Nigredo: Fervet Opus

Magda had claimed a table at the far margin of the Athenaeum, next to a window that overlooked the silver network of catwalks webbing the volcano’s hollow. She had a small pile of cards arrayed in a grid before her, each scrawled with quick, narrow script. The cards were not for playing, but for organizing: the logic of the corridor’s doors, the rules as spoken by Amabilis, oddments of alchemical correspondence, and the names of every other Reactant. She wore the lab coat again; this time, it trailed open at the front, and there was a reasonable chance she had forgotten to dress beneath it, judging by the way she kept pulling the lapels tighter at each new draft of air.

Adrien watched her for a moment from the upper landing, then descended the stairs at a measured pace. The way Magda held herself—shoulders curved in, hands busy but not restless—reminded him of a jeweler working under poor light: focused, half-aware of threat, ready to shift in an instant. She did not notice him until he reached her table and tapped two knuckles on the surface.

“May I?” he asked.

She glanced up, then to the cards, then back at him. “Of course,” she said, and cleared a space by stacking several cards with a neat, perpendicular alignment. She did not offer a seat, perhaps assuming he would prefer to stand.

He did stand, but close enough to be overheard by no one. The Athenaeum was almost empty at this hour, except for a golem posted at the main entrance, its presence more decorative than functional.

Magda waited for him to speak.

Adrien glanced at her cards. “Still mapping the system?” he said.

She shrugged, then tucked the pen behind her ear. “I prefer not to improvise when it can be avoided. The less I leave to error, the less I will have to answer for later.”

He smiled faintly, then looked away, as if composing a sentence that resisted coming out. When he did speak, it was lower than usual. “Would you walk with me?”

Magda studied him for a beat. “Is it private?”

He nodded.

She slid the cards into a tidy block, tucked them under her arm, and stood. The lab coat was belted at the waist, but as she rose the lower hem flared just wide enough to show that she was, in fact, bare-legged beneath. If this troubled her, she gave no sign.

She followed him through the Athenaeum’s mezzanine, past the unmoving golem, and into the corridor marked only by the faintly glowing line that traced the way to the Axis Staircase.

They descended without talking. The sound of their steps—his precise, hers deliberate—was the only evidence of their existence in the tunnel. The Axis Staircase was wider than needed, carved in a spiral that suggested both a downward and an inward direction. The air cooled as they walked.

“Are you taking me to your quarters?” Magda asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“No,” he said, too quickly. The word landed between them with more **** than he had intended, and he heard it as she must have: a small, reflexive recoil. He glanced at her. “Forgive me. That came out badly.”

Magda’s expression was unreadable. “It came out clearly,” she said, which was worse.

At the base, Adrien stopped before the massive, undecorated door that opened onto the Axis Path. He pressed his palm to the surface; it responded at once, cycling open with a mechanical sigh.

The corridor was as he remembered: pure glass, every angle engineered to render the sense of depth and distance irrelevant. The magma below was slow-moving, a living river of orange and gold, utterly indifferent to the two people crossing above it. At this hour the glass was neither hot nor cold; it seemed to exist at a temperature just below perception, perfect for inviting a sense of unreality.

Magda entered without hesitation, her stride smooth and unbroken. She did not look down, nor did she comment on the strangeness of walking in open air with only a centimeter of engineered nothing between herself and ****.

Adrien walked beside her, then paused at the midpoint, where the Axis Path bowed slightly in defiance of geometry. He turned so that both could see the caldera, but neither was tempted to linger at the glass railing.

He spoke first, but not easily. “You’ve crossed this before,” he said, a statement of observation.

Magda nodded. “It is not difficult if you do not imagine falling.” She peered over, then fixed her gaze on the glass ahead. “Is this where you wish to speak?”

He exhaled. “Yes.”

She waited, hands folded behind her.

He arrived at the words by increments. He had rehearsed for this, in the silence of his room, tracing each move in the conversation as if laying out a chess problem with himself as both Black and White. But the instant Magda turned her face to him, the opening vanished. Every line he’d prepared seemed bloodless in the face of her attention—not curiosity, not even skepticism, but a receptive, scientific patience, as if she’d already accepted that this was not a social visit and was ready to slice him open and catalogue the organs.

