Page 43 of Odder Still
The orca crashes against the glass once more, pounding it with a strength no natural sea creature of its size should possess. The sharp clink of shattering follows. A single crack splits across the ceiling. I continue to move, keeping my gun trained on Malloch. Fear tingles in my lungs. Maraheem must have protections against major flooding, but that will do nothing for me if an entire ocean surges into this library while I’m still in it.
When the orca hits a third time, it produces a sickening crunch, then a soft, terrible drip, drip, drip. A bead of seawater hits my cheek, slipping down to my chin. I turn and shove Tavish out of the library. Behind us, three of the guards watch the ceiling in horror, leaving only one to lunge at us, but they’re fast, their stick slamming into my arm. The parasite engulfs the electric energy, but the force of it still throws me off balance. My feet slide on Ailsa’s flayed books. I miss the doorway and slam into a bookshelf.
An alarm blares through the building, and a massive metal slab rises up from the floor of the entrance, tearing the library’s wooden doors off its hinges as it climbs toward the ceiling. My heart launches into my throat an instant before I throw myself through the remaining space. The tip of my boot catches on the slab. It continues to rise, the sea pouring into the library behind me with a crushing roar.
I wrench my foot free and roll to my feet just in time to make out the guards scrambling to activate their brooches, Malloch already twisting into seal form. The water lifts them alongside Ailsa’s body in a swirl of paper and blood, her personal notebook rising to the top. A tiny wave slips over the lip of the metal slab. Then the seal locks, cutting us off from the room entirely.
The skylight above the hall reveals a sliver of water between here and the next layer of the Findlay estate. Through the gap I watch the mutated orca crush one of the seal-form selkies between its teeth, releasing a cloud of red. I’m almost hopeful it’s Malloch, but a creature with their star-shaped brooch slips by the preoccupied orca, diving into a tighter water channel with the other three guards close behind. At least this high in the city, it will take them time to swim for the nearest gate.
“Rubem!” Tavish shouts over the blaring of the alarm.
“We can’t talk here.”
Distant commotion bombards us all the way down the hall, and even though we see no one, Tavish’s door still feels like a flimsy barrier between us and eventual doom. I pull the deadbolt immediately.
“That was a breach alarm!” Tavish doesn’t lower his voice, its diamond edge snapped nearly back into place.
“The library ceiling caved in.” I scramble into the bathroom as I explain. Sheona’s breathing device sits right where I left it. “I had to stop Malloch somehow.”
“By dousing all the evidence that might have exonerated me?” Cracks form in his words. “Now it’ll be the word of Ailsa’s bodyguard of seven years against the black sheep of the family who inherits the company now that she’s dead.”
I force myself to breathe. Each inhale seems to press against a warm rubber band tied in knots around my lungs. Knots made of darkness with rainbows in their centers. “Fuck.”
“What am I going to do?” His stable exterior breaks, revealing panic etched in something darker and fuller than fear, something that resembles the moment before an empire collapses.
“You tell the BA you’re innocent the same way you told that boardroom you needed me!”
Tavish’s pale face turns so ghostly that the red flush that blotches between his freckles looks like a rash. “I cannot—this is not what I’ve practiced for. With how much I panic—they’ll see right through me. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize.” A part of me thinks he’s wrong. He can do this, whatever he says. But I can’t convince him of it if he doesn’t want to believe it. Just as with our innocence, the only piece of evidence I can offer comes from personal anecdotes: the way my knees grow weak when he steadies his shoulders and my heart skips a beat when he walks through the world as though he could turn it inside out with a flick of his cane.
Now he does the opposite, half collapsed and half strung up, and from the way his voice trembled back in that library, it’s too much to ask any more of him. He just lost his second sibling in two days, while his mother runs his plans for me into the dirt, and the universe seems bent on dragging the foundations of his life out from under him. This would be too much for any single person to bear, even him.
“Is there anywhere you can hide for a bit?” I ask. “Someone here that would shelter you?”
“Thisisthe one place that should shelter me!”
“What will happen to you if you stay?” I almost don’t want to know.
“They probably won’t hurt me. I’m a Findlay, after all.” This little laugh is broken and bitter. “But if the assembly puts me on trial, it will cause a power war between the big seven. With Ailsa gone, I am, technically the last Findlay heir to the company, and most of the other heads will be thrilled to push Findlay Inc. out of our family’s hands, even if they have to play a long game to do it. If they have no one else—no one with obvious guilt—they might lock me up or deport me to one of the other smaller cities just because they can.”
“So we find them someone who looks even more guilty.” I don’t have time for this—I know I don’t have time for this. But with Tavish’s future on the line, I can’t just leave him here to suffer. “The weaver symbol is the sign of the lower districts’ revolution, you said?”
Tavish’s brow tightens. “Aye, but the assassin used ignits as weapons. Even the wealthier upper citizens barely have access to those, and every loan is recorded and signed for.”
“Lilias has some.” The full picture hits me, not like a wave or an avalanche, but like the rising tide, something I’ve felt creeping in around my ankles for hours and simply needed to open my eyes to notice. “She brought back a whole bag of them from the South. She’s from the lower, wants to gain control of the auroras, and has a stock of ignits and few enough morals to consider murder a good option. She might also have access to the upper city—she’s determined enough that I doubt she’d let the gates stop her.” The only thing that theory fails to cover is her fighting style, but my encounter in the pool room is too blurred by alcohol to tell whether the cloaked assassin’s attacks match with what I know of Lilias’s or not.
“She just got back to Maraheem,” Tavish protests. “Alasdair’s death was the very day you escaped her.”
“And she came to the city right beforehand, left me alone in Falcre just to visit Maraheem. Is that a coincidence? She has a partner working in the city. They might have set things up for her.” The thought of tracking her down makes my skin tingle, tracing sparks along each of the veins the parasite has woven into. “If nothing else, we know she’s up to something—something the big seven won’t be happy with.” My gut twists. Am I doing their dirty work for them? But Lilias deserves this, and Tavish and I deserve to see her behind bars instead of him.
He still doesn’t look convinced. “If we run, I’ll appear all the more guilty. And unless we find the culprit, that will only make things harder on me later.”
“You could always leave Maraheem.” I can feel myself tense under the words just as surely as he does. “I’m not saying you should, but it’s only an option as long as you’re still free.”
That seems to drive a stabilizing wedge into Tavish’s fissures. “No. This is my home and I won’t abandon it.” He closes his eyes. “But you have to save yourself; find someone who can coax that aurora out of you. I’ll be fine here, one way or another. It’s you I’m worried about.”
Then come with me, I want to say, but his decision already takes up too much space in my chest. I knew our friendship would always be short-lived. My goal is still to sit on my porch again, just me, my pets, and a bottle of wine. Tavish was never going to be a part of that.
