Cyan is increasingly disillusioned as he and Felix make a discovery on their way to the Roman baths beneath the school…

An Episode of The Twelvelms Conspiracy

Content Warnings

• Discussions of grief and abandonment
• Discussions of removal of a child from their parent
• Descriptions of a neglected, injured animal
• Mentions of blood
• Mentions of violent injury, including fatal injury
• Descriptions of experiences of trauma
• Character using harsh language to describe mental illness, in reference to themself
• Implications of child neglect

Transcript

Ah, now I’ve set all this up, you’re asleep already. Maybe I should try to sleep more, too. Abagnale is due here tomorrow. Perhaps it would be best to wait until then. I’m afraid I’ll have another dream like the one which disturbed us both, little one. 

You do so look like your mother, that head of red-hair. Will you be clever, as she was? 

I don’t want him to take you. Selfish as that is, I don’t want that. I know I cannot care for you well, that you need a proper home, not just some tiny cabin in the wilderness. 

[THE BREATH CATCHES IN CYAN’S THROAT]

I want to know you. I want to watch you grow up. I am so scared that it won’t happen, if I let Abagnale take you. That you’ll be gone and away, and Abagnale will find some new task for me as he always does. Send me back to the sea to speak to other Selkies again, come back to him and tell him what I’ve learned. I am a traitor to both sides of myself, ferrying Selkie secrets to mages who want me only as long as I can serve a purpose to them. It’s no wonder neither half of myself wants me. 

It was talking about my mother that did it, I think. Brought those old nightmares back. How surreal it was when I learned I could have followed her. That I needn’t have spent weeks terrified of slipping up, in the company of three people who did not want me around. And then, right on that threshold of us becoming friends, Felix took me to the Roman baths, seawater pulled in from the nearby coast, heated with magic so old nobody knew how it worked. Felix took me there and I learned I could swim and I realised I didn’t need to be there at all. Not in the baths, not at Twelvelms. 

I— I think what I imagined was that if I’d followed my mother she’d have kept me safe, that I could have been a whole selkie, the way that Felix so boldly described me. That I could have swum the seas and been happy in my seal form and never set foot on land again. It wouldn’t have mattered that I spoke stiffly and knew nothing about magic. It wouldn’t have mattered that the world of mages was a mystery to me, that I could not cast a spell deliberately, that my magic exploded out of me in moments where I was stressed or afraid. 

Just daydreams, and they didn’t matter. I had not followed my mother. I’d stayed. I’d stayed in the cottage by the sea where I’d grown up my father’s prisoner, and Abagnale found me there hours later, still sat with my back against the cabinets, bare feet stained with my father’s blood. 

[INTRO MUSIC: This is the Twelvelms Conspiracy, episode seven, friends and familiars.]

I know Abagnale meant the best for me. He is not an unkind man. He’s suffered much in his own life. He grew up outside the purlieus, raised in London by his unmage mother, who had no idea why her son could fix broken plates with a touch of his hands, or why animals seemed so fond of him that by the time he was ten, he had turned an urban fox into a pet so tame it would fetch him eggs so gently in its jaws that the shell would not even crack. 

Like me, Abagnale came to Twelvelms after a disaster, though he was much younger when his happened. Abagnale himself has never shared it with me. I cannot know how true it is, or how he must have felt when it happened.

I know he was fourteen when it happened, but there is dispute about that. He was small for his age, and the records of his life before he came into the world of magedom have been destroyed, so there’s no way to confirm it. There’s a romance to believing he is younger than he claims; he was already so young, to achieve the things he achieved. 

Regardless, the claim is that he was fourteen when he saw a man stabbed in an alleyway not far from his own. 

The part of London where Abagnale grew up is apparently known for being on the rougher side, though nobody is entirely clear on which part of London this rough place is meant to actually be. When Abagnale talks about London he always speaks fondly of it. He says it’s a place full of people trying to live, a place full of promise and hope for the future. 

The cause of the stabbing is not so important as that it happened, and Abagnale saw it, and he did not run. That little fox he’d trained and made a friend charged ahead of him. The assailant ran, and who can blame them? An angry teenager sets a mangy fox with its tooth bared at you; the strangeness of the scenario alone would be enough to make almost anyone want to flee. 

The man who had been stabbed tried to run too, but got no further than two steps before he collapsed. The story goes that Abagnale bent over him, hands over the hole in the man’s stomach, blood bubbling hot and slick between his fingers. He said over and over again, ‘be okay, be okay.’ 

