Page 4 of Dark Mate

The wall at the end of the corridor is the outer wall. I put my hand flat against it.

Warm.

Not sun-warm—the window faces north here. Not pipe-warm—there are no pipes on this side. The stone is warm with something else. Something on the other side of it. Something big enough and close enough that its own heat is bleeding through two feet of rock.

My fingers spread on the surface. The warmth pulses. Or I make it pulse, in my own head, and I can’t tell the difference. My hand is flat on the stone and on the far side of it there is something breathing, something that’s been here long enough to warm the rock, and I don’t move.

I just stand there. Palm on the wall. The warmth soaking up into my hand. My heart’s doing something it doesn’t usually do, beating up in my throat instead of down in my chest, the pulse of it ticking in my wrist against the pale stone.

I don’t have a word for what I feel. It isn’t fear, and it isn’t quite curiosity either. Something under both of those, something the Cage never gave me a name for. Something with weight, that sits in the space between my ribs and waits.

A door opens behind me. Footsteps. I pull my hand off the wall and turn.

Sister Mora. The tray again—afternoon tea, the same floral warmth.

“There you are.” She smiles. She doesn’t ask what I was doing. She doesn’t look at the wall. “Come, love. Your tea will go cold.”

I follow her back to my room. I drink the tea. The warmth fills my mouth, my chest. Whatever I felt in the east corridor—the pulse, the weight between my ribs—dissolves like sugar.

I sit on my bed and watch the light move across the floor, and I don’t go back to the wall.

Not today.

2

ELLIE

Neve’s braiding jasmine stems into a crown when I find her in the garden.

She’s on the stone bench under the biggest olive tree, legs crossed, the white petals bright against the dark of her skirt. Her hands work without looking, the stems bending, weaving, her fingers quick with the same easy automatic way the Cage trains into all of us. Braiding, weaving, embroidering, the careful busywork of hands that have nothing else to hold. The sisters teach it to us as a kind of prayer. Neve does it as something to look at while she thinks about other things.

She’s twenty-four. Three years older than me. She’s been here since she was twelve, which means she remembers more of the before than I do—four extra years of the world before they collected her. Those four years sit behind her eyes like furniture in a room she won’t let you into. Sometimes I catch her watching the birds over the courtyard—not the way Ireth watches them, soft and pleased, but with something harder. Jealousy, maybe. Or knowing. Like she remembers what it felt like to go where the birds go.

“The jasmine’s blooming,” I say, and sit down beside her. The stone’s sun-warm through my skirt. The tree above us drops shifting coins of gold on the ground every time the breeze moves the branches.

“Everything’s blooming. It’s the season.” She holds up the crown, frowning at a gap where two stems won’t meet. Pulls one loose and weaves it back. The jasmine’s sweet and thick this close, almost too sweet, the kind of smell that sits at the back of your throat. “The garden goes wild every spring. Have you seen the vines on the east wall?”

“I saw a scratch on the east wall.”

Her hands stop.

Not a big stop—Neve doesn’t do big. Her fingers just pause mid-weave, and the pause is where the whole thing lives. She looks at me. Her eyes are gray, the color the stone goes when it sweats, and they land on my face with a weight I’m not used to carrying.

“Where?” she says.

“Under my window. Three floors down. High up—higher than anyone could reach.”

“When?”

“Last night, sometime. It wasn’t there the day before.”

Neve sets the crown on the bench. She looks at the east wall—not at the scratch, which you can’t see from the garden, but at the wall itself. At the place where the canopy presses up against the stone, branches so thick they’ve shoved the ironwork outward. From down here the canopy looks like a second wall standing behind the first—darker, alive, leaning in with a patience that plain stone doesn’t have.

“There was one last month,” she says. “Lower. Down near the foundation, where the stones get big. I found it on a walk. The sisters had it filled inside a day.”

“Filled?”

“Mortar. Smoothed over. You’d never know it was there unless you’d seen it first.” She picks at a loose thread on her skirt, then catches herself and stops. “I went back three times to be sure I hadn’t dreamed it. Wall looked good as new. Fresh mortar comes in a little paler, though. If you know to look.”