Chapter 1: Pear and Struck Match

Pear.

Cold pear, the skin just broken, and under it, thin as a fingerprint on glass, something burnt. A match struck and shaken out.

Rhea Calloway stopped walking.

The service corridor behind the Aldine Museum's east gallery smelled the way service corridors always did. Floor wax. Steam off the catering trays. The cigarette a waiter had smoked by the fire door an hour ago and believed nobody would ever know about. Rhea had been in the corridor for less than a minute, following an events coordinator whose lanyard said ASK ME, and she had already sorted fourteen smells, two exits, and a fire extinguisher eleven months past its inspection tag.

The pear was new.

It came from her left, from a door marked STAFF ONLY · COATS, and it was so faint that if she'd been breathing through her mouth she would have walked straight past it.

Something drew tight behind her breastbone.

She knew that feeling the way she knew the weight of her own sidearm. She had swallowed her suppressant at six, a white tablet the size of a lentil, the same dose she'd taken every evening for sixteen years. The tablet sanded the edges off. It didn't remove them. Most days that was enough. Most days the world was full of people who smelled of soap and coffee and whatever they'd had for lunch, and the ones who might have smelled of something more, the omegas, wore blocker patches on the backs of their necks and smelled of nothing at all.

Patches worked. That was the entire point of them. Rhea had stood beside patched omegas in field hospitals and embassy lobbies and once, for nine hours, in the back of a stalled transport, and smelled nothing but diesel.

"Ms. Calloway?" The coordinator had noticed she was no longer following. "The family's table is through here, it's just—"

"Who's in there."

"The coat room? Nobody. I mean. Coats."

Rhea opened the door.

The coat room was long and low and lit by a single fluorescent tube, and every rail was full: three hundred winter coats on numbered hangers, wool and cashmere and one fur that was probably illegal. At the far end, on a folding chair wedged between two rails, sat a woman in a dark green dress with her shoes off.

She was flicking a silver lighter. Open, shut. Open, shut. She wasn't lighting anything.

She didn't look up.

"If you're my new nanny," she said, "you're late. If you're not, the coats are self-service."

Rhea let the door close behind her. The coordinator stayed outside, which showed some sense.

"Calloway. Kestrel Protective."

"I know who you are." The lighter snapped shut, and the woman finally raised her head.

Rhea had memorized the face off a briefing sheet at three that afternoon. The photograph had been taken by someone who didn't like her. In the photo Isadora Vane looked cold. In person she looked like someone who hadn't slept for three days and was furious about it. Dark hair pinned high off a long neck. A mouth built for the word no. Eyes a pale, unlikely gold, like weak tea held up to a window.

"I read your file," Isadora said. "Rhea Calloway. Thirty-four. Alpha. Eleven years in the army, four in private work, one commendation for something they blacked out. Speaks rarely and to the point. My stepmother underlined that bit. I think she meant it as a selling point."

Rhea said nothing.

"Oh, good. It's accurate." Isadora let her head fall back against a sleeve of camel wool. "I'm Isadora Vane. I'm twenty-nine. Out there are four hundred people pretending to mourn my father so they can find out whether his last drug is going to make them rich or embarrass them, and in forty minutes I have to stand under a whale and say something moving. I came in here to think of something moving to say. The coats haven't been much help."

Where the pinned hair lifted away from her nape, Rhea could see the edge of the patch. Skin-toned. Square. Medical grade, the kind Vane Therapeutics sold to hospitals in boxes of fifty.

And the pear came off her anyway. Faint, steady, threading through the wool and dust and the buzz of the light.

Rhea kept her face exactly where it was.

"You shouldn't be alone."

"I'm aware. That's why there's a dead man's portrait in the ballroom and a live one at Saint Brigid's with a broken pelvis." Isadora stood, hooked her shoes up by their straps and didn't put them on. "Teo was with me four years. Somebody hit him with a car in my own garage twelve days ago and drove off, and the police are calling it an accident because the camera on level two happened to be pointing at the ceiling. So, yes. I shouldn't be alone. I wanted ten minutes when nobody was standing next to me, breathing."

She came down the narrow aisle between the rails. There was no room to pass without passing close. For one step the pear thickened, and the burnt note under it sharpened, and Rhea's back teeth met.

Isadora stopped with her hand on the door.

"You're staring at my neck, Ms. Calloway."

"Checking the patch."

"It's a Vane patch. It's the best on the market. My grandfather invented the adhesive." She opened the door and the corridor's floor-wax air rushed in between them. "Do try not to stand that close in the ballroom. People will think you're interested."

· · ·

They had put the gala under the blue whale.

The Aldine's main hall was three stories of marble, and the skeleton hung from the ceiling on steel cables, ninety feet of bone swimming over the round tables and the white lilies and a lectern with a framed photograph of Augustus Vane propped beside it. Rhea took the wall under the whale's left flipper. From there she could see the family table, the stage, both main doors, and the service door she'd come in by.

The air handlers were running hard. Venues always ran them hard when several hundred people with working glands were drinking on empty stomachs; she could hear the vents breathing in the ceiling and feel the slow upward pull of it, scrubbing every scent thin. Champagne. Lilies. Somebody's cologne, put on with a trowel.

The cologne was coming toward her.

