We'll Make The Universe Bigger

The summons found her like all of Ivo's calls. Quietly, through the wrong door. This time, at an hour when the body has finally surrendered to rest and resents being called back from it.

Lou was halfway through a stale roll in the Assistant Corps mess when Prior's aide appeared at her shoulder, and she knew before he even opened his mouth that her one free night had just been confiscated. People did not move that fast through the Center carrying good news. 

Good news could afford to stroll.

"He wants you in his study," the aide said. "Now."

She finished the roll first. A small rebellion. The only kind the chip in her neck still permitted her.

Prior Ivo Martin did not look up when she came in, and that was in itself a kind of courtesy. He had learned, somewhere in his ascent, that men in his position made a room flinch simply by lifting their eyes. But he disliked making rooms flinch. So he let her cross the study at her own pace while the cello on the gramophone wound down its slow, aching phrase, and only when the needle lifted did he set aside the file.

"Reed." His voice was quiet. It was always quiet; it never needed to be otherwise. "I have a tedious favor to ask, and the discourtesy to ask it at this hour."

"You've got the whole Corps for favors."

"I have the whole Corps for orders. This is a different animal." The faintest movement at the corner of his mouth — there and gone, so dry that a person not paying attention would have missed it entirely. "Inquisitor Joncière and his wife will attend a Council reception tonight. As you know, there were three threats against ranking Inquisitors this month. Two of them had teeth. I would prefer not to spend tomorrow drafting a eulogy for a man I dislike, which would oblige me to lie warmly and at length." A pause. "You would keep them alive. Until the door is locked behind them and the night has nothing left to offer anyone."

Lou’s lips thinned. "Stone's the one you'd send. An empath reads a crowd."

"Stone reads a crowd by bleeding into it. I want eyes tonight, not an open wound walking through a party." He let the silence sit for a moment, not rushing to fill it. He aimed for content to let the quiet do his work. Then, he went on more plainly: "And you already know how to stand in a room with Joncière without losing your nerve, which is a rarer skill than the Corps pretends. I'd sooner trust the asset he can't intimidate."

Lou spent a second silently thinking, until she crossed her arms. "He can't stand me."

"He cannot stand anyone. He merely fails to respect most of them. You, he respects and resents in roughly equal measure, which from Mark Joncière is nearly a marriage proposal." Now he looked at her, and the clinical surface thinned just enough to show the strategist underneath. "His wife will be there as well. Letitia. You won't have met her. She paints, she charms, she runs that household like a small, beautiful country. I have no specific reason to distrust her." A beat, weighted, the way his pauses always carried more than the words around them. "I have made it a habit not to distrust people for no reason. It has cost me, once or twice. Keep your eyes open in that house, Reed. Not for tonight's knife. For the shape of the place."

It was, she thought, the most honest thing a powerful man had ever said to her face. He did not dress it in rank. He did not make her grateful for it. He simply handed it over. Plain.

"And if I say no?" she said, testing. "If I'd rather have my night and let Joncière fend for himself."

Something almost like approval moved through him. "Then you have your night, and I find someone else, and nothing follows you for it. I'd think less of you for fearing the question than for answering it wrong." The dry flicker again. "You may quote me. No one will believe you."

She almost smiled, but didn't. On principle.

"Get them home," Ivo said, and lowered the needle back onto the vinyl. Lou knew better than anyone that this was the dismissal. "And watch your own back as closely as theirs. It is the one I'd miss."

She should have heard something in it. She had spent her life learning to obey the part of an order that kept her breathing and let the rest fall to the floor unheard. Tonight that skill would do her no good at all.

She had been bickering with Mark Joncière for two months across the Prior's security perimeter, and she still wasn't used to him.

He met her at the door of his apartment — the whole floor of the building, naturally, the Pures stacking their excess toward the sky as though height were a kind of virtue — and looked at her the way he looked at every psionic the Corps sent into his orbit: a useful tool of uncertain reliability that he had not personally requested, and could not yet send back.

"Reed." He said her name like he filed a report. "Of all the assets Martin could have spared."

"Missed you too, Joncière. Two whole days without you telling me my perimeter timings are sloppy. I was starting to heal."