The blood stopped flowing. When Abagnale moved his hands, the wound had sealed. Both he and the stabbed man were so shocked, neither knew what to say. They parted in silence, not even exchanging names. Abagnale walked home, covered in blood, and went to bed. Officials sent from the Raeg by the High Table arrived an hour later. 

It was Reilly who told me this. The reason she was telling me about Abagnale was that when we’d arrived at the library that afternoon, Lady Otilie had made a point of coming over and asking how I was getting on. ‘It is so strange to have a Happener at Twelvelms,’ she said. ‘A confirmed one. There have always been rumours, of course, but we don’t traffic in rumours here.’ 

Lady Otilie made a great point of mentioning how much she preferred not to indulge in rumours immediately after sinking her teeth into one. She’d gesture at the books on the shelves she so meticulously maintained as though her dedication to them was proof that although she knew everything about everyone and their comings and goings, confirmed or not, her real passion was for facts. 

Over time I began to doubt this. I rarely saw the same zeal in her eyes when she spoke about the known as when she spoke about the possible, and especially the scandalous.

Once Lady Otilie was pulled away to attend to another scholar, I asked Reilly what rumours she’d been dangling in front of us. There were a few names, apparently, but the one which stood out to me most was Lord Abagnale’s.

‘Is this why Quinn’s grandmother doesn’t trust him?’ I said.

‘Well, Consul Derwen doesn’t trust many people. It’s really not Abagnale’s fault he’s controversial. The Raeg is just very set in its ways. I suspect that’s where the rumours of the Happener thing come from actually. It’s a product of the controversy, rather the cause of them, if that makes sense.’ 

‘I suppose it does. What do you mean that the Raeg is set in its ways?’ 

‘They like things done in a specific kind of way, that’s all. I suppose it makes sense; those ways have kept us safe for so long.’ 

‘Is there any merit in the rumour that Abagnale’s a Happener, then?’ 

Reilly explained the story of Abagnale’s coming into the world of magedom.

‘And then the old Lord Abagnale, who worked at the Raeg as a collector, claimed he’d been to London fourteen years before and slept with Abagnale’s mother. This boy must be his child, a product of a one-night-stand, a child he’d never considered might exist or else he’d have set out to claim him sooner,’ Reilly explained. 

 ‘The old Lord Abagnale was a senior collector, so it was like, next to impossible to try to challenge him once he’d made the claim that Abagnale was his son. People say when he first laid eyes on our Abagnale, he was moved almost to tears. Said he recognised him as his own son at once. Something about his eyes.’ 

I thought about Abagnale’s eyes, that cold blue, twinkling, almost white. 

‘And what about his mother?’ I asked. ’Did she say it was true, that she’d slept with the old Lord Abagnale and had his baby?’ 

‘I don’t know,’ said Reilly. ‘None of the books or articles I’ve read mentioned her, and she never comes up when people talk about all this.’

‘Why not?’ 

‘Well, she’s not mage. Why would she?’ 

‘So what happened after the officials from the Raeg arrived?’ 

‘Well, they took Abagnale away, and they brought him to Coven Derwen to live with the old Lord Abagnale.’

‘And what happened to his mother?’ 

‘I imagine they erased her memory and she’s happily going about her life, somewhere.’ 

I choked on my own spit. ‘They erased her memory?!’ 

Reilly shrugged. ‘Most likely. Not everything, of course, just what she’d known about Abagnale.’ 

‘That’s horrific.’ 

‘Ha, it’s not as intense as you’re imagining, we call it an erasure of memory but really it’s more like an alteration. The mind is a tricky thing to manipulate with magic; if you push to hard, it has a tendency to snap back into shape.’

My stomach was in knots. ’Would they have told her what what was going to happen to him before they did that?’ 

‘I mean, probably not. What’s the point, if she’d forget it anyway? There would have some closure at least; she probably thinks her son passed away.’

‘And Abaganle. Would he know what they’d done?’ 

‘I suppose he’d have to have been told. He went to live with the old Lord Abagnale the same night he was brought to the Raeg. The house he grew up in is right on the edge of the ground of Castle Derwen, actually. Nobody lives there now. The whole thing is shuttered up.’ 

I shivered. 

‘I guess it is sort of horrible to think about. But it’s not like Abagnale was alone. And he was in magedom, now.’ She said this with a shrug, her tone suggesting an obvious superiority in magedom which did not exist beyond it, which did not even need to be spoken aloud. 

