Seven Lives, One Enemy

Chapter Five: Filed and Forgotten

I lock the vault three times before I trust the latch.

Twice would be habit. Three times is because his voice is still in my head, low and infuriatingly kind, you're not as careful as you think you are, and I hate that it's his warning I hear instead of my own, hate it enough to test the door a fourth time just to prove neither of us gets to be right about me.

I wash the blood from my jaw in the staff room basin, watch the water go pink and then clear, and keep the bloodied cloth anyway, wringing it out and folding it small and shoving it into my pocket instead of the wash bin. I don't let myself examine that decision. I don't trust what I'd find if I did.

Dawn comes grey and indifferent through the high windows. I change my blouse, brush my hair forward to cover my collar, and by the time the day clerks file in I look, I hope, like a woman who slept badly and nothing worse.

The dawn audit starts at the seventh bell, and I sit through it with my pulse hammering so hard I'm certain the auditor across the table can hear it.

Sela Rook's file comes up fourth. I watch his hands this time instead of the table, because looking away has never once made anything less true, and I see the exact moment his thumb stops on the page.

"This ink's a different batch than the rest of the file," he says, not looking up, and my whole body goes cold and still. "Newer. See the shade?"

"I re-inked the ledger pen last week." The lie comes out steady, archival, the register I trust more than my own pulse right now. "Half the recent entries will show it. Check page six of the census log, same batch."

He doesn't check page six. He looks at me instead, a long, assessing look that lasts exactly as long as it takes my heart to slam four more times, and I hold his eyes and do not blink and do not let one muscle in my face confess anything at all.

"Recheck in one year," he says finally, and the stamp comes down, and the sound of it is the loudest thing I've heard all morning.

It should feel like winning. It's felt like winning every other time. Today it feels like I've handed someone a smaller danger to carry so I don't have to look directly at the one still sitting three floors down in a lead box with my own collarbone's mark etched into it.

The fragments don't wait for privacy anymore. A clerk laughs two tables over at lunch and for half a second it isn't her laugh at all, it's someone else's, warmer, and my spoon clatters against the bowl loud enough that the woman beside me glances over, and I have to force a smile and a mumbled apology and swallow the rest of my meal without tasting it, heart still racing from a memory that isn't mine.

By the afternoon bell I've caught myself scanning the courtyard four separate times for a scar through one eyebrow that has no business being there in daylight, in public, and I know that, I catalogue it as fact, and my eyes keep checking anyway, some animal part of me refusing to believe safety just because logic says so.

I tell myself, walking home at dusk with the folded cloth still in my pocket and the ghost of a burn still faint under my collar, that tomorrow this settles into something manageable.

I don't believe it even as I think it.

"Thessaly." Perpetua's voice finds me on the stairs before I've reached the door, and there's something in the way she says my name, careful, testing, that tells me she's already seen far more than I wanted her to.