Grace
Kaylin has paint chips fanned across her bed like a hand of cards, and she’s dead serious about all of it.
“Not this one.” She flicks a pale green square off the pile. “This one made me think of hospital walls.”
“They’re all the same,” I say.
“They are not all the same.” She holds up two that look, to me, exactly the same. “This one’s sage. This one’s eucalyptus. There’s a difference.”
“There is not a difference.”
“Grace.” She puts a hand to her chest like I’ve wounded her. “I let Jericho pull strings so I could have my own quarters, and you’re going to stand there and tell me the paint doesn’t matter?”
“I didn’t say it doesn’t matter. I said I can’t see the difference.”
“That’s a you problem.”
I laugh, and it comes out easier than I expect, like something in my chest unlocks for a second.
It’s the first real laugh I’ve had in days.
Kaylin holds the two greens up to the window light, squinting between them with a focus she never gives anything else, and for a moment I let myself just be a girl in a friend’s room looking at paint.
The door’s already open when Nadia leans into it, two mugs in her hands. “Someone said there’s a paint emergency.”
“There is absolutely a paint emergency.” Kaylin waves her in. “Tell her there’s a difference.”
Nadia sets the cups down, takes both chips, holds them at arm’s length, and tips her head.
“This one.” She points to the one on the left without hesitating. “That one’s going to look gray by lamplight.”
“See.” Kaylin turns to me, triumphant. “She gets it.”
“I withhold my opinion,” I say.
Nadia grins and hands me one of the mugs without being asked. Tea, not coffee. I don’t remember telling her that.
“I like how you do that,” I say before I can stop myself.
“Do what?”
“Notice people.” I feel a little shy saying it.
She shrugs like it’s nothing, which is somehow worse, because it means it costs her nothing to see people, and I’ve spent too long learning it isn’t supposed to be that easy.
Kaylin’s back to the chips, holding a third up beside the first two, muttering about undertones. I sip the tea and let the two of them argue color theory, and for a few minutes I forget to keep track of my own face.
That’s when I feel it. Three short pulses against my ankle, through the boot.
My stomach drops before my brain catches up to why.
It’s the middle of the afternoon. They don’t call in the afternoon. Months of this, and the calls have always come at night, when the compound’s quiet and there’s a reason for me to be alone. Never now. Never with people three feet away.
“You okay?” Kaylin’s looking at me over the paint chips.
“Yeah. I just remembered I told Ember I’d pick up her new notepads on the stationery run today. I totally forgot.”
“She can’t survive an afternoon without a notepad?” Kaylin says.
“She’s got a meeting with Iris and Kieran later, and you know how intense they get. She’ll need to take notes.” It’s a bad lie and I know it the second it’s out of my mouth, but Kaylin’s already turned back to Nadia, asking her opinion on a fourth chip, and neither of them is looking at me anymore.
I don’t run. I make myself walk, unhurried, down the hall and around the corner to the stairwell nobody uses because it only goes up to a locked mechanical floor. I’ve sat on these steps before. Nobody’s ever caught me here.
I pull the phone from my boot with hands that aren’t quite steady and put it to my ear.
“Why are you calling now?” I keep my voice low. “It’s the middle of the day. If someone hears me—”
“No one’s going to hear you.” The voice again. Always a woman. Calm in a way that never once matches the situation. “We need to talk about something, and it can’t wait for tonight.”
“That’s not how this works. We agreed—”
“We’re changing how this works.” Flat. Final. Not unkind, which is somehow worse than if it were. “We’d like to go over everything you’ve provided so far. In person.”
My whole body goes cold at once. “In person,” I repeat, like saying it back will make it make more sense.
“It’s time we did this properly. Face to face.”
“Why now? Nothing’s changed.”
“Something’s always changing, Grace.” A pause, the kind she uses to let a thing sit. “You’ll go to the usual spot behind the hardware store. Not a drop this time. We’ll meet you there.”
The usual spot. Where I’ve left things before—twice, three times—things I told myself didn’t count as much as they should have.
A few pages torn from a diary. A report on an excursion that happened six months ago.
Small. Useless to anyone trying to plan an actual operation.
I made sure of that every time, made sure whatever I handed over couldn’t get anyone at Aurora hurt.
I told myself that was the line. I told myself that as long as I held it, I hadn’t really crossed anything.
I don’t know what it means that they want to meet me instead of just taking what I leave behind. Maybe they think I’ve been slow. Maybe they’ve stopped believing the little I give them is all there is. Maybe they just want to look at my face and see if I’m lying.
You are so damned screwed.
“I can’t just go off compound without a reason,” I say. “People will ask where I’ve gone.”
“You’ve managed before.” A beat. “Your sister’s looking better these days. Healthier. The people looking after her seem to like her.” Another pause, precisely timed. “It’s amazing what a little cooperation buys.”
My throat closes around whatever I was going to say next.
“We’ll expect you within forty-eight hours,” she says. “Don’t make us wait.”
The line goes dead before I can answer.
I sit on the stairs with the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to a dial tone that isn’t there, my heart going too hard against my ribs. My hands are cold. My knees don’t feel like they’d hold me if I stood right now, so I don’t.
They want to look at me.
I don’t know what changes when a voice on a phone becomes an actual face, but I know it isn’t nothing.
Everything about this has stayed at a careful distance for months—a call, a drop, a photograph of Serenity that could have been taken anywhere.
The distance was the only thing that ever let me pretend there was still a wall between what I do in this place and who I actually am.
They’re taking the wall down.
I push the phone back into my boot and sit a while longer, elbows on my knees, staring at the dead space above me.
I can’t go back to Kaylin’s room like this. She’ll take one look at my face and know something’s wrong, and I don’t have anything true to tell her.
So I stay where I am.
Months of small things. Months of telling myself the drops didn’t matter because I made sure they didn’t—measuring out exactly how little I could hand over, never once letting it tip into something that could get someone killed.
I thought that was enough. I thought if I could just keep it small and useless and survivable, I could hold this open forever without it costing anyone but me.
It was never going to stay small. I think I always knew that and just didn’t let myself know it.
They’re done with what I’ve been giving them. They want more, and they want to watch my face when they ask for it, and somewhere behind all of it is a room where Serenity is sitting, healthier these days, cooperating, waiting for a sister who still hasn’t found a way to get her out.
I’ve been treading water. Buying time Serenity doesn’t have, because I’m too afraid to admit I don’t have a clue how to free her.
You should have gone to Viktor. Or Jericho.
I rub my eyes. They know about Serenity. When I first got here, they said they’d find her. And then the calls started, telling me her safety depended on me doing what I was told.
They’re going to hurt her anyway. I’m one person against an international operation that sees my kind as less than human.
What the hell am I going to do?
You’re such an idiot, Grace.
It’s too late now. Too late to go to Viktor and tell him what I’ve been doing. He’ll lock me up. And when the Syndicate finds out I’m compromised, Serenity’s as good as dead.
I have to do something.
But what?
I sit on the cold steps a long time, and I don’t have an answer. But I know the answer isn’t give them a little less than they want and hope it holds.
That option ran out today.