Chapter 3: Rain on Slate

"Point three millimeter bit," said Wanda Pell. "Hand drill, not a power tool. You can see the little skid mark where it slipped before it bit. Somebody careful, but not a professional. Professionals don't skid."

It was 6:20 on Monday morning and Pell's lab was a unit in an industrial park behind the airport, between a tile wholesaler and a place that rented bouncy castles. Inside it was very clean and very cold and smelled of acetone and the burnt sugar of Pell's third cup of coffee. Pell herself was fifty-two, a beta, five foot nothing, and had once spent six months as Rhea's company chemist testing water supplies for things that would kill a platoon. Now she tested protein powders for things that would embarrass a celebrity. She said the pay was better and the people were worse.

The canister sat on a square of white paper under a magnifying lamp. Rhea stood across the bench and didn't touch it.

"When."

"The varnish? Forty-eight hours at least. Probably more. It's cured right through." Pell tapped the bead with the tip of a probe. "Drugstore top coat. The clear kind every woman over forty keeps in a drawer for runs in her pantyhose. Doesn't narrow it down, sorry. Drained in one go, I'd say, through the hole, with a syringe, and the counter left alone to keep on lying. Whatever she inhaled for the last couple of days was the dregs in the valve. Fumes, basically."

So it had been done before Rhea ever walked into the coat room. Before the gala. Before the scissors.

"Her patch was on," Rhea said. "Friday night. I could smell her."

"Well, if she's been half-dosed for a few days, her scent would be leaning on the patch pretty hard." Pell took off her glasses. "Still. Medical grade, at conversational distance? A normal nose shouldn't get a thing."

Rhea said nothing.

Pell looked at her for quite a long time.

"Oh, Calloway," she said. "Oh, no."

"Don't."

"You can smell her through it. Not just Friday. You can."

"Pell."

"Every paperback in every airport in the country has that in it, you know that? The one alpha who can smell you through the blocker. Scent-matched. Fated, if you're nineteen and you've had two ciders." Pell's grin was enormous. "You've got the face. You had that face about the colonel's dog for a year."

"It's a myth."

"So's the tooth fairy, and my kid still got four bucks a tooth." Pell slid the canister into an evidence sleeve and held it out. "What's she taking now, then? With this gone?"

"Over-the-counter. Two tablets at six. Two more at noon."

Pell stopped grinning.

"That's a supermarket dose. For a high-expression omega who's been running on fumes." She glanced at the wall clock. "What's she doing today?"

"Board review. Two o'clock."

"In a room full of directors."

"Yes."

"Alphas?"

"Most."

Pell put her glasses back on and turned back to her bench, which in the years Rhea had known her was the only way she'd ever said be careful.

· · ·

Julian Vane got into the elevator at the lobby.

He did it the way he seemed to do everything, with a smile already on, sliding between the closing doors so they had to bump back open for him. The cologne came in first. Then the man.

"Izzy." He pressed thirty. "Big day."

"Every day's a big day, Julian. That's what it means to have a job."

The doors closed. The car began to rise.

Rhea stood at Isadora's left shoulder, half a step back, and watched Julian's reflection in the brushed steel. He was looking at his cousin. He kept looking. Under the cologne something shifted, and Rhea recognized it the way she'd recognize a man resting his hand on a holstered weapon: an alpha leaning on his own scent, deliberately, the way you'd lean on a car horn in a quiet street.

Beside her, Isadora's shoulders went tight. And the pear rose, sudden and sharp, the burnt note under it turning hot.

"You look a bit flushed," Julian said pleasantly. "Not coming down with anything, I hope? Not this week."

Rhea moved her weight from one foot to the other. That was all. It put her shoulder an inch in front of Isadora's, and her eyes on Julian's in the steel.

Julian's gaze slid to her, and held, and slid away.

The elevator chimed. Thirty. He got out, still smiling, and said over his shoulder, "See you upstairs," and the doors closed on him.

Isadora reached past Rhea and hit thirty-one.

"Stairs," she said. "I'm not walking out of an elevator into that lobby smelling like this."

· · ·

Stairwell C was gray concrete and fluorescent light and a painted number 31 on the wall, and it was mercifully empty.

Isadora gripped the handrail with both hands and breathed. In through the mouth, out through the mouth, the way she'd been taught at twelve by a school nurse who'd said you'll get used to it, sweetheart. She had not gotten used to it. She had simply arranged her entire life so that she never had to.

She could smell herself again. Pear and struck match, coming off her own skin like heat off a road. Above them, one flight up, was a room with eight people in it, and at least six of them would know the instant she walked through the door.

"Nine minutes," Rhea said.

"I know what time it is."

"I can cover it."

Isadora turned her head.

Rhea Calloway, who in four days had not offered a single thing she wasn't asked for, was standing two steps below her with her hands at her sides and her gray eyes on Isadora's face.

"Cover it how."

