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Verso is watching the futile last stand of Expedition 49, debating whether or not to intercede, when Clea finds him.
Immediately, his traitorous heart leaps into his throat. He hasn’t seen his eldest sister in over fifty years, and a part of him wants to rush to her side and pull her into a tight embrace, no matter how much he knows she would hate it. However, the sensible part of him remembers that this is not his sister, that she’s the reason that his Clea has been missing for decades, and that the last time he saw this Clea, she was attempting to kill him.
He readies his weapons. He may not be able to die, but he’d rather avoid being ripped apart all the same.
Clea raises a disdainful eyebrow. “Oh, please,” she scoffs. “Settle down. I’m not here to fight you.”
“Forgive me if I don’t trust that,” Verso retorts. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”
Barring the momentary glower of annoyance that crosses her brow before it is deliberately smoothed over, Clea doesn’t even bother to acknowledge his question. Instead, she just says, “Alicia has entered the canvas.”
Verso tries and fails to keep the surprise from showing on his face.
“Of course, Maman painted over her all but immediately,” Clea sighs. “So she’s been reborn as one of her creations. She’ll have to grow up with no memory of who she is.”
“That ought to make it easy for you to extract her then,” Verso says. “What do you want, Clea?”
Clea’s expression is grim. “I’m not extracting her. Not yet, at least.” She folds her arms in that way that Verso knows so well from his painted memories of their childhood, the way she always does when she feels defensive. “It’s not ideal,” she continues, “but while she’s in here, the Writers can’t get to her again. It’ll give me one less thing to worry about while I handle things on the outside.” Clea takes a breath, then, with clear reluctance, says, “I need you to keep an eye on her.”
Verso had suspected that might be the case. “Why should I?” he bites back. “You and your family have caused me nothing but pain. The worst that can happen to Alicia here is she gets sent home a little sooner than you’d like. Who’s to say I don’t just let it happen?”
His sister—not his sister—gives him a piercing look that makes him tighten his grip on his blades. She says with unshakeable confidence, “You won’t.” And then, with no small amount of bitterness: “Maman took care to get you right.”
Before he can think of how to respond, Clea is turning away and tearing a hole through the world through which to depart. “You’ll find her in Lumiere under the name Maelle,” she says.
The rift in reality shuts behind her, and she is gone.
Verso wishes he could say that Clea is wrong, that he can make his own decisions, separate from the strokes with which he was painted.
But the man whose name and face he shares—the man whose gaping absence he is meant to fill—had loved his little sister with his dying breath, and Verso knows that no force in the world could stop him from doing the same.
With a weary sigh, he sheathes his blades and begins the trek to Esquie’s nest. He’s going to need a ride to Lumiere.