Chapter 273: About Time

She materialized from the side path between the academic district and the spiral hill the way she did everything, without announcement, as though she had simply always been there and the world had only just noticed.

He was not surprised. He had stopped being surprised by Nyx sometime around the third month of first year.

She fell into step beside him at exactly his pace, which meant she had been watching him walk for long enough to know it before she stepped out. Her lavender hair caught the afternoon light. She had her hands in her pockets and the expression she wore when she was performing the absence of urgency, which was a different expression from actually having no urgency.

He let her walk beside him for a moment.

“Isole,” she said, “looked insufferably serene in our session this morning.”

He said nothing.

“Valerica sent a message to her tailor before noon.” She looked at the path ahead. “She only does that when she is in a specific emotional state. I have catalogued the pattern across eleven months.” A pause. “I notice things.”

“I know you do.”

She stopped walking.

He stopped.

They were on the path with the afternoon light coming through the trees above it and the academic district behind them and the hill ahead. The sound of other students had faded to the ambient level of the island at midday, present and distant.

She turned and looked at him. The opal eyes, the swirling depths of violet and something darker underneath, the specific quality of attention she reserved for things she had decided to take seriously. The performance of lightness was present, the coat she wore over everything, but he had learned to read what was underneath it the same way she had learned to read everything about him, which was through sustained observation over a long period of time.

“You opened the boxes,” she said.

“Yes.”

“All three.”

“All three.”

She looked at him. Something moved in the opal eyes. “Isole I understand. Her declaration was formal and she waited the correct amount of time and you are precisely the kind of person who would learn her language to acknowledge it.” She tilted her head slightly. “Valerica I understand. She made something by hand and stood on a hill three times and she is in love with you in the specific way that people who do not permit themselves vulnerabilities fall in love, which is completely and without a tactical exit.” A pause. “I sent three words on a parchment from a hospital bed.”

“They were the correct three words.”

“They were,” she agreed. “I thought about it for thirty-one days in a coma and that was the conclusion I arrived at.” Her voice carried the lightness she used to cover things that had cost her. “The Dreamscape does not fully switch off in induced sleep. It runs slower. It runs without the precision I can normally bring to it.” She looked at him. “It ran toward you. For thirty-one days. I found that inconvenient.”

He looked at her. He thought about the clock tower and the way she sat on high places alone and watched the island at night. He thought about her in the western woods, doing something that nearly killed her, that she had gone and done because she was Nyx and staying out of dangerous things was not in her nature. He thought about the midnight blue box materializing on his desk between Valerica’s crimson and Isole’s silver, the specific audacity of that entrance, the three words that somehow contained everything she was.

“You have been watching me from the clock tower since the leviathan left,” he said.

She was still for a fraction of a second. Just a fraction. “You knew.”

“I looked up once in October. You were there.” A pause. “I looked up in November. You were there.” He held her gaze. “I stopped being surprised around December.”

She looked at him with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously and managing all of them except for one small thing in the eyes that she was not quite managing.

“You could have said something,” she said.

“So could you.”

A beat. Then the corner of his mouth.

She laughed. It was sharp and sudden and genuine, the real one that arrived before she could produce the performance version, and it lasted exactly two seconds before she brought it back under control and looked at him with the opal eyes that were now doing something entirely different from what they had been doing a moment ago.

“I watched you for twelve weeks from a tower,” she said. “At some point the observation became something else. I am not accustomed to things becoming something else without my consent.” She looked at him steadily. “I want that acknowledged.”

“I know,” he said. “You watched the island every night from the clock tower and it was not academic and you sat in a coma for a month and it ran toward me and you sent three words that were the correct three words because in thirty-one days that was the most honest thing you could find.” He looked at her. “I should have said something before the leviathan. I knew what it was. I was not ready to say it correctly and I chose the coward’s option of saying nothing. That is not an excuse.”

She held very still for a long moment. The afternoon light moved through the trees above them and the path was quiet.

“There are others,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I know about the others.” She said it simply, without weight. “I have known about the others in extensive detail for considerably longer than any of them have known about each other. The Dreamscape is not selective about what it observes.” A pause. “I am not interested in being a secret.”

“You won’t be.”

She looked at him with the opal eyes. Something in her settled, the specific settling of a person who has been holding something at a careful distance and has decided the distance is no longer worth the effort.

Then she stepped forward and straightened his collar with both hands. It did not need straightening. She did it anyway, her fingers precise and brief, and when she stepped back there was something in her expression that was entirely real and entirely hers and entirely not performing anything.

“Good,” she said.

He looked at her. “The parchment.”

Her hands stilled.

“You carry it everywhere,” he said. “You have had it since before the western woods. It has something to do with Lancelot.”

She looked at him for a long moment with the eyes that had seen everything. “You noticed.”

“I notice things,” he said.

The corner of her mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. It was the expression she wore when something had surprised her and she had decided to allow that. “There is information I am going to give you,” she said. “Not today. You are not ready for it today and I am not ready to give it today. But you will be and I will be, and when that moment arrives you will understand why I waited.” She held his gaze. “Trust me on the timing.”

He thought about her in the western woods. About what she had gone looking for and what she had found. About thirty-one days in a coma running the Dreamscape toward something she had not chosen.

“I trust you on the timing,” he said.

She nodded once, which for Nyx was the equivalent of a formal agreement sealed in writing. Then she turned and looked up the path toward the clock tower and then back at him.

“Walk me back,” she said.

He walked her back to the tower.

The afternoon was going golden around the Academy’s white stone, the specific light of September on the island at the end of a first day, warm and long and not yet cold. She walked beside him with the hands-in-pockets ease of someone entirely comfortable in the space between two things, which was where Nyx had always lived.

At the base of the tower she stopped. She looked at him once more with the opal eyes, the full attention of the Dreamscape pointed at him without disguise for the first time since he had known her.

“About time, Rat,” she said.

Not the letter. Said out loud, to his face, with the specific weight of three words that had been true for considerably longer than thirty-one days.

She went up.

He stood at the base of the tower for a moment in the afternoon light, and then he turned and walked back down the hill toward Villa 4 where Mara had already started dinner and the bird was on its wall and second year was three days old and there was still one more thing left to say.

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