Chapter 22
My hands are cold and Asha is trying to button my dress.?
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“You’re shaking.” Her fingers work the covered buttons up my spine — small, fabric-covered, the kind that take patience. The dress is simple. Cream silk, long sleeves with embroidery, a neckline that sits across my collarbones and doesn’t plunge or drape or do anything designed to attract attention. It falls straight from the waist to the floor in a clean line. It was measured on my body six weeks ago by a woman named Tess who works out of a shop in the town below the commune, who wrapped the tape around my ribcage and wrote everything down and asked me twice if I was sure about the sleeves.
I’m sure about the sleeves. They cover the crescent scar on my left wrist and the healer’s scar on my right palm and they hold heat against my skin, which is the only engineering requirement I gave Tess besides make it mine.
“You’re not shaking from cold,” Asha says behind me. “You’re shaking from nerves and you’re going to stretch these buttonholes if you don’t stop.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Your hands are blue.”
“My hands are always blue.”
“Bluer than usual.” She finishes the last button and steps back. “There. Turn around.”
Petra is sitting in the chair by the window. She’s in a dark jacket, trousers, her hair cropped close, and the cane is leaning against the wall beside her. She can stand without it now for short stretches — Asha cleared her for light duty two weeks ago — but she keeps it close. Habit, or insurance. She’s watching me with an expression I can’t fully read, and the Gift stirs at the edge of my awareness and I let it. What it finds is simple enough to make my throat tight: pride, and grief, and a complicated tenderness that has nothing to do with the dress and everything to do with the woman wearing it.
“Well?” I say.
Petra tilts her head. Looks at me the way she used to look at tactical layouts — assessing, thorough, missing nothing. “The neckline is good.”
“That’s your review? The neckline is good?”
“What do you want me to say? You look like a Luna.” She pauses. Her jaw works once, the way it does when she’s pushing past something. “You look like yourself.”
The room is small, because we’re in my quarters at the commune, the same room I moved into when I arrived, expanded slightly during the renovation last year, which is a generous term for a bedroom with a tiny attached office and a window that faces the courtyard. I don’t sleep here any more, most of the time, but it’s still mine for when shifts run long. There’s one mirror. A full-length one on the back of the door that I bought from the same shop where Tess works, carried up the stairs myself, and hung with a level and two screws and Jessa holding the other end.I turn toward it.
The woman in the mirror is wearing a cream dress that fits her body because it was cut for her body and no one else’s. Her dark hair is down, loose around her shoulders. Her shoulders are straight. Her hands are at her sides and they’re trembling slightly and she’s not pretending they aren’t.
She’s alone in the reflection. One woman, one mirror. No twin beside her. No twin in a room down the hall wearing the same measurements. No six-sided fitting room reflecting a life that didn’t include her.
The crescent scar is hidden under the left sleeve, but I can feel it — warm, always warm now, a low pulse against the inside of my wrist that matches my heartbeat. The healer’s scar on my right palm is covered too, but I close my hand around it anyway and feel the thin ridge of tissue against my fingers. Two marks, both mine. One earned in a clinic, one burned into me by a bond that broke and left something better in its place.
“Asha.”
She appears at my shoulder in the mirror. Dark eyes, the professional face softened into something personal and warm. My friend. The first real one I’ve ever had.
“You look perfect,” she says. “Don’t argue with me. I’m a surgeon and my professional opinion is that you look perfect, and if you cry right now I will end you because I just finished those buttons.”
I laugh. It comes out rough and wet and surprised, and Petra makes a sound from the chair that might be a laugh or might be a cough and Asha’s hand finds my shoulder and squeezes, once, and the three of us are in this small room in a commune built on neutral ground and nobody in this room is performing and nobody in this room is lying and the dress is mine and the morning light is making long shapes on the floor.
Petra stands. Reaches for the cane out of instinct, then stops herself. She picks up my bouquet, waiting on the end of the bed instead and crosses the room to hand it to me. Three steps, steady, her rebuilt spine holding her upright — and she looks at me with that complicated expression and for a second the history is loud between us. The training yard and the bad wine and the formations she stood in while my title was redesigned. The intake desk and the cane and the question she asked in the corridor: was it just me?
It wasn’t just her. It isn’t just her. And she’s here, standing in my room on my wedding morning, because I treated her anyway and she stayed anyway and the answer to both of those choices is the same: the system works when you don’t make exceptions. Not for cruelty. Not for grudges. Not for the complicated, tangled history of two women who were both chewed up by the same machine.
“Ready?” Petra says.
Asha opens the door. The corridor is bright. Somewhere downstairs, people are gathering — the commune staff, the Ironholt wolves, the small and deliberate guest list I chose because these are the people who chose me. No delegations, no politics, no six flower girls and a bridesmaid who’s already wearing my crown. Just mine.
My hands are cold. They’ll be cold when I walk down the corridor and cold when I reach the room where Aleks is waiting and cold when he takes them in his own warm grip and doesn’t comment on the temperature, because he never does. He just holds on.
I step through the doorway.