Chapter Fourteen: Stolen Hours

Dear Theo,

I've been caught three times now, if you can believe it, since I last saw your face. The Matchers first, you already know that one, and thank every star the pamphlets don't count that you ran when you did. Then Magistrate Vane, at the door to a place I had no business being near, and I lied to him quickly enough that I still don't fully understand why he let me walk away from it. And now, most recently, a boy named Corin, who I think against every careful instinct I have left might actually turn into an ally rather than a danger. I'll explain everything properly when I see you, because none of it fits safely on paper, even paper we'll burn.

It is getting riskier by the day, Theo. I won't pretend otherwise. But I am taking Friday as my day home. Same place. Same time. I have missed you so terribly it has become its own kind of ache, one I carry through every lecture and every careful, composed hour in that building. I miss the way you smell after a day at the docks, salt and river water and something underneath that's only ever been you. I miss your hands. I hate this system with everything in me, and I cannot wait to be near you again, even for one stolen evening.*

Always you.

I fold the letter smaller than usual, my hands unsteady with something that isn't quite fear this time something closer to the particular restlessness of counting down the last few hours before a thing you've wanted for weeks finally arrives.

Friday comes slower than any day has any right to come, and faster than I'm prepared for, both at once.

I spend the morning of my home day exactly the way I'm meant to helping my mother in the kitchen, half-listening to my father's account of a tariff dispute at the tannery that has apparently consumed three full Council sessions, laughing, genuinely, for the first time in weeks, at Perpetua's account of a disastrous attempt by her cousin to court a girl three streets over using what Perpetua describes, with real relish, as "the worst poetry ever composed by a human hand, possibly the worst poetry composed by any creature with a functioning brain."

"He rhymed 'radiant' with 'obedient,'" she tells me, entirely straight-faced, over tea in our kitchen. "I want you to sit with that. Obedient. As a compliment."

"Some men," my mother says, from the stove, without turning around, "believe compliments and instructions are the same category of speech."

My father, bless him, doesn't look up from his ledger, but I catch the corner of his mouth twitch, and Perpetua nearly chokes on her tea trying not to laugh outright, and for one full hour, sitting in the warm familiar clutter of my own kitchen, I let myself forget entirely about resonance silver and sealed doors and a boy named Corin with a dead sister's name buried in an archive two floors below the courtyard. I am simply Wren, home for the day, laughing at bad poetry with the two people who have known me longest.

It is, I think, exactly the kind of hour the Institution would tell you is the whole point of these three careful years. Family. Steadiness. Self before attachment.

It is also, I think privately, watching the light shift toward evening through the kitchen window, exactly the kind of hour that makes the ache of everything I'm not allowed to have sit closer to the surface, not further from it.

I tell my mother, around seven, that I'm going to Perpetua's for the evening a lie so practiced by now that it barely registers as deception in my own chest anymore, which frightens me a little when I let myself think about it directly. She nods, absorbed in mending a hem, and says only, "Not too late, Wren, you've an early start back tomorrow," and I feel the small, specific guilt of a good lie told to a good mother, and carry it with me out the door anyway, because I have never once, in six years, found the strength to carry it any differently.

The walk to the grain exchange is shorter than I remember, or my feet are simply faster than usual, and by the time I reach the door that doesn't lock, my heart is already going the particular unsteady rhythm it only ever does for this one specific set of stairs.

He's waiting at the top, the way he always is, and the moment I clear the last step he crosses the roof in three strides and has both arms around me before I've fully caught my breath, lifting me half off my feet in a way that would be entirely undignified if there were anyone here to witness it and is, instead, simply perfect.

"Six weeks," he says, into my hair, his voice rough with something that isn't quite steady. "Six weeks and four days, not that I've been counting."

"You've absolutely been counting."

"I have a system. It's very sophisticated. Involves a length of string and considerable self-pity."

I laugh — a real laugh, the kind that comes out of me only around him these days, months of careful composure cracking open all at once — and when he finally sets me down, his hands find my face, thumbs brushing my cheekbones the way they always do, and for a long moment neither of us says anything at all, just looking, the way you look at something you were genuinely afraid you might not get to look at again.

"I have things to tell you," I say, finally, pulling back just enough to actually speak. "Real things. There's a boy — Elias, a fellow apprentice — his brother was banished years ago, and he's been looking for the truth about it this whole time, same as I've been looking about the quarry. And there's another one now, Corin, who caught us in the sealed Archive two nights ago and, instead of reporting us, told us his own sister died young after an unusually strong Assessment match, and that he thinks there's some kind of pattern the Institution's been hiding for—"

"Wren."

