Chương 9: “Bodie’s Mother”

June came home on a Thursday with a bruise on her arm. She said she'd bumped it. She said it like a fact, not a lie, a thing she had decided was true because the alternative was saying the real thing, and the real thing would have to go somewhere and she had not yet worked out where. Vorrath went very still. He had been very still before catastrophic events for three thousand years. But this stillness was different. Lauren saw the bruise at dinner. She asked. June gave her the same fact she'd given herself.

Lauren looked at her daughter across the table and accepted this, because June's voice was steady and her eyes were clear, and then Lauren excused herself and went to the kitchen and stood at the counter for a moment and then called the school. The school was politely useless in the expected way of institutions that are designed to handle complaints without being required to change anything. Lauren was very calm on the phone.

The calm that is not the absence of fury but the management of it, the deliberate choice of it, because fury on the phone to a school gets you nowhere faster than calm does. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. She got nowhere. Politely. She came back to the table. She didn't say anything about the call. She asked June about her homework. Normal. Steady. June did not need to know the fury was there. Vorrath noted all of this.

That night he reached through the walls to Bodie's house, which was four streets away and just at the edge of what he could manage without risking the binding. He didn't hurt anyone. He found the lights and he flickered them, just a bit. He found Bodie's games console and pressed against it until it broke. He found the correct shadow in the corner of Bodie's room and he thickened it, just enough, just so. He did not touch Bodie. He didn't need to. June asked on Friday why Bodie seemed jumpy all of a sudden.

Vorrath didn't answer. She squinted at him with the same method she used when she already knew the answer and was checking whether he'd confirm it. He glowed innocently. This was the first time he had done anything innocently in three thousand years.