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They pulled the body out of the wreckage in the early hours of the morning, while dawn was still a faint promise on the eastern horizon. It would already be in the sky, all the way back in Nevermoor, almost at lunchtime by now, but for the devastated citizens of Ylvastad, it was only the beginning of what promised to be a very long day.
He recognised her on sight. No one else could, except Jack, who was shivering in a blanket someone had given him for shock. But Wunder remembered, and therefore the gossamer did too.
It was a dull thud to the sternum to have his fears confirmed right in front of him. He had known this for hours. There was no other conclusion to be drawn when he and half of Wunsoc had rushed here, only to see the building in flames.
They hadn’t spoken in months. He had been anxious about the task that she had undertaken but Morrigan had taken everything in her stride. Right up until now.
Someone was shouting somewhere, but it took for his throat to start aching and someone grabbing his shoulder, trying to calm him down for him to realise that it was him, his eyes streaming, knees buckling.
“... back to the Free State,” someone was saying in his periphery. “Makes it… prepare the bodies… identified?” his hearing kept coming in and out, voices being replaced by a rushing in his ears.
He was being led somewhere, a firm hand on his shoulder, something wrapped around him, and then he was being sat down in the back of one of the vehicles, a mug of something hot and steaming sitting in his hands. He took a sip and scalded his tongue.
He hadn’t said goodbye. Not because they had been arguing. They hadn’t. It had been such a routine thing for her to disappear for days or weeks on end, whatever work the society pulled her into, or whatever she got up to with things she didn’t really tell him about anymore.
Maybe if they had talked more. Maybe if she had mentioned oh by the way, my mission this time is in the Wintersea Republic and I’m going to end up using my own body as a bomb in order to blow up the building of research of how they’re trying to break down the barriers around Nevermoor and we’re never going to have a conversation ever again-
He cut his thoughts off with a sob, his throat tightening as he put his hand to his mouth in a belated attempt to muffle it.
Mog was dead. Mog was a charred corpse on a stretcher and she wasn’t coming back.
He was never going to see her again. She was dead and gone. It was an easy thing to understand that someone being dead meant that he couldn’t see them again. And yet it was difficult to comprehend that that person in this regard was Morrigan Crow. And he really wasn’t going to see her again.
It was a blur, being taken back through the portal, having identified- done all the business that was required of him, clutching onto Jack like a lifeline. Jack, who looked as bad as he felt, helped him slide an eyepatch onto his own eye, filtering out, for the first time in decades, as he shook and howled like a wounded animal in the back of the truck.
The political ramifications of what had happened were dire, but he hardly cared about that. The fallout from sending in agents to destroy weapons created to invade a state which most of the citizens didn’t know the existence of was never going to be easy to clean up. Especially when it featured one exploding wundersmith and a government building collapsing on everyone. A decision made in fear and panic. It was still hanging around her corpse, or it had been before he had been pulled away from it. She had been angry. And scared.
At least she wasn’t anymore. It was small comfort. Miniscule.
He stopped crying on the way back to Nevermoor, as he was driven down the streets at midday. The sky was stony and every so often a violent burst of rain clattered noisily onto them, bouncing almost half a metre off of the cobbles where it had originally landed.
He couldn’t comprehend the storm that must be happening at Wunsoc right now, and that wasn’t even considering the weather.
They were dropped off in the forecourt of the Hotel but their driver stopped the car fully and walked them in even though the car was illegally parked. All things considered, it was hardly a blip on the horizon, and Wunsoc would easily pay the fine if any member of the Stink walked by at the wrong moment.
He was asked questions. Jack was asked questions. They were dragged up to the Smoking Parlour, and handed cups of tea which grew cold in their hands. Or his hands. He had a vague recollection of Jack throwing his at the wall. The patch meant he couldn’t see what the others were thinking or feeling, but he could read normal expressions perfectly well, and without telling them, they already knew.
He bundled himself off to bed, for all that it was the middle of the day. It was an excuse to be left alone and to self-flagellate while staring up at the black ceiling. His room was good at giving him what he needed, which was usually a bed and a warm fire. Now, it hadn’t soundproofed against the traffic outside, the honking of cars and foot fall and talking and sounds from other hotels and shop bells ringing. It was loud. And unpleasant. He had the sense that his room knew this. That it was trying to distract him. It almost worked, but each time his eyes slid shut, he was back in Ylvastad, smoke in his nostrils, regretting every single moment that had led them all to this.
Uncle Jove was gone in the morning. This was unsurprising. It was frequently his routine to disappear to Wunsoc, to the League, to another realm when he was called, regardless of if he was needed at home.
