Iris had a system.
The system had evolved over the course of several months and involved tracking Aiden's schedule with the comprehensive accuracy of someone who had, over a long period, had very little else to attend to. She knew his class times, his work shifts, his library sessions, his late-night visits to the lake, his routes between buildings, and the specific quality of variation in his schedule that indicated something unusual was happening versus the regular variations that were part of the standard pattern.
Tonight's variation had been: he had gone to Serena Sterling's suite at eleven fifty-two and had not returned.
She was aware that she was tracking this information with the particular attention she reserved for things she was not entirely comfortable with herself about. She had been developing a vocabulary for her own emotional states — one of the projects she had undertaken in the months since Aiden had given her a reason to undertake projects — and the word she had arrived at for what she was doing at two in the morning, when she was aware that he had not returned from Serena Sterling's suite, was: jealous.
She did not consider herself a jealous person. She had not had enough proximity to the conditions of jealousy to have developed it as a pattern. But she was sufficiently honest with herself — she had been working on this, the honesty, another project — to recognize the feeling and name it accurately rather than finding a more comfortable frame.
She was jealous. She was also, beneath the jealousy, a little ashamed of it, because she understood the situation. She understood what the wraith was and what it did and why Serena Sterling needed what she needed. She had not been assigned a guardian role over Aiden's availability. She had no claim. She knew all of this.
She was jealous anyway.
This was, she had recently come to understand, a feature of being alive rather than a bug. The feature was called: caring about someone, and its side effects included: discomfort when that person's attention was elsewhere. She was alive, or trying to be, and caring about someone was a consequence she was apparently going to have to learn to carry without letting it become the thing she led with.
She arrived at Serena Sterling's suite at seven in the morning.
She came through the wall — the particular skill she had developed over a year of navigating architecture that was not designed for someone in her state. The suite was large by dormitory standards: a sitting room, a bedroom, a study. The grey November light was coming through the curtains in the sitting room and the suite had the particular morning quality of a space that had been occupied all night by people who had not quite been sleeping.
She assessed the configuration with the instant accuracy that her year of observation had given her.
Serena Sterling was asleep on the sofa, sideways, Silver hair fanned, her professional armor entirely absent. She looked younger asleep than awake — which was true of most people but was particularly striking with her, because her awake-face carried such a complete architecture of control that its absence revealed something almost shocking in its ordinariness.
Aiden was in the armchair by the window, awake, watching the light.
He looked up when she came through the wall. He always looked up when she came through walls — had, apparently, developed a sensitivity to her particular way of entering spaces, something she found unreasonably affecting given that she had been moving through walls for over a year with no one noticing.
His expression said: *I know.*
Hers said: *I know you know.*
They looked at each other across the sitting room of Serena Sterling's suite in the grey morning, and Iris took stock of the situation and made a decision about how she was going to handle it, which was: she was going to handle it badly and then feel guilty about it and then do better, because this was the approximate sequence she had been going through with most of her emotional responses since she had started having them again.
She looked around the room for something she could move.
This was not a frequent capability. Her ability to affect the physical world had improved since Aiden had fractured the Soul Eater, but it was still limited: she could manage approximately three to five deliberate physical interactions per day before the effort of it became too much. She had been rationing this capability carefully, using it for things that mattered.
This, she acknowledged to herself, did not meet the criterion of things that mattered.
She looked at it anyway.
There was a book on the study table — a heavy one, legal text, the kind with a cloth spine. It was near the edge of the table. She could manage this.
She concentrated. Directed the small force she had available at the corner of the book.
Nudge.
The book shifted two inches.
She looked at Aiden. He was watching her with an expression she recognized: the one that was not quite the precursor to a smile but was the precursor to the precursor — the very early stages of the neural sequence that would eventually result in him almost smiling.
Nudge.
The book moved to the edge.
His expression had completed the sequence to: definitely the precursor to something.
The book fell.
The sound it made hitting the floor was considerably louder than she had anticipated. Large books on hard floors, she noted for future reference, had significant acoustic impact. In the sitting room, Serena Sterling came awake with the speed of someone whose nervous system had been on alert all night and registered a loud sound as requiring immediate response.
She sat up and looked at the room with the sharp comprehensive look of a person who woke at full capacity. Looked at the book on the floor. Looked at Aiden in the armchair. Looked at the book again.
"What — " She stopped. Looked at the table, at the edge where the book had been. Looked at Aiden. "Did that fall?"
"Wind," Aiden said.
Iris looked at him with what she hoped conveyed: *you can do better than that.*
His expression conveyed: *you are the one who knocked the book over.*
Serena Sterling looked at the room with the expression of a very intelligent person who had just been given an explanation that did not survive contact with basic physics. The windows were closed. There was no wind. The book was large and had been on a flat surface away from the edge.
"The window is closed," she said.
"Draft," Aiden said.
Iris covered her face with her hands. Or would have, had her hands been solid enough to actually cover her face.