"Your perimeter timings are sloppy. By four seconds, at the east gate, consistently." He turned into the apartment without inviting her to follow, which was its own kind of invitation. "Six meters tonight. You don't speak unless spoken to. I'd say it to anyone."

"You'd say it gentler to anyone. I bring out your best material."

The corner of his mouth did something. The architecture where a smile might one day be built, if the man ever broke ground. He didn't deny it, which from Mark Joncière was practically a concession written in blood.

The apartment was an obscenity, and she catalogued it as she has done with every room she entered. Exits. Sightlines. The weight of the objects she could throw without lifting a hand. A wall of glass held the whole burning sprawl of New Paris at arm's length, neon bleeding pink and violet across pale floors. A piano nobody touched. And the paintings — real ones, oils worth more than the entire Termitary block where she'd learned to walk — hung along the corridor like a family that had simply exhausted every other method of spending.

"You're scowling at the Rothko," a voice observed from the end of the hall.

Letitia Joncière came down the corridor in a long fall of dove-gray silk, and Lou's threat assessment recalibrated and came back uncertain, which never happened. The woman moved like water that had studied for a very long time how to find the lowest and most graceful path. 

Lou had been told, in the elevator of her own mind, to play the part. She tried a joke instead. "Don't worry, I'm not here to steal the art. Couldn't fit it down the Termitary stairwell."

It fell flat. Both of them. Mark's expression did not move and Letitia's polished smile did not falter and the silence afterward had a temperature to it, and Lou thought, right, these are not my people, and adjusted.

For some reason, this affected Lou more than it should.

"I'm scowling at the price," Lou said, trying to recover.

"Mm. So am I, most mornings." Letitia stopped at a careful distance, hands folded one over the other. "I was told we're to be guarded tonight, but never mentioned that our guardian would have opinions about the art."

"Opinions are free. It's the only thing in this room that is."

For half a second the elegant composure slipped into something warmer and far more dangerous. Amusement. Quick and unguarded but gone again before it could be held to account. Lou filed it away with the rest of the things she should not have let herself notice.

"Forgive me," Letitia said, rescaling the balance in the room similar to a hostess — smoothly, before the guest can feel the seam. "We're not often visited by anyone Ivo trusts. It puts Mark on edge, and Mark on edge puts the whole house there. You'll find we're warmer once the wine's been opened." Her gaze settled on Lou, courteous and unhurried and, underneath it, reading. "I'm Letitia. You're the one my husband complains about. He does it almost fondly, which I've never once heard him manage."

"That's the rumor going around. Lou Reed."

"I know. He's said it more this month than he's said my mother's name in a decade." A graceful little turn of the wrist that dismissed the observation even as she made it. "I paint. You'll be desperately bored by me within the hour. Most of Mark's colleagues are." She smiled, and it was lovely, and it gave away precisely nothing. "I think you'll be an interesting evening, Miss Reed."

Across the wide pale room, Mark was watching the two of them with an expression Lou could not read at all. And Mark, by now, after two months, was a man she could very nearly always read. That single fact unsettled her more than anything else in the whole gleaming obscene apartment. 

Keep your eyes open for the shape of the place, Ivo had said. Lou kept her coat on, and filed the watercolor paper away with the rest of the things she didn't yet understand.

The reception was as dangerous as a room full of smiling people always is, and nothing happened, which is the single most exhausting variety of danger there is.

Lou kept her six meters. She watched hands, inner seams of coats where a thin blade would like to ride, and the slow tidal currents of the crowd that formed, then broke, then re-formed around the powerful. She watched the Pure aristocracy of the Center drift past Mark Joncière trailing that particular deference people reserve for men who can end them with a signature and a held breath; little half-bows, eyes that slid respectfully down and away, laughter pitched a careful degree too warm. They smiled at him and they feared him and not one of them actually saw him, and while standing there at her professional distance, Lou found that she could not stop seeing him. It was becoming a problem. She catalogued it as one and kept watching anyway.

