Page 125 of Graceless

The phone rang at nine in the morning and Tara didn't say hello.

"Nothing."

"Good morning to you too."

"Cat. Nothing." Her office was loud behind her — the kettle, a chair with a bad wheel. "Seven letters. I ran them against every attestation database I have credentials for, and then I called in two favors for the ones I don't. Every onomasticon. Every roster, every inscription corpus, every genizah fragment anybody's ever digitized. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Five letters hitting nothing is a curiosity. Seven letters hitting nothing is —" the chair wheel shrieked; she'd stood up — "it's not rare, Cat. Rare I could publish. It's absent. It's a name built exactly the way names are built, sitting in dead center of every naming convention we have, and it does not exist in the record. Anywhere. Ever."

"So what does that mean?"

"It means one of two things. Either it's invented — somebody's fantasy of a name, which the workmanship argues against, because nobody spends that kind of gold on a doodle." A pause. The kettle clicked off. "Or it was removed."

"Removed."

"Scrubbed. Every instance, every copy, every citation, across every archive that survived — which is not a thing that happens, Cat, you'd need centuries and reach and a reason." She laughed, short, no landing in it. "So it's invented. Obviously. I'm going to write it up as an invented name and it's going to eat at me for the rest of my life."

My feet were up on Nina's pillow arrangement, and across the room the muslin lay over the panel, over the shape under it, and the question was out of my mouth before I decided anything.

"Tara. Do you ever wonder if any of it's real?"

"Any of what."

"All of it. The things in the books you read for a living. Angels. Watchers." My hand had gone low without asking me. "The stuff everybody wrote down like it was the morning news and we decided was poetry."

I expected the laugh. I'd have bet on the laugh.

"Of course it's real," Tara said.

Flat. The way you'd say the mail comes at eleven.

"...Tara."

"You asked. I spend my whole life in the basements of eleven religions, Cat. You want to know what's down there? Effort. Massive, sustained, expensive effort — to record some things and bury others. And here's what forty years of other people's basements has taught me." The bad wheel rolled; she'd sat back down. "Nobody goes through that much trouble to bury a lie. Lies don't last this long. Only the truth does."

The radiator ticked. I didn't say anything, because I couldn't.

"Anyway," Tara said, entirely herself again. "Invented name. Going in the write-up. If you ever find another panel from that workshop, I will leave my husband and marry it. Bye."

She hung up, and I sat there with my hand low and my heart going, looking at the muslin.

Removed, I thought. You'd need centuries and reach and a reason.

"Okay," I said, to nobody, and picked up my tea.

✦

That night I washed and he dried.

We'd gotten good at it — the border-town rhythm, plate to rack to towel, nobody negotiating anymore — and I was up to my wrists in the sink, wrestling the lasagna pan Nina had smuggled in, when he stopped.

Not pause. Stop. The towel went still, and the plate in it went still, and the air beside me changed — that shift, him going somewhere else inside that enormous frame. His eyes were on my hands.

On my hands, in the water.

Two seconds. Maybe three. Then he came back — the return landing in his face like a man surfacing — and he set the plate down with too much care, the way you set things down when you don't trust your grip.

"Where did you just go?"

"Nowhere."