“There is something I have not told the others,” Adrien said, voice pitched lower than the magma river beneath them. He felt the words jam up at the narrow part of his throat, then slip out anyway, a bead of mercury on glass. “I think you, of all people, would understand the necessity, but also the risk. I need your help to check whether I am reasoning badly.”

Magda’s expression did not change, but her chin tipped up a fraction—a tiny, precise ratcheting of attention. She was not flattered by the confidence; she was alert to the possibility that she was being used. “Are you asking for a diagnostic?” she said, keeping her hands folded lightly behind her back, as if she’d already been running the internal checklist.

“Yes,” he said, feeling helplessly grateful that she did not smile at the transparency of it. “I’m asking for a neutral audit of my reasoning. There are gaps I may not see.”

She accepted the assignment with a small, pleased nod. “Then present your data.”

He started with the basics, the data points that were least likely to provoke strong reaction. “You know what the Host called this place, the Harem Hotel. I was familiar with it before arriving here, not in the literal sense—I’ve never watched it, but in the context of prose. There’s a genre of story, a kind of game with rules and escalation and a competitive structure. The basic shape is as Amabilis described: women are gathered, they are bound to a Master, and there are mechanisms for evaluation and elimination.” He paused, searching her face for the first sign of skepticism, or boredom, or the flatness that meant he’d gone off course.

He paused, searching her face for the first sign of skepticism or annoyance.

Magda absorbed this, then said, “I see. Continue.”

He felt the urgency building—he had to get it all out before the impulse to hide it took over. “What I did not say, and what is critical, is that the system is not merely social. It scores us, visibly or invisibly, on progress. Points are awarded for impressing the Master, for placing well in challenges, but in most seasons, the bulk of the points come from intimate actions with the Master.” He hesitated, the next part feeling like it would cost him something. “Those who fall behind are, eventually, eliminated. The process is not fatal per se, but as the Host implied, there are horrible consequences for failure. Amabilis herself warned of dissolution, or at least demotion to a kind of golem state.”

Magda’s lips compressed, then relaxed. It was not surprise—she had already constructed half the theory—but a confirmation, like the click of a lock. “This was not mentioned to us in detail.”

“It was not,” he said, feeling again the guilt of omission. “And I do not know whether it is ignorance or deception.”

She considered, then said, “I understand.”

He watched her face. Magda did not blink. He would not have blamed her if she had.

She was quiet for longer than he expected. She looked down at the glass beneath her feet—the only thing between the two of them and the radiant, obliterating fire below—then at the far end of the corridor, then, finally, back at him. It was as if she had to triangulate his position not just in space, but in the web of possible consequences. “Did you come to me because you thought I would understand,” she said, “or because you thought I would not make it worse?”

He considered this honestly, because it was the only way she would allow the conversation to proceed. “Both,” he said.

She nodded, once, as if filing the answer. “Go on.”

He shifted his weight back, feeling the glass flex by a millimeter under his heel. “It’s more than just games and scoring,” he said. “Amabilis warned me against sharing my knowledge of the broader Harem Hotel with you all, because assuming that physical intimacy is the only key to success would prove dangerously misguided. I understood why, when she explained that the system here is designed for balance. Salt, Mercury, Sulphur—each is tracked, and the Reactants are graded on their progress. If one is too much ahead in any, the system will rebalance, sometimes by catastrophic means.”

Magda interlaced her fingers in front of her, the skin pale against the crisp white of her coat. “You mean to say, if the system senses manipulation, it will counter it. Like a body casting off excess bile.”

“Precisely. Other seasons—the ones I read, the ones people watch—usually reward direct attempts to game the process, because the whole purpose of the show is to provide intimate encounters for the viewers’ pleasure. But here, if the Reactants believe only intimacy advances them, and pursue it exclusively, the system will overcorrect. The result would be elimination.”

Magda’s brow furrowed, not in surprise but as if she’d been waiting for this line of logic to appear. “What happens during elimination, then?”

“The Harem Hotel prefers to convert failure into utility,” he replied. “Those who do not progress may be… repurposed. As servants, or supplicants. Sometimes as cautionary examples.” He wondered if she would catch the implication: that behind every golem, every unremarkable fixture in the volcano, there might once have been a person who had not played the game with sufficient agility. And worse, that person may still be inside, unable to do anything but watch for eternity as their body acted outside of their control.

She did catch it. He saw her eyes flick to the golem at the far end of the corridor, and then return. She said nothing about it, but her silence was more expressive than any outcry.