He hated all of it. She could read it in the rigid honesty of his shoulders, in the surgical economy with which he closed each conversation down before it could bloom into anything more. He performed nothing. There was no pleasure, no interest. Not even the small social lies that greased every other body in the room. When a perfumed deacon tried to flatter him over some recent and apparently admired sentencing, Mark flatly said, It was procedure, not artistry, and turned and walked away mid-compliment. Lou had to fold her startled laugh into the shape of a cough and swallow the whole thing down whole. And when she looked up from doing it, Mark was already looking back at her across the heads of the crowd, as if he had said it to her as well. As though in a hall packed wall to wall with people who would never in a thousand years get the joke, he had located the single person present who would, and had wanted, badly, to watch it land on her.

And it did land. Low and quiet, somewhere under the sternum, in the small locked place where she did not, as a rule, let things land.

And Letitia. She moved through the reception like a woman born to it, because she had been. A crystal glass held loose and forgotten in one hand, a precisely calibrated word for everyone who approached, that lovely closed-border smile fixed and flawless. But every so often, across the shifting heads of the crowd, her eyes would find Lou where she stood against the cold marble of the wall, and would settle, and hold. And there was nothing closed about that look at all. It was the look of a woman studying something she had already privately decided she wanted — to paint. Twice their eyes caught and held a beat past anything defensible, and the second time, it was Letitia who refused to look away first, who let the contact stretch and burn until Lou felt the heat climb the back of her neck again. This time it had nothing to do whatsoever with embarrassment, and they both knew it.

Lou understood somewhere around the slow poisoned middle of the second hour, in trouble of a kind that nothing she went through until now had ever once prepared her for. The husband across the room, making her laugh without moving his face, finding her in the crowd to share a joke no one else could hear. The wife drifting the room's far currents, watching her like a held and waiting breath. Two separate gravities, each with its own distinct and terrible pull, and Lou standing at the precise unlucky point in space where the two fields crossed and reinforced and would not let her go.

People fall into it, Ivo had told her — of the household — Keep your eyes open. Her eyes were wide open. Turns out, that was exactly the problem. She could see every inch of the trap and she could not, for the life of her, make her feet step back out of it.

Late, in the dead slack water of the evening, near the long table of barely touched wine, Mark came at last to rest against the wall beside her. Close. Closer than the job could possibly justify. Close enough to let it be known that it was a decision and not an accident. She was abruptly, acutely aware of the warmth of him radiating along her side, and the clean austere scent of him beneath the cold cathedral incense of the room.

"You're not bored," he said, low, pitched for her alone under the murmur of the crowd. "The Corps always glaze over at these things within the hour. Their eyes go flat. Yours haven't."

"I'm reading every person in this room for the one most likely to put a knife in you. Best party game anyone's ever handed me. Beats the canapés."

"And? Your assessment."

"Deacon by the east window's got something heavy riding in his left coat pocket, but it's just a flask, not a blade; he's just a drunk hiding it from his wife. The thin man near your wife keeps checking the main door every ninety seconds; he's waiting on someone who isn't going to come, probably a mistress who thought better of it. Nobody in this room actually wants you dead tonight." She tilted her head, not looking at him, every nerve she owned aware of him. "Well, they all want you dead, in theory. Comfortable abstract wanting. None of them want it enough to spoil a good evening over it."

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again his voice had dropped into a register she had never once heard come across a radio. "You read me like that, too. From the very first week. Across a checkpoint, half a city block of floodlit dark between us, and you'd know my mood before I had finished deciding I was in one." A pause. "I told myself at the time that it was unnerving. That I disliked it. I have, very recently, begun to suspect that I was lying to myself on both counts."

She turned her head then, and found him already turned toward her, already looking. She didn't have a word ready for that. Or she had several and discarded each one before it reached her mouth, because every one of them was a door she wasn't sure she was allowed to open in a hall full of deacons. 

He said seen, in that worn-through voice, standing close enough to be a scandal. But her first thought — her treacherous, unprofessional, deeply inconvenient first thought — was not of him. It was of his wife. Of the way Letitia had looked at her across the room all evening. I find that I have been attentive, he was saying, and Lou turned the sentence over and over in the dark of her own head, hunting it for the second meaning, and could not for the life of her decide whether she was inventing some warmth in it, or whether it had been set there on purpose.

"And what name would that be," she said at last, carefully, giving nothing away, testing the ice before she trusted her weight to it. "The right one. The one you reassigned it to."