Jack had a feeling that he had left because he didn’t want to be here. Jack didn’t want to be here either, his patch pulled back, looking for traces of Morrigan along the furniture, through doorways and halls. She was there, if he looked. If he found things that were likely to be from her. Evidence of inferno, or lingering traces of stray wunder.
Her room was locked, which was odd considering that her room had never had a lock before, but maybe the Hotel wanted it left alone. Wanted her to be left alone. He could understand that, even as he skulked around the door of Room 85, anxious to not be seen by anyone who might invite him to the Smoking Parlour with a hot cup of tea, or to sit in the kitchens and have something warm and sweet made for him to eat fresh.
The only things he had felt in the past two days was the surge of heat coming up from the explosion as he had run towards it, and his hand scalding as he threw his cup of tea at the wall.
He had apologised to Martha on the spot obviously, and cleaned it up, with a brush and pan rather than sticking his bare hands into shards of ceramic mug, but that had been the lot of it. It was like being hollow. He searched inside of himself for any kind of feeling but came up empty. It had fled when he hadn’t been looking and right now he wasn’t sure it was ever going to come back.
Or even if he wanted for it to come back. He was halfway convinced that if this numbness left him and he were able to feel everything he ought to be feeling right now, everything he knew was just being pushed somewhere very far down inside him right now, he might collapse on the spot.
He couldn’t stay here right now. The walls of the Deucalion seemed so much closer now, the ceilings so much lower. And it was dark in here.
He went for a walk.
He returned that evening soaked to the skin, only vaguely aware of that due to the fact that he dripped onto the marble floor, as Kedgeree looked up in relief at his return. No one had wanted to say whatever they had been thinking but when he moved his patch away again he could see the worry hanging around them, quickly replaced with sharp relief, all underneath that deep blue grief hanging around them.
He had meant to go to his rooms. He had wanted to be alone. But his legs, traitors that they were, took him to his uncle’s study instead.
Uncle Jove was wan, the dark circles under his eyes only matched by the black mood hanging around his head.
He slid the patch back on.
“Were you at Wunsoc today?” he asked, his voice croaky. When had he last spoken? Talking to Martha in the Smoking Parlour? When before then? Had he screamed when the building had erupted like a bomb had exploded inside of it?
In a way, it had. His throat felt raw, but he had no recollection of any sound. Just the sudden rush of heat and the way it had felt as if everything in the world had rapidly ended because he had been too late.
What could he have done? What could Jupiter have done?
Talked to her? Come up with a plan? She’d called for an extraction. Morrigan had called for help and if it had been even twenty minutes faster coming, they could have done something else. They could be making stupid jokes about the mission to ignore how fucking scary it had been but no. He was instead waiting for his uncle to tell him about the details of her memorial service instead.
Jupiter did no such thing. He sat there, surrounded by drinks undrunk and cold, and snacks that a likely hopeful Martha had brought up at some point, and he stared into the unusually unlit fireplace with the one eye that wasn’t covered by one of Jack’s spare eyepatches.
“I was,” he said finally. He waved a vague hand and the gesture seemed so much more tired than it really ought to have been. “Meetings. The Elders wanted to talk about what happened. The Public Relations people wanted to talk about what’s going to happen but I left before I had to look Holliday Wu in the eye again.”
Jack had never had the dubious displeasure of meeting Holliday Wu but he’d heard enough about her from Morrigan. Actually he suspected that at one point Morrigan had had a crush on her, but being outed as a wundersmith seemed to return her to her senses.
He stifled a sob thinking about one of the meaner jokes she’d had about her, his fist clenched in front of his mouth.
“Jack,” Jupiter said, getting up from beside his desk and bending down so he was looking at him. He pulled the eyepatch away, and Jack did the same with his own.
It was immediately as if the whole room were bathed underwater, but the deep blueness was darkest between the two of them, “I’m fine,” he said, hating how tight his throat began to draw.
“No you’re not,” Jupiter said. His eyes were very red now that Jack could see them up close, swollen and baggier than usual.
He shook his head slowly, “Yeah. Okay, I’m not. Who would be?”
He blinked a few times. “Jackie,” and his head was being drawn into just above Jupiter’s shoulder, a hand running fingers through his hair, the other rubbing circles against his back in a room that was far more difficult to breathe in than it should be.
They’d been told in private but ever since the words had been uttered in her hearing, Cadence just heard a ringing sound over and over as she was handed cup of tea after cup of tea and biscuit after biscuit from shaking hands.