Magda considered this. “And your part in this? Are you required to participate?”

He shook his head. “No. Not in the usual sense. I can abstain, or I can choose to participate. But if I do nothing, if I refuse to participate in the scoring system at all, the Reactants will have no way to win, and the system will eliminate them all.”

She gave a single, clinical nod. “You are the Catalyst indeed, then. Without you, the reaction cannot proceed. If you are inert, the system fails.”

“That’s the trap,” he said. “If I do what is required, how is that not indirectly coercive of you all? If I abstain, I risk your destruction. And Amabilis was explicit: If I tell the others about the nature of the system, or about the threat of elimination, it may destabilize things further.”

Magda’s eyes narrowed. “So the optimum path is to be authentic. To let your preference, your intent, be the guide. The problem is, you cannot know what you want.”

He laughed, not out of humor but the recognition of an old flaw. “Yes. You see it. I spent my entire life—lives—refusing to choose, thinking it was the only ethical stance, the only stance that would allow me to survive without breaking. Now, if I persist, it will only create more suffering.”

She did not immediately answer. She seemed to be running every possible scenario, testing the boundaries of his claim. “Are you sure this is not just guilt speaking? Or,” she added, voice gentle as a whetstone, “is it only that you do not wish to be the cause of suffering, even if passively?”

He watched the river of magma, the way it moved with both infinite slowness and absolute inevitability. “I don’t know. I’ve told myself for two millennia that not choosing is the only safe way, because all other choices end badly. But this place—it doesn’t allow for ambiguity. Not anymore.”

She nodded, and let the silence hang between them, neither rushed nor permissive. When she did speak, it was with the calm of an experimenter rephrasing the problem. “You are not asking for permission,” she said. “You are asking for a check on your logic. A calibration.”

“Exactly.”

Magda’s expression shifted for the first time since they’d begun, but not in the way he anticipated—no arch of the brow, no prim tightening of the lips, not the shade of empathy he’d grown familiar with in more ordinary conversations. She inhaled as if she meant to sample the air: slow, deep, and with a subtly chemical wariness, as if she expected something toxic to be released at any moment. Her gaze was neither cold nor kind, but exact in the way that only people who have studied the difference between the two can manage. She exhaled. “You want to know if you will become a danger to us, or if you are merely incapable of not being one.” Her voice was softer than before, pitched so that the sound would die at the corridor’s edges. If she had wanted to unnerve him, she had chosen the right words.

Adrien had to brace himself with a hand on the glass rail, surprised at how much the sentence hurt. “Yes,” he admitted, and found no better words to add.

She seemed satisfied, but not at his suffering—at the clarity of the question. “Have you ever tried it the other way?” she asked. “Not abstaining, I mean, but making a decision—choosing a person, a path, a project, without deferral or contingency, without the armor of indeterminacy.”

He stared at the caldera for a while, the horizon cut flat by the artificial geometry of the volcano’s rim. “Not in two thousand years,” he said. It wasn’t a boast. He felt, acutely, that at this distance the number sounded fraudulent, as if he were inflating it to make her pity him.

“Why?” she asked. No inflection, no judgment. She left a space for it.

He tried to catch her gaze, but her focus was directed inward, as if she were already performing the analysis and merely waiting on the data. “Because I have seen what happens. Because every time I have, someone gets hurt.”

“Then you are certain that not choosing is always the lesser harm.”

He paused, then said, “I was certain. I am less certain now.”

She waited, letting the silence settle around the statement as if to see whether something else would precipitate from it. Her look was nearly bored, but he knew this was her way of letting the most essential parts of a conversation emerge on their own. “And the women? You are concerned that if you participate as the system intends, you will be coercing us. Is that correct?”

He nodded, feeling the confirmation land with a dull thud in his chest. “It feels that way.”

She turned to face him fully, feet set deliberately wide on the glass, the light from the caldera tracing faint, irregular shadows up the insides of her legs and pooling beneath her coat. She let the pose hold for a moment, as if to grant him the full weight of her presence. “Does it not occur to you,” she said, “that some might prefer **** to oblivion?”

He blinked at her, genuinely taken aback. The idea had not occurred to him, or rather, he had considered it and dismissed it as a failure of his own imagination.

