lied. She willed her face not to move, her Made lungs not to breathe. “The princess delivers the treaty and the trick works. Her father makes peace with the neighboring kingdom. All is well.”
“Ah,” said Ayla, more breath than word, a sweet little sigh. “That’s good.”
Neither of them moved for another long moment, just staring at each other in the dark, Ayla’s face unreadable, masked again, this time by moonlight and shadow. She was still shivering.
“You’ll fall ill,” Crier said at last. “We can’t stay.”
And so, drenched and shivering, they pulled themselves back up onto the rocks, the ends of their wet clothes dragging across sand and soil all the way back to the palace. They parted silently at the edge of the garden, and the night felt emptier, the air colder than the water had been, when Ayla left, each of them promising not to speak of what had happened.
That night in her bed, though, moonlight falling through the window like a curtain of white silk, Crier could not stop thinking of Ayla—her face, her words, her curiosity, her habits. The ways she moved and spoke. She was unaccustomed to this lack of control over her thoughts—usually she thought only about her studies, or a book she was reading, or carefully constructed fantasies about the future. She had only ever experienced a similar compulsion, a loss of control, when she listened to a piece of music she thought particularly pleasing, diverting, and then found it playing in the back of her mind, perfectly reproduced, for days. An invisible orchestra. Soft strains of piano and violin, a deep heartbeat drum that only Crier could hear.
Now piano was replaced by the way Ayla’s dark eyes flickered over Crier’s bedchamber the first time she had seen it, the way her gaze had lingered on the hearth, the reading nook, the massive bed. Violin was replaced by the tightening of Ayla’s jaw when she knelt beside Crier at breakfast, hands clasped in her lap, head bent in deference to her lady.
Piano. Violin. And the deep heartbeat drums were replaced with a single question: Why did you save me that day on the cliffs?
Can you sense the human in me?
There were two possible answers to that question, and Crier had no idea which she would rather hear: No, you are the perfect Automa, or . . .
Yes. You are different.
I see you.
No matter how hard she tried, Crier could not force herself to sleep. Ayla was there, always, in the shadows of her mind, looking back, her gaze not like the stars but like the soft darkness that enfolded them.
Stop it.
When she didn’t think of Ayla, she thought of Queen Junn, whose upcoming visit would perhaps finally bring answers to the curiosity in Crier’s mind.
The restlessness drove her out of bed and into the hallways. She just needed to walk around for a little while, to sort out her thoughts. Along with Ayla’s face, she also couldn’t stop thinking about Kinok’s chilling words during the council meeting—even after the night full of stories, the horror of the day, of its humiliation, was still there, alive and hungry, waiting for her in the darkness. Did he really think there was a chance Councilmember Reyka had a Flaw? Surely Kinok had just said it to get under Crier’s skin. A latent threat. But what if there was some truth to it? And now Reyka was gone?
Her mind raced with something—a kind of heat—and she thought again of how Ayla had been when she found her at the celebration: worried.
Crier was worried. What would happen to her if others found out her secret? Found out about her Flaw?
Crier paused for a moment, angry with herself. Kinok had so much power over her, he was ruling even her thoughts.
Maybe she could take some of that power away.
She didn’t know whether Kinok had a copy of her Design papers, but if he did . . . if he did, she wouldn’t put it past him to blackmail her. He could control her for the rest of her life. But if she got it back . . .
Her father and Kinok had remained at the Old Palace with the other Hands. Hesod had told Crier once that all the real politics happened after the official council meetings—laws were created and negotiated and altered in conversation over glasses of liquid heartstone. While Crier had come home early, Hesod and Kinok wouldn’t return until tomorrow morning. Another blow.