#maybepeace

"Is this fine? Is it something a children's librarian would wear?"

She turns, lifting the corners of her A-line skirt. The black matches her top, but where the top is plain, the skirt is patterned with cardinals and bluebells.

"Can you come with me? Maybe set yourself up in the next room, and if it looks like I'm about to black out or blow the whole interview, can you just. Like. Shoot me."

If you didn't want to come back, you shouldn't have.

She doesn't say it. Inside her, the hawk is quiet but restless, not understanding why it has to be secret from Fynn now when it never was before. On the outside, she still won't speak to him.

When her barn cat one evening brought home a rabbit kit still half-alive, and it died despite all Alice's efforts to nurse it to health, as she should have known it would—she should have known better than to care for it at all—even so, even knowing better than she did, her mother had said, It's hard, isn't it? To really look at something without loving it.

Alice keeps her eyes fixed stubbornly on her hands. Her nails are clean. The grey habit, likewise, is neat and drab. She doesn't feel like herself in it, nor with her curls cropped close to her head. (When it grows back, it won't be the same hair that her sisters' fingers ran through to braid it.) But she matches the chapel with its plain stonework, or rather, blends into it. A narrow window of stained glass casts the only sliver of color across her lap.

The bright line connects her to him. She can see his muddy boots on the floor, same as before. His hand on the bench beside her, just the back of it, scarred and familiar, and it makes her want to melt into his side. All her strength is going into wrapping her arms around her middle, holding herself upright, so that does not happen.

She never wants to see another sick or dying child again.

She learned her herbcraft for this, but she can tell by looking at the little girl that it won't be enough. She's been too sick for too long. Even though she's only, what, three or four years old? The age her sister was.

Alice tries to be careful. She learned something useful so that she could use it. But this refugee camp is the most starved and ragged Alice has visited since the end of the war, and the people here—they're not from Aquila. Maybe, maybe. They wouldn't see magic and think devil.

The daemon stirs. Wounded? Prey?

Young, she corrects. We protect our young. She knows it will listen to this, because when she was young, it protected her.

Its wings flutter inside her rib cage. Quickly, she asks the girl's mother to fetch water, and once she's stepped away—

Alice flexes her fingers. Something moves in her hands, like talons pushing out from under her nails. A gust of wind picks up under her hair. As if she were flying. A flash of yellow in her vision.

When the mother joins them again, Alice is smoothing back the little girl's hair with entirely human hands; the hectic red of her cheeks has faded to a more normal color. Her skin is already cooler. She tells the mother to give her water—don't be sparing, we brought enough—and moves on to the next person.

But with an instinct that goes beyond sight, the daemon says, Watched.

***

She tugs at Fynn's sleeve to get his attention, but a powerful sense of being fourteen again comes over her. She lets go abruptly.

"Do you see the man with the metal arm? Is he staring at me?"

"Parker says you practice, um, alien invasion... preparedness?"

It wasn't intended as a question, but Alice doesn't make it through entirely straight-faced. The combination of words usually conjures guys with bunkers full of canned meat and guns. A lot of more or less normal people say they believe in aliens, of course, but anyone she's met who takes the idea of invasion seriously has been a fear-mongering pundit or a total crackpot.

Anyone else, anyway.

As he sets the ceramic mug in front of her, she adds casually, "Would you want more practice?—Ohh. Nice latte art."

It starts with a vintage radio at a rummage sale. It is at least fifty years old, and Alice knows—and says—it doesn't work before he forks over the $10. But maybe it's no surprise that Bucky is determined to repair something broken.

For a week or so, it's a pet project. He wipes off dust and grime and buffs out marks. He straightens the antenna. He tightens screws. It's missing a dial; Alice hauls him to the library makerspace to 3d print a new one. The librarian, who falls on the younger side of millennial, looks just as confused by the radio as Alice is. He has to fiddle with the antenna some more.

It's nice to see him working on something for him, not just whatever the landlord hasn't bothered to get to for their neighbors up and down the complex.

And then they have a working radio. She hasn't heard one of those since she drove her dad's car to school.

On a clear evening, she follows him up to the roof. The moon hangs waning in a still-blue summer sky. The sofa looks a little less like he dragged it out of a dumpster, which he did, with the addition of fairy lights strung around the rooftop. She perches on the arm and swings her legs, watching him turn one silver knob and one two-toned purple-blue knob, courtesy of the Chicago Public Library system.

I'll never smile again Until I smile at you I'll never laugh again What good would it do

She's swaying with the beat, slow as it is, but it doesn't occur to her to take it seriously when he says, "Dance with me?"

Alice laughs. "Change the station and maybe I will."

It's just a subtle tightening of his face that tells her (her own eyes widening, smile dropping) that he actually meant it. Her hands go still mid-playing idly with the skirt of her dress, along the place where a seam skips over the sunflower print.

You know we couldn't have danced in the '40s, she doesn't say. She's never felt self-conscious before that she can't be nostalgic with him—she just takes him as he is, and doesn't worry about the rest. He'll tell her if it matters to who he wants to be.

Maybe this matters.

Because there's his face again. His irises appear very pale blue in the light. His eyes being so steady is nothing strange. He hasn't broken his staring habit yet, maybe never will. But he's not looking at the radio; he's looking at her.

And she doesn't believe it's just nostalgia. Not really.

"I guess I've got no beef with Sinatra."

She pushes herself off the arm of the sofa, shaking out the full-length skirt, then giving it an experimental swish. Glancing up at him then, her heart jumps into her throat.

Scarab is suspiciously silent about her pulse rabbiting off.

Within my heart I know I will never start To smile again Until I smile at you

Alice lifts her hands, and then flinches back. Like a hot stove, or that game where you try to pull your hands away before your partner slaps them—just as her fingertips touch his.

"I don't know what I'm doing."

She hasn't dragged her dead away from the unhallowed, unbeloved dead. It isn't a matter of strength; her youngest sister is still small enough to carry in her arms. Even smaller now. But her hands have changed. There's something wrong with them. Everything she's touched, she's mangled.

Everything has changed. There's something wrong with her.

When everyone else stopped moving, so did she. Stopped. The only difference between her and the bodies is that she kneels instead of lying flat. Blood dries stiff under her nails, up the arms she locks around herself, in the folds of her nightdress, on her face. And inside...

Summer crickets all around. Owls, if she listens. Barn cats prowling silent and unseen after mice in the tall meadow grass. She senses all of them. She hunts now, too.

Someone coming.

Her breathing quickens, but she doesn't move. She feels like she can't move. But a hand lands on her shoulder, and something wakes up in her.

In the small hours of morning, Alice opens the door as quietly as she can and slips back into the apartment. She's still dressed, but this isn't the walk of shame—lately she found the shame (or at least embarrassment) a bit much, to be honest, with Fynn right there on the couch to see, so she hasn't been doing that. As often. But there's something tentative in her face, which automatically offers a little smile when she sees that he's awake.

She lifts the box of bagels in her hand. In the absence of a coffee table, she sets it on the floor in front of the couch. It's not exactly a peace offering, because they haven't argued. But if she's going to be out so early, she might as well grab breakfast.

She pulls up her skirt as she sits so that she can tuck her legs under her. But instead of reaching for the bagels, she leans sideways on him, and says nothing for awhile.

"Hey, Fynn?" Her voice is feather-soft, as if she doesn't want to disturb him, even with her cheek and her curls smudged up against his shoulder.