She pressed the point, her voice gaining a scalpel’s edge: “You are not the only one who dislikes ambiguity. The others—many of them—would rather suffer a known violation than an uncertain end. You think of them as fragile, but several are stronger than you believe. The point system is the threat, not the intimacy.”

There was something so precise in the way she said it that it felt like a hypothesis already supported by experiment. He tried to answer, but found that the only words available were a repetition of her own: “The point system is the threat, not the intimacy.”

She did not wait for him to elaborate. “You could tell them. You could also simply participate, in good faith, and let the system function. Both will produce casualties, but so does any experiment worth doing.”

He smiled with the left side of his mouth; it was the only way he could smile, these days. “You are more merciless than I remember.”

She shrugged, shoulders rising and falling in a single, dismissive plane. “I am only honest, Herr Rosenkreutz. And I have less time than you, so I do not enjoy wasting it.”

He looked down at the glass bridge beneath his shoes, the way it shimmered as the heat refracted up through it, and realized that for all its clarity, the surface was never quite transparent. “What would you do, in my place?”

Magda did not answer at once. She gazed out at the far end of the corridor, where the glass met basalt, and the massive door to the Axis Mundi waited, impassive as a verdict. “I would test both hypotheses. I would tell one, and not the other. I would act as if the system’s threats were real, but also as if the women’s desires were sovereign. In time, the system would reveal which risk was greater.”

He frowned. Experimenting with the lives of the other women, though he understood Magda’s reasoning, felt callous.

She continued, less as an addendum than as a final pronouncement: “Or, you could do nothing. But then, we all become golems, or worse. I prefer agency, even if it is costly.”

He looked at her, and she met his gaze without flinching. “Thank you, Magda,” he said. It was a strange thing to say, because gratitude had never been their currency.

She gave him a long, unreadable look. “Don’t,” she said, and the sound of it was not unkind, but stripped of all the usual conventions of discomfort. “I have not told you what to do. I have only told you what your argument is missing.” She gathered her cards and stacked them in her hand, a gesture of closure. “Come back when you know which problem you’re actually solving.”

She walked back toward the staircase, her stride efficient and even, not once looking back to see whether he followed. Halfway to the far landing, she paused, as if struck by a thought, but did not turn. Then she continued, vanishing from his line of sight as though she’d passed through a one-way mirror.

He stayed on the glass after she was gone, listening to the slow pulse of the magma river below. In the quiet, he replayed the conversation, trying to identify the moment when he had lost any claim to objectivity. He found it in the first sentence, and then in the next, and then in every moment since he’d come to this place. It all felt recursive. At some point, he was not sure when, the distinction between becoming a danger and being unable not to be one had collapsed.

For a long time, he stayed on the Axis Path, watching the slow-motion river of fire below. He tried to imagine the choices he would make, and whether it was possible to live with any of them, or if the only thing that made life bearable was the refusal to choose at all.

When he was sure Magda was well out of sight, he leaned his head against the glass and let the heat, the silence, and the uncertainty surround him.

The magma flowed, slower than thought, but just as unstoppable.

The Refectory at mid-afternoon was quieter than a church on Monday: no voices, no music, only the faint, metallic ring of a golem restocking plates somewhere out of sight. Oudemia sat with her back against the far wall, knees drawn up, arms slack at her sides, head bowed just enough to cast her face in shadow. The twins found her there, unmoving, her long, dark hair pooled around her like a spill of ink.

Summer slowed when she saw the girl, half-thinking to back out and come back later, but then shrugged and nudged Autumn to follow. They moved to the serving counter and loaded up a plate: two thick slices of brown bread, a scoop of dried apricots, and the crusty end of a cheese wedge that nobody ever took. Summer set the plate on the floor in front of Oudemia without ceremony.

The girl looked up, not at the food, but at the twins. Her gaze was not wary, not even particularly curious—just the slow, methodical scan of someone who had not yet decided if it was worth engaging. She blinked, once, then looked down at the plate.

Summer cleared her throat, and they squatted next to the food. “Not a trap,” she said. “Just bread and cheese. If you want something else, you can tell us.”

Oudemia picked up a piece of bread, broke it in half with the careful precision of someone who remembered when food had to last. She ate it in small bites, each one chewed all the way before she went for the next. After a while, she looked back at the twins and said, “You are not together.”

