Page 21 of The Mask Falling

Perhaps it was the low pitch of his voice. Perhaps it was the warmth of him beneath my fingertips, a reminder of when his arms had drawn me close. Perhaps it was the red drapes that concealed us.

His eyes darkened, and I was sure we were recalling the same night. I let go of his wrist.

“All right,” I conceded. “I’ll eat one of these morbid-sounding meals. And then we’re going to find Mélusine. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

While I drank my hot mecks, I thought of how I had instinctively reached for him. Only two weeks ago, I had been racked by fear that I would never share that casual intimacy with another person again. While Suhail Chertan tortured me, he had told me over and over that I was repulsive. Then the Vigiles had taken their turn to beat and waterboard me.

For over a week after the escape, I had shied away from Arcturus, afraid that Suhail had been right—afraid of any touch at all, because for too long, every touch had caused me pain. The fact that I could reach for him now, without thinking, was a small victory.

A different waitron came to take my order. “Your French is excellent,” Arcturus said, once we were on our own again. “You speak as if you were born to it.”

“Thanks. I started learning it in Ireland, but I was lucky to have a very good teacher in London, too,” I said. “She thought my speaking Irish was an asset. I was conversationally fluent in French by the time I left school, and I’ve worked on it ever since.”

After a pause, he said, “Did something happen to her?”

He was getting better at reading my expressions. I looked down.

“After we left Ireland,” I said, “I begged my father to keep speaking Gaeilge with me at home so I wouldn’t lose it. He refused. I’d hold long conversations with myself in secret, but I was only eight when we left Ireland. There were words I didn’t know. Madelle Alard somehow got hold of a dictionary so I could keep teaching myself.” The candle flickered. “She was hanged for sedition about two years ago. I suppose she helped one too many outcasts.”

“I am sorry.”

I nodded, trying not to remember the day I had walked past the Lychgate and seen her.

The waitron came back with a silver tray. She placed my food in front of me—served in a burial urn, no less—and shut the drapes behind her.

“They’re committed to their theme down here.” A casserole of sausage, white beans and mutton was baked into the urn. I dug in. “Enough about me. Tell me how you get around citadels so fast without anyone seeing you.”

“I am surprised that interests you,” Arcturus said. “You have been able to evade Scion for months.”

“Tell me anyway.” I blew lightly on my forkful. “Now that I’ve got the chance, I’m going to ask you everything I can.”

“Rephaim are not wholly corporeal,” he said, as I ate. “Our sarx allows us to circumvent some laws of the human world. Cameras see little more than a shadow when I pass.”

“I knew there was something.”

“I do not wish to seem opaque to you, Paige. You may ask me whatever questions you wish.”

“Will you answer?”

“When I can.” Once I had eaten some more, he spoke again. “How do you mean to find Mélusine?”

“I know the underworld.”

“Paris is not London.”

“No,” I agreed. “Which is interesting, because Scion tries hard to regulate its citadels. The blue streetlamps, the cohorts, the white cabs and buses.” I scraped up some more of the casserole. “I suppose you can never tell a city what shape to take. Still, Scion has done us a favor by attempting to standardize the unstandardizable. The underworlds will have similarities, because they were created as safe places in citadels designed to give us no safe place. They’re the gaps between the bones. Similar bones, similar gaps—which means I should be able to navigate them.”

Arcturus looked at me, long enough that it made me more aware than usual of the way I was sitting, the fall of my hair, the space between us. Not for the first time, I wished I could hear his thoughts.

“I am glad to be with you in this particular citadel,” he told me. “No matter its shape.”

“Likewise.”

“And I think you are enjoying being my mentor.”

“I would never be so petty.”

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