Later, Imogen will admit that she had been about to leave when Laudna walked in.
It’s her third time interviewing for Starpoint’s graduate program. It’s her third time pulling out this blouse that’s too stiff, these pants that are too short. These shoes that crush her toes together and leave her with weeping blisters for days after, reminding her painfully and precisely of her failure every time she steps wrong back on the ranch.
The dread settles over her like a dense fog as the clock in the corner continues to tick. Twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern, and if her application gets rejected a third time then it’s not about bad luck anymore but instead about just not being good enough.
“Well. You aren’t,” someone says, and she tries to roll her eyes without letting tears fall, dutifully humming an old lullaby backwards until the voice’s echo finally fades. She blinks to staunch the tears, and holds herself as steadily as she can. She should leave and save herself the embarrassment. Get out quietly.
She is getting to her feet slowly as a door bangs open.
She tenses at first, ears ringing, thinking that the admissions council is calling someone in, but it’s the doorway to the hall instead.
A woman’s standing there, dark-eyed and pale and gripping a sheaf of paper like she’s afraid a strong wind’ll kick up and blow it from her. She’s wearing a toolbelt, inexplicably. She is immediately fascinating.
“Hello, I’m terribly sorry,” she says to the room at large all in a rush, the prim apology charmingly out of step with the determined set to her jaw, “but is this where we’re supposed to wait for graduate interviews?”
Imogen blinks. It’s the first interruption to the quiet space since she got here—everyone else has entered silently and sat down without a word, and is apparently electing to ignore the intrusion. She feels a half-smile tug at her mouth.
“Yeah,” she calls out, and the woman snaps her head over to Imogen, utter relief dropping her shoulders from where they were frozen up around her ears. She runs over with abandon, arms and legs pumping like she’s running in a footrace. She sticks her hand out for a handshake when she reaches her, like she’s conducting a formal business deal and not standing out of breath in a room that was silent as a church before she walked in.
Imogen shakes her hand without a moment’s hesitation, and Imogen catches the other woman’s eyes widen in surprise for a fraction of a second before an eager smile takes over her face.
“Laudna,” she offers. Her mouth quirks to one side in consideration. “Or… well, wait. Does the shake come first, and then the name?”
“I’m not sure,” Imogen admits. She’s still holding Laudna’s hand. It’s cool to the touch and she can feel the lumps of each finger’s knuckles against her palm. “I’m Imogen.”
“Imogen.” Each syllable drawn out and made its own. “Lovely name.”
“Well. Thanks, I… yeah. Thanks. I like Laudna a lot, too.”
She preens, hooks the thumb of the hand not clenching her papers through her toolbelt and rocks back on her heels. “I chose it,” she says proudly, and smiles so wide that her canine teeth are digging into her bottom lip.
Someone clears their throat in that way that people do when they want you to shut up. Imogen winces slightly, notices that Laudna does the same.
“They’re running behind schedule,” she murmurs. “I was goin’ to grab a drink from the vending machine, if you wanted…” She jerks her thumb in the direction of the hallway, where Laudna burst in only a few minutes ago. “We could talk out there. Might be easier.”
“Oh. Yes. Yes please,” Laudna says, all in a rush again. Another person coughs pointedly, so Imogen rolls her eyes and marches out into the hall, hoping against hope that Laudna will still follow behind—some odd, small part of her, something waking up bleary-eyed for the first time, knows that she will, that she will turn and Laudna will be right behind her.
She does. She is.
The vending machines are old and faded, but manage to be operational enough to sputter out two soda cans when Imogen thumbs in a few quarters. Laudna takes a can gratefully when Imogen hands it to her.
“I’m quite awful at this,” she says softly, rapping her long nails absentmindedly against the top of the can before popping the tab. “All of this.”
Imogen huffs out a laugh and casts a glance over to the tersely quiet room they just left, thinking of its ticking clock and the voices pressing in like the sizzle of a bad summer heat. “Yeah. Me too.”
Commiseration alights in Laudna’s eyes, her face opening with a smile, but then something flickers in her expression and it all shutters closed again. She clutches her papers tighter against her chest.
