Page 16 of Redline Communion

“That isn’t something I’m permitted to explain yet.”

“Permitted by who?”

I don’t answer.

This time the silence costs me because I can see exactly what it looks like from where she’s standing: a man who knows more than she does and has chosen, again, to keep it that way.

“Cassian.”

“You’ll know what you need to know before the rite begins.”

Her face closes immediately.

“That’s the worst sentence anyone in this house has said to me, and I live with Alistair.”

“I know.”

The words leave before I decide whether I should give them to her.

Lorelei pauses.

So do I.

Neither of us does anything useful with the moment.

Then she turns and leaves.

No goodbye.

I stay where I am, alone in the garden where Talia became Lorelei’s friend without my instruction, with my father’s closing line still sitting perfectly in my memory.

I said it correctly this morning.

I could say it correctly again now.

That does not mean I believe it.

Chapter four

Off The Clock

Lorelei

Ineed tonight the way you need air after holding your breath too long, though thinking too hard about that would mean admitting how much of the last three days I’ve spent bracing for a ritual nobody will explain.

Tonight I don’t want to know anything. I just want to be twenty years old with a fake ID and a car full of people who don’t require me to manage what they think of me.

Kiwi’s driving, one hand on the wheel and the other conducting some invisible orchestra to whatever’s playing, off-key in a way that somehow makes her more likeable. The passenger seat is buried under a nursing textbook, a stethoscope case, and what looks like an entire pharmacy’s worth of highlighters, which is how I’ve ended up in the back with Zaconia instead, and neither of us minds.

Kiwi and I met the way most things at school happen: assigned lab partners in a gen-ed class I only took because the time slot worked. By week two she had correctly diagnosed half my symptoms of exhaustion without my saying a word, because apparently that’s what future nurses do whether you’ve consented to the diagnosis or not.

“You’re doing the thing,” she says now, glancing at me in the rearview. “The thousand-yard stare thing.”

“I don’t have a stare thing.”

“You have several. I’ve catalogued at least three.”

“You’ve only known me a month.”