Page 2 of Dark Mate

She doesn’t know yet that the wall is coming for her.

1

ELLIE

The light’s been moving across the floor since I woke up.

It comes through the bars in slats—warm gold landing on the pale stone, sliding a little farther every time the sun climbs. I’ve watched it reach the foot of my bed. My ankle. The curve of my shin under the sheet. The warmth has a direction to it, and that’s the strange part. It isn’t like the warm sheets, or the heated water they run through the walls in winter. This warmth is on its way somewhere. Even if I’m not.

I should get up. Mora will bring the tea soon.

The tea is just what mornings taste like. Warm, a little bitter under something floral I’ve never had a name for. I’ve been drinking it since I was small enough to need both hands for the cup. Mora carries it in on a tray with the same soft smile she carries everything—gentle, sure, like the walls and the schedule and the lessons. The tea is part of how the place holds together. You don’t ask questions about the things that hold a place up. You live inside them, the way you live inside your own skin.

My room’s the third on the east corridor. Stone walls the color of cream left out too long—not quite white, not quite warm, a color that won’t commit to anything.

The coverlet’s silk, the color of pale water. The pillow’s goose down. The window’s a tall arch, dark ironwork twisted through the bars in a pattern made to look like climbing roses against the morning sky. The window is beautiful. The bars are beautiful. The fact that not one piece of it opens is beautiful too—that’s the trick of this place. It makes everything beautiful by making it permanent, and somehow you never get around to noticing the difference.

I’ve been here since I was ten. Thirteen years. Two-thirds of my whole life inside these walls. The first third—before the Cage, before the Ordained—has gone thin. A woman’s voice. A house with yellow curtains. Warmth that came off a body instead of a pipe. I was eight when the sky came down. They collected me a couple of years after. Whatever I was before that has been folded up so small I can’t find the creases anymore.

The light reaches my knee. I pull it back under the sheet, like it’s a thing I get to keep.

The compound is a square of joined buildings wrapped around a garden courtyard. High walls on all four sides, pale stone, twelve feet, topped with more of that pretty ironwork that’s pretty and also very, very sharp.

The garden’s got three olive trees and a fountain that runs on caught rainwater. The sound of it never stops. I fall asleep to it. I wake to it. It’s the heartbeat of the whole place, and I have somehow never once thought of it that way until right now, with the light on my knee and the morning pushing through the bars.

Forty-one women live here. Some longer than me—Ireth came at seven, so young she doesn’t remember any world but this one. She hums while she braids her hair. She hums while she eats. It’s the sound of someone who’s never had to be anything but content, because content is the only shape this place leaves room for.

Some came last month. Tessa—dark-haired, sharp-jawed, pulled out of a settlement after a raid. She watches everything with eyes that won’t settle. She asks the kind of questions that make the sisters go quiet for a second before they answer. She’s twenty-two, and she walks like someone who’s been carrying her own weight her whole life and is offended that anyone’s suddenly offering her a chair.

I’m somewhere between Ireth and Tessa. Shaped enough to fit. Awake enough to catch the shape, some days.

Or I thought I was. The truth is I see the shape the way I see the bars—as part of the pretty pattern. I’ve never once pulled them out from the roses.

The door opens.

Mora, with the tray. Two cups—mine and Tessa’s, since Tessa’s room is next. The tray’s dark red lacquer, polished so deep I can see the ghost of my own hand reaching for the cup. My cup has my name on the bottom. I turned it over once, years ago, and there it was in Sister Mora’s careful little letters.Ellie.I thought it was sweet. A cup that was only mine. I never thought past that.

“Good morning, love.”

Her voice is the temperature of the tea—warm without burning, the kind of warm that asks you for nothing. She’s in the gray robes the attending sisters wear, the cloth gone soft with washing, the hem fraying at the left ankle where it catches on her sandal strap. Her hair’s in the low knot she always wears, a few strands loose at her temples. The strands are going silver. I’ve watched them go silver for thirteen years. I know her face the way I know the window—the shape of it is just home.

I take the cup. The warmth goes in. The restlessness I woke with, a low itch under my skin, the feeling of having dreamed something I can’t get back—smooths right out. It does this everymorning. The tea settles me the way the fountain settles the courtyard. I have never once wondered why.

“You slept late,” Mora says. She sets the tray on the bureau and opens the wardrobe, the soft hush of fabric sliding on wood. She picks a dress. Ivory linen, long sleeves. The Cage dresses us in pale things. Light colors, soft cloth. I’ve worn silk, cotton, linen in every shade of white, cream, and honey since I was ten. I don’t own one dark thing.

“I was watching the light,” I say.

“The light?” She smooths the dress across the bed. Her hands move the way they always move, sure, practiced, a thing she’s done a thousand mornings running, her hands going through it without her.

“On the floor. The way it comes through the bars.”

Mora looks at me. Something flickers across her face. I’d call it worry, if worry weren’t too big a word for it. Something nearer to attention. She crosses to the window. Looks out. Then down, at the courtyard below.

“The garden looks lovely this morning,” she says. “The jasmine’s blooming.”

She didn’t look at the light on the floor. She looked at the wall.

I drink my tea. The floral warmth fills my mouth, my chest. The restlessness goes quiet. Whatever I started to notice about Mora’s face goes quiet right along with it.