“I wish they’d just leave us be,” Imogen mutters, looking back down to the floor and scuffing the toe of her shoe against the carpet. “Let us do our work, get our answers.”
“What’s your work on?”
The genuine interest in her voice gets Imogen to lift her head. There’s still secrets there, in those eyes like night, but Imogen has not yet earned the right to press, and Laudna seems to truly want to know what she’s working on. That’s always been Imogen’s soft point. People don’t often want to hear what she has to say.
“Volume reduction in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and its impact on audiovisual hallucinations in hereditary schizophrenia,” Imogen recites, seeing the starkly bold text of her paper title in her mind’s eye as she rattles it off. “I work in neuro,” she rushes to simplify. “Brain scans, ‘n things.”
“Ah, alright,” Laudna says, nodding. “Is your work restricted to schizoaffective disorders, then?”
Imogen blinks, pleased at the understanding. “For now, yeah. Looking to… understand more. There’s so little understanding in the field around hallucinations, it’s… well. Just a lot of guessin’.”
“And the hereditary aspect…” Imogen feels her face tense, watches Laudna notice it too. “You don’t have to answer, of course,” she rushes to continue, “I didn’t mean to imply that—”
“Nah, no, you’re… fair question,” Imogen says, trying for a smile and falling short of the mark. “My mom. Me. She, uh… left. After I got diagnosed.”
It’s more than she’s given any interviewer, any statement of purpose. She never mentions her own diagnosis. Occasionally, she’ll mention her mom’s, if she thinks it provides necessary anecdotal context, but she knows this field, she knows how it works. Her own label is a very, very well-kept secret, managed through alarms to take her bitter antipsychotic medication and weekly therapy over video call and a lifetime spent trying to be anything other than what she is.
She just looked Laudna in the eyes and told her the truth. She belatedly realizes that she maybe should have just shut up, but she sees that light in Laudna’s eyes from earlier, back at full force, and recognizes it for what it is—understanding.
“Imogen, run.”
The voice comes from behind her. She sighs, breathes through her nose, and tries to hum under her breath.
“I’m sorry,” Laudna says quietly. “About your mother.”
“Nothin’ that can be done, now,” Imogen murmurs into her can, and her mother’s voice fades away from her head. Laudna tilts her head a bit like a bird, watching her, her expression painfully transparent—then what are you doing here?
Imogen chooses not to answer the unspoken question, clear as it is. “Enough about me, anyway,” she says, gesturing to Laudna’s tightly held papers. “What’s your work on?”
“Archaeology,” Laudna says quietly, pressing her already thin lips together into a near-invisible line. Imogen waits for more, and when she doesn’t get any, only feels foolish. They’ve only known each other half an hour, after all, and just because she decided to share more of herself with Laudna than nearly anyone else alive doesn’t mean that Laudna has to return the favor.
“Interesting,” she says, and she hopes this time her smile hits a little closer to real. “We should… yeah. Head back,” she says, crushing her can under the heel of her shoe and chucking it in the direction of the bin in the corner. She hears it miss. She doesn’t quite care.
“Could I get your number?” Laudna asks after Imogen’s already turned to head back into the waiting room. She looks back, and Laudna is still leaning against the other vending machine, her shoulders fallen in and eyes turned to the ground. “To talk? After this?”
“I… yeah, okay,” Imogen replies, confused hope flickering in her chest. “If you want. Check in about the interview process,” she says. She is desperate to offer some distance in case Laudna was just being kind. She gets the sense that Laudna is often kinder than is deserved.
“No,” Laudna says, raising her head to look at Imogen, and now Imogen’s heart is plunging through the floor in embarrassed disappointment, “no, I wanted to talk to you. Truly. As a friend, if… well. I don’t have many. I’d understand if you’re uninterested.”
This time, Imogen’s smile is unquestionably real, so genuine she laughs a bit. “I’m real interested. God, you really talk ‘round a point, don’t you?”
