Chapter 141: Jigsaw Puzzle
Natalia returned to class on the second day of Winter Term. She was back to her usual cheery self, but Eydis could tell it was only a performance. The subtle fatigue around her crimson eyes hinted at a lack of proper rest.
What surprised Eydis more was that Natalia had returned at all. Had she already learned how to evade mind-reading? As Lionel had come clean to Natalia, for her safety, he would never have let her return without proper preparation.
“I haven’t had the chance to thank you, Eydis,” Natalia spoke quietly as they walked through the empty courtyard. It was lunchtime, and the students had dispersed throughout the academy’s indoor campus, from the dining hall to the library to the common room, in pursuit of warmth.
“Thank me? What for?” Eydis feigned puzzlement. “Did I somehow cure a global pandemic in my sleep? Negotiating world peace between dreams? Or, by some unfortunate accident, locate my doppelgänger across the multiverse?”
“I… w-what? You’re joking, right?” Natalia looked utterly baffled.
Eydis tilted her head, lips curving. Splendid. So far, Natalia suspected nothing at all. Eydis had no desire for anyone else to uncover her secret, especially when she still wasn’t certain she could trust Elias.
“You’re definitely messing with me. Uh, anyway,” Natalia said quickly. “Lionel couldn’t stop talking about you. I think you worked your magic with your mouth—WAIT—your words. I mean your words!”
In a moment of poor judgment, Natalia hooked her arm through Eydis’s. The Queen glanced down at the sudden physical contact, her eyebrow climbing on reflex, which made Natalia quickly retreat.
“I don’t mind,” Eydis softened her voice. “I’m rather surprised you’ve returned to such… familiar gestures.”
In truth, she did mind the casual touch. She was not one for uninvited contact even on a good day. But since Natalia’s feelings were laid bare, the redhead had consciously avoided sitting too close, let alone making friendly touches. By that measure, this was progress.
Oddly enough… I might actually miss it.
Something in Eydis’s expression seemed to reassure Natalia more than her words did.
“I—okay, don’t read into it.” Natalia let her shoulders relax, pulled a face, and punched Eydis lightly on the arm. “I’m a hundred percent over you. A hundred and ten, actually. Completely uncooked. Physically I’m half-dead thanks to Lionel’s murder workouts, but otherwise perfectly fine. And alive!”
“Dead and alive simultaneously… Glad to hear that. And by training, you mean—”
Natalia lowered her voice conspicuously. “Okay so. Turns out we can do cool things with our minds.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a few seconds, then popped them open with a sheepish grin. “I swear I just did something really impressive. You probably didn’t even notice.”
Eydis allowed herself the tiniest smirk. Oh, she’d felt it. The tether to her Sins had flickered the moment Natalia concentrated. Good for her.
Less good for Eydis.
She still needed to work out how to approach these Boundary Breakers without interruptions. She could not afford to lean on Lust’s power indefinitely.
Illusions, once seen for what they were, shattered. Quite loudly in fact. If these EM-Gifted could mess with the frequency of thought, she would need a different form of communication with her Sins.
“—which is why I’m so done,” Natalia was saying. “I genuinely cannot survive Lionel’s military-coded torture schedule. A hundred push-ups a day? I’ll lose my hair before I gain any muscle. But I am curious about my progress, so…” She paused, her grin gradually spreading wide enough to make Eydis’s eyebrow twitch with a bad premonition.
“So?” Eydis urged.
“So I signed up for the Gifted Showcase!” Natalia announced.
“The Gifted Showcase,” Eydis repeated. When she first saw those obnoxious pink-glittered bulletins, she had assumed — reasonably, she still maintained — that they announced some form of coliseum-style bloodsport.
She had since been corrected, but she was starting to think her first instinct had been prescient. With Orion being here, the last thing Natalia needed was to stand out.
Casting Natalia a sidelong glance, she said, “That is an exceptionally ill-advised idea.”
