17 Kaia
The croquet mallet came up in Eli’s hands, swung, and clacked against the ball with a sound too cheerful for any of this.
I logged it on my clipboard, like I had logged it yesterday and the day before that.
Three days of Nadia’s drops. Three days of finding closets and camera blind spots to quench my Heat.
And all of it was beginning to shred too thin to keep holding.
My pulse was running too high. I’d checked at the top of the lawn and I would not check again, because checking was a tell, and a Steward who kept pressing her own pulse in front of the High Alchemist was a Steward with something to hide.
The grass had been cut that morning into stripes so even they looked combed.
Pastel flags marked the wickets, lavender and butter-yellow and a soft hospital green, and the koi pond caught the afternoon sun and threw it back.
Beyond the stone wall the mountains stood up blue and indifferent, and all of it smelled like the lavender they pumped through the courtyard vents the same way they pumped it through the dormitory halls and the orientation packets and the linens.
Engineered serenity. I’d burned that oil myself in a hundred braziers.
I knew exactly how thick you had to lay it to cover what had lived under the floor.
Fifty dormants had escaped, Tommy and me with them.
By the way everyone acted, even the Wardens, you would never know it had happened.
Tommy ambled across the lawn toward the cluster of potential dormants at the second wicket, hands loose at his sides, taking in the manicured grass and the koi and the pastel flags with the bright wandering attention of a man who’d booked the wrong vacation and decided to make the best of it.
Broad through the shoulders. The cotton rolled to the elbows over the burn-blistered forearms they’d given him in the chemical wash.
I knew about the blisters, I’d logged the incident myself in four clean lines, and the fifth line I hadn’t written was that I’d had to walk past Dormitory B afterward and not stop, not turn my head, not let one muscle in my face know that the man bleeding under the salve was the only person on this earth who’d ever put his mouth to my skin like it was something holy.
The clench took me low, without warning, the way it had been taking me since the transport.
I love you.
Deep behind the bone, in the hollow place under my navel, a slow squeezing pull rose that had nothing to do with the fever and everything to do with the fact of him three meters away and untouchable.
He’d drained the Heat on that shaking transport.
He’d taken me apart with his mouth and his hands and grounded the poison into the earth and asked for nothing, and it had saved my life, and it had not finished the thing.
My body had learned what it was for now.
It knew there was a completion it hadn’t been given, and it ached for it with a single-minded animal stupidity—the heavy stretching reality of him, his weight, the seal of the bond snapping shut like a door against the whole gray world.
I gripped the clipboard until the metal bit a line across my palm.
A missing limb. That was the closest I could come to it. The phantom itch of a thing that wasn’t there and should have been, that my whole body kept reaching toward and finding gone.
And under the want, worse than the want, the memory came up that I had no defense against.
The children’s book. The one my mother kept folded inside the lining of her uniform jacket where the dorm matrons couldn’t find it, a thin watercolor thing with a cracked spine, read to me by penlight after curfew.
A wolf family under a wide tree. The father gray and steady.
The mother curled around three sleeping pups, her tail laid over them like a blanket.
And the little ones slept safe, because they were never alone.
My mother had no mate. Her mother had no mate.
We were daughters of daughters, conceived cold under glass in concrete rooms, never claimed, and she’d read me a story about a thing none of us would ever have, and I’d believed in it the way I’d later learned to believe in the Order—totally, and with my whole starved heart.
I wanted the watercolor. Standing on a manicured lawn right then, I wanted it so badly my eyes stung, and I wanted it with him.
Spine.
I drew it up. Chin level. I locked the wanting in the cage where everything else lived and turned my face into the flat clean nothing the morning required.
On the second-story veranda, High Alchemist Joss stood at the railing in the sun.
He’d come out to watch. The wax of his face hung soft in the daylight, and the blue light wept slow from the inner corners of both eyes and ran down to drip off the iron rail, winking out before it reached the flowerbeds below.
He wasn’t watching the game. His glowing eyes had found the broad-shouldered idiot at the second wicket and settled there with the patient appetite of a man counting the days until a fruit comes ripe.