At Imogen’s laugh, a radiant expression comes over Laudna’s face, and she stands straighter as she shrugs. “I’ve been told that I have a hard time understanding the rhythm of conversation,” she says, digging her phone out of her pocket. “Apologies.”
It’s some ancient thing, a flip phone with a physical antenna and a rubbed-blank keypad, but Imogen thinks she manages to press in her number.
Hi :) she sends, and feels her pocket buzz. “There you go.”
Laudna takes her phone back, looks at the message, and gives that smile that’s too big for her face again. This time, it’s easy to return it.
“We really should get back,” Imogen says, reluctantly, inclining her head to the door. “I happen to know they don’t take too kindly to being late around here.”
“It’s horrible in there,” Laudna murmurs, falling back and becoming small again. “All that quiet. Tense.”
Imogen usually enjoys silence, actually—less chance of overwhelm. She’s finding, though, that she almost prefers Laudna’s strange, continuous chatter. Like her therapist-prescribed humming, it seems to help drown the voices out.
“You’ve gotten this far,” Imogen says. “Wouldn’t it be a waste if you left now?”
She hears an echo of her words in her mind, lets them settle and swallows hard. So rarely is it quiet enough in her mind to hear her own voice.
That dark thing, that dark, heavy occlusion, falls back over Laudna’s eyes, but this time a struggling spark fights its way through it, steadies her stance and opens her posture. She takes a deep breath.
“Yes, it would,” she says firmly. “And you’re here now, which is wonderful. Couldn’t possibly leave you all alone.”
“Oh, Laudna,” Imogen says sagely, tapping her right temple with an air of utmost seriousness. “Don’t you worry. I’m never alone.”
That draws a true bark of laughter from Laudna, delightful, hoarse and sharp. Imogen can’t help but grin crookedly over at her as she leads them back into the room.
Most of the people from earlier are still waiting here, flipping through binders or frantically typing on laptops, but the space has also begun to fill up with appointments for the later part of the afternoon. Imogen’s tattered briefcase still sits on her spot, but the only other open chair for Laudna is on the other side of the room. They notice this at the same time.
“Thank you for everything,” Laudna says, still too loud for the small room, and with a gentle squeeze of Imogen’s hand, she’s walking away, taking what feels like some of the air in the space with her.
Imogen just stands there for a minute. It kind of feels like her entire world has been turned on its head over the course of one walk down the hall and back. She watches Laudna sit down, fold herself up in her chair with a knee pulled to her chest, immediately apologize to the tense-looking med student to her right when she accidentally elbows him.
It feels impossible to look away, but Imogen manages it, sits down in her own chair slowly and mechanically. She pulls out her folder, her dog-eared pages of work, and looks through them again without really reading a word.
The voices begin to crush back in, nonsense words all layering over each other and pressing at the underside of her skull. She winces. When they’re not saying anything at all, and it's just the pressure of human-sounding noise all around her, sometimes it’s the hardest to shake.
She drums her leg, hums her wavering tune fruitlessly. As the sound presses in tighter, her eyes flick over to Laudna, who is rocking back and forth in her chair. She feels a little smile ghost at her lips. She imagines Laudna’s voice, lilting along in its halting tone with the notes of her song.
Like she can feel Imogen’s stare, Laudna’s unblinking gaze snaps over to her, her head tilting strangely in that way that is now becoming warmly familiar.
“Temult, Imogen?”
She flinches at the unexpected sound of her name halfway to raising her hand in a wave to Laudna. The woman who called it is standing in the north doorway, watching her.
“Yeah,” she says, sitting up, shifting her shoulders back. She tries to nod assertively. “Yes, I’m here.”
“We’re ready for you.”
Imogen clenches her fists in her lap hard enough to feel her nails in her palms and then lets them go.
“Okay,” she says faintly. “I… okay. All right.”
The woman turns back into the room brusquely, and Imogen knows she’s supposed to follow. She gets to her feet, gathers up her briefcase and her coat, but before she enters the interview she turns back to look at Laudna one more time.
