Veinlight
ETERNAL™ | SHORT STORY
I
The violet veins of the Kenkara Ravine pulsed like a patient’s heartbeat—slow, sure, ancient. Quenbi de Apani Je stood at the observation rail and watched the glow lift and fall along the walls as if the stone were breathing. Apprentices lined behind her in neat rows, their tablets and lenses ready, their mouths closed. No one inhaled until Quenbi did. No one spoke unless she asked the question first.
“Open the gate,” she said at last.
A set of electroseals from her own design clicked. The gate’s slats lifted. Heat licked the air. On the opposite catwalk, a group of miners in dust-streaked coats waited for her signal to proceed. The oldest one, a woman with knuckles like knotty wood, nodded at Quenbi with the restrained warmth of someone who had learned long ago to be grateful for the genius that kept her people alive and wary of the genius that might also kill them.
“Measure nine,” Quenbi said. “Then twenty. Then stop.”
“Measure nine,” repeated the forewoman, and the crew eased their instruments into the glowing seam.
Violet light swam through the fibers of the probes and into Quenbi’s onyebeads. The readout hovered in the air, a sheet of light only she and a handful of Apani Je could fully understand. Valcium signatures harmonized. Toxin levels held flat. Pressure stable. A hush fell across the catwalks as the Ravine accepted the intrusion the way sleeping gods accept a kiss from a favored child.
Her brother’s reflection appeared on the glass in front of her before his voice reached her ear.
“You can lead ore,” he said softly, “and molecules, and light. But can you lead people, Queen?”
“Is this another speech, Kudan?” she asked without turning. “You’ve delivered me to enough councils for three lifetimes.”
“I delivered you to the candidacy,” he said. “The council delivered judgment.” His tone shifted, gentler. “And the people… they deliver rumor.”
Quenbi snorted. “They always have. Let them talk.” She flicked her wrist. The readouts reflowed from a jargon-dense sheet into a simple bar of green. “The vein is stable. Note that for the record. We continue in seven minutes.”
The apprentices bent their heads as if a wind had blown them at once.
“Seven minutes,” the forewoman called, and the miners pulled back to rest.
Kudan lingered. In the glass, his face stood beside hers: his eyes, weary; hers, sharp and too awake. He was the one who had put her name forward to be the next Eternal—one of seven candidates, each drawn from a noble lineage, each shaped by a different pillar of Ojii’s might. He knew precisely the weight he had set on her. He carried some of it on his shoulders, and she resented that he thought he had to.
“You’re not alone up there,” he said. “You like to pretend you are. But you’re not.”
“I know that,” she said. “I counted every eye.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then say what you mean, brother. Some of us have veins to stabilize.”
He almost smiled. Almost. “The people love you for what you make,” he said. “They do not yet love you for what you break to make it. If you want the crown, you will have to teach them the difference without making them hate you.”
“The crown,” Quenbi said lightly, “is an accessory that clashes with my coat.”
Kudan shook his head and left her to the glow.
In truth, the crown had never frightened Quenbi. She had been born into a matriarchy that bent history the way she bent circuits—Apani Je had never been ruled by a man, never even been threatened by one. Their women crafted medical miracles from the Ravine’s breath and wrote formulas against decay on the bones of the earth. They ran the mines. They ran the hospitals. They ran, if we are honest, the deadlines that became law everywhere else. Men in Apani Je did not lead; they assisted. Their mother, Vosaye de Apani Je, could wheel a gurney with one hand and a negotiation with the other and cut a man with either if he got in her way. Quenbi had grown up on the inside of a fortress of capability and love. Outside it, she was a rumor with teeth.
Six of the other candidates had been presented to the council and the city the week before in a ceremony that pretended tradition was stronger than ambition. Rhea de Hamora—the people’s darling—had stepped forward with calm eyes and a smile that made elders put down their canes and listen like children at a school story. Hasan de Quun—inked in shimmering wards that glistened and crawled at his command—had been watched even as he bowed; his father, the sixth Eternal, had lost his nobleness and his name in a betrayal everyone still counted, and Hasan had inherited his household’s suspicion like an heirloom. Akono de Agbara—sixteen and already Admeri of the Third, also known as the Assassination Squad, whose reputation precedes them—had stepped into the light, the heat of a god fading off his skin.
