Chapter 3 CHAPTER THREE: What She Sees
CHAPTER THREE: What She Sees
Mira Ardell's Point of View
My son is strange.
I say this with all the love a mother can have, which is the kind that does not have a bottom, the kind that keeps going even when you do not sleep and your back hurts and the rent is due.
I say it because it is true.
Zane was a quiet baby. Not an unhappy one. Just quiet. He would look at you while you talked to him and you would get the feeling, the very strange, very specific feeling, that he understood every word. Not the way babies sometimes seem to follow your tone. I mean understood.
I would catch myself apologizing to him for interrupting his thoughts.
He is five now, almost six, and he does not play the way other children on the street play. He watches them. He sits on the step outside our door and watches the children run and yell and fight over sticks, and his face is very calm and very attentive, like a scholar watching something he is studying.
I once asked him if he wanted to go join them.
He considered the question seriously. Then he said, "Not yet."
"Not yet?" I said.
"I am still learning how they move," he said.
I did not know what to say to that.
He reads everything he can find. He finished Colt's smithing manuals in a week and then very politely asked if there were more. He read my Guide to Aether Use cover to cover and did not ask me a single question about it, which means either he understood it or he did not care, and from the look on his face when he put it down, I think he understood it.
One afternoon I came home from the market and found him at the kitchen table with Colt's old military handbook in front of him. Not a child's book. Long words and harder ideas. Zane had it open to the middle and was reading slowly with one finger on the page. He was not struggling with it. He was thinking about it.
"What do you think?" I asked from the doorway.
He looked up. "The supply estimates in chapter four are wrong. They do not account for bad weather on the roads."
He is kind, in the way that very old people are kind. Measured. Intentional. He does not hug me often but when he does it is very deliberate, like he decided to do it and then did it with his whole self.
I have never told Colt this because Colt would worry, but sometimes at night I hear Zane in his room, not crying, not talking, just very still and breathing in a pattern that is too controlled for a child. Like someone doing something on purpose in the dark.
I stand outside his door and listen and I think: what are you carrying, my boy.
And then I think: whatever it is, you do not have to carry it alone.
But I do not say it because I do not know how, and also because something tells me he would just look at me very calmly and say something like, "I know, Mother," in that voice that sounds like it comes from somewhere much older than a child's throat.
The day of the core assessment, I watched my husband's face while the sphere went dark.
I watched how he held himself together.
He held it together until we were home. He held it through dinner. He held it until he thought I was asleep and then I heard him downstairs, very quietly, doing something with his hands at the kitchen table.
I went down and he was just sitting there with his hands flat on the table, not doing anything.
"He is fine," I told him.
"I know," Colt said.
"He is still our son."
"I know."
"Then stop sitting in the dark as if someone died."
He looked at me and he almost smiled. "When did you get so harsh?"
"I married you," I said. "I adapted."
He laughed, quiet, and I sat down next to him and we sat there for a while without talking.
Then he said, "I just wanted him to have a chance."
"He has one," I said. "He just has to make it himself. Same as everyone else."
Colt was quiet. Then he said, "You have seen how he thinks. He does not stop. He just finds another way."
"He gets that from you," I said.
"He gets it from you," he said.
We did not argue. We both knew.
And upstairs, in the room above us, I heard the very slow, very controlled sound of my son breathing in the dark.
And I thought: he is going to be something. I do not know what. But something.
And I am going to be here for all of it.
That night, past midnight, I heard three soft knocks at the front door. I heard Colt go down, his knee on the stairs. I heard a woman's voice, smooth and pleasant in a way that felt wrong without being able to say why. Pleasant the way a closed door is pleasant. It keeps you out and smiles while it does it.
I could not hear all the words. Birthday. A boy. Passing through.
And then I heard Zane. Moving quietly across his floor above me.
He was awake. Of course he was awake.
Colt came back up. I asked who it was. He said a traveler and went back to sleep almost immediately. Too fast. Too easy. Like something had taken the memory and smoothed it over.
I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about that voice.
I thought about my son, standing at the top of those stairs in the dark, looking down at a stranger who came to our door at midnight.
And not being afraid.
That was the part that stayed with me. Not the woman. Not the hour. The fact that my son had not been afraid at all.
Most children would have run back to bed. Most children would have cried out for me. Not Zane. He had stood there in the dark and looked down at her like he was the one doing the watching.
Whatever was coming for him, he already knew about it.
I did not know if that should make me feel better or worse.
I decided it made me feel like I needed to pay closer attention.
And whatever came for my son was going to have to go through me first.