“Octavia,” Echo says, and for the first time since he walked in, something softer passes through his face. Not softness, exactly. Humility maybe. Or the effort of it. “What I’m about to ask you is very important.”
My grip tightens on the card.
“Did that man ever mention a girl? A girl named Katya.”
The name means nothing.
At least, not in any immediate way. I search backward through every fragment I wish I didn’t remember. Motel walls. Men’s voices. Smoke. My mother. The Handler’s eyes. Debt. Tallies. Screaming. But no girl. No Katya.
A slow shake of my head answers him.
“No.”
Echo absorbs that without visible disappointment, though something in his eyes dims all the same. He turns to Silas next.
“How about you?” he asks. “Did you hear anything?”
Silas shakes his head too. “No.”
That faint shadow returns to Echo’s face, gone almost as soon as it appears. Whatever Katya means to him, the name clearly matters. The fact that he lets the sadness show at all for that brief second unsettles me almost more than his composure did.
Then his expression firms again.
“Well,” he says, “Catalyst thanks you both for what you’ve done. To repay our gesture, we ask one thing.”
Silas’s arm stays around me, but I feel the tension in it sharpen.
Echo turns to him fully now.
“That you consider working for me once you’re done with school.”
The sentence sits in the room like a dare.
“It’s rare,” Echo adds, “that I see myself in someone so young.”
That earns him a scoff from Silas, a real one this time. He narrows his eyes with all the open hostility of a boy who has survived too much authority to accept another man’s interest as flattering.
“Ask me again when my stab wound is healed,” he says.
Roman’s mouth twitches. He looks away just long enough to hide what is very clearly the beginning of a laugh.
Echo, for his part, only inclines his head as if this answer was not only expected but somehow appreciated.
“Right,” he says. “If you hear anything about Katya… you know who to call.”
He turns then, finally seeming ready to leave, but not before looking toward my mother.
“I’ll give Noah your regards,” he says.
Something private passes over my mother’s face, gone before I can read it.
Echo continues as if discussing weather rather than the catastrophe of our lives. “I know he’ll be thrilled to hear Corvin actually made it into school.”
That sentence hits strangely. Familiarity without explanation. More of a world existing around this room than I know how to handle.
He begins walking away.
Roman falls into step behind him.
