Wrong Questions

The curtains are gone.

For days, the big windows of the twins' office stayed covered, because the view was a country-sized crime scene. Now there's only sky out there — clean, stupid, blue — and a floor of clouds like the world got wrapped in gauze.

They changed the spell. Nobody announced it. Someone just decided we'd seen enough, and the windows agreed.

I'd say that's considerate, if I weren't here to find out how much these two old men let happen.

"Sit," Nihil says.

Five chairs, arranged in a half-circle in front of the two leather armchairs. We fill them the way we fill everything now — with one gap that nobody looks at and everybody sees.

Helena sits on my right, the little silver chain visible at her collar. Clara and Alex take the middle. Joseph sits on the far end, spine straight, and I recognize the posture: he's not here to grieve. He brought his whole face of cross-examination.

Good. Me too.

"Ask," Nihil says.

"..."

All that fury I carried across a graveyard yesterday, and now the first word won't come out of anyone.

It's Clara who breaks. Quietly, to her own hands: "What were those things?"

"Demons," Nemo says. No drama, no pause for effect. "The word is older than any church and it means less than you think. They are neighbors. The world has neighbors, and some of them are very bad, and they do not come in through the front door. They come through cracks."

"Cracks in what?" Clara asks.

"Space." Nemo folds his hands. "The world is a house. The walls are thick. And still."

I think of a black abyss folding open in the corner of my eye once, in a place between places, and of something enormous moving in it — and the thought slides off me like water off glass, gone before I can hold it.

Weird. Anyway.

"Why here?" Joseph, now. He leans forward. "Demons could crack into anywhere, presumably. Why Glooven? Why three weeks after we arrived? That's not weather. That's a schedule."

Nihil looks at his brother.

Nemo pours tea, which I've learned is his version of clearing his throat.

"Because of what your church did," he says.

"It's not our—" Dan would have said something funny here. The silence where it should go is a physical thing. Joseph swallows. "Go on."

"To summon a classroom of children across worlds," Nemo says, "you need more than faith and candles. The church used something to do it. Something that was not theirs to use. The tower told them so. The tower told them to give it back."

He sips his tea.

"They didn't. And its owner came to collect."

The room does what rooms do when a floor disappears.

"The ar—" I catch it between my teeth. The artifact, I almost said, a word I'm not supposed to own. "The— what was it? The thing they used?"

"Wrong question," Nihil says.

Nemo's eyes stay on me half a second longer than they need to. I drink some of nothing and keep my face bored.

"How is that the wrong question?" Joseph objects. "It's evidence. It's the whole case."

"Because what it was changes nothing you can do," Nihil says, "and knowing it would cost you sleep you can't afford. Next."

"The owner." Joseph doesn't blink. "What is it?"

"Wronger question."

"You can't just—"

"I can," Nihil says, and for a moment the room remembers that this cranky old man made a cardinal cough blood by tilting his head. "Be glad you don't know its name. Names look back."

Alex speaks for the first time, small: "Is it coming back?"

The twins trade a look. It's short, and it's the most honest thing I've seen all morning.

"Not for you," Nemo says.

That is not the same as no, and every single one of us hears it.

"You knew." Joseph again, and now the lawyer is gone; there's a sixteen-year-old under it and he's shaking. "The tower warned them. You KNEW something was coming, and you— what? Filed it? You could have told people. You could have—"

"Could have what?" Nihil's voice doesn't rise. It gets flat, which is worse. "Emptied a capital of two million on the word of the tower against the word of the church? Fought over it? Boy, the tower is neutral because the last time towers took sides, continents changed shape."

"So you just let it happen."

"We are not the world's parents."

"Then what are you ours?" Joseph snaps.

Silence.

"...Teachers," Nemo says, gently, "which is already more than the world gave anyone else in that city."

Joseph sits back like something in him cracked and re-set. He doesn't apologize. Neither do they.

"Why did you put us to sleep?" Clara asks. "That night. We were floating, and then—"

"Because some things cost more than your eyes to look at," Nihil says. "You're welcome."

And then Helena, who hasn't said a word — who has spent the whole conversation with two fingers resting on a thin silver chain — asks hers.

"If Oliver hadn't become your disciple." Her voice is level. "Would you have left us all there?"

Don't. I don't say it. I don't breathe it.

Nihil looks at her. The old man has an entire arsenal of faces — mockery, theater, boredom, that flat lethal nothing — and he chooses honesty, which is his cruelest one.

"Yes."

Helena nods slowly, like she's filing it. Then she looks at me — a full look, eyes all the way in — and something in my chest does the math on what her look is doing: you are the reason I'm alive, and right underneath it, quieter, what else don't I know about you?

The necklace rests against her collarbone. Half a heart, keeping score.

"Last one," Nihil says, standing, shaking out his sleeves like he's shedding the whole conversation. "Make it count."

Everyone looks at everyone. What do you ask, after all that? What's left?

"What happens now?" I say.

And Nihil smiles — first time in six days, small, sharp, familiar, like the ghost of every joke he hasn't told this week.

"Finally," he says. "A right question."

He flicks two fingers. Over the low table between us, light unfolds into a map — a continent, coastlines, mountain ranges, names crawling along borders in careful gold. Glooven is a modest patch near the middle, small enough to hurt. My eye snags, without permission, on a landmass in the west that dwarfs everything around it.

Sacred State of Hale.

Still there. Still enormous. Still wearing my name like it doesn't know me.

"The tower is leaving Glooven," Nemo says. "There is nothing left here to be neutral about."

"Leaving," Clara repeats. "The tower. The building. Leaves."

"It's done it before," Nihil says, and pats the wall like an old horse. "This is not the first kingdom to die around it."

He looks at us over the shining map — five kids and a hundred golden names, an entire world's worth of directions.

"Going where?" I ask.

"Wherever we decide." Nihil's smile widens by exactly one tooth. "Start thinking about your answer."