Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
I do not deny it.
What would be the point? Of course he has worked out that I do not live in the government apartment. No one could, and I would certainly never keep Mina there for any length of time. The place is disgusting.
I have also realised that I am a spectacularly poor liar, which is why I keep my mouth shut nine times out of ten.
It is simpler.
Vivian and Thea return with a feast.
Two members of staff wheel in a trolley bearing a full afternoon tea. Tiny sandwiches, cakes, pastries, scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, and bowls piled with fresh fruit. They set a teapot, cup, plate and cutlery before me, bow deferentially to Cáel and withdraw.
I do not know whether I will ever get used to this endless parade of food.
Vivian pours without asking and fills my plate.
Mina licks her lips as I pick up what appears to be a quarter of an egg sandwich and take a cautious bite. The bread is so soft that it dissolves before I can properly chew.
I eat several before I quite realise it.
While the others talk, I turn sideways towards the window, pad and pencil in hand, and begin again.
The Bone District this time.
The magic rises as before—unforced, simply present—and time slips away.
When dusk falls, one completed sheet lies before me for each lower District, the important streets and structures rendered with impossible precision. The linework is as steady on the last sheet as on the first, as though the magic keeps its own standard regardless of mine.
At least now we have a complete picture.
I lower the pencil and notice my hand.
It burns. The joints are stiff, my fingers reluctant to straighten.
Vivian presses another cup of tea into my good hand while I flex the other.
Cáel crouches beside my chair. “May I?” He holds out his hands for mine.
At this point, I will accept any help I can get. “Of course, thank you.”
He takes my right hand between both of his and works his thumbs along each joint. The ache eases almost at once, and a faint gold glow gathers in his palms.
Healing magic.
“Just fatigue,” he says.
He holds my hand a moment longer than necessary, then releases it gently.
I flex my fingers. The pain has vanished.
“May I mend the bruising on your face and what still lingers in your ribs?”
I remember his hand stopping short beside my face in the utility, the heat in his palm and the way he accepted my no without argument.
He hesitates. “My magic can tell that you used a potion. It knitted the bones and most of the muscle, but there’s still inflammation. I can feel it simply from holding your hand.”
I appear to be doing this.
“Yes, please.”
“I’ll need to touch the skin on your left side. That’s where the worst of it remains. And your face.”
I nod and, with my cheeks blazing, lift the angora top. “It’s fine,” I squeak. Not quite achieving the composed reply I intended.
His hand settles against my ribs, careful and deliberate.
Warmth blooms beneath his palm.
This time, it is not an ache but a deep, internal itch—muscle and bone shifting and resettling beneath the magic. The sensation is stranger than the potion’s effect, more invasive, though clearly more thorough. I close my eyes, bite my lower lip and barely manage to remain silent.
His hand lifts.
Cold rushes into the space his palm leaves.
“There.” His voice softens as he cups my cheek. His hand is large enough to cover most of my face, reminding me that I am more Jack Russell than mastiff: bold, feisty and unaware of my size until moments like this make it embarrassingly obvious.
The second pass is quicker. Less itching, more of a low hum I feel rather than hear.
He watches closely as the bruises fade, although his attention does not feel entirely clinical.
The tingling subsides, but the warmth of his palm remains. His thumb glides once, lightly, along my cheekbone.
He smiles. “There. Good as new.”
“Thank you. That was remarkable.” I meet his eyes. “I’m surprised you work in government rather than medicine.”
“Because a surgeon saves the person in front of them.” He straightens his cuff, unhurried. “I wanted the ones who never reach a surgeon.”
It is the least modest thing he has ever said.
“What is it?” I ask. “Your magic. Which kind?”
“Which kind?” For a moment he looks genuinely puzzled. “We don’t sort it like that in Velmora. You are given what you are given, and you are taught to use it without hurting anybody.” He shrugs. “I have always been able to mend things. That is all.”
His colour has faded slightly. He curls his fingers once, then tucks his hand against his thigh.
I notice it and say nothing.
Cáel takes the pad and slides it into the slim black case. A line of purple script flashes beneath his thumb before the lock seals with a quiet click.