I’d heard that same priority almost every day since I’d come to Twelvelms but it was so strange to hear it from Reilly, who’d grown up outside the Purlieus herself, whose own mother was unmage, who even had a younger sister who did not seem to have any magical gifts at all. Reilly, who was teased for missing kettles and toasters, who liked to paint her nails with polish instead of using magic like Quinn and the other girls. Who brushed her teeth every evening even though we all had a potion which meant there was no need to. Reilly. 

We did not speak of Abagnale’s mother again. That afternoon, we had a mountain of work to get through, and she slipped out of our minds as easily as she slipped out of the history books. I wrote about my conversation with Reilly in my journal, but until I read through it, found this account, I’d entirely forgotten about it. About my horror that she’d been so blasé. 

I wished I’d remembered it. 

Years later, when the news that Reilly had married your father reached us, little one, Abagnale said that though it seemed perplexing that she’d commit herself to such an archaic way of life, to him, it made perfect sense. ‘We do a good job of keeping our secrets, in this world,’ he told me. ‘But we do an even better job at convincing ourselves those secrets are things that we should keep. When you have grown up outside the purlieus, and especially if you have friends and loved ones who are unmage, who have no knowledge of magic, you live with the burden of knowing that there are ways to spare them pain which you can never share.’

Abagnale’s words did not help ease the hurt or smooth out my confusion about why Reilly had behaved the way she had, not at the time. But I think I understand it, now. In Reilly’s position, she had a choice. She could believe either that the practices of magedom were fundamentally flawed, that the institutions she’d dedicated her whole life to becoming a part of, the traditions which had led her to leaving her parents home at just thirteen to enshrine those aspirations into possibility, all of those things, were in some way broken and in need of tearing down. 

Or she could believe those same things were all that kept her safe. Were what set her, and all of us, as mages, apart from everyone else. That we were secret and select because we deserved to be. That it was a sanctity in need of protection and reinforcement. 

I can understand why she chose the second option. She’d given up so much to get where she was. That dedication, that sacrifice, it was a part of her. She needed magedom to be right and just, the way it claimed to be. 

I don’t know what I think about it, if I think about it at all. I had no life outside of magedom. Just an attic bedroom with amanuensis stones under a loose floorboard, a shelf of books and records, and my mother two floors below me, singing me to sleep. I don’t feel I have a right to comment especially because one half of my blood belongs to the sea. Selkies have their own world, with its own metaphorical locked doors and sealed vaults. They are more secret even than mages, and I couldn’t dispute they need their secrecy to keep themselves safe, not after seeing the way they are treated, not after the ways I’ve been treated myself. 

Maybe that means Reilly was right, and magedom is a sacred space from which outsiders should be banished. That the traditions and institutions which enforce our isolation are necessary to prevent our destruction, however much assistance that denies the people beyond our borders. I don’t know. 

I just don’t know. 

When I was younger, that realisation I could have followed my mother made me angry, but it mostly manifested a sadness that settled over everything like the January snow settled over the Twelvelms grounds. Despite all of Reilly’s help with studying, despite Quinn’s encouragements, despite Felix sitting guard with me at the baths every evening, I was hopeless in all of my classes. I felt it was clear and obvious that I was not meant to be a mage, that whatever thing Abagnale had been trying to prove when he brought me to Twelvelms was wrong. 

Any magic I performed the night I killed my father, and again the night of the attack on the atrium, it was clearly a fluke. I had managed to explode a glass of water in one Practical Casting lesson, and that was the sum total of all the deliberate magic I’d mustered through my entire school career. I was sneaking around, hiding a secret, lying about who I was, to people who were beginning to show signs they really wanted to be my friend, and I could tell only one of them and that was only because he’d barged in on me and I’d terrified him. 

I did not belong. I was useless at everything. It all felt so hopeless, so pointless. I should have just followed my mother into the sea. 

But at least Felix knew and despite everything did not seem like he was going to tell anyone about it. I couldn’t make sense of it, but I was grateful. And it was such a relief to have him see me, as I was. I don’t know why. 

He spoke to me when I was in my seal form as though I was no different to how I’d been in my other, did not even blink as I switched forms. He did not ask me why I was there, probe me for why I could not tell anyone else what I was. He took it all in his stride. He just saw me, treated me no different, and that’s it. 

It meant the world. 

