Chapter 12
TWELVE
He stood in the linen closet for thirty seconds, staring at folded towels, before he admitted to himself that he had no reason to be there.
The corridor past the studio curved in a single direction and ended here. He had walked it four times since morning. The towels had not changed. Neither had he.
Three visits before this, he thought. Three invented reasons.
The first had been defensible. He'd needed to confirm that the north-facing windows were properly sealed before storm season — a structural assessment, reasonable for a man responsible for a sprawling estate.
He'd paused outside the studio door only because he'd heard something: Octavia's voice, low and warm, in a register she'd never used with him.
Laughter followed. Not hers — Niara's, a bright startled sound like a bird surprised into song, and beneath it the soft glow of the girl’s Lirathi bioluminescence pulsing brighter for one fleeting moment before settling back to its wounded baseline.
He had stood still in the corridor and listened to Octavia Tate coax laughter from a girl who hadn't laughed in the entire time she’d been there.
The second visit was less defensible. He'd invented a need to retrieve a volume on chromatic theory from the shelf near the studio entrance — a text he hadn't opened in three years and didn't need now.
Through the half-open door he'd seen Octavia crouched beside Zenith, one hand hovering over the droid's sensor dome, peppering the small machine with questions about her optical calibration.
Zenith's lens tracked Octavia's hand with unmistakable pleasure, beeps emerging rapid and musical — the droid equivalent of preening.
Octavia grinned, paint on her jaw, and said, "You're showing off.” Zenith’s melodic beeps were just a little smug.
The third pass had no excuse at all. He'd walked the corridor because he knew she'd be there. Because the estate felt different with her moving through it — not warmer exactly, but populated in a way it hadn't been since before his mother died.
He'd heard her thanking Nadir for the tea service.
Not perfunctory gratitude, but a genuine, specific thanks.
She'd noticed the butler had included a blend she'd mentioned preferring, and she'd said his name when she thanked him.
Her voice carried the weight of someone who understood that being seen in minor details was its own form of kindness.
Through the door he'd watched Nadir's inner eyelids flutter twice — the tell the old man couldn't suppress when something moved him — before the butler inclined his head and withdrew.
The fourth time, Skarreth hadn't even slowed. He'd walked the corridor, registered the sound of her humming — a melody he didn't recognize, human and minor-key and completely unselfconscious — and continued to the linen closet, where he now stood.
He turned around and walked back.
Nadir was waiting at the end of the corridor. Of course he was.
The evening tea ritual occupied the same hour every night — a holdover from his mother's household, maintained by Nadir with the quiet ferocity of preserving something sacred.
The sitting room glowed amber. Zenith had positioned herself near the hearth, her gunmetal shell catching the firelight, her optical lens swiveling between the two of them with the attentiveness of an audience that had paid for good seats.
Nadir poured, and steam rose between them. The silence had texture — comfortable on the surface, loaded beneath.
"You've walked past the studio four times today, my lord." Nadir set the teapot down. "The corridor leads only in one direction."
Skarreth accepted his cup without looking up. "The seals on the north windows need inspection before storm season."
"I inspected them last week. They're sound."
"Then I was being thorough."
"You were being something." Nadir settled into his chair with the care of aging joints.
His gold eyes held their muted, patient quality.
"Four passes in one day is unprecedented.
Your previous record was two, and that was the morning after the Thessan extraction when you hadn't slept in forty hours and your judgment was, if you'll forgive me, impaired. "
Zenith emitted a specific two-note descending beep that dropped in pitch with a dismissive finality.
"She says dinner is ready," Nadir said.
What Zenith had actually communicated occupied a different register entirely, and the droid's lens fixed on Skarreth with an intensity that suggested she knew how inadequate the translation was. She rolled two inches closer and repeated the beep. Louder.
"Thank you, Zenith."
The droid produced a low, skeptical wobble and glided toward the kitchen at the pace of someone making a point by leaving.
Skarreth drank his tea. It burned his tongue, and he welcomed the small, clarifying pain. "The gathering will be here before we know it. I need to assess how the studio arrangement is progressing. Whether the cover will hold up under scrutiny."
"And this assessment requires four corridor passes and no actual entry into the room?"
