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He lingered at her lips a moment before stepping back. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
She just smiled, though the stretch of her lips felt unnatural.
Michal left, that same step squeaking on his way down, the windows rattling when he closed the door. Lore heard Elle heave a sigh, as if her brother’s job were a personal affront, the thin walls making it sound like she was right next to Lore instead of all the way on the first floor.
Lore stood there a moment, the light of the slow-rising sun gleaming on her hair, the worn silk of her gown. Then she dressed in a flowing shirt and tight breeches, made her own way down the stairs. She had a meeting with Val to attend.
Elle was curled up on the couch again, a ragged paperback novel in one hand and another mug of tepid tea in the other. She eyed Lore the way you might look at something unpleasant you’d tracked in from the street. “And where are you going?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear? I received an invitation to the Sun Prince’s Consecration. I wasn’t going to go, but rumor has it there might be an orgy afterward, and I can’t very well turn that down.”
Elle rolled her eyes so hard Lore was surprised she didn’t strain a muscle. “There is something deeply off about you.”
“You have no idea.” Lore opened the door. “Bye, Elle-Flower.”
“Rot in your own hell, Lore-dear.”
Lore twiddled her fingers in an exaggerated wave as the door closed. Part of her would miss Elle when the spying gig was up, when Val had a different running outfit she wanted watched instead of Gilbert’s.
But not as much as she’d miss Michal.
She couldn’t miss either of them for long. People came and went; her only constants were her mothers—Val and Mari—and the streets of Dellaire she could never leave.
That, and the memories of a childhood she was always, always trying to forget.
With one last glance at the row house, Lore started down the street.
CHAPTER TWO
Those born to darkness will carry it in their nature; they will carry sin in their very selves, body and mind and soul.
—The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 7
Dellaire was easy to navigate. Lore had heard tales of other cities—chaotic and winding, byways butting into themselves—and the concept seemed entirely foreign to her after half a lifetime spent in Dellaire’s well-organized roads. The Four Wards at ordinal directions, the western two coming up against the sea while the eastern led to Auverraine’s rolling farmland. The Church in the city’s center, built in a circle, guarding the Citadel within.
But if Dellaire was a grid, the catacombs beneath were a tangled web.
Weak sun radiated over the back of Lore’s neck as she stood at the entrance to a dilapidated building a few blocks from Michal’s row house. It had the look of a construction that had been many things in its time, so many that they’d all canceled one another out, so now it was nearly featureless. A slight wind off the sea rippled the torn cloth hanging in the windows.
Lore cursed softly. Being this close to the catacombs always made her twitchy.
They were empty. She could sense it, even now, standing yards away from their entrance. There was no one in the tunnels, at least not for a couple of miles.
Still, her skin prickled.
This was the skill that made her invaluable. The one she’d shocked Mari with on that day ten years ago, when she was a thirteen-year-old wandering in the streets with blank eyes and a fresh burn scar on her palm. Val’s wife had been heading to the market and had come across a young Lore staring at a ragged hole in the side of a derelict building, one that led to the catacombs.
Lore still remembered it. She’d blocked out nearly everything that came before this moment, thirteen years of life spent almost entirely underground, but her recall of meeting Mari was crystalline, perfectly preserved, as if her mind could wash over everything that had come before by saving this memory in vivid detail.
“Are you all right?” Mari’s voice was soft and low, her long, dark braids twisted up on top of her head. A moment of hesitation before her golden-brown hand settled on Lore’s shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
Lore had stared at the hole and concentrated on the sting of the still-healing burn on her palm, on the darkness beyond and how it stretched out into what had been her forever. She blinked, and the layout of the tunnels overlaid the back of her eyelids. “No one is coming,” she’d said. “Not right now.”
In the present, Lore shook her head. She’d gotten better at only tapping into her awareness of the catacombs when she needed it—even now, as the strange skill seemed to be growing in strength alongside her sense of Mortem—but standing so close made it nearly impossible to ignore, made it seep through her thoughts like ink in water. She felt the tunnels like phantom limbs, like the catacombs and the Mortem within them were part of her. Sometimes Lore thought that if you peeled off her skin and turned it inside out, there’d be a map on the slick underside, pressed into the meat of her.
With a sigh, she leaned against the side of the building. She was a little earlier than Val had told her to be, and Val was nothing if not punctual.
A minute later, Val was striding down the street toward her, with the same determined gait that equally served for a casual stroll or a charge into a knife fight. A middle-aged woman more severe than traditionally pretty, with a paper-pale face, bottle-green eyes, and a scarf that had faded to near colorlessness holding back her gold hair.
