Chapter 157: Whose Pendant

The pendant sat in the middle of the palace sitting room’s low table, on a folded white cloth Marro had produced without being asked, and nobody wanted to be the first to touch it.

Morning light came through the tall windows and lay across the stone as if it had no idea what it was being asked to light up. Mireille sat nearest, hands flat on her knees. Keiko sat beside her with the wooden spoon back in her cardigan pocket, for reasons no one dared question. Kaelith, Wren, Tetsu and Selene made a loose ring around them. Ryuji had not slept. He stood at the window with his arms folded and his heart doing something he refused to look at too closely.

[System Log: Day 163]

[THE PENDANT HAS NOT STOPPED GLOWING SINCE LAST NIGHT]

[IT IS PULSING AT FIFTY-TWO BEATS PER MINUTE]

[I WILL NOT EXPLAIN WHY THAT NUMBER MATTERS TO ME]

[...]

[I AM TRYING VERY HARD NOT TO HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT A NECKLACE]

"It is not an attendant’s anchor," Kaelith said at last. She had not touched it. She held her hand a finger’s width above the stone, and the glow flickered across her ancient face. "An attendant’s anchor carries one thread. One bearer, one world. This carries three."

"Three," Wren said. She had gone pale.

"I can read two. The oldest is the same craft that built the Drowned Spire. The second is newer, and it has been tuned to one person." Kaelith turned her head toward the window. "It was made to answer to you, Ryuji."

He said nothing. His mother’s hand moved to her mouth.

"And the third," Selene said.

"I cannot read the third," Kaelith admitted. "It is not hidden. It simply does not belong to any pattern I know."

Ryuji unfolded his arms. "Someone put that in my mother’s things. Only one person had the chance."

"Dmitri," Mireille whispered.

The name hung in the room like a dropped plate. Ryuji had heard it spoken maybe a dozen times in his life, always by Keiko, always with a softness she never used for anything else.

"I need to tell Selene something first," he said. "Before the rest of this."

Selene turned, and he saw her brace.

"I told you my father died when I was seventeen, of a heart attack, and that we were never close. That part is true. His name was Dmitri Volkris, and he translated cargo manifests at a harbor office. He hummed when he worked. I barely remember his face." He held her eyes. "Then I told you stories about a father I fought with and fled from, and I let you think it was the same man. It wasn’t. That was Kuroda, the old man I worked for after Dmitri died. The one who fed me and beat me and taught me everything I know about staying alive. I called him father at his funeral. I couldn’t cry for him either."

The room had gone very still.

"You let me grieve the wrong man," Selene said, quietly.

"I did. I didn’t mean to. It was easier to keep them as one man than to separate them." He swallowed. "Dmitri was the good one. I just never learned how to talk about the good one."

Selene studied him for a long moment. Her jaw was tight, and the void around her fingertips had gone cold and very still. Then she let out a breath through her nose.

"Thank you for correcting it," she said. "I will be angry later. Not now."

"Fair," Ryuji said.

"Tell me about the good one."

So Mireille did.

She spoke slowly, staring at the pendant rather than at any of them. She had been posted to the harbor in a city called Yokohama, in a world that smelled of salt and diesel, to watch a place where the air bent badly on foggy nights. For months she saw nothing and reported nothing. Then, one night, a thin man in a rumpled coat came walking down the dock with two paper cups of tea and offered her one.

"He said, ’You’re watching it too,’" Mireille said. "Not a question. I nearly ran. Then he told me his grandmother had watched it before him, and his great-grandmother before that, and that nobody in his family had ever once been thanked for it."

"He was a keeper," Kaelith said slowly. "Of your world’s end of the tear."

"A line of them," Mireille said. "Dmitri was the last. He never told me who trained him. He said, ’Later.’ He always said later." Her voice cracked. "I stopped sending reports because he asked me to stay, and because for the first time in four thousand years of my people’s duty I wanted something that was mine."

Keiko reached over and took her hand without a word.

"And the pendant," Selene prompted gently.