She isn’t looking back at her. She’s standing, pacing in the small width of the room, bumping up against people’s feet as she walks from wall to wall. Her hands are flapping wildly at the wrists, she’s mumbling to herself—Imogen wishes more than anything she could hear what she was saying.
It’s a good picture to take with her as she turns and walks into the stuffy, high-ceilinged room. Her phone buzzes as she sits down in front of the committee, but she won’t be able to read it until after.
[FROM: Laudna]
Crossing my fingers for you!
Hey
oh my god hi :) how did it go
Good, I think? Hard to tell. How
about you?
not so good
What??
it’s all right, truly wsnt expecting
much
ive been here before, etc
What the hell Laudna
Did they say something to you?
You can report them
truly not anything to worry
yourslf over
the valiance is appreciated however :)
No really did they say something to you
You’re brilliant! Your work must be too
They’re idiots for not seeing that in you
theyre the smartest people in the
country, imogen
Doesn’t matter. They’re idiots. I’ve
decided.
imogen they could very well still let yu in
u may want to lighten up on the vitriol
Don’t think I will
It’s funny the lowercase texting looks
so different from how your voice sounds
flipphone imogen!!
IS THIS BETTER
IT’S KIND OF ALL OR NOTHING
I H8 TO TELL YOU
ALSO THE TYPOS
COMESWTIH THE TERRITORY
Good lord
I’m sorry today didn’t go how
you hoped Laudna
They’re idiots
SO YOUVE SAID
MANYTIMES
IT IS APPRECIATED
I’m really really glad you showed
up there today though
ME TOO :)
happy friday! ths made me think of you! :)
You’re so sweet
That is a very nice pencil!!
Wait I saw something yesterday too hold on
[Attachment: 1 Photo]
imogen
that’s so beautiful
snakes !!!
that’s much better than a pencil
I like the pencil! I was just thinking that
You know
They’re kinda like us :)
yes. exactly yes
Morning :)
good morning!!
Can you call later? Need to talk through
a presentation setup and want your input
certainly. you’re in my calendar :)
Do you have an Instagram
imogn
wait sorry i’m running late into the lab today
let me fix that
imogen
i have a flip phone
what do you think
Well okay yeah that’s what I thought
My roommate is asking for pic
of you and i have none I wanted
to ask!
[Attachment: 1 Photo]
:D
Laudna that’s the scariest shit
I’ve ever seen
Why is it two pixels
Omg it’s gonna scare him so bad
I love it so much
whats your roommates name
Dorian Storm
o wow! full name
[Attachment: dorian.mp4]
LAUDNA
HAHAHAHA
How’d you get your voice to do that?
i spent a lot of time alone
as a child
i know this is shocking
Me too but all I have to show for it
are horse facts
SHARE SOME
A female horse under four is called a filly
In racing though they’re fillies until five
There’s more space in a horse’s head for their
teeth than their brain
Omg hang on Dorian just got home
Laudna you scared him so bad that was
so funny
[Attachment: 1 Photo]
o good he’s laughing
was worried i genuinely traumatized him
it has happened before
Nah :) that was really really good
Wow I need about thirty more clips of you
doing that voice
heard anything yet from starpoint?
No
Probably not a good thing huh
What are you doing Friday
nothing at the moment
going into the lab perhaps
why?
So I haven’t gotten into Starpoint yet but I got
invited to their prospective student gala whatever
that means
And they gave me two tickets
imogen !!
thats such a good sign!
Would you want to go
??
yes of course
you should check with other people though
does dorian wnt to go? ik you’ve mentioned
he likes an occasion to dress up
I want you there Laudna
oh!
okay :)
yes then :)
Meet there at 7?
yes
:)
Imogen clips her cheek with the razor.
“Ah, shit,” she mumbles, fumbling for a piece of toilet paper to stick over the cut.
“Everything okay?” Dorian calls from the kitchen.
“Yes!” she yells. “Shaving! Runnin’ late! Leave me alone!”
“If you slice a crucial artery, you won’t be able to go on the date at all,” Dorian says, in that airy tone that means he’s making fun of her, but in his distinctly tender way. It has taken Imogen about a year to learn this.
