He woke the way he sometimes woke from the worst of it, all at once, the body snapping back into the room before the mind had finished deciding whether it wanted to return.
He lay still for a moment. The ceiling of his dormitory room. The familiar cold of the stone walls. The window set high in the wall letting in the particular grey of early morning that was neither dark nor light but something uncomfortable in between.
He sat up.
Then he said it, reluctantly, like a word he had not decided to say until it was already out.
Solandre : "Vela."
She emerged from a mass of black that surfaced from the floor the way oil surfaced on water, slow and without apology, and stood in the morning light of his dormitory room.
He had seen her in the garden. He had seen her in the dark and in the grey of a night that had ended badly. He had not seen her like this. In the ordinary light of an ordinary morning, with the window casting its pale rectangle across the floor and the sounds of the academy beginning outside the door, she was extraordinary in a way that the dark had actually understated. Her black hair. Her black eyes with the depth that had nothing to do with colour. Her skin in the morning light was the white of something that had never needed warmth and did not miss it.
He noticed all of this the way he noticed everything. From a distance. Without letting it move him.
Vela : "What do you want?"
Solandre : "Two questions. What is the power I received?. And have you made pacts with other humans before me?"
She looked at him with the patience of someone who had been asked questions before and had decided in advance how much of each answer to give.
Vela : "The blade you saw last night is yours now. It lives in shadows. Yours and theirs. You can bring it through any shadow you choose, including the shadows of other people. A wound from it does not simply injure. It opens the person to you. Their senses. Their perception. What they feel. What they fear. All of it becomes something you can reach into and rearrange."
She paused.
Vela : "As for your second question." Another pause, longer. "You are the first."
He said nothing.
There was something wrong with him this morning and he had known it since he opened his eyes. Not the wrongness of grief or horror. Something quieter and more shameful than either of those things. A discomfort that had nothing to do with what he had witnessed in the garden and everything to do with the fact that what he had witnessed in the garden was not disturbing him the way it should have been. Less than a day had passed. Seven people were dead. Sera was dead. And he had woken up, and the ceiling was the ceiling, and the walls were the walls, and somewhere underneath the discomfort was something that felt uncomfortably close to normalcy.
He kept that to himself.
He was aware that Vela could read intentions. He kept it to himself anyway because keeping things to himself was the only reflex he had left that felt like his own.
He thought about what she had said last night.
You never valued them. You are the one who came here and made your offering.
She had been right. He had known she was right when she said it and he had refused her anyway, the way he refused things that were true but unbearable. He had spent the hours since constructing reasons why the fault lay elsewhere. The Devil. The pact. The memory she had shown him, which could have been fabricated, which he could not prove was real, which he had chosen to believe was real because believing otherwise required a different kind of courage than he currently had access to.
And now he was doing it again.
Standing in his dormitory room blaming a concept for his own comfort.
He looked at Vela.
Solandre : "What do you represent. Tell me again."
She looked at him with the particular attention of someone who had already seen where this was going and was waiting to see if he would get there on his own.
Vela : "Hypocrisy."
The word landed the way certain words landed, not loudly but with weight, the weight of something that had been true for longer than the conversation had been happening.
Hypocrisy.
Is that what this is. Is that why I feel like this.
He stopped.
No.
The thought arrived before he could stop it and arrived with the specific clarity of something he had been avoiding since he opened his eyes. He was doing it again. Right now. In real time. He was taking the feeling, the horrible comfortable feeling of a morning that felt too normal, and he was placing it outside himself. Attributing it to the Devil. To the concept. To the pact.
As though his own comfort were something that had happened to him rather than something that was simply him.
He stood very still for a moment.
The mix of feelings that followed had no clean name. Bitterness. And underneath it, worse than the bitterness, something that resembled relief, because at least now he knew what he was dealing with. He was not broken. He was not failing to grieve properly because something was wrong with him in some new and unfamiliar way.
He was exactly what he had always been. And that was the part that made him sick.
He walked to the bathroom without speaking. The shower was cold the way it was always cold and he stood in it longer than necessary and did not think about anything he could help not thinking about.
When he came out Vela was gone.
She was not gone. He could feel her in the way he could now feel shadows, a peripheral awareness that moved when the light shifted, present in the cold that settled along the tattoo on his back whenever she was near. It was not unpleasant. That was also something he chose not to examine too closely.
He dressed. He stood at the window.
From the small window of his dormitory room he could see Paris. The part of Paris that remained, the part that existed inside the barrier, the cobblestones and the rooftlines and the iron balconies and the particular morning light that fell across the city's pale stone and made it look, for a moment, like something that deserved to survive.
And further. Past the barrier's edge, visible only as a quality of difference in the light, the ruins.
Brown and grey and still. The dust that never fully settled. The shapes of buildings that had been buildings and were now something else, something with no function and no name. The silence that he knew was there even though he could not hear it from here. The particular silence of places where many people had been and were not anymore.
He stood at the window and looked at both of them. The city that had survived. The world that had not.
Arms came around him from behind.
Vela's hands were cold the way she was always cold, one settling at his throat, the other tracing along his jaw with the deliberate patience of something that had decided to take its time. He did not move. He was aware of the tension in his body and aware that it was diminishing and aware that he did not entirely understand why her proximity produced that specific effect and chose not to investigate.
Vela : "You stand here every morning, don't you." Her fingers traced along his jaw slowly, unhurried. "Looking at what remains. Looking at what was taken." A pause, soft and deliberate. "Tell me, Solandre. What is it that you truly want to change about this world? What keeps you standing at this window instead of looking away like the rest of them?"
It was the first time she had used his name.
He noticed that. Filed it without reacting to it.
Solandre : "I hate them. Both of them. The angels and the humans. Two races that deserve each other."
Vela : "Hate is easy." Her thumb traced slowly along his jaw. "Even the weakest men hate. I am asking something harder than that." She let the silence sit between them for a moment before continuing. "What do you want to change, Solandre? Not destroy. Not punish. Change. What does this world look like when you are done with it?"
He looked at the ruins beyond the barrier. At the grey and brown and still of a world that had been condemned and had refused to accept the verdict and had built a ceiling to prove it and had called that victory.
Solandre : "Anyone who tries to impose their vision on me. On anyone."
Vela : "And if removing them requires becoming something they would also want removed?"
The question arrived the way her questions always arrived, light and unhurried, as though it had no particular weight. It had weight.
Solandre : "I have already sinned. I have already sacrificed." He paused. "I cannot stop now. I have to see it through."
Vela : "See what through, exactly?"
Solandre : "This. All of it. This useless conflict. This corrupted world. I will end it. I am willing to go further than I already have."
She smiled against his shoulder. The smile of someone who had been waiting for a specific answer and had known it was coming long before it arrived.
Vela : "Then tell me. Do you want them dead?"
He did not answer immediately. He looked at the ruins. At the city behind the ruins. At the people moving through that city going about the business of survival with the practiced normalcy of people who had decided that normalcy was the most defiant thing available to them.
Solandre : "I want them to understand. And if they cannot understand then yes."
Vela said nothing.
She simply held him, cold and patient and entirely unbothered by what he had just said, the way something held you when it had already known the answer and had only been waiting for you to arrive at it yourself.
He did not see the smile that remained on her face.
He was still looking at the ruins.