Chapter 293: A Pure Blood.
Venna was still breathing against my shoulder, her hand still flat on my back. The dark room held us in complete black. The only sounds were the two of us breathing and the soft, continuous pressure of her palm against my spine.
Neither of us said anything for a while. We needed the silence.
Because the future hadn’t answered a single thing. It had only handed me questions I hadn’t been smart enough to think of yet. The taste of smoke still sat at the back of my throat. The image of purple hair in the middle of a burning street refused to leave.
Is that the ending?
I put it to the system directly, sitting in the dark with a woman’s heartbeat going against my chest. The words formed cleanly behind my eyes.
And the part that wouldn’t leave me was that there had been no side to it. No winners standing over anything. Sophia dead in the road beside Monica. Carrise and Mercury twenty metres apart. Primordials and mortals torn up in the same street by the same thing, four hundred years of scheming ending in one afternoon with everybody face down together. The fires had thrown the same light across all of them.
[ There is no fixed ending. ]
[ Different events produce different endings. ]
Then what causes that one. And how do I get us off that road?
[ Mark all primordials. Extract all sources. ]
Same answer it always gave. Flat. Absolute. Uninterested in the bodies I’d just watched.
But I was already somewhere else with it, because I’d seen who was standing upright in the middle of all of that. Unhurried. Not fighting anyone. Watching it happen the way a man watches weather.
And I knew exactly who was wearing that body.
"Ready?" Venna asked. Her voice was quieter than usual, the edges of it still rough from the smoke that shouldn’t have been able to touch us.
We still had a deal. She’d taken me into my past twice now and I hadn’t given her a single thing back. We didn’t stop until she had her own history in her hands.
"Yes. You?"
"I’m ready." Her grip came off my back. The loss of contact left a cool patch on my skin. "Let’s use the hands this time."
I don’t want to go back wherever that was.
She hadn’t said it out loud. I let it pass like I hadn’t caught it. The thought arrived clear and private and completely without armour.
We came out of the embrace and found each other’s hands instead, and I didn’t tell her what I’d worked out. The contact had never been the point. Whatever had lifted us into that burning street had come out of me, not out of this room, and the system had told me about it this morning in one line and no instructions.
[ You can move into the past and glimpse the future. ]
Glimpse. As though it were something I aimed.
"Close your eyes," she said.
They were already closed. The second darkness settled over the first.
***
We came down outside the forest house.
Same trees. Same green light coming through them in soft, filtered columns. The air was cool and carried the clean smell of damp earth and leaves that had never known the plain’s heat. Birds moved somewhere above us, ordinary and unafraid. The libra had put us back exactly where it had left me.
The baby was crying somewhere inside—high, thin, absolute.
Venna started walking before I did and I followed her up to the door and through it.
The house held its warmth and its ordinary arranged life—the faint smell of food cooked and waiting, the quiet order of chairs pushed in, a cup left on a surface. We followed the sound of the newborn down the narrow corridor to the room at the end.
Everything was where it had been, except my father was gone from it, and Eleanor with him.
The crying stopped.
We came around the doorframe together.
Riya Belmonte sat up against the headboard with pillows stacked behind her, exhausted, radiant with it. Her blue hair was damp at the temples. The blue-haired baby was at her breast, feeding with the complete focus of something that had only just arrived and already knew what it needed. The child’s small hand rested against the curve of Riya’s skin. Soft afternoon light from the window laid a pale gold stripe across both of them.
Venna stopped moving.
"That’s my mother," she said. The words came out thin, almost careful.
"Yeah."
"And that’s me."
"Yeah."
Neither of us moved for a long moment. The woman on the bed shifted the child slightly and murmured something to her that we were too far away to hear—low, continuous, the private language of a mother who had only just finished the longest work of her life. The baby’s blue hair caught the light in a soft, impossible halo.
"Are we siblings?" Venna asked.
Her grip in the libra had gone soft. Not letting go. Just soft. The pressure of her fingers against mine had changed quality entirely.
And I stood there with the answer sitting in my mouth and no proof for any version of it. I’d felt something the first time I met her at that graveside. Something I hadn’t been able to name then and still couldn’t. A pull with no explanation attached to it. And since then we had gone considerably further than two people with an unexplained pull should have gone. The knowledge of that sat between us like a third body in the doorway.
"Did you know about this, Bram?"
"No." I turned to look at her. In the filtered green light her face was pale, the blue of her eyes almost black at the centre. "Why?"
"Because you asked me." Her voice stayed level, which was worse than if it hadn’t. "This morning. In the reception room. You asked me what I’d do if I found out I’d slept with my brother."
The words had been sitting in her all day, waiting for this exact room.
"Ven."
"I need a minute." She hadn’t taken her eyes off the bed. The baby’s small hand flexed once against Riya’s skin. "Please. Just give me a minute with her."
"Okay."
I let go of her hand. The loss of contact was clean and complete. I walked out.
She had it now. Her history, her mother, her father, the answer to the one question she’d never been able to reach because she could read every past on earth except her own.
Mine kept moving further away. Every answer I got turned into a door with something worse behind it.
I went down the corridor and into another room. The boards under my feet were the same ordinary boards that had carried my father’s weight a few hours earlier in this same stretch of time.
Eleanor was in there with my father.
They were holding each other, and something about the way they held on stopped me in the doorway, because it was the way Venna and I had been standing in the dark room ten minutes ago. Not romantic. Something older than that. Two people bracing each other against a thing neither of them could stop. His face was buried in her hair. Her hands were locked at the back of his neck.
"I’ve got another woman, Ele," my father said into her hair. "It isn’t over. We can still make a pure blood."
A pure blood.
Another woman. My mother, walking back through a safe city with lipstick still on her mouth and a man’s promise in her ear. The image arrived complete and cold.
I’m not a son. I’m an attempt.
"Just be careful, Eth." Eleanor pulled back and held him at arm’s length. Her eyes were tired and clear and completely without illusion. "Please. Just be careful this time."
She straightened her dress, walked straight through me without knowing I was there, and went out toward the room where Riya was. The air of her passage moved against my skin and left nothing behind.
I turned to follow her.
"I know you’re looking for answers."
I stopped.
My father was standing where I’d left him, and he was looking directly at me. Not through me. At me. His eyes were the same shape as mine. The recognition in them was quiet and absolute.
Wait.
You can see me?