Page 109

“This was written years ago?” I say.

He nods.

All three conditions are currently happening. We know this now. We see the sky. He has the Bleeding charts. I have been to the veil and felt that carved-out absence where my father and sister should be.

“Read the last part,” I say.

He finds the page and reads: “The entity itself, as described in the cult’s surviving fragments, is characterized by vast scale, patience, and a form that does not translate cleanly into surface-world perception. Accounts describe an awareness beneath still water, segmented, pressing upward. The cult’s term for it translates approximately as the One Who Waits Below. Their cosmology held that the sea itself was the entity’s membrane, a second skin between our world and wherever it originates, and that the Deepwyrm of island legend were not mythological creatures but peripheral manifestations of its presence in shallower water.”

I stop breathing.

Baz looks up from the page and whatever is on my face makes him put it down. “What?”

“I’ve seen that,” I say, tapping the paper. “In the Mire. When I crossed to bring you back. There was something in the water beneath me. Pale, segmented, enormous. I thought it was a Deepwyrm, though I always assumed Deepwyrms were just a myth, sea monsters sailors invented to explain bad crossings. But it was there, it was real, and it was looking up at me. I couldn’t see its eyes but I knew it was looking at me.”

He’s very still, his brows furrowing as if he’s trying to remember something.

“If Deepwyrms aren’t mythological,” I say slowly, “if they’re peripheral manifestations of something larger…then they’re not just in the sea. They’re wherever the membrane is thin enough. They’re behind the veil. They’re in the Mire right now, beneath anyone who crosses.” I look at him. “What if the sea is just where they surface? What if they’re all around us, on the other side, and the water is just how they reach through?”

Baz looks at the paper on the table between us, then back at me, and I watch him turn it over in his mind with the look he gets when he’s connecting things fast.

“Whoever wrote this,” I say, “either uncovered the conspiracy or is inside it. This isn’t a theoretical framework, Baz. They describe the revival conditions like a checklist. Like they already knew.”

He turns the paper over and looks at the byline again.

“We should tell Caranthis,” he says.

“We don’t know if we can trust Caranthis.”

“I know.” He exhales. “But we have to tell someone and the list of candidates is short.”

“I have to go get ready,” I say finally.

He nods and starts gathering the pages.

Avelene’s room smells of powder and flowers and when I close the door behind me, it’s like stepping into a different season. She has four candles lit around the small mirror on her desk and Nelle is already there, sitting ramrod straight with her dark hair pinned up while Avelene works on her eyes with a small brush, and Ambrose is here despite this being theoretically a girls’ preparation and is sitting on the floor with Harken eating biscuits.

“You’re late,” Avelene says without turning around.

“I was in the library.”

“On Mortalia morning?” She does turn around at that, giving me a look. “Saturna.”

“I know.” I hang my cloak on the hook and sit on the edge of her bed. “Can I have a biscuit?”

Ambrose hands me one without a word and my stomach grumbles. I have not been eating as much as I should be. Neither has Baz, for that matter.

Despite the fact that I haven’t been to one of these gatherings in what feels like forever, it feels as comfortable as it always did. Ambrose is making Nelle laugh at something, Harken eating in companionable silence, pouring us all copious amounts of wine, Avelene’s quick precise hands moving from Nelle’s face to mine when Nelle is done, all of it the small joy of being with people who don’t need explaining to. I sit still under Avelene’s brush and feel the morning’s weight lift slightly.

Or maybe that’s the wine.

Then Nelle stands and moves to the lamp to check the pin in her hair and I see something strange.

She lifts her arms to adjust the pin, her back half-turned to the lamp, and her shadow on the wall behind her stays still for a half-beat after she moves, not following her arm, not tracking the motion, just lagging, as if it belongs to a different person who is a fraction of a second behind. Then it catches up and she turns and the moment is gone and she’s just Nelle, checking her reflection with her usual critical precision.

I look at Avelene. Avelene is blending something at the corner of my eye and hasn’t noticed.

I look back at Nelle. Nothing. Just Nelle.