"Stand close long enough, mine sits on top of yours. For a few hours, anyone with a nose gets me first." A pause. "We did it on evacuations. Getting omega civilians through checkpoints."

"You want me to walk into my father's boardroom," Isadora said, "smelling like I belong to my bodyguard."

"Smelling like someone nobody wants to argue with."

Isadora opened her mouth to say something devastating.

Nothing came. Above them a pipe knocked twice in the wall. Her hands on the rail were damp. In seven minutes, or eight, Julian would watch her walk in and see whatever there was to see and file it away for the panel, and every careful year she'd spent being a blank in a room full of noses would be over in a breath.

She let go of the rail.

"How long does it take."

"A few minutes."

"How close."

Rhea undid the single button of her jacket and held one side open.

It should have been absurd. It was absurd. Isadora Vane, twenty-nine, head of the most important drug program her family had run in forty years, stepped down one stair in her good heels and into the open jacket of a woman she'd met on Friday, and put her face against a gray shirt collar, and stood there.

Rain on slate. That was all Rhea smelled of, up close. Cold stone with water running over it, and under that something warmer, like a hearth that had been lit and gone out. It came up around her slowly. It didn't push the way Julian's had. It simply arrived and stayed, the way weather does.

Rhea's hand settled flat between her shoulder blades. The other came up and rested at the back of her head, above the patch, fingers in her hair. Neither moved.

They were both so very still that Isadora could hear it: Rhea's heart, under her cheek, going hard and fast and not at all in time with the calm, slow breathing above it.

It was the only part of Rhea Calloway that had ever told her anything.

Isadora's own breath caught on that, and stuttered.

"Isadora," Rhea said, low, into her hair. "Breathe."

She'd never said it before. Four days of Ms. Vane, or of nothing at all. Never this. Isadora heard her own name in that flat, rough voice and felt it go all the way down her spine like a dropped key.

She tipped her head back.

Rhea's face was very close. There was a small scar at the edge of her eyebrow that Isadora hadn't noticed before, and her eyes weren't flat at all from here. They were gray the way the sea is gray: lots of things going on underneath, none of them on the surface.

"If I'm going to walk in there smelling like you," Isadora said, "I'd like to have earned it, at least."

And she kissed her.

It was not a long kiss. Rhea went utterly still against her mouth, the way she'd gone still at the sink with her eyes closed, and for one terrible moment Isadora thought I've misread the whole thing, I have misread an entire human being. Then the hand between her shoulder blades pressed, once, and Rhea's mouth moved under hers, careful and warm, the same care as the thumb around the edge of the patch.

Two floors up, a fire door banged open against the wall.

Footsteps. Voices. Somebody laughing about a parking space.

Rhea's hands were gone. She'd turned, half a step up and to the side, so that her body was between Isadora and the stairs above, before Isadora had even finished opening her eyes. Her jaw shifted once.

The footsteps went up, not down. A door closed. Quiet again.

"Ms. Vane," Rhea said, to the stairwell wall.

Isadora stared at the back of her head.

"Oh, we're back to that, are we."

Rhea didn't turn around. The tips of her ears had gone red.

"Six minutes," she said.

· · ·

The review went well.

Isadora would remember that afterward with a kind of disbelief. She walked into the thirty-second-floor boardroom smelling of rain on slate, and she watched it happen around the table: Director Brandt leaning in to shake her hand and then, very slightly, leaning back, the way you do from a closed door with a dog behind it. Two of the outside reviewers glancing past her to the woman standing by the wall in a black jacket. Julian, at the far end, starting to say Izzy and stopping, with his nostrils flared and his smile gone for one unguarded half second before it came back.

Nobody looked at her neck. Nobody looked at her flushed cheekbones. Everyone looked, once, at Rhea, and then looked back at Isadora with a new and careful courtesy.

She took them through the trial data in forty minutes. She did it without notes.

Julian waited until the very end.

"One question." He had his pen against his lip. "The volunteer cohort. Any adverse events this month? Breakthrough symptoms? Anything at all we'd want to know about before the panel?"

The room was quiet.

Isadora thought about a pinhole and a bead of clear varnish and a dose counter that had clicked obligingly down to 38.

"None reported," she said.

Julian smiled, and wrote something down.

· · ·

Afterward the room emptied slowly, the way rooms do when everyone in them wants to be the last one to leave. Rhea stayed by the door. Isadora gathered her papers and found her hands were nearly steady.

Celia came round the table with a glass of water.

"Drink this. You were magnificent. Your father would have been unbearable about it." She pressed the glass into Isadora's hand and kept her own fingers over it for a moment, cool and dry. She smelled of hand cream, exactly as she always had. Nothing else. Betas didn't.

She leaned in to kiss Isadora's cheek, the way she'd done after every school play and every graduation and the funeral.

She stayed there a moment too long.

And against Isadora's ear, very softly, so that nobody else in the room could possibly hear, her stepmother said:

"Why do you smell like her?"