I sighed. “My face is the biggest traitor of them all.”
“Your face is a public notice board.”
I held the packet against my coat.
“Delphine wanted Lior to know,” I said.
Rev was silent.
“Now he won’t.”
Her lip tilted up. “Maybe not from her.”
I blinked at Rev.
She was looking at the counter, at the crumbs, at anything but me.
“You can’t write him.”
“I can write my grandmother.”
“And your grandmother can write around things?”
“My grandmother could hide a murder accusation in a discussion of the weather.”
“Rev, be careful.”
She held up one hand.
“I’m not promising anything. Stupid promises are how people get hurt. I’m just saying Delphine’s brother may not be as unreachable as the Council thinks he is.”
I hadn’t realized how badly I had needed someone else to be angry about it with me.
“You should go,” Rev said. “The rest of the kitchen staff will be back soon.”
“Everyone has been handing out warnings today.”
“Mine come with food. That makes mine better.”
I smiled despite myself and went to the door.
At the garlic strings, I stopped when she said, “And Astra?”
I turned back around. “What?”
“If Verraine gives you instructions tomorrow morning, for heaven’s sakes, think before you follow them.”
“You don’t trust her.”
“I trust her to be doing three things that serve three different people at once and caring most about the one that hurts her least.”
I left the east kitchen with the cloth packet under my arm and the knowledge that Delphine’s unsent letter was sitting somewhere in the gate office, folded and useless and addressed to a boy who still didn’t know what had happened to his sister.
In Room 114, I put the food on the small table, took out Cosima’s notebook once more, and opened to the page about interrogations.
At the bottom were five words I had missed the first time:
They always schedule an interrogation.
