Page 97 of Reckless Heir
"Find my?—"
"In the dark." He looks at me. "You find me, or you find whoever finds you."
I understand, then, what's underneath the resignation. "And if I find the wrong person."
He doesn't answer immediately. "The tradition has rules about what that means."
"Tell me the rules."
"The person you find — if it isn't your Heir — has claim over you for the remainder of the event." A pause. "It's an old tradition. From when the Orphan structure was more absolute."
I think about who else will be in the dark. I think about Dimitri.
He's been in the edges of everything since October. At the Masquerade, on the yacht, at the Met Gala, in a corridor at St. Gabriel with an envelope. Whatever he's been building, he's been patient about it, and the Mirror Game would be exactly the kind of setting he'd use to make a move. A tradition with ancient rules that give cover for things that wouldn't be permitted in other contexts.
"You'll find me," Aleksei says.
It's not quite a command. It's not quite reassurance. It's somewhere between the two — the specific quality of a man who trusts a variable he can't fully control and doesn't like the feeling.
"I know," I say.
The address is a skyscraper in Midtown that stopped being occupied four years ago — fifty-three floors of glass and emptiness, the kind of building that's too expensive to repurpose and too visible to demolish, so it simply waits. The cars drop us at the service entrance at 11 PM on a Thursday, a dozen of us filing in without speaking because the invitation was clear:come prepared for silence.
Outside, Manhattan. The city goes on indifferent to whatever this is. Inside, the lobby is lit with the same under-floor lighting as Aleksei's poker table — amber, minimal, just enough to see by. Screens have been installed in the elevator banks: a numbered sequence, a set of instructions.
You will enter alone. You will be led through the rooms. When the lights cut, you will find your House.
"What does that mean?" I say, low, to Aleksei.
"Exactly what it says." He looks at the screen without readable expression. "It's a test. The rooms will show you things. At the end, the lights go out."
"And then what?"
He glances at me, briefly. Something in his jaw. "You find me."
"How?"
"You'll know."
I search his face for something more specific and find nothing. He looks back at the screen and I understand: he can't tell me how, because the game is designed to be told without preparation. The instruction is the thing.You'll know.Either you do or you don't.
The elevator opens.
He doesn't touch me. He stands very close for a moment — the specific proximate quality of a man choosing not to reach for something he wants to reach for — and then the attendant calls my number and I step inside alone.
The rooms are mirrors.
Not all of them literal — the first is a corridor of glass panels reflecting my own face at angles, multiplied into a hall of Sofias stretching to vanishing point. The woman in the glass wears the gray plaid uniform from the first day. The barcode tag on the lapel glows under the low light.
Property.
I stand in it for a moment.
I've been in this building for three months. I've sat through the blood oath in a concrete room that smelled of antiseptic and old stone. I've worn the uniform and eaten in the dining hall and attended seminars on syndicate law and asset valuation and the criminal intelligence methodology that this school uses to teach its students to think of people as resources. I've said the words:I have no house but what is given. I have no name but what is granted.I said them in a voice that barely shook.
The woman in the glass looks like someone who knows what that cost.
She's still here.