There were others, too. There were always others. But those three had lodged under Quenbi’s ribs for different reasons: Rhea’s softness that did not hide her steel; Hasan’s grief braided with duty; Akono’s power that turned a boy into a legend.
“Seven,” Quenbi said, and the probes slid into the seam again.
The world ended between the ninth and the twentieth measure.
A gasp shuddered up through the Ravine like a building exhaling before it falls. Something under the violet throbbed too hard, too fast. A pressure spike sliced Quenbi’s readouts into static, and the forewoman’s voice snapped, “Back! Back, now!”—too late for the ring of heat that ripped outward like a careless sun.
The blast threw Quenbi to the floor. The apprentices went down in a click of knee caps. The opposite catwalk groaned and spat a miner into the glow; someone caught her by the ankles before the light swallowed, and the air filled with the sweet-sour chemical stink of something that should not have been released. Sirens cried. The Ravine’s old gods rolled in their sleep and muttered a language Quenbi had once called superstition and now desperately wished she spoke.
When she could hear again, there were three sounds: coughing; the soft slide of the gate dropping under emergency protocols; and whispering, starting as a thread and weaving to rope.
Intruders.
It was a whisper that had haunted Ojii for a generation, every time a ledger didn’t match or a border patrol found an extra boot print. The foreigners watched them, envied them, undercut them, Ojii muttered. Foreigners slipped past the guard, stole resources, vanished. Every accident wore their shadow. Every failure wore their scent.
Quenbi curled her fingers into the trembling floor and told herself to stand. She did.
“Seal the lower tunnels,” she said. Her voice was even, and if her hands shook, only the glass saw it. “Activate pressure bleed. Medical teams to gates two and three. Now.”
People moved. They always moved when Quenbi spoke. Kudan was suddenly at her side with a med kit, and she shrugged him away—not because she didn’t need him, but because if she let him help now she would let herself break, and there were bodies, and there were screams, and she needed to stay a wall until there were fewer of both.
At the mouth of the Ravine, the council messengers were already running their short, elegant loops: first to the council chamber, then to the houses of the candidates, then back to the Ravine to take testimony no one would read for weeks. Quenbi watched the loop with the bright, tiny part of her that catalogued chaos to build better tools to survive it.
“You were at measure nine,” Kudan said. “Your design would not have set it off.”
Quenbi wanted to say Of course it wouldn’t; I am not careless. She wanted to say You brought me to this. She wanted to say I should have stayed at the bench and let the men with titles handle it.
Instead, she said, “If it was sabotage, then the trigger was old.”
“Eastern,” said a voice to her left.
Rhea de Hamora had arrived without Quenbi noticing her. That told Quenbi something about Rhea’s training and her presence both.
“Or perhaps only convenient to blame,” Rhea added, and Quenbi looked at her, sharply.
Rhea’s hands were already dirty to the wrist from lifting rubble, and her white shawl was streaked with black. She smiled at Quenbi with weary kindness.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Quenbi said. “You’ll complicate accountability.”
“You think the council will hold itself to account without witnesses?” Rhea asked mildly.
Quenbi opened her mouth to retort and closed it because she could feel the heat of her own anger rising like a fever, and she had promised herself (and her mother, and Kudan, and a mirror she had once punched) that she would stop mistaking volume for victory. She breathed. The Ravine breathed back.
“Come,” she said tightly. “If you are here, you may as well be useful.”
The Ravine’s lower tunnels were off-limits to everyone who did not carry the Apani Je’s mark on the inside of their wrist, and Quenbi wore hers like a crown. Rhea did not. The sentries balked until Quenbi’s eyes cut them, and they opened the seals. Their distrust trailed them like a draft.
“Your people don’t like me,” Rhea observed after the third gate.
“They don’t like anyone who isn’t us,” Quenbi said. “On good days, they don’t like each other.”
“That’s honest.”
“I’m busy,” Quenbi said. “I don’t have time to be anything else.”
Rhea glanced sideways at her. “You also don’t have time to be alone,” she said quietly.
“Did the council ask you to say that?”
“No. I am saying it because I am tired of watching you bleed in public and pretend it is sweat.”
Quenbi actually stopped. The tunnel light made Rhea’s face a soft bronze, and her eyes were steady and unafraid. Quenbi had not asked for comfort. Rhea gave it anyway, and somehow did not make it feel like pity.
