Chapter 1 — Beginnings & Ends

WELSH — The Novel (Coda's Perspective)

The city held its breath again this morning, and I was the only one who noticed.

That's not a boast. I'd give it away if I could. It's the kind of thing you'd rather not be alone with — like being the only person at a table who can hear a clock ticking in the next room. You can't un-hear it. You just sit there, chewing, waiting for someone else to look up.

Nobody looks up. They never do.

I was on the ledge outside our kitchen window when it happened, which is where I usually am before breakfast. There's a spot where the ivy's thick enough to lean into and the stone's still cool from the night, and from there you can see most of Lantern Row before the market fills it: the baker's boy hauling crates, the woman with the henna hands setting out her onions, the grey cat that belongs to nobody and eats everywhere. Ordinary. That's the point. I read out there because the room feels smaller once the day gets going, and out there I can keep one eye on the street.

So I was reading, and the street was doing its street things, and then — there it was.

A pause. Not a sound. A pause. Like the whole city drew in and forgot, for one heartbeat, to let go.

The baker's boy didn't stop. The cat didn't stop. The onion woman laughed at something I couldn't hear. But I felt it under my ribs, the way you feel a step that isn't there in the dark.

Coda: There it is. That feeling again. Like the city just held its breath.

It's been doing that for weeks now.

Coda: Nobody else felt that. They never do.

I haven't told anyone. Not Elan, not Sable, not Wick. Not my parents. If I said it out loud I'd have to explain it, and I can't, and the not-explaining would be worse than the thing itself. So I hold it. I read. I wait for the city to breathe out.

It always does. That's the only reassuring part.

The book was one of Father's. Most books in our house are Father's. He runs the shop downstairs — Aldric & Maren, Books & Remedies, half his and half Ma's, which is a fair description of most things in our lives — and the ones he can't bring himself to sell migrate upstairs one at a time until the stairs are more shelf than stair.

This one was old. Older than the shop. Its spine had been resewn twice and the second person had done it badly. I'd opened it to a page near the middle because that's where it fell open, which usually means that's where the last person kept returning.

The night sky and the stars,

no hand to lift them, none to call.

They come the way the evening comes,

and no one sees it fall.

Someone had written underneath, in a different ink, in a hand that pressed too hard:

Then where are they?

I read it three times. I don't know why. Everybody knows about the Paths the way everybody knows about the sea — you've never seen it, you don't expect to, it's out there doing whatever it does. Seven seats. Seven colours. Gold, White, Red, and the rest. Stories for winter nights. The Grey Expanse used to belong to somebody who held one, Father says, back when it was still a place and not a warning.

Coda: So somebody else wondered too.

I closed the book on my thumb to keep the page.

Maren: "I can see you."

She was leaning out of the window above me with a spoon in one hand, hair coming down in the curls she'd spent the whole morning pinning up, smiling like she'd caught something small and harmless in a jar.

Coda: "I was just —"

Maren: "You were just."

Coda: "Coming inside. Like a person with a house."

Maren: "There's a door."

Coda: "The window's faster."

From somewhere behind her, my father's voice, warm and unbothered and not looking up from whatever he was reading:

Aldric: "He has a point."

Maren: "Don't encourage him."

I went in through the window.

Our kitchen is where the shop and the house give up pretending to be separate. There's a stove and there's a distillation stand next to it, and on a good morning you get bread on one side and something green bubbling on the other and the smells fight. Bottles on the sills. A clove of garlic hung next to a bundle of dried feverleaf. Ma says it's organized. Ma is the only one who knows the organization.

Father was at the table with the book he'd been reading all week, spectacles halfway down his nose, tea going cold beside him because he'd forgotten it existed.

Aldric: "Maren. Did you know the Grey Expanse had seventeen functioning cities before the collapse?"

Maren: "You told me yesterday, love."

Aldric: "Did I? What about the aqueducts —"

Maren: "And the aqueducts. Yes."

He smiled at his page. She smiled at her pan. This is what they're like. I used to think everybody's parents were like this, and then I met other people's parents.

Maren: "Sit."

The bowl she put in front of me was hot enough to fog my spoon. Grain, something sweet cut into it, the good honey she pretends we don't have.

Aldric: "You were up before dawn again."

Still not looking up. That's how he asks things he actually wants answered — sideways, so you don't feel watched.

Coda: "Couldn't sleep."

Ma set her spoon down.

Maren: "Same dream?"

Coda: "…Yeah."

They looked at each other. It's a fast look, the one they share. I've been watching it my whole life and I still can't read it.

Father closed the book. That's when I knew it was a real question.

Aldric: "Coda. What happens in the dream?"

Here is what happens in the dream.

Coda: I see the world after.

Coda: No people. No cities.

Not ruined — that's the thing I can't make anyone understand, if I ever tried. Not ruined. Just… finished. Stone that's gone soft at the edges the way old bread does. Flowers coming up through it. Everywhere. Little pale ones I don't know the name of, and some that are too bright to look at, and vines that have never been told they aren't allowed.

Coda: Just flowers growing through stone. And I'm standing in the middle of it. Alone.

Coda: And it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Coda: That's the part I can't explain.

Not the emptiness. The beautiful. I wake up and my chest is full of something that feels like the opposite of grief and I don't have a word for it, and then I lie there waiting for the guilt to come, because it should, shouldn't it? A world with nobody in it. I should be afraid of that.

I'm not.

I'm never afraid in the dream. That's the worst thing about it.

Coda: "Nothing. It's fine."

Father waited. Ma waited. The pan hissed.

Coda: "I just see a garden."

It wasn't a lie. It was the truest sentence I had that wouldn't make the kitchen go quiet.

My mother looked at me for a moment longer than a mother normally would. Not worried. Something under worried. Then she picked up her spoon.

Maren: "Eat your breakfast."

And they let it go. Just like that. That's what parents do, I think — the good ones. They know exactly where the door is and they choose not to open it, and they let you decide when.

I ate.

Coda: Today's a school day. Same as every day.

Edren will make us solve a caravan problem on the board, Elan will get it wrong loudly, Sable will get it right without looking up, and Wick will say one quiet thing that makes Edren stop talking. Then Venn's room, then Rook's yard, then home. I'll go out through the door, probably. Ma will be pleased.

Coda: Ordinary. That's all I want it to be. Ordinary, and the city breathing right.

I didn't tell them about the pause.

I'm still not sure why.