Mona’s fingers stopped just a little in front of the latch.
She glanced up to look at Darlus and Lisa, who had drifted back into the kitchen at the sound of the backyard door.
"You’re sure about this," Mona said in a tone that confirmed that it wasn’t a question.
Her eyes stayed on Morden.
"Whatever’s in here, it’s not going to un-happen once they’ve seen it too."
Morden looked at Darlus first; he had a smile on his face and steady arms crossed like he was waiting but not pushing.
Then Lisa, still half turned toward the door like she hadn’t fully committed to staying, her eyes darted around vigilantly.
He thought about the time in the Omnisphere when they had relied on each other, and right now they were even going to be living together.
’If I’m going to trust them with a roof, I can trust them with this.’
He gave a small nod.
"I’m sure."
Mona studied him a second longer, like she was checking for hesitation underneath the answer, then turned back to the box without another word.
Her fingers found the latch again, and she pulled, but to everyone’s surprise, nothing happened.
She frowned, adjusted her grip, and tried again, and she did it even harder, but there was still nothing.
"That’s strange," she murmured before turning the box over in her hands and inspecting the seams along every edge.
"It’s not stuck; if I were to guess, it would be sealed," she said slowly.
Morden felt something cold settle low in his stomach.
"Sealed? How?"
"That’s the question; you always ask questions," Mona said.
She then proceeded to ignore Morden, and her expression grew more serious than she was earlier.
Shadows peeled up from beneath her sleeves.
They moved almost like threads that were much thicker than normal, and they were also completely under control.
Morden had seen her ability once before, briefly, and then she had used it to kill a man directly in front of him but never in a kitchen with morning light cutting across the table like nothing dangerous was happening at all.
The tendrils found the seam of the box, no thicker than thread, slipping into whatever tiny gap existed between lid and frame.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the shadows tightened, and the latch didn’t just open; it burst with a sound sharp enough that Lisa flinched at the doorway, small pieces of old brass latching skittering across the table.
Mona exhaled slowly, the shadows retreating back beneath her sleeves like they’d never been there at all.
"That shouldn’t have taken effort," she said, and there was something in her voice Morden hadn’t heard from her before.
It was not quite unease, and it was much closer to genuine confusion, the kind she didn’t seem used to feeling.
"You’re saying it was a seal with Vital Energy," Morden said.
"I’m saying," Mona said while lifting the lid slowly now.
"That someone went out of their way to make sure this wasn’t opened casually."
The lid came free.
Inside sat a single brown journal with the leather worn soft at the corners; from the leather it was sure that it had been used really frequently.
Morden reached for it before he could think better of it, and this time, nothing or no one tried to stop him. He was eligible to be first.
He opened it slowly, and the first page held nothing but a name, a name written in handwriting he recognized instantly, the same looping style that used to sign birthday cards and grocery lists and the note she’d leave on the counter when she left early for work.
It was his mother’s handwriting.
He flipped through the pages, and what he saw weren’t names anymore; they were drawings.
Symbols, and there were at least a dozen of them, spread across the pages in careful, deliberate ink markings that Morden recognized immediately, because he’d seen versions of them before.
On Darlus’s forearm. On Lisa’s collarbone, half-hidden under her collar. On his own left arm, in the mirror, more times than he wanted to admit.
It was Bearer tattoos. But not really the typical ones.
Each one was subtly different from the versions Morden actually knew; there were small variations in the curl of a line and an extra stroke where there shouldn’t be one.
Darlus leaned over the table, and strangely he was quiet for once, as his eyes narrowed as he stared at the page Morden had stopped on.
"That’s not a standard marking," he said.
"Each one of these has something differentiating them from the standard bearer markings.
Lisa moved closer too, and her hands came up slowly, tracing the shape of one symbol in the air without touching the page, like she was comparing it to something only she remembered.
Mona said nothing for a long moment, staring down at the journal with an unreadable expression.
"These aren’t sloppy," she finally said.
"Whoever drew these knew exactly what bearer tattoos look like, and this change means something. This isn’t guesswork."
She looked up at Morden, and for the first time since he’d met her, there wasn’t a trace of her usual composed distance in her expression.
"Your mother wasn’t a normal person like you believed she was," Mona said quietly.
"She knew something about the Bearer world, and she was studying it, and she was doing it in detail most ordinary people would never have access to."
Morden’s fingers tightened on the edges of the journal, the paper suddenly feeling far heavier than it should have.
’Ordinary people don’t draw variations of markings they shouldn’t even know exist.’
He turned another page, and another, the same careful symbols repeating with small, deliberate differences every time, like his mother had been tracking something changing, something evolving, page after page after page.
None of them said a word for a long moment; the only sound in the kitchen was the soft rustle of paper as Morden kept turning pages he wasn’t sure he was ready to understand.
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