“Be useful,” Quenbi said again, but there was no bite in it now.
They reached the section of tunnel where the spike had originated. Quenbi’s portable spectrometer hummed while she held its mouth to the rock. The readings danced in a language Rhea did not pretend to know. Quenbi read and frowned and read again.
“What is it?” Rhea asked.
“Not us,” Quenbi said. “It mimics us, but it’s not. There’s a resonance in the impurities that’s wrong.” She scowled. “Crudely wrong. A child would do better.”
Rhea smiled despite the wreckage. “You would know.”
“Don’t flatter me,” Quenbi said. “I’ve had enough of that from the gunkstains who want my signature on their proposals.”
Rhea’s laugh escaped before she caught it. “Gunkstains?”
“Breathing ones,” Quenbi muttered. “Most of them.”
Footsteps clicked behind them. Quenbi spun, her hand already palming the injector she had turned into a stunner last year for fun. Two figures approached: one tall and burning and young, the other ink-etched and older by grief.
Akono de Agbara did not so much walk as arrive—heat shimmered the air around him, and the twin curved swords on his waist drank the glow and gave it back like a sunrise. The title Admeri sat on his shoulders like the sun, and at sixteen, he wore his mantle without apology. Hasan de Quun moved like a man in a room of knives, each step careful, each breath counted. The tattoos on his body shifted in patterns that matched nothing in the rock and everything in the profound logic of his blood.
“We’re late,” Akono said, not even winded from crossing an ocean in what had probably taken four blinks.
“You’re early,” Quenbi said. “I didn’t invite you.”
“The Third Division walks where the threat walks,” Akono said. His voice held the kind of finality that made even elders reroute arguments. “There were whispers of foreign hands. If the rumor is food, the Third eats first.”
“And spits out the bones on the city steps,” Rhea murmured.
Akono’s grin flashed. “Sometimes. If fear serves.”
Hasan’s eyes found Quenbi’s instrument, then the vein, then the hairline crack in the tunnel floor that would have looked like a seam to anyone else. He knelt and pressed his inked palm to the stone. The tattoos uncoiled like river snakes and slid into the fissure.
“What do you feel?” Rhea asked.
“Greed,” Hasan said softly. “And a signature that is almost ours and not.”
“Treason,” Akono said.
“Convenient,” Hasan replied, and for a heartbeat something hard and wounded showed in his face. “That is what they say of me as well.”
Quenbi caught the look and filed it in the part of her mind that had not yet learned mercy. “If you’ve come to help, then help,” she said. “Otherwise, find the nearest gate and trip over it.”
Her delivery was so dry that Rhea choked back another laugh. Hasan looked up at Quenbi, the ghost of a smile cutting the distance between them.
“I’ve come to help,” he said. “Too many of my kin have not. I will not wear their choices like a coat.”
Akono squinted down the tunnel where the heat shimmered thickest. “What’s your hypothesis, Quenbi?”
“That we are supposed to blame the East,” she said. “And that we are supposed to do it loudly enough to drown the sound of someone inside the council counting the profit.”
Rhea’s gaze sharpened. “Then we’ll need proof.”
Quenbi lifted the spectrometer. “I can give you signatures, patterns, traces. The council will call them guesses. We need the hands.”
“We will fetch them,” Akono said. “If they are foreign, we will leave their bodies on the stairs of the council. If they are ours, we will drag them in chains.”
“Alive,” Rhea said.
“Alive,” Akono agreed easily. “Fear works whether a man is breathing or not. But justice needs breath.”
Quenbi glanced at Hasan. “And you?”
“My father taught me nothing I care to remember,” Hasan said, standing, “except how to read ink that lies. There is an elder on the council whose lines have been altered.”
Quenbi’s mind leapt. “Elder whose?”
Hasan hesitated. The tattoos on his wrists knotted and unknotted like a throat swallowing. “A man of my house,” he said at last. “Maaru de Ibori.”
Rhea’s breath slid out slowly. Akono did not move.
“I knew he disliked me,” Quenbi said, too lightly, because if she let her anger take its true shape it would fill the tunnel and choke them all. “I did not think he would collapse a vein to kill a reputation. Or a city.”
“He would not do it for spite,” Hasan said stiffly. “He would do it for power.”
“Worse,” Quenbi said. “Spite cools. Power forgets to.”
