Chapter 216 The Voices in the Ruins
POV: Isla | Parliament steps, then the shelter
The Parliamentary tradition for executed vampires is burning, which is framed as respect and which functions as finality, the complete removal of the physical from the situation, and the burning happens within an hour of death, which means that by the time I reach the Parliament steps the burning is done and what remains is the specific grey quality of ash that has been scattered by the afternoon wind and which is settling in the corners of the steps and in the cracks between the stones.
I have a collection vessel, which is what you bring when you know this is coming and you want to do the only thing that can be done, which is to gather what can be gathered. The vessel is glass and it is small and I fill it with the ash from the corners of the steps where it has settled most thickly, working in the specific focused way I work when I need my hands to have something to do because the alternative is standing in the middle of Parliament steps in the afternoon and understanding what the afternoon contains and I am not ready to do that yet.
I have been talking to Valentina in my head since noon, which is not something I would have described as a habit before noon and which appears to have begun immediately after it. Not performing conversations she would have had, not imagining responses. Simply talking, in the way you talk to people whose voice you know well enough that the talking does not require the person to be present, and the voice in my memory that responds to things is the real one, the specific quality of Valentina's voice that I have had three years to learn, and it is more real right now than the afternoon and the ash and the glass vessel.
She would tell me to be useful. This is not a projection. This is simply what Valentina did with every situation, which was find the useful thing and do it, and she would expect the same from me, and I am trying.
I am thinking about everything we planned together and did not finish. The shelter expansion, the second-floor rooms that were going to be individual spaces for the older children when we had the resources. The documentation project, the record of each child's medical history and ability profile that Katherine and I were building and which needs someone to continue it. Lucia, who is three months from being born and who is going to need a mother and who is not going to have the one who should be there.
The specific grief of this is not the large kind. It is the small kind, which is worse, the accumulation of specific things that are not going to happen now, each one individually manageable and collectively the shape of the absence.
I find the locket in the ash at the base of the left pillar, where the wind has pushed the densest concentration. It is gold and it is not destroyed, which is because it is not vampire material and the burning did not take it the way it took everything else, and it is warm from the afternoon and small in my hand and I open it without deciding to open it and the photograph inside is Callum, taken at some point in the past two years in the Rookeries, looking at something outside the frame with the expression he has when he is thinking about a problem.
She carried this. She carried this every day, this small gold thing with his face in it, and she did not tell me, and I did not need to know, and knowing it now is the thing that breaks the specific composure I have been maintaining since noon.
I am alone on the Parliament steps in the afternoon and I sit down on the stone and I collapse in the specific clean way that people collapse when they have been holding something too long, which is completely, without performance, without management.
After a while I stand up. I put the vessel in my bag and I put the locket in my pocket and I go back to the shelter because there are thirty-one children who need someone to be present for them, and I am the person who is going to be present, and that is what being present requires, which is going back.
I give the locket to Callum three days later. I place it in his hand without speaking and he looks at it and he closes his hand around it and he does not speak for three days.