Page 106 of Aïdes the Unseen
A sentinel.
A witness.
Something older than he looked.
I closed my eyes. The storm inside me was still building, but, for the first time, I wasn’t afraid of it.
I turned back to Mnemosyne.
“If you protected the part of me she couldn’t reach,” I said, “then that part belongs toyou, doesn’t it? The memories. The truth. Unlock it.”
She didn’t blink. But something behind her eyes, vast and ancient, narrowed as if the aperture of a vault closing tighter.
“I can’t.”
Mara stepped forward, arms folded, lips already pressed in warning. “Shecan’tbecause it doesn’t work that way. Not even for Titans. You’re not a door, Irina. You’re a labyrinth. And the memory’s at the center.”
“But shehidit,” I snapped, jerking my attention from one woman to the other. “You said so yourself.”
“Yes,” Mnemosyne said. Her voice didn’t rise, but it filled the air like water flooding. “I shielded it. I scattered fragments across your lives. Symbols. Places. Smells. Touch. The dog.”
He perked up at that—ears forward, tongue lolling slightly, as ifawareof the weight of her words.
“Then if you planted it,” I said slowly, “why can’t you unearth it?”
“Because I did notkeepit,” Mnemosyne said. “I’m not your vessel. I’m your threshold. The memories don’t belong to me. They belong toyou. I couldn’t carry them forward or they’d become mine. I had to leave them in you. Submerged. Sealed. Waiting.”
“That’s so much bullshit,” Mara said under her breath.
Graven gave her a sharp look.
“No,” I said. “Let her speak.”
Mara blew out an annoyed breath. “It’s not that shecan’t. It’s that shewon’t. Not fully. Because if she forces your memory open, it’ll shatter your mind. You’re not meant to be a container for all of itat once.”
I stared at both of them. “Then what the hell am I meant to be?”
The dog bumped against my hip. A soft sound. An anchor.
“You’re meant to be the one whochooses,” Mnemosyne said. “Not just where you go, or who you love, but which self you bring with you.”
Graven hadn’t moved. But his fingers were twitching again with small, nervous motions he probably didn’t realize he was doing.
“You didn’t tell me any of this,” he said. “You let me build a monument to her memories and never once said she’d have toreclaimthem herself.”
“I didn’t say it,” Mnemosyne replied, crisp, practical and utterly unapologetic where he was concerned. “But I guided you to it. Your power, your tech, your node net, Thanatek itself—it’s always been more than a map. It’s amirror.It reflects her back at herself. You’re not chasing echoes. You’re drawing a path home.”
A path for me. He’d been building it ever since I disappeared. But he couldn’t walk the path without me and I wouldn’t walk it without him.
“Then give me a key,” I said to her again. My voice cracked. I didn’t care. “Not all of it. Not the whole thing. Just something to begin. If you’re the threshold, open one door.”
Silence.
It stretched out with brutal intensity until every nerve I had seemed to scream.
“There’s a name,” Mnemosyne said slowly. “One you’ve never said. Not in this life. Not in any recent one.”
“What name?”
