Nobody turned the screen off.
His family didn’t even look at it anymore. His aunt walked past it with the plates, and Juno sat with her back to it. The screen had been showing the same thing in this kitchen for eight days, so they had gotten used to it.
Mav ate what was put in front of him. It was the best meal he’d had since he left, but he was too upset to enjoy it.
"How long have you been on the furnace line?" he asked his uncle.
His aunt stopped cutting the bread.
"Mav," Garrett said, in a warning voice.
"How long, Uncle?"
Juno answered for him, and she stabbed a potato angrily.
"He has been there since the day after your name went up on the wall. Mister Harrow called him into the office and said that House Ironvein couldn’t have a foreman whose family was a public joke. He worked there for 26 years, and then they sent him to shovel coal." Her voice shook with anger. "The men he trained won’t sit with him anymore, and somebody wrote TRAITOR on his locker. And at school, Leda Marsh said that you had probably drowned in a puddle, and that it was the best thing a Silkborn had ever done. So I..."
"So she broke Leda Marsh’s nose," his aunt said tiredly, "and the school sent her home for a week."
"It was worth it."
Mav looked at the yellow bruise on his cousin’s cheek. Then he looked at his uncle’s hands, which were wrapped in fresh bandages over the old scars. A foreman didn’t get burned. But a man who fed a furnace at 44, with a bad back, got burned every day.
He had always thought that his name only hurt him. He had never imagined that it would hurt them too.
First, he felt guilty. Then he felt so angry that One began to glow under his shirt.
The green light came through the cloth, and he could see it on the edge of his plate.
Juno saw it too.
"Mav," she said slowly. "Your chest is shining."
-----
He hadn’t planned to show them.
He looked at the three of them and thought about it for a moment. He couldn’t tell them what his talent really did, because knowing it could get them killed. But these three people had already kept one secret for him for eight years, so he trusted them.
He took off the green scarf and opened his shirt.
His aunt gasped, and Garrett didn’t move at all.
One lay around his chest in two flat coils, as wide as two fingers and as green as new leaves, and its light filled the dim kitchen. From there, it ran up his spine to the base of his skull. Where it went in, the skin had grown over it, smooth and pale.
"It’s my species," Mav said. "This one lives on me. It keeps me breathing under water, and it heals me when I’m hurt. I would have died on the first day without it, and on most of the days after that."
"It’s inside you," his aunt whispered.
"Yes."
"Does it hurt?"
He thought about it before he answered.
"It did at first, but it doesn’t now. I’ve stopped noticing it." He saw her face, so he added, more gently, "It’s all right, Aunt Mira. It’s the only reason I’m still alive."
Juno had come around the table. She reached out a finger, exactly as Ronald had.
One lifted its free end and touched her hand, as lightly as a feather.
Juno laughed with delight, but his aunt looked frightened. Garrett kept looking at the place where the seaweed entered his nephew’s neck, and Mav couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
"Nobody can know about this," Mav said. "At the Nexus, I keep it hidden."
"Who would we tell?" his uncle said quietly. "Nobody in this district has spoken to us in a week."
-----
Later, when Juno was asleep and his aunt was pretending to sleep, Mav and his uncle sat at the table with the lamp turned low.
Mav put the coins on the table between them. There were 270 credits. Garrett looked at them without a word.
"I can’t take that."
"I got it by selling a piece of a dead fish. I’ll earn more."
"Mav, no."
"You hid me for three months when hiding me could have gotten all of you killed," Mav said. His voice came out harder than he meant it to. "You fed me for eight years on a foreman’s pay. Take the money, Uncle Garrett. Buy her a winter coat."
Garrett’s jaw moved, but no words came. He put one bandaged hand over the coins, and left it there.
The rain tapped on the window, and the screen in the corner was still showing the wall of names.
"I’ll ask you one thing," Garrett said at last. "Then I won’t ask again."
Mav waited.
