Across the Palace, while Cassian and Rafael were tearing a desert apart, Cixi sat on the couch with her legs drawn up, the long afternoon light going gold across the floor.
She had given up waiting at the window. Cassian would come back when he came back, and her body had decided, somewhere in the last hour, that it would rather be horizontal about the whole thing. Her eyes drifted closed. She was almost under, in that warm sinking moment just before sleep, when a single thought reached up and yanked her back.
She had not witnessed a murder.
Her eyes snapped open.
All the sleep went out of them at once. She lay very still and turned it over, and the stillness only made her more awake, because the thing she had dreaded every evening for months, the thing that came for her like clockwork, simply had not come tonight. Or had it? Had she witnessed it and forgotten? She pressed at the edges of her own memory, searching for the cold, floating absence she always carried back with her in the morning, that sense of having been somewhere terrible. There was nothing there.
She sat up carefully, one hand under the belly, and made herself think.
There were only two answers. Either she had seen a death and her mind had wiped it clean, or her soul had never left her body at all. She tried hard to recall her soul lifting free the way it always did. She could not. No matter how she reached for it, the memory refused to be there, and a memory that refuses to be there is very different from a memory that has been taken away. She knew the second kind. This was the first.
And now that she was thinking properly, there had been another night like this. The night Cassian had stayed at her apartment. She had not remembered any death that night either. She had woken beside him whole and unhaunted, and she had been too distracted by the fact of him to notice what was missing.
So what did that mean?
The curse was simple, or it had always seemed simple. Every night at ten, her consciousness slipped its moorings and her soul left her body to stand witness over a killing somewhere in the world. It did not ask her permission. It did not care whether she wanted to see.
But that night with Cassian, at ten o’clock, she had not been unconscious. She had been very much awake, and very much occupied, and quite a lot of what she had been doing involved saying his name rather loudly into the dark.
A loophole.
The realisation went off in her mind like a string of firecrackers. The curse was not constant. It was not the fixed, unbreakable law she had spent months bowing her head to. It had gaps. It had a mind of its own, and it changed, shifting from one night to the next according to rules nobody had bothered to explain to her. What kind of freakish, half-built curse came with a loophole nobody mentioned?
Not that she was about to file a complaint about not remembering a murder.
She pressed her lips together and felt something close to a smile. If keeping Cassian near her was what kept the killings out of her head, then she would keep him near. She would spend every single night with him if that was the price of waking up without blood behind her eyes. There were worse ways to outrun a haunting.
And there was one thing she would admit, lying here in the quiet, that she had not let herself admit out loud.
The curse had changed her, and not only for the worse. Before it, she had been the kind of girl who apologised for taking up space, who swallowed insults at the counter and thanked people for stepping on her. Then she had started watching strangers die. She had stood over scene after scene and watched people beg, watched them plead and weep and promise anything, and watched the killer cut them down all the same. After enough of those nights, a hard, clean truth had settled in her. There was no profit in being gentle with someone who had no intention of being gentle back. So she had stopped. She had stopped shrinking, stopped excusing, stopped handing out kindness to people who only took it as weakness. She gave them back exactly what they gave her, now, no more and no less.
The curse had cursed her. It had also made her bold.
*
On the far side of the Palace, in the rose garden, Olga led her daughter away from the house to talk where no one could hear them.
"Stop this nonsense, Tatiana. Rafael is not good for you."
"Why do you keep changing your mind?" Tatiana folded her arms and would not look at her. Her blonde hair lifted on the warm breeze. "First, you push me toward him, and now that I’m ready, suddenly you’ve decided I shouldn’t. You should learn to stand by one decision for longer than a week."
"I understand that you’re angry with me. I have told you I made a mistake. I was blinded by your father’s words, Tina." Olga reached for her arm and stopped just short of taking it. "You should not marry him. I don’t trust him."
"But I trust him, Mother. He’ll give me everything he promised. We have a perfect arrangement."
Tatiana had no intention of listening, not to her mother and not to her father if he turned against the match, too. She was nineteen. She had every right to make her own choices, and if she wanted to sell her soul to the devil himself, that was her business. She was not backing out.
"You need to accept this, Mother. And honestly, I wish you would, because I’d like to do it with your blessing rather than without it. I also need to visit the college and sort out my admission. I’m going with Rafael."
"And what if he hurts you?" Olga searched her daughter’s face for the girl she remembered.
"Everyone hurts each other in a relationship. I’ve read about it." Tatiana said it with the flat certainty of someone quoting scripture. "You’re being far too paranoid. You need to relax."
"Tatiana." Olga’s voice caught. "How are you speaking to me?"
Because this was not how her daughter spoke. Not the girl she had raised in Russia, the one who used to tuck her cold hands into Olga’s sleeves and ask her opinion on everything. They had been here less than a week, and in that handful of days, something in Tatiana had turned over completely. "I should never have brought you to this place," Olga said quietly.
"Too late." Tatiana finally looked at her, and there was nothing soft in it. "I’m already here. I’m leaving now, and don’t bother trying to stop anything, because I am not a child anymore."
She turned and walked off through the roses to go and meet her future mother-in-law, leaving the last of her sentence hanging in the warm air behind her.
Olga stood where she was, her chest aching. She watched her daughter dismiss every fear she had laid bare and walk away from it without a backward glance, and she could not begin to understand how the girl had turned a full 180 degrees in under a week.
*
Cixi was still waiting for Cassian, still half-rehearsing how she would make him sit down and talk to her properly about the alien baby and the hundred other things he kept folding away behind that calm face of his, when the room changed.
A presence. She felt it before she could name it, the way you feel someone reading over your shoulder. The warmth went out of the air. The gold afternoon light still lay across the floor, but the heat behind it had drained, and the cold that replaced it settled over her skin and would not lift.
Cixi rose from the couch. Slowly, both hands bracing the belly, her eyes moving over the room.
"Is anyone there?"
Nothing answered her. The curtains hung still. The terrace doors were shut. The study stood dark and empty through its open frame. And yet the cold did not ease, and the certainty of being watched only pressed harder against the back of her neck.
Her gaze went to the terrace, and her body remembered before her mind caught up.
The push. The hands at her back. The rail rushing up and then falling away beneath her, the long sick drop, the ground turning over. She had been thrown from that terrace once, and her heart slammed into a panic now at the memory of it, fast and hard, every nerve in her telling her to get away from the open space and the high stone and whatever had just walked into her room without a face.
She did not wait to be brave about it.
She fumbled with her phone, found Cassian’s name, and called.
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