He didn't answer right away. He only looked at her. It wasn't that flat, assessing look she'd survived for two months, this was a look that wanted something from her. Across the room, Lou felt rather than saw Letitia turn toward them. She could feel that frank artist's gaze, and Lou braced, out of long reflex, for the cold. For the particular cruelty of a powerful wife who has just watched her powerful husband lean too close to the help.

Instead, when she made herself meet Letitia's eyes across the whole length of the crowded room, the woman lifted her glass. A fraction of an inch. Toward them. Toward both of them. And she smiled. And there was nothing closed in it now, nothing careful or composed or held in reserve. Only something warm, certain and faintly, knowingly amused, the private smile of a woman watching a thing she has already decided to permit unfold at last into the open.

Lou's pulse did something complicated and entirely unprofessional, low in her throat.

Get them home, she reminded herself, sternly, uselessly. That's the whole of the job. That's all this is.

She did not, even then, with the warning still ringing in her own head, fully believe herself.

They went home near midnight, and her orders were as plain as they could be. See them locked safely in, confirm the perimeter, then leave. She fully intended to do exactly that. She had every intention in the entire world. She would think later, intentions lying somewhere she had no business lying are organic paper: fine, rare, and worth a very great deal. Good for absolutely nothing at all the moment the rain finally gets to them.

But the heavy door swept shut behind the three of them, and the apartment was suddenly quiet and gold-lit after the white glare and the cold incense of the reception. The lower city was glowing its endless colors through the great glass wall, and Letitia was already crossing toward the bar with unhurried proprietary grace. 

And Mark, who did not traffic in pleasantries and had not in the two solid months of acquaintance ever offered Lou a soft word that wasn't immediately armored in an insult, said it simply.

"Sit. Before you go." 

It came out rougher than an order ever should. It was as if a much longer sentence was supposed to come out afterwards. A sentence floating in his chest all night and could not, for his life, get the remainder of it past his teeth.

And Lou had spent her entire watchful life learning to tell an order from the soft thing hiding folded up inside it.

And she was tired. Bone-tired. And the couch ran deep and inviting as a riverbed. And here it was warm. And two people were looking at her as though she were something that had been quietly missing from the room for a long while.

So she sat.

"I don't drink on the job," she said, and took the heavy crystal glass Letitia pressed into her hand — the wine in it dark as old blood, thick with something fruited and strong — and she drank.

Letitia folded herself down onto the couch beside her. Deliberately, unmistakably close — Lou could catch the scent of her now, beneath the wine: turpentine and rose, paint and perfume, the working artist and the aristocrat's wife layered together in one warm breath. She did not speak right away, but turned her own glass slowly by its slender stem, watching the colors of the city smear across the glass, and when she finally did speak, her voice had shed the hostess entirely.

"I am going to say something now," she said, "and I would like the two of you to do me the very great kindness of letting me finish all of it before either of you ruins it with cleverness. You're each so dreadfully quick. It is exhausting to be near, and it is also, if I'm honest, fully half of why I have not been able to stop looking at her all evening." A breath, drawn and released. "I married a man who keeps a single locked room somewhere inside himself, and lets no living soul anywhere near the door of it. I made my peace with that arrangement years ago — truly, and without bitterness; we are fond, Mark and I, in the careful cool way that two people are fond who have long since forgotten how to be anything warmer to each other. I have my paintings. He has his work, and his protocol, and his terrible necessary duty. The house is very beautiful and it is very cold, and I had stopped, some long time ago, expecting either of those things to ever change."

Mark had gone utterly still by the glass wall, the neon moving over the dark planes of him. "Letitia."

"I'm not finished. And you knew perfectly well that I wasn't." Gentle and implacable. The velvet glove with nothing cruel in the hand inside it: no hidden blade, only a woman who had been so terribly careful for so terribly long, and who had decided to simply stop. 

Her eyes came to Lou and settled there. "And then he mentioned you. The second time, three days ago, when the detail roster came through his study and he read your name off it aloud without meaning to. And I watched the locked room open. By an inch. One single inch — over a sarcastic, stubborn, slum-born psionic who is not the least bit afraid of him." Her composed voice frayed, and for just a moment something raw showed plainly beneath all the years of careful polish. 

