VESPER’S FEAR

Day 66 of 100

She had felt her drown.

That was the thing she could not put down. Four nights, and she carried it still in her lungs like a swallowed stone. She had been standing in the Great Hall in her ruby satin, with the black pendant hot against her throat and a hundred faces swinging toward her in a roar of voices, when the thread in her breast had gone suddenly and violently slack. It had not snapped. It had fallen, like a rope dropped down a well. And then the cold had come, and the dark, a vast black rushing weight that pressed on her ribs and filled her mouth; and she had put her hands to her own throat in front of the whole Academy and gone down on her knees on the wax, choking.

Josie had caught her. Josie, who had thrown a punch-bowl at a Bureau porter not a minute before, had caught her under the arms and said "Mara? Mara!" in a voice cracking with terror. And Vesper had lain across her knees and coughed up nothing, nothing at all, a taste of lake-water that was not there, and thought, with perfect clarity: I have killed her.

I have killed her, and I am going to die of it.

For a long, bright, terrible quarter of an hour she had waited to go out.

Then the thread had tightened.

It had come back in her breast like a heartbeat, a faint, slow, stubborn tug from somewhere far off in the dark; and she had lain on the floor of the Great Hall, among the broken lanterns and the spilled punch, and wept with relief. And hated herself for it. And wept again.

She's alive.

She had said it over and over in her head for four days, sitting in the cracked mirror's light, with the black pendant in the drawer. She's alive. She's alive.

It was not the same as I'm glad.

But it was very near.

…

She found the paper on the fifth night.

She had not been looking for it. That was what she told herself afterward. She had been looking for Section Twelve.

The Director had promised it in writing. At your convenience, he had said. Before the Gala. And the Gala was past, and the Doppel had been unmasked, and the clerk had vanished into the lake; and the Director had gone about the Academy in his silver coat with a face of mild, grieved dignity, saying nothing to anyone, least of all to Miss Ashgrove. She had sent a note. She'd had no answer. She had gone to the Dean's study twice, and been told by a stone-faced porter that the Director was engaged.

So at midnight she put on a dark cloak, and took off her shoes, and went to look.

It was not difficult. The Faculty Hall had been given up to the Bureau, but the Bureau was thin on the ground; most of the Wardens had gone, or been turned out. The porter at the door was asleep. The corridor was dark. She went down it in her stockinged feet, with her heart beating like a little hammer, past the portraits of the dead Chancellors, to the door of the Dean's study.

It was not locked.

She stood on the threshold and listened to the long silence of the room.

Be quick, said a voice in her head. Be quick, and be brave, and take what is yours.

She went in.

…

The desk was a wreck of papers.

She had expected order. The Director was a precise man. But the drawers had been ransacked, and the contents spread in drifts over the blotter, as if by a man who has been searching hastily for a thing he cannot find. Dispatches. Telegrams. A tray of cold tea. A map of the Academy grounds with the chapel ringed in red.

She bent over it by the light of a match.

Section Twelve. She turned the papers. A commission. A circular. A bound copy of the Act itself, in red cloth, with a ribbon marking a place. She opened it at the ribbon.

An Act to provide for the Regulation of Persons of Doubled Aspect, and for other Purposes.

She turned to the contents.

Section One. Definitions.

Section Two. The Duty to Report.

Section Three. Examination.

Section Four. Custody.

Section Five. The Vault.

Section Six. The Hundred Days.

Section Seven. Appeals.

Section Eight. Penalties.

Section Nine. Jurisdiction of Wardens.

Section Ten. Costs.

Section Eleven. Repeal.

She read it twice.

She counted. She ran her finger down the list, and counted again, as Mara would have done, with her lips moving. And when she had finished she stood quite still in the dark, with the match burning down toward her fingers, and a cold went through her that was nothing to do with the room.

There was no Section Twelve.

The Act had eleven sections. It had always had eleven. It ended with Repeal, and a line of printer's flowers.

A clause I framed myself, he had said. It permits the Director, in cases of extraordinary merit, to grant a surviving Doppel the standing of the Original.

In writing. At your convenience.

The match burned her. She dropped it, and ground it out on the floor, and stood in the dark with her thumb in her mouth.

He made it up, she thought.

He sat in a chair, and poured me wine, and made it up on the spot. Because I would not have known. Because I am a creature of the Act, who has never read it. Because it was a name, and I wanted a name, and he knew.

She laughed. It was a small sick sound in the empty room.

Idiot.

You fool. You absolute fool.

…

The other paper lay under the map.

She almost didn't see it. It was a single sheet, folded in three, and thrust half under the blotter, as though by a man in a hurry. It had the Bureau's seal in the corner and a date: the twenty-second of May. Four days ago. It was in the Director's own hand, the sloped, elegant, rather beautiful copperplate she had seen on the commission. It was headed: Order of Procedure. Hundredth Night.

