Chapter 124 The Child
NYX
Petra's mother did not cry. That was the part I remembered afterward. Lena stood in the doorway of Maret's workroom, listened to everything we told her, and did not make a sound. She just kept her hands pressed flat against her thighs like she was stopping them from doing something she had not decided on yet.
Her husband Doros sat down when his legs went. We let him.
"How long," Lena said finally.
"We cannot date it precisely. The thread does not carry a timestamp." Maret kept her voice level. Clinical. She had learned over centuries that clinical was kinder than gentle in moments like this. "But the depth suggests months at minimum. More likely longer."
"She has been here the whole time. Inside these walls. With us." Lena's voice did not waver. "How does something get inside a child who has never left this building."
"That is what we are trying to understand."
"Has she done anything. The writing. The gaps." Doros looked up from the chair. His eyes were red but his voice had steadied. "Has she lost time."
"Not that we have observed. Not that she has reported." Maret folded her hands. "The thread in Petra is dormant. That is the most accurate word. It is present. It is established. But it is not yet active in the way we have seen in Cassian."
"Yet," Lena said.
"Yet."
Nobody filled the silence that followed.
"I want to see her," Lena said. "Now. Before anything else."
"Of course."
Petra was in the next room. Maret had told her only that she needed a standard health check. Routine. Nothing alarming. Petra was a composed child in the way that children who grow up around healers sometimes are. She had sat still through the examination, answered questions with complete sentences, and asked twice whether she was done yet because she was supposed to meet a friend for study.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bench when Lena came in. Looked up. Read her mother's face the way children read faces long before they understand what they are reading.
"What happened," she said.
"Nothing happened. Everything is fine." Lena sat beside her and put both arms around her and held on. Petra let her. Patted her mother's back once with a small hand.
"You are doing the thing where you say fine but you mean something else." Petra looked at me over her mother's shoulder. "What is it."
"We found something small during the examination," I said. "Nothing you did. Nothing that is your fault. We are going to work on it."
"What kind of something."
I glanced at Maret. Maret gave a small nod. Petra was sharp enough that a vague answer would create its own problems.
"You know about the First Ones," I said. "You have heard us discuss them."
"The collective. The ones who want everyone to merge." She said it the way a palace child says things. Matter-of-fact. Grown-up vocabulary over a child's frame. "Yes."
"We found a trace of their presence in you. Very faint. It is not hurting you. You have not noticed it because it has been quiet." I kept my voice steady. "But Maret is going to work to remove it. And in the meantime we want to keep you close and watched."
She processed this. Her face did not do what I expected. No fear. No panic.
"Is that why I dream about the field," she said.
Lena pulled back and looked at her.
"What field," I said carefully.
"The eastern field. The one with the red flowers." Petra looked at the middle distance like she was trying to reconstruct something. "I dream about walking to it. Not in a frightening way. Just walking. And there is a voice. Not words exactly. More like a feeling. Like being called somewhere warm." She paused. "I always assumed it was just a dream."
"How long have you had this dream."
"I don't know. A long time." She looked at her hands. "Since I was maybe eight? Nine? I stopped thinking about it because nothing bad happened in the dream. It always felt peaceful. I thought it was just something my mind made up."
Eight or nine. Three years minimum. Possibly longer.
Maret met my eyes across the room. I saw the same calculation happening behind hers.
I left them there. Went back into the corridor and stood against the wall and thought.
Petra had never known loss. Had never had a door opened by grief. But she had been born here. Had grown up sleeping within the palace walls. Had spent every night of her life within reach of the eastern field.
Proximity. Not grief.
Maybe grief accelerated it. Made the channel wider and faster. But proximity to the anomaly's territory was enough on its own. Enough to build the thread slowly. Patiently. Over years.
Every child born inside this palace. Every person who had lived here long enough.
I pushed off the wall and went to find Father.
He was with Theron in the yard. Training. Working through forms that he had known for three hundred years because movement was how Father processed things he could not solve through thought alone. He stopped when he saw my face.
"How many children are in this palace," I said.
He went still. "Currently?"
"Yes."
He thought. "Eleven. Twelve with Petra."
"All born here. All sleeping here nightly." I looked at Theron. "We need to check every single one of them today."
Theron left without being told twice.
Father and I stood in the yard. A bird moved across the pale sky above the eastern wall. Red flowers were not visible from here but I knew they were there.
"Proximity," Father said.
"Yes."
"Then anyone who has lived here long enough."
"Yes. And we do not know the threshold. Do not know how long proximity is enough. Do not know if it varies by person." I crossed my arms. "Do not know if it has already spread to the outer city through people who left here and moved beyond our reach."
Father was quiet. He had the look he got when a problem expanded beyond its previous shape. Not panic. Just recalibration. He had always been better at recalibration than most.
"Then we start here," he said. "Work outward. Check everyone we can reach and treat what Maret can treat. And we build the network Nyx talked about. Healers trained specifically for this."
"That takes time."
"Everything takes time."
"And while we train them the thread keeps growing in people we have not reached yet."
"Yes." He looked at the wall. "That is the problem with infrastructure. It does not wait for you to catch up."
A guard appeared at the yard entrance. Young. Recently posted to the palace. Maybe six months inside these walls.
He was holding a folded message and looking at the ground between his feet and he did not come closer.
"What is it," Father said.
"Message from the northern territories. From Commander Aldric's post." The guard looked up. "Three of his soldiers walked out of camp four nights ago. Into the hills. Nobody saw them leave. Nobody saw them return."
"Walked out."
"He sent scouts after them. Scouts found the camp they had made. Fire still going." He swallowed. "But the soldiers were gone. And the ground around the camp—"
He stopped.
"What was on the ground," I said.
"Symbols. Cut into the soil all around the fire. Hundreds of them. Like they had been sitting there writing for hours before they—" He faltered. "Before they went wherever they went."
Father took the message. Read it. Handed it to me.
I read it. Read it again.
Then I looked at the guard standing in the entrance to the yard. Six months in the palace. Sleeping here every night. Close to the field. Close to the anomaly's reach.
And I thought about how many guards we had. How many staff. How many people moved in and out of these walls every single day carrying something they did not know they were carrying.
The thread was not just in the palace.
It had never been just in the palace.