Page 25 of Into Ember

“Okay.” I hold up my hand and start counting, because if the world won’t be reasonable I will at least keep records. One finger, pointed at Leif. “Cat.” Second finger, Erik. “Shadow.” Third finger, back down the hall, where Rayner has appeared in the doorway looking exactly zero percent sorry. “Dreams.”

I let the three fingers hang in the air.

“Is there one normal privacy violation left, or have you people collected the entire set?”

Silence. Gunnar’s mouth twitches. I pivot to Brock, because he’s the only one who hasn’t confessed to anything and I need one win this morning.

“You.”

Both hands come up immediately. Palms out. “No dreams. No cats. No shadows.”

“Thank you.” I could cry. “Thank you. Finally. One normal—”

“Mostly.”

“…Brock.”

“What?” He shrugs. “I read people. Not minds — people. Faces, voices, what they mean underneath. And I’ll point out that I didn’t even know you existed until we saw you in the nest, so whatever timeline of crimes you’re building, I’m barely on it.”

He says it like he’s submitting evidence for the defense.

I realize nobody is breathing and it hits me.

“…The what?”

Nobody moves. It’s the dinner table all over again, except now it’s six a.m., half of them aren’t wearing shirts, and every face turns toward Brock — except his. His is on me, and surprise crosses it. Real surprise. Apparently that’s a thing that can happen to him.

He didn’t know I didn’t know.

Or he forgot.

I’m not sure which is worse.

All I know is I need to know now.

“The nest,” I say. “What nest. What NEST, Brock.”

Somewhere to my left, Gunnar makes a sound. A tiny one. The sound of a man clamping down on the funniest moment of his century.

“We may have skipped ahead,” Leif says.

“SKIPPED — " I take a breath. It doesn’t help, so I take another one, and that one doesn’t help either, and fine. Fine. “Kitchen. Now. All of you. Coffee is happening, and then testimony is happening, and I want the whole of it — the cat, the shadows, the dreams, the nest, whatever Gunnar’s deal is—”

“Rude.”

“I stand by it. I want all of it, because I have been here one day and I still don’t know where here IS, or what any of you actually ARE, and I am done finding out by accident.”

They start moving. Sleepy, chastened, enormous — trooping past me toward the stairs one at a time, and it should feel like winning and instead it feels like the part of the movie right before the map gets unrolled.

Rayner comes last.

He stops in front of me. He’s quiet, and the hallway’s quiet, everyone else’s footsteps going down and away, and up close in daylight his eyes are exactly the color I didn’t make up.

The noise goes out of me all at once.

“You were really there,” I say. “In my dreams. That was really you.”

“Yes.”