Mona followed Celia Ashcroft for the entire day.
Not closely.
She wasn’t built for closely, not above ground, where the light came at her wrong even through the lenses.
She followed the mole way, by the wrongness of a thing moving through her territory, surfacing at the edges of it to check.
Celia went to the upper library. Mona was three shelves over, lenses up, not reading.
Celia took lunch in the Class A wing.
Mona stood in the corridor outside it, planted, until a prefect moved her along and she drifted ten feet and planted again.
"She’s tracking her," Maren said. She’d come to watch and stayed because it was the best thing she’d seen all week. "She’s actually tracking her, like a job."
"She thinks it’s a job."
"It’s not?"
"It’s the other thing." Soren watched Mona resurface at the far end of the hall, fix on the Class A door, hold. "She just doesn’t have the word for it yet."
◆◆◆◆
Selah found it funny.
Selah found most suffering funny, but she found this one funny in the warm way, the rare one, where the frost on her hands went soft instead of sharp.
"She doesn’t sleep," Selah reported, dropping into the seat across from him.
"I checked the dorm. The mole’s bed is cold. She’s been pacing the wall between our floor and the stairs since the period ended."
"Patrolling."
"Mooning." Selah propped her chin on her hand.
"It’s the same wall the rich girl’s stairwell runs behind. She found the closest she could get to the woman and she’s wearing a groove in the floor in front of it."
"That’s not mooning."
"What would you call it."
He didn’t have a clean word either. The thing Mona was doing didn’t have a clean word in any language he’d read.
"New," he said.
"New," Selah agreed, and watched Mona’s reflection cross the dark window glass on another lap, and didn’t quite hide that it had gotten to her, the warm part.
"She’s so bad at it. Look at her. She’s terrible. She found a feeling and she’s holding it like a shovel."
◆◆◆◆
Maren thought she was adorable, and said so, which was a mistake.
"You’re adorable," Maren told her, catching Mona by the shoulders on one of the laps, crouching to her level. "You know that? You’re going to wear a trench in the school over a girl who put one hand on a desk."
Mona looked at her.
"Augh," Mona said. Flat. The word doing the work of a sentence she didn’t have.
"I know." Maren grinned. "It’s the worst. Welcome."
She let her go and Mona went back to the wall, and Maren stood up still grinning until she caught Soren watching her, and the grin went somewhere more careful.
"What," she said.
"You remember doing that."
"Doing what."
"Wearing a trench."
Maren’s tail moved once, slow. The fox ears she couldn’t tuck flicked back and didn’t come forward again right away.
"That was different," she said.
"Was it."
"I had words." She said it lighter than it landed. "I could at least yell about it."
◆◆◆◆
The thread told him things words didn’t.
He felt Mona’s want move through it all day, a heat with no language, building each time the Class A door opened and Celia wasn’t done with whatever kept her up there. It wasn’t the homing. The homing was gone, replaced by this, which was worse and which was hers.
The homing had only ever pointed her at him. It had never once made her hurt.
This made her hurt. He could feel it doing it.
Every lap of the wall was a small wound she was choosing to keep walking into, and the choosing was the part the system kept logging and the part that kept the well going down.
Closer cost more.
He’d done the math in the dark and here it was running by daylight, a girl pacing a groove into the floor and a level in his chest finding a floor of its own, lower than yesterday’s.
He could have called her off it.
One word and Mona would come to heel, drop the patrol, fold down beside him and let the want go quiet.
He didn’t.
You don’t take a feeling away from someone the day they finally grew one.
◆◆◆◆
She came to Joan in the end.
Joan was the one she went to for the things that didn’t fit anywhere, and Soren only knew about it because Joan told him after, flat and plain the way Joan told him everything, no thread between them to soften it or sharpen it.
Mona had found her in the dorm. Sat down in front of her. Worked her jaw around something too big for the words she had and got it out in pieces.
"She asked me a question," Joan said.
"What question."
Joan looked at him with the steady non-color of someone the system had no page for, the elective one, the choice with no signature, who of all of them understood best what it cost to want a person on purpose.
"She asked if it’s wrong," Joan said. "To want him only for herself."
Soren waited.
"I didn’t answer her yet." Joan’s hands were folded in her lap, still. "I wanted to ask you something first."
"Ask."
"When you turned her real." Joan held his eyes. "The thing it costs you. The thing none of you will say out loud and all of you can feel."
She didn’t finish it as a question. She let it sit there finished anyway.
"Does she know," Joan said, "that the wanting is the thing that’s spending you?"
[DING! — Bond [Mona]. Obsession Index: 71 → 73. Source event: directed possessive response, sustained. Elective linkage confirmed. Bearer reserve draw holding above baseline.]
The number came up between them, soft, after the fact. It always came up after the fact.
Soren looked at it and then past it to the floor where Mona had worn her groove, and gave Joan the only true answer he had.
"No," he said. "And I’m not going to be the one who tells her."