Page 72 of Aïdes the Unseen
The tea had gone cold in my hands.
“I found Graven last night,” I said, quietly. “Hedoesn’tmatch the ghost-blank like Kassian does. He has history. Work. But it’s all tied to Thanatek. And it allfeelslike misdirection.”
Dr. Heinritz didn’t confirm or deny. “He’s not a stranger to the systems we use. But he’s not their pawn either.”
“He’s, what, in love with Persephone?”
“More than love,” she said softly. “Bound. Across lifetimes. One of the oldest stories there is. He’s not the villain here, Irina. But he may be too close to see clearly.”
I closed my eyes. The room felt heavier now. Denser. Like something unseen had entered with the truth. I opened them again. “The envelope,” I said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. But it’s for someone I haven’t seen in a long time.”
“Someone… like him?”
Dr. Heinritz nodded once.
A part of me wanted to leave. Run. Call my mom. Pretend this was all some elaborate dream wrapped in the scent of moss and soil and jasmine tea. But I didn’t move. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” I asked, finally.
“I wasn’t sure it wasyou,” she said. “Not untilRegrowthopened the way it did. That revealedherpresence. That wasyou.”
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. “And now?”
Dr. Heinritz leaned forward, her gaze calm and exact. “Now,” she said, “you have to choose how much truth you want to carry. Because once it starts coming, it won’t stop. And it will change everything.”
Chapter
Fourteen
GRAVEN
It was subtle, at first. A ripple in the tether.
The tether wasn't physical. Not really. But it thrummed in a way that made the hairs at the back of my neck rise — old instinct paired with older technology. Biofield resonance had its quirks, especially when paired with shared myth-coded lineage. I'd studied them. I’d designed instruments to measure them. But nothing had prepared me for whenhersignal finally spiked.
Irina Bloom. Persephone’s spiritual-signal in a modern skin. And now,awakening.
I closed the interface and stood. The air in the Thanatek monitoring suite had gone suddenly stale. Too clean. Recycled too many times. I hated this building. Its precision. Its lies. I had built its foundations, but I had never made a home here.
The screen still glowed behind me, faint afterimages of a waveform spike that looked almost like?—
No. Notalmost. It was apattern match. One I’d seen centuries ago.
My coat was already in my hand before I realized I was moving.
By the time I reached the Annex, the sky had bruised into that unpleasant mid-morning gray. I didn’t use the front entrance. I moved through service corridors, not because I needed to be secretive, but because being seen—trulyseen—could trigger memories she wasn’t ready for. Not yet.
But something had changed.
Her tether had flared hard enough to make my vision swim. That wasn’t just fear. That was identity realignment. Recognition at the soul level. Something—someone—had told hertoo muchtoo fast.
I reached Heinritz’s office just in time to catch the last trailing edge of Hermes’s departure.
Ofcourseit was him.
Oscar West. The god of transitions, of messages between the worlds, always showing up where doors began to crack. His fingerprints wereeverywhere—just like always. Subtle. Playful. Dangerous. His aura still lingered like ozone after a lightning strike.
I didn’t knock. I opened the door.