Rhea touched Quenbi’s elbow, a silent We will finish this. “We have names,” she said. “We have patterns. We have a city that in two hours will be at the council steps with empty jars to catch blame like rain.” She looked at Akono, then Hasan, then back to Quenbi. “We need a plan.”
Quenbi opened her mouth to say I will craft one and closed it. The last time she had taken a plan into her own hands, a dozen miners had come back wearing masks over their mouths for a month because the ventilation grid she had insisted would work had needed five more days. She still believed in that grid. It was saving lives now. But the memory of a woman coughing into a rag while thanking Quenbi for saving her anyway had calcified in Quenbi’s throat.
“My plan requires witnesses,” she said finally. “And speed. And… trust. Ugly word.”
“Not so ugly when you say it,” Rhea said gently.
“Grating,” Quenbi answered, but it came out close to a smile.
They met in a disused treatment room three doors down from Quenbi’s office, because sometimes the best place to hide a conspiracy is in a place where everyone knows you work. Quenbi sealed the room with a handprint; Hasan traced protective loops at the threshold; Akono blew out the lanterns and relit them with a thought so that the room’s flame carried his signature and could be tracked only by those who understood his bloodline. Rhea brought in a basket of fruit, because her politics ran on full stomachs.
“Say it,” Rhea told Quenbi after they ate in the quiet. “Out loud, so we can test it for holes.”
Quenbi swallowed a last mouthful and wiped her hands. “We flush the spy by giving him what he wants,” she said. “Access. A chance to finish what he started. We tell the council we will conduct a cleansing of the Ravine tonight at high tide—they cannot say no while the city is watching—and we make a ritual of it. We invite them to hoist their banners and claim they have protected the people. While they posture and the elders preen, the spy will move to the lower vents to put a second device in place and make the ‘cleansing’ fail on record.”
“And you will be waiting,” Rhea said.
“I will be everywhere,” Quenbi said. “Sensors, stunners, pressure bleeds, I can trigger from my sleeve. I will wear a veil tonight, and they will think it is for the smoke. It won’t be.”
Akono leaned forward, eyes bright. “Who takes him?”
“You,” Quenbi said. “When he runs, you cut the light around him. Box him with your blades. Do not kill him. If he has a tongue, he has the council’s secrets on it.”
Akono’s grin grew remorseless. “You do not have to tell me twice.”
Hasan’s gaze flicked to the floor as if he saw the map of tunnels under the map of tile. “And Elder Maaru?”
Quenbi’s jaw tightened. “He will be in the council’s west stand, preening. When the spy is secured, we bring him up the west stairs. In front of everyone. And I tell the council precisely what mixture was used to mimic our signature, and I show them the mark on Maaru’s palm where he pressed the device the first time he rehearsed for his sins.”
Hasan’s tattoos writhed. “You have seen it?”
Quenbi lifted her sleeve and revealed a series of tiny burns on the inside of her wrist. They were too neat for accident. “I tested the device on glass,” she said. “The pattern comes back on skin. It fades. He wore a glove at the ceremony two weeks ago in a room where no one else did.”
“Because of a bruise,” Rhea had murmured at the time to her aide, and then forgotten it because a woman in a yellow dress had asked about the price of grain, and Rhea had chosen grain over gloves. She filed it now, painfully, under Lessons.
“I will bring witnesses,” Rhea said. “Not elders. Bakers. Nurses. Teachers. Miners. They will fill the square and put their trust on the council steps where the council can trip on it.”
“And me?” Hasan asked.
Quenbi looked at him for a long time. “You bind him,” she said. “When Akono boxes the spy, you weave your ink around him and hold him like a child who will not stop kicking. And when we bring him up, you look your kin in the eye and decide whose blood you belong to.”
Hasan’s throat moved. The tattoos on his forearms flowed down to his knuckles and made a net there. “I already decided,” he said. “But I will say it in public, so the ink hears me.”
“And if the council stops us?” Akono asked, almost hopefully.
“Then,” Rhea said, “the city will not.”
Quenbi exhaled. “We do this,” she said, “and I do not become Eternal.”
Rhea went very still. “You might.”
“I don’t think so,” Quenbi said softly. “Not because I cannot. Because I should not. I am a blade and a scalpel. Tonight requires both. Tomorrow requires… hands.”
