Chapter 2
I don't move for a long time.
The shirt is still on the floor where I dropped it. The bag is still open on the bed. And the thing in my head is still there, warm and settled and waiting, taking up the exact space it has taken up for a month.
Calypso.
"Don't."
You're shaking.
"I said don't." My voice sounds like someone else's but I can’t just keep this interaction inside my mind anymore. "Who are you?"
Nothing. Not silence—it doesn't leave. It just declines, the way you'd decline a second helping. The warmth stays right where it is, patient, like it has all the time in the world and knows it.
I pick the shirt up off the floor because my hands need a job. "Fine. Easier one. Two weeks ago, on the levee. I got powdered sugar all over him and left a handprint on his jacket." My throat tries to close. I talk through it. "Which shoulder?"
Does it matter, now?
The bottom drops out of me.
Because that's not a no. That's not a yes either. It’s a copout. A really fucking cruel one.
"You let me think you were him."
I never said I was.
I put my hand on the bedpost.
It's true. That's the worst part. It never once said it.
I was wondering and filled in the rest, because a boy was kind to me in the daylight and something was kind to me in the dark and I wanted them so badly to be the same person that I never asked.
Not once. Twelve years of trusting nobody, and I handed the inside of my own skull to whatever this is because it used a nice voice.
"How long?"
Longer than you'd like.
"How long?"
Calypso. And it's gentle. That's the thing. It's so gentle. You're already frightened. You don't need the rest of it tonight.
"Get out."
I can't do that.
"Get out—"
I'm not somewhere you can put me out of. No edge to it. Just fact, the way you'd tell someone it's raining. I'm where your magic is. I've always been where your magic is.
I stand in the middle of my dark room with my hand on the bedpost and I go through everything.
Every night. Every time the world tipped and I reached down into that warm low place and let it hold me up.
The things I said. The things I only thought and never said out loud to Nellie, never to Odette, never to Aamon in a hundred hours across a training-room table.
All of it, poured down a channel into something with no name and no face, and it took every word.
And it's still here. And it's pleased. I can feel that, the way you feel someone smiling behind you.
"You're not him," I say. "You were never him."
No.
"Then what are you? Who are you?"
The warmth deepens. Comes closer. Wraps around the cold scraped place under my sternum like a coat being put over my shoulders.
Someone who has never once lied to you, it says. Which is more than you can say for the rest of them.
I pick up the duffel.
I don't know what else to do with my hands, my body, the roaring in my chest, the exhaustion from the explosion of my magic, so I pick up the bag and I go back to folding. I put the second shirt in flat and hard like I'm packing a wound.
You're not going anywhere, Calypso.
"Watch me."
Calypso—
"You don't get to say my name." I zip the side pocket.
"You've had a month of me. You had every ugly thing I've ever thought.
That's it. That's all you get. So sit in there and be quiet, because in about six hours a man in a starched collar is going to walk in here and put me back in a white room, and you can find out what twelve years of nothing sounds like too. "
It doesn't answer.
“Good. Stay that way.”
I don't get the chance to find out if it will, because the ones coming for me don't wait six hours. They don't even knock.
The front door to the cottage blasts open and I realize I never locked it—and Aamon comes through first with four people behind him.
I knew it was coming, I just didn’t expect he’d be leading the charge.
Corvin peels off to the left of the room, Zeva to the right, both of them settling into the corners like furniture that can kill you.
Leyonna comes in after them still in the deep-green gown she must have worn to the Revel, the hem grey with fallout, a long tear up one side.
No mask, no jewelry—she's stripped off whatever was for show.
Her hair's come half down. Her eyes go to the open duffel on my bed and something in her face gets very still.
And last, Balcour.
Same starched collar at three in the morning. Same manicured hands. Same leather portfolio, and the pen already out.
"Miss Dellaby." He turns a page. "You're conscious. Good. That simplifies scheduling."
"Balcour—" Aamon says.
"Professor." Balcour doesn't look up. "You requested to be present. That was the extent of the accommodation."
Aamon’s jaw clenches. Balcour clicks the pen.
"Pursuant to Council Directive 14-7, subsection B, and the emergency review convened at zero-one hundred this morning, the following determinations have been entered.
