Chapter 40 #2
“I share an apartment with two other technicians.” He responds in English, though she spoke in Talusar. “Not far from the base.”
“You like your work?”
Theren can’t stop himself from making a strained, frustrated sound. Kesia frowns at him.
“I’m not allowed to care about my son?”
“You left him without a word, and for four years, you let him believe his brother was dead,” Theren says. “So, no. You don’t get to care.”
Her hair, now threaded with gray, is pulled back in a tight knot. There’s dust in the creases of her skin. He has the same brow as her, but otherwise, she always said, he’s his father’s son.
His father—-who came through a doorway in the fucking stars.
“Theren.” Theren doesn’t need the Fever to hear the pleading in his brother’s voice, but for once, he can’t indulge it.
“No,” Theren says. “I came here for a purpose. If you want to enjoy a charade of a family reunion, Kesia, you can do it when I’m finished.”
Isre’s hurt is a sudden twisting in his gut. He ignores it.
“Very well, let us accomplish your purpose, then,” Kesia says.
“I recently recovered a memory. I have questions about it, and I know you have the answers.”
“Recovered a memory.”
“One that Rava had someone bury.”
She doesn’t seem surprised, and maybe that’s the worst of what she’s done to him—-that she continues to witness the terrible things that have happened to him, and she acts like the fact that he can endure them means they aren’t so terrible after all.
“What do you want to know?” she says.
“Tell me about Sevik.”
The name, his father’s name, rattles her. A gust of wind makes the canopy shudder and snap, and he closes his eyes against the dust. He thinks again of the days he spent crossing this desert with the grit of sand in every fold of skin.
Kesia tucks her hands into her sleeves, and squints at the horizon.
“Sevik.” She speaks the name slowly. “If you know his name, then you know, I suppose, that he was from another place entirely.”
Theren nods, though he still can’t actually believe it.
“He asked me to keep the secret of him from you,” she says. “Until you were touched with Fever—-his phrase, not mine.”
“I’ve been touched with Fever for four years.”
“You would barely look at me. You were never alone. Guards in the Crucible, guards in House Vidar. This information is too important to risk revealing it to her.”
“You could have arranged a meeting.”
“You already hated me plenty. I couldn’t bear to make you hate me more.”
Theren squeezes his hands into fists, digging in his fingernails without thinking about it. Elegy reaches for him, her hand sliding just beneath the collar of his shirt to cover the top of his spine, her touch gentle and cool. Reassuring.
Kesia’s eyes shift to Elegy’s hand. She sets her jaw.
“Regardless of why you didn’t tell me sooner,” Theren says, “tell me now.”
The horse, standing in the shadow of a nearby rock formation, tosses its head. It’s a young animal, restless, white dappled with gray. Kesia watches it for a long time before she responds.
“Your father came from a distant place. He never gave me the name, and it would mean nothing to us anyway,” she says.
“He was a man, which is to say, he shared our biology, and told me that my people and his have a common origin. Not truly alien, though strange to me, in certain ways. I’m still not sure how he learned our language, or why he came here to begin with. ”
Her hand passes over her mouth, as if remembering some old tenderness.
“But he told me that after you survived the Fever, you would need to seek him,” she says. “And that he would plant the coordinates in the past for you to find.”
He waits on the other side for his son. He has been waiting a long time.
Isre frowns. “Plant coordinates in the past? What does that mean?”
“It means creating a memory in his own life, prior to Theren’s birth, that can only be retrieved by an epocha looking into Theren’s deep past,” Elegy says. She’s still standing at Theren’s shoulder, like a sentry ready to defend him. “Right?”
Kesia nods. “He knew that the right person would be able to see down the line of your progenitor. Like the other Knight—-”
“Fenn,” Theren says roughly. Down the line of your progenitor.
The same phrase Fenn said in the memory he retrieved.
If the past was a string that Fenn could tug harder than other people, perhaps that was the “line” to which the phrase referred.
And Theren’s father was the fish hooked on the other end of it.
“Yes,” Kesia says. “Fenn.”
“Who is still alive.”
“As far as I know.”
“How long did you know he was alive before you came to House Vidar the last time?” Theren says. “How long did you know that I wasn’t the sole survivor?”
Kesia doesn’t answer. Theren’s throat burns. His eyes burn.
“Is there anything else?” he says.
“Fenn was the one who ordered my silence,” Kesia says. “And his orders must be obeyed.”
Much as he would like to, Theren can’t exactly blame her for that. He knows how epocha are treated in Valla. How severe the punishment is for disobeying them.
“Please look at me, Theren.”
Her eyes are lighter than his own, an indeterminate hazel. Right now they look almost golden in color.
“It took me four years to realize how badly you needed help,” she says. “I believed, when you were moved to House Vidar, that it was—-a position of honor. Many Talusar would see it that way. But when I saw that you lived there, in those rooms; that it was all routine for you—-”
“Is that what it was?” Theren chokes out. “Routine?”
“When I saw you there, I realized I had to do something—-”
“Don’t pretend you were in the dark,” he says. “You saw—-” He chokes again, but forces himself to go on: “You saw everything she did to me before then. And it was never enough for you to help me.”
“I was a fool, but I didn’t want that—-”
“Enough.” He shakes his head. “I have been telling you over and over again since the Getty, and each time you treat me like I’m an impetuous child throwing a tantrum. I’m not. So hear me now.” He leans toward her, and says, in a quiet, level voice: “There is no way to repair what you broke, Kesia.”
“Because you won’t allow it,” she says, her voice unsteady.
“That’s true. I won’t, and I don’t want to.”
He’s shocked by how calm he feels, no ringing ears, no numb fingers, just a kind of weight—-a weight like resignation, like loss, but also like stability.
He stands. Touches the place where Ranos stabbed him, though it’s healed now and no longer tender to the touch. Kesia’s eyes are bright with tears. He turns, and walks toward the Finch, the hot sun burning the back of his neck.