Rhea’s mouth quirked. “I have hands.”
“You have a heart that people follow without asking where it is going,” Quenbi said. “They will need that after this.”
“You say that like you have decided for me,” Rhea returned, not unkindly.
Quenbi’s laugh was small and tired. “No. I say it because I have decided for me.”
Akono leaned back, satisfied. “All right,” he said. “Let’s break a council.”
The cleansing ritual drew half of Ojii into the square and the other half to their balconies. The council filed into their tiers in robes that flowed like waterfalls and eyes that darted like minnows. Elder Maaru de Quun took his seat among them, bare hands on the rail, rings flashing. If his nostrils flared when he caught sight of Hasan standing with the candidates instead of in the shadows where the council had encouraged him to live, only one man noticed, and that man was Hasan.
Quenbi walked to the lip of the Ravine with a veiled headress of filigreed gold on her head and a coat that flared like storm clouds. “We cleanse tonight,” she said to the crowd, “not because the Ravine is unclean, but because the council is frightened and thinks that burning the wrong thing will make the right thing stop stinking.”
The crowd—bakers and nurses and teachers and miners—laughed the way people laugh when they have cried too much and need to remember their throats have other music.
Quenbi lifted her hand. The constructs of honey she had threaded through the lower vents on her way here breathed awake in the dark and waited for her touch to turn them from watchers to hands. Beneath the square, something moved that did not belong to the Ravine. Quenbi felt the movement in the hair at her nape.
“Now,” she whispered, and Akono was already gone.
To the human eye, the Third Division’s Admeri vanished and reappeared in the same breath. To Quenbi’s sensors, he was a line of fire threaded through a maze of cold pipes in patterns that should not be possible for a child or a man. He found the shadow at the seventh vent and cut a fence of light around it so quickly that the shadow did not realize it had been caged until it tried to step and burned.
The spy hissed and threw a palm of powder into the light. The fence went white and cracked. The spy moved like water around the crack.
Hasan’s ink surged in a snarl. Black lines leapt from his skin to the stone and then from the stone to the air, weaving a net that writhed to match the spy’s movement. The spy kicked, twisted; the ink swallowed the kick and tied the twist into itself.
The crowd above did not yet know why the hair on their arms rose. They felt the square hold its breath.
“Breathe,” Rhea said from the platform where she stood with a row of elders from the baker’s quarter—a woman scarred from an oven explosion years ago at measure nine, a man with flour on his cheeks like war paint. “We are safe.” And the way she said it made it true long enough for the council to look reckless when they glanced over their shoulders for exits.
Quenbi’s constructs reached through Akono’s fence and Hasan’s net and kissed the device the spy clutched. On Quenbi’s mark, the constructs weaved through the device, awakening its memories, and a smear of signatures bloomed in the air like a perverse flower.
“There,” Quenbi said into the council’s ears. “There is your ‘Eastern’ spice. There is our vein. And there is the hand that pressed them together first.”
She raised her veil and looked straight at Elder Maaru de Ibori. His hand twitched toward the rail. In the second before he pulled it back, the faintest crest of a pattern glowed on his palm, the pattern of a small, arrogant burn.
The crowd saw nothing. They saw Rhea lift her palm in a slow, calm signal. They saw Akono ascend the west stair with a foreigner in a net of living ink slung like a child between the arcs of his blades. They saw Hasan follow, his face empty and full. They saw Quenbi step to the top of the stair to meet them, her veil at her shoulders now like the shed skin of a snake who has decided it will be a thunderhead instead.
The council rose a little, then sat, because to rise would be to admit fear and to sit would be to betray it, and they had been doing both for so long that their bodies no longer knew which posture meant what.
“Elder Maaru,” Quenbi said pleasantly, “you dropped something.”
He held his palm out on instinct like a man who has been asked to show his ticket at the theater door. The pattern flashed again as if delighted to perform. The square made a sound as one body—the sound a city makes when it recognizes a lie in its own mouth.
Rhea did not look away from the people when the elder’s composure cracked. It mattered that she did not. She had learned long ago that people wanted their leaders to see the same thing they saw and name it without asking for a different word.
