Chapter 3
I count the day in trays.
There have been two of them. Somebody brings them down and leaves them inside the door on the slate slab and takes the last one away untouched, and that's how I know a day has passed, because down here there's no morning.
The slit of grating high in the wall lets in a grey nothing that never changes.
Could be dawn. Could be dusk. Could be the inside of my own skull.
The second tray is going the way of the first. Bread gone hard at the edges.
A wax carton of something. A cup of water with a skin of dust on it now because I haven't moved it.
I sit against the back wall of my little stone room with my knees up and I look at it and I feel my body ask for it, the low animal pull of a stomach that's been empty a day and change, and I tell my body no.
It's the only thing left I get to decide.
They chose the room. They chose the ward over the door and the wall at my back and the man on the other side of it. They chose fourteen days and the technology in my neck and whether I get to keep breathing air that isn't pumped through a vent.
Fine.
All of it, fine.
But nobody gets to make me pick up the cup or eat. That one's mine.
You need to drink something.
There he is. The warm thing behind my sternum, low and careful, the way it's been since they locked the door—rationed, quiet, like it's learned there are ears down here it didn't used to worry about. I scoff at the gentle, stupid warmth that rocks through me when I know he’s there.
"No," I say.
You've had nothing since—
"I said no. You don't get to do that anymore. You don't get to be reasonable in my head like you've got a right to be in here."
I've always been in here.
"That's the problem." My voice scrapes. It's the most I've spoken in hours and it comes out rusty.
"A month. A whole month I told you things.
Things I never said to Nellie. Things I never said out loud in my life.
And you sat there and took every one of them and let me think you were—" I can't say his name.
The room's cold enough without it. "You let me think you were somebody I really cared about. "
I never told you who I was.
"You never told me who you weren't, either. You let me fill it in. That's the same as lying, wherever you learned to argue." I press the heel of my hand hard against my sternum, over the place it lives, like I could push it back down through my own ribs. "Get out."
You know I can't do that.
"Then be quiet. If you can't leave, be quiet.
I don't want your voice, I don't want your advice, I don't want you telling me to drink water like you care whether I—" My throat closes on it.
"You had a month of me. That's all you get.
Now sit down in the dark and shut up, same as everything else they buried down here. "
For a moment it doesn't answer, and I think maybe it will keep going, keep being warm and patient and worming, and I don't think I have it in me to fight it and the room and the grief all at once.
All right, it says. So gently it makes my eyes sting. All right, Calypso.
And then it's quiet.
I blow out a ragged breath and wrap my arms around my knees, tugging them closer.
The quiet stretches out. No trays, no footsteps, no warm voice worrying at me.
Just the drip of water somewhere down the passage and the grey light that never changes and the fact of me, sitting on a stone floor in a cellar that used to hold blood, waiting for a countdown I can't see to run out.
I try to do the math on the days and give up.
I try not to picture the chapel and fail.
I think about Nellie and whether they've told her where I am. I think about Emric’s face.
I think, in the smallest, ugliest part of me, that the cellar has it right—that a thing like me belongs down here in the dark with the other things people are afraid of, and everyone up there is safer for the walls.
They are.
I’m in another prison cell. And it’s where I belong.
The council and I were both stupid for thinking I had a chance at a normal life.
My legs start to go numb so I hold them tighter and bury my head in my arms.
The door scrapes open.
Aamon’s out there most of the time—the little common room with the shelving and the drain.
He stops in the doorway for a moment and just looks at me, folded into the corner where the two cold walls meet, and then he looks at the tray on the slate by the door with everything on it exactly where it was this morning.
He picks it up with a sigh.
He crosses the room and crouches, setting it down on the floor an arm's length from me.
Close enough that I could reach it without moving anything but my hand if I wanted to.
The bread. The wax carton. The cup with its skin of dust. Then he settles back on his heels, out of my space, and waits, like he's got all night, which he does.
Neither of us are going anywhere for fourteen days.
"You haven't eaten," he says again.
"You can see that."
"It’s been two days, Calypso."
"You can count too."
