The Ice Queen
"Walk with me."
He hadn't seen her. He'd been rolling his right shoulder, the trapezius still pulling from three days of sleeping wrong and Shiva's habit of targeting soreness like it owed her money, and the corridor was dim enough that a person standing still against the wall could be furniture.
Nyssa Raatko pushed off the wall and started walking before he answered. The answer had been decided before the question.
He walked with her.
She was taller than he'd guessed from across the dining hall. Nearly his height. The militant dress from dinner was gone. Dark trousers, a high-collared jacket that fit like armor but wasn't, boots that made no sound on the stone. Her hair pulled back. The jaw sharper in profile than it had been at distance. Lighter skin, different bone structure from Talia. Further north. Russia, the foreknowledge said. Born somewhere around 1775.
The corridor went down. Stone steps, no railing, torches in iron brackets that the League apparently preferred to electricity because ambiance mattered when you were a death cult. Or because Ra's thought fluorescent lighting was beneath him.
"You're quieter than I expected," she said after a while.
"You haven't asked me anything."
"Most boys your age fill silence. They find it threatening."
"I'm not most boys."
"No." She didn't look at him. "You're not."
The stairs ended at an iron door. No visible lock. She pressed her palm flat against a stone to the right of the frame and the door swung inward on hinges that didn't make a sound.
The archives were cold.
Preservation cold. Long, narrow room, shelves built into the stone on both sides. Scrolls, bound volumes, loose pages in glass-fronted cases, maps in wooden tubes. The torchlight was lower here. UV damage was probably a concern when your collection spanned centuries.
She walked along the left wall without touching anything. He followed.
"Six hundred years," she said. "Give or take. My father's project. Cleanse the earth. Cull the herd. Reset the balance." She stopped at a case holding a map of Europe with red ink marks on it, densely clustered, faded. "Every strategy documented. Every failure analyzed. Plagues engineered and deployed. Political destabilizations. Ecological sabotage. Financial collapses designed to starve specific populations."
She tapped the glass over the red marks.
"All failures. Every one. Humanity grows back. It always grows back. He's tried to kill it in every way a brilliant mind can conceive and the species refuses to cooperate."
Her voice was level.
"He will burn the League to the foundations before he admits the project was flawed. He has done it before. Rebuilt from nothing. Recruited new soldiers, trained new daughters, started the cycle again. He'll spend another six hundred years running the same experiment and calling the results promising."
She moved on. He stayed at the map for a second. The red marks were dense over central Europe. The foreknowledge supplied dates for some of them and the dates were ugly.
"This is your sales pitch," he said.
She glanced back. Her mouth barely moved. "This is context."
"Context for what?"
"For understanding what you've walked into." She kept walking. "My sister won't give you context. She gives you loyalty and the version of my father that she can live with. I give you the version that's real."
She stopped at the end of the archive corridor. The door to the next vault was ahead.
"Whether you do anything with it is your decision. I don't make decisions for other people. That's my father's habit."
The weapons vault was warmer, which was probably the wrong thing to notice about a room full of things designed to kill people.
Larger than the archives. Higher ceiling. Racks on the walls, cases on the floor, blades and firearms and things that sat between categories. A curved sword near the entrance had a placard with Arabic script and a date: 1243.
Nyssa stopped in the center and turned to face him.
"My father has kept two daughters alive for longer than most nations have existed. Do you know why?"
"Biology."
"Do you know why he kept us?"
He waited.
"Competition produces results," she said. "Two daughters who want the same approval will each outperform what a single daughter would produce alone. The rivalry is designed. Talia is the heir apparent. I am the contingency. She outperforms, I push harder. I outperform, she doubles her effort." She picked up a throwing knife from a display rack. Tested the balance on one finger. The blade sat perfectly still. She put it back. "He uses us against each other because the competition generates more value than either of us would produce content."
She said uses like she'd been carrying the word in her mouth for two hundred years. Worn smooth. Still sharp.
"He's not evil," she said. "That would be simpler. He genuinely believes the project is necessary. He genuinely loves us, after his fashion. The fashion is just compatible with treating us as tools."
"Talia knows this."
"Talia knows and competes anyway because the approval is real even when the system is rigged. I stopped competing about a century ago."
"And you've reconciled it."
"I reconciled it when I was younger than she is now." She ran her thumb along the edge of the display rack. "I just took longer to stop being angry about it."
The anger was right there. Buried under the calm, visible in the precise spacing of her words. Each sentence measured, complete. People who'd actually let go didn't speak with that much control.