It isn’t a date. They never called it that.
She sighs, and begins shaving the other side of her face with more care.
Her heart is pounding in her throat from nerves. She tries to swallow it back down.
It’s been two weeks since her interview—it’s been two weeks since she met Laudna, and she still feels like the universe is reorganizing itself around her. Conversation has never come so easy with another person; she has never been so immediately understood.
Imogen has a hard time meeting people and an even harder time forming any sort of meaningful relationship with them. Dorian doesn’t count—that’s her brother, in every sense but blood, who found her at one of the lower points of her life on some stupid online forum for trans people new to the city. Dorian brought with him Orym and Fearne, who by some stroke of luck happened to click with her out-of-step strangeness.
She loves them all with everything she has, she does—but no one, until Laudna, has made her feel so unencumbered or so light. She didn’t realize how bad it had gotten, how far she had fallen inside herself, until Laudna stuck that hand out for her to take in that dusty room.
She steps back from the mirror, rubs her neck and face over with her moisturizer to tame the redness. Soon, she’ll be seeing Laudna in person again—in an enormous hall with hundreds of people, yes, but it might even be worth it.
“When do you have to be there, again?” Dorian asks.
“Seven,” Imogen says automatically, which has been living in her mind since the plan was made earlier this week.
“You’ll have to take the cable car,” Dorian says, the teasing note in his voice replaced with a softer gentleness. “You know that? It’s in a different spire.”
“Yeah,” Imogen says, almost dropping her mascara. “Yes. I know.”
“Okay.” She thinks he’s dropped the issue, but then he clears his throat. “Do you want me to ride with you, Imogen? I will. I’ll just take the car right back after I drop you off, it’d be no trouble.”
“I can handle myself, Dorian,” Imogen says quietly, turning to look at him through the crack in the door.
“Never said you couldn’t,” he replies, and grins. “I like the eyeliner.”
“Really? ‘S not too much?” She looks at herself in the mirror, at the way the liner cuts her eyes out from her face, makes the purple of them seem to glow.
“Certainly not. You’re trying to sweep her off her feet, yeah?”
Imogen swallows her heart again. She thinks of Laudna’s dark eyes in her face, of the shadows of crow’s feet pulling at the corners of her eyes. Of the way she had looked at her, with all of herself.
“I think so,” she says softly. “I think I might be.”
She thinks of Laudna’s hand in hers.
“Well, then. I’d say you’re doing just enough.”
“Will you ride with me?” Imogen blurts out, after she’s been tersely silent for about a minute figuring out her blush. “Did you mean it?”
Dorian has also gotten used to her. He grins again, and stands up. “Course I did. Please let me add highlighter to your face. A little dusting under the eyes. She’ll never know what hit her.”
Imogen rolls her eyes, but sits down on the edge of the tub and gives herself over to Dorian’s expertise. He has taught her everything she knows about makeup—unfortunately, as a drag queen, that does tend to mean that her looks tend towards the fantastic and showmaking rather than her preferred unobtrusive and subtly beautiful. She thinks she’s starting to like it anyhow.
They manage to get out the door on time, and their cable car journey is relatively uneventful. Dorian needled Imogen into picking up some flowers for Laudna from the shop on the corner, and their smell helps ground her as the car starts to rock.
Voices have been quiet tonight. She takes that as a good omen.
“This will be good,” Dorian agrees as the car approaches its destination, and maybe she said that last part out loud. He squeezes her hand as the doors open and she stands to leave. “Have fun. And Imogen?” She turns back. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Oh, hell.
It’s Valentine’s Day.
When the car grinds to a swaying, uneven halt, Imogen stands stuck and stunned, so Dorian pushes her out (gently) onto the landing platform.
“You’ll be fine,” he calls out. “It was already a date.”
Imogen stands there still, flowers hanging limply at her side, blinking glassily at the expansive view around her. How did she forget it was Valentine’s Day? A gala on Valentine’s Day invites expectation, invites a certain kind of idea.
Does Laudna think this is a date?
“She already said yes,” someone says to her left, although no one stands there. She waves them away, even though they’re right.