"Juno’s Bestowal is in 11 months. If the stone lights up for her, she will go through the same gate as you, and those people will know that she is your cousin. You’ve seen what they did to her already, only because of your number on a wall." He looked up, and his tired eyes were steady. "So stay quiet up there, and keep your head down. Don’t climb, don’t fight, and don’t give them a reason to look at this family again. I want you to stay last, and to stay alive. Promise me."
It was a fair thing to ask, so Mav felt even worse.
His uncle had survived for 44 years by never being noticed, and he had saved Mav’s life the same way. Mav knew that nothing he said would change his mind.
Mav thought of everyone who had looked down on him.
He thought of the sergeant at the Homegate, of Dorian, and of the board with his father’s name on it. Then he thought of his Subjects at the bottom of his sea, and of how many there would be in a year.
He had no intention of staying last.
"I promise," Mav said.
It was the first time he had ever lied to his uncle, and he hated how easy it was.
Garrett nodded, and he looked relieved.
Mav lay awake afterward in the narrow bed under the roof, listening to the air go in and out of his own chest. It felt strange after a month under water.
’I’m sorry, Uncle. But I’ll become strong enough that nobody will ever send you to the furnace line again.’
-----
He left before dawn, because he didn’t want to wake them for another goodbye.
The square behind the Concord Hall was already full when he reached it, and something was wrong. The crowd wasn’t moving. Hundreds of people stood pressed against the walls, with their caps in their hands, and a wide, empty lane ran down the middle of the wet stones.
Soldiers in dark red lined both sides of it.
"What’s happening?" Mav asked the woman beside him.
"Be quiet and keep your head down. A Sovereign is crossing the square."
A Sovereign was an Awakened of the highest belt, and there were very few of them. Then Mav saw the man who was walking up the lane, and he forgot about the woman.
Lucan Pyrecrest was not tall, and he wore no armor. He was about 80, thin and straight-backed, in a long coat of dark red, like a dying fire. Despite his age, his red hair showed no trace of gray, and it was tied at his neck exactly as his son’s was. He walked without hurry, reading a paper that a helper held for him, and the rain didn’t touch him. It turned to steam a hand’s width from his shoulders.
He had Cassian’s face. It was the same clean, bored face, but 60 years older.
The whole square bowed as he passed, one row after another.
Mav didn’t bow.
He hadn’t planned it. His body simply refused to bend. He stood straight in the middle of all those bowed people, with his heart pounding, and he looked at the man whose soldiers had killed his parents and his sister.
’It’s really him.’
He had imagined this moment for eight years. But in his mind, he had always been older and stronger, and he had been able to do something.
The back end of a spear hit him behind the knees.
He fell hard on the stones. Then a boot came down on his back and pressed his face into the wet ground, and a soldier said, almost kindly, "You bow to a Sovereign, boy."
Mav knew that he could have thrown the soldier off. But he lay still instead, with his teeth pressed together so hard that they hurt, and he turned his head just far enough to see.
Lucan Pyrecrest walked past, three steps away.
He didn’t slow down, and he didn’t glance aside. A boy had been knocked to the ground at his feet, and he hadn’t even noticed. He said something to his helper about a delivery, turned the page, and went on.
He hadn’t seen Mav at all.
Mav had never hated anyone so much. His whole body shook with it, and his fingers pushed into the gaps between the stones until two of the stones cracked.
Then something cool tightened around his ribs, gently, under his shirt.
It was One. This time, it wasn’t stopping him by force, the way it had when he pushed Five. It was only holding him gently, and Mav understood what it meant: not today.
He took a breath, and he made his fingers open.
The boot lifted, and the soldiers moved on. Around him, people stood up straight again and went back to their morning. Nobody looked at the boy who was getting up from the ground.
Only one person was watching him.
At the edge of the crowd, a woman in a gray coat closed a small notebook. She had written down two things: the hour at which Maverick Silkborn had returned to the gate, and the fact that he had not bowed.