“Diplomatic papers,” he explains, catching my look. “No one here has the authority to open it.”
Only then does some of the tension leave my shoulders.
“Thank you. They’re much safer with you.” The thought of carrying evidence like that through the Districts makes my skin crawl.
“What if you need them?” he asks.
“I drew them once. I think the patterns are fixed in my magic now—I could reproduce them.” I touch the case lightly. A faint answering prickle runs through my fingertip. “The originals feel connected to whatever lies beneath the city.”
His gaze sharpens. “Connected how?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Mina whines, and we agree it is time to leave. Cáel carries the locked case himself and never puts it down. Security glances at the diplomatic seal but does not ask to inspect it.
We drive back in convoy.
At the house, I go straight upstairs to change. The new clothes are beautiful, and I feel guilty wearing them for reasons I can’t explain, so I put my own things back on.
I keep the socks.
Nobody needs to know about the socks.
Downstairs, with my permission, they open the black case and carefully remove the drawings from the pad. We spread them across the floor. I help position each sheet until every District lies before us and the roads and rune-lines join to form a single vast design.
The first thing we notice is that, on the outermost sheets, several lines do not end at the city boundary.
They continue beyond the edge of the paper towards the surrounding towns.
“That is not good,” I murmur.
No. It is deeply alarming.
This crime reaches beyond our boundaries, into towns that have nothing to do with any of this, and I have no idea whether anyone there knows.
If those creeping runes are active, the Fade will follow.
If it has not begun already.
Cáel crouches at the edge of the outermost sheet and says nothing for a long moment.
“How far past the boundary?”
“I can only draw what I can see. The lines were still going when the city ran out.”
He traces the air above the paper, following one of them past the margin, and I watch him work out where it would be heading if it carried on.
“Velmora is four hundred miles that way,” he says.
Nobody answers him.
“We’ll help,” Vivian says. She rubs my arm in what she must believe is a comforting gesture. My skin feels ready to jump off and run away. I resist the urge to slap her hand aside and tell her not to touch me. I draw a slow breath, then step away when something else distracts her.
An hour ago, I let a man I have known a few short days put his hand flat against my bare ribs. He asked first. That is the whole of the difference, and my sister has no idea the problem exists.
“We will all help,” Cáel adds.
They all say it, and I believe they mean it, but meaning and doing are entirely different things.
They do not know the Districts or the people. They do not understand how dirty this will become. They are shiny, magical and educated, with lives that matter far beyond the city’s problems. Important work. Important people depending upon them.
I am already dirty.
I may as well be the one to wade into the muck.
This is my task.
I am the one who has to fix it.
Cáel uses a secure Velmoran device to photograph the maps. Unlike the living runes themselves, the graphite lines appear clearly on its screen. He encrypts each image, then returns the original sheets to the diplomatic case.
Only once the lock seals do the questions begin.
I answer, but my voice is flat. I am simply exhausted.
Magic is like a muscle. Neglect it long enough, and even a little use leaves you wrung out.
I have been wrung out for years.
All I have ever wanted is family and magic.
I thought getting my power back would feel like invincibility. Every locked door swinging open at once. The end of something that has been slowly killing me.
Instead, I am more frightened than before.
My life was balanced—grim and narrow, but balanced. I understood my place. I knew how to be the better monster.
People hating me is something I can manage. I have had decades of practice.
Being a beloved sister is not a part I know how to play. I set it aside long ago, and I was not particularly good at it even then.
And now there is Cáel.
I do not know what to do with him, so I have decided to ignore the problem and hope it resolves itself.
It will not, but the intention is there.
I want to go home. To crawl onto my mattress and pretend the fight of my life is not waiting on the other side of a night’s sleep.
“I’d better get home,” I say quietly.
Thea blinks. “Of course.” She hesitates. “But you don’t have to go back tonight. You already have more colour in your cheeks. The longer you stay up here, away from whatever that magic is doing to people”—she glances at Vivian—“the better. In my professional opinion, you really shouldn’t return.”
“Thank you, but I need to go.”
I know I should stay.
Sleep here. Eat here. Spend as long as possible above the runes and allow my body to recover.
