Ellie
Neve’s braiding jasmine stems into a crown when I find her in the garden.
She’s on the stone bench under the biggest olive tree, legs crossed, the white petals bright against the dark of her skirt.
Her hands work without looking, the stems bending, weaving, her fingers quick with the same easy automatic way the Cage trains into all of us.
Braiding, weaving, embroidering, the careful busywork of hands that have nothing else to hold.
The sisters teach it to us as a kind of prayer.
Neve does it as something to look at while she thinks about other things.
She’s twenty-four. Three years older than me.
She’s been here since she was twelve, which means she remembers more of the before than I do—four extra years of the world before they collected her.
Those four years sit behind her eyes like furniture in a room she won’t let you into.
Sometimes I catch her watching the birds over the courtyard—not the way Ireth watches them, soft and pleased, but with something harder.
Jealousy, maybe. Or knowing. Like she remembers what it felt like to go where the birds go.
“The jasmine’s blooming,” I say, and sit down beside her. The stone’s sun-warm through my skirt. The tree above us drops shifting coins of gold on the ground every time the breeze moves the branches.
“Everything’s blooming. It’s the season.
” She holds up the crown, frowning at a gap where two stems won’t meet.
Pulls one loose and weaves it back. The jasmine’s sweet and thick this close, almost too sweet, the kind of smell that sits at the back of your throat.
“The garden goes wild every spring. Have you seen the vines on the east wall?”
“I saw a scratch on the east wall.”
Her hands stop.
Not a big stop—Neve doesn’t do big. Her fingers just pause mid-weave, and the pause is where the whole thing lives. She looks at me. Her eyes are gray, the color the stone goes when it sweats, and they land on my face with a weight I’m not used to carrying.
“Where?” she says.
“Under my window. Three floors down. High up—higher than anyone could reach.”
“When?”
“Last night, sometime. It wasn’t there the day before.”
Neve sets the crown on the bench. She looks at the east wall—not at the scratch, which you can’t see from the garden, but at the wall itself.
At the place where the canopy presses up against the stone, branches so thick they’ve shoved the ironwork outward.
From down here the canopy looks like a second wall standing behind the first—darker, alive, leaning in with a patience that plain stone doesn’t have.
“There was one last month,” she says. “Lower. Down near the foundation, where the stones get big. I found it on a walk. The sisters had it filled inside a day.”
“Filled?”
“Mortar. Smoothed over. You’d never know it was there unless you’d seen it first.” She picks at a loose thread on her skirt, then catches herself and stops.
“I went back three times to be sure I hadn’t dreamed it.
Wall looked good as new. Fresh mortar comes in a little paler, though. If you know to look.”
I sit with that. The word filled drops into my chest and presses on something. Filling a scratch means somebody admits a thing made it. Filling it fast means somebody doesn’t want it seen. The sisters never do anything fast unless the fastness is the whole point.
“What made it?” I ask.
Neve picks the crown back up. Goes on braiding. Her eyes stay on her hands, but I can feel the attention she’s giving me, sideways, the attention of someone who learned a long time ago to look without being caught looking.
“You already know,” she says.
I do. The Cage is here because of the Nethershades.
The lessons teach what they are—the claiming, the sacred bond, the divine union.
The sisters talk about them like a purpose: instruments of the new world, its will made into flesh.
What the sisters never talk about is the size of them.
The reach. The scratch on the wall is the Ordained’s pretty careful words turned into stone.
Something came to the wall. Something with claws.
“Are you scared?” I ask.
“Of the scratch?”
“Of what made it.”
Neve ties off the crown. Turns it in her hands. The petals are starting to bruise where the stems bent, little brown shadows creeping into the white. She runs her thumb along one bruised edge and the petal tears, a wet sound so small I nearly miss it.
“They presented me six months ago,” she says. “Took me out to a clearing in the canopy. Two miles past the walls, maybe more. Dressed me in white, put flowers in my hair, and stood me in a gap in the trees where the light came down.”
She says it the way she says everything—flat, careful, each word picked like a foothold on bad ground.
“I waited. The sun moved. The clearing smelled like wet bark and something sharp under it, like metal left out in the rain. My arms were heavy. The preparation tea—the special one, the one they give you the morning of—it makes your whole body feel like it’s underwater.
I could hear my own pulse in my ears and nothing else.
The canopy had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet when somebody important walks in. ”
She turns the crown over in her lap, studying the weave like it’s the most interesting thing in the courtyard.
"He came. The Shade. I heard him before I saw him—branches shifting overhead, the weight of something big moving the canopy around.
Then he was at the edge of the clearing.
Crimson. Not as big as the Apex they whisper about, but big enough that the trees looked wrong next to him, like the size of the world had been rewritten and nobody told the trees.
“He looked at me.”
She turns the crown over. A petal falls.
“Looked at me the way you look at a door that opens on the wrong room. Curious for a second, then nothing. He turned around and walked back into the canopy. The whole thing took less time than this conversation. The Ordained came and collected me half an hour later. I stood in that clearing thirty minutes, alone, in a white dress with the flowers rotting in my hair, waiting on people to come pick me up like a parcel that got dropped at the wrong house.”
There’s a bitterness in her voice, folded up small, but I hear it. I’ve never once heard Neve sound bitter about anything. She sounds bitter about this.
“Wrong scent,” I say. The lessons cover it—the claiming is particular, driven by a pull in the blood the Ordained call divine selection. Not every woman matches every Shade. The bond’s meant for one.