The Lazarus chamber was below everything else.
Narrower stairs. Damp stone. The air changed as they descended, warmer, heavier, and there was a smell he didn't have a word for. Mineral and organic at the same time. Old.
The chamber opened at the bottom. Large. Natural rock ceiling, uncut, walls half-carved and half-cave. In the center, sunk into the floor, the Pit.
Green. The surface was still, flat, and it didn't look like liquid. It looked like light that had decided to become a substance. The glow lit the chamber from below and turned everything the color of shallow ocean and the shadows were wrong because the light source was in the floor.
He stayed at the threshold.
His skin prickled. Static across his forearms, the back of his neck. His teeth ached, more vibration than pain. And behind his sternum, a warmth that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. A pull. Directional. The Pit knew he was standing there and had an opinion about the distance between them.
His pulse was sixty-two. He checked it against his wrist without thinking. Shiva's habit. The warmth in his chest was steady and the pull was constant and his feet didn't move.
"You feel it," Nyssa said. She was watching his face. "Most people step back."
He hadn't moved. His feet were where they'd stopped and he was caught between closer and absolutely not. The green light was on his hands, his arms, turning the hair on his forearms a shade he'd never seen them.
"What is it?"
"Lazarus chemistry. The Pit interacts with biological systems at proximity. Most people find it unpleasant. Nausea, headache, the urge to leave."
"I don't feel nauseous."
"No." She was studying his pupils specifically. The clinical focus shifting from his face to his eyes. "You don't. Your pupils are dilated but your pulse hasn't changed. That's unusual."
She stepped closer.
Cold perfume. Pine and mineral water. Clean. No flowers.
Six inches. She stopped.
"My sister chose well," she said. "You don't scare easily."
"Your sister scares me plenty."
The corner of her mouth. Barely. "That's not what I said."
Six inches. The green light on both their faces. Her eyes were lighter than Talia's in this light, gray-green, and the perfume was cold against the warmth in his chest and the Pit hummed beneath them in a frequency he felt in his teeth.
He should let it happen. Stand there, be profiled, keep his mouth shut.
"You and Talia love each other more than either of you loves him."
Her jaw tightened. One muscle, left side.
"And neither of you will say it. Because saying it would be the most dangerous thing either of you has done. He built the rivalry to prevent exactly that. If you're competing, you're not conspiring. If you're rivals, you're not sisters."
The jaw muscle still visible. Her breathing hadn't changed but her hands had gone still at her sides. Forced still.
"That is not the observation of a seventeen-year-old boy from Gotham."
His stomach dropped. The Pit's pull steady behind his ribs.
"I pay attention."
"You pay attention like a man twice your age who's seen this pattern before." She was looking at him differently now. The profiling was over. She was looking at him like Shiva did after a cascade exchange that shouldn't have worked.
"I've met controlling fathers."
"Not like mine."
"No."
She held his gaze. The six inches hadn't changed.
"Interesting," she said. Same word Shiva had used. Different mouth. Different weight.
She stepped back first. The six inches became two feet and then three and the cold perfume faded and the Lazarus warmth didn't.
"We should go back," she said. "Training resumes early."
They walked back in silence. Through the weapons vault and the archives and up the stairs. The torches in the brackets had burned lower while they'd been below. One had gone out entirely and the gap in the light made the corridor feel longer than it had on the way down.
A beetle was making its way across the bottom step of the upper staircase. Black, about the size of his thumbnail. He stepped over it. Nyssa didn't notice it or didn't care.
The warmth in his chest didn't fade. Ten minutes since the Lazarus chamber and it was still there, steady and low, like a coal behind his ribs. His body holding onto something the Pit had offered without either of them agreeing to the terms. The foreknowledge had told him about Lazarus Pits. It hadn't mentioned this part.
The corridor leveled out. The compound's sounds returned as they climbed. Distant voices, the scrape of a door, the wind.
Nyssa stopped at the junction where the corridor split toward the east wing and the dormitories. She looked at him. Mask back. Eyes flat.
"My sister's quarters are in the east wing," she said. "I'm sure you know."
"Goodnight, Nyssa."
She looked at him longer than the conversation required.
"Goodnight."
She turned left. He turned right. The corridor was empty and the stone was cool under his feet and the warmth in his chest was still there and he was going to walk to Talia's door and carry the Lazarus heat into her bed and he didn't know what that meant and his body didn't care about the question.
His teeth had stopped aching. Everything else was the same.