Chapter 219 The Veiled Visitor
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, three days after
The room I am in has a window and the window has light coming through it and the light has been doing different things over the course of three days as it moved through its cycle, and I have been watching it without registering it, which is the specific quality of the past three days, which is that things have been happening in my visual field without registering as information.
I have not spoken. This is not a decision I made. It is something that has happened in the specific way that some things happen, which is without consulting me, the voice simply not being available, the mechanism of speaking having gone quiet the way a room goes quiet when the main occupant of it is gone.
Tom has been in and out. Cormac has been present in the specific Cormac way, which is present without requiring anything from me, sitting in the corner of the room with maps and his phone and the operational business of the coalition that is continuing regardless of what is happening in this room, because operational business does not pause. Dante has been here and not here, the specific movement of someone who is also managing something large and who does not have a category for managing it in stillness.
The visitor comes on the third morning.
Moira is wearing dark clothing in the specific way that people who are observing mourning wear dark clothing, not a formal tradition exactly but the acknowledgment of a tradition, and she comes into the room without knocking because the door is open and sits in the chair across from me with the quality she always has, which is the quality of someone who has been through things and who is not performing having been through things but simply is the person those things produced.
She does not say I'm sorry. She does not say she's in a better place or she wouldn't want you to grieve or any of the things that people say when they are trying to fill the silence that grief produces because the silence is uncomfortable. She sits in the silence the way Valentina sat in difficult situations, which is without requiring the situation to be different from what it is.
After a long time she says, "I lost someone too. Not the same way. But the specific quality of the loss, the person-shaped absence in every room, I know that."
I do not respond because the speaking mechanism is still not available.
"When you're ready," she says, and she says it with the patience of someone who knows that ready is not a fixed point and who is not setting a deadline, "there is a child who needs you. Not Finn, though Finn is also here and he is asking about his uncle with the specific persistence of a two-year-old who has decided something is important. Lucia. She needs her father." She pauses. "Dante has a lead on the facility. He's been sitting on it waiting for you."
The speaking mechanism has been quiet for three days and it has the quality of something that is going to require effort to restart, the specific effort of a mechanism that has been still long enough that stillness has become its default.
What comes out is the first thing that has come out in three days and it is the thing that was underneath everything else that the three days contained, which is the question that has been organizing itself in the quiet under the silence.
"Lucia," I say. "Where is she?"