" Another page. "One. The containment device functioned within design parameters.
Activation occurred, suppression achieved, secondary escalation prevented. The protocol performed as designed."
The room is very quiet. I can barely breathe as I process his words.
"Two. The incident is classified as an anticipated variable in a high-yield subject undergoing supervised integration. Projected tolerances accounted for material loss. One casualty falls within—"
"His name was Emric."
Balcour's pen doesn't stop.
"—falls within acceptable margin for a subject at this stage of regulation, and does not, in the council's assessment, constitute program failure."
"Acceptable margin? His name," I say, louder, "was Emric Vane."
"The casualty's identity is recorded in the incident file, Miss Dellaby."
"Say it."
He turns a page.
"Three," he says. "Effective immediately, residential privileges are revoked. Subject will be relocated tonight to a warded containment room underground in the old salt cellar, where she will remain outside of scheduled instruction and supervision."
Leyonna shifts her weight and nods.
"Four. The proximity requirement is amended.
Review found that response latency during the incident exceeded acceptable parameters as a function of supervisor distance.
" Now Balcour looks up. Grey eyes, unimpressed, exactly the same as the first day.
"Your supervisor was on the far side of the hall.
In future he will not be. Professor Aamon will maintain a fixed maximum distance from your person at all times, waking and otherwise, until the council determines otherwise. "
I hear Aamon breathe in.
"Five. A formal inquest into the events of this evening convenes in fourteen days. Until that date your enrollment continues in provisional status. Your conduct in the interval will be entered into evidence."
"And House Vane," Leyonna says. First words she's said.
"House Vane has entered a claim." Balcour clicks the pen closed. "It is unresolved. That is not a matter for tonight."
"It's a matter for me," Leyonna says. "It's my student in that file and my chapel in pieces."
"Noted," says Balcour, and writes it down.
I start to laugh.
It comes out wrong—cracked, ugly, entirely without a joke underneath it—and every person in the room turns to look at me except Balcour, who is capping his pen.
"Material loss," I say.
Balcour keeps writing.
"That's—" The laugh spirals out of control until I’m out of breath.
"You wrote him down. He has a name, you people have it in a file, and you stood in my room and read him off as material loss like he's a broken window.
" The heat's coming up my throat and I don't stop it.
"None of you are even going to say it. Not one of you.
He's ash on our shoes and you're arguing about my new curfew. "
"Miss Dellaby." Balcour turns a page, unhurried, like I'm weather. "A degree of attrition was anticipated for a subject of your yield during the integration period. It was budgeted for. The council does not enter into an undertaking of this nature expecting it to be clean."
The room tilts a half-inch to the left.
"Budgeted," I repeat.
"House Vane will be answered through the appropriate channels. Redress will be made." He clicks the pen. "This was, in the assessment of the review, within the range of outcomes we prepared for. It does not constitute failure. It constitutes cost."
And that's the thing that does it. Not the salt cellar, not the leash, not the two weeks. I’d gladly be locked into another cell if it meant paying for what I just did–giving Emric the justice he deserves. It’s the we prepared for it.
The Council sat in a room, before I ever set foot on this campus, and did the math on how many people I might kill and decided it was an acceptable number.
Emric was a line in a spreadsheet before he was ever a boy with sugar on his cuff, and they had the column ready, and tonight they just filled it in.
I sit down.
Not on purpose. My legs just quit, and the edge of the bed is there, and for one horrible second I can't tell if any of this is real—the collar, the pen, the four people in my bedroom at three in the morning discussing me in the third person.
It has the flat, too-bright wrongness of the fail-safe dreams. Maybe I'm still on the chapel floor.
Maybe none of this is happening and I'll wake up and he'll still be—
He won't. That's the one thing in the room I'm sure of.
I get my head back up.
"Is this real," I say.
It's not the question I meant to ask. It just falls out, quiet, and it's aimed at no one.
"Any of it. This? You, in here, with your little book.
Am I—" I press the heel of my hand hard against my sternum, over the cold scraped place, like I can feel for the edges of the fail-safe and figure out which side of it I'm on.
"Because it doesn't feel real. It feels like the thing I dream in the fog.
And I would really like one of you to tell me I'm awake. "