Page 28 of The House of Quiet

Chapter Twenty-Two

An Arrow Nocked

“Who are you?” Birdie asks. She doesn’t look afraid, or angry. Arrow wants her to be angry. Wants Birdie to attack her, to lunge at her. To make what happens next self-defense and not murder.

Arrow came here to become a murderer, but not like this. Not Birdie. No matter what the maid is hiding, Arrow doesn’t want to kill her.

But she will.

“It doesn’t matter who I am. I know who you are.”

Birdie surprises Arrow again. She laughs . “Who am I, then?”

Arrow feels oddly defensive. Like Birdie’s the one in control. Like Arrow should be embarrassed to be holding a knife. She adjusts her grip. This is why she’s here. This is why she abandoned her home, her people, her life.

Not that she has much left of any of those, anyway.

Arrow should just kill Birdie. Slit her throat and be done with it.

She knows where to aim, what moves of a blade can do quick but irreparable damage.

The whole journey here, she imagined elaborate methods of killing the southern operative.

But now that she knows it’s Birdie, Arrow doesn’t want to do any of them. She just wants to get it over with.

So why hasn’t she moved yet?

“You’re a plant,” Arrow says. “Recruiting for the military. Here to find those with the most devastating abilities to send them north so they can hurt my people. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Birdie has the audacity to frown. “ You’re from the north. I wondered. But who told you I was working for the military?” She tilts her head, much like her namesake might while considering a meal.

Arrow wishes they had given her the name a week ago, before she liked Birdie.

Before she’d seen Birdie be kind and helpful to everyone here, including Arrow.

When she sent Iron the names of those in the house, she didn’t even list Birdie’s.

So how did Iron know who Birdie was, if Birdie isn’t their target?

No. Iron wouldn’t get this wrong. They had risked too much to get Arrow into this house.

“Just tell me what wasn’t real,” Arrow says, needing something to spur her on to this final terrible act. “Tell me what you were lying about. Tell me where you’re really from, what your name really is.”

Birdie still doesn’t look angry or scared, but she does look a little sad.

“My name is Birdie. I’m from the lower east quarter of Sootcity.

We call it the light quarter, even though it’s always dark, because most of it has been taken over by factories making gas lamps.

I’m not part of the military. I’ve worked as a maid since I was ten, and I extorted the minister of finance to get my spot here. ”

“What?” Arrow wasn’t ready for that last bit of information. Why would Birdie need to extort the minister of finance to get here if she’s working for the Ministry of Defense?

For a while, Arrow was terrified River was the operative, with her connection to the minister of defense. She was devastated to find Birdie’s name buried in a newly delivered sack of sugar, but at least it wasn’t River’s. That’s her only consolation.

“My sister came here,” Birdie says. “A little over six months ago. I think. No one can access the records, so I’m not sure. I was hoping I’d find her, but I’m not a lucky person.” Birdie gestures toward the knife as evidence of that truth. “Are you going to stab me or not?”

Arrow scowls. This keeps going worse. Iron wouldn’t have hesitated; she would have already taken care of Birdie. But Iron wouldn’t have needed a knife to do it. Arrow’s useless. She needs to keep Birdie talking while she figures out what to do. Or how to do what she already knows needs to be done.

“I’m not going to stab you here,” Arrow says. “We’re going out into the bog. I’ll say you ran away. No blood, no body, no way to prove me right or wrong.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I was worried you were a liar and stupid.”

Arrow laughs. She can’t help it. Birdie’s funny when she’s not pretending to be the meekest maid to ever live.

“You said your dad died going to get bread,” Birdie says. “Was that a lie?”

Arrow’s throat is tight and painful. “The miners were picketing. One of the soldiers with abilities made everyone panic. In the chaos, my father was trampled to death. He wasn’t even there for the demonstration; he was just trying to get across the street to the shops.”

Birdie’s expression goes soft. “Oh. And your mother?”

“Doctor and surgeon, for whoever needed it. Which more often than not were termites.”

“Termites?”

“You’d call them bogger insurgents. Terrorists. Freedom fighters.”

“Them? Not us?”

Arrow scowls. “My mother wouldn’t let me join. She saw the cost, day in and day out, on the kitchen table she used to operate. And then one day I came home and she was dead. Lying on that same table.”