He's got his sleeves pushed to the elbow, hands loose between his knees, and that carefully arranged nothing on his face—the one I now can't stand to look at, because every line of it is a decision and I know exactly what the decisions are for.
Contain the asset. Keep the asset stable. Do not let the asset expire before the inquest can rule on it.
That’s all I am to him To all of them. An asset.
"I'm not doing a hunger strike," I tell him, because I can see him building the report in his head. "Put that in your little file. It's not a protest. I'm just not hungry."
"You're not sleeping either."
"I don't sleep well in refrigerators. Turns out."
Something moves at the corner of his mouth and is gone. He stays down on his heels where he is, level with me, under my eyeline, and I hate that too—the gentling of it, the way he makes himself smaller like he doesn’t want to spook me.
"Train with me," he says. “In the meantime.”
I laugh. It's ugly and there's nothing in it.
"You're going out of your mind down here," he says, even, reasonable, the voice that used to talk me off ledges before I knew he could be so duplicitous.
"Fourteen days in a stone box with nothing to do but not eat and not sleep apparently.
It will break you before the inquest ever gets the chance.
So train. An hour. You set the terms, you call the stop, and it gives your head somewhere to go that isn't the back of that wall. "
"No."
"Calypso—"
"I said no." I put my head back against the stone. "I'm not letting it out. Not down here, not for you, not for anything. You saw what happens. So no, I'm not going to stand up and play witches and warlocks for you so you can feel like you're managing me. It stays in. Where it can't reach anybody."
"That's not how it works and you know it. It doesn't stay in. It builds."
"Then it builds."
He goes quiet. The muscle in his jaw shifts a centimeter, and if I still let myself care about the geography of this man I'd know exactly what he was thinking.
He’s annoyed. He wants to grab me by the shoulders and force me out of this funk.
I don't give him an inch. I turn my face to the wall.
"There's food," he says finally, standing. "It'll be here when you want it."
"Don't hold your breath." Then, because I can't help it, because meanness is the only muscle I've got left that still works: "Oh. Sorry. You don't have to."
Aamon doesn't rise to it. Of course he doesn't. He leaves and pulls the door closed behind him.
∞∞∞
I don't mean to sleep.
That's the thing about the back wall—it's cruel enough that I thought it would keep me up.
Stone doesn't care about you. It leaches the heat out of your spine and it doesn't soften and it doesn't hold you.
Even though the cot is four feet away being soft in the dark, I won't touch it.
The cot is a comfort and I don't get comforts, I get a wall, I get exactly as much as I gave that room full of people, which was nothing, which was worse than nothing.
So I sit against the wall to punish myself and my body betrays me anyway, the way it always does, and somewhere in the grey nothing my eyes close and don't open.
And then I'm back at the place I was avoiding like the plague. I’m back… at the Revel.
I know it's the dream because the edges are hazy but the emotions, the thickness of my fear feels just the same as the real thing.
The chapel's gold with candlelight, the marigolds still whole on their ropes, the witchfire blue and floating, and Emric is in front of me in that jacket with the sugar still on the cuff from our date.
He's saying my name. The way he said it at the end, warm, unafraid, tipping his head at me the way he did—
breathe, Calypso, you're okay, I've got you—
and I know what comes next but I still try to stop it.
I throw my whole body against it but nothing changes, and the light comes up my arms white and wrong and I watch it reach him.
I watch it go through him. His face doesn't even change.
That's the part that chokes me. He looks at me like he's not afraid, like he trusts me, right up until there's nothing left to look at me with, right up until he's a grey drift coming apart in the air with my name still hanging where his mouth was—
I'm screaming before I'm awake.
I come up out of it clawing at the stone, at my own arms, and the room's gone white—not dream-white, real, my magic pouring up out of me in the dark and throwing hard light across the walls, and I can feel it, the coal fed and roaring now, climbing my throat, no room, no air, nowhere for it to—
The door explodes inward.
Aamon comes tearing across the room, drops to his knees in front of me with his hands already coming up and his face wide open, every door blown off it, and he says my name once, low and ruined, "Calypso—"
and for one second I let him.