Page 22 of Odder Still
I grip the coin so hard it bites my skin. So many times, I’ve done this, with Lilias, with the Murk, with the river people. So many times, I have waited patiently for the axe to drop. Waited for someone else to decide. “You of all people must have a strategy for that. I want to know it.”
“We really must—”
“Now, please.” It’s such a weak plea, one I expect to be met with pitying condescension.
Instead, my cracking seems to break him in turn. His lips part, and the lines multiply between his eyebrows. His gaze goes straight through me, but the weight of his attention is a physical thing, gripping me to my bones, as though we are two people inhabiting the same reality, both of us ghosts, or neither of us so.
“Ah, I ken.” And somehow, by a miracle or a curse, it’s him who stumbles over his words. “I’m sorry, it seems I’ve been inconsiderate. Or, let me rephrase that: notseems, buthave. I have been inconsiderate.” He barely draws a breath, charging onward. “I’ve witnessed firsthand what my mother thinks of you—or what she doesn’t think, I suppose—and I don’t want you to feel as though I’m the same. I don’t want tobethe same. You are here because you need help, and if at any moment you feel I can no longer help you, then you are free to find someone else who can. But you can hardly do that when you don’t understand what help I’m offering.”
My fear cracks into ugly, stale chunks. Past trauma has rotted them inside, but I try to look beyond it, to hope. Tavish was an ally when I didn’t even realize I needed one. He might continue as such. No betrayal or misuse or abandonment. The thought won’t silence my doubts, but it lets me sidestep them into something almost peaceful.
“All right. You’re forgiven, this time.” It’s the same words he used, the same tone, but it feels different now: feels like every soft, tight emotion I’m holding in my chest. I take one step, then the next, and the rest just follow.
Tavish joins me.
“This laboratory you mentioned? We’re going there now?” I play with my coin as we descend the stairs, Sheona far enough away that it would almost feel private if she wasn’t so obviously listening.
Tavish’s face twists up. Despite a full hallway and heavy door between us and the boardroom, he keeps his words barely audible. “The Trench? Och, no. It’s the primary Findlay Inc. laboratory in which the auroras are kept. Taking you there would mean handing my mother full control. I may have shuffled some forms toward their department supervisors, but I don’t trust them not to cave to my mother the moment she enters the room.”
“But all the forms, and everything you told Raghnaid, was that all a lie?”
“I implied what I needed to in order to win this particular battle.” The diamond edge comes into his voice again, aimed not at me but at something larger and farther away, the full expanse of the world, I think, or perhaps just someone who clouds his. “Nothing I’ve levied against her has ever held, though. The temporary experimentation waivers I received from the assembly had very specific wordage that stops any dangerous operations from being forced on you until they decide who officially owns your aurora, but give my mother a day or so, and she’ll pressure or bribe or outright intimidate them into signing it over to her.”
We cross a landing embedded with thin swirls of shells so lovely I feel odd stepping on them. “What will we do once that happens?”
“We, I hope, won’t need to do anything because you won’t be here anymore. I’m contacting Dr. Druiminn to see if she’ll provide us with a medical team—she’s been a fantastic partner in helping reestablish hospitals in the lower since her sister died—and there’s a few Trench scientists I may be able to bribe for assistance. I’m certain Greer O’Cain would be eager to take part as well.” A slight flush tints Tavish’s cheeks, and he fiddles with the top of his cane. “I’m not entirely unselfish in this endeavor. Greer was the company head I’d wished to meet at the beach yesterday. They’re not fond of my family and have taken to ignoring me entirely, but I hope giving them access to this might entice them into working with me in the future.”
“Can we trust them though? How do we know they won’t prioritize the aurora over me, hoping they can keep it after?”
“Greer is stubborn and an asshole at times, but they believe that all life is valuable, even if they seem to despise anything that can walk on two legs.”
A kindred spirit, then. “You know them well for someone who seems to think so little of you.”
Tavish’s expression morphs into a callus stare of superiority so chillingly like Raghnaid that it sends a shiver across my shoulders. “Their misgivings do seem reasonable when you consider one particular side of my family tree—and that my father gleefully abandoned the O’Cains for it. He’s Greer’s little brother, and they’ve never forgiven him.”
“Ah, a typical family feud, then,” I say, as though I’ve been close enough to any of my living family to have had such an experience. I return to bouncing my coin along my knuckles, watching Sheona’s back as she prowls ahead of us.
A guard post appears. Beyond looks like a new building, the architecture somehow even more grand and dramatic, a palace instead of a place of business.
“Welcome to the Findlay Estates,” Tavish announces. “You should be safe here while my mother untangles my bureaucracy and settles things with the assembly.” A grin spreads across his face, a bubble of pride in his voice so soft that it seems even he isn’t sure whether or not to pop it. “She won’t bother you until it’s done—likely won’t even think to look for you here. She’ll have to cut out her own stone heart before she views you as a guest instead of a science project.”
He can’t see the way I cringe, nor feel it mirrored in the parasite’s emotions.
We walk in silence past the guard post and through a set of pearl-crusted archways so magnificent they belong in the citadel of an undersea god. One glance at Tavish, his curls a perfect sweep away from his freckle-strewn face, and I think I’m not half-wrong. But for a kind of god, he is overly anxious. His fear still haunts him in the constant motion of his jaw as he chews on his own tongue, and he recoils from every distant voice.
Sound travels through his elegant palace like rustles in a graveyard, both too loud and too soft all at once. Water trickles down elaborate structures of iridescent stone and polished sapphires, and magnificent external windows reveal the deep blue of an endless sea, while interior glass walls give glimpses of coral and fish. The first signs of home life appear—sitting chambers completed by grand pianos or art displays, and a dazzling dining area with a chandelier of hanging crystals—but each new room seems just as uncomfortable as the last, everything spread too far apart and so empty of life it could be a tomb.
“Your family certainly doesn’t know the meaning of modest.” Even my faint whisper feels as though I might shatter this hall’s impossible amounts of glass.
“This floor is used most for events and house parties. My parents both reside seventy-four steps above, in what my late Findlay grandmother dubbed ‘The Tower.’ And this,” Tavish explains, leading me down yet another immense stairway, “is the floor I share with my siblings.”
The shift in scenery is barely noticeable, but the high ceiling does appear a tiny bit lower, the spectacle of it all reduced, slightly. Tavish seems to fit them better, as though their precise level of regality was made for him, or perhaps more accurately,hewas raised to suitit.
Sheona continues on ahead to do what she calls a “perimeter scan” and what Tavish refers to as an “overprotective time waster.”
A minute later we pass a set of cracked open doors to a dark parlor lit only by the faint glow of ignation in the ceiling. A cat pokes its head out. The rest of it follows, its sleek, tabby-striped body a deep blue-grey against its sea-green eyes. Its tail twitches as it walks. It cocks its head at me.
“Hold on,” I tell Tavish, slipping Ivor’s coin back into my pocket. Slowly, I crouch down to the cat’s level and offer it my open palm.