“Elder Maaru,” Quenbi continued, as if addressing a student who had done sloppy work on a problem a child could have solved more cleanly, “this is where you pressed the false catalyst into place when you rehearsed. You wore a glove at the ceremony because you were ashamed of your hand. We have all worn gloves in our lives. But not over this. The device is an amateur’s imitation of our signature. The East taught you how to break it. You taught yourself how to pretend that you hadn’t.”
“I did no such—” he began, and then Akono tilted his blade, and the trapped spy shrieked without language as the light shifted through a spectrum named in no book, and whatever courage Maaru had left ran down the inside of his sleeve and puddled invisible under his seat.
“Who paid you?” Hasan asked, and his voice was the only soft thing left on the steps.
Maaru looked at his nephew like a man looks at a child he has never learned the name of. “Do not take that tone with me,” he snapped, which is a thing men say when the truth behind it is too large to carry in their teeth.
“That tone,” Hasan said, and the tattoos on his wrists flared in a pattern none of them had seen before, “is the one our house used to use when we told the truth to power and were not ashamed.”
Quenbi’s constructs shimmered. The spy stilled as if someone had walked across his grave three times. “He will speak now,” Quenbi said. “He will say the name he was trained to forget. And then we will decide what to do with our mouths.”
The spy lifted his head and spat a string of syllables that belonged to the Eastern court that called itself Dawn. The square listened to the foreign shape of it fall and break on their stones.
“The Dawn Court,” Rhea repeated, not unkindly, and let the crowd say it back like a lesson they would need to know for the test that was not today but would come.
Quenbi turned back to Maaru. “Your name,” she said, in the tone one uses to remind people of who they were supposed to have been.
He did not give it. Instead, he lifted his chin toward the elder in the third row who had done nothing except watch and calculate since the first siren had sounded. That elder looked away first. The council shifted like a herd of animals who have realized the river they are in belongs to crocodiles.
“The council will—” Maaru began, and Rhea spoke over him with the gentlest voice in the city.
“The council will listen,” she said, and the square leaned forward because it was a soft command, and soft commands are the ones people want to obey. “The council will make the arrest publicly. The trial will be open. The names will be spoken in the largest room we have.” She paused. “The people will go home safely tonight. No one will run. If anyone runs, the Third Division will teach them that running is a poor way to pray.”
Akono did not smile this time. He did not have to. The glow from his eyes made the air around him shimmer like a warning.
“And you, Quenbi?” Rhea asked, without turning her head. “What will you do?”
“Finish the cleansing,” Quenbi said. “But this time, of the right thing.”
The square laughed again, the sound cracked and beautiful. Quenbi lifted her hand, and the constructs soothed the tensions in the Ravine back into their beds. The stone settled. The air loosened. People who had not realized they were holding their breath let it go and found it again in the next inhale. Somewhere in the crowd, a baby yelled because a mother squeezed him too hard with relief. The old gods in the Ravine rolled, sighed, and went back to their dreams.
The arrest did not go easily. Power rarely yields without breaking something it can name as an excuse. Maaru tried to wrap himself in the council’s robes and call it due process. He was surprised when the robes shrugged him off. The spy tried to make himself a stone to be thrown into a river. Hasan’s ink refused to be the river. Akono’s light refused to be the sky. Rhea’s voice refused to be drowned.
When it was done, and the square had emptied in that gentle, grateful chaos cities become when danger has been named and put in a box for a night, Quenbi walked the west stair alone. She did not go home. She went to her lab.
The apprentices had cleaned while she was gone. The shattered glass had been swept; the instruments had been set back to rights by hands that had learned to touch without breaking. Kudan had left a cup of honey-ginger tea on her table with a note in his handwriting so plain and earnest that it looked like a child’s: Proud of you even when I’m absent. — K.
Quenbi stood in the doorway for a long moment, then crossed the room and sat at her bench. The Ravine glowed through the glass like a lung lit from within. Her hands hovered over her tools and did not touch them, which was new.
“You left your coat on the railing,” Rhea said from the door, and Quenbi did not start, which told them both a great deal about what had changed in a day.
“It didn’t match my crown,” Quenbi said, dry. “And the crown doesn’t match my life.”
Rhea came in and sat without asking. She did that with a grace that did not require permission. Quenbi respected that. She did not like it when people asked to breathe.
“It was not the crown that kept the Ravine from blowing again,” Rhea said. “Or the council from pretending this was a storm and not a theft.” She tilted her head. “You did not have to share the plan.”
