“Fuck,” I whisper, wondering if I’m reading the signs wrong. Maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see. I flip through the calendar. Every two or three months, right on the 15th, there’s an entry with “D/O. MM.”
Why? When I lived there, people didn’t die more than once or twice a year. Has Mana-ma started making more disappear? Or is there something else the Hearth has that Ensi and the Ratel want? The hairs on my forearms stand up straight. I’m still missing something.
What?
How long has this been going on, whatever it is? At least ten years. That’s when Adam disappeared. I have a feeling it’s been longer.
I take a deep breath. Nazarin comes into the kitchen and I send everything away, hiding the scans deep within my implants again.
He nods at me in greeting and grabs the SynthGin. It’s early in the day.
“Did it go badly?”
He pours liquid into the glass, bringing over a second one for me. “No. I’ve been promoted. He’s going to Test me, make sure I’m trustworthy. It’ll be different to yours, as he’s not using me for lucid dreaming, but I imagine it’ll be along the same lines. I guess we’re celebrating that somehow things didn’t totally go to shit last night.”
“Did you know what was going to happen?” I ask him.
He takes a swig. “No. I knew Leo was going to try something, but I thought he was months away from actually doing it. I guess he didn’t trust me enough to include me in his plans.”
“If he had, would you have sided with him?” If he had, would the end result have been different?
“No. Too dangerous. If there’d been even a hint I was involved, I’d be as dead as the others.”
“Right.” I sip the SynthGin. “Did you know Tila is sleeping with Ensi?”
“She’s his canary?” he asks. “No. I most definitely did not know that.” His eyes ask the question I don’t answer.
I take another gulp. “What does that mean, to be his canary? Malka called me that, too.”
“Tila is—you are—his newest pet. His newest toy. He’ll play with you for a time, like a cat with a canary.”
“Then, what, he’ll eat me? Is that what he does with the others?”
“Sometimes. If they displease him. If not, he lets them fly away, and then finds another.”
“Right. He’s been with her before. Tila. I got the feeling it’d been more than once. He seemed to … care.”
Again, the question with his eyes. I sigh. “I didn’t sleep with him. I almost did but we were … interrupted by gunfire.”
“Right.” He takes another sip. “How did the Test go?”
“It was horrible,” I say. “If you’re going to be Tested, I shouldn’t tell you about it.”
If he knew it wasn’t real, it’d alter the readings to the electrodes. And, in any case, the Test for him could be completely different from mine.
“And if I fail, I’m stuck as a Knight or a Pawn for good.” Or worse. Nazarin’s heard of the odd Pawn or Knight disappearing after their Test.
We’re silent. I slosh more drink in the cup. I’m drinking too much. Before all this, I hardly ever touched the stuff. At least my liver will be safe. Whoo.
“So what does the SFPD want our next step to be?”
“I take the Test. We keep playing our roles. Kim’s been perfecting something she thinks can help us gather evidence.”
I let out a slow breath. “How soon do you think she’d be able to do this?”
Nazarin perks up. “Why?”
“Because there’s going to be a drop in a few days.” I project the scanned pages of Ensi’s notebook onto the wallscreen. He squints.
“I have no idea what any of this means.”
I walk him through what I found in the planner. He also has no idea what the link between the Hearth and the Ratel could be, beyond inheriting occasional men and women without identities that Ensi can brainwash into working for them.
“We still don’t definitively know if that’s what they did,” I say, thinking of Adam, the way he’d smile more on one side than the other. The way he loved to play with the younger children, and how he loved to go swimming in the lakes with the others, turning back to wave at us as we watched from the shore, unable to join him. He’d never harm another person.
Everyone has a darker side.
I still think there must be more to it than that. Adam was sixteen when he supposedly died. How could he change that completely? I suppose being torn from everything you’ve grown up with could do that. I remember how confused Tila and I felt. How it was like we were drifting, unanchored, in this strange new world we knew nothing about. Is that enough?
“Verve,” Nazarin says. “He’s rewriting personalities.”
Rewriting personalities. I still don’t know if I believe I changed Mia in any way in the Vervescape. Maybe it was only my words that got through to her, rather than a deeper sort of push. Imagine not remembering who you were. Becoming exactly what Ensi wanted you to be. A weapon. An assassin. A tool.
The only reason he didn’t do it to me in the Test is because it doesn’t work on lucid dreamers.
“You can’t do the Test,” I say.