Chapter 17 #3
“No,” Vincent said softly. “I’d like to meet George. He sounds like the sort of chap I’d get along with, the way you and Biz talk about him…”
That name—aloud, finally—hit Ezra square in the chest.
He felt like a grenade with the pin half pulled, seconds from shrapnel.
But the explosion never came.
“He was.” It was strange, not knowing whether to use the past or future tense.
“George was the first person to welcome me to Thornhill. I remember him bursting through that massive front door, dashing past all the maids and butlers to reach our carriage. He grabbed my hand and hardly let it go that whole day… A good thing because otherwise I would have gotten lost in that house.” Ezra closed his eyes and two versions of the estate overlapped—the one with an heir and the other with free-roaming sheep.
“I did. Without him. Biz and Lord Blackwood too.”
“Biz always sounds like a different person when she talks about him,” Vincent murmured. “As do you.”
“I’ve been so many different people.” Ezra’s body was still tight, still waiting to fall to pieces: scholar, soldier, lover, ward, son, the little boy hiding under his blanket, monster, hero. Which one was sharpest? Which one was true?
“You’re not alone.”
There was something haunting about Vincent’s whisper. It felt much farther away than the few feet that separated them.
“And you?” Ezra murmured. “You don’t have anyone you’d bring back for yourself?” Aside from the fact that they’d made a fortune manufacturing bullets, Ezra didn’t know much about the Cain family. It was possible that all four of Vincent’s grandparents were still alive.
“Long ago, I lost someone. It hurt in ways I still can’t name. It broke me…” Silence swayed between them. “But apparently you can’t die. Lucky bastard.” Vincent said this last bit with a laugh, as if to alleviate the weight of what he was saying.
Click-clack.
Click-clack.
The train barreled on. Ezra wanted to keep up.
“I’m sorry, for pushing you away back then. You were right. I was scared… Still am. I would have fallen apart without you today,” he confessed.
“I know.”
Vincent sounded as self-assured as always, but Ezra’s insides wobbled. Did his old flame really know how close they’d come to staying in that tomb? Dead. Dead. Dead.
“I—I could have—”
“I know what you can do, Ezra,” Vincent broke in. “I felt it. We all did.”
“What if it happens again?”
Luxor was not a large city by any means. The odds were high that they’d run into Hugo and company. The odds were even higher that said encounter would end with knives out.
The other young man shifted on his cot; Ezra could feel his stare through the dark. “I have more than one memory of us together.”
Click-clack.
Click-clack.
“What if that’s not enough, next time?” Ezra whispered into his pillow.
Across the cabin he could hear Vincent breathe in—sharp. “I suppose you could always ask the gold digger for another private lesson. Surely there’s a way to control whose shadow you’re controlling. Hugo managed it well enough.”
“I don’t want to control people.” He’d had enough of strings—being pulled to and fro.
From Egypt to England to France, then back again.
“I just want to understand who I am. Where I belong… I thought returning to Egypt might help, but I feel just as strange here as I do in the Queen’s College dining hall.
My Arabic is rusty and the food tastes new and everyone treats me like a tourist. But I’ve always felt like a visitor in England too.
Too strange, too foreign, too queer. So where does that leave me? ”
He didn’t expect Vincent to answer this question, but after a moment his cabinmate spoke. “Maybe Luxor will be different. That’s where you lived with your mother, yes?”
But even those memories held a storybook quality—divided into chapters of desert excavations, playing by the river, and Nour reading to him through the gauze of the mosquito net. Slightly distant. Even then.
“It was so long ago…”
“We’re in Egypt, Bright! Nineteen years is a sneeze.”
He wasn’t wrong. Ezra could feel the crinkle of the map where he’d tucked it against his chest—mostly useless without the X.
Had his mother drawn it on their kitchen table?
The one that was always littered with amulets and covered in the paw prints of mummified cats?
Had she known he would be searching so desperately for himself one day?
And her?
What about her?
He tried to envision Nour hunched over that table, pen in hand, but the picture didn’t come easily. His mother was too faded at the edges… and the color of her masque was too blue. The same lapis lazuli as it had been in the pyramid reliefs.
“Maybe it would help, to go back to our old flat,” he said. “I’m sure it belongs to someone else now, but maybe visiting will trigger some memories.”
“Or magic,” Vincent added. “That’s not a bad idea… Better than sitting around the train station and twiddling our thumbs, at least.”
Their train clattered on—click-clack, click-clack.
This time the silence lasted. The image of his mother grew stronger, like tea steeping.
Only, parts of her seemed to be carved out of sandstone.
She looked at him with blue-blazed eyes, but her mouth was sealed shut.
When Ezra tried to see the map she’d been working on, it was all scribbles.
Gibberish. He glanced back up, but Nour was no longer sitting at the table.
Professor Blythe had taken over her seat, reading glasses sliding down his nose as he started to transcribe the senseless marks into writing that was, albeit, neater, but just as illegible.
He paused in his work, nodding at Ezra’s arms, where feathers had suddenly started to sprout through his sleeves.
“Try not to fly too far into the sun, Mr. Bright.”