Chapter 110 Insufferable
ARYA
Luca moved toward me and stopped when he was close enough to speak quietly, his voice dropping below what the room’s stone walls could carry. “It could be false intelligence. Drawing us to a location while the real attack happens somewhere else.”
“I know.” I kept my eyes on Mordecai. “What do you want in return?”
“Consideration in the tribunal proceedings.” He met my gaze steadily, his hands flat on the table between us. “Not absolution or freedom. Evidence of cooperation acknowledged alongside evidence of my crimes.”
“The tribunal is independent. I don’t control the outcome.”
“No. But you could tell them what I gave you.” He spread his hands wider, a gesture that was almost open. Almost. “That’s all I’m asking. That the record be complete.”
I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back. His eyes were my eyes and they were nothing like my eyes, and I was trying to figure out what the difference was, exactly, when I realized — his were eyes with no one left behind them who was afraid of anything.
That wasn’t strength. That is what strength looks like after you’ve been alone long enough.
“Give Bardon the information,” I said. “We’ll verify what we can. If it proves accurate, I’ll speak to the tribunal about your cooperation.” I stood. “And Mordecai.”
He looked up.
“The void research the Reclaimed are pursuing. The controlled access. If they find a way to do it—”
“It would be considerably worse than anything I intended,” he said. “The void is not a power source to be mined. It is a state of being that does not permit exploitation without consequence. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn’t spent enough time there to understand what it costs.”
“Then help us stop them.”
He was quiet for a moment. Just the length of a breath, in a room that had suddenly gone very still.
“Give me something to write on,” he said.
LUCA
I waited until we were back in the upper temple before I said anything.
The staircase had felt longer on the way up, the weight of what we were carrying increasing with each step. Bardon was already absorbed in the information Mordecai had provided, his weathered hands moving quickly over his tablet, cross-referencing with something in his head that his expression said was confirming more than it was contradicting. His brow was furrowed in the way it got when the pieces fit together in a direction he didn’t like.
Arya walked with the particular quality she had when she was processing something difficult. Not slow exactly. More like she was moving through slightly thicker air, her gaze present but turned partially inward.
I waited until Bardon had peeled off toward his workroom, the soft click of the door behind him leaving us in the quieter end of the corridor. Then I took her hand and steered us into a small alcove off the main hall, away from the temple staff beginning their evening routines, their voices low and purposeful in the distance.
“Talk,” I said.
“In a minute.”
“Now. While it’s still immediate.”
She turned to face me, her back finding the alcove wall. Her expression was doing something I didn’t have full words for — the complicated working-through that happened when she was feeling something real and simultaneously trying to understand what to do with it.
“He looks like me,” she said finally.
“Distantly.”
“He is me, maybe distantly.” A pause. “but we have the same bloodline, the same gifts and got trapped in the same void for a while.” Her eyes didn’t leave mine. “What he became is what I could become.”
“No.”
“Not as a certainty. But as a possibility.” She held my gaze. “You know it’s true.”
“I know it’s the kind of thing someone who just spent an hour across from eight centuries of isolation would think.” I moved closer. “I also know you’ve been through things that would have broken people who had significantly more support than you did, and you came through them with your compassion intact. That’s not a small thing.”
“Compassion and power are different things.”
“They’re the same thing in the long run. Power without compassion becomes what he is. Compassion without power can’t protect anything.” I cupped her face, feeling the tension she was carrying in the set of her jaw. “You have both, and they’ve held together through things they shouldn’t have held through. That’s not an accident.”
“It doesn’t feel like a guarantee.”
“Nothing is a guarantee.” I pressed my forehead against hers, close enough that the rest of the corridor ceased to matter. “But I’ve lived eight hundred years. I’ve seen what people become under pressure. And Aeliana — categorically, repeatedly, in ways I keep accumulating evidence of — you are someone who becomes more herself under pressure. Not less.”
She was quiet. I could feel her breathing slow slightly, the tension in her jaw easing by degrees.
“His information is good,” she said. “I don’t know how I know, but I do.”
“Your instincts are usually right.”
“Usually. Not always.”
“Then we verify what we can and plan for both possibilities.” I pulled back enough to look at her properly, to make sure she was actually here and not still somewhere in that cell with him. “We’ll brief Caspian and Sage on what we have now. Caspian can start the verification process tomorrow. And you—”
“Sleep,” she said, before I could finish.
“I was going to say rest, but yes.”
“Same thing.”
“Not always.”
She almost smiled at that — a small, tired thing that was still real. “Fine. Both.” She pushed off the wall, straightening, the weight settling back onto her shoulders in the practical way it did when she’d decided to carry it rather than examine it. “Come on. I need to eat something before I brief anyone or I’m going to be insufferable.”
“You’re occasionally insufferable when you’ve eaten.”
“Then at least there’ll be a reason for it.“