She unfolded it.

I. Preliminaries.

The Subjects (A, the Original; B, the Doppel) to be brought to the Soul Sanctum beneath the Chapel by the evening of 29 June. The Mirror to be installed in the Sanctum on the 27th. Wardens to be dismissed from the precinct.

II. The Erasure.

At the first contact, the Mirror will draw Subject A (the weaker). At the moment of totality, the Rite will draw Subject B. The Subjects, being of one soul, will resonate. Their light will be conducted by the iron frame to the Reservoir at Blackfrost, by means of the new-laid cable, and the discharge will be complete in one hundred and twenty seconds.

The Erasure takes the whole of the Subjects. Body, name, record, memory. No remains.

III. Aftermath.

The Director will report that the Doppel was identified and the Act was fulfilled. There will be no Original to claim her. The Academy, being without a Mara Ashgrove, will adjust. The Dean will be informed that she left the Academy by night. No inquiry will be made.

She stopped reading.

She read the last line again.

The Subjects, being of one soul.

Both drawn. Body, name, record, memory.

No remains.

There was no promise. There was no Section Twelve. There was not a line in the paper about a Doppel who would be kept. B was a Subject. B was a source. B would be drawn at the hour of totality, in the dark, and conducted to Blackfrost along a new-laid cable, and be done in a hundred and twenty seconds.

No remains.

She sat down on the floor.

She did not mean to. Her knees simply went. She sat with her back against the leg of the Director's desk and the paper in her lap, in the dark, and put her fist against her mouth.

…

She did not remember leaving the study.

She was in the corridor, and then in the stair, and then she was going down. She did not know why. Her feet knew. They carried her round and round, down the worn stone steps into the cellar of the Faculty Hall, where the air was cold and smelled of straw, and a single gas jet burned in a wall-bracket over a heap of packing crates.

The Mirror stood against the far wall.

They had unpacked it fully. It stood on a low iron platform, seven feet tall, dull black, in its frame of etched iron; and it gave back nothing. The gas-light fell on it and was swallowed. There was a smell around it of cold metal, and ozone, and something sweetish and faint, like the smell of a room where someone has been ill for a long time.

She went toward it.

She did not decide to. She walked across the flags with her arms hanging, like a sleeper, and stopped an arm's length from the stone.

It will draw the weaker.

It will draw her.

She raised her eyes to its surface.

At first she saw nothing. A black, polished, bottomless nothing, like a night sky with no stars. Then, very faintly, something stirred. A paleness. A shape. A woman's face, small and white, floating at the center of the dark; with long hair, and wide eyes, and a mouth that trembled.

It was her own.

It was Mara's, too.

She could not tell which. The face in the stone was neither. It was a face half-drawn, half-wakened, a white blur with two eyes in it, gazing out at her with an expression of unbearable weariness.

Who are you? thought Vesper.

The face did not answer. But as she looked, its edges softened and ran. The black stone darkened, then brightened, as water brightens when a cloud passes; and the face dissolved, and in its place there came, slowly, like a picture surfacing through fog, a scene.

…

A dock.

It was dusk. The lake lay gray. And in the middle of the light, a boy knelt on the boards, with his back to her, in a rough shirt; and in his hands, held out before him like something holy, was a blaze of blue-silver fire.

It was torn.

She knew it. She had seen it before, in Mara's memory, a hundred times, from outside. But now she saw it from within. She was looking up at him, as one looks up from the floor of a well: a great, dim, blurred shape against the sky. She was very small. She had no body. She was only a thing in a pair of hands, an ache, a flicker, a half-formed wish.

She was the lifted grief.

And she was being held.

It was like nothing she had known. It came to her through the stone, across ten years, with a force that made her gasp: the warmth of those hands. The tremor of them. They were closed round her as round a bird fallen from a nest, cupped, careful, shaking. A tear fell on her. Another. She felt it as a warm, wet, shining drop, running through her light like a thread of fire.

"I'm sorry," said the boy.

His voice was cracked and hoarse and very young. He was bent over her, so close that his forehead nearly touched the flame. His breath stirred it.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it. Please, please don't go out."

She had not known she could hear.

"I'll keep you safe," he whispered. "I don't know how. I don't know what you are. But I won't let you go. I swear it. I swear it on my mother's grave. You're hers, you're a part of her, and I'll find a way to give you back. Just— just stay."

He bent his head. His lips touched the fire.

It was a kiss. It was the gentlest thing she had ever felt.

And then the hands opened, and the light went up from them in a long soft arc like a thrown ribbon, over the water, over the pines; and the dark closed round her, and she was falling, falling into the Stone.

…

She was on her knees on the cellar floor.

