Ink and Bone

When Niccolo Santi stepped inside the tent, Jess felt a surge of fury and bitter disgust. At Santi. At himself. At all the dreams breaking into pieces.

Morgan didn’t see Santi. She saw Jess’s face. He was a good liar, had been one his whole life, but he couldn’t hide how he felt in that moment. One look, and she knew. She backed up a step, eyes wide, and whispered, ‘No.’

Behind her, Santi said, ‘Morgan. Please don’t make this more painful than it has to be.’

‘No,’ she said again, this time a little stronger. ‘Jess, you knew.’ The disappointment in her, the look in her eyes, the wounded betrayal … it was like knives cutting pieces of him away. ‘You said stay.’ It was simple, those three words. It was the world cracking open between them.

She lunged at him. He captured her in his arms and held her so tight that she couldn’t hit him, couldn’t struggle, until Captain Santi pulled her away.

Santi pulled out a pair of iron shackles, and he fitted them over Morgan’s wrists. They were a favourite of the London Garda. No Obscurist tricks. Just a key. She went still as she felt the locks click shut, and her face, God, Jess would never forget that look as long as he lived. Her stare was as cold as a winter river. She’d have ripped his throat out if she could, and there was no changing it. No going back.

If he’d warned her the second she’d walked into his tent, if he’d told her to run then, maybe it would have been different.

But he’d asked her to stay, and she would remember.

Santi’s face was remote and still, as if he was a stranger to both of them. ‘I know it doesn’t help,’ he said, ‘but I’m sorry.’ He walked Morgan towards the tent’s exit. Gentle, but firm.

Morgan dug in her heels long enough to give Jess one last, look. ‘You told me there were always choices. When did you stop believing it?’

When I didn’t have any choice but to love you, he wanted to tell her. But he didn’t have the right to say it.

He was the reason she was in chains.

‘You’re damned quiet,’ Dario said the next morning. He’d taken the seat beside Jess in the armoured carrier – this one had real seats, with padding, which was a vast improvement from their last conveyance. The Library had dispatched what seemed half an army to accompany them home, and yet Jess felt very, very alone.

‘Tired,’ Jess said. He had his eyes shut. There was nothing to see, and he didn’t want to join in his friends’ chatter.

He felt, rather than saw, Dario bend towards him. ‘I heard Morgan is in the other carriage. What’s wrong, she come to her senses and want nothing to do with you?’

Jess opened his eyes and stared Dario down at very close range. He didn’t know how it looked, but he knew he was a hair’s snap from punching the boy in the throat.

‘Not today,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

Dario lost his grin and faced forward. He seemed suddenly very interested in the story that Thomas was telling about a bar in Munich where he’d made a dancing automaton puppet in exchange for his uncle’s unpaid bill. It was a good story.

Jess wished he cared.

Khalila was both smiling at Thomas’s story, and watching Jess in concerned little glances. Her sympathetic, questioning gaze was impossible to bear. Wolfe and Santi hadn’t told anyone of Morgan’s detainment, and Jess … Jess didn’t have the stomach.

He rose and shifted farther back from the others to an empty row, where he stretched himself out across two seats and pretended to sleep. He hated the sound of his friends’ laughter; it felt like a whetstone scraping his soul open. He wanted to be somewhere else. Gone.

‘Shove over,’ said a voice from over him. He took his arm off his eyes and frowned up at Glain. Her head wound had healed, but there was an angry scar cutting diagonally across her forehead that would probably be with her for life. She was proud of it. Battle scars.

‘Plenty of seats up there,’ he said, and put the arm back in place. She took his legs and pushed them over, and he came upright with something that felt and sounded like a snarl trapped deep inside his chest.

She dropped into the seat beside him. ‘It’s tiring, isn’t it? Pretending it’s normal. I know about Morgan.’

One less person he had to break the news to, then. ‘Tell them, not me.’

‘If you want.’ She let a second or two slip by before she said, ‘Wolfe’s afraid you’re going to be accused of Burner sympathies. Makes sense. You went off with them after the train blew.’

If she’d been intending to prod him into real anger, she succeeded. He slowly sat up, staring at her. ‘I didn’t go off with them. I was taken.’

‘Then they just let you go free, with hardly a scratch on you that couldn’t be explained by the train explosion. Look, I don’t say I believe it. I’m telling you that it’s easy to paint you that shade. The Artifex sees infiltrators behind every column in Alexandria. You should take care he doesn’t see you that way, too. You’ve already got enough marks on your record.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean your family, yn fytyn. I didn’t know before Oxford, but now we all do. You don’t think the Artifex knows? Even if he doesn’t, don’t you think Dario would use it if you came up against each other for a placement?’

‘Or you would,’ Jess said. Glain sent him a sideways glance. ‘We’ve never been friends. You’d shove me over the cliff for what you want.’

‘We don’t want the same things, so that doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’m not well suited to be a Scholar, but I intend to be Garda Magnus one day. So I’m no threat to you. Nor you to me, I think.’

‘I’m a threat to everyone right now.’

‘Mostly to yourself,’ she said, and paused. Her tone changed, just a little. ‘Santi says that she’s all right. Angry at everyone, but all right. She’ll make it. She’s strong.’

It sickened him that even Glain, the least sensitive of all of them, could read him like a blank. ‘I knew he was coming for her,’ he said. ‘She could have escaped. I made sure she didn’t.’

Glain didn’t immediately reply to that, and when she did, her voice was even softer and more guarded than before. ‘She wouldn’t have made it. I spent time drinking with the Toulouse brigade. If Morgan got free, they were to hunt her down by any means necessary and send her back by Translation. If we got in the way, they would have killed us.’

He turned to look at her. She seemed all too serious. ‘Bollocks!’ Although he didn’t think it was, not really.

‘It’s not bollocks. They’d just say the train fire had no survivors. Letters to our families, so sorry, problem solved. And Wolfe is a problem for the Artifex, you know. You heard him at di

‘He was drunk.’

‘He was honest.’ Glain met his eyes squarely, for once, and it wasn’t an angry glare. It was almost kind. ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’ll know that, eventually.’

She patted his knee in a strange, awkward way that he realised was her version of affection, and got up to rejoin the others.

He stretched out across the seat again, and shut his eyes. It was his fault, no matter what Glain said. And even if Morgan forgave him, some kinds of guilt had to be carried, for ever.

The convoy travelled far, camped, and Morgan wasn’t seen again. Not by anyone. Glain was as good as her word; she told the others, quietly, and by that evening, no one mentioned Morgan to him at all.

No one, not even Thomas, knew what to say, so they pretended it was all fine, that going back to Alexandria was a relief, that everything would be back to normal once they slept in their own beds at Ptolemy House. It was gallows cheer, and Jess was the silent ghost at the table.

He couldn’t avoid Thomas the second night, because the big German decided that Jess needed company on his walk through the camp. The elite men and women from Alexandria weren’t taking any chances. They had set picket lines, sentries, heavy armaments.