Page 48 of Fated to the Fang

"Dorian." Celeste's voice is low and careful and afraid. "If we take this up, it does more than split us. It names Helena as the one that opened the vault. Half our people will call it treason. The other half will call it survival."

"And if we bury it, we are them."

A step on the stair. I am between the lamp and the dark before I finish turning, but it's Avery, coming down the worn stone with one hand on the wall, tired to the bone. I promised her the truth. I must tell her.

"Come look," I say.

She crosses, reads the slab where I point, takes the permit and the line into her own hands and holds them to the light.

"This last payment." Her thumb is on the line. "Is it still going out? Is the council still paying him?"

Celeste and I glance at each other. Neither of us answers, which is its own answer.

"And the log upstairs." Avery sets the slab down. "The one that wrote your names when you walked in. Who reads that?"

"Anyone with a senior seal," Celeste says.

"So the people who signed this." Avery is steady, just worn thin and direct. "They can find out you opened it. Tonight."

The dry air seems to drop a degree. I think of the four days I had been counting on, and feel them fold shut.

"We don't have until Friday," I say. "We have until the elders who signed this realizes we've read it."

Celeste wraps the copy in oilcloth and hands it to the runner waiting beyond the archive door. "Bram. Tova. Aldric. Greer, if he can carry it. No chamber channels. No council seals."

"You're exposing this before Helena calls the room," I say.

"I'm keeping proof alive long enough for truth to matter."

I take Avery's hand and we follow Celeste, and I'm no longer certain whether I am running toward the council or away from everything.

31

AVERY

The rain starts before we reach the cliff road, fat and sudden, too cold for festival weather, the kind that feels dragged up from under the harbor instead of dropped from the sky. Celeste peels off at the fork with the slab wrapped in oilcloth under her coat, headed for the people she trusts to keep proof alive if we don't. She doesn't say good luck. She says, "Don't do anything that makes me carry two things tonight," and then she's gone, and it's only Dorian and me.

Somewhere down in the lit part of town, Caleb is sitting in Greer's office believing the worst thing coming is a man with wire cutters and a grudge against a festival. I'd rather he thought that than the truth. It's the only gift I can give him tonight—a smaller monster than the real one.

We reach the old terrace behind his house, the rain has us. Not a drizzle. Soaking thick water. The flagstones are black and slick, the sea throwing itself at the rocks below loud. He stops at the low stone wall, and stands there letting the water run off him like he's forgotten he can move.

"You buried him," I have to shout over the storm. "And she dug him up. You've been suffering with that your whole life and didn't even know it existed."

"I even weighted the chain myself." His voice is flat and terrible. "I remember being grateful it was done."

"I saw your face down there, Dorian. You've already decided how this ends. You walk in, you do what should have been done, and if it costs you everything, that's just the destiny coming due."

He doesn't deny it. Rain runs silver off the sharp line of his cheek.

"That isn't justice," I say. "That's you finishing what you think you finished years ago."

"You don't know what it is to outlive everyone you⁠—"

"No. I don't. I'll probably die in fifty years if I'm lucky, and you'll keep going, and that terrifies you." Close up, the strange wrong temperature of him hits me that I stopped questioning weeks ago. "Don't use my short little life as a reason to throw yours away first. That isn't noble. That's just leaving early so it hurts less."

Something breaks open in him. His hands come up and frame my face.

"I am afraid of you," he says quietly. "Not for you. Of you. Of watching you age and end while I stand here unchanged. I spent centuries making sure I never had this exact thing to lose."