Every evening, Felix would sit at the edge of the baths and read as I swam and tried to forget. Sometimes, he’d take off his shoes and socks, dangle his feet in the warm, salty water as I swam. I’d splash his legs with my tail; he’d raise balls of water with magic and hurl them back at me. Mostly, though, I’d swim and he’d read, as though we were each alone.

One evening, I was turning through the water, and it was so warm, so luxurious, I could not help but make a small sound of pleasure. Well, to me, it felt small, but seals are quite loud, and I startled Felix so badly he almost dropped his book into the water. He caught it with magic just before the pages got wet. I chuffed at him, and he giggled. Not a laugh, or a chuckle, a giggle of delight. 

I switched forms. ‘Are you laughing at me?’ I asked him. 

‘Yes,’ he said, completely unashamed. 

‘Why?’ 

Felix shrugged. ‘That little sound. It was cute,’ said Felix. 

‘Cute?!’ I said, and Felix started laughing again, though more normally than he had before. I was insulted, but the feeling was oddly… wriggly at the edges. 

‘I could probably bite clean though your arm, you know,’ I said.  

‘Oh really?’ Felix asked, grinning and raising his eyebrows.

‘Yes. My jaws are very powerful.’ 

Felix hummed. ‘Hmm. So, you bitten through many men’s arms, then?’ 

I turned red, pushed away from the side of the pool, folded back into my other form with a chuff. Felix laughed again. I did my best to scowl at him, and beared my teeth, whiskers forward. 

‘You’re so scary,’ he said, grinning. ‘Look very soft, though.’ 

I splashed him with water and sank to the rocky base of the pool, and stayed there as long as my lungs would let me. 

The next day, every time we caught each other’s gaze, we grinned. Reilly was baffled, and Quinn made out like it was getting on her nerves, but she kept smiling even though she was rolling her eyes at us. 

The next night, as soon as we were in the tunnels, both of us burst out laughing, and the glass candles shimmered. Felix shoved into me. I shoved him back. He grappled at me, shoved me lightly against the wall, and started to run. 

‘Felix!’ I called after him, laughing, out of breath from laughing, trying to run after him.

‘Catch me, selkie boy,’ he called back, laughing again, and then he’d disappeared around a corner. 

I gathered myself up, shaking my head, jogged after him, but he’d not moved much beyond the corner and I almost knocked him to the ground. I spluttered, ’sorry.’ 

Felix’ face was completely serious. He shook his head, put a finger to his lips. 

I tried to follow his sightline, but there was nothing but the rocky wall. 

‘Felix?’ 

‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said. 

We didn’t speak as we went to collect my coat from the room beyond Abagnale’s office. 

As we came back to the room with the baths, he grabbed my arm. For a moment, all I could think about was his cool, slender fingers, his slightly too firm grip. Then I heard it. A tiny, frail cry. 

Felix’ eyes were wide and waiting for mine. ‘You heard it?’ he whispered. 

I nodded. His hand on my arm gripped tighter. The sound came again. 

‘A bird?’ I said. 

Felix’s hand was gone. My skin tingled in the absence of his touch. Felix headed back towards the tunnels. He was heading back down the way we’d come, treading carefully, minimising the crunch of his boots on the ground. I followed, stepping as lightly as I could, too. 

We stopped at a fork in the tunnels. We were somewhere at the edge of the school, between the gates and the path to the first Coven House off the Round. Three tunnels split off, one headed straight, the others taking a turn in opposite directions. We stood there, quiet, listening, until the bird croaked again. It came from the tunnel on the right. 

‘Towards town,’ said Felix. ’Towards the Raeg.’ 

We crept down the tunnel. It seemed to go on, and on, with no branches or turns, just a long, curved line. It was narrower than the tunnel we’d come from, barely wide enough for us to walk side-by-side. The alcoves in the walls which held the glass candles were spread further out, so as we walked, we passed through great stretches of almost-dark. The sound of our breath echoed. The bird’s croaks got louder, louder, as though they were coming from everywhere. 

Felix stumbled. I caught him by his elbow. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Stairs.’ 

At the base of the stone stairway was a brick wall, forcing us to turn right again, single file, for a few feet down this unlit path. A wooden door. On the other side, a long room, vaulted. A stream of water ran directly through its middle, a few inches deep. From this gutter of clear, fresh water, tributaries made of tiles trickled into eight cells, each of them dark and empty except for scattered straw. The bars were wrought iron, unadorned but for their brass locks, which were huge and etched with leaves. 

