Directly. The gray-blue—theslightly darkergray-blue—meets my storm-gray with the particular, unguarded contact of someone who is looking at another person and seeing something unexpected. Not threatening. Not suspicious.Unexpected.The expression of a man encountering data that doesn’t fit his existing model and is recalibrating in real time.
“The only one who ever noticed that is our mother.”
The sentence enters the amber-lit room and changes its temperature.
Their mother.
The only other person in the world who looked closely enough at these two identical faces to see the difference that everyone else missed.
And I saw it.
From a hospital bed. While recovering from poisoning. Through a fog of chemical residue and neurological compromise.
I saw what only their mother sees.
Something moves behind my sternum.
The sensation is small, involuntary—the physiological response of a body that is processing an emotional input the void didn’t authorize. It’s not warm, exactly. Not the identifiable, categorizable warmth that people describe when they talk about feelings. It’s more like the awareness of a space that is usually empty being briefly occupied by something that doesn’t have a name yet. A flicker of light in a room that is usually dark.
Don’t.
Don’t let that in.
A single observation about eye color doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t mean he’s safe.
It doesn’t mean either of them is safe.
People who share your secrets are just people who haven’t used them against you yet.
Vivian shared everything. Vivian was the other half of my face, the other half of my name, the other person in the world who should have seen me the way a mother sees her children—completely, specifically, with the particular love that comes from knowing the difference between two things that look the same.
And Vivian used it all to build the weapon she aimed at my back.
So no.
A pair of slightly darker gray-blue eyes and a mother’s observation doesn’t earn anything.
Not yet.
“Oh,” I say.
The syllable is flat. Neutral. The void’s standard packaging for information that has been received and is being held at arm’s length rather than processed. If Cassian expected an emotional response—a softening, a reciprocal vulnerability, the kind of moment that most people would produce when told they share an observational gift with someone’s mother—the syllable doesn’t deliver it.
He nods slowly.
The motion is measured, accepting—the nod of a man who has registered the non-response and filed it undershe received it but isn’t going to show you what she did with it, which is, based on his expression, an acceptable outcome.
“Maybe she’ll like you,” he says.
“Is she alive?”
The question exits my mouth with the clinical directness that I apply to matters of survival. Not emotional—pragmatic. If their mother is relevant to the conversation, the first variable to establish is whether she exists in present tense.
He nods.
“Our dad’s dead. But he’s not the one running the empire.”