"The week before the accident, he told me that if the watch ever took me from him, he would make sure the boy had a way to find me. I thought he was being dramatic." Mireille laughed, wetly. "He was a man who irons his socks. He was never dramatic."

Ryuji felt the floor tilt a little under him. "He packed it in your bag."

"He must have. I have never seen it in my life." Mireille looked up at him. "Ryuji, he knew. He knew the seal would come."

"Closed casket," Keiko said, very low. "I told them it should be open. He insisted, Dmitri did. He wouldn’t let anyone see her face."

"Because there was nothing in there," Tetsu said, and then winced. "Sorry."

"Because there was nothing in there," Ryuji agreed.

For a while nobody spoke. The pendant pulsed against its cloth, fifty-two beats a minute, patient as a metronome.

Selene stood and crossed to his side at the window. She did not take his hand. She stood close enough that her shoulder touched his arm, and he understood that was the best she could do and also a great deal.

"You are going to want to go back," she said, very low, so only he could hear.

He did not answer fast enough.

"I am not accusing you," she said. "I am telling you what I saw when you looked at that cloth. You looked like a man standing at a door." Her mouth tightened. "I have spent a year learning to be someone you chose. I did not think about what happens if the person who chose you most never left a door open for me."

"Selene."

"Let me finish." Her voice shook once and steadied. "If you go, I want to be told, not found out. And I want to be asked whether I am coming, not informed that I should wait."

He turned to face her fully. "If I go, you’re coming. I was never going to ask any other way."

"You say that."

"I also said I’d stay in a kitchen with a woman who wanted me dead. How’s that one working out?"

Her mouth twitched, against her will. "Do not use my own attempts at murder to win an argument."

"It’s the best evidence I have."

She exhaled, and some of the stiffness left her shoulders. "I am still afraid," she admitted. "But I believe you. That is not the same as not being afraid."

"I know," Ryuji said. "I’ll take it."

Wren cleared her throat from across the room, apologetic but firm. "If I may. The older craft in this pendant. I believe I have seen something similar."

"Where," Ryuji asked.

"Not here. Not in Avarthos at all." She frowned. "In the village. There is an old story the attendants tell their children. Of two keys, made by the sealers, one for each end of the door. When the sealers died they hid the keys in different worlds, so no single enemy could take both."

"Two keys," Kaelith said, and went rigid. "A seal held by two anchors. That is why the five of us could close the Door at all. The ritual did not seal it. It borrowed strength from the one anchor that has been on this side of the world since this morning."

"You mean," Ryuji said, and looked down at the pendant.

"I mean you have been carrying one half of the lock for twenty years," Kaelith said. "And I think the Door’s attention last night was never about the ritual. It was about you."

Mireille went white. "Then the other half."

"Is still in your world," Kaelith said. "And if the thing beyond the Door has learned what the pendant is, it will want the other one very badly."

The pendant flared, once, so bright that Tetsu swore and Yui, who had slipped into the room unnoticed and now stood in the doorway with a mug of tea, dropped it. It did not break. Light spilled upward in a thin, steady thread, and the thread bent, as if someone had pulled it, and pointed through the wall toward a direction none of them could name.

"What is that," Yui whispered.

"A line," Kaelith said. "From this half to the other. The way the cord runs between two bells."

Ryuji walked to the table and put two fingers on the glowing stone.

It was warm. It was warmer than his mother’s hand had been the first time he held it, in the cathedral, after twenty years. It was warm the way a hand is warm when it has been held for a very long time, and he knew, with a certainty he did not like, that the warmth was not his own.

"Kaelith," he said. "That third thread. The one you can’t read."

"Yes."

"Tell me something. Does it feel alive to you?"

She was silent a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed.

"Yes. It is warm. Far away, but warm." She met his eyes. "Ryuji, the other end of this cord is not a stone. It is a person, and that person is holding on."

The sitting room felt very small.

"Dmitri has been dead for eleven years," Ryuji said.

"Then someone," Kaelith said quietly, "is wearing his signature."