Morgan was watching her.
Not obviously. Morgan rarely did anything obviously. But I’d spent enough time studying Morgan’s face to know where her attention actually lived regardless of where her eyes appeared to be pointed, and her attention was on Hailey with focused interest.
I said nothing about it. I filed it, the way I filed most things involving the two of them, in the category of developments requiring further observation.
I sat across from Morgan, and she looked up then. The firelight caught the gold flecks in her green eyes, that movement like trapped sparks I’d long stopped trying to analyze.
“You know, I bet you both would like one another,” I offered as I motioned to Hailey with my chin.
Morgan set down her cup. “I already like her,” she answered. “Any woman who says ‘fuck’ as much as she does is someone worth knowing.”
Morgan reached across and took the stack of reports I offered without saying anything more. I watched her face while she worked through them.
She had a face that revealed very little. That was one of the first things I’d understood about her and one of the things that had kept me watching her for longer than was strategically necessary. She could listen to news of a catastrophe, and her expression would stay composed, careful, the way a surgeon’s expression stays careful during an operation, not because theyfeel nothing but because they can’t afford the luxury of showing what they feel in the moment they need their hands to be steady.
She read each report in order. I’d left them in the sequence I’d received them: garrison movements from the northeast passage, troop rotations in the outer wall at Camelot, three accounts of missing persons along the northern Logres border, two reports of crop failures in areas where the soil had shown no prior weakness, one report about livestock deaths with no discernible cause, and the last one.
She reached the seventh.
She read it twice. I watched her do it, watched her eyes move to the beginning of the page again after she reached the end, which she didn’t do with any of the others.
Her finger traced the description of the eyeless fish. The species no one recognized, hauled up from depths they didn’t belong at, in a lake that the report noted had no deeper channels: a lake, in other words, that shouldn’t have had depths at all.
She put the reports down and looked at the fire.
Across the camp, Hailey was no longer writing. Soon, she stood up and approached us, and when she did, she dropped her eyes to the reports in Morgan’s hands. Morgan made no attempt to hide them, so Hailey read what she could. As she did, her expression clouded.
“The fish,” she said.
Morgan looked at her.
“And the livestock,” Hailey continued, carefully. “And the border disappearances... They’re connected.”
Morgan studied her for a moment with that assessing stillness of hers.
“Yes,” she said.
Hailey absorbed that without visible reaction. Then she picked her notes back up and began writing again, which washow she processed things: by immediately finding the practical implication and working toward it. “Then we need to know the pattern before Arthur fucking does,” she said, without looking up. “Because if he figures out what it fucking means before we do, he’ll find a way to use it.” With that, she turned around and walked back to her crate, sitting down to continue her notes.
Morgan looked at me. I looked back at her.
Neither of us said anything, but something passed between us that was adjacent to the specific, reluctant acknowledgment that someone had just said the most useful thing that had been said all evening.
“What do you know?” I asked.
“Several things.” She picked up her cup again. “Not all of which I can tell you.”
“Morgan.”
“Not because I’m protecting secrets from you.” She met my eyes. There was something tired in her expression that I didn’t often see. She carried exhaustion the way she carried most things: privately, without display, but tonight it was closer to the surface. “Because some of what I know will mean nothing to you without context you don’t have, and I don’t have time to give you.”
“Try.”
A pause. The fire snapped. Somewhere above us in the pines, an owl called once and went silent.
“As I’ve already said, the veil is thinning,” she started.
I waited.
