Page 149 of Carousel

Hevalla or Rhavna. Again.

I drop the menu.

“Is this another Integration test I have to pass?”

She rolls her deep-set eyes. “Not everything is about you, Ara.”

I go for the fish chowder after all.

A soldier in an apron – no more than a boy – brings out our bowls and silver spoons quickly, and we eat in silence.

I decide I don’t like being here alone with her. I still can’t place her. If Dezeeves is a traitor, does that mean she is, too? Is that why she’s helping to remove the blood magic on me?

Yet she so viciously fought me when I could have grabbed the gun in The Bridge.

She’d been the one to put the mask over my head. She’d even looked humoured during the Swan Test. Those things don’t make her, in my eyes, loyal to Rhavna. Or an ally, to me. And Cosmer doesn’t trust her either.

But she could still be useful.

“Meg,” I say. “As a first officer, you have access to certain places. Don’t you? Like this deck.”

“Obviously.”

I glimpse the side panel the soldier had entered from. It’s still shut.

“Do you have access to the brig?”

She licks her spoon neatly, the way the palace cat used to lap at bits of cream on its paw.

Lowering it, she says, “I’m not taking you to see Cosmer.”

The chowder is threatening to come right back up my throat.

“Meg. Please. I just want to see him. Know he’s okay.”

She swills her spoon in her bowl. “He probably won’t be. It’s the brig. Not the Captain’s Quarters.”

“I love him.”

“So you keep telling everyone.” She peers down at me through the thick strands of hair that have fallen over her face. “And yet, I’m certain I just saw you and Drake looking longingly into each other’s eyes. While your hands were touching⁠—”

“Meg,” I say, craning my head. As if expecting, suddenly, to see Cosmer right here. The look of disappointment and hurt on his face.

She leans back. “That’s why I stepped in, before anyone saw you.”

“It’s my magic,” I say to her, steadily. “It… draws me to him. For some reason.”

She seems intrigued by that. “Draws you to him, how?”

I push my bowl away. “I don’t know.”

“Describe it,” she prompts. “Is it like a crane fly to a flame, for example?”

“No. No, I don’t think that’s right. It’s like… a crane fly, to another crane fly. And…” I swallow. “And the flame is inside them.”

“Are you not just describing love?” she asks. Poised. Like she really is trying to understand.

“No,” I say. “No. It’s⁠—”