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The coffee had, in truth, been a long way down Harrow’s list of priorities. In the face of Lieutenant Chatur’s bewildering ardour, she could only muster a chilly: “No.”
A strange ripple passed over the younger girl’s face, as though she were trying very badly not to laugh. But she said, “It’s not like anything you get back at home. It’s got extra stimulants and things—like, acids—for space exposure. Bio-adaptive … Can you tell me what it is, Isaac?”
He screwed up his narrow eyes, sighed a little, and then supplied: “Bio-adaptive reuptake inhibitors.”
“And what do we call it?”
“BARI,” he said.
“Yeah, BARI! It makes the coffee taste weird, but if you make it the right way, with like spices and stuff, it’s actually great. The Cohort wouldn’t run without the on-duty coffee adepts. We wanted to try this deck’s cafeteria, because they’ve got a hotshot new BARI star.”
Harrowhark found herself at the front of the queue beyond which this BARI star apparent waited; and she found herself looking down at the counter, her tongue tied.
“Let me guess,” said a voice. “You take it black.”
She reached out for the cup. The server pushed it toward her in the same instant—their fingers brushed awkwardly in the act of transmission, and in a mummified moment of time, they looked at each other.
The coffee adept was a girl that Harrowhark had never seen before, though she must have been part of their training platoon. With the plain shirtsleeves and apron, and a cloth slung over the shoulder obscuring her insignia, it was impossible to tell her affiliation: the arms beneath the rolled-up sleeves betrayed lean, taut muscle, a little dewy with sweat and steam from the mess. But it was the face that sent her neurons in a thalergetic spin. When Harrowhark looked at that face, she found a curious heat travelling all the way up from the pit of her pylorus to the high collar of her Cohort shirt. It then traversed her cheeks, her nose, her brow, her temples. The other officer smiled a firm-jawed, long, crooked smile at her; Harrow was electrified by the fact that beneath the hastily brushed crop of red hair those eyes were—
“Absolutely not,” said Abigail, from beside her.
43
ONE NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
HARROW THRASHED ON THE mattress and breathed in lungfuls of splintering air. She writhed like a shot animal; arms pinned her down—“Stay with us, Ninth, come on,” someone was saying—and a sudden spasm seized her, shaking her from the inside until she was certain she would vibrate out of her skin. There was a susurrus of hushed mutters coming from above her, urgent voices, none of which made sense to her:
“Are we stable—?”
“I hope so; another pull like that and she’ll bring the children back wholesale, and I don’t think I can bear sending them out again—”
“Why now?”
“Wasn’t that—?”
“I honestly preferred some of those to—”
“No. Better the rules we have,” interrupted the second voice. “We have no idea of the limitations in those other scenarios.”
Another breath—and her throat refused, closing up in protest; she turned her head and coughed, affronted, affrighted—she opened her eyes, and the world rushed up to meet her.
She awoke convinced that she was staring up at Dominicus framed within a blue sky, a lambent and unreal blue, a nonsensical backdrop. A familiar voice—Magnus’s—said kindly, “You’re fine. You’re fine.” The sky was the ceiling, and the ceiling was a decrepit room in Canaan House, veiled with the hot white breath from her own throat. When the world finally landed its long wound-up sucker punch, a tangled howl came out of her throat, and she was shocked that she was able to make such a noise. Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.
There was a blur of faces, of movement. Harrow found that she was not shocked, after all. She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this.
“Harrow?” said someone close by—someone familiar; her vision swam.
“If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.”
And, unsteadily: “Griddle.”
The hands must have withdrawn; she found herself facedown on the mattress, sobbing as she had not sobbed since she was a child. Someone said, “Everybody out. Go—” But this was more than she could take stock of. Harrow was too amazed by her body’s expanding capacity for despair. It was as though her feeling doubled even as she looked at it, unfolding, like falling down an endless flight of stairs. She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.
She only stopped weeping when her body had physically exhausted itself. The tears could not flow from gummed-up eyes; nor sobs from a cracked throat. For a long time she pressed her face into the wet patch of mattress she had cried into, and smelled the old stuffing, and felt the grief that had multiplied into a universe.
She sat up. She breathed. She pressed her face into the front of her worn black robes, and dried her tears into chilly tracks on her cheeks. Harrowhark looked around her, and the bloody rawness of her throat made her guttural as she asked curtly: “What have I done?”
“That was actually a question I’d hoped you’d answer,” said Abigail Pent.
She was the only one left in the room. Harrow looked her over with new eyes. Even with this new perspective, in all respects Pent was the same as ever. Neat, if a little scuffed around the edges, as though she really had been slumming in an ice-cold Canaan House and had not had a proper bath in a while—brown-eyed and fresh-faced, every inch a daughter of the Fifth. There was a scarf tied around that immaculate hair, and she wore large puffy mittens on each hand.
She was not, more to the point, the ruptured corpse she and Gideon had found at the bottom of the facility stairs: the body with the slit abdomen, with a key sealed neatly inside her kidney. She seemed alive, and well, and living.
“You died,” said Harrowhark. “Septimus killed you. The Lyctor masquerading as Septimus.”
“Yes,” said the Fifth adept. “It was unpleasant. Look, I hate to ask, but did you—get her? None of us are sure.”
“Nav and I drove a sword through her breastbone,” said Harrow, and swallowed against a wad of saliva burning in her throat. Her brain was whirring like an overheated mechanism; she could almost smell the hot dust. It was long past the hour to put herself in order.
She said, “Give me a minute.”
“Take your time,” said Pent.
The cold did not worry Harrow until, as habit, she tried to warm her core from within, and found that she could not. She was somehow not a Lyctor here. Pushing her blood cells around made her feel that old, hungry pang for thanergy that she had not felt for the better part of a year. She closed her eyes so that the only senses assaulting her were the temperature—the reddening burn on her cheeks and hands—and the blackness of her lids, as blank as the pages of an unwritten book.
Sixty seconds. Anything more was indulgence. She opened her eyes and said, “Lady Pent. Tell me about your childhood bedroom.”
“It was the size of this sitting room, perhaps,” said Pent promptly. “Two beds with their heads against the far wall from the door. I liked to have my younger brother sleep in my room sometimes, when I was small. Primrose walls in paste-on flimsy, not wash—a pretty chroma of the Prince Undying, but a little cockeyed—a Vit-D panel in place of a window, with a repeated design on it. My grandfather’s arm bones over the door. A little reinforced table where I played at dolls or read, with a cubby beneath it where I was meant to crouch in case a zonal jet made it past the winnow. Phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling, a peg on the wall for my gloves and robe. I haven’t thought of it in years. Why?”
“Initial test,” said Harrowhark. “The flexibility of metaphysical solipsism aside, I have hardly any knowledge of the Fifth House and how its people live there. The more nonsensical your answer, the more likely you were to be a construction of my brain.”
Abigail laughed, but it carried a tinge of rue: the laugh of a woman who had opened a long-lost book to find the most necessary page torn out.
“Reverend Daughter,” she said, “I’ve been accused of many things, but this is the first time I’ve been assumed to be a delusion.”
“But you are—”
“A ghost,” said the woman smilingly. “A revenant, more precisely.”
Then she said: “There was so much I wanted to ask. So much I’d assumed! I sought a deliberate pattern in your choices when, perhaps, none existed, which is a shameful mistake for a scholar. Therefore, let us debunk all my pet ideas. You are a Lyctor now, aren’t you?”
