Page 6 of Dark Mate

I look at her.

“Not bad. Wrong. Sweeter than it should be, or more bitter, or the floral note sits heavier. I started paying attention after I came back. The taste changes on the days the schedule changes—presentation days, visitor days. The days something happens.”

“Mora makes the tea.”

“Morabringsthe tea. It gets made in the kitchen annex. The locked kitchen annex, the one past the laundry the sisters call storage.” Neve straightens the crown. “You ever been in that room?”

“No.”

“Neither has anyone. Except the sisters.”

I sit with that. The fountain sounds different now, louder, or I’m just hearing it clearer, the splash of the rainwater on the basin carrying something I’ve never listened for. My tea this morning. The warmth settling the restlessness, the way it always settles, the way I’ve never once questioned. The cup with my name on the bottom.Ellie.Not sweet. Made. Made for one person and no one else.

“Neve.”

“Mm.”

“What do you want?”

She turns to me. It isn’t the question she expected. I can see it in the lift of her eyebrows, the gray eyes going a fraction wider. She opens her mouth. Closes it. The jasmine crown tilts. For a long moment there’s only the fountain, the leaves, a bird calling somewhere past the canopy line.

“I want to know what my own thoughts sound like,” she says. “Without the tea. Without the schedule. Without being told every single thing I feel is part of a holy plan that somebody else wrote down.”

The words drop into my chest like a stone into the fountain. I feel the ring of them go out. I open my mouth to answer and nothing comes, not nothing, the shape of something, the start of an answer the morning’s tea has rounded off so smooth I can’t get a grip on it.

I don’t have one. I don’t know what I want. The question sits in me with edges I can’t find, and the edges are sharp, and I can’t name a single one. When did I last want something that wasn’t handed to me first? When did I last reach for anything they hadn’t already set inside arm’s length?

I can’t remember. And the not-remembering is its own kind of answer.

“Neve—”

“Don’t go near the east wall at night.” She says it without changing her voice, without looking up, like it’s the same sentence. “The scratch is new. There’ve been others. Whatever’s making them is getting closer.”

I wait for her to say more. She lifts the crown off her head, sets it on the bench between us, and stands. The light crosses her face as she rises—gray eyes, sharp jaw, the jasmine browning against her dark hair. She looks older than twenty-four. Shelooks like someone who aged six months in a clearing and came back wearing the years like armor.

“I didn’t say be afraid,” she says. “I said don’t go near the east wall at night.”

She goes. The crown stays on the bench, the petals already browning, the stems curling in where the heat of her head warmed them. I sit there with the fountain, the olive trees, the soft light, all the edges I can’t name. The afternoon bell rings. I go to embroidery. I sit with Ireth and pull white thread through white linen while she hums beside me, the tune shapeless and sweet, and I watch her face for the thing Neve described—the difference between born quiet and made quiet.

I can’t tell. And that scares me more than the scratch did.

I don’t go near the east wall. Not that night.

But I lie awake a long time. The fountain’s louder than usual. The air through the bars carries something green and alive, pressing close. The scratch is out there on the stone, three floors down, raw and pale, and I lie under my silk coverlet with Mora’s tea sitting warm and smooth in my blood, and I think about Neve’s question.

What do you want?

The answer’s down there somewhere, under the smoothness. I can feel the shape of it, heavy and formless, the way you feel something big moving in dark water.

And from past the wall, low, so low I feel it more than hear it, a sound that isn’t the fountain, isn’t the wind, isn’t anything the Cage ever taught me to name.

3

ELLIE

Brother Cassian stands in a shaft of sunlight and tells us we’re blessed.

The lesson room’s on the second floor, south-facing, the warmest room in the place. High windows throw the light across the wooden floor in long warm rectangles, and the rectangles crawl as the lesson goes, sliding from the west wall toward our feet in slow gold inches. I’ve watched them reach me before. The warmth lands on my ankle first, then my knee, climbing my thigh as the hour goes by. The lesson is always exactly as long as the light takes to cross the room.