Chương 40: Chapter 39: The Interrogation

The mortar in Rita's bucket had gone gray and stiff by the time Elma found her. She knelt at the base of the wall near the willow, her palm pressed flat against stone, her eyes closed, her lips moving in a silent count. To anyone passing, she was simply a maid at prayer, or resting.

But beneath her palm, hidden behind the flawless illusion of unbroken masonry, her fingers traced the ragged edge of the breach only she could feel—patching it stone by invisible stone, working entirely by touch, guided by nothing but memory and the faint resistance where true rock ended and empty air began. Every few minutes she stopped, opened her eyes just enough to glance toward the corner towers, counted the guards silhouetted against the afternoon lights, and waited.

When their heads turned away, her hand pressed deeper into the illusion, hurrying. When they didn't, she went still, humming something tuneless under her breath.

"Are you leaving through the secret entrance?" Rita's whole body flinched. Her hand shot back from the wall as though it had burned her, and she spun, one palm flying to her chest, the color draining out of her face so fast Elma could track it, watch it happen in real time, the blood retreating like tide pulling back from a shore.

"M—my lady." Rita's voice cracked on the second word.

"I was just—the mortar's cracked here, I was only patching it, I wasn't—""You weren't leaving."

"No! No, my lady, of course not, leave where—" The lie ran out of momentum halfway through the sentence, the way lies do when the person telling them can hear how thin they sound out loud. Elma watched her for a long moment. Rita's eyes kept sliding toward the willow, toward the guards then settling back at Elma as if she was searching for a way out or someone to take Elma away from her.

"Come with me," Elma said. Rita didn't come easily. She backed a step toward the wall, murmuring something about her shift, about the kitchens, about how she really did have work, my lady, truly, if she could just— Elma stepped into her path. Rita's hand came up. Her palm caught Elma's shoulder and pushed. It wasn't hard, but the gesture itself made something inside Elma go quiet and cold.

"I did not ask," Elma said. The green light came up before Rita could apologize, before she could do anything but stare down at the veins threading up through the grass and wrapping around both their ankles like rhizomorphs.

"Wait—my lady, what is—" The world went white and green and then gone.

They landed on scorched stone. The sun temple rose around them in a broken silhouette, its collapsed roof letting the afternoon lights fall in slanted columns through the gaps, vines threading through the char-black timber, the golden sun sigil above the ruined entrance dulled with soot and time. Elma was testing the reach of the veins, and found this was as far outside the estate as they would carry her. The pulse here ran thin and slow, nothing like the strong current she felt back home. But it was enough.

Rita staggered, caught herself on a collapsed pillar, and looked around with the wide, animal panic of someone who had just watched the world rearrange itself without her consent.

"Where—" Her breath came in short, struggling pulls.

"What did you do? Where are we?"

"Somewhere private," Elma said. Rita's eyes swept the ruin, her eyes shinier with each blink, and something in her face folded inward.

"Please," she whispered.

"Please take me back. We shouldn't be out here, it's not safe—""Who dug that hole in the wall?"

"I don't know anything," Rita stumbled.

"I swear it, I don't know who made it."

"You told Jorm someone showed you." Rita's mouth opened, closed.

"I don't—I was confused, I don't remember what I said, can we just go back—""Were other maids involved?"

"No one. Just me. I'm begging you, my lady—take me home." Elma watched her unravel in real time, the sentences shorter each round, the crying starting somewhere in the middle and never really stopping, hitching breath layered under every denial. It would have been almost convincing, if Elma hadn't already watched her lie badly twice today. Rita just continued crying. Great, heaving, useless sobs that answered nothing. Elma closed her hand into a tight fist, her knuckles turning white.

"I will not ask again." Rita let out a sharp cry then folded in on herself, hands covering her face as words dissolved into hiccupping cries.

"M-Mother..." she whimpered, the plea escaping before she seemed to realize she'd said it.

"Mama... p-please…" Then her eyes lifted back to Elma.

"Are you..." Rita's breath caught.

"Are you really possessed?" Elma's jaw tightened.

