Edwin Vale had told me to rest. The irony of it followed me upstairs. Three days earlier, Vale had helped lure me into a hospital basement, where hired Beyonders surrounded me and attempted to drag me back to Doctor Vane. Before that, he had spent years helping Vane keep the original Evelyn obedient, alive, and useful. Vale had monitored Evelyn’s breathing while she was restrained, corrected dosages when Vane pushed too far, and told himself that preventing the worst thing in the room made him a good man.
I had just spent an evening taking that belief apart. By the end of it, Vale had stopped defending Vane. He had admitted that the cases used to justify the experiments were cases he had never personally verified. He had remembered Evelyn begging him to make it stop and admitted that he had still held her down. He had agreed to give Lucien and Mara every address, name, correspondence pattern, and uncertain suspicion he possessed. For Evelyn.
As I left, he had examined me with the same attentive habit he once used to monitor patients and said I had done enough for the night. I disliked how complicated that made him. It would have been easier if he had been empty. A cruel man was simple. A greedy man was simple. Even a coward was simple enough once the fear was identified.
Vale had cared about Evelyn. That was the problem. He had cared about her and still helped destroy her. On the first night of what I would later count as the beginning, I sat at the desk in my room with my notes from our last conversation spread before me. Evelyn was awake inside our shared mind. I could feel the direction of her attention without needing to ask.
'You're reading it again.'
'Yes,' I answered Evelyn inwardly. I kept my attention on the notes. The words had not changed since the last time I read them, nor had the memories attached to them.
'You already know what he said.'
'I know,' I replied. The pen remained between my fingers, unmoving above the page. I had already copied the important parts cleanly.
'Then why?' Evelyn asked. I rested the pen across the page. The easiest answer was that I was checking the wording. It was not the true answer.
'I want to find the point where he became what he was,' I replied inwardly. Evelyn considered my answer. I looked down at a line I had written from memory.
Vale's words were there on the page: I thought bringing you back was keeping you alive.
'Do you think there was one?' Evelyn asked.
'Not one that we’ll ever have access to,' I admitted to Evelyn. That made the question worse. Vale had not woken one morning and chosen to become Vane's assistant in every moral sense of the title. He had accepted one premise. Then another.
Vale had been praised for competence, trusted with more responsibility, and permitted to stand beside the table instead of lying on it. He questioned details and mistook that for questioning the whole. By the time Evelyn begged him to stop, he had already built a life in which stopping felt like betrayal of the work, the doctor, and the person he believed himself to be.
I had watched the structure collapse in less than an evening. Worse, I had helped decide what would replace it. Vale had begun looking to me to interpret his actions, to supply a judgment of what his life meant. That part had frightened me more than making him cry would have.
I was a Telepath. One Sequence above the Spectator who had tried to read me in the morgue and confidently reported emotions I had deliberately displayed for him. At Sequence 8, I could already guide conversations around what people feared, wanted, avoided, or needed to believe about themselves. The thought followed naturally to another word that had appeared often enough lately that I could no longer dismiss it.
Psychiatrist. I had caught the word in Sisyphus's thoughts more than once. I did not yet know whether it was the next Sequence of my pathway. I suspected it was. I suspected a great many things lately.
Somewhere beneath the manor, Vale was probably speaking to Lucien or Mara. Somewhere outside it, Doctor Vane remained free. Somewhere above Vane were people the doctor had obeyed without admitting they were his superiors. Calder. An unnamed visitor. Correspondence that arrived unsigned.
There was always another layer. I closed the notebook. Then I did something I had not planned. I knelt beside the bed. I could not tell whether desperation had driven me to my knees or whether I simply needed someone to lean on.
There was no altar. No sacred emblem. No candle. I had read enough about the Church of the Evernight Goddess over the previous year to know the common forms of prayer, but knowing a form and belonging to it were different things. I folded my hands anyway.
"My Lady." My own voice sounded too loud. I almost stopped. Evelyn did not interrupt. I sensed that my decision to pray had frightened her. I tried again.
"My Lady, I don't know if You listen to people who are not Yours." That was badly phrased. I continued before embarrassment could win. My hands remained folded while I stared toward the floor rather than anywhere that might have felt more appropriately sacred.
"I don't know whether I am supposed to introduce myself. If You can hear me, I assume You know enough for an introduction to be unnecessary." Nothing happened. Good. A visible miracle at the first sentence might have killed the attempt. I lowered my gaze.
"Doctor Vane is free. Edwin Vale is not." The floorboards were cool beneath my knees. "I spoke with Vale recently. I wanted information from him. I got it. I also changed him." That was the part I had not known how to say to anyone else.
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"I do not mean through power. Not directly. I watched him. I found the places where his explanations did not fit. I kept pressing until he could no longer use them." The room remained ordinary. "He deserved to understand what he had done." My fingers tightened together.
"I believe that." Another pause. "I also know I enjoyed being able to do it." There. That was the ugliest part. The admission remained in the quiet bedroom with nowhere else to go.
"I knew which words hurt. I knew when anger was useful and when understanding would be worse for him than anger. I knew when to call him a dog and when to stop. By the end, he was looking to me for answers about himself." The old house settled somewhere in the wall. "I don't want to become Vane with better manners."
Evelyn's attention moved closer. Not offended. Not afraid of me. Just listening. I continued despite my audience.
"Vale believed he was protecting the original Evelyn." There was no need to clarify whom I meant to the consciousness listening within me. "He cared. Not enough to stop. Not in the right way. But he cared." My mouth felt dry.