As always, Arrow wonders: Did the soldiers bash her mother’s head in when she fought back? Did her mother do it to herself before they could burrow into her thoughts? Or did the termites kill her before she could give them away?

It doesn’t matter. Gone is gone. That’s what they tell themselves, in her village.

Gone is gone , they said, when the soldiers lit their bordering peat bog on fire so they’d lose their fuel source and more men would have to go work in the mines, extracting coal for the south’s industry.

Gone is gone , they said, when Arrow’s favorite little neighbor wandered into that burning peat bog, looking for his missing cousin, and never came back.

Gone is gone , they said, when kids were taken from yards, from homes, and then from schools, whole groups of children just vanished.

Carted south, never to be heard from again.

Gone is gone.

Arrow’s never been able to accept that. She knows her mother is gone, but it does matter. It has to matter. And besides, not everyone who goes stays gone. Iron is proof of that.

When Arrow was little and even more of a rot-brained fool than she is now, she told her friend Iron that she wanted to go to the south and get the procedure so she could see in the dark.

“That’s not an ability!” Iron had laughed, jabbing her meanly in the side.

Despite her name, Iron was as buttery and golden as a perfect summer day, the kind they got once, maybe twice a year up north.

But, just like those days, Iron’s loveliness was a deception.

Because behind the sun is always a knife of coldness waiting to cut them back down and remind them they don’t get beautiful, gentle things.

Iron wasn’t kind as a child. And when she came back from the dead to offer Arrow a chance to help the north, she was even worse. But she was also the only stolen child who escaped. A miracle. The north never got miracles. Who was Arrow to deny her request?

Arrow never asked who the real Minnow was or what happened to her. She doesn’t want to think about it. Just like she doesn’t want to think about what has to come next. Because no matter what she thinks of Birdie, the north has to come first. She has to fight for it, because so few others can.

“It’s all just luck, isn’t it?” Arrow asks.

“Luck that my mother traveled to the north, fell in love with my father, and decided to stay. Luck my father died, trampled to death in a crowd. Luck I grew early and didn’t look twelve anymore that night all my friends disappeared.

Luck that my mother was able to do what she did for as long as she could.

Luck that she got caught. Good luck, bad luck, it’s all the same: random and uncontrollable.

” Arrow looks down at the knife. So little has ever been within her control, but this still is.

“Wait,” Birdie says. “Your friends disappeared when they were twelve?”

Arrow scowls. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what happens.”

“Please, tell me.” Birdie leans closer. She should be leaning away, trying to escape.

“You take them. The children. You snatch them up and send them south to work in the factories or on the farms or who knows where. We never see them again.” Except for Iron, who made it back. But she didn’t make it back whole. She made it back…different.

“Stone. Hammer. Obsidian. Silver.”

Arrow flinches. “I had a cousin named Obsidian.”

Birdie’s voice is calm but insistent. “I’m not an agent of the south.

I don’t know who told you that or why. I’m only here to find my sister.

But I think I know what’s happening to the children taken from the north.

Those were names scratched into the floor of one of the cells. I think they were here.”

“Why would they be sent here?” Arrow asks, and then it all falls into place.

Iron never told Arrow how she got her terrible power, or what happened to the children who were taken alongside her.

“They’re putting them through the procedure,” Arrow whispers.

“But why ? Why would they do that? Why would they want potential enemies to have abilities?”

“I don’t know,” Birdie says, and Arrow finally believes her.

She’s played enough card games with Birdie to know that Birdie has a tell when she’s trying to be deceptive: she makes full eye contact.

And right now, Birdie’s not doing that. She’s being herself, looking down more than up.

The way she’s always been trained to, because Birdie is, in fact, a maid.

Iron was wrong. That’s the only explanation. Birdie’s death wouldn’t do a thing to help the north. So who is here that Arrow actually needs to kill? Or was Iron’s intel completely off from the start?

“We both need the same thing,” Birdie says. “Information. We have to get through the House Wife’s door.”

Arrow lowers the knife. She’s not going to kill Birdie. It might be a mistake, but it’s a mistake she can live with.

“Have you managed to get onto the hidden third floor yet?” she asks.

“What?” Birdie looks aghast. “There’s a hidden third floor? That’s why you were asking about secret staircases!”