Chapter 4 The Bargain

POV: Elara

Okay. Okay, so that's — I don't even know what that is. A threat? A warning? He said it like he was reading off a grocery list and somehow that's worse than if he'd yelled it. My back hits the window before I notice I've been moving away from him this whole time, and the glass is freezing through my blazer and I can't stop thinking, stupidly, that if he pushes me through it I probably won't even feel the fall.

"Then do it." Not as steady as I wanted. Whatever. "Hand me over. Get it over with, I'm tired, I've been up for two days and I buried my sister who isn't even dead and I don't have it in me to be scared of you right now, so just — do it."

That got something. His face did something. I don't know what to call it because it was gone before I could look at it properly.

"That's not what I want." He says it like the sentence itself annoys him.

"Then what do you want. Because I've had about four different people threaten me tonight and none of them have gotten to the point yet."

He walks to the window instead of answering right away, and I realize he's not looking at me on purpose, like he needs the extra second. When he talks again his voice has dropped and gotten careful, the way you talk when you've rehearsed something so many times in your head it doesn't sound real out loud anymore.

"I've been building a case against my own family for a year." Pause. "By myself. The second anyone finds out, I lose everything I've spent that year getting access to."

My stomach does something ugly. "You knew. About the students. About—" I can't say her name. Not in this room, not with whoever's on the other side of that door probably listening.

"I suspected." He turns around and for once he doesn't look like he's carved out of marble, he looks like someone who hasn't slept properly either. "I didn't have proof. Not until you showed up wearing her face and broke every careful thing my family built to keep this quiet."

"So use me." I hear myself say it before I've thought it through, which is becoming a theme tonight apparently.

"I need someone who'll walk into that tunnel without stopping to think about what happens if she's caught. You did that. Tonight. Without blinking."

"I wasn't being brave, if that's what you think this is. I was thinking about my sister. There's a difference."

"I know." Just that. And somehow those two words do more to me than the whole rest of what he's said, which is annoying, actually, because I don't want anything he says to do anything to me.

I cross my arms because I don't know what else to do with my hands. "So what's the deal. Actually."

"I help you find her." He stops, like he wants to add something and decides against it. "I have access you don't. Files. Schedules. Rooms that aren't on the map they hand new students."

"And you get what."

"You tell me things." He almost winces saying it, like it sounds worse out loud than it did in his head. "What you see. Who talks to you. Because they think you're her and they'll say things to her they wouldn't say to me."

"You want a spy."

"I want you alive." Louder than the rest, like it surprised him too. He looks almost annoyed at himself for saying it that way. "That's — those aren't separate things here. Being useful to me and staying alive. They're the same thing in this building, whether either of us likes it."

Hearing him not use Wren's name and not use mine either, just circling both of us, that's what gets me, somehow, more than anything sharp he's said tonight.

"How do I know you won't just hand me over the second it's easier for you."

"You don't." He doesn't even try to make that sound better. "I can't give you a reason to trust me. I can only tell you I haven't yet, and I could have three separate times already tonight."

I think about the video. The bruise under her eye. I think about the ID card still crushed in my fist inside my pocket, some girl who supposedly left this school six months ago and never actually left the tunnel underneath it.

"Fine." My voice doesn't sound like mine when I say it. "Fine, okay, I'm in, whatever this is, I'm in."

He doesn't smile, doesn't do anything I'd call relief. He just goes still for a second, like something in him finally stopped bracing, and then he crosses to a cabinet, unlocks it with a key from his own pocket, and comes back with a notebook. Black cover, edges gone soft from being handled too much.

"Everything I've found." He holds it out and I take it and our hands touch and neither of us says anything about that, which somehow makes it worse.

I open it. Handwriting, small and controlled, going for pages. Names with lines through them. Dates circled so hard the pen's gone through the paper in places. And then, underlined twice —

Wren Whitmore. Last confirmed sighting: East Wing, sublevel two.

Four days after they told me she died on that cliff road.

"She was — this says she was alive after the funeral, after they told me, this says—" I can't finish it. I don't have the rest of the sentence.

"I know." He's not looking at me like I might break, which I appreciate more than I expect to. "I've known for days and I couldn't tell you because I didn't know if I could trust you yet. I still don't, actually. Not completely."

"That's not exactly comforting."

"I wasn't trying to comfort you." Something almost like the start of a laugh, gone as fast as it came. "I don't really know how to do that. I'm better at the other part."

I don't know what to say to that so I don't say anything, and neither does he, and it stretches out longer than it should, long enough that I notice him noticing where he's looking and then deliberately not looking there anymore.

The doors slam open before either of us has to figure out what happens next.

Headmistress Voss, two guards behind her, and her eyes go straight past Cassian to the notebook still open in my hands like she already knew exactly what she'd find.

"Well." She's smiling and it's the worst thing I've seen all night, worse than the video, worse than the tunnel. "Isn't this an interesting way to spend an evening."