She did not know how she had come there. Her hands were flat on the cold flags. Her face was wet. She was crying, great, silent, helpless tears, with her mouth open and no sound coming, as a child cries that has been shut in a cupboard.

I was held.

I was held. He held me.

I told her that no one had ever held me. I told her to her face. I stood in a clock tower and wept it, and it was a lie. It was the one thing I truly was sure of. And he had my whole self in his two hands, and wept on me, and said—

I'll keep you safe.

Just stay.

She pressed her palms to her eyes.

It was Rooke. It was the Captain. It was a boy of nineteen, with a lock of black hair across his face and a hoarse voice and a dead father on a keg; and he had loved her. He had loved her before she had a name. He had loved her as a ruined, bleeding, half-wished thing in a ball of flame, and had sworn on his mother's grave to give her back.

And he had.

He had put her in the dark of the Stone, and there she had lain for ten years; and when she came out, he had been standing at the foot of the dais with the eyes of a man who had seen a ghost.

He knew me.

He knew me then. He just never knew it was me.

…

The Mirror hummed.

She raised her head. The stone was black again, and still; but she thought it was drawing, very faintly, at the edges of her sight, as a wick draws oil. She got to her feet. Her legs shook. She stood before it, a small straight figure in a dark cloak, with her face streaked and her hair undone, and spoke aloud.

"Why does everyone want me gone?"

Her voice rang against the vault.

"I only want to live. That's all. I don't ask for a crown. I don't ask to be loved. I ask only to have a body and a name and a place in the morning light. And everyone I meet is waiting for me to stop." She drew a long ragged breath. "The Director. The Bureau. Even Mara, I think, in her heart, though she'd never say it. She is so kind. She says I see you. And she means it. And she is going to walk into that Sanctum, on the hundredth night, and ask me to give it up."

The Mirror gave back nothing.

"Well, I won't," said Vesper.

It was very quiet. The gas-jet hissed.

"I won't. I've a right. I'm as real as she is. I felt the water. I felt her drown. I have a heart that beats and a mouth that eats and I've been held, do you hear me, I have been held by a better man than she'll ever deserve—" Her voice broke. "And I won't be erased. Not by him. Not by her. Not by the sun."

The stone said nothing.

But she felt it. She felt it come, quite suddenly, through the thread. A vast, soft, enormous wave of fear that was not her own. It rolled over her from a long way off, cold and dark and aching, with a taste of ashes in it; and under the fear, very faint, like a bell under water, a voice that said, What if she doesn't want to?

She put her hand to her breast.

It was Mara's. She knew it as she knew her own pulse. She was afraid. She was lying somewhere in the dark, thirty-four days from the end of everything, and she was afraid, not of the Director, not of the Vault, but of her.

She's afraid of me.

She's afraid I'll say no.

She stood there in the cellar with her hand pressed to her heart and Mara's terror pouring through it like water through a sieve, and she thought, with a kind of wonder: So that is what it is to be known.

…

She wrote the letter on the back of the Director's Order of Procedure.

She had meant to put it back. She had folded it, and put it in the bosom of her gown, and gone up the stair; but in the corridor she had stopped, and taken out the paper, and read it by the light of a window. And the whole thing had risen in her again, the No remains, and the hundred and twenty seconds, and she had gone to her room and sat down at the little desk with the green lamp and the snail-shaped inkwell and turned the sheet over.

She wrote:

Mara.

She looked at it a long time.

I do not know how to begin. I have never written to you. I suppose I have never needed to; you are always here, behind my eyes, and I thought you must know.

I want to tell you that I did not push you off the tower to kill you. I have told you so. I do not think you believed it. I would not believe it either.

I want to tell you that I am sorry about the ice.

I have found out something. I will not tell you what yet, because I do not know what to do with it, and I do not want to frighten you. But it is about him. And it is about us. And it is the worst thing I have ever read, and the loveliest.

I do not want to die.

I know that is a poor thing to say. It is a small, mean, ordinary thing, the thing any creature says that is cornered. I know you will say you do not want to either. I know that between us there is only one life, and it cannot be divided. Pryce says so. The Director says so. I think the sun says so. But I have lain here for six nights with my hand on my chest, feeling you breathe, and I cannot make it come out right.

I do not want to die.

I do not want you to die.

I do not know how to want both.

The lamp guttered. She dipped the pen.

—V.

She read it over once. Her eyes burned. She folded it small, and then smaller, until it was a tiny hard square no bigger than a button. She did not seal it. She had no way to send it, and no one to take it. She held it in the palm of her hand and looked at it in the lamplight, white and square and trembling.

Then she opened the drawer of the little desk, and laid it carefully inside, beside the black stone and the cold pearl comb, and shut the drawer on both.