Serena looked at the room for another moment with the look of a person who had decided that some battles were not worth fighting at seven in the morning and that the correct response to a draft that knocked a large heavy book off a flat table was to let it go and move on with the day. "All right," she said. And began the remarkable process of becoming Serena Sterling again — the straightening, the smoothing, the reassembly of the architecture, accomplished in approximately thirty seconds.
Iris watched this process with the objectivity she tried to maintain about the other people in Aiden's orbit. She was working on objectivity. It was a project.
Objectively: Serena Sterling was formidable. Objectively: what had happened in this room last night — the anchor, the all-night stay, the grey morning — was not nothing. Objectively: Aiden had stayed because someone needed him to stay, which was a thing he did, which was part of who he was.
Objectively: she had knocked over a book out of jealousy, which was not her best moment.
She looked at Aiden. He was looking at Serena's resumed assembly of herself with the particular quality of attention he brought to things he found — she had been learning his responses, she was good at this — admirable. Not romantically. The admiration you had for a thing done well. For a kind of competence that was real.
"You stayed all night," Serena said. Not a question.
"Yes."
She paused. "The wraith —"
"Twice. Minor. You didn't need to know in the moment."
A silence. Then, without fanfare, without the quality of someone making a significant gesture: "Thank you."
He said: "You're welcome."
Iris heard the exchange and heard the quality of it — different from the deflection, different from the subject change. Received. Both of them receiving something.
She felt the jealousy shift.
Not disappear — she was honest enough to acknowledge it was still there. But it shifted into something more complex, which was: she understood what this was and it was not the thing she had been afraid it was at two in the morning. The thing at two in the morning had looked, in the dark, like something that excluded her. In the grey morning light it looked like what it was: a person who needed something and a person who provided it, and both of them learning what that meant, and none of it erasing what existed between Aiden and Iris at the lake, at the hospital, in the slow building of forty-one pages of conversation.
Different geometries. She was learning the geometry.
She moved to the window — not making herself known, just being near the light the way she had been near the light for a year, the way that the light was one of the things she had held onto.
Aiden turned slightly. Not toward Serena, who was gathering her things. Toward the window.
Toward her.
She blinked — their code, the three blinks, the signal that meant: *I'm here.*
He turned back to Serena before she could see him respond. But she had seen: the small nod, directed at the window, almost invisible.
*I know you're here.*
*I know.*
She stood in the morning light and held onto that, which was smaller than the things she had been holding onto for a year and larger than almost anything she had held.
And she thought, with the particular precision of someone who had been learning to be honest: *I'll do better next time.*
*The book was unworthy of me.*
You've reached the end of this chapter
Iris had a system.
The system had evolved over the course of several months and involved tracking Aiden's schedule with the comprehensive accuracy of someone who had, over a long period, had very little else to attend to. She knew his class times, his work shifts, his library sessions, his late-night visits to the lake, his routes between buildings, and the specific quality of variation in his schedule that indicated something unusual was happening versus the regular variations that were part of the standard pattern.
Tonight's variation had been: he had gone to Serena Sterling's suite at eleven fifty-two and had not returned.
She was aware that she was tracking this information with the particular attention she reserved for things she was not entirely comfortable with herself about. She had been developing a vocabulary for her own emotional states — one of the projects she had undertaken in the months since Aiden had given her a reason to undertake projects — and the word she had arrived at for what she was doing at two in the morning, when she was aware that he had not returned from Serena Sterling's suite, was: jealous.
She did not consider herself a jealous person. She had not had enough proximity to the conditions of jealousy to have developed it as a pattern. But she was sufficiently honest with herself — she had been working on this, the honesty, another project — to recognize the feeling and name it accurately rather than finding a more comfortable frame.
She was jealous. She was also, beneath the jealousy, a little ashamed of it, because she understood the situation. She understood what the wraith was and what it did and why Serena Sterling needed what she needed. She had not been assigned a guardian role over Aiden's availability. She had no claim. She knew all of this.
She was jealous anyway.
This was, she had recently come to understand, a feature of being alive rather than a bug. The feature was called: caring about someone, and its side effects included: discomfort when that person's attention was elsewhere. She was alive, or trying to be, and caring about someone was a consequence she was apparently going to have to learn to carry without letting it become the thing she led with.
She arrived at Serena Sterling's suite at seven in the morning.
She came through the wall — the particular skill she had developed over a year of navigating architecture that was not designed for someone in her state. The suite was large by dormitory standards: a sitting room, a bedroom, a study. The grey November light was coming through the curtains in the sitting room and the suite had the particular morning quality of a space that had been occupied all night by people who had not quite been sleeping.
She assessed the configuration with the instant accuracy that her year of observation had given her.
Serena Sterling was asleep on the sofa, sideways, Silver hair fanned, her professional armor entirely absent. She looked younger asleep than awake — which was true of most people but was particularly striking with her, because her awake-face carried such a complete architecture of control that its absence revealed something almost shocking in its ordinariness.
Aiden was in the armchair by the window, awake, watching the light.
He looked up when she came through the wall. He always looked up when she came through walls — had, apparently, developed a sensitivity to her particular way of entering spaces, something she found unreasonably affecting given that she had been moving through walls for over a year with no one noticing.