“Wrong scent,” she agrees. “Wrong everything. He knew it in one breath. One breath, and I wasn’t what he’d come for.”
She stops. Looks at the crown like it might break in her hands.
“He was gentle when he turned away,” she says finally.
“The lessons leave that part out. When the scent’s wrong, they don’t—” She stops again.
Picks at a stem. “Mine wasn’t dosed. I think they try it clean the first time.
A real match, or the hope of one. But when the scent’s wrong and the male just walks off, they don’t let it go at that.
” Her jaw tightens. “The other clearings—the ones nobody talks about—they dose the males beforehand. Something to make them go along with it. Because without the right scent the body doesn’t want it, the bond doesn’t catch. So they make it happen anyway.”
She puts the crown on her own head. The jasmine’s already wilting. She wears it like a girl who doesn’t care.
“When I came back, things looked different. The Cage looked different. Not worse, not better—just visible, in a way it hadn’t been before.
Like I’d been looking at a painting my whole life and somebody finally told me it was a window.
” She tilts her head and the crown slides.
“The sisters were so gentle with me. That was the worst part. Gentleness with a shape to it—the kind you give a disappointment. Fewer grooming sessions. Less notice from Brother Cassian. Like the whole place had quietly sorted me into a different column.”
“Neve—”
“Lissa didn’t come back from preparation the same,” she says, not answering me, following her own thread.
“She used to argue. At meals, in theology, over the embroidery—opinions about everything. The thread tension was off. The soup was bland. Brother Cassian’s stories didn’t add up.
” A flicker of something that isn’t quite a smile.
“She went into preparation and came out humming. She hums while she eats now. She hums while she braids. She hums like Ireth, except Ireth was born quiet and Lissa was made quiet. There’s a difference. ”
The words sit between us. I don’t push. The olive tree shifts overhead, the coins of light rearranging themselves on the stone.
A breeze moves through the courtyard. The leaves shuffle, dry and papery, almost like whispering. The fountain catches the wind and throws a fine mist that lands on my bare arms. Cool. I didn’t expect it.
“The tea tastes wrong some mornings,” Neve says.
I look at her.
“Not bad. Wrong. Sweeter than it should be, or more bitter, or the floral note sits heavier. I started paying attention after I came back. The taste changes on the days the schedule changes—presentation days, visitor days. The days something happens.”
“Mora makes the tea.”
“Mora brings the tea. It gets made in the kitchen annex. The locked kitchen annex, the one past the laundry the sisters call storage.” Neve straightens the crown. “You ever been in that room?”
“No.”
“Neither has anyone. Except the sisters.”
I sit with that. The fountain sounds different now, louder, or I’m just hearing it clearer, the splash of the rainwater on the basin carrying something I’ve never listened for.
My tea this morning. The warmth settling the restlessness, the way it always settles, the way I’ve never once questioned.
The cup with my name on the bottom. Ellie.
Not sweet. Made. Made for one person and no one else.
“Neve.”
“Mm.”
“What do you want?”
She turns to me. It isn’t the question she expected. I can see it in the lift of her eyebrows, the gray eyes going a fraction wider. She opens her mouth. Closes it. The jasmine crown tilts. For a long moment there’s only the fountain, the leaves, a bird calling somewhere past the canopy line.
“I want to know what my own thoughts sound like,” she says. “Without the tea. Without the schedule. Without being told every single thing I feel is part of a holy plan that somebody else wrote down.”
The words drop into my chest like a stone into the fountain. I feel the ring of them go out. I open my mouth to answer and nothing comes, not nothing, the shape of something, the start of an answer the morning’s tea has rounded off so smooth I can’t get a grip on it.
I don’t have one. I don’t know what I want. The question sits in me with edges I can’t find, and the edges are sharp, and I can’t name a single one. When did I last want something that wasn’t handed to me first? When did I last reach for anything they hadn’t already set inside arm’s length?
I can’t remember. And the not-remembering is its own kind of answer.
“Neve—”
“Don’t go near the east wall at night.” She says it without changing her voice, without looking up, like it’s the same sentence. “The scratch is new. There’ve been others. Whatever’s making them is getting closer.”
I wait for her to say more. She lifts the crown off her head, sets it on the bench between us, and stands.
The light crosses her face as she rises—gray eyes, sharp jaw, the jasmine browning against her dark hair.
She looks older than twenty-four. She looks like someone who aged six months in a clearing and came back wearing the years like armor.
“I didn’t say be afraid,” she says. “I said don’t go near the east wall at night.”
She goes. The crown stays on the bench, the petals already browning, the stems curling in where the heat of her head warmed them.
I sit there with the fountain, the olive trees, the soft light, all the edges I can’t name.
The afternoon bell rings. I go to embroidery.
I sit with Ireth and pull white thread through white linen while she hums beside me, the tune shapeless and sweet, and I watch her face for the thing Neve described—the difference between born quiet and made quiet.
I can’t tell. And that scares me more than the scratch did.
I don’t go near the east wall. Not that night.
But I lie awake a long time. The fountain’s louder than usual.
The air through the bars carries something green and alive, pressing close.
The scratch is out there on the stone, three floors down, raw and pale, and I lie under my silk coverlet with Mora’s tea sitting warm and smooth in my blood, and I think about Neve’s question.
What do you want?
The answer’s down there somewhere, under the smoothness. I can feel the shape of it, heavy and formless, the way you feel something big moving in dark water.
And from past the wall, low, so low I feel it more than hear it, a sound that isn’t the fountain, isn’t the wind, isn’t anything the Cage ever taught me to name.