“First of all, ouch.” Natalia deflated. “Secondly, why does everyone keep saying that? I’m not trying to be A-Class. I just want to see if I’ve improved. I’ve been working really—”
“Promise me something.” Eydis’s voice lost every trace of playfulness. “Promise me you’ll lay low. At ground level. Preferably subterranean.”
Natalia opened her mouth to argue, and was immediately flattened by a pair of human koalas, otherwise known as Colette and Birgit, who had apparently survived their ‘near-death’ bout with the flu and were keen to prove it through high-velocity impact.
“Nat! You’re back!” they wailed in stereo, nearly toppling her.
Whatever warning Eydis had left died an unlamented death. Natalia shot her a panicked, “save me” look as the twins began herding them both toward the dining hall.
“First of all, Enchanté. The look. The hair. You’ve levelled up, for real,” Colette said to Eydis once they were seated. The French girl reached out to touch Eydis’s hair, only to yelp when her glass of water accidentally toppled and soaked her shoes. “Putain.”
While Colette scrambled for tissue, Birgit calmly unwrapped her sandwich and gave Eydis a diagnostic squint. “You look different. I can’t quite place the variable. Was it the glasses?”
Natalia coughed out a laugh. “I know you’re face-blind, but not this face-blind. Can’t you see the difference? It’s night and day.”
“Facial recognition is a soft science.” Birgit took a bite of her sandwich.
Eydis tuned them out and mourned the collapse of her previously functional anonymity. She had begun to understand why the original owner of this body had tried so hard to blend in while doing questionable things in the background
How had she ever ended up choosing Queen of Shadows as a handle?
Eydis had reluctantly asked Elias for help, since the hacker had successfully blended into St. Kevin’s for years without being detected, rather than choosing a more reliable source like Adam.
For there were eyes on her, not just from Orion, Athena, or even Theo, but from nearly everyone she passed in the hall.
She was accustomed to people actively avoiding her gaze like it might personally offend them. In her own realm, no one had dared approach within a transcendental 3.14159 metres of her.
Here, someone had broken into her locker. The interior had been filled — filled — with handwritten confessions, the majority in pink envelopes, the majority authored by women, the majority containing prosecutable sins against the craft of simile, not to mention the enthusiastic abuse of emojis.
“You’re the centre piece of my jigsaw puzzle but I keep trying to rotate you into the wrong place :/ :(. Still I think about you in a weird smiley face way :)”
Eydis shivered internally. That was definitely a threat, and a cringeworthy one at that. She had initially attributed the chaos to Lust’s meddling, but that was absurd, for she had made sure that unpleasant pest only spoke when she allowed it.
Which was never.
The sweet scent of burnt sugar brushed against her mental senses. It was Lust’s sulky protest. She cut it off immediately.
Out of pure irritation, Eydis snatched the orange juice box in front of her and downed it gracelessly. The table fell quiet. Birgit’s cheeks went the colour of a stop sign. The carton had already been half-drunk, and her own muted rose-coloured lipstick overlapped the existing baby pink stain.
She looked up and noticed the same shade of lipstick on the girl sitting across from her.
It had, in fact, clearly been Birgit’s.
Goosebumps rose involuntarily across Eydis’s arms. “My apologies,” she muttered, tossing the empty carton backward into the recycle bin without looking, before taking a sip of her glass of water to wash off the sugary liquid.
Birgit stared. Then stared harder, as though recalculating. She pushed her glasses up her nose with one finger. “Oh. Oh. Now I see it.”
“Illuminate me,” Eydis said flatly, with no genuine appetite for illumination.
“The glasses were never the variable. The hair was never the variable. The — is that cashmere? It might be the cashmere. No.” Birgit shook her head. “It’s just you. The variable was always you.”
“Riveting. You should publish a dissertation," Eydis deadpanned.
“Mon dieu, someone stop her before she actually does.” Colette, dried and re-seated, planted her elbows on the table. “Eydis. Fess up. How many, and is anyone making you feel things, and please rank them if at all possible.”
