All Chapters of Night Flower: Chapter 11 - Chapter 18

Reineck came back that evening and questioned me for two hours.He was good at it. Patient in the way that made patience feel like pressure, unhurried in the way that made every silence feel like an invitation to fill it with something you hadn't intended to say. He doubled back at irregular intervals, returning to questions he had already asked in configurations slightly different from before, checking whether my answers had the small natural variations of genuine memory or the fixed quality of a rehearsed account. He never asked the same question in the same words twice. He had done this before, many times, and he had gotten better at it each time.I had also done this before. Not from his side of it, but from positions adjacent to it, and four years of fieldwork had given me a working understanding of how good interrogators thought. They were looking for the places where the story held too well, the answers that came without the friction of actual recall. Real memory had texture. Co

Reineck came alone on the fourth day.He sat in his usual chair with the unhurried precision of a man who had learned that the body communicated before the mouth did, and that composure was its own form of pressure. Set his hands on his knees. Looked at me with the expression of a man who had reached the end of one approach and was deciding whether the next one was worth the time."You're not going to change your story," he said."It isn't a story.""Mm." He looked at the window, the light coming through the curtains at the angle that said late afternoon, then back at me. "You have no digital footprint before fourteen months ago. No employment records, no residential history, no medical records in any database I can access, which is a considerable number of databases." He paused. "You appeared, fully formed, on a road in the midlands with a phone and a first name."I held his gaze and said nothing.Lyanna Black had no explanation for that. Whatever explanation I offered would be worse

AdirReineck had been standing in my office for four minutes before I looked up from the report I was reading.This was not unusual. Reineck had been the right hand of this house for longer than most of the males in the compound had been alive, and he had learned early that I did not appreciate being interrupted mid-thought. He had learned it once, directly, and had not needed to learn it again. He waited with the particular patience of a man who had stopped needing to prove the importance of what he carried, who understood that information delivered at the right moment landed differently than information delivered at the first available one.Four minutes was his standard. Long enough to register that he was waiting. Not long enough to become a statement about it.I set the report down."Speak.""The woman." He said it with the careful neutrality he reserved fo

AdirShe didn't stir when I stood.Didn't stir when I crossed the room. I moved the way I had been moving since before any of the males in this compound were born, without announcing the movement, without the small preparatory sounds that most people produced without awareness, the micro-adjustments of weight and breath that telegraphed intention before intention became action. It was not something I had learned so much as something I had refined over a very long time until the refinement had become the default. The room absorbed me and I moved through it and arrived at the edge of the bed and crouched down to her level without disturbing anything in the air between us.Her face in the low light was younger than Reineck's description had suggested.Not young in the way that required adjustment, not a child, not anywhere near it. But younger than the profile implied, younger than the competence she