Page 79 of Aïdes the Unseen
His jaw flexed. “Yes.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Well,” I said, tracing the rim of my mug with a fingertip. “That makes three of us.”
Graven blinked at that. Just once. But I saw it—a flicker of amusement in the glacier of his expression.
The air shifted again—less from the tension, more from theknowing.I could feel something pressing around the edges of reality. Like the world was waiting for a signal. Or a decision.
I looked at him over the steam of my drink. “Tell me something true,” I said quietly.
He frowned. “About what?”
“You,” I said. “Tell me one thing that’s real. Not Thanatek. Not myth. Justyou.” I didn’t even know why I added “myth” in that request. I couldn’t quite process everything Dr. Heinritz had said and frankly, I didn’t want to think on it too closely. Instead, I focused on Graven.
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was thick. Alive. While Graven didn’t answer immediately, he held my gaze for a long moment. With a half-formed sigh, he shifted his attention to the edge of the garden, past the fence where ivy curled around black iron and morning light filtered through the leaves. He held his coffee like a shield, though his grip was loose. Calm.
But his eyes…
His eyes saideverythingwasn’t.
“I’ve lived in this city a long time,” he began finally. His voice was quiet but clear, like someone telling a secret to the space between breaths. “Long enough to know the difference between being alone and beingunseen.”
He paused.
The puppy lifted his head at that, and I stilled too. Graven didn’t look at me. Just kept watching something distant.
“I used to think solitude was just a side effect of purpose,” he continued. “That when your work matters, you don’t have to explain the empty spaces. They’re just… part of the shape of things. Tools don’t get lonely.”
His fingers tensed slightly around the mug.
“But lately,” he said, “I’ve started noticing the hours more. The repetition. The way the silence feels like a weight instead of a peace. The way even the city stops answering back.”
That caught me. The phrasing.
“You talk about the city like it’s alive,” I said softly, echoing what he’d said to me earlier.
At that, he glanced at me. Just for a heartbeat. But something in that look made the ground feel less stable under my feet. Like I’d stepped too close to the edge of something vast and ancient.
“It is,” he said. “In its way.”
Another breath. He looked down into his coffee.
“I spend my days making decisions that move other people’s endings. Quietly. Sometimes mercifully. Sometimes... not. The work fills the hours. The hours blur. There’s never a shortage of need, or memory, or death.”
The last didn’t shock me. Not from him.
“But none of it…” He hesitated, voice going even softer. “...matters.Not the way it should. Not the way I think it used to. There was a time I thought that was enough. That fulfilling the function was the same asliving.”
He looked at me then. Really looked. And everything he wasn’t saying hummed in the air between us.
“But now?” he said. “Now I’m not so sure.”
The puppy let out a low breath and leaned his head against my boot. I reached down and rested my hand on his soft ears without thinking. When I looked up at Graven, my instincts told me that what he’d said wastrue.
But it wasn’tall.