I walked along the central stream to the end of the room, blocked off with more iron bars. Through them, more tunnels, glass candles glowing with their ghostly, grey-white light. 

Felix called my name, drawing my attention. He was standing next to one of the cells. It was not empty like I’d thought. Almost invisible in the dark of the back of the cell, wings spread, clumps of feathers missing, was a raven. The edge of its beak caught the purple-red light of Felix’ signet stone as he held it aloft, as did its beady eye. Slowly, its beak opened, the pink on the roof of its mouth shockingly violent in the dark. It bleated a sad, mournful sound. The sound that had led us here. 

‘It’s the one we saw on Samhain,’ said Felix. There was no doubt in his tone. 

‘But. Reilly said familiars can’t survive the death of their mages.’ 

’So he’s not dead,’ said Felix. He was running his hand through his hair. ‘Of course. They didn’t say anything about a body. I thought they were trying to hide it. But this makes sense. They can’t. Everyone has to believe this place is a fortress. But this makes more sense, doesn’t it. He escaped.’ 

‘That night, when we got back to House Derwen… the man who attacked us. You said he was a spicer.’ 

Felix nodded. ‘A member of the Cult of Respice Finem.’ 

‘Yes. Reilly got me some books out of the library about it.’ 

‘Good old Brainy,’ said Felix, with a humourless laugh.

‘Before we took those books out, we ran into Lady Otilie. She said she’d heard a rumour that whoever it was that broke in, it was Thomas Vane. Abagnale’s assistant.’ 

Felix closed his eyes. ‘He hasn’t gone by that name in a long time.’ 

‘Lady Otilie said something similar.’ 

‘Well, it’s true. Members of the Cult of Respice Finem take a new name. The Raeg wouldn’t recognise it of course, not as a proper name, but spicers don’t give a shit about what the Raeg thinks.’ 

‘But they’re gone, aren’t they? The Spicers have been gone since the fall of Avalon, and the last group to use that name was wiped out centuries ago.’ 

All the air whooshed out of Felix’ lungs at once. ‘No. People just don’t know where they are. Did anyone tell you which coven Thomas Vane was kin with, before he turned spicer?’ 

I shook my head. 

Felix chuckled darkly. ‘Coven Sambucus. The same coven I was born to. Growing up on Isla Sambuce, all of us understood that Respice Finem was not just a story. They were real, and they were out there, and one day, they’d come back, and mages would take their rightful place in the world, at last. Maybe it was Vane, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. But I know for sure the man we saw that night in the atrium was a spicer.’ 

‘How can you tell?’ 

‘His robes, for one and the colour of his magic; it was white. Did you notice? When they renounce their old name and coven kinship, they bury their old signet stones and pull new ones from their own altars. The stones they pull are always clear. That’s why they call it the Cleansing.’ 

‘When he was lying on the ground, before I got to him, he spoke to you.’ 

‘Yes,’ said Felix. 

‘What did he say?’ 

‘Omnes propositum habemus. Propositum est quod sumus.’

‘Is that some kind of spell?’ 

‘No. It’s a phrase. It’s on the gates of my old family’s home, on Isla Sambuce. It means we all have our purpose. Our purpose is what we are.’ 

I frowned. ‘Strange thing to put on your gates.’ 

‘There are many strange things about the Scarletts. That’s the least of your worries.’ 

I thought of that night on the Round, when I’d almost killed Felix’ brother. Of Felix, slumped on the floor of his room, drunk and angry. Of him sneering over the table on Solstice Eve as Lady Otilie pressed him for details of his past on Isla Sambuce.

‘You think I’m mad,’ said Felix, with a laugh. 

‘I don’t,’ I said, and I meant it. 

‘It’s alright; loads of people think I’m mad. Who can blame them, given all of this?’ He gestured at himself. ‘Maybe they’re right. I don’t know anymore. Maybe I am mad. Maybe all of this, it’s just the stories I grew up with, haunting me, and I’m just barking at shadows. I don’t know.’ 

‘Spicer or not, I don’t understand how he could have survived what I did to him. I… The blood. He was so still. He wasn’t breathing.’  I thought of my father. The pools of blood. Scrubbing my feet, trying to get it out from under my toenails. Sobbing, sobbing. ‘

‘There are ways to appear dead, with magic. and ways to recover from almost any injury, if you’re willing to pay the price. If the bird’s alive, then so is the spicer.’ 

‘It looks hurt.’ 

‘Yes. I think it’s dying.’ 

‘How do you know?’ 