She did already say yes. And Imogen is holding flowers for her.
She is wearing a flowing, sheer dress that was Dorian’s pre-transition—he gave it to her years ago, and since, she’s had Fearne embroider designs on the skirt, let Orym help her cut fabric from the top to expose her shoulders.
She feels beautiful.
When she reaches the Conservatory—shot through with light, immense, a marvelous jewel in the spire’s crown—she opens her phone.
[TO: Laudna]
I’m out front!
The response comes immediately.
IM RUNNING
IM ALMOST THERE
DONT YOU DARE MOVE
Imogen giggles, a sound foreign to her ears. She lifts her head, scans the scattered crowd for too many teeth and hair like afternoon shadow, and finds it—indeed, running doggedly towards her.
She pushes onto her tiptoes, which is still not much help, and waves her arm frantically.
“Laudna!”
“Imogen!”
Laudna pushes past several people all far fancier than the two of them, getting slammed between others who are rushing and tugged back when someone’s jewelry gets caught on her hair, but eventually she’s standing in front of Imogen; rumpled, out of breath, and sort of the most gorgeous creature Imogen has ever seen.
She’s dressed in a dark, beautiful skirt, ornately patterned with rich red thread that matches with the dress shirt tucked in at the waist—it’s a masculine cut, but it serves to emphasize her already prominent collarbones, the hollow of her throat. Imogen wants to put her mouth there. She stops herself from saying that aloud in the nick of time.
“You look so good,” she murmurs instead, her voice filled with so much awe that she thinks surely it will give her away. However, when she’s met with silence, she comes back to herself a bit, and she realizes that Laudna has been staring at her with her mouth hanging slightly open.
“Imogen,” she manages, raspy, after a few minutes. “Imogen.”
Imogen can’t help the smile that breaks overlarge onto her face. For lack of anything to say back, made shy by the sheer radiance of Laudna’s affection, she holds out the flowers towards Laudna—pink peonies. For softness, for care, for a million things.
Laudna loses her voice again. She takes the flowers in her right hand, reverently, and her left hand flaps back and forth a bit before clenching in and out of a fist in apparent excitement. She looks to Imogen and beams. The dark of her eyes lights up with a deep, beautiful brilliance.
“I’m glad you like them,” Imogen says softly. “Can I… should we go inside?”
She sort of doesn’t care about the gala right now, or Starpoint, or the endless burden of her mother and her research. She’d stay out here with Laudna forever.
Laudna lifts a flower from the bouquet and wordlessly slips it behind Imogen’s ear before nodding.
They turn together, and walk in.
Immediately, it’s the kind of loud that would typically set off a migraine, or at the very least aggravate her hallucinations, but Imogen holds fast to Laudna, who moves through the crowd with a singular, dedicated determination. The hard-set expression on her face only ever eases when she looks back at Imogen, and all the angles of it soften.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers eventually after she’s dragged them all over the hall, very close to Imogen’s ear so that she can be heard. “I’m trying to find us a quieter spot. I don’t much like it out here.”
“Me neither,” Imogen murmurs, and squeezes her hand where they’re still clasped together. “But I don’t mind this as much as I would if you weren’t here.”
“Imogen,” Laudna says softly, always so soft, always so good, “Imogen, I wanted—”
“Ma-til-da?”
The name is unfamiliar, and would be of no interest to Imogen if it were not for the seismic shift in Laudna’s body language. She freezes like a mouse with its brainstem cut, like a dead neuron, like Imogen, when she is somewhere she does not want to be.
“Laudna, should we—” Imogen says urgently. “Laudna, we can go.”
“Matilda. You’re Delilah’s girl, aren’t you?”
He’s a relatively nondescript man. To the wider room, he probably even appears nonthreatening. As he approaches, though, Laudna seizes further, and Imogen hears clear as day in the back of her mind, in her mother’s labored drawl: “Imogen, run.”
She listens, for the first time in years, and takes off at a dead sprint, hauling Laudna along behind her.
