Page 95

“That is not that reassuring.”

“But it’s the truth.” He gives me a tired look. “We can leave in the morning on the dawn ferry. I’m tired, Saturna. I’m tired in a way I don’t yet have the words for. I would like to sleep in my own bed one more time. I would like that very much.”

He speaks so plainly that I have no choice but nod.

“Alright. We stay. But we need to talk about what this means. Not tonight. But when you’re up for it.”

“Yes. Tomorrow. I need to sleep on it. I need to let my brain do what it does when I let it run wild.”

I help him right the desk, and I pick up the books and put them back on the shelves, guessing where they would go. He goes into the bedroom to light a couple of candles and get changed, and I hear him moving around in there slowly, the small domestic sounds of a tired man finally in his own space. It reminds me that this is the real Baz, the man who lives here and who I truly don’t know much about, no matter how close I feel to him. Literally and figuratively.

I take the moment to look under the overturned chair by the window because it is the only place neither of us has looked.

There are pages under there. Loose, three or four, slid under in the ransacking and gone unnoticed until now. I pull them out. They are in his handwriting, which I know as well as my own now, a slanted, hurried version of a hand that could be beautiful if he gave it the time. The pages are observation notes.

On me.

The first page is dated three weeks before I would have met him. Greythorn, S. Admitted on letters alone, no practical examinations. Age 27, which is older than the standard intake. Family in Fernhollow. Island background.

The second is from the first week of class. First Bone Work, Monday. Greythorn reads the uncatalogued radius intuitively. Reads it right—Salthaven seamstress, influenza—and gives a formal explanation for how she knew. The explanation is a lie. The reading was intuitive. She is not Mortis-trained in her method. Watch her closely.

The next has to be from the end of the month he’s lost. The handwriting is slightly worse than the others, as if written late at night. I am going to have to leave her alone. But I’m not going to be able to leave her alone. She writes with her tongue between her teeth when she is concentrating and I will think about that for the rest of my life. God help me.

I look up.

He is standing in the bedroom doorway holding a lit candle and a small glass of water, watching me read. He doesn’t say anything.

I finish.

“I found some things they missed,” I say, feeling awkward, like I shouldn’t have been reading these.

“I see,” he says, and from the way he says it, the tension that has filled the room and is fighting for space with the tether, I know he remembers what he wrote.

I look at the page again. The handwriting with the tongue-between-teeth line. The God help me at the end. The way it makes my heart do summersaults, as if he’d just written a confession on how much he loves me.

He comes over and sits down on the floor beside me and hands me the glass of water. I take it from him, our fingers brushing against each other, sending shivers down my spine, which is silly considering the circumstances. He takes the pages gently out of my hand and folds them and puts them in the inside pocket of his coat.

We sit beside each other, not sure what to say, and I’m giving him space and looking at the pin-marks on the far wall when I suddenly realize we aren’t alone.

There is a figure standing in the corner of the room. Tall. Thin. In outline only, no features I can make out but I can tell it has eyes and I can tell it’s staring right at me.

I can’t help but gasp.

“What?” Baz asks.

I slowly extend my finger, which shakes. “Who…who is that?”

But by the time I point, the shadow is gone in the blink of an eye. I am looking at the angle where the shelves meet the wall and there is nothing there. All is quiet and still.

“Who was what?”

“There was a man standing there. In the corner, by the bookshelves. A tall man. I only saw him for a second. I don’t know how I missed him before. He was just—he was there, and I looked at him, and then he was gone.”

I expect him to look at me like I’m crazy, because clearly we are the only two people in this apartment. But instead he looks sad.

And I know why.

Because I’d seen that man before.