His expression said: *I know.*
Hers said: *I know you know.*
They looked at each other across the sitting room of Serena Sterling's suite in the grey morning, and Iris took stock of the situation and made a decision about how she was going to handle it, which was: she was going to handle it badly and then feel guilty about it and then do better, because this was the approximate sequence she had been going through with most of her emotional responses since she had started having them again.
She looked around the room for something she could move.
This was not a frequent capability. Her ability to affect the physical world had improved since Aiden had fractured the Soul Eater, but it was still limited: she could manage approximately three to five deliberate physical interactions per day before the effort of it became too much. She had been rationing this capability carefully, using it for things that mattered.
This, she acknowledged to herself, did not meet the criterion of things that mattered.
She looked at it anyway.
There was a book on the study table — a heavy one, legal text, the kind with a cloth spine. It was near the edge of the table. She could manage this.
She concentrated. Directed the small force she had available at the corner of the book.
Nudge.
The book shifted two inches.
She looked at Aiden. He was watching her with an expression she recognized: the one that was not quite the precursor to a smile but was the precursor to the precursor — the very early stages of the neural sequence that would eventually result in him almost smiling.
Nudge.
The book moved to the edge.
His expression had completed the sequence to: definitely the precursor to something.
The book fell.
The sound it made hitting the floor was considerably louder than she had anticipated. Large books on hard floors, she noted for future reference, had significant acoustic impact. In the sitting room, Serena Sterling came awake with the speed of someone whose nervous system had been on alert all night and registered a loud sound as requiring immediate response.
She sat up and looked at the room with the sharp comprehensive look of a person who woke at full capacity. Looked at the book on the floor. Looked at Aiden in the armchair. Looked at the book again.
"What — " She stopped. Looked at the table, at the edge where the book had been. Looked at Aiden. "Did that fall?"
"Wind," Aiden said.
Iris looked at him with what she hoped conveyed: *you can do better than that.*
His expression conveyed: *you are the one who knocked the book over.*
Serena Sterling looked at the room with the expression of a very intelligent person who had just been given an explanation that did not survive contact with basic physics. The windows were closed. There was no wind. The book was large and had been on a flat surface away from the edge.
"The window is closed," she said.
"Draft," Aiden said.
Iris covered her face with her hands. Or would have, had her hands been solid enough to actually cover her face.
Serena looked at the room for another moment with the look of a person who had decided that some battles were not worth fighting at seven in the morning and that the correct response to a draft that knocked a large heavy book off a flat table was to let it go and move on with the day. "All right," she said. And began the remarkable process of becoming Serena Sterling again — the straightening, the smoothing, the reassembly of the architecture, accomplished in approximately thirty seconds.
Iris watched this process with the objectivity she tried to maintain about the other people in Aiden's orbit. She was working on objectivity. It was a project.
Objectively: Serena Sterling was formidable. Objectively: what had happened in this room last night — the anchor, the all-night stay, the grey morning — was not nothing. Objectively: Aiden had stayed because someone needed him to stay, which was a thing he did, which was part of who he was.
Objectively: she had knocked over a book out of jealousy, which was not her best moment.
She looked at Aiden. He was looking at Serena's resumed assembly of herself with the particular quality of attention he brought to things he found — she had been learning his responses, she was good at this — admirable. Not romantically. The admiration you had for a thing done well. For a kind of competence that was real.
"You stayed all night," Serena said. Not a question.
"Yes."
She paused. "The wraith —"
"Twice. Minor. You didn't need to know in the moment."
A silence. Then, without fanfare, without the quality of someone making a significant gesture: "Thank you."
He said: "You're welcome."
Iris heard the exchange and heard the quality of it — different from the deflection, different from the subject change. Received. Both of them receiving something.
She felt the jealousy shift.
Not disappear — she was honest enough to acknowledge it was still there. But it shifted into something more complex, which was: she understood what this was and it was not the thing she had been afraid it was at two in the morning. The thing at two in the morning had looked, in the dark, like something that excluded her. In the grey morning light it looked like what it was: a person who needed something and a person who provided it, and both of them learning what that meant, and none of it erasing what existed between Aiden and Iris at the lake, at the hospital, in the slow building of forty-one pages of conversation.
Different geometries. She was learning the geometry.
She moved to the window — not making herself known, just being near the light the way she had been near the light for a year, the way that the light was one of the things she had held onto.
Aiden turned slightly. Not toward Serena, who was gathering her things. Toward the window.
Toward her.
She blinked — their code, the three blinks, the signal that meant: *I'm here.*
He turned back to Serena before she could see him respond. But she had seen: the small nod, directed at the window, almost invisible.
*I know you're here.*
*I know.*
She stood in the morning light and held onto that, which was smaller than the things she had been holding onto for a year and larger than almost anything she had held.
And she thought, with the particular precision of someone who had been learning to be honest: *I'll do better next time.*
*The book was unworthy of me.*
You've reached the end of this chapter