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“Is he still in there?” Sarah asked.
Alice nodded, still staring at Sebastian and Leon. “He is.”
“Oh boy,” William repeated with more intensity and leaned his elbows on his knees.
That was the second time a member of the Ralsdi family had asked that, and their reactions hadn’t exactly been encouraging. “Would they have preferred that I—?”
“No, of course not.” Sebastian didn’t speak out loud, but his arm jerked, and he almost dropped the food off his fork and onto the table. Then he grimaced. “I mean, it might have made things less…precarious. But of course not.”
Leon did not find himself convinced.
“Apparently, he saved Sebbie.” Alice leaned forward and took a dinner roll from the little basket on the tray.
An abashed smile spread across their lips, though Sebastian obviously attempted to stifle it. Yet there was no denying the self-satisfied pleasure that leaked out of him. “He’s the one that put me here.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Alice looked up at them sharply, the tone of her voice uncannily similar to Sebastian’s.
“Hess put me in here.” Sebastian tapped their temple. “Some bigot high on that fear gas ripped me out of my body. Hess saved me.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s very…”
“Look, he cut a hole in himself for me.” Sebastian twisted around and dropped his chin to his chest to show them the ragged gash—scabbing over quite quickly, perhaps a side effect of the torvar poison—on the back of Leon’s neck.
“You sound proud of this.” Leon reached out for Sebastian’s burgeoning feelings of delight and honor, forgetting for a moment the panel of family members across from them.
“I…am, I guess. I mean, you…” Sebastian turned back around to stop showing off his scar to his family and blushed. “I never imagined someone would do that for me. And they should know you did.”
“Leon Hess did this?” William clarified, staring at them intently.
“Well, I’m sitting here in Leon Hess’s body, aren’t I?” Sebastian lifted his chin. “And he can hear you, remember?”
“God, that’s creepy.” Sarah shuddered, picked up a dinner roll, and crossed her legs.
Leon eyed her body language. “Isn’t she a torvar too?”
“They all are, yeah.” Sebastian glanced at his sister before shoving a fork laden with too much food into his mouth. “But they’ve been in their bodies their whole lives. They’ve never had to share one.”
To his family, he said aloud, “Look, we need somewhere to lie low, and as you might have noticed, I need a new body.”
“That’s for sure.” Alice snorted. “We can get you one in the morning.”
“In the morning?” Sebastian sat up. “I was hoping you’d have one in the bunker.”
“We do.” Alice shrugged a shoulder. “In the other house’s bunker.”
The other house’s bunker… The surrealism of this conversation was harder to grasp than the strangeness of sharing a body with Sebastian.
Sebastian groaned. “Not this one?”
Alice’s face softened, and she shook her head. “Not this one. We haven’t replaced the one you took a couple months ago.”
Leon shivered. He understood that it made sense for a torvar family to keep extra bodies on hand, especially given that their younger son was an underground Resistance agent. But it was still uncomfortable to think about the most well-respected family on the continent stashing human bodies in underground bunkers at all their houses.
“You’ll stay the night, and we’ll have the body ready in the morning.” William reached across the table and clasped Sebastian’s knee in the most fatherly move Leon had seen from anyone in a long time.
But Sarah shook her head. “You might want to lie low here longer than that anyway. The capital is in chaos.”
“Ask them what happened to the crowd.” Leon pressed on Sebastian, and Sebastian twitched in Leon’s body. Leon felt him push him back a bit.
