Page 14 of Dark Mate

“Mora,” I say. “Do all the cups have names on them?”

“Mm? Oh—yes. The sisters label them. Keeps things orderly.”

“Orderly.”

“Forty-one women, love. Easier to keep track when everything’s got a name.”

Track. She said track. The word sits in my mouth like a pebble, hard, not the word you use about tea. You track animals. You track supplies. You track things that might wander somewhere you didn’t mean them to go.

I drink.

The warmth goes in. The settling starts, that old smoothing, the world’s edges rounding off, the restlessness easing back down where it usually lives. And I feel it happen. I’ve felt it every morning for thirteen years, but this is the first time I’ve felt theshiftitself—the before and the after, the sharp going soft, the sharp dropping away. Like a hand laid gentle over my eyes. Like someone turning down a lamp. The corridor lock goes back to being just a lock. Tessa’s attendant goes back to being just an attendant. The seams of my dress stop pressing my collarbones.

I hate it.

The hate is new. Small, quiet, a candle flame in a windless room. But it’s there. The tea is doing something to me and I can feel it doing it and I don’t want it to. I drink the rest anyway, because I’m not ready.

The world at full clarity was too much. The silk too close. The air too near. The smells too many. I’m not ready to live without the filter, and that cowardice sits in my chest like a stone, because the cowardice might be mine, or it might be the thing the tea builds, the comfort of going numb, the way a cage turns into a home the day you quit testing the bars.

I can’t tell which. That’s the point. That’s what thirteen years of the tea does. It makes you unable to tell what’s yours and what’s the drug.

The tea settles me. The hate settles down with it. Mora goes. The tray’s empty. My cup sits on the bureau with my name turned to the wall, and I don’t know if I’ve always set it that wayor if the sharpness made me do it—hide the name, the proof that the warmth I’ve been drinking has an address.

I go to the garden. The jasmine’s bloomed all the way overnight, the bushes heavy with white, the smell thick enough to taste. Even through the tea’s smoothing it’s stronger than yesterday, the flowers open wider, the petals near see-through in the sun. The olive trees throw their usual shadows. The fountain runs.

Neve finds me inside the hour.

She sits beside me on the bench. Doesn’t speak right away. She pulls a stem of jasmine off the nearest bush and turns it in her fingers, studying the petals like she’s reading something written in code. I wait. Neve’s silences have a shape of their own—not empty, loaded. She’s choosing what to say.

“You skipped the tea last night,” she says.

I look at her. “How did you know?”

“Your eyes.” She tilts her head. Studies me the way she studied the jasmine. “They’re different this morning. Wider. More here.” She taps two fingers to her own temple. “You looked at Tessa’s attendant at breakfast. Actually looked. You never do that.”

“I drank the morning tea.”

“I know. But you missed a dose. The thing runs on doing it every day—one miss doesn’t undo thirteen years, but it opens a crack.” She drops the jasmine. The petals scatter on the stone between our feet, white on pale gray. “How did it feel?”

“Loud.” I can’t find a better word. “Everything was loud. The silk. The air. I could smell layers in my own room I didn’t know were there.”

“The almond oil,” she says. Not a question.

“How did you?—”

“It goes a little rancid after a week. They swap it out every ten days. You can only smell the turn when you’re sharp.” Shereaches into the fold of her skirt and brings out a little clay cup—her own, her name on the bottom. Half full. The amber catches the light, the floral scent rising faint. “I’ve been drinking half for six months. Pouring the rest in the garden when no one’s looking. The jasmine’s very well-watered.” A flicker of something that might be humor, dry, barely there—the first time I’ve seen her mouth curve since she came back from the clearing.

“The withdrawal takes time,” she goes on. “Your body has to remember what full attention even feels like. It isn’t comfortable. The first week I cried every night. Not sad—just swamped. The sheets felt like sandpaper. The fountain sounded like a waterfall. I could hear the sisters’ footsteps three corridors off, the exact weight of each one, and I couldn’t make it stop.”

“Neve—”

“Don’t skip twice in a row.” Her voice drops. Not a whisper—urgency packed down small. She leans in. I can smell her skin under the jasmine, warm and faintly bitter, the smell of someone burning through the tea a different way than I am. “Once sharpens you. Twice makes you restless enough that the sisters notice. Then they adjust the dose. I’ve watched it happen.”

She pauses. Her jaw works, the muscle tightening under the skin.

“A girl named Darya. Two years before you got sharp enough to see anything. Twenty, maybe twenty-one. Dark hair. Strong hands—she’d worked fields before they took her. She skipped three days running.” Neve’s fingers find the jasmine stem again, twist it. “By the fourth day she was asking questions in theology that made Brother Cassian sweat.Why are the presentations only at night? Why do the preparation women stop talking? Where do they go after the clearing?By the fifth day they’d moved her to the preparation wing. By the seventh she was in a clearing.”

It goes into me like cold water. I feel it in my throat, my stomach. My fingers go cold against the warm stone of the bench.