‘Can’t you feel it? That sense of… loss?’ 

‘No. I don’t feel anything. Why would they keep it here, like this?’ 

Felix shrugged. ‘Maybe they’re hoping the spicer will come back for it.’ 

‘But if it’s dying, maybe the spicer really is dead.’ 

Felix sighed. ‘No, it’s been weeks, months. Familiars die within hours or days of their mages. They won’t let themselves live this long without them. It’d have found a way to end it by now, if he was gone.’ 

‘We should ask Reilly, she’ll know something about this,’ I said. 

‘No, we can’t.’ 

‘Why?’ 

‘We’re not supposed to know the raven’s here. The fact they’ve locked it up down here? That means the High Table knows the spicer is alive. And Abagnale most definitely knows it. Whatever the reason they’re keeping it here, we are not supposed to know about any of this.’ 

‘Why does that mean we can’t tell Reilly?’ 

‘Because if we tell Reilly, we have to tell Quinn, and I won’t do that to her.’ 

‘Do what?’ 

‘Put her in a position where she has to choose between her loyalty to her friends and her duty to her coven! I won’t do it, Cyan. It’s not fair.’ Felix was breathing hard and fast. 

The raven crowed weakly from the floor of its cell. 

Felix turned to it, reaching through the bars. He could just about reach the edge of its wing. As he stroked its feathers, the beady eye slid shut. 

‘Besides, if we tell them about the raven, we have to explain why we were down here in the first place,’ said Felix. 

‘We could make something up,’ I said. 

‘What? That we were making out in the glass candlelight?’ 

I felt my cheeks turn red. ‘Something else.’ 

Felix rolled his eyes and got to his feet again. ‘We can’t tell them, Cyan. You know I’m right.’ 

I looked at the bird again. 

‘Come on,’ said Felix. ‘You still need to soak.’ 

‘I feel bad, leaving it there.’ 

‘We can’t stay; someone will find us. And I’m not letting you go a night without soaking. You pick your skin, when it gets dry. It’s like your whole body has dandruff.’ 

‘Rude,’ I said. 

I could tell he was still rattled, but he was trying to be reassuring, so I let myself be reassured. We left the cell, climbed the stairs, and walked back to wards the baths, both pretending we could not hear the solemn birdcalls following us down the tunnels, getting sadder and more desperate the further away we got.

In the baths, Felix sat at the edge of the water, pulled off his boots, stuffed his socks into them. He sighed as he sunk his feet into the water. 

I was already wearing my coat, twisted into my seal form whilst still standing upright, and flopped int the water with a huge splash. 

Felix yelped, and I could hear his laughter reverberating through the water, punctuated with profuse exclamations. He drew his knees up to his chest. I turned onto my back, watched him through the rippling surface of the bath. He watched me back. As he did, his smile slowly dissolved. There was something awful about his expression. A sadness that was almost frightening. His eyes were red around his irises, tears clinging to his eyelashes, but he seemed determined not to let them fall. 

I gasped as I breached the surface of the water. I rested my furred chin against the edge of the bath and breathed deep.

Felix, less than a foot away, reached out his hand. A question, without words. I closed my eyes, raised my chin briefly from the wall. His touch was light at first, fingers shaking slightly as they met the dome of my head.  His hand was cold, but only for the briefest moment, the heat from me radiating into him. The lightness of it was agonising, and I could bear it only for a moment before I nudged up and pressed my muzzle against his hand. An odd little laugh shook out of Felix, and a funny little bleat burst out of me.

The moment was brief. He drew his hand back. I twisted into the water. 

For some reason, I don’t know why. We didn’t take my coat back to the room beyond Abagnale’s office that night. I carried it bundled under my arm as we walked back to House Derwen, side by side, in silence. 

[A MOMENT OF QUIET] 

He’s alright, you know, Felix. 

I’m sure of it.

Or at least, I hope that’s what this feeling in me is. 

I’d know if he was dead. Surely I’d know. So he must be alright. He’s going to find us, eventually. When he does, he’ll let me explain why I had to run. I had to keep you safe. He’ll understand that. If I’d not taken you, you’d be stuck the way he’d been stuck when he was young. He gave up so much to escape. I know he’d want you safe, more than anything. Everything else I’ve done, I know he’ll be able to forgive, because I took you. I took you. You’re safe. We’re safe. He’ll understand, once he knows that. 

He’s alright. Yes. He is. Felix is alright. He’ll find us. 

[END]