He was watching his investment.
Marisol stood near the koi pond with a stack of clean towels over her arm, her round face soft with the simple pleasure of seeing patients laugh in the sun.
Livia knelt by Cora’s chair, adjusting the woman’s lap blanket, smiling at something Eli had said.
They didn’t know. They thought they worked at a sanctuary.
They handed out towels and gentle words and went home at night believing they’d done mercy, and the man on the veranda was deciding which of the laughing dormants to open first, and these two women would have wept to know it.
Along the far edge of the lawn, moving the perimeter in the opposite direction from the nearest Warden, Sloane was doing her rounds.
She looked exactly as she always had. Stern.
Clipboard angled to the light. Her pale eyes working the crowd with the fluid, predatory efficiency that read, to anyone watching, as routine monitoring.
I had watched her do this exact walk for months.
I knew the difference between Sloane surveilling a room and Sloane putting herself somewhere on purpose.
This was the second one.
I kept my face on the game. I did not move toward her. I let the distance close at her pace, on her terms—she came to you when she’d decided it was safe, never before, and you didn’t rush it.
She reached the edge of the lawn four feet from my position and stopped, angling her clipboard toward the second wicket as though logging the game. When her voice came it was below the ambient noise, lower than the mallet clacks and Eli’s running commentary.
“The calibration logs from sublevel three have been corrupting since Tuesday.” Her eyes didn’t leave the players. “Don’t pull them directly—they’ll flag your access. Route through the maintenance manifest.”
“Sloane.” I kept it below the lawn noise. “The doors. When the pack arrives—do you have a way to—”
“Yes.” Steady. Level.
I looked at her.
For one second her pale eyes came off the players and met mine, and what was in them was the controlled urgency of someone carrying more than they could say in daylight, four feet from a Warden’s patrol line. Not here. Not now.
She moved off.
Stride unchanged, clipboard angled back to the wickets, already three paces gone.
Yes, I told myself. There’s a way. She’ll help.
Eli swung again and missed, and laughed, and the laugh came up bright and unguarded across the whole lawn—
—and on the veranda Joss’ wept light brightened a degree, and his glowing eyes flicked from Tommy to the loud boy and back, marking the volume, marking the joy, marking the Steward who was allowing it.
Now, I thought, and hated it, and did it.
I crossed the grass to Eli with my Steward’s stride, measured and cold, the clipboard at my breastbone like a shield, and I let my voice come out at the register I’d learned at my mother’s knee.
“Intake forty-four.” I didn’t use his name.
Using his name was a kindness and kindness was the thing I had to take from him.
“Your volume is unregulated. This is the third reminder this week. The disturbances in your blood feed on overstimulation. Every time you indulge them, you make the cuff’s work harder, and you delay your own healing. ”
The light went out of his face like a switch thrown.
It died so fast and so completely that something tore loose in my chest, low and ragged. He’d been nineteen and laughing in the sun for one whole minute and I’d reached in and turned it off because a wax-faced man on a balcony needed to see me do it.
Did I have to use that exact tone?
The thought came up acid and immediate. The very tone. The clipped flat liturgical chill my mother had used on a six-year-old kneeling on cold tile, the wild rose has to be trimmed, Kaia, hold still—I’d reached into the worst cupboard I owned and handed it to a child, and called it protection.
It was protection. That was the unbearable part. Joss had to read me as a Steward who broke spirits on schedule. The colder I was to Eli on this lawn, the longer Eli stayed off Joss’ list.
“Yes, Steward,” Eli whispered. He set the mallet down. His shoulders curled in around the place where the joy had been.
“Stand at rest until the interval concludes.” I made my face give him nothing. “Reflect on your regulation.”
I turned before I could see his eyes finish filling.
“Whoa, hey, that’s on me.” Tommy’s voice came in loud and bright and clumsy, the California idiot rushing to the rescue of his own cover. “I told him the joke, Steward. Whole thing’s my fault. I have a documented condition, I’m allergic to silence, it’s medical—”