Page 66 of Graceless

"Raq."

"The first part you have." He didn't raise his voice, and somehow it filled the room anyway. "No lies. Not ever. That word I will give you, and you now know what my word is. The second part — no. I will not hand you what can get you killed, no matter what you decide. Not for your autonomy. Not for your anger. Not for anything. What I will give you is this: everything I can, the moment I can. And when I hold something back, I will tell you I am holding it, and I will tell you why."

"You'd give your word? The binding kind?"

"It is the only kind I have."

I looked at him a long moment. It wasn't everything I'd asked for. It was better — because it was true, and he could keep it.

"Deal," I said. "Ask you everything, no lies ever, dangerous ones get named. Now eat your veal."

"Ask." He picked the fork back up, and he ate what I fed him, all of it, and he answered everything.

Then I got to the one I'd been building toward the whole time, the one every other question was scaffolding for — and I found I couldn't just fire it across the table like the others. Some questions you don't ask a person. You ask permissionfirst.

"I want to ask about the scars," I said. "About what happened. And you can tell me if tonight isn't the night. That's allowed under the deal — you name it, I wait."

"Ask."

"You're sure?"

"Caterina." Quiet. "Ask."

I kept my hands still on the cup, and I made it as gentle as a true question can be made.

"Who took your wings?"

He looked away.

He looked away — the creature who had held my eyes through every terrible question all day, who watches me the way lighthouses watch water, broke and looked at the wall, and the kitchen got very small around it.

"The ones we answered to," he said, to the wall. Then he came back to me, and the flatness was back on, but I'd seen it go off, and we both knew I'd seen it. "Who they were — who held the blade, whose order it was — that lives inside the most dangerous answer I hold, and I am not opening it sideways tonight. Ask me the rest."

I let it go. For now. And I asked the rest.

"Then Enoch. Tara's book. It says you were set to watch, and you came down because you wanted." I watched him. "You stood in my studio two nights ago and didn't correct it."

"The buried book is the true one. That's why it's buried." He said it flat. "There was no battle. No banners. There was wanting. And there was punishment for wanting. That is the entire history of the fall, and everything else anyone has ever painted on a ceiling is what got painted over it."

"Punishment," I said. The word sat on the table between us like something that had crawled up out of the drain. "For wanting."

"Yes."

"Wanting what?"

"What you had." No hesitation on that one — the wanting of the two hundred was apparently a fact he could hand straight across the table. "All of you. Everywhere. Every night we stood the watch. Lives. Tables. Doors that close with someone on both sides of them. Being in the world instead of posted over it. Being tired at the end of a day because the day had you in it." He was looking at my hands when he said the last part. "And love. Not the assignment kind. The kind that picks one face out of all the faces, and stays. We watched it happen below us every night of the world, Caterina, and we were built to want nothing, and the builders were wrong."

My hand moved before I decided anything — across the table, halfway to his, and stopped there, palm down on Nonna's wood. An offer, in the middle. He looked at it for a long moment, and something in his stillness changed grain, and he did not take it, and I understood that too: not yet, not in the middle of this. But he kept it in reach.

Punishment for wanting. I put it in the drawer where I keep the true things, and felt how much bigger it was than the drawer.

"Wait." It arrived out of nowhere, the way the true gaps do, while I was stacking the plates. "Where do you live? All these weeks — you're here at eight, you're under the streetlight at midnight. Where do you go, Raq?"

He looked at me, and did not answer, and the not-answering was the answer.

"The doorway," I said. "The roofline. The circuit. That's — you don't go anywhere. There's no apartment. There's no anywhere."

"There is a post," he said. "There has always been a post. It is enough."