"I have been married to that locked door for eleven years, Lou Reed. I have knocked, and I have waited, and I have learned not to. I have never once seen it open. Not for me. Not for anyone." A pause. "And I find that I am not interested, not even a little, not even out of wounded pride, in resenting the thing that finally opened it. I find that I would so much rather come and stand in the warmth of the open door than go on guarding the cold of the closed one by myself for another decade."

The silence that came after had real and considerable weight to it. It pressed on the warm air of the room.

Lou looked at her — this composed, careful, achingly lovely woman, come undone at exactly one seam, just enough to be unbearably and suddenly real — and then she looked past her to Mark, who could not seem to lift his eyes up from the dark glass.

"That true?" she softly asked him. All the practiced banter gone clean out of it now.

 Mark Joncière, who used words as blunt instruments, who in his entire disciplined life had never once knowingly wasted a single one of them, turned at last from the window. And he did not reach for the mask. She watched him decide not to reach for it. She watched the deciding cost him something palpable. Watched the muscle work once in his jaw, and watched him pay the price anyway, fully, without flinching from the bill.

"You have been a thorn in my perimeter for two months," he said. "You are insubordinate. Your timings are four seconds slow at the east gate, every single night, and you have never once apologized for it. And you are the only person in all of New Paris who speaks to me as though I am a man, and not a sentence waiting to be read aloud over the strapped-down body of someone who can no longer run." 

His voice warmed through, right along the edge, the last of the clinical sand worn away to show the grain beneath. "I did not have a word for what that was. I assigned it to irritation, because that was the only drawer I owned that was anywhere near the right size to hold it. My wife — who is a lot more honest than I am, and very much more observant than either of us would prefer — has informed me, at some length, that I filed it wrong." He held her eyes across the small warm distance, and did not look away. "I have wanted you for some weeks now. I am reliably informed that I am permitted to say so out loud. So I am saying it. Badly, I have no doubt. I did warn you that I was a wall."

The thing in Lou's chest that she kept locked came loose all at once, the bolt sliding back without her permission. She set her heavy glass down very, very carefully on the marble of the low table, because her hands had abruptly decided to be unsteady, and she would be damned twice over before she let them shake around a full glass of red in front of these two.

"This," she said, and her voice was not nearly as flat as she wanted it to be, "is a spectacularly bad idea. You both know that. You're an Inquisitor. You" — to Letitia — "are the wife of an Inquisitor, with eleven years and a name and a lot to lose. And I am Corps property, with a chip in my neck, and a curfew and a barracks cot, and tomorrow morning there are going to be a hundred separate reasons that none of this can possibly have happened."

"Tomorrow," Letitia agreed, softly, "will be absolutely full of reasons. It always is. Reasons are the one thing this city manufactures in true abundance." She reached over, unhurried, and she tucked a stray strand of hair back behind Lou's ear — the gesture of a woman who has all the time in the world and won't waste any of it — and her manicured fingertip grazed the small puckered chip-scar at the side of Lou's throat.

Yet Lou did not flinch. She did not pull her hand back the way the Pures always, always did — impure, marked, other, not one of us, never one of us. Letitia's fingertips traced the rough edge of the old scar once with tenderness, as though she had spent the whole evening wanting to study at her leisure. 

And that was the precise moment Lou understood, with total bodily certainty, that she was not going to leave this apartment tonight.

 "But tonight is not tomorrow. Tonight, there are three people in a single warm room, who have spent far, far too long being careful, and exactly one beautifully bad idea sitting in the middle of us. And I have always found, in my experience, that the worst ideas keep the best ones warm through the night. Stay, Lou. Be reckless with us. Just the once. Let the house find out, after all these years, what it feels like to be warm."

Lou had not stood up from the couch. She noticed that fact, distantly, from somewhere outside herself. She had been entirely free to stand and leave from the very first minute she sat down, but her body had, on its own authority, declined to take the option.

She looked down at Letitia's hand, still resting feather-light against her throat. She looked up at Mark, who had crossed half the wide room toward her without her even marking the movement. Mark, who in two whole months had never once stepped inside arm's reach of her on purpose was now close enough that she could see his pulse going hard at the side of his jaw.