She’d drunk all of them but it was more because it was something to do rather than out of any interest or desire for a cup of tea. It was how things were done. Something bad happens? Put on the kettle. Something good happens? Kettle. Something happens which makes you feel like your internal organs are giving up the ghost and you want to crawl into a hole forever? Kettle.
“Who was the last of us to talk to her?” someone asked. She thought it might have been Mahir.
They were all looking at her when she gathered enough strength to look up from her empty mug, “I saw her two months ago,” she said. “Right before she left.”
“Did you know where she was going?” said Hawthorne. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last twenty minutes. She felt as if she had aged a hundred. Was it her imagination or was the room greyer?
“No,” she said, and put the mug down, all residual heat gone. She shook her head, using the back of her hand to wipe her nose. “I had no idea. I thought she was going to be checking out the wunder shortages in the Fifth Pocket.”
“That’s what she told me too,” Hawthorne said. He was trembling, she noticed, like he was trying to stop himself from physically reacting. “I don’t- what was it? They have to tell us. She’s in our unit.”
“Was, Hawthorne,” said Francis.
“She doesn’t stop being in our unit just because she’s dead!” he shouted. Cadence flinched. She sat on her hands and rocked forward and backward on them, trying to think. Trying to remember what she had said to Morrigan the last time she had seen her.
They’d been drinking coffee in the kitchen in their flat. Had something seemed off? Had anything given away that this would be the last time they would see each other? Had Morrigan known that her “mission to check wunder shortages in the Fifth Pocket” would end up with her blowing up a building in the Wintersea Republic with no one left as witness to why specifically she had done it.
There was conjecture, sure. They had known that that building had had a) Squall b) President Wintersea c) the engineer who had devised the weapon d) the blueprints for said weapon in their entirety (as far as anyone knew but there would be an investigation to make sure apparently), e) the weapon itself.
Maybe it had been Squall even, they said, who had really done it. All they knew was that the explosion was wundrous in nature and so powerful that it could only have been done specifically by a master wundersmith.
But Morrigan had been charred to the point that she was unrecognisable. And Squall had died from smoke inhalation and severe burns. Cadence wasn’t a mathematical genius, but she could put two and two together.
Morrigan had been very brave, they’d said. Cadence didn’t need to be told this, and being told this made her quite angry honestly. What good was being brave if she was never going to come home again? What good was being brave if Morrigan was gone?
Morrigan’s death was a tragedy, they’d said. Cadence knew this also but Wunsoc had always been less willing to extend help to their wundersmith than they would have for anyone else in that situation. There had been help but too little too late. A cleanup crew to tidy up after her. To tidy her up. But it wasn’t assistance and it never had been.
Morrigan had worked herself to the bone week in and week out for Wunsoc, all for the meanest thank yous and smallest amounts of gratitude they could manage to give out. She’d given everything to the Society and now there wasn’t anything left to give.
Cadence had had plans for both of them. Vague, and not complete because Morrigan was always coming and going, but plans. Nice dinners. Time away from the city and the Society and their jobs. Time for themselves.
That wasn’t happening now. That was never going to happen now.
“Did you see it?” she asked Lam in a low voice. “Did you know it was going to happen?” She knew she sounded mean and accusatory. She was angry, but not at Lam. She was angry at the Society. She was angry at Squall and the Wintersea Republic. She was angry at Morrigan, which was possibly the most fucked up part of it.
Lam swallowed a couple of times. “If I saw something it wasn’t in any way I understood,” she said quietly.
Hawthorne’s face was red and he was picking at the bandages where his index finger on his left hand used to be, “It’s not fair,” he said.
“No one said it was,” Thaddea said.
“But there’ll be another one, won’t there?” he asked. “Elder Quinn said-”
The ringing came back, cutting off her hearing from what Elder Quinn had said. She knew what he meant though. When a wundersmith died, another was reborn. Ergo, the facts were thus: Morrigan was a wundersmith. Morrigan was dead. When a wundersmith dies, there would be a new wundersmith born to take their place. They had to look for that baby.
“We can’t take a baby,” Anah said, putting a fourth handkerchief to the side, and pulling out a fifth.
“We need to find her,” Cadence said.
Hawthorne nodded, “We don’t need to… take the baby or anything. Heaven knows how any of us would take care of one. But we owe it to Morrigan to do it. Who’s with me?”
They all raised their hands, and Cadence’s mind started to race with the possibilities of it before crashing abruptly to a halt. She had been excited for a second. Not happy, but anticipatory. And then she remembered, right as she had thought I wonder what Morrigan could teach the kid, wundersmith to wundersmith.
But that was what was so cruel about it. They could never meet. And she could never see her again.