“Is Delphine Untethered?”
“No.”
“Then why are you looking like that?”
“Because the pattern is.”
Juno’s voice went lower.
“A girl becomes inconvenient. Her room empties. Her letters stop leaving the gate. The school changes her name into a condition and sends her somewhere her family cannot follow the trail to.”
Delphine at the west door.
My mother’s name in a ledger that had called her absence voluntary.
My wrist in the basin, splitting itself into three bright accusations.
“So what happened to Delphine is what happened to my mother?”
“Not exactly,” Juno said. “But the same hands took hold.”
Weariness moved across Juno’s face and stayed there long enough for me to see it.
Old exhaustion.
The cost of silently and secretly fighting something.
I had the sudden, awful sense that she had been standing between girls and this room for longer than I had been alive.
“Why tell me this now?”
“Because Caswell has seen the branching. Cosima has recorded it. Caspian Ashford has contradicted a room in front ofwitnesses. The Council will not wait as long as it might have yesterday.”
My pulse moved strangely at Caspian’s name.
I ignored it badly.
“And Kieran? Hale?”
“Their names will become relevant faster than either of them would like. Hale’s might already be, if he sent you to me.”
“That isn’t comforting.”
“I’m not here to comfort you.” Juno’s eyes held mine. “Don’t give them a clean refusal until you know what they intend to do with it.”
My throat tightened.
“I thought refusal was the point.”
“Refusal is a tool. So is consent. So is silence. The Council has survived for centuries by pretending those words are simple.”
That made me angry because I wanted simple.
I wanted yes and no to mean what they meant in ordinary mouths. I wanted my wrist to belong to me because it was attached to my body. I wanted Delphine to have gone through the west door and come out somewhere with windows. I wanted my mother to have left me more than other people’s careful omissions.
Juno stood.
The session was over, then. Apparently that was how Juno ended conversations: by shutting up and standing up.
