Page 13 of Dark Mate

I go to breakfast. I eat my porridge. The oats are warm, bland, familiar—the same porridge I’ve eaten every morning for thirteen years. Today it tastes like nothing. Not bad—just absent, like the canopy air burned out my tongue’s ability to care about oats. I drink my tea. The settling comes. The ache in my chest softens to a dull press I carry through the morning like a bruise.

The day goes by in the Cage’s usual rhythm—embroidery, lunch, theology, the afternoon rest hour—but the rhythm feels thinner today. The gaps between things feel wider. The Cage is the same. The three empty chairs at dinner are the only change you can see. Lissa’s chair. Hanne’s. Rem’s. The sisters have already cleared their settings. By morning their rooms will be ready for new arrivals.

Evening comes. The lanterns dim. Mora doesn’t come tonight, she’s in the preparation wing, seeing to the empty beds, the rooms Lissa and Hanne and Rem left behind. Their things are already gone. The Cage is efficient about absence. The rooms will be cleaned, re-dressed, ready by morning.

I lie in bed. The moonlight comes through the bars. The fountain runs. I close my eyes to sleep and find sleep won’t come, that the restlessness is louder than usual, that my skin is prickling with something the day’s tea should have settled and didn’t.

I skip the evening tea.

I didn’t decide to. The cup’s right there on my bedside table—Mora left it before she went to the wing, a little thermos with myname on the lid. I pick it up. Set it down. Pick it up again. Set it down.

The restlessness doesn’t smooth out. It grows. Not louder—sharper. The edges the morning tea rounded off are coming back, and the edges have texture, and the texture is something I’ve never once felt with my whole attention before.

I lie awake. The moon crosses my window. The fountain runs. The canopy breathes against the wall.

And under all of it, too low to hear, the vibration goes on. Patient. Closer.

6

ELLIE

Iwake up different.

Not in a big way. The room’s the same—pale stone, silk coverlet, the arched window with its pretty bars. The light comes through in the same slats. The fountain sounds the same. But the edges are back. The restlessness the tea settles every morning is running loose, and with no evening dose to hold it down through the night, it’s had hours to sharpen.

The silk on my arms. I can feel every thread of it. Not the soft general blur I’m used to—each strand on its own against my skin, the whole weave readable through my forearms. I push the coverlet back and my bare legs meet the air, and the air has a temperature now in a way it never used to. Not cold, exactly. Justthere.The air is touching me and I can feel it touching me, the warm pocket under the coverlet against the cooler room pressing on my calves, my ankles, the tops of my feet.

I sit up. My pulse is faster than usual. I can feel it in my wrists, in my throat, a beat I never notice because the tea keeps it somewhere under my attention. Without the evening dose it’s come up to the surface. My body’s announcing itself.

My room smells different. Or it smells the same and I’m smelling it different, the almond oil on my pillow, the faint mineral tang of the stone, the jasmine from the garden below. And under all of it, the green pressing smell of the canopy that lives in these walls whether the sisters admit it or not.

The smells have layers. They’ve always had layers. I just could never pull them apart before. The almond oil’s sweet and a little rancid at the edge, the oil going old. The stone smells like rain that dried a long time ago. The jasmine’s alive and the stone isn’t, and I can feel the difference in my nose, in the back of my throat, sharp enough that it’s almost too much.

My hands are shaking. Not from fear—from something waking up. Muscles held at half-attention for thirteen years, suddenly running at full. I hold them up in front of my face. The light catches the fine hairs on my forearms. I’ve never once seen them catch the light before. The tea smoothed that too, I guess—even the sight of my own skin.

The morning bell rings. I dress. The linen on my skin is an event, the cool slide of it over my shoulders, the seams pressing my collarbones, the way the skirt brushes my thighs when I move. I stop at the door with my hand on the latch and feel the iron under my fingers, cold, a little rough with age, and it hits me that I’ve touched this latch every morning for thirteen years and never once noticed what it felt like.

Everything’s louder. Not in volume. Inpresence.The world’s the same world it was yesterday. I’m the one who’s different.

I walk down the east corridor toward breakfast and I see the lock. A heavy iron bolt set in the door at the end of the hall, the one to the sisters’ quarters. I’ve passed it every day. Thousands of times. Today I see the weight of it, the newness of the metal next to the weathered oak, the keyhole set low enough you’d have to crouch to use it. Today the lock looks like a lock.

In the dining hall, Tessa’s at the far table on her own. Her attendant—Sister Vael, the narrow-faced one with the careful hands—stands three paces back, by the wall. Not sitting. Standing. Watching. I’ve seen attendants trail women before. I’ve seen it the way I see the bars on the windows, as part of the scenery, a feature of the place I never thought to read.

Today the three paces look like watching. Today the standing looks like guarding.

The sharpness is everywhere. Every surface, every sound, every face. It’s too much. I want the tea.

Mora comes with the tea.

She smiles. She sets the tray down. My cup with my name on the bottom. The warmth curls up off it in a thin line of steam that catches the window light. The floral scent reaches me and my body leans toward it—not a choice, an instinct. The way a plant turns to the sun. Thirteen years of this, every morning, the warmth and the settling and the smooth erasing of whatever woke me up too sharp.

“Good morning, love.”

I take the cup. The ceramic’s warm against my palms. I look at the surface of the tea—pale amber, clear, the smell rising. I bring it to my lips.

I stop.

Mora’s watching me. Not the soft watching of most mornings—a particular kind of attention, her eyes on my mouth, waiting for the swallow. It’s only there for a second. She smooths it away fast, swaps it back for the warm easy look she always wears. But I caught it. The attention was there. It was waiting for the moment the tea went down.