"My report," she said, weakly, the very last of her armor, "is going to be an absolute nightmare to write."

"I write the reports," Mark said. "I am exceptionally good at them." And the great cold Inquisitor of New Paris, the man who had filed her under irritation for two solid months for the simple reason that he had owned no other drawer the right size to hold her, closed the last of the distance between them, and kissed her. Neither careful, nor clinical. It was nothing that she could have read off of him across a floodlit checkpoint in the cold. 

And she stopped, for the first time in her entire watchful, calculating, exit-mapping life, paying the slightest attention to where the doors were.

What then passed between the three of them was unhurried, tender, and entirely their own thing.

Mark’s hand found Lou’s, their fingers interlacing with such heat that it sent a shiver racing up her frame. He kissed the way he argued. Without preamble or apology, every motion of him meant exactly what it was supposed to, and nothing held back in reverse. Underneath all that severity, Lou found a man who had not let himself want a single thing in years, and who had run out of reasons not to.

And Letitia did not watch from the cool edge of it like a treacherous, half-braced part of Lou had expected her to. She was woven all the way through it, completely present, with her clever well maintained hands and her low, warm voice at the shell of Lou’s ear.

They drew her down between them. The bedroom was a held breath of glass and white silk - like the rest of the apartment - and the city’s pink, violet, and deep electric blue poured in through its single great window wall, spilling and pooling across the sheets like watercolor bleeding into paper.

In the quiet afterglow, Lou's fingers brushed the bedside table, discovering an actual sheaf of rare organic paper—its fibrous texture unmistakable, forbidden outside elite circles. She traced the edge of the sheet hesitantly, the fibers cool and alive beneath her touch like no synthetic parchment could ever. Letitia stirred beside her, and pressed a lingering kiss to Lou's temple. "You're not just the Inquisitor's blade tonight," she murmured, voice husky with spent desire. "You're ours." Mark stepped in behind as his arm tightened around Lou's waist, his chest warm against her back, his breath stirring the fine hairs at her nape as he echoed the sentiment with quiet reverence, fingers splaying over the curve of her breast in a gesture more protective than possessive. 

Letitia drew Lou even closer, her dark hair spilling over bare shoulders. She shed the formal dress, revealing the elegant curve of her breasts and the slick heat already gathering between her thighs. Mark’s hands were gliding over Lou’s hips to unfasten her garments, exposing the taut lines of her form. They moved together onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, Letitia’s mouth claiming Lou’s in a deep kiss. Her fingers traced down to part the folds of her pussy, stroking the swollen clit with slow, insistent circles that drew soft gasps. Mark’s cock, now hard and throbbing, pressed against Lou, as he kissed the nape of her neck. His hand started guiding her own to wrap around his length, but Letitia quickly batted his hand away.

”Switch.” Letitia grinned, breaking the kiss and leaving Lou to catch her breath.

Letitia shifted with fluid grace, moving to press against Lou's back, her body molding close as her hands slid around to cup Lou's breasts. Mark eased forward to face her, his sharp features softened by the low light, his cock still brushing Lou’s thigh as he drew her into a deep kiss that tasted of shared heat and quiet longing. 

The paper remained on the table, its presence a quiet shadow that tempered the glow even as pleasure crested again, Lou arching between her lovers with a soft cry, their bodies locked in tenderness until release left them breathless and entwined. Mark's arm draped over her waist, Letitia's kisses lingering at her nape, yet the forbidden sheet's texture lingered in Lou's thoughts, a reminder that this sanctuary held its own veiled fractures amid New Paris's watchful fog.

Lou's lithe frame trembled between them, her cunt slick and aching under the dual press of their bodies; Mark's fingers parted her folds with tender precision, circling her swollen clit while Letitia's breath warmed her neck, one hand drifting down to guide Mark's length against Lou's entrance in a slow, mutual thrust that filled her with aching fullness.

She felt truly valued in that moment. Not as a tool, but as the woman whose gasps and shivers drew their reverent touches; Mark's hips rocking into her with measured depth, his hands framing her face as he whispered her name like a secret, Letitia's fingers joining his at her clit to heighten every sensation, the three of them moving in seamless rhythm. Lou's hands wandered freely, stroking Mark's chest and reaching back to clutch Letitia's thigh, her eyes half-lidded with the rush of connection that thawed years of isolation. Each shared moan and slick glide was affirming that she was wanted for her own desire, not her gifts. 