I cannot.
I need to go home.
To think.
To plan.
Vivian hugs me at the door. I stiffen automatically, then force myself to breathe. She smells of clean soap and tea. “I love you,” she murmurs into my hair.
“I love you too.”
I mean it more than I expected.
Mina and I leave, and Cáel follows. We climb into the car and head back. After the lift deposits us at street level, I direct him towards my tower block.
“May I walk you to your door?” he asks.
“I need to walk Mina first.”
“Would you like company?”
“Yes, please.”
It is selfish—an hour of borrowed time at most—but I want it.
We set off towards the hilly park I use at night. Mina trots ahead, already knowing the route. Streetlights glow at irregular intervals. Some bulbs have been smashed and never replaced; others flicker with neglect.
The park itself is immaculate. No broken glass or rubbish hides in the grass, waiting to slice an unwary paw. People here can’t mend the lights or repair the crumbling buildings, but they can tend the trees and keep the paths clean.
The Districts are deprived, not uncaring. We have not lost our pride. Only the money and strength to tackle the larger things.
“I can’t believe you walk around here at night,” Cáel says.
“It’s home. I’m used to it.”
I appreciate that he does not try to persuade me back to the Zone or challenge a decision he clearly disagrees with.
He simply allows it to stand.
I know returning to the Zone would stop the pulling sensation. I already feel diminished, and we have been below for less than an hour.
Perhaps the lasting damage is not immediate. Perhaps what I feel now is only the first tug, while the true harm accumulates over years—a slow, festering plague that explains why children’s magic still breaks through, weakened but not yet extinguished.
They have not been exposed long enough to lose it completely.
I know that going back up would make me stronger. A few days in the Zone, and I could probably manage far more than I did today.
Yet the thought unsettles me.
What if the power I channel up there is magic siphoned from the people down here? Filtered upwards, refined and redirected to strengthen the Immortal Zone while the Districts hollow out?
If that is true, every hour I spend recovering above makes me part of the very magic destroying them.
No better than those who conjured it.
The thought chills me more deeply than the night air.
I do not have enough evidence, and I should not allow myself to spiral over a theory I cannot yet prove.
But it is horrible all the same.
“I can see it in your face,” Cáel says. “You’re planning something.”
My silence is confirmation enough.
I may as well trust him. He will not let the matter drop until I do.
“Vivian and Thea must stay well clear of whatever comes next,” I say. “And so should you. This isn’t your fight. You have a country of your own.”
“I watched you draw a line running out of this city towards it,” he says. “Try that argument again.”
I have nothing to set against that, so I do not try.
He waits in silence for the rest.
“I don’t know much about rune mechanics. We need to learn how the network works, where the siphoned magic goes and who benefits. That means finding the anchors.” I glance towards the dim city beyond the park. “Break those, break the spell.”
After a beat, he replies, “And then?”
“Whoever controls the magic will come looking.” I shrug. “Shake the tree and see what falls.”
“Right.” He considers this. “And you planned to do it alone.”
“Obviously.”
“That’s not happening,” he says evenly. “You need someone watching your back.”
He must see something shift in my expression because his voice softens. “You don’t trust me yet. That’s all right. You will.” He offers me his hand.
I do not trust him completely, but I trust him more than anyone else capable of surviving what comes next.
I huff out a laugh and take it. We perform an awkward handshake that dissolves into something not quite formal. “Partners,” I say.
“Partners.” He pulls a tennis ball from his coat pocket. “Now, who wants to play ball?”
Mina’s ears swivel.
He rounds the corner towards the grass and throws. The ball arcs much farther than it should. Whether that is magic or simply Cáel being irritatingly good at everything, I can’t tell.
Mina quivers, waiting.
“Go,” I tell her.
She streaks after it, nose down. She finds the ball and races back, her tongue lolling from the side of her mouth.
“I’ve always wanted a dog,” Cáel says, watching her.
“You’re allergic, and you must be unable to heal yourself.”
“It doesn’t matter. What are a few hives between friends?”
Mina sits at his feet and drops the ball.
He looks down.
She looks up.
“Good girl,” he whispers. Then he throws the ball again.