It was not a question. Summer’s brain scrambled for the reference, then realized what she meant. “Oh! No. Not… not like that. We’re conjoined, but we’re not, like, a couple.” She laughed, a nervous reflex. “I mean, we’re sisters. Is that what you meant?”

The girl tilted her head. “You move as one, but speak as two. It is new to me.”

Autumn said, “It’s new to everyone.”

There was a long silence. Oudemia ate a few dried apricots, chewing each with unhurried intent, as if they needed to last until the next full moon. Summer wanted to fill the air, so she tried. “I’m Summer. She’s Autumn. I don’t think we caught your name?”

The girl said, “Names change. I do not have one now.” She picked up the cheese, sniffed it, and took a small bite. She waited for the taste to land before swallowing. “I had names before.”

Summer exchanged a quick glance with Autumn, but neither pressed. “Is it okay if we all call you Oudemia, then? We sort of already do, but I realize no one asked you.”

She nodded slightly, continuing to eat another apricot. Oudemia said, “You want to know about the cistern.”

Summer blinked. “No—I mean, yes, but only if you want to talk about it.”

“I was there for a long time,” the girl said, with no inflection. “It was not good or bad. It just was. You would not like it.”

Summer said, “No, I don’t think we would.”

Autumn watched her, but also watched the girl. “Did you sleep, or did you just… wait?”

Oudemia said, “The first century I slept. After that, I did not.” Summer felt a chill.

Oudemia ate with the intensity of a field mouse who’d found a cache of grain: each motion small and tightly controlled, but never furtive. She never looked at the food as she chewed. Her eyes, black as obsidian and almost as reflective, tracked the twins’ faces while she worked through the bread.

Summer waited for her to swallow before prodding again, “So, uh, before you got here. Where did you live? Like, what was your town called?”

“I was born in Pella,” Oudemia said. “Then I lived in Alexandria, but not for long. When my father died, I was in Pella again. After that, I was taken through Tyre, then Rhodes, then to a desert place. I do not remember the name.” She sipped water, never looking at the glass. “They do not keep you in the city if you are a bad omen.”

Summer felt a sudden flush of horror, but **** it into a joke: “Yeah, small towns, you make one mistake, and it’s like, you’re the weird kid forever.” She laughed; Oudemia didn’t join. Autumn did not smile, either.

“What about your family?” Summer tried. “Did you have…?”

Oudemia paused. “My father was the King. My mother died when I was a baby. I had two little brothers. They killed them.” She glanced at Autumn, then back to Summer. “You ask so you will not have to tell your own story. You should go ahead.”

It caught Summer off guard; she blinked and stared, then shrugged. “Yeah. That’s kind of true.” She looked at Autumn, who nodded, resigned.

“We’re not really hiding anything, though,” Summer said. “Our mom and dad were just normal people. They had the one ultrasound, and the nurse fainted, and after that everybody just sort of… braced for impact.” She let the story roll out, the practiced rhythm of it clear from years of explanation. “We grew up in Wyoming. Small town called Ashcombe Vale. It was actually—“ she glanced at Autumn— “not bad, for us. The town had a lot of kids born different. Something in the soil, they always said. There were even two other sets of conjoined twins in our school, though not like us. So we weren’t the weird ones, exactly. Our grandma lived with us. She was the only adult who didn’t act like we were a problem to be solved.”

Oudemia chewed the cheese, watching with what looked like faint skepticism, as if waiting for the punchline.

“We did have a therapist,” Summer continued. “When we were nine, the school said we should see a therapist. She was nice. She kept a bowl of M&Ms on her desk, and we figured out she only refilled them once a week, so if you ate one color she’d notice, and if you ate a mix, she’d never know. That was the big mystery: how much could we empty the bowl without her catching on?” She grinned, not because the story was funny, but because it was the only way to keep it from being sad.

“She caught on,” Autumn said.

“Yeah,” Summer agreed. “She said we were too clever for her. Then she quit, and we didn’t get another one until high school.” Summer looked at Oudemia. “Anyway. It was normal, I guess. For us.”

Oudemia considered this, then asked, “Were you always as you are now?”

“Yeah,” Summer said. Autumn echoed her, “Yes. We were born this way.” She did not elaborate.

“Do you hate it?” Oudemia asked, as if it were the most natural question in the world.

Summer was too surprised to answer immediately, so Autumn filled the gap: “No.”