"I was observing."
"You were hovering."
Skarreth set down his cup. Nadir met his gaze with the gentle immovability that had weathered seven years of this mission and three decades of service before it.
He had earned the right to say difficult things by proving a thousand times over, that he said them out of loyalty rather than presumption.
"She made Niara laugh," Skarreth said. He hadn't meant to say it. The words came through a gap in his defenses he hadn't known existed.
Nadir's expression shifted by fractions. "I heard."
"The girl hasn't laughed since we extracted her from the holding facility. Octavia's been here a few days and she—" He stopped. Rerouted. "It's relevant to Niara's psychological readiness for transit. A stabilized emotional state reduces risk during the handoff."
"Of course, my lord." Nadir's voice carried no inflection whatsoever, which was its own form of commentary. He lifted his cup. Drank. Set it down. "Shall I serve dinner in the formal room or the study?"
"Study."
"Will Mistress Tate be joining you?"
The question was a trap with no moving parts. Either answer revealed something. Skarreth stood, his chair scraping back with more force than necessary. "She may eat wherever she prefers."
He left the room. Behind him, Zenith — returned from the kitchen with timing that suggested she'd been lurking in the corridor — emitted a long, slow, descending beep so laden with editorial weight that even someone who'd never heard her speak could have parsed the meaning.
Nadir sipped his tea and allowed himself the faintest curve at one corner of his mouth.
The intelligence arrived before the portrait session the next day, routed through three encrypted relays and decoded by Nadir in the quiet of the study while Skarreth stood at the window and did not look at the studio door across the courtyard.
Nadir didn’t sit. He stood with the datapad, which meant the news required standing distance.
“Niara’s window opens tomorrow.” He read from the dispatch without inflection, which was its own kind of inflection. “Route seven through the Kessler Belt. Eleven minutes, if Dynn runs the approach at reduced signature.”
“Dynn.”
“She’s reliable.”
“She lost a cargo drone in the Tessari corridor.”
“She lost a drone.” Nadir set the datapad on the desk between them. “Not a passenger. In eleven years, not one passenger.” A pause. “The alternative window is eight days out. Voss’s patrols aren’t contracting.”
Eight more days. The girl’s bioluminescent markings dimmed a little more every time a shuttle passed overhead, and she flinched at the engine sound. Eight more days of that with the Crimson Ledger’s net drawing tighter around all of them.
“Tomorrow then,” Skarreth said. “Alert Dynn.”
Nadir didn’t move. His double-jointed thumb stilled against the datapad — the tell that meant something had been held back and was now being offered.
“There’s a secondary consideration. Regarding the protocol.”
Skarreth looked up.
“She’s been here ten days already.” Nadir’s voice dropped half a register — the tone he used when something mattered enough to say plainly.
“The window for the protocol closes at ten. After that, the dose required to suppress that depth of memory —” He stopped.
Started again, more quietly. “I’ve seen it go wrong.
What comes out the other side isn’t always the same person who went in.
And in Niara’s case, even a minimal dose could cause injury. ”
The study was quiet.
Skarreth had built the protocol himself, years ago, in the cold arithmetic of necessity.
It had always been a violation. He had always known it was a violation.
He had administered it eight hundred and twenty-three times and filed the knowledge in the drawer where he kept the other unwearable things — the names he didn’t learn, the faces he refused to remember, the small careful cruelties that kept everyone alive.
He had done it because it was the only way.
With Niara, it wasn’t an option he wanted to explore.
“She knows the estate,” he said. Working it through.
“She knows a guest wing, a garden, and a studio. She knows Mistress Tate’s name. Nothing that constitutes operational intelligence.” Nadir’s inner eyelids flickered once. “What she carries —” A pause. “What she carries is the first evidence of healing I have seen in her since she arrived.”
The silence held the weight of a decision already made.
“Then we proceed without the memory wipe.” Skarreth returned to the datapad. “She’ll be briefed on what she can and cannot disclose. Teck handles the debrief protocols at the Free Worlds end.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And Nadir.” He didn’t look up. “She’ll want to say goodbye.”
“She will.” Nadir’s voice shifted— barely perceptible, the grain of the wood showing through. “The girl has had enough taken from her.”