"That seems more frightening than if he had not." Nothing answered me. The room remained exactly as it had been before I knelt, which was somehow easier to bear than an immediate response would have been.
"I am not asking You to punish him. I am not asking You to find Vane. I don't know You well enough to ask for anything." That sounded ridiculous when addressed to a goddess. But it was honest. I stayed where I was.
"I only wanted somewhere to say this where no one needs me to already know what it means." I remained kneeling for a while after that. No dream took me. No voice came from the dark. Eventually I stood, rubbed feeling back into one foot, and went to bed.
'Do you think She heard?' Evelyn asked once I had settled beneath the blankets. Her presence felt quieter now than it had beside the desk.
'I don't know,' I answered.
'Will you do it again?' Evelyn asked.
'Probably.' I pulled the blanket more securely around my body. The room had already gone dark.
'You sounded terrible,' Evelyn observed.
'Thank you,' I replied. I stared into the dark, already understanding that she had not meant it kindly.
'I meant at praying,' Evelyn clarified.
'I know,' I replied. I sensed Evelyn's faint amusement. It helped steady me. Sleep came more easily after that than I expected.
On Day Two, I built a shrine. It was not grand: a small table near the wall, dark cloth, a candle, and a sacred emblem of the Evernight Goddess that I had purchased from a shop whose clerk had barely looked at me.
A shallow porcelain dish held flowers cut from the manor grounds. I spent several minutes moving everything by fractions of an inch. Evelyn followed my adjustments from within our shared mind. Nothing about the arrangement felt more sacred after the fourth adjustment than it had after the first.
'You know moving the candle again will not make you more religious,' Evelyn remarked.
'It might,' I answered aloud. My fingers remained against the base long enough to shift it once more.
'It will make the candle slightly farther left,' Evelyn replied.
"That may be the first step to my religious awakening," I said dryly, rolling my eyes. The candle remained slightly farther left. I decided not to move it again.
When evening came, I lit the candle. The small flame settled quickly, casting weak light across the dark cloth and porcelain dish. I sat rather than knelt this time.
"My Lady, I have tried to make this less embarrassing." The flame burned normally. "I have failed." Still normal. That was also reassuring.
"I have been thinking about Vale." Evelyn gave me a distinct impression of dry disbelief. I ignored her. The flame remained the only moving thing on the small table.
"He spent years checking records for consistency. Dates. Symptoms. Procedures. He was proud of how carefully he worked." The candle moved in a draft I could not feel. "He never met the people those records described." I watched the flame.
"I think that may be the most useful thing he taught me." The irony was not lost on me. "A story can be internally perfect and still begin with a lie." I looked toward the emblem. The words felt more useful once spoken aloud.
"I would like to remember that." The flame shortened for a moment. Not enough to prove anything. I did not pretend otherwise. When I eventually left the shrine, I left everything exactly where it was.
The days that followed brought no revelation. Vale's information produced several useful threads and no immediate capture of Vane. Calder remained the strongest name. Lucien and Mara pursued matters I was not included in, which was probably wise. I was still weak, weaker than I wished to be.
On Day Four, I returned to the shrine with the same candle and the same dark cloth waiting where I had left them. Nothing about the little table had changed enough to justify how familiar it was beginning to look.
"I think I forgave Lucien and Mara a long time ago." The statement surprised me after I spoke it. I sat back and considered whether I meant it. "I did." Evelyn remained quiet.
"They did things I would not have permitted if I had possessed more choices. They also gave me choices when they could have taken them." I thought of Vale. Of the difference between a person claiming to preserve choice and actually leaving it intact. "I don't think forgiveness requires me to call everything acceptable." The candle remained still.
"That is convenient, because I won't." I remained before the shrine for several minutes after saying it. There was nothing else I particularly wanted to add.
On Day Five, I returned angry from a conversation with one of Lucien's contacts and spent ten minutes complaining at the shrine about people who answered direct questions with metaphors. The candle endured the complaints without comment. By the time I finished, irritation had become embarrassment at how long I had managed to continue.
On Day Six, I did not pray. I passed the little table more than once throughout the evening without stopping. Nothing happened because of it, which I appreciated more than I wanted to admit.
On Day Seven, I returned with a different problem, one that had nothing to do with Vane, Lucien, or Vale.
"One of the manor servants did not intend to tell me his mother was ill," I said. "I heard enough to understand why he was distracted, so I sent him away early." I rubbed my thumb against the edge of the chair. The memory itself was harmless. The way I had acquired it was not.
"That helped him, though I still took information he did not give me." There was no answer. I found I preferred that to easy absolution. The candle burned without judgment while I remained there long enough to consider the difference.
On Day Eight, I opened a book on Evernight theology and discovered three different writers explaining concealment in three incompatible ways. I brought the book to the shrine and left it open across my lap. Notes crowded the margins where I had attempted to reconcile interpretations that did not appear interested in being reconciled.
"One of these people must be wrong." Nothing happened. "Possibly all three." The flame trembled. I narrowed my eyes at it. Whatever theological insight I might have gained from that movement remained unavailable.
On Day Nine, I did not ask for protection from Vane despite the fact that I wanted to. The desire remained present from the moment I sat down, simple enough that I could have turned it into a request with almost no effort. I left it alone.
"If I only speak to You because I am frightened, I will never know whether I came here for You or for safety." That night I slept incredibly well. It proved nothing. At least not to me.