That's the thing that's changed.
I have not been changed by the claiming the way I thought being changed meant—I haven't been made peaceful or blunted or wrong in the particular way Rosalind's early letters were wrong. What I've been changed by is: I can't close the compartments anymore. They're open. All of them. The grief and the shame and the wanting and the family wound I have been running on top of for fifteen years. The water is at the top of the dam and I can feel it.
Good, says some part of me that has been waiting fifteen years for that sentence.
Good.
I get up.I wash my face a second time with the cold water. I look at myself in the mirror—the marks shifting at my throat, the dark circles, my own eyes—and I look like someone who has arrived somewhere she was always going to arrive, which is not comfortable but is at least honest.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I eat the bread the woman at the desk gave me. I drink the cold tea.
I think about what I know.
He built the trap. The magic shaped my feelings for months. He used my work and lied to my face and signed the order on the first night. All true.
I have been a spy since I was sixteen. I know the difference between a closed case and a contradictory one. A contradictorycase doesn't close by standing outside it. You have to go in and look at it from the inside.
I need to know what he is outside the plan.
Not because the child, not because the bond, not because I've forgiven him or decided the trap was acceptable or stopped grieving Lena for a single minute. Because I have been collecting the glimpses of the thing underneath the mission and I have been keeping them somewhere for months and I want to know what they add up to when there's no magic running underneath anything. Because whatever was in that fraction of a second on the gallery platform is either real or it isn't, and I would rather live inside the complicated truth than outside the clean incomplete version.
And the truth underneath all the truth—the truth I have been not-saying—is that I want to go back. Not because the biology is compelling me, though the bond-distance is real and the nausea is real and the child is real. Because Vaelis Nebulon is the first person who looked at me and found what was there and wanted it, and I have been hungry for that since I was ten years old, and I know the trap was built around that hunger, and I know it, and I want to go back anyway, and there is a version of me standing outside the door that looks like dignity and a version of me that goes in and lives inside the contradictory truth, and I have never in my life been the version that stands outside the door.
I am a spy. I go through doors.
The womanat the desk is already there when I come downstairs. She looks up when she hears my step. "Leaving early?"
"Yes," I say. I set the room key on the counter.
She looks at me with the practised neutral assessment of someone who has seen several decades of guests in various states of difficulty. "You want something to eat before you go? Cook's in. There's bread."
"There was bread already," I say. "Thank you. It helped."
She nods once, the nod of someone who has been quietly useful to people in the middle of things and finds that preferable to comment. She goes back to her receipts.
I walk out into the early morning city—cold, grey, the streets mostly empty, a milk cart on the far corner. The bond pulling from the direction of Mist Court, uncomfortable now, a real ache below my sternum. I am going to feel this for three hours on the train and I am going to stay in my seat and I am going to feel it because this is what's true.
The station is twenty minutes on foot.
I am not going back because I forgive him. I don't know yet if I will ever forgive him. I am not going back because of the biology or the child or the claiming marks at my throat that are permanent and respond to his proximity even from three hundred miles away.
I am going back because I have been hungry to be seen since I was ten years old and he saw me and used it and it was still real and I have had fifteen years of water behind a very good dam and the dam is open now and I am going to live in it.
I am going back because Lena was coming for me and I might not have gone even if she'd gotten there in time, and that's a grief I am going to carry for the rest of my life, and I am not going to let it be the reason I stand outside the door.
I am going back because I'm a spy and I don't stand outside doors.
I walk.
28
VAELIS
Three days.
The bond ache is directional. I knew this from the literature. Knowing it did not prepare me for the specific location of it, which is below my sternum and extends through both cocks at intervals that have no pattern I can predict. Fresh claiming, wrong distance. Both together.
I manage the court. I read reports. I sign what requires signing. I eat twice. I sleep badly. I stand at the window until there is no point standing there, and then I stand there longer.
