Page 119 of Graceless

"You are thinking about this census as a thing that passes over," he said, to me, not to Raq. "A bad night. Something to sit still through. It does not pass over what you are carrying. It is half his kind and half yours, and that is not permitted — it has never once been permitted, in any age, by anyone. There have been others. I can tell you what happened to every one of them and it is the same sentence every time." He did not soften it by so much as a syllable. "If they hear it, they will come and they will end it. The child, and you, and probably him."

My hand went low on my stomach under the table and stayed there.

And then something in me got up on its back legs and refused the whole thing.

"No," I said. "No — I don't believe you."

Cam's eyebrows went up a fraction.

"I'm serious." I was shaking my head, and I kept doing it. "I didn't believe in the saints. I've told God to His face what I thought of Him and I meant every word of it, and I still put fresh water in front of a statue on the sill because my grandmother did. So no, I'm not one of your believers. And here you sit anyway. Fine. You're real. You win. You're all real.

"But you're telling me that the good ones — the ones who stayed, the ones on my wall, the ones the nuns spent my whole childhood selling me — that they get sent down here to kill a woman and a baby that hasn't got fingernails yet." I put my spoon down because my hand wanted to throw it. "Nope. No. Whatever else is true in this kitchen, that one isn't. I don't believe it."

Cam was quiet for a moment.

"That," he said, "is the most human thing anybody has said to me in an age."

"Don't talk down to me in my kitchen."

"You are half right," Cam said. "The half you have wrong is the half that matters.

"They have no quarrel with a woman in a basement. They do not go about ending people; they have never needed to, and they would find the suggestion vulgar. If they passed over this street a year ago they would have seen a restorer and a ruin keeping company, and written it down, and gone home, and I would have been tired for a month and that would have been the end of it." He paused. "That is what my brother has spent this entire season protecting you from. Attention. Not a sword. Attention, which is worse, and slower, and comes back."

"And now?"

"Now you are not a woman in a basement." He held my eyes. "To them you are the vessel of a thing that is not permitted to be. That is a different category, Caterina, and the protections that cover you do not follow you into it. I am not going to describe what happens next. I have seen it happen. I have stood in the field where it happened, and I am not putting it on this table in front of you, and if you press me for it I will lie."

"But the child will not be permitted," he said. "There is no order for that, and no discussion, and nobody will have to be sent. It is simply what they do."

"Enough."

It came from beside me, and it was quiet, and every glass in my cabinet moved.

I turned my head. Raq had not stood up this time. He was sitting exactly where he had been, both hands on the table, and he was looking at his brother the way you look at a road you are about to walk down.

"You have said it," he said. "She has heard it. You will not say it again in this house."

"She has to understand what⁠—"

"She understands. Look at her hand." Cam's eyes went where mine had been under the table for five minutes, and he stopped talking. "She understood before you opened your mouth. She has understood since a bathroom on the second Friday, alone, with a plastic stick in her hand and nobody in the world to call, because I was standing on a roof in Queens congratulating myself." He said it perfectly evenly, which was somehow worse than shouting. "You are not informing her, Camael. You are frightening a woman who was bleeding a few hours ago. It is finished. Ask what you came to ask."

Cam looked at his brother for a long moment.

"You would not have said that to me a year ago."

"A year ago there was nothing in the world I would have said it about."

Four hours ago a woman in a white coat had told me reassuring instead of fine, and I had thought that was the worst sentence anybody could say to me about this baby.

It was not the worst sentence. But I sat there with my hand low under the table and thought: whatever else is coming up that street — I am not alone in this room.

"Say the rest," I said, when I could.

"I have not told them. Every day I do not tell them is a day I have lied to the only thing I have ever served, and I have never done that. Not once. Not in any age, for anyone." His hands were not steady. "And I cannot do it forever. It gets louder every week."

"So why are you here? What do you want?"

"I want you out of this city before they come." Immediate. The whole reason he was in my kitchen. "Not that cottage. Somewhere prepared, far, with water, and a physician who does not ask questions. You go quietly, you stay until it is born, and then we discuss the rest of your life." He straightened his cuffs. "It is the only version of this where the three of you are alive at the end of it."