Crimson Veil

Chapter Nine — What the Dark Carries

✦ Eve's POV ✦

The stronghold had a particular quality after the evening bell — a settling, like a large animal breathing out. The soldiers on night rotation moved through the corridors with a different energy than the day shift, quieter, more contained, and the ward itself went through a nightly transformation from a place of active work to something closer to a vigil.

I stayed late more often than I needed to.

It wasn't insomnia, exactly. It was more that the nighttime ward was the version of the place I found easiest to be in — the lower noise, the reduced emotional register of people in sleep rather than waking, the chance to do the quieter administrative work that the busy daytime hours made difficult. I told myself this and it was true, and it was also not the complete truth, and I had gotten reasonably good at not examining the gap between those two things too closely.

On the night of the third week, I went to the outer wall.

It was a habit I had developed without meaning to — the eastern outer wall had a wide stone ledge at its base, accessible through a door off the secondary corridor, and the space beyond it was a narrow strip of ground between the wall and the building's back face. Not a garden. Not a designated anything. Just a strip of grey stone and frost-killed grass where the lamplight from the ward windows fell in pale rectangles and the air was cold enough to be clarifying.

I sat on the ledge with my knees drawn up and my coat pulled close and tried to be empty for a while.

The day had been difficult in a way that was hard to explain to someone who didn't carry what I carried. A soldier had come into the ward mid-afternoon in respiratory distress — a training injury that had developed into something more serious — and I had worked on him for two hours with Theron and Mira both present, and we had stabilized him, and he was going to be fine. But two hours of that level of concentration, with the proximity of his fear and pain and the particular quality of someone who genuinely didn't know if they were going to survive the next hour — it had left sediment behind, the way a flood left sediment when the water receded.

I was sitting with the sediment when I heard footsteps.

I didn't look up immediately. The footsteps had a familiar quality — a particular weight and economy that I had learned without trying to learn it, the way you learned the sounds of a place you spent enough time in.

Adam Voss came around the corner of the building and stopped.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything for a moment that stretched long enough to have a shape.

Then he crossed to the wall and sat down on the ledge perhaps four feet away from me, with his back against the stone and his forearms resting on his knees, and looked out at the dark beyond the wall.

He didn't ask what I was doing there. He didn't explain what he was doing there. He didn't offer any version of are you alright or I heard today was difficult or any of the other things that people said in situations like this, which would have required me to answer, which would have required me to locate words for something that didn't currently have any.

He just sat.

The cold settled around us. Somewhere beyond the wall an owl called once and went silent. The lamplight from the ward windows lay across the ground in pale gold strips.

I didn't look at him. He didn't look at me. We existed in the same small strip of cold air and that was all it was, and it was — without any logical justification that I could identify — exactly what I needed it to be.

I don't know how long we sat there. Long enough for the cold to work its way properly through my coat. Long enough for the sediment from the afternoon to settle into something I could carry rather than something that was carrying me.

When I finally stood, he stood too — not quickly, just the natural response of someone who had been still for a while and was now moving again.

"Thank you," I said, because it seemed necessary to say something, even though I wasn't sure thank you was quite right for sitting in silence next to someone.

He looked at me in the lamplight. "For what," he said. Also not quite a question.

I didn't have an answer that made sense. "Goodnight, Commander," I said instead.

"Goodnight, Ashcroft," he said.

I went back inside.

I lay in my bunk that night and stared at the ceiling and understood, with the clarity that came sometimes in the quiet, that I was in a significant amount of trouble.

Not the faction kind. Not the stolen artifact kind.

The other kind. The kind that arrived quietly, without announcement, and rearranged things.

I closed my eyes and told myself very firmly to go to sleep.

It took a while.