There was nowhere left to look.
No. It wasn’t that, but it was still the same – there were so many places to look, infinite places to look, worlds. Plural. Every effort felt futile. Croe could have just as easily counted the Sahara’s grains of sand…not to say she didn’t try. She was giving the search everything she had, using every skill she’d learned as an intelligence operative, as a criminal, as a bounty hunter. The breadth of her experience was well-suited to this task and still, it was impossible.
But it was equally impossible to stop.
She’d begun with Shyllipa Major. It was too obvious, but Croe could not leave an obvious lead unexplored, even when every instinct told her he would not be there. The command “Mallos” had given to release his greatest enemy went unremarked, thanks to Allliannah’s intervention, and the nymph worlds were quiet, blissfully unaware. Croe had been careful not to tell them that Mallos was missing. She was careful not to tell anyone, though the whole Council knew, now. First one chairman, then a second…when Croe finally found him, she’d have to give the search for Tsi a lot more of her attention.
“When.” Not “if.” But it had been three days, and Croe had run out of leads. In the hours between midnight and dawn she’d arrived at the penthouse in Granada and collapsed onto the couch, too heartsick and frustrated to lay down in their bed in Madrid. A few hours later she’d awakened with a jolt, somehow more tired than before. She needed to think, regroup, look at this whole fucking mystery with fresh eyes…So she’d made coffee, and she’d showered for the first time since Moraira, and she’d smoked half a pack of cigarettes as she rifled through drawers and bookshelves. She was stabbing one into an ashtray in the bathroom, glaring into the mirror, when she heard Sperantia arrive. In the span of a breath she was standing in the doorway, taking in the scene, hope dying on her lips.
Sperantia looked terrible. Croe watched her clumsy progress up onto the couch, her mouth a hard line. Without a word, she walked into the kitchen, pulled out a shallow soup bowl and filled it halfway with water. They did not get along, were barely more than enemies observing a truce, but that cat loved Mallos and Croe would be damned if she showed her anything less than the courtesy she’d afford a colleague. She was carrying the bowl into the living room when Sperantia began to pace, making her pause.
And there it was. The encore.
Croe stared at her lover’s familiar, her face almost neutral – almost, except for the hint of pain that tightened the corners of her eyes. It was ironic that her memory was nearly perfect, now that she had one at all; she could recall the details of that encounter with perfect clarity. Obviously, so could Sperantia.
But even with a memory like that, crystalline and vivid enough to pass for present tense, it was incomprehensible. Croe could not imagine the frame of mind she must have had, to default to something like that with so little provocation. She’d been willing to kill before, had been able to table empathy as needed, but always within systems…always for a reason. There had been a higher calling at work when she had trespassed, and lied, and stolen, and killed for the Alliance. Without those things…the monster she had become on Shaman was all her – all of her faults with only brief flashes of her virtues. And if it had not been for Mallos, she would have stayed that way. There, the irony continued; everyone assumed they would bring out the worst in each other, but somehow, they brought out the best.
She’d started down that path back to her humanity with an outrageous threat against the person she now loved. It might have been funny, in the way the absurd can be, if she weren’t so painfully reliving it in retrograde.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, with feeling. She wanted to tell her she understood, that she wouldn’t forgive herself either, in Sperantia’s place. She wanted to explain that she wasn’t the same person anymore. But she knew that would be a lie; Croe was still the warbird, the burden of memory and the tethers on her heart were the only things augmenting her ethics. Maybe anyone would unravel in the same way without those things…or maybe deep down she was a demon, and others had angels inside them. Weightless hearts.
Maybe some people really were good.
Croe held the cat’s gaze with her own a moment longer, enduring it like a burn. “I know that’s not enough, but I’m sorry. And I promise I will find him.” She set the bowl of water on the end table, and moved toward the window on soundless feet. Her reflection was superimposed over the city like a blot of shadow. Somehow, it still looked small.
Because the world is vast. Exhaustion settled over her, heavy and thick, blurring the edges of her vision with darkness. She reached for the half-drawn curtain to draw it back, let the bright Spanish sunshine chase some of those shadows away. It hissed across the curtain rod and rustled against the floor – the scrape of metal and fine silk. Croe blinked blearily at the hill it revealed in the distance. A hill capped by a fortress, golden in the light.
There was no sound but the roar of blood through her ears. Croe could hear her own heart stutter.
“He could be anywhere, but what’s the worst place ‘anywhere’ could be.” Her voice sounded as sharp and tinny as those metal rings in their slide, completely at odds with the avalanche of rage crashing through her. Her voice should have been fire, the rumble of a bomb. If he was there…if that imposter had left him there…
There would be hell to pay.
“Let’s go,” she said through gritted teeth, shadow already gathering around her hands.
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