"I warned you, Rita." Nothing but noise. Something in Elma's chest, already stretched thin by the day, went taut and then snapped. She crossed the distance and flared her Field, pinning Rita against the broken pillar, her Field, wrapping tight around the woman's frame before Rita could think to run. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"I will ask you exactly as many times as I decide to," Elma said, her voice stripped of the childish register she usually forced into it.

"You will decide how many of those times are necessary." Rita's sobbing spiked into something closer to childish shrieking, useless, wordless, no answers hidden anywhere inside it. Elma pushed her Resonance inside the crying maid's latticeless frame, past skin and muscle, feeling for the small, hard obstruction her senses had already catalogued the moment they'd landed here—a kidney stone, lodged low, waiting. She didn't need Geo for this. Water moved through everything, even stone, given enough patience.

She moved it. Rita's scream tore through the ruined temple and out into the empty trees beyond, and her whole body convulsed against the pillar, her hands scrabbling uselessly at nothing.

"Who told you about the hole?" Rita nodded. Frantic, incoherent nodding, no words behind it, just motion. Elma stopped.

"Say it." Nothing but shapeless sobbing answered her. Elma moved it again. Rita screamed something that might have been a name, might have been nothing, lost entirely in the sound. She nodded again, desperate, pleading with her whole collapsing body. Elma didn't stop this time. If she stopped now, Rita would learn that begging worked. That noise could end pain. But it couldn't. Rita had kept the breach secret, and in that silence, Leta had died… She was the reason Leta died.

Elma held onto that thought like a rope in deep water, repeating it, letting it carry her past the sound Rita was making, past the part of her that wanted to stop.

"I'll talk!" Rita's voice broke apart on the words, barely words at all.

"I'll talk, please, I'll talk, stop, please stop—" Elma stopped only when Rita's eyes had gone glassy and unfocused, her body sagging bonelessly against the stone, right at the edge of losing consciousness entirely. She released her. Rita crumpled to the temple floor in a heap, chest heaving, tears cutting clean tracks through the dust on her face. Outside, the daylight filtering through the broken roof had begun to dim toward evening, and neither of them had noticed the time pass.

"A man," Rita whispered, once she could speak again.

"A man in a gray cloak. I never saw his face. He found me four years ago, near the market, when my brother was sick and we had no coin for a healer." She dragged in a shuddering breath.

"He told me to dig a hole in the wall and gave me the disk to hide it. I finished it a month ago." Her hands twisted in her lap.

"I didn't ask where it came from. I didn't want to know."

"You dug it?" Rita's chin trembled. Tears spilled freely down her face as she gave a small, broken nod.

"You took his money."

"I took his money." Rita's voice cracked entirely.

"I was young, and stupid, and my brother was dying, and I took it. I regret it every single day, my lady, I swear it, I regret it more than anything—""Jorm told me that you went to the city a few nights ago. What happened?" Rita's whole body went rigid.

"I went to meet him," she said, very quietly.

"After. Alone. The other maids had all gone off to do their own things. He'd asked me to, before, in case he ever needed anything urgent. I thought... I don't know what I thought. I went, and he..." Her breath caught.

"He tried to kill me. I don't know why. I don't know what I did wrong. And then…" She stopped.

"Then what," Elma said.

"The boy." Rita's eyes lifted, wide with disbelief.

"The one everyone was talking about. We could feel him following us after we left, but when we reached the city, he disappeared. I thought he'd gone. Then, while I was meeting the man, he came out of nowhere and fought him off. I ran. I didn't look back. I don't know what happened to either of them." Elma sat with that for a long moment. If that boy was the Other, what was his problem with the man? If they had truly fought, then he had to know who he was. It would have been helpful if he was here. A man in gray.

Faceless. Paying servants for his dirty work, discarding them the moment they stopped being useful. Rita had never mattered to him at all.

"I don't want to leave," Rita said, once the crying had thinned into something more exhausted.

"I don't want to go anywhere. I just want to go home. He's still out there. If he knows I told you—""He won't know."

"You don't know that." Rita's voice was raw.

