Chapter 24
CLAIRE
The train leaves at quarter past three.
I buy a ticket with the coins from the inner pocket of my coat—three years of field habit, always coins in the inner pocket, the kind of thing that becomes automatic. I find a corner seat in the second-class carriage. I sit down. I put my bag on the floor between my feet.
I walked out of Mist Court.
I walked out through the gate and down the road and I am sitting on a train and the bond is pulling from behind me and I am not going back. Not yet. Not until I have the picture without the interference.
The carriage fills. A woman with two small children takes the seats across the aisle.
The children negotiate the window seat with the seriousness of a territorial dispute and the younger one prevails by climbing onto the seat and pressing both palms to the glass before the older one has finished making her case.
The older one crosses her arms and stares at the opposite window as though she planned this outcome.
A man drops his case on my foot getting it into the rack. He says so sorry without looking at me and I say it's fine without looking at him. The platform slides past the window. Then the station roof. Then open sky.
The bond pulls from behind me.
I know this feeling precisely now—the direction of it, the way it sits in my sternum and increases with distance. I know it will get harder over days. I stay in my seat.
The woman across the aisle breaks a biscuit in half and gives a piece to each child and then glances at me. "Do you want one?"
I haven't eaten today. "Thank you," I say.
She passes it across. Shortbread, slightly crumbly. I eat it and look at the flat November countryside—the fields, the stripped trees, the sky low and grey and close.
"Travelling far?" she says.
"Three hours."
"Business or family?"
"Family," I say. Which is true in the specific narrow way that most true things are true.
She nods, the nod of someone who has learned that family covers a range of things that don't need elaborating, and turns back to her children, who have moved on from the window seat dispute to something involving a button that one of them has and the other wants.
I look out the window and I think.
Here is what is true.
The wanting was there before the magic. Lesson three at the brass sphere, my eyes going to the front of his breeches regardless of instruction.
That was mine. He hadn't done anything except stand too close and be what he is.
Before any working, before any shaping, before any of what I now know the plan contained.
The marks are mine. They shift under my fingers when I touch the one at my throat and they're not going anywhere and I don't hate them the way I thought I would.
The child is mine. I am keeping this at the edge of the page still, but it is there and it is a fact.
The grief for Lena is mine. The full size of it, which I felt this morning with the magic down, which is large and is going to be mine for the rest of my life.
Lena at seventeen teaching me to wear a cover from the inside instead of the outside.
Lena at twenty-three sending me somewhere dangerous and tracking my check-ins with her specific careful attention.
Lena's laugh. The letter I burned two paragraphs in.
The third paragraph I already knew: I have the route. I have the safe house. Send word.
She was coming for me.
She was building the extraction and keeping the route open and waiting for word, and I assembled the picture in his workroom and handed it to him and glowed at his approval and she is dead and fourteen people are dead and the route is gone and I am still in his court with his marks on my throat.
I handed him the map to find her.
I sit with this. I have been sitting with it for four hours now, in the workroom and in my room and in his study and now on this train, and it does not get smaller.
It is not going to get smaller. The grief for Lena is going to be the size it is for the rest of my life, and part of that size is the specific knowledge that I built the picture that found her, that I used my own hands for it, that I didn't know and he did and he let me do it anyway.
Outside: a farmhouse set back from the track. A woman in the yard hanging washing in the November cold—sheets going grey and stiff in the damp air. She doesn't look up as the train passes.
The older child appears at my elbow, having climbed down from her seat. Perhaps six, very serious. "Are you sad?" she says.
I look at her. "A bit," I say.
She considers this with the gravity of someone receiving important information. Then: "My gran says sad is just love with nowhere to go." She says it with the authority of a person passing down received wisdom. "She says give it somewhere to go and it becomes something else."
I look at her. "Your gran sounds wise."
"She is," she says, and climbs back up to report to her mother.
The woman across the aisle mouths sorry at me. I shake my head.
I look back out the window and I think about what the child's grandmother said.
I have been using the word wanting. The bond.
The claiming. The pre-heat biology. The approval dependency.
The magic running through every room of a court I entered as a spy.
I have been precise and clinical—every word except the one that applies, because using it means acknowledging something about what the last two months have been.
He ran the magic on my feelings for months. He shaped what I was able to feel sharply. He made the wanting larger than it would have been on its own.
And also: the wanting was mine. It was there on day three, my eyes going where they kept going regardless of instruction. Before any working, before any shaping.
I have been a spy since I was sixteen. I know the difference between a compromised source and a person who is actually choosing something. My father runs me. Vaelis ran me. Neither of them could have run me on feelings that weren't there to run.
Lena is dead. The grief for Lena is large and it is going to be there for the rest of my life.
Somewhere to go. I built her a path to find her, and now I have to carry the size of that.
I can put that somewhere—not away, not small, but into something real.
Into not looking away from it. Into what I decide to do next.
The wanting is also mine. Even inside the cage. Even knowing every plank the cage is made from.
The train runs south-west. Mist Court is behind me, the bond pulling steady and insistent. I know the physiology. I am going to stay in my seat.
I need to hear it in my own voice first. Say it out loud to someone outside the court with no magic in the air, and then I'll know what I think.
My father's house is forty minutes away.
I know what I'm going to find there. I know the look on his face when he opens the door—the assessment, the calculation, the way a general looks at an asset.
I know what he's going to say. I'm going anyway because I need to say everything out loud to someone who isn't inside the bond, and he is the only person I have outside of it.
Then I'll know where I am.
A level crossing. A man on a horse waiting for the train to pass, watching the carriages go by with the patient expression of someone accustomed to waiting for things larger than him.
The horse puts its ears back as the noise passes and then the crossing is gone and there are more fields, more November sky.
The three seconds in the gallery. Something on his face before the arrangement caught it—I've been keeping this in the same place as the warmth of his hands in my hair, the sound he made when I touched his face deliberately, the way he said my name after I said his.
Not the magic. Not warm and managed. The other thing.
The cold specific wanting that was pointed at me from before any plan.
He was a beat too slow.
I know what he was managing. I know the mechanism. What I don't know is what was underneath the managing, what exists in him outside the calculation, whether there is a version of him that isn't built around the plan.
I told him: I'm going to find out.
I meant it when I said it. I mean it now, three hours into a train journey with the November countryside going patient and grey outside the window.
The city appears on the horizon. Buildings, smoke, the smell of it coming through the gap at the top of the window.
The younger child presses both palms to the window again as the station slides in—the same gesture as the departure, bookending the journey.
"Bye," says the older one. Unexpectedly.
"Goodbye," I say.
The platform. I step off into the cold and the crowd and the particular noise of the city—entirely itself, entirely ordinary, nothing managed and nothing running underneath anything.
My father's house is twenty minutes on foot.
I walk.