Natalia choked. “Colette —”
“What? It’s a fair question.”
“We probably shouldn’t—”
“We absolutely should,” Colette insisted. “We spent movie night cozying up in bed together, and Eydis slept through the entire romantic scenes. We’ve more than earned this convo.”
Eydis was composing a scathing dismissal when something darker, richer, warmer displaced the air behind her. She did not need to turn around, already knowing who it was.
The dining hall-slash-cafeteria grew quieter, nearby tables had the wherewithal to pay attention. Colette’s mouth hung open. Birgit’s sandwich stopped moving. Natalia mouthed, “not again.”
Astra pulled out the chair to Eydis’s right and leaned down, her silky silver hair carelessly spilling onto Eydis’s shoulder as though it belonged there.
“Sharing beds now?” said Astra, in that unrushed, yet dangerously smoky voice of hers. “That’s new. Mind if I join you?”
“Eh, Astra, wait, that’s not — we weren’t — I mean the bed was —” Natalia stumbled over her words, while Colette glanced between the three of them with widening eyes.
“I meant lunch,” Astra said with complete serenity, setting her plate of seafood linguine on the table.
“Oh.” Natalia sat back. “Right. Obviously.”
Eydis turned to Astra and her face, without any instruction from her, went ahead and softened. She had long since stopped silently complaining about this.
“Well,” she teased warmly, patting the empty seat. “This seat does appear to be unoccupied by one very brooding, syllable-conserving, not at all ambiguous roommate of mine.”
“Ambiguous? I’m certain I know exactly who you’re describing.” Astra’s lips curved into a tiny smile that melted the ice around her demeanor with explosive force. She lowered herself into the chair and held Eydis’s gaze without the slightest indication that she intended to stop.
Eydis, for the record, did not stop either.
After a moment that had stretched to approximately twice its recommended length, Astra seemed to register that other people existed. She looked away and took a sip from the same glass Eydis had used. The lipstick stain matched perfectly.
Only then did Eydis realise that, in her hurry this morning, she had accidentally used Astra’s shade.
The Saintess studied the rim of the glass before lifting her gaze to the koala twins across the table, whose mouths hung open as if they needed to breathe.
The smouldering heat in her crimson eyes switched off like a light. She murmured, “I’m Astra.”
“We know,” the koala twins breathed together, looking utterly star-struck.
Eydis had a strong feeling it had nothing to do with the introduction. Anonymity, she reflected, had been a pleasant arc while it lasted. She knew precisely whose fault its ending was.
It seemed, perhaps out of jealousy, the Saintess had decided to drop subtlety altogether.
The Saintess in question was currently stealing a piece of Eydis’s bread roll without asking, before placing the linguine and a generous portion of seafood onto Eydis’s plate, where a sad-looking broccoli resided.
Cute.
Eydis rested her elbow on the table and lifted her fingers to her mouth, not quite fast enough to hide the smile that had gotten away from her. She laced her fingers through Astra’s and announced casually, “I hope you don’t mind Astra joining us for lunch from now on?”
A soft smile danced on Astra’s lips, dissolving the last frost in her eyes. And for that, Eydis tuned out the entire world around her.
In the far corner of the dining hall, seated close to a fireplace, Orion remained unmoved.
Her pizza had gone cold twelve minutes ago, she knew because she had been counting, and she had not looked away from the table by the stained-glass window once. Her sea-glass eyes moved only when Eydis moved. Stilled only when Eydis stilled.
When Eydis laced her fingers through Astra’s, and those girls at their table reacted with pure shock, Orion’s head tilted by approximately four degrees. Calmly, she picked up her fork, cut a single neat piece from the centre of the pizza, and placed it in her mouth.
Rotating it slowly with her tongue, she searched for the exact, precise position.
She swallowed it whole, a feline grin spreading across her lips.