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Melanie King always had a good memory; now, it is flawless. It is one of the perks of her new position, and perhaps the one she is the fondest of.
It means that she can, with perfect clarity recall how it felt to strangle the life out of Elias Bouchard. Whenever she has a bad day, she calls up the memory and lives inside of it for a few moments. It never fails to make her smile.
But she cannot just live in her memories, not when there is so much more work to do. She allows her gaze to widen, sweeping across the Institute. She finds Basira first, voice quiet and sure as she reads out a statement. If there is anything Melanie regrets, it is the loss of Basira’s friendship. But there was nothing to be done for it; Daisy had grown unmanageable, and Basira was a much better Archivist without her.
She watches the newest crop of assistants for a moment, hunched over computers or reading in the library, before turning away. She doubts any of them will last the year. She’ll need to get Basira proper assistants at some point, but good help was hard to find. And anyway, these assistants were more for Jon anyway.
Stopping the Unknowing had taken almost everything from Jon, but their master did not abandon its loyal servants. The Beholding had Seen him in his dying moments, and it had made of him something beautiful and terrible and wise.
She’d moved him down to the basement, just above the door to the tunnels. His many eyes protected them from anything that would threaten the Institute. Martin stayed with him there, faithful to the last, and every few months he would lure one of the assistants down so that Jon could satisfy his newfound hungers.
The last of these had been quite recent, and so today Jon seemed almost human in his aspect as he lay curled next to Martin, watching him sleep, one long arm wrapped around his chest. He turned from Martin as Melanie’s gaze approached, watching her with the cold, hungry curiosity he reserved for everything but Martin. She turned her eyes from him, part respect and part self-preservation. Jon would never intentionally kill her, but his self-control wasn’t what it once was.
She could turn her gaze further outward, to the fractured cults of the Desolation or the Darkness. She could check in on Tim, see what new skin he was wearing these days, if it was one she might recognize. She could See the compaction of the earth thousands of feet below the ground, or out into the emptiness of space, but she did none of these things.
There was a voice in the back of her head that sounded like Elias, like Jonah Magnus, like the scratch of pen on paper. It told her what to do to keep her Institute safe. It told her that even now, the other Powers conspired to take this world for her own. It told her there was only one way to stop it.
It told her to open her eyes, for she had great work to do.