"—decades, Theo, actual decades, and he wants us to tell him first if we find anything, which is either the bravest alliance I've ever made or the most reckless, I genuinely can't decide which, and I've been turning it over every night since—"

"Wren." He's smiling now, that particular fond, exasperated smile he gets when I've clearly been carrying too much alone for too many weeks and it's all coming out of me at once. "I believe you. All of it. Every single word. And I want to hear every detail, I promise, properly, tonight." His hands slide down to rest against my waist, gentle, certain. "But I have exactly one evening a month with you right now, and I would like, for at least the first ten minutes of it, to not think about archives or Institutions or dead sisters at all. Is that allowed?"

I look at him — really look, the way I haven't let myself in six weeks, cataloguing every small change, the new calluses on his hands, the slight sunburn along his collar from long days at the docks, the exact particular gold his eyes go at this hour of the evening — and something in my chest, tight and careful for six long weeks, simply lets go.

"That's allowed," I say.

He leans forward and his lips find mine, It's slow, it's soft, it's perfect.

I lose track of time entirely, which is, I will admit freely to anyone who asks, precisely the mistake I promised myself I wouldn't make tonight curled against him on the roof's low wall, his coat around both our shoulders against the evening chill, his mouth finding mine again and again in the particular way we've never once been allowed the luxury of before, six weeks of separation collapsing into something that feels less like an evening and more like the only real hour either of us has had in far too long.

It is only when the bell tower two streets over tolls the tenth hour, its low, familiar sound cutting through the fog of everything else, that I surface enough to remember I have a curfew, a household, a mother who mends hems by lamplight and waits up, however much she tries to pretend otherwise.

"I have to go," I say, breathless, already regretting every syllable of it.

"I know." He doesn't let go right away, forehead against mine, one last long moment before either of us has to be sensible again.

"Same time next month?"

"Same time next month. Assuming I haven't been caught a fourth time by then."

"Try not to be," he says, against my mouth, half a laugh, half something far more serious underneath it. "I'm running out of ways to be brave about it."

I take the same careful route home I always take, hood up, footsteps quiet, checking corners out of a habit so deeply practiced by now it barely feels like fear anymore, just routine. I ease the kitchen window open with the same careful, silent technique I've used a hundred times since I was old enough to need it, and I am one leg through the frame, victory so close I can practically taste it, when a lamp flares to life at the kitchen table behind me, and a voice level, familiar, entirely unimpressed — cuts through the dark.

"Where have you been, young woman?"

I freeze half in and half out of the window, one foot still on the outside sill, caught in what must be, objectively, the least dignified position a person can be caught in by their own mother.

"Perpetua's," I say, swinging the rest of the way through with as much composure as I can salvage, which is not very much at all. "We lost track of the time."

My mother regards me for a long moment over the rim of her tea, still fully dressed, clearly having waited up with the specific patience of a woman who has done this exact thing before and expected, correctly, to do it again. "Perpetua's mother sent a boy round an hour ago," she says, mild as anything, "to return a book you'd apparently left at their house last week. Perpetua wasn't home. Hasn't been, by his account, since supper."

I open my mouth. Nothing useful comes out of it.

"You climbed out of a window, Wren," my mother says, and there's something in her voice now that isn't quite anger , closer, I realize with dawning horror, to something almost fond, something that sounds uncomfortably like recognition. "At eighteen years old. Wearing your good boots, which I notice are considerably muddier than a quiet evening at a friend's house would account for."

"Mother—"

"I am not," she says, setting down her tea with great deliberateness, "going to ask you where you actually were. I think I have a reasonably good idea, and I think some part of me has known for rather longer than you'd probably like." She looks at me for a long moment, something old and complicated moving behind her eyes, something I recognize now, with a lurch, as the same story she half-told me once over plum wine and has never finished since. "But I am going to ask you to be considerably more careful than you were tonight, because a boy delivering a book at the wrong hour is a much smaller problem than the one you'll have if it's ever a Matcher standing in this kitchen instead of me."

I stand very still, soaked in equal parts terror and something unexpectedly close to tenderness, watching my mother — steady, careful, endlessly composed Adelaide Callahan look at me like she knows exactly what six years of stolen rooftop hours feels like from the inside.

"I'm sorry," I say, finally, meaning it more than the words can really hold.

"I know you are." She stands, gathering her tea, already moving toward the stairs, and pauses at the doorway just long enough to add, over her shoulder, in a tone that somehow manages to be both a scolding and, unmistakably, a kindness, "Next time, use the door. It's considerably less likely to get you caught."

I stare after her for a long moment, half laughing, half close to tears, and it isn't until I'm lying in my own bed, replaying the whole strange, sweet, terrifying evening , Theo's hands, the bell tower, my mother's tea gone cold on the table that I let myself wonder, for the first time with real hope instead of fear, whether the woman who raised me might, in the end, turn out to be my strongest ally in all of this.

Not "again," she'd said. Not this time.

Just: next time, use the door.

Then I grab my writing materials and I write " Dear Theo, you are not going Believe what happened, I got caught AGAIN…”