Chapter 91: The Sun is also a Star

Chapter 91: The Sun is also a Star

Sebastien

Month 1, Day 21, Thursday 11:30 a.m.

Siobhan was struggling, desperate to escape but trapped in a body that wouldn’t listen to her commands.

A bracing sting on her cheek provided a way out. She woke with a gluttonous gasp of air, bolting upright in a bed she didn’t recognize—a room she didn’t recognize—with someone holding her arms to her sides, restraining her!

She panicked for a good few seconds. Fighting against the shackling grip, she let out a low, panicked moan as she grasping around for her Conduit, which wasn’t there—until Damien’s familiar, if tired, face resolved into coherence in front of her.

He was forcibly keeping her from flailing her way off of a University infirmary bed. “Help! We need help over here!” he yelled, turning his head. “Sebastien, you’re okay. You’re safe,” he said in a lower, soothing tone that did nothing to disguise the worry underneath.

The sound of her other name helped ground her, and she stopped struggling to escape, blinking rapidly at his reassuring grey eyes.

The healer bustled up. “Panic attack?”

“He was having a nightmare,” Damien said. “I tried to wake him, but he wouldn’t, so I tapped him—maybe a little too hard—on the cheek, and he woke up fighting and making these noises like he was hurt.”

“‘M fine,” Sebastien mumbled, still panting, the crashing thump of her heart against her sternum slowing. She looked around, unable to help her paranoia, or the niggling sensation that she was seeing things that shouldn’t exist out of the corner of her vision. In a way, the clear signs of panic were a relief. Her body was reliably responding to the stimuli sent by her mind, which had plenty of cause for hysteria.

“We gave him a strong calming potion along with the sedative—I’m surprised he still managed to have nightmares—but sedatives can make it harder to transition from sleeping to waking. Sometimes they cause sleepwalking and the like.” The woman turned to Sebastien, pulling a vial out of the pocket of her apron “Mr. Siverling, everything is alright. You are safe in the University’s infirmary. You’ve had a big shock, but nothing can harm you here. You need your rest to recover, so why don’t I give you another calming potion, and once you’re feeling better we can help you get back to sleep?”

“No!” Sebastien snapped. “No calming potions. No sedatives. Not now, not ever. Never again! I—I have a bad reaction.” Professor Lacer must have transferred her to the infirmary after free-casting that sleep spell on her. With the sedatives keeping her from waking herself up, she’d been trapped inside her own mind. With her nightmares.

The woman seemed taken aback. “Oh, I’m very sorry, Mr. Siverling. It wasn’t in your file. Are you allergic to any particular ingredient? The laughing poppy, perhaps? We do have alternate brews available—”

“No,” Sebastien said again, more insistently. “Calming potions only with my permission, but never sedatives. Nothing that will force me to sleep.”

There was an awkward pause before Damien spoke, his voice small, the tone almost childish in its hesitance. “Is that what the Aberrant did to you? Force you to sleep?”

The healer’s eyes opened wide, a hand flying up to cover her mouth. “Oh. Oh, I’m very sorry, Mr. Siverling. It was just standard procedure—”

Sebastien ignored the woman, climbing off the bed and searching for her things. Someone had stripped her to her underclothes and dressed her in worn cotton pajamas—the standard garb for everyone admitted to the infirmary overnight, apparently, as she saw others wearing the same on their own beds.

All the bruises she had accumulated the night before were gone, and someone had cleaned her with a spell. She had the dry, irritated skin to prove it, and her fingernails were clean of the blood that had been crusting their edges. Agent Vernor had noticed and taken a swab, but Sebastien had explained that she must have accidentally touched some of the blood on the floor. It wasn’t nearly enough evidence to suspect her of being the one who’d healed Chief, or whatever the maimed Morrow man’s name was.

Thaddeus Lacer being Sebastien’s Master probably had a lot to do with how accommodating the Red Guard had been. Perhaps, without him, she would have found herself locked in a windowless cell in Harrow Hill for the investigation process, and overall much less likely to fool them.

Sebastien’s belongings were tucked under the bed, and a quick perusal showed that nothing seemed to be missing. Her right boot still had the black star sapphire Conduit in it, though it had fallen into the toe. She didn’t mention it, and could only hope that no one had noticed it when they were undressing her. “Leave,” she ordered.

The healer, who had still been babbling about something, quieted, staring at her.

“I want to get dressed,” Sebastien explained.

“You need to stay at least another twenty-four hours for observation,” the woman argued. “Professor Lacer indicated you might be in danger of Will-strain from your...ordeal.”

“I’m fine. Staying in this place certainly won’t improve my mental health. I just want to leave.”

The healer still hesitated, so Sebastien turned to Damien. “Please.” As manipulations went, it was clumsy at best, but it had the desired effect.

Damien turned toward the healer and crossed his arms. “I’ll handle any paperwork.”

Hesitantly, she nodded. Nothing stopped her from doing so, though she felt some resistance.

“Did the Aberrant kill Newton?”

She rubbed her dry lips together. “Not...exactly.”

