Page 17 of Dark Mate

Neve sits beside me. She looks tired. There are shadows under her gray eyes the Cage’s careful diet and sleep schedule shouldn’t allow. She’s been drinking half the tea for six months. That’s six months of the world pressing in at full clarity, six months of hearing the sisters’ footsteps three corridors off, six months of smelling the almond oil go rancid. The tiredness makes sense.

She lays her hand in my lap. When she pulls it back, there’s a ceramic knife in the fold of my skirt—short, pale, no longer than my finger, the blade thin and sharp.

“I took it from the kitchen six months ago,” she says. “After I came back from the presentation. I don’t know how to use it. You probably don’t either.”

I curl my fingers around it. The ceramic’s cool, smooth, lighter than I thought it’d be. The edge catches the light, a thin bright line, sharp enough to mean something. The handle fitsmy palm the way the tea cup fits my palm, sized exactly for a woman’s hand, which makes me wonder if the Ordained make everything this size or if my hands just got shaped by thirteen years of only holding what the Cage hands me. Cups. Spoons. Needles. Brushes. Things that tend. Things that decorate. Things that wait.

This one doesn’t wait. This one has a point.

I press the flat of the blade to the inside of my wrist. The ceramic’s cool over the vein. I can feel my own pulse through it—the little blue jump Mora checks sometimes when she thinks I’m not looking. The knife is the first thing I’ve held in the Cage that the Ordained didn’t hand me. It was taken. Stolen out of a kitchen the sisters keep locked. An act of defiance small enough to fit in a fold of cloth, and I’m holding it, and it’s mine.

“You should have something that’s yours,” Neve says.

I look at the knife. I look at Neve. The gray eyes are steady. The jasmine crown she wove yesterday is dead on the bench between us, the petals brown, the stems gone dry. The fountain runs behind us. A sister crosses the far end of the courtyard, gray robes moving, and Neve shifts to put her body between the sister and my lap. Casual. Practiced. The move of someone who’s been hiding things in the Cage a lot longer than I’ve been seeing them.

“Neve. If I’m presented?—”

“When.” Her voice is flat. “They always say within the week and they always mean three days.”

Three days. The word lands in my breastbone, behind the place the bruised clarity sits, and the two of them pulse together. Three days. Six more cups of tea. Six more doses of whatever the locked annex puts in my blood to keep me soft.

“Three days.”

“Ellie.” Neve takes my face in her hands. Her palms are cool on my cheeks. “You are not stupid. You have never been stupid. The tea made you manageable, not dumb. Everythingyou’ve caught in the last week—the scratches, the wall, the doses, Tessa—you caught because you’re paying attention, not because you’re clever enough to see through some plot. There’s no plot. There’s just the way the place runs, and you’ve been inside it your whole life, and now you’re seeing it from one inch outside.”

Her thumbs press my cheekbones. Her eyes are close.

“One inch is enough.”

She lets go. I hold the knife under the bench. The edge catches the light.

That night, Brother Cassian makes the announcement at the evening meal.

He stands. The dining hall goes quiet the way it always does when he stands, not at a command, just under the weight of a roomful of women turning toward a voice they’ve been trained to trust. The sisters go still. The spoons rest. Even the fountain seems to pull back, like the Cage itself is holding its breath.

“Sisters,” he says, in the same measured warmth he uses every evening, fatherly, sure, the voice of a man who’s never had to question his own authority because the whole place was built to make that authority invisible. “I have joyful news tonight.”

The lantern light catches the bloom sigil on his chest, gold thread. He’s smiling the way he smiles during the best lessons—warm, easy, a man handing out a gift.

“Our sister Ellie has been blessed with a strong fertility reading. I reviewed her this morning, and I am honored to say she will enter preparation within the week.”

The quiet holds for one breath. Then the room opens up.

“How wonderful,” Mora says, and her hand finds mine under the table. Warm, sure, the grip of a woman who loves me enough to walk me to the edge of something terrible and call it holy. She squeezes. Once. Twice. Three times, each one its own little gift of affection.

Ireth hums—not her usual shapeless hum, but a glad, climbing note. Other women pick it up. The humming runs through the hall, dozens of voices threading into a sound that’s almost, not quite, music. The same hum the preparation-wing women hum. The same note. The same rhythm. Like the thing they do to a woman rubs out her own voice and leaves this shared one behind.

“You’ll be beautiful in white,” somebody says—maybe Kath, maybe any of the soft voices that blur together in the warm light.

“The divine instruments are blessed to receive someone like you,” another adds.

Hands touch my shoulder. My arm. The back of my neck. Dozens of women turning to me with the same gentle light in their eyes, the light the tea puts there, the light that saysthis is good, this is right, this is what we were gathered for.

I eat. I smile. I say thank you to every touch, every congratulation, every small kindness. I do the gratitude the Cage wants, because the Cage is the only stage I’ve ever stood on, and my lines are the lines they’ve always been, and the audience is the same audience, and nothing about the performance has changed except that now I can see the wings of the stage, and the ropes, and the dark past the lights.

After dinner, alone, I put the knife under my pillow.

I lie in the dark with the ceramic edge pressing up through the down, and I feel something I don’t have a name for. It isn’t fear; the tea dulls that. It isn’t anger; the tea flattens that too. Something under both. The thing I’ve been carrying lower and lower with each dose. It sits in my chest and pushes outward and says, in a voice that sounds like mine but cleaner:I don’t want this. And the not-wanting is mine.