Nova
Brent walks like there’s somewhere he has to be and none of the rest of us are moving fast enough.
I’m trying. My shoulder has opinions about pace and I’m overruling them, but Trey keeps slowing to match me and then speeding up and then slowing again, which is somehow more annoying than just being slow.
“Stop,” I say.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re hovering.”
“I’m walking.”
“You’re walking at me.”
Zoe laughs from my other side. She has my good arm and she’s not letting go, which I’ve stopped arguing about. The crow drops from somewhere above and lands on a fence post as we pass. Zoe looks at it. Looks at me.
“Is that the bird that warned you?” she says. “Before they came?”
“Yeah.”
“So it’s—”
“I don’t know what it is.”
She watches it over her shoulder as we pass. “Do we think that’s weird?”
“Probably.”
She snorts.
I hate that I smile.
Rane appears from somewhere in the back of the group and squeezes up beside Trey. “What are we talking about?”
“The crow,” Trey says.
“Love that crow.”
Behind us Vaelor says something that makes Kyron snort and I don’t catch the rest because Brent rounds the corner ahead of us and I have to keep up. I want the bunker. I’ve been wanting the bunker since I woke up this morning and I am being very patient about it.
Minerva’s door is open.
She’s standing when we come in. The room has tea on the low table that nobody’s touched. Books stacked with a folded piece of paper on top. A chair angled like she sat down and stood back up at least twice before we got here.
She’s nervous. Huh.
Vaelor crosses to her. Locke finds the doorway. Brent goes to the far wall and stays there.
Trey is close on my left. Zoe keeps my arm.
We talk about the shoulder. The wings — the kid this morning, the partial shift, just warm. Minerva says the Hollow has been steadier since I came back, the forest closer, something about the garden.
I let it run maybe two minutes.
“Why are we here?” I say.
Minerva stops.
“Because there are things you should hear from me,” she says, “before you hear them from him.”
Her eyes change for a moment and go from Vaelor to me.
“But first, are you alright?”
I blink because I was not expecting that from her of all people. I didn’t think she cared. Not like that anyway.
I nod. “Yeah, thank you.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just nods and moves on.
“Your parents came to me once.”
“They aren’t my parents.”
It comes out before I decide it. It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud anywhere except inside my own head. It feels wrong admitting it, like it’s real now.
Zoe’s grip tightens.
I can’t look at the guys. I just stay focused on Minerva.
“Harrick said—” His name is wrong in my mouth. I can’t.
Minerva doesn’t say that’s not true. She doesn’t say anything.
“Nova, whoever they were,” she says, “they loved you.”
I nod, barely. Keep my eyes on her. “Tell me what you know.”
She sits. Folds her hands the way she always does.
“They came when you were an infant,” she says. “Frightened. They didn’t understand what you were because the mark hadn’t appeared. They wanted answers.” She takes a breath. “I didn’t have the ones they needed.”
I stay quiet.
“But I couldn’t stop thinking about it after they left.
That if they existed — a child outside the system’s categories, people the system hadn’t accounted for — there had to be others.
” She looks at her hands. “A few months later, a woman came. Her mark had split, half Shadow, half Memory. The system called her unstable. She had two small children and nowhere to go.” She smooths her shirt.
“I couldn’t very well send her away. So I told her she could stay while I figured out where to send her. ”
“And?”
“I never figured out where to send her. Because then a man came whose shift was only partial and the system had labeled him defective. Then a cluster whose Order records said they weren’t one.” She opens her hands. “They just kept coming and I stopped trying to figure out where to put people.”
Something climbs through my chest.
“You built a whole town of people the system threw away.”
“They built it,” she says. “I just stopped closing the door.”
I look at Locke in the doorway. At Vaelor beside his grandmother.
Two scared people showed up with me and she couldn’t help them. And then she spent decades building the place she wished she’d had to send them.
“Obviously the Order knows about this place now,” I say. “Why didn’t they shut it down?”
Minerva goes quiet.
“I don’t know,” she says finally. “I told myself we were careful. Hidden. That we’d built far enough outside the system’s attention that they simply hadn’t found us.
” She smooths her shirt again. “But after what happened — after they walked in here like they’d always known where the door was — I’m no longer sure that was true. ”
My breath catches.
Not hidden.
Allowed.
The thought makes my stomach turn.
“When word came out that they were looking for an anomaly,” she says, “for you, I tried to get Clockwork here faster. Hoping we had everything in place before you arrived.”
She purses her lips.
“We had incursions. Patrols at the border. But nothing coordinated. Nothing like what came for you.” She looks at me. “And the help came too late.”
I look at Locke. He’s already looking at me.
“But it’s here now.” Locke says quietly. “We helped them set it up just before coming to get you.”
I nod, thank fuck for that.
I turn back to Minerva. “You’re afraid.”
“Yes,” she says with no hesitation.
Minerva, who built all of this and held it together all this time — sitting here afraid and not pretending otherwise.
Vaelor’s eyes find mine. He doesn’t say anything.
“Did they know,” I ask. “Celeste and Hunter. What I was?”
Minerva’s hands fold tighter.
“I don’t know,” she says. “They didn’t tell me. I’m not sure anyone told them anything. They were scared. They wanted answers. I didn’t have them.”
The words hit harder than an answer would have.
“So no answers there. Fantastic.”
I breathe.
“Did you love them?” Zoe asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”
“Then they were your parents. That’s all it takes.”
I don’t have anything to say to that.
I look at Brent.
He’s been at the far wall the entire conversation. He looks anxious. That’s not like him.
He catches me looking and looks away.
Minerva doesn’t have all the answers. But I know someone who does.
I’m already standing, turning for the door.
“Nova?”
I stop. Don’t turn around.
“Be careful with what you’re carrying when you walk in there,” Minerva says. “He’ll use it.”
I look at her over my shoulder.
“Good.”