"Please. I only ever wanted the money for my brother. I was fixing the wall, I swear, I was trying to close it, I never wanted any of this—""If you tell Jorm about this," Elma said, "I will kill you." Rita nodded so fast it looked like it hurt.

"Did anyone else know? The truth. Not what you think I want to hear."

"No one. I swear on—on anything you want, my lady, no one else knew, I never told a soul—""Fix the wall," Elma said.

"If anything happens—anything at all—you tell me. No one else."

"I will," Rita whispered.

"I will, I promise, I will."

"Good." Rita's eyes fluttered, the last of her strength finally spent, and within moments she had slipped into an exhausted, unconscious sleep against the broken stone. A man in gray. That was all. No name and no face, no thread to pull. Elma sat in the ash-smelling quiet of the ruined temple and turned the information over, looking for an edge to grip and finding none. I learned nothing useful. She reached down to gather Rita's limp hand, meaning to position her better for the jump back.

Rita looked strangely peaceful now. Elma's fingers wouldn't let go. A sudden, blinding pressure split through her skull, and she gasped, her vision swimming white at the edges. Beneath her grip, Rita's forehead began to change—thin red lines rising up through the skin like something being written from the inside out, unhurried, forming shapes that had nothing to do with anything Rita's unconscious body should have been capable of producing. Elma's hand wouldn't move. Her arm had stopped answering to her.

Whispers threaded through the inside of her skull, too many voices layered over each other to separate into words, and beneath them all, one thought arrived that wasn't hers, dropped into her mind like a stone into still water. The letters resolved. SEKAR. Elma wrenched her hand free with a strangled gasp, stumbling backward, her chest heaving. She pressed both palms against her own temples, forcing air into her lungs until the ringing in her ears began to fade. When she looked back, the letters were gone.

Rita lay exactly as she had, unconscious and unmarked, breathing evenly in the dust. Elma looked around the temple—the broken pillars, the dead vines, the empty, indifferent dark beginning to gather in the corners. There was no one else, nothing else. Sekar... Could he have been the man in gray?

She teleported them both back to the edge of the maid house, laying Rita gently in the grass near the servants' door where someone would find her come morning and assume exhaustion, nothing more. Then she walked back to the nursery alone, her small legs heavy, her mind heavier still. Two fights. One confession. One name written in imaginary blood. It had been, by any measure, an extraordinarily long day.

Mira was waiting when she returned, her blindfold catching the last of the evening lights, her posture as rigid and correct as it had been that morning. She didn't ask where Elma had been. She didn't ask why her dress was streaked with soot, or why her hands wouldn't quite stop shaking. It wasn't her job and Elma felt a bit of relief that it wasn't. Mira simply set to her work. Dinner first, plain and warm, eaten in silence while Mira stood at attention nearby.

Then the bath, brisk and efficient, none of the earlier morning's combativeness left in either of them. Then the soft cotton of sleep clothes, and Mira's hands working through Elma's hair with the same mechanical patience as before, nothing but the quiet rhythm of the brush. When it was done, Mira tucked the blankets around her with a precision that bordered on tenderness, and left without a single word. Elma lay in the dark and let herself, finally, exhale.

The boy had followed Rita and the other maids all the way into the city, where he had fought the man in gray. Merideth had said he fought Sekar too, and now the pieces aligned in a way Elma didn't like. If the man in gray was truly Sekar, then this was no longer just an assassination attempt hidden behind servants and secret entrances. A general of Veraxys had a connection to what happened to her. The entire matter went far deeper than she had allowed herself to imagine.

She didn't even have proof to incriminate him yet. She turned to her right. But she had a direction now, and a direction was more than she'd had this morning. The green light rose beneath her before she felt Sable's pull settle fully into place, the familiar cold threading up through her exhausted limbs. Elma closed her eyes. Things were still unfinished with Christa.

Her body ached in four different registers of tired, and somewhere behind her ribs sat the particular, unexamined weight of everything she'd just done to Rita, waiting for a version of her with the energy left to feel it properly. Not tonight. She let out a slow breath, and let the veins take her.