Down a hallway, then another, then a third, each turn taking them to a stranger, darker part of the building, until they end up backed against some truly elaborate heavy oaken doors.
Imogen listens, holds herself between Laudna and the direction they came, but there’s no sound of footsteps following, nor any voices.
She heaves out a breath. She didn’t realize how long they’d been running until they stopped.
“Sorry,” she hears faintly behind her, “sorry, I’m sorry…”
“What—Laudna, what are you sorry for?” Imogen asks, turning around to see Laudna having folded herself into the corner between the wall and the door, pressing her face tightly against the wood.
“You should go back.”
“Laudna, ain’t nothin’ in that damn gala that’s more important than you right now. You don’t have to be sorry for a thing, okay?” She kneels on the bald carpet of the hallway, tries to lean into Laudna’s frame of vision. “We can wait here until you’re ready to leave. We’ll take a back entrance out, or something.”
The only sound for another few minutes is both their ragged breaths, which even out slowly until Laudna’s voice is able to rise again.
“I’m not an archaeologist,” Laudna whispers. Imogen blinks.
Her eyes that day, in that sunlit hall. Filled with some secret Imogen couldn’t parse.
Is this it?
“What?”
“I’ve been working under Delilah Briarwood in her biology lab for the past ten years.”
Delilah Briarwood… the name knocks against the back of Imogen’s brain in a strange way. “She… didn’t she get shut down? Ethics grounds, or something?”
Laudna turns her face away from the door just enough for Imogen to catch the barest hint of an empty smile. “The thing about evil people, darling, is that they tend not to take no for an answer.”
“But…”
“She has been pushing her work through me, as a research candidate who isn’t blacklisted, for the past ten years. Every year, I present her work at forums. Every year, I apply for different funding blocs for her under my name. She usually gets them.” Laudna turns away from the door fully, sits back against the wall and presses the heels of both hands into her eyes. “I’ve been under her thumb for what feels like forever.”
Imogen doesn’t say anything, but there must be something in her face.
“My parents,” Laudna says, answering the unspoken question. “My parents came from humble means—they knew I wanted to go into some sort of academic career, and they couldn’t afford to fund my education. We certainly didn’t have enough good standing to take out a loan.” Her next exhale shudders on its way out. “They wanted me to… they wanted me to have an education, so they responded to a research inquiry from her. Begged and pleaded for her to take me on as a mentee, in exchange for their participation in a risky surgical study that she was having difficulties finding subjects for.” She swallows, begins to rock slightly back and forth. “They did not live long after the study’s completion. From the damage incurred, you see.”
Imogen feels like she’s about to vomit. “Oh my god.”
“Yes.”
“So why… a graduate program? What ends can she possibly achieve through that?”
Laudna smiles thinly, and her rocking slows. “That wasn’t her. That was me.”
Imogen feels her eyes fill with tears.
“I want to study the archaeological history of burial rites. How we honor our dead. I had a pet rat, once—” she digs in her toolbelt, which Imogen didn’t even notice she was wearing— “and when he died, I was rather distraught, I… well. So I gave him a second chance at life, you see,” she says, and pulls out a rather poorly taxidermied rat with a crow skull affixed to his head.
“‘Ello!” the rat chomps out. “I’m Pâté!”
“Hello,” Imogen says faintly. Her head is spinning with all the information. At some point, she reached out and took Laudna’s free hand, and she squeezes it now.
“And I was researching, one day, in Delilah’s library when she was out—and I found something that looked just like Pâté! Only he was found in a tomb, back before the Calamity!” She’s regained something of herself, sitting up taller. Imogen can recognize her now. “We’ve been making things to cope with our grief forever, Imogen, forever. Isn’t that fascinating? The things we want to carry with us, when we cross over?” She smiles. “I’ve been putting together my own work for about two years now—a thesis, of sorts, although not looked over in any real professional capacity. I do some correspondence with an undergraduate, Marwa, but that doesn’t quite count.”
