Chapter 20
Cosima’s notebook was under my coat when I left the east tower.
It was a stupid place to put a dangerous thing.
It was also the only place I had.
One line from Cosima’s notebook kept following me down the stairs.
Suppression is not absence. It is obedience made visible only when it fails.
I had thought of Hale before I finished reading it.
I should have gone to my room.
Instead, I went down.
The lower corridors were cold enough to make the metal of the brooch bite through my shirt. Morning had begun above me: doors opening, voices starting, the first bell preparing to turn us all back into students.
The salle door stood open.
Hale was inside.
He stood at the far rack with a practice stave in one hand and his sleeve pushed back from his wrist.
His Mark was uncovered.
That stopped me more than the sight of him did.
The lines along his forearm were darker than they had looked through cloth, pressed flat beneath skin that had learned to contain them.
He looked up before I spoke.
“Do you live down here?” I asked.
“No.”
“I’m not convinced.”
“I sleep elsewhere.”
“Consistently vague.”
His eyes dropped to my wrist.
Then he reached for his sleeve.
“Don’t.”
His hand stopped.
The Pull came in on the pause.
Leather. Heat. Rain against stone after a long dry spell.
My wrist answered beneath my sleeve.
His eyes dropped to the front of my coat.
I had one hand pressed there without realizing it.
“You saw Verraine.”
“I’m starting to resent being so easy to read.”
“You’re guarding something, and she likes to hand out secrets. And you’re angry, which is an effect Verraine often has on people.”
“Am I really that obvious?”
“Only to someone looking.”
“And you’re always looking.”
“Yes. I told you, I notice everything.”
He didn’t apologize for it, which was becoming one of his more infuriating qualities.
I stepped into the salle.
The floor had been swept. A fresh chalk line crossed the center boards, straight enough to look personal.
“That for me?”
“Yes.”
“You knew I’d come.”
“I thought you might.”
“That’s a lot of chalk for might.”
He set the stave against the rack.
“You don’t like having nowhere to put anger. I can sense it in you.”
I looked at the line.
“Cosima gave me a notebook.”
“I assumed she gave you something dangerous.”
“It says suppression is obedience waiting to fail.”
His thumb pressed into the worn grip of the stave.
“That sounds like Verraine.”
“It sounds like you.”
He accepted that without giving me the satisfaction of agreement or disagreement.
I crossed to the chalk line and stopped with my toes just short of it.
“Your Mark is calling mine,” I said.
Hale’s gaze stayed on me.
“Yes.”
“And yours?”
“My Mark is answering.”
He made no attempt to soften it.
“Do you want it to?”
Hale looked at me then.
Fully.
It was worse than being touched.
Touch would have given me something to blame. His hand. His mouth. The space between us closing.
This was only his attention, steady and dark, moving over my face, my throat, the wrist I had hidden under my sleeve, and leaving heat everywhere it landed.
“Asking what I want is not the safest question.”
“I didn’t come here to ask the safest questions.”
For a moment, I thought he would retreat into one of his hallway answers. Rules. Warnings. The kind of sentence that left me with less than I’d asked for.
Instead, he said, “Then yes.”
That simple admission was the last thing I’d expected.
“You could have said that sooner,” I said.
“No, I couldn’t have.”
“Why?”
His eyes went to the uncovered Mark on his forearm.
“Because my family sent me here to do the opposite.”
I went still.
“Sent you here?”
“Yes.”
“For me?”
“Not by name.”
“That distinction isn’t doing much for me.”
“They believed another Star-Marked girl would come to Zenith.”
The old word moved through me.
The Council would never have chosen to use it.
That made it feel more like mine, somehow, though I had only been given it yesterday.
“Juno called me that.”
“If anyone would know the proper name, it’s Juno.”
“And your family?”
“My grandmother used that word when the curtains were closed.”
That made the word feel less like a title and more like a thing people had protected with their teeth.
Hale crossed the salle and took another stave from the rack.
His sleeve stayed pushed back.
“My uncle bonded against Council order,” he said.
“With a Star-Marked woman?”
His fingers flexed around the stave.
“Yes.”
“And the Council killed them?”
Hale’s eyes lifted to mine.
“The Council recorded an intervention.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t. But that’s the official answer.”
The notebook pressed against my ribs.
Korey Dorian, dead before he could finish asking.
Cosima, fourteen and praised for being frightened.
Hale’s uncle, turned into a warning.
My mother’s brooch, cold over my heart.
Dead people who shared one thing in common.
“So your family sent you here for revenge.”
“For proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“That a Hale could face the same Pull and survive it.”
I stared at him.
“Me.”
“The answer. The Mark. The thing the Council used to kill my uncle.”
“I’m not a weapon they left lying around for your family to test itself against.”
“No. As it turns out, you are not.”
He looked down at his uncovered Mark.
“That was the first thing I got wrong.”
The anger in my chest changed shape.
It didn’t go away.
It found more people to be angry for.
“My Verse said my Mark would answer a Star-Marked girl.”
“So you dimmed it to stop that.”
“My family dimmed it first.”
I went still.
“I was nine.”
That silenced me.
I had expected the hand of a man’s discipline.
I hadn’t expected a child.
Hale glanced at the stave in his hand.
“Suppression is easier to teach before a boy knows he is allowed to hate it.”
“And now?”
His hand closed once around the stave.
“Now it doesn’t hold the way it used to.”
My wrist warmed.
“Because of me.”
“Because of us.”
“Hale.”
“Jonah,” he said.
My mouth closed.
The salle seemed to notice the name at the same time I did.
“If we’re talking about what my yes means,” he said, “use that name.”
The Pull moved under my skin.
“Jonah,” I said.
His Mark brightened.
Only a little.
He looked pained by how much he wanted it not to show.
“Your yes means death?” I asked.
“It means I know what the Council does to bonds it didn’t arrange.”
“I’m getting very tired of partial answers.”
He set the stave back on the rack.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Then Hale crossed the chalk line.
The Pull sharpened with every step he took.
I should have stepped back.
I didn’t.
He stopped close enough that I could see where the Mark disappeared beneath his cuff. Close enough that the air between us changed.
His hand lifted.
Not to touch me.
To stop himself.
The restraint cost him. I saw it in the tendon at his wrist, in the way his fingers closed in a fist and opened again.
“Jonah,” I said again, quieter.
His eyes closed.
Only for a breath.
When he opened them, he looked me in the eyes.
Then at my wrist.
Then away.
“Don’t say my name like that unless you want me to forget why I shouldn’t answer.”
My pulse went unhelpfully enthusiastic at the idea.
“And if I do?”
The bell rang above us.
Breakfast warning.
Neither of us moved.
Hale’s hand lowered.
Slowly.
“Then ask me when there is time for the answer.”
That took the room out from under me.
The Pull stayed bright under my skin.
I wanted to be furious with him for stopping.
I wanted to be grateful.
I settled for breathing.
Erratically.
Hale stepped back.
“Go to breakfast,” he said.
“Is that an order?”
“Yes. You’re too skinny as it is.”
“At least that was honest.”
I walked to the door because staying would make me say or do something reckless, and I feared I had already surpassed my limit of useful recklessness before seven in the morning.
“Astra.”
I stopped.
His sleeve had fallen back into place over his wrist.
“Do not let Verraine’s notebook make you think knowledge is the same thing as safety.”
“What is it, then?”
“Leverage.”
His eyes dropped to the place where the notebook pressed beneath my coat.
“Use it before they use you.”
I didn’t have anything witty to say to that.
So I left with Jonah’s yes under my skin.