"You're the replacement." Tall, mid-thirties, good suit. An alpha who'd sprayed cologne over his own scent the way some men wore a loud tie: so you'd notice he had bothered. "Julian Vane. The cousin." He smiled with a lot of teeth. "Has Izzy tried to fire you yet?"

"No."

"Give her an hour." He looked across the room. Isadora was at the family table with her shoes on, letting a white-haired man hold her hand for far longer than a handshake required. "She went through three guards before Teo. She thinks she doesn't need one. She thinks a lot of things." He lifted his glass an inch, a toast to nobody. "Nine days till Stillwater goes in front of the panel. Keep her in one piece till then, would you? I'd hate for anyone to say I won by default."

He drifted off. Rhea filed the cologne, the teeth, and the word default.

She went back over the briefing while the room filled. Benny Marsh at the Kestrel office that afternoon, sliding three clear evidence sleeves across his desk one at a time.

The first held a photograph of Isadora Vane's front door, taken from inside her building's locked lobby.

The second held a grocery list in her handwriting, fished out of her recycling. Pears. Lemons. Razor blades. Call Celia back.

The third held a used blocker patch, folded sticky side in, sealed in a plastic sleeve of its own. Somebody had written a date on the sleeve in small, neat blue capitals.

"Hand-delivered," Marsh had said. "Inside the lobby, into her mailbox. No stamps. Someone's collecting her, Rhea." He'd rubbed his eyes. "The stepmother wants it quiet. There's a launch."

The stepmother found Rhea a few minutes later. Celia Vane was small and silver-blond and wore pearls the size of chickpeas, and she smelled of hand cream and nothing else, the way most betas did. She put a light hand on Rhea's sleeve.

"You came. Thank God. She'll be awful to you, you know. It's how she says thank you."

"Understood."

"I can't make head or tail of any of it myself." Celia glanced at the lectern, where a technician was tapping the microphone. "All this business with patches and scents. I've never been able to smell a thing. Augustus used to say I was the only restful person in the family." She squeezed Rhea's arm. "Keep her safe."

Then the lights dimmed, and Isadora went up the steps to the lectern.

She didn't use notes. She stood with both hands on the wood and looked out at four hundred faces and said, "My father was not a warm man."

The room went very quiet.

"He was a careful one. He spent forty years making it possible for people like me to walk into a room like this one without anybody turning around." A small movement of her hand toward her own nape, not quite touching it. "Most of you never thought about that. That was the idea. In nine days we'll ask a panel to approve the last thing he started, and if it works, you won't think about it either. That's the only memorial he would have—"

The fire alarm went off.

It wasn't a bell. It was the modern kind, a whooping electronic shriek that came out of every wall at once, and on its third cycle the main lights died and the emergency strips came on along the floor, red, so the whole hall turned the color of the inside of an eyelid.

Four hundred people stood up at the same time.

Rhea was already moving. She'd been moving since the first whoop, along the wall, under the flipper, toward the stage steps where the crowd was folding in on itself like water going down a drain. Chairs went over. A woman's heel came down on Rhea's foot and she didn't feel it. She saw the green dress for half a second between two dinner jackets, saw a hand that wasn't Isadora's come up behind Isadora's head, and lost them both in the crush.

She went through. Not around. Through.

She found a wrist and knew it was the right one before she looked, because of the pear, and closed her hand on it and pulled.

Isadora came out of the crowd against her chest. Her pins had come loose. Her breath was short and hot against Rhea's collar.

"Someone," Isadora said, "touched my neck."

"Service door."

"Someone touched my—"

"Later." Rhea turned her by the wrist and put her own body between Isadora and the room. "Walk."

· · ·

The car was where Rhea had left it, nose out on the loading dock, because she always parked where she could leave. She put Isadora in the back and was pulling out past a catering van before the first fire truck turned onto Museum Row with its lights going.

Nobody followed. She checked three times.

In the back seat Isadora had gone quiet, which Rhea already understood was worse than the talking. In the mirror she watched her reach up under the fallen hair, to her nape, and hold her fingers there.

"It's gone."

Rhea's eyes went to the mirror and stayed.

"It's not torn. It's not peeled." Isadora's voice was very level. "There's a rim of adhesive left. With a straight edge. Somebody cut it off me. In a room full of people. With scissors."

The traffic light ahead went amber. Rhea went through it.

"My spares are at the apartment," Isadora said. "How long?"

"Twenty-six minutes."

"Then drive faster than twenty-six minutes." She sat back. She was holding her own wrist now, where Rhea had held it. "I'm high-expression. Do you know what that means? It means the suppressant handles the biology and the patch handles the smell, and without the patch, stress does the rest. I'll be noticeable in five minutes and impossible to miss in twenty. So roll your window down, Calloway, because in about twenty minutes you're going to regret ever taking this job."

Rhea didn't roll her window down.

"Calloway."

"It won't help."

"I beg your pardon?"

Rhea looked at her in the mirror. The red of the brake lights ahead lay across Isadora's face in a band, gold eyes, set jaw, a woman holding very still because the alternative was shaking.

"I've smelled you since the coat room door," Rhea said. "Patch and all."

In the back seat, Isadora Vane stopped breathing.

The dashboard clock turned over to 10:47.

Twenty minutes, give or take.