12 Sloane #2
“I need more than a good story to explain to everyone else that the location of every Hearthward on this continent now lives in the skin of a man the Compact built to hunt oath-breakers.” She set the folded sheet on the stack and reached for the next.
“You understand what you’re asking. You’re asking me to trust a single point of failure.
Forty years I’ve kept this network alive on one law: no one person knows everything.
No one is worth the whole. And you’ve walked in here and told me the whole of it now rides on one man. ”
She looked at Finn for the first time since she’d started folding.
“One man who can be captured. One man who is, unless I’ve badly misjudged the ash on him, walking straight out of a war.”
All of it was true, and I had no answer, because there wasn’t one.
I opened my mouth to make the argument anyway. To fight for it.
And I saw Maren’s eyes flick past me, and I turned, and Finn wasn’t listening to the argument at all.
Someone—one of the college students, maybe—had set a basket of towels down beside him when we came in, half a joke, half a test, and Finn had picked one up. He was folding it. Standing off to the side, gray to the shoulders with ash, folding a stranger’s towels into neat thirds.
I walked over, reaching for a towel from the same basket, and murmured under my breath, “Your corners are a little off, Senior Firefighter.”
Finn shot me a dangerous, mocking grin. “I’m a hotshot, Sloane. We fold for utility, not for display.”
“Clearly.” I smoothed the edge of his fold. “Let the woman who raised me think you have some domestic potential, Calloway? Is that the plan?”
“I have plenty of potential,” he whispered, his eyes dark with a sudden, playful heat as he nudged his arm against mine. “I just prefer to show it in private.”
Maren watched him bring the corners together, set the towel down, and reach for the next one, and something in the flat calm of her face shifted.
“I felt the Oath return,” she said, to no one, to the sheet in her hands, “All of us did—every witch who ever administered it. Like a compass finding a north it had forgotten it had.” She folded. “I told Deborah someone was coming who’d carry it. I didn’t know if I believed myself.”
She looked at the ash in the lines of Finn’s throat, at the marks at his wrists, at the towel folded square in his hands.
“And here’s a man who walked through the burned dead to carry out her babies, folding my towels, acting like he’s known my adopted daughter for her entire life.”
She set the sheet down.
Maren didn’t say you’re forgiven and she didn’t say I trust him and she didn’t take back one word. She just crossed the room to me and held out both her hands, palms up.
The old greeting. She’d done it the first day I came to her, eight-years-old, half-feral and running from something I was too young to remember.
She’d held her hands out palms up across a table exactly like this one and said nothing in these, see?
nothing to fear from me, and I’d put my grubby fists in them, and she’d never once let me down since.
I put my hands in hers.
“Judgment’s suspended,” she said. “Not lifted. I’m not a fool and neither are you.” Her chapped fingers closed warm around mine. “But I’ll hear the rest of it, and I’ll hear it from the girl I raised.”
I smiled at Finn, and he let out a breath, his eyes crinkling. Right in front of Maren, he stepped up to my side, slipping his arm around my waist and pulling me flush against him. He gave my hip a firm, warm squeeze, dropping a blatant kiss on the side of my head.
Maren looked at us touching, and let out a dry huff that was as close to a blessing as she ever got.
And then she went still.
Her grip on my fingers changed, gentled, turned into something older.
Her thumbs pressed the insides of my wrists where the Oath used to live.
Her eyes half-closed. And I felt her reach, the way I’d felt hedge-witches reach a hundred times, a warm careful attention moving over me and into me, and it went past my wrists, past the burned-out channels of the Oath, down into the deep quiet center of me where the fever still banked its last low coals—
And it hit the fever, and it hit something else, and Maren’s breath caught.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, you clever girl.”
“What.” The fear came up automatic, old, animal. “Maren, what—”
She didn’t let go of my hands. She turned her head and looked at Finn, and then she looked back at me, and her plain face did something I had seen maybe three times in my life, a warmth breaking through the banked-down surface like light through a cracked door.
“First one. Your Heat’s finished. Right now, this minute—it’s spent itself all the way to the bottom and it’s putting itself out under my hands.
Seventy-two hours it’s had you. It’s done. It did its work.”
I looked inside myself and realized she was right.
The furnace at the base of my skull that had been roaring for three days had banked.
My skin had cooled. My knees went loose with the sheer relief of it, the plain animal glory of a body that had stopped eating itself alive, and Maren held my hands and held me up and let me have it, one long shuddering breath and then another, cool air all the way to the bottom of my lungs.
“There,” she murmured. “There it is. Breathe it out.”
“And the next thing,” I managed.
Maren smiled.
“Barely more than three days old,” she said.
“Already burning bright.” She said it to the room, to both of us, to Finn as much as to me—because she was a witch of the Lodestone Underground and she’d delivered more hidden babies than any hospital would ever have a record of.
“You’re carrying. Just barely. Whoever is in there is lit up like a lamp.
” Her thumbs pressed my wrists once, gentle. “Congratulations, Sloane.”
I already knew.
But knowing it and hearing it said out loud in Maren’s kind voice in the folding room where I’d grown up were two entirely different animals.
I didn’t look at my own stomach. There was nothing to feel there yet, nothing to hold. I looked at Finn.
The towel was still in his hands, half-done, and he’d gone absolutely motionless with it.
I watched Maren watch his face—that was the tell, that was the thing, she’d turned her whole attention onto the Executioner to see what the news would do to him.
I knew his face better after three days than I’d known anyone’s in years, and I saw the granite of it break—into something raw and undefended and terrified and luminous all at once.
He dropped the towel and took my face in both of his big, ash-stained hands. He pressed his forehead to mine, his chest heaving, his gold eyes wet.
“A lamp,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Sloane.”
“I know,” I breathed, my own hands coming up to cover his wrists. “I know.”
Everything he couldn’t say came down the bond in one wordless, beautiful flood that nearly took my legs out a second time.
Whatever Maren had been looking for in his face, she found it.
She went back to the basket and picked up the next sheet. She folded the sheet in half. Then in half again. And that was all—she didn’t add to it, didn’t explain it, didn’t so much as glance up until we’d finished having our moment.
She set the folded sheet on the stack.
“The Thorne girl,” she said, in the exact same voice, moving back to business. “Kaia. What happened to her?” She reached for another sheet. “Did she make it somewhere good?”
“She made it somewhere good,” I said, and my voice went thick. “She has a pack now. Reed’s pack, with a mate who’d burn the world down for her. She’s safe, Maren. She—” I had to stop. “She made it all the way.”
Maren nodded, once, as if she were checking a name off a very long list she carried in her chest and never showed anyone.
“Good,” she said. “That’s good, then.”
And she went on folding, as though we hadn’t walked in trailing ash and war and a lit Fifth Line, as though the whole roaring world weren’t bearing down on her laundromat.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
There was a cot room behind the boiler.
I’d slept in it as a girl on the nights I ran too late to make it anywhere else—a narrow room off the utility corridor, warm from the big tank ticking through the wall, one cot and one bare bulb and a shelf of spare quarters and lost socks. Somebody had put clean sheets on the cot.
Finn ducked through the low doorway after me and pulled it shut.
The roar of the world dropped away behind it, muffled to a hum, and for the first time in three days there was no clock loud enough to hear.
No Saint on the ridge. No fever climbing my spine.
No transport manifest, no burning house, no gun to anybody’s head, biological or otherwise.
Just the tick of the boiler and the bare bulb and my mate looking at me.
“You’re still covered in soot, Calloway,” I murmured, leaning back against the boiler tank with a tired, teasing smile.