Damien let out a harsh, ragged breath. “Newton was the Aberrant?”

She nodded again, more shallowly because she could feel the magic of the vow restricting her. In the eyes of the spell, Damien must not know enough for her to communicate with him freely. And whatever that skull had done, this vow was based around compulsion, not the threat of punishment. ‘I wonder how strong the compulsion is, how far I can push it?’ She hesitated before attempting to tell Damien everything, however. Partially because she worried the Red Guard might somehow learn of her unfaithfulness—she had no idea how that artifact worked, after all—and partially because she was simply too fatigued to make the effort. “I’m sorry. I’m really unable to talk about it. If you want details, Professor Lacer knows most of it, though not about the order of no name or our longer-running surveillance of Tanya. You might be able to get more information if you pester him.”

“Are you...are we safe?”

“As far as I know, yes. But you’ll want to avoid acting suspiciously. And give me the bracelet—the one Newton triggered.” The one she had triggered while removing evidence from Newton’s metamorphosed body.

Damien did as she asked, and she tucked it into her pocket with the others, trying to remember if there was anything else waiting to cause problems. She could think of nothing, though in her current state she wasn’t entirely reassured by that.

“Did Newton die because of us?” Damien asked, visibly bracing himself for the answer. “Because we brought him in to watch Tanya?”

Sebastien hesitated. “We never lied to him,” she said instead of answering. “If a copper dies on the job, is it the fault of the person who hired him? Even if he took the more dangerous mission voluntarily, when he didn’t have to?”

Damien didn’t look away from her gaze. “Maybe. If that person should never have been hired. If they weren’t cut out for the job, and then didn’t get proper training.”

She nodded. “Then maybe.” She turned to leave, but Damien stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

She hesitated. “You can get out—of the pact we made, of the secret group—if you want. Your oath of secrecy for anything that’s passed would remain, but you wouldn’t be involved in anything further.” This could be a dangerous tipping point for him. If he withdrew, it might solve some of her problems, but she felt ambivalent about the idea. Without him, she would be even more alone in all this. She hadn’t realized it, but his alliance—his friendship—had become a pillar of support, despite the potential trouble he represented.

Damien frowned at her. “No, I—that’s not what I meant.” He shook his head. “I’m not quitting the thirteen-pointed star. This is...horrible, but I’m not giving up or running away. I just want to know what our next step is, now that something like this has happened. Are we going to be sanctioned by the higher-ups? Do we keep watching Tanya? Do we get transferred to another mission? What is happening?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t think we’ll be disciplined.” After all, aside perhaps from Oliver, their little organization didn’t actually have any higher-ups to reprimand them. “I don’t know if we’ll keep watching Tanya or not. Whatever we do, it will be with more precautions now that everything’s gone to shit. As for the rest, the generalities? We keep going.” She pressed her fingers to her mouth, resisting the sudden and irrational urge to claw at her lips. She didn’t want to be saying any of this, not the lies, and especially not any plans to keep going down the path that got Newton killed. “We get stronger, and smarter. More powerful. If you don’t know what you need to solve your problems, Damien, seize power. True power can be converted into almost anything else.” Her grandfather had told her that, long ago. She occasionally remembered the advice, usually when everything was going wrong. As always, it seemed truer than ever. If she’d been more powerful, perhaps she would’ve had other options last night.

“That’s it? Just...” Damien trailed off, shaking his head. He looked like a lost child.

Sebastien softened. Gracelessly, she leaned over and wrapped her arms around him in what was probably the most awkward hug either of them had ever experienced. She didn’t normally like to touch people, and he obviously hadn’t been expecting it. “Sometimes we fail. That doesn’t mean we were wrong to try.” She fumbled for words, but pressed on. “Do you remember observing the night sky during the acceptance ritual? Sometimes it’s too clouded to see the stars, but the sun is also a star, and its light reaches us through even the heaviest storm. We take responsibility for the things within our grasp, and we keep going. Otherwise what was it worth? What was it all for?”

She didn’t know if what she was saying made any sense. She didn’t even know if she believed it. But she pulled back and kept her gaze locked on Damien’s, trying to imbue it with the sense of stability that she felt so little of.

He was trembling slightly, but he steeled himself, straightening. “Okay.”

She hesitated, then said, “We can do something for Newton even if he’s not here. He had a family. He cared about them a lot.”

Damien pressed his lips together, his eyes growing glassy as he nodded quickly. “Yes.”

She felt awkward about leaving Damien when he was so obviously emotionally compromised, but she wanted to stay in the dorms even less. She had to get away. “Maybe you should go home to Westbay Manor for a couple of days,” she said.

Damien gave her a one-shouldered shrug.

With another uncomfortable squeeze of his shoulder, Sebastien walked away, leaving Damien standing alone in the dorms behind her. Her words of comfort to Damien rang hollow in her ears, and she hugged herself, pressing her fingers into her arms until her joints ached and the dull pain of a future bruise bloomed beneath her skin.

She took the tubes down the side of the white cliffs and hailed a carriage, heedless of the cost. “Take me to Dryden Manor,” she told the driver.