“So you… those papers…”
“My research,” Laudna confirms. “I’m quite precious about it. It never leaves my side.” She brandishes a thumb drive from her toolbelt. “I was trying to apply, to get out,” she says softly. “Of course, Delilah knows the board, and she may be horrible but her word carries some weight…”
The rage that spikes through Imogen could flatten a city block. “They listened to that bitch?!”
“Oh, Imogen, of course they did,” Laudna says. “This whole world of academia runs on connections and who-knows-who. Unfortunately, in my case.”
“Fuck those people. Who needs them anyway?”
“Imogen,” Laudna says gently, somehow, “Imogen, it’s not worth it. You want to do your research, find your mother—the last thing I want to do is get in the way of that.”
“Laudna, I don’t care. There’s other research labs—independent ones. I can glom myself onto one of them, easy. I just—I cared about Starpoint because she went here.” Imogen takes Laudna’s other hand in hers, too. “But I don’t need that. I don’t… I think she ran away from here for a reason, Laudna. I think maybe I can go after her.” She looks up at the ornate doors. “All this place has is a bunch of assholes and some real nice doorways. Ones with pretty girls standin’ in ‘em.”
Laudna smiles slowly at that, and nudges Imogen with her foot. “Where will you go?”
“Not sure,” Imogen murmurs. “There are other libraries in Marquet. I’ll probably have to apply to their programs, too.”
“What books do you need? For your research?”
Imogen scrolls back in her mental list, half-watches Laudna get to her feet slowly. “Uh, volumes 4 and 5 of Neuroscience Annual Review, a few papers chiefed by Vysoren…” She closes her eyes, clenches her jaw. “And then probably whatever studies that were done on my mom.”
“She was a subject?”
“In a lot of things. Right up until she left. I only found out last year when I got into a personal archive collection through a friend.” (The friend was Fearne. It was an illegal break-in.)
“Hm. Well.” Laudna gets up from where she was crouched and pushes the door open. “Let’s look around and see if we can’t find anything, shall we?”
“Oh,” is all Imogen can say, dumbly, because apparently the doors they’ve been pressed up against for a while now are doors that lead into the archives. She gives a cursory, worried look around, finds only Laudna’s proudly smiling face, and then she takes Laudna’s hand and leads them in.
The stacks are… expansive. Imogen wishes she had hours, wishes she had days. She sees categorical trade routes across the continents, star maps for arcane practice, books on every chapter of history in Marquet. She sees well-kept children’s storybooks, tomes of authors long-dead… they have everything.
“You look too,” she commands Laudna. “Fifteen minutes. We find what we need and then we run.”
She says we without a thought, and Laudna just beams. Of course it’s the two of them. Of course they do this together.
“Is twenty minutes okay?” she asks gently.
Imogen pauses. “Twenty?”
“This is a very lovely song,” Laudna murmurs, holding a finger up to indicate the music that can still be faintly heard from the event hall. “And I would like to have a dance with you before we turn our lives upside down.”
Imogen is standing altogether too far from Laudna in the middle of all of these towering bookshelves. She strides over to her, shortens the distance between them to less than a breath.
“You turned my life upside down from the minute you stepped through that door,” she whispers. “Come on, you know that.”
Laudna touches her forehead to Imogen’s. She has to lean down to do it.
“I saw you, and something righted itself,” Laudna murmurs. “Is it insanity to say that it feels like I’ve been looking for you?”
Imogen’s mouth quirks in a small grin; she watches Laudna’s dark eyes trace the movement.
“I know insanity like the back of my hand, Laudna,” she says gravely. “Doesn’t sound crazy in the least.”
Laudna leans just slightly closer. Any further, and it would be a kiss.
“Can I kiss you?” Imogen asks in a breath, so that she can hear Laudna’s voice say Yes.
“Yes.”
So she will. So she does.
She kisses her, and kisses her, and then Laudna sweeps her up in a grand sort of dance that Laudna tells her is a traditional Tal’Doreian waltz, and all in Imogen’s head is quiet. She looks in Laudna’s eyes, and notices that spark of recognition she saw on the day they met. She feels it reflected in herself.
They will take what they need from this place and leave it behind, and they will discover the world together. She knows this in her soul.