Page 57

We are seated in the high commissary chamber of Blackthorn—a long, cold, expensively panelled room built to make people feel small, with a wall-mounted screen at its head on which the CEO’s face hovers, beamed in from wherever men like him keep themselves when the dirty work is being done.

Commissioner Pryce occupies the head of the table in the flesh, all silver hair and institutional disapproval. And I sit at the room’s center, flanked—arranged, really, like a triptych—by Silas on my left and Riot on my right.

The only person standing is Hale.

No one offered her a chair.

She knows precisely why no one offered her a chair, and the reason is the sort of thing she would never lower herself to name aloud, and the three of us are far too unbothered to do her the courtesy of naming it for her.

So she stands at the room’s edge with her arms crossed and her scentless calm fraying at the seams, and we let the elephant graze undisturbed.

“You’re requesting,” Pryce continues, reading from the document as though it personally offends him, “that this patient—Genevieve Celeste Valentine—be granted temporary clemency. That she be permitted back into the outside world, into a gated and controlled space, for the express purpose of determining whether some party is specifically targeting her, or is instead focused on dismantling the reputation of the Blackthorn Institute itself.” He lowers the page. “Have I understood the proposal?”

I nod, slow and unhurried, the picture of a reasonable man making a reasonable request.

“Do you have any conception,” Pryce says, “of how insanely preposterous that proposal sounds, coming from the only logical physician in the room—while he sits flanked by a convicted killer, and a…” He pauses, and I watch him reach for the word with the fastidious distaste of a man handling something he’d rather use tongs for. “A mortician.”

Silas brightens like a candle at a wake.

“The finest one available,” he says warmly, “which Blackthorn rather conspicuously requires, given there are presently three bodies in your morgue awaiting decoration.” He sighs, a small artist’s sigh of overwork. “Four, technically, though I’ll need to reassemble the one your cafeteria divided before I can do anything elegant with her. I do the stitching myself—it’s delicate work, the kind most won’t touch. There’s an additional fee. But for a valued institutional partner, I’m prepared to extend a discount.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose between two fingers and breathe, slowly, through the urge to lose what remains of my mind.

The room, I should note, smells like a war between three weather systems.

My own scent—old books, blood orange, the slow burn of amber—holds the center, where I keep everything. To my left, Silas pours off cold lilies and beeswax and graveyard cedar, the hush of a chapel after the mourners have gone. To my right, Riot smells of a building actively on fire, woodsmoke and gun-oil and warm iron, a scent that has made two of the standing guards relocate by half a meter without quite realizing they’ve done it.

We are not a comfortable trio to share an enclosed space with. We are, I have come to understand, considerably worse than the sum of our parts—and the men across this table have not yet done the arithmetic that would tell them how badly outmatched they are by people they believe they are interviewing.

It has been a long week.

The longest, by some measure, since I made the considered decision never to let anything matter to me again, a policy a woman in an orange jumpsuit has comprehensively repealed without consulting the board.

The single good thing—the only thing keeping me civil at this table—is that Vex’s condition has, as of this morning, been declared officially stable.

It was not stable for most of the week. She surfaced and submerged on a tide no one could chart, lucid one hour and lost the next, cycling from glassy-eyed hallucination into screaming fits violent enough to clear a ward.

The fits, mercifully, all aimed themselves at the same target—Riot, who weathered them with a patience I would not have credited him with, absorbing her thrashing and her nails and her shrieking accusations and emerging each time with negligible damage. Unless, by his own cheerful accounting, one counts the persistent erection.

I have declined to count it.

To be fair, I don’t want to think about it at all, with mixed success.

In the end the physicians induced a temporary coma, to grant her ravaged nervous system the stillness it needed to knit itself back together while the compound bled out of her. Half a dose of something that should have killed her outright, and didn’t, because a clumsy strangle interrupted the delivery and three men happened to be standing close enough to drag her back across the line.

She lies now in a guarded medical bay, sedated and breathing and watched around the clock—which is the entire reason for this meeting, this ultimatum, this absurd tribunal. Blackthorn cannot keep a patient under permanent armed guard indefinitely without admitting, on some record somewhere, that it has utterly failed to keep her safe. And Blackthorn would sooner do almost anything than admit a failure.

Riot has not left her side once in six days. They tried, the first morning, to walk him back to his chamber; it took four men and the threat of a needle to relocate him as far as the corridor, where he simply folded down against the wall outside her door and stayed until they surrendered and let him back in. He sits at this table now only because Silas swore to him, on something the two of them hold sacred, that he’d keep the vigil in his place for the duration of this meeting.

That is the entire leash on the most dangerous man in the building—a sleeping woman, and a promise about who watches her breathe.

Which is the lever.

I built the entire proposal around that single institutional terror, the way you build a trap around the one bait the animal cannot refuse.

I went to see her this morning, before this circus convened. I tell myself it was clinical—a director checking on a stabilizingpatient, perfectly defensible, the kind of visit that lives comfortably in the official notebook.

It was not clinical.