“Well,” Emma said, bringing out her own packet. It was only a little crumpled from her crouch under the desk. “I’ll have to eat fast to catch up with you. I brought dawn cakes today. I think you’d like them.”
He was so intent on his book, Emma could almost imagine he was listening. Two best friends, sitting in the sunlight together, just like always.
“They’re best fresh fried, but I saved them to show you. They’re from Saskia’s favorite vendor at the night market—Saskia, the one with the dark hair and the nuclear tongue, you remember? I’ve got another story to tell you about her…” She had time. Nat always lingered over his book. Telling him about her new life made it all feel almost normal. Even if he couldn’t hear her.
“I went hunting again. By myself, this time. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Nat, it scares me, but I evenlikedit. I passed Granville College and heard music. It was a party, in someone’s rooms. The window was open, and I slipped in, a shadow among all those bright blazing mortal fires. But Nat, this time it felt like power. To be unseen. Unstoppable.
“So I brushed up against a girl here, a boy there. Peeling away that one spark from the fire of their mortality. I don’t know what I took from each of them. Maybe the music they heard in a dream.Or the last good night of sleep before their exams. I wonder whether they’d have thought it a worthwhile trade, if they knew what they’d taken from the Night City’s power in exchange. A textbook memorized the night before finals. An electric performance onstage. The kinds of things mortals care about. That I used to care about.
“You know, I’d not stopped to think what I might have taken from the Night City, when I was mortal. But now I remember my river project: how methods leapt to mind, and my reports seemed to arrange themselves to point to the right conclusions. I would have been proud of that work, if I’d been allowed to finish it. Even if I’d known I was bargaining away pieces of myself to do it, I would have called it a fair trade. Some things are worth the sacrifice.
“I knowyou’dagree with me.” Emma smiled at Nat, picking at the last few crumbs of dawn cake. “I’m not sure anyone will forget the time you decided to learn eleventh-century Gaelic in time for your firstMacbethrehearsal. For ‘proper character grounding,’ I think you said.”
A ghost of a smile flitted across Nat’s face. Emma knew that he must have read a sentence that tickled him. He could not have heard her. It still twisted her heart.
“But don’t worry.” She propped her chin on one hand. “I’m not going to drain you anytime soon. It’d be too strange, between friends. I wonder if anyone has, though. If it was Saskia—well, I think you’d like her. She’s grumpy, but she’s got a big heart, under all the scowling. She loves books as much as you do. And Nancy’s looked after me, every moment. She’s much sharper than she lets people think. At first, I didn’t see past the cleaning and the housekeeping, but Nancy has secrets she doesn’t tell any of us, I’m sure.”
Nat was still reading. Emma leaned as close as she dared.
“I just wish I could let you know. That I’m all right, and I have friends. I don’t want you to be sad.”
There were tiny lines around his eyes now. He was too young, surely, to have those. What had the last year been like for him, to draw such lines on his face?
“I mean, yes, the Night City is a pit of monsters and impossible tasks. But if I could only show you some of the wonders. There’s a shimmer that dances through the streets. Every ancient wall, every cobblestone. It’s all alive. Remember that strange archway—the one by the secondhand bookshop? It looked bricked up to us, but to a nightdweller, it’s a passage. To the night market. Oh, Nat, if you could see it.”
So she told him, as if it would smooth the lines from his face. About trailing Saskia through the maze of billowing cloth and incense. The music of the night market beating into her pulse, the winged lanterns floating above the stalls like stars. About the vendors, a flurry of hands and paws and talons thrusting goods beneath her nose. Melons with the sheen of jewels. A fairy horse smaller than her palm. A heart in a crystal jar, still beating.
She described for Nat the stall of the jeweler with dragonfly eyes, and the dainty bracelets she had bought there. One for each of her sisters. Not pure silver—her purse could not stretch that far. But the chains were as fine as rivulets of water, and the jeweler had shaped her a tiny winking fox charm for each. The first purchase made with earnings from her own hunts. Her sisters had used their savings to buy Emma’s ball gown. They had cared that much that Emma felt part of things. Emma only hoped her gift showed what their bond meant to her. That it was worth as much as any promisemade to the City. And unlike the City’s silver collars, these bracelets were something they could choose to wear. A mark of friendship, not servitude.
She told Nat how Nancy had cried when she put hers on. Selina and Gertie had held her in a hug so tight, Emma had to claw her way out, laughing, before the breath was crushed from her. Saskia had looped the bracelet twice around her belt, quick and casual, and fastened it there. But sometimes, when Saskia thought herself unseen, Emma had caught her reaching to stroke the fox charm.
A shadow crossed the sun. With a glance at the oncoming clouds, Nat sighed and scraped back his chair.
“Wait—” Emma said.
He was tucking his book into his bag.
“No—”
He was gone.
Emma sucked the inside of her cheek. Less time than usual, today. Desolation ran sharp fingernails down the inside of her throat. It was not as though she had not known it would end this way. It always did. But she still had to breathe through the hurt.
She scuffed her way into the Library to wait for Saskia, taking the back stairs. Nat was not the only mortal who might know her, after all. She had seen Julia here once. How she had longed for that moment, before it happened. Often, when her new life had seemed too strange to bear, Emma had called on the memory of Julia to hold her together. The Julia behind the elegant facade: crooked smile and snorting laugh, kind and silly. Making up nonsense lyrics to their favorite songs, toes shining with wet polish. But Emma had barely recognized the gaunt figure in the Library’s astronomy room. It had hurt to see Julia so thin and hunched, worrying at astrand of greasy hair like a rosary. When someone asked to borrow a pen, Julia startled from her seat as though she had been shot. Emma had not seen her since.
But she had seen Jasper’s friend Richard, zooming like a happy bumblebee between the stacks and his military history room. So earnest. So dimpled. She still found it in her to pity him, and it frustrated her. She was determined to hate all Turnbulls: They deserved no less. But a memory kept presenting itself: Richard picking at the mortar of a windowsill, speaking thoughts that could have been her own. What it was to be without a father, and to long for one. Looking at him now, she saw a lost rag doll dragged in the wake of the Balfours. Straining for the attention of a man who would never see him as a son. It made her angry for him, which made her angry at herself. None of them deserved her thoughts. Especially not the one whose face flooded her dreams. Night after night, she would close her eyes and find herself in a rose garden. Rot dripped. Flowers fell. And there he would be. Jasper, golden and cruel. Burying her in a shroud of petals. His weight on top of her, dangling a barbed stem above her eye. Pushing it through the socket. Smiling. She woke snarling from those nightmares.
It was too much, all of it. She longed for just one sleep without any dreams at all. Emma tapped on the door to the Librarian’s office. It was mercifully empty. And there were hours before Saskia and her mystery were due to arrive. Emma coiled herself into an armchair, trying to keep one ear open for danger. But she could fight sleep no longer. She closed her eyes.
CHAPTER 29
Emma woke to the sound of an avalanche next to her ear. A stack of books wobbled an inch from her nose.
“Good. You got my note. I’ve finally made progress with the Turnbull question.” Saskia, resplendent in tartan and leather, and offensively awake, plunked herself on the arm of the chair. “Do you want to take the first book, or shall I?”
“I swear I locked the door,” Emma croaked.
“Me? Well, if I must.” Looking pleased, Saskia reached for the top of the stack.
