted them to.
I nodded.
Juno opened the door.
The corridor outside was empty.
For now.
I stepped out and the door closed, leaving me standing in the corridor with my sleeve still pushed up and my Mark uncovered.
Untethered.
My mother had carried the word before me.
Delphine had been taken by the same hands, even if the school had used a different name for the taking.
I pulled my sleeve down.
This time, it didn’t feel like hiding.
It felt like keeping one thing to myself while I still could.