“I did,” Quenbi said. “I just had not yet learned the part of me that knew that.”
“Will you pursue the candidacy?” Rhea asked, soft as a cushion placed under a fall.
Quenbi looked at her hands, which were not shaking anymore. “No,” she said. “And yes. I will stand where I have been standing, and I will make it harder for the next saboteur to find a seam, and I will teach children to make better instruments than mine, and I will ruin the days of every gunkstain who thinks a title makes him a scientist.” She smiled, slow. “I will also show up when the people need a mouth that can make a council listen. But the sash that comes with the crown is cut wrong for my shoulders.”
Rhea’s smile rose and gentled. “You speak like you chose me.”
“I speak like I chose a city,” Quenbi said, and then, unwilling to let the moment sentimentalize itself, added, “and like I choose efficiency. You slow down for people. I speed up for problems. Between us, things might happen on time.”
Rhea laughed, and it was a quiet, exhausted, perfect thing. “We needed you today,” she said. “We will need you again tomorrow.”
“You will,” Quenbi agreed. “Because tomorrow the Dawn Court will wonder why their spy did not come home. And someone else will wonder what happens if you press a different pattern to the stone.”
Rhea sobered. “We will be ready.”
“Bring bread,” Quenbi said.
Rhea rose. At the door, she paused. “Your mother will ask you if you cried,” she said. “Mine will ask me if I ate. The answer to both should be yes.”
Quenbi made a face. “Do not mother me.”
“I will,” Rhea said, unoffended. “You were brave in front of a city. Be tender in front of someone who knows your name.”
When she left, the lab was very quiet. Quenbi took an instrument from a drawer and set it back. She touched the glass with her fingertips and felt the slow heartbeat of the Ravine answer. A few hours earlier, she had told herself she could not breathe. She inhaled now, deep and long, and the stone breathed with her. The old gods did not wake, because they trusted her to turn off the lights when everyone else went home.
Behind her, steps sounded. She did not look. “If you have come to tell me you are ashamed,” she said, “you may save your mouth, Hasan.”
Hasan stopped three paces into the room. He had put on a shirt. His tattoos lay quiet as if sleeping after a long day of work. His face had the hollow look of a man who has thrown a house off his back and is surprised to still be standing.
“I have come to tell you I am grateful,” he said. “To you. To Rhea. To Akono, though I am not inclined to say it where he can hear.”
Quenbi almost smiled. “He will hear regardless. His ego has excellent range.”
Hasan’s breath was a short, humorless laugh. “My father,” he said, and stopped as if there were a word after father he had forgotten how to form. He began again. “When I was five, he told me that ink obeys the will, not the man. He meant that a man who bends cannot command any magic worth keeping. I learned today that he was wrong. I bent and did not break. The ink listened anyway.”
Quenbi turned then. He looked younger without the armor of suspicion. He would never look young the way other men his age looked young. But he would not look old like his uncle, either.
“You did well,” she said simply. “You will do better tomorrow.”
Hasan nodded, once. “We will give our statements in the morning,” he said. “The council will try to cut them down into something delicate that will make them comfortable. Rhea says we will not let them.”
“Rhea is correct,” Quenbi said.
Hasan started to go, then hesitated. “When the ravine needs a hand not yours,” he said, “call me. The ink bends to my will because I bend it toward you.”
Quenbi raised a brow. “Is that loyalty or flattery?”
“Efficiency,” he said, a ghost of her smile in his voice, and left.
When the door had shut, Quenbi sat again and put her forehead on her forearms. She did not cry. She had cried earlier, in the second between the spy’s naming and the crowd’s exhale, and she had not liked the shape her face made. She did, however, rest, which was a thing she had once considered a hobby and now thought might be a profession.
Outside, the city slept with one eye open. On the far edge of infinium, the eastern wind carried a name to lips that would taste it again soon. Dawn Court. It sounded pretty until it burned.
Quenbi reached over and drew the coat she had left on the rail into her lap. She folded it. She set it aside. The crown she had despised all day lay on the bench like an instruction manual left under a table. She touched it once, then pushed it farther away.
The Ravine throbbed. The instruments hummed. The old gods slept. Quenbi smiled—small, true—and whispered to the stone, to the air, to the city, to herself:
“Tomorrow, then.”
And the stone answered, old and young, and did not argue.