Lou lay between them in the soft wreck of the silk, the heat of them banked close on either side of her — Mark's heavy arm a slow certain weight across her waist, Letitia's slow even breath stirring the short hair at her shoulder — and finally remembered that she read every single room she entered for the fastest way back out of it. The world had gone quiet. Stood down.

"I have to go back," she said, at last, after a long and unmeasured while. She said it to the high dark ceiling. She did not move so much as a finger toward leaving. "Termitary curfew. The chip logs me through the gate by midnight, or it logs me as missing, and missing is a word that gets a psionic looked for in ways she doesn't come back from."

"Mm." Letitia's fingers were tracing slow idle shapes against the bare skin of her stomach. The absent, drifting way a brush moves across a page when the painter no longer focused on the painting and started thinking about something else entirely. "Or you stay. And Mark writes one of his beautiful, meticulous, utterly unimpeachable procedural notes. And a Corps asset is duly documented as having remained on protective detail at the Joncière residence overnight, exactly as the elevated threat assessment so clearly and so urgently required." The city lights caught and pooled in her dark eyes. "He is terribly, terribly good at paperwork, my husband. I do believe he will positively relish lying, for the first time in his life, in a genuinely warm cause."

"It is not lying," Mark said, low, into the back of her neck, and she felt the words travel through the whole length of her more than she heard them in the dark. "The threat assessment did require it. It is, in every particular, correct." A pause. And then, lower still, pitched for her and her alone — the radio-voice, and the checkpoint-voice, and underneath both of them, a third voice she had never once heard him use: "Stay. I have spent too long telling myself, every single night, that you were a complication I would be glad to finally be rid of. I would like, for one night, to stop being right about that."

"You're both completely ridiculous," Lou said, and was genuinely alarmed to discover that she meant it tenderly. "This is the single worst-defended safehouse in all of New Paris. Your assigned guard is hopelessly compromised."

"Comprehensively compromised," Letitia agreed, with open delight and a thread of real, unguarded laughter running bright through it now. "And I compromised her myself, I'll have you know. Personally. Over the wine. With a speech I had been quietly rehearsing in my own head from the precise moment the elevator doors slid open on her magnificent scowling face. You merely arrived at the end and finished the job, darling. You always were so much better at endings than you ever were at beginnings."

"Reed." Mark's arm tightened across her, drawing the whole improbable warm tangle of the three of them in closer against the white. "Stop looking for the exits. Just this night. The details are relieved."

Lou would turn over and over again in the long gray weeks that came after, back down in the Termitary, every single time the city above her lit itself violet through the smog over the slum roofs. And she ached, low, private and furious, for a warmth she had no right to and could not for the life of her stop wanting. The strange thing was that she did. She actually did. The girl with walls of stone now lays perfectly still in a Pure's enormous bed, between an Inquisitor she had known of nothing but insults and a woman she had known for the bare length of a single evening. Qnd she let herself — just this once — be somewhere she did not need to leave. Be still. Be rooted. Just for a season, her father might have said, in another life, in another city, to another girl. Just to see.

Across the cold, sleeping Center, he sat solitary in his lamplit study, bearing a city’s weight and a surplus of secrets. He would never ask where she had been; he, of all people, understood the bitter price of an hour spent as neither instrument nor property. He had told her to watch the house for its shape, to study that strange, deckled watercolor paper in the hall, the way it drank the light. One day, its meaning would emerge, a revelation she would desperately wish she had never been clever enough to decipher. But that was a grief for another time. 

Tomorrow was already burdened with its own reasons, and they, every last one, could wait until the light came.

Tonight the house was only warm. For once, she let it be warm, and asked it for nothing more.

The lamps had gone steady again in their sconces. Beyond the great glass wall, New Paris burned on through its thousand indifferent colors and knew nothing. Cared for nothing. For what had finally, after so long, come quietly unlocked in one warm apartment near the very top of the world.

Lou closed her eyes.

"One night."