“As Justice, she’s pledged to support Kos; as Seril, she’s independent. And since the Blacksuit is a repurposed temple contract, you’re technically her priestess. You said you seized this boat—”
“Ship.”
“Ship, you seized it with other Blacksuits?”
“And with Raz.” She made a face when she said his name.
“Something wrong?”
“Don’t start.”
“Fine,” she said. Cold bodies lay behind the closed door. “So, you and Raz. Anyone else?”
“Aev.”
“Good. We can claim Seril, rather than Kos, seized the boat. Ship. Seril died—at least, we all thought she did—before they started building idols on Kavekana, so she’s never signed a full-faith-and-credit agreement with them. That should work.”
“So Seril gets the ship.”
“In a way, the timing’s perfect. Yesterday I would have said no, because this would tip off the world that Seril was still alive. But we’re announcing her survival in an interview tonight. I can set up the triggers in advance. When we’re ready, you and Raz sign the paper and wake these people up, giving us more evidence Seril’s separate from Kos—because if she was not, we couldn’t break this circle.” She rifled through her purse. Vials, vials, astrolabe, sextant, compass, paring knife, rabbit’s foot, black bag, silver nails, more vials. “Shit. Do you have any cinnabar?”
“I’ll send someone,” Cat said.
“We need the good stuff. There’s a guy on Twenty-third and Vine—”
“I’ll send someone.”
“And I’ll get to work.”
25
Matt woke at quarter to three as usual, and found Claire sleeping. He lit the stove with his morning prayers, made coffee, and pondered eggs. The coffee smell woke her, and she entered the kitchen wearing Donna’s robe belted tight around her waist and closed up to her throat. Couch cushions left a deep crease down her cheek.
“Coffee?” she asked before he could offer. Her voice was a crackle of dead leaves. He poured from the percolator and she drank as if racing to reach the bottom. “Thank you,” she said when she finished, and he poured more. The coffee filled in the cracks of her voice.
“Do you like eggs?”
“Every way but boiled.”
He’d planned to take a few hard-boiled from the bowl in the refrigerator, but she was a guest. “Cheese?”
“Yes.” She poured herself more coffee. Emptied the percolator halfway through the cup. “I’m sorry. I didn’t ask if you wanted—”
“I’ll make more.” He was not whispering, but he talked low. “I don’t have company in the mornings.”
“I’ll do the coffee. You make eggs.”
He grated a handful of sharp cheese, heated oil, cracked the eggs into a bowl, did his best to ignore Claire moving through the kitchen. Her footsteps weren’t Donna’s, and he hadn’t realized how unused he was to anyone else’s presence here. “Coffee’s in the cabinet upper left of the sink.” Outside the sky was still black, and streetlights burned. Scramble, scramble.
“You buy it ground?” As if he’d confessed to killing children.
“The store grinds it for the percolator.”
She kept quiet, leaving him space to ponder the wrongness of his opinion. She dumped grounds into the sink, which made him wince—they didn’t have a disposal. He remembered yesterday’s sharp-edged conversation and compared it to whatever was happening this morning, so early that Donna still called it night. There was dew on the window. The eggs set; he tossed in cheese, and didn’t correct her about the grounds in the sink.
She watched the coffee as if it were the spring’s first flower opening from a bud. Snapped off the burner, poured fast. When he drank, the flavor opened and kept opening into the back of his throat.
“Good eggs,” she said around a mouthful.
“What did you do to the coffee?”
“If you overboil it, there’s too much acid,” she said. “The taste’s weaker than it should be but that’s what you get using ground beans. I added cinnamon, but it’s not the same.” She shoveled the remaining eggs into her mouth, swallowed hard, then added coffee. “Good, though.”
“You’ll have to show me.”
“It’s easy.”
Dishes in the sink. He grabbed his jacket. By the time he returned, he found she’d washed the dishes, racked them to dry, and scooped the grounds out of the sink.
He stabled the wagon in a garage three blocks over. The morning’s chill fingers ignored his jacket, shirt, and skin, shoved right into him to grab handfuls of viscera. Claire kept her chin down. Theirs was the first cart to leave the garage; the golem plodded forward on four legs. They descended the garage ramp to the street and picked up speed as they drove west through drifting mist beneath a sky still hung with stars.