“Not really,” Summer admitted, her voice going small. “It can be inconvenient at times, but we love being together.”

Oudemia accepted this, as if it required no more explanation.

She finished the bread, then said, “You do not argue. You do not fight.” She looked at Autumn, then Summer. “Are you ever alone?”

Summer considered, then shook her head. “Not really.”

“It is good,” Oudemia said.

Autumn smirked. “But we argue and fight plenty. You just haven’t seen it yet.”

Oudemia shrugged.

The silence stretched. Autumn watched Oudemia’s face and noted how the muscles never twitched, never gave away the little tics of emotion she had learned to read in others. It was like watching a statue talk.

Oudemia asked, “Do you wish you could be one?”

Summer didn’t answer for a long time. “We did sometimes, when we were little,” she said. “But I think we’d get bored.”

Autumn added, “And I’d miss her.”

Summer smiled. “I’d miss her too.”

They let that stand for a while.

Oudemia shifted her focus. “I used to have another brother,” she said, unprompted. “He died very young when I was five years old, but my father had a tomb built for him. It was the only time I saw my father weep.” Her tone was flat, matter-of-fact. “He did not care for me, but he gave me my name. I liked it.” She paused, then: “I do not remember his face anymore.”

Summer, who had learned that silence often meant something important had been said, let the gap open before asking, “What happened? To him, or to you?”

Oudemia shrugged. “He died. I do not remember. The world was always killing someone.”

Autumn asked, “Did you love your father?”

Oudemia thought about it. “No. But I loved how the world changed when he was near. It felt like everything could be undone, if he decided it.”

“Is that why you tried to run away?” Summer asked, gently.

She shook her head. “No. I wanted to stay. I wanted to see what happened next. But it was not allowed.” Oudemia reached for the final apricot, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. “After my father died, they came for me. There was a man who said he would bring me home, but he did not. He cut my throat. Then other men came. Andreas never did. He says he was delayed.”

Summer said, “Did he love you?”

Oudemia did not answer, but after a moment said, “I don’t know. I think he wanted to, but he was not allowed either.”

She ate the apricot, then set the pit on the empty plate.

Summer wanted to say something comforting, but the story made her too sad, so she just nudged the plate a little closer.

Autumn asked, “Were you ever happy?”

Oudemia smiled, but only slightly. “There was a day when my father took me for a ride in the desert. I do not remember the reason, but there were flowers, and I was allowed to sleep outside the walls. It was good.” She looked at the empty plate. “Sometimes it is good to just wait. Sometimes it is better than wanting.”

Autumn looked at Summer, and they shared a silent conversation in the brief collision of their gazes: This is a lot. Yeah, but it’s true. I know.

Oudemia asked, “Do you want to go home?”

Summer said, “Yes. Very much.”

Autumn said, “We don’t know if it’s possible.”

Oudemia nodded, as if this was the expected answer.

She looked at the twins for a long time, then asked, “What will you do if you can’t?”

Summer said, “I don’t know.”

Autumn said, “We’ll figure it out.”

Oudemia seemed satisfied.

She pushed the plate away and folded her hands in her lap. She did not get up, but instead stared at the twins, as if cataloguing them for a later inventory.

After a long time, Summer broke the silence. “Does anything scare you?” she asked.

Oudemia considered, then said, “Yes. I am afraid of the cistern. I do not want to go back. But if I have to, I will.”

Summer shivered. “That’s awful.”

Oudemia shrugged. “It is not the worst thing. The worst thing is wanting something you cannot have.”

The words hung in the air for a minute, then two.

Summer looked at Autumn, searching for a clever response or a way to change the subject, but Autumn’s mouth twitched and she let it stand.

Oudemia said, finally, “It is less strange to share a body for a lifetime than to be alive and alone for two thousand years.” She said it the way she said most things: as information, not confession.

Summer stared at her, stunned into rare silence. Autumn’s mouth twisted in what might have been the beginning of a smile, but she caught it and tucked it away.

Oudemia sat, hands still in her lap, hair pooling down her back, and looked at nothing in particular.

Summer opened her mouth, then closed it. There was nothing to say to that, or rather there were too many things, none of them adequate. She looked at Autumn. Autumn looked at Oudemia. Oudemia looked at nothing in particular, her hands still in her lap, the empty plate between them.

None of them left.