The tear that fell on her sister's name was the last concession Catherine made to the girl she had once been.
It was a pearl of pure grief, a farewell to an innocence she never even knew she had lost. The name Anne was a ghost that had slipped into the fortress of her mind, and for one long, terrible moment, it threatened to burn everything down.
Unlived images, impossible memories assailed her: the laugh of a little girl, the feel of a small hand in hers, a blurry face with her own eyes.
Grief was a black tide, and rage, a fire that consumed her from within, a hatred so vast and absolute it could have annihilated the entire city.
She let herself fall to the floor, her back against the bed, the parchment trembling between her fingers. She allowed herself to feel. She let herself drown.
The weight of thirty years of lies, the brutal truth of her existence built on the ruins of a massacre, the theft of her family, her name, her sister… it all came crashing down on her.
She was suffocating. It was the kind of pain that broke people, that turned them into drunken specters or screaming madmen.
And then, in the deepest part of the abyss, the icy core within her the survivor, the predator resurfaced.
Pain was a force of nature, yes.
An ocean. But even oceans could be navigated.
Fire could be contained, channeled, used for forging. It was a matter of will.
Slowly, methodically, Catherine began the process.
She took the incandescent ball of her rage and grief and began to compress it.
She folded it, hammered it with her iron discipline, cooled it with the glacial contempt she held for her own weaknesses. It was a terrible alchemy.
She was transforming raw pain into something else. Something more useful. Fuel. Cold determination.
Focus.
The heat of her hatred did not disappear; it was merely contained at the core of a reactor, ready to be unleashed not in an explosion of fury, but in a concentrated, lethal beam, at a time of her choosing.
She rose to her feet, her face dry, her eyes shining with a new and terrible light.
The crying girl was gone. The Oracle had returned, but she was different. Harder. Emptier.
She spread the documents on the floor and began her real work. She read every word of the investigator's secret report.
With her vision, she felt the fear of the man who had written it, his frustration at seeing his investigation stifled.
Names appeared, leads that had never been followed. A certain Lars Jensen, a dockworker who had sworn he saw men wearing the colors of a private transport guild near the main warehouse an hour before the fire.
The report stated that Jensen later "recanted" his testimony after "inheriting" a considerable sum of money from a "distant relative" and had left the city.
Another note mentioned the city watch Captain of the time, a man named Jun-Ho Park, who had personally ordered the inquiry closed for "lack of conclusive evidence," despite the investigator's objections.
Here were names. Threads to be pulled.
She spent hours memorizing every detail, every date, every name.
The ruined families: the Solari, the Van Der Meers, and her own family, the Elmers, whose port assets had been hit the hardest.
The families that had prospered: Silas's, which had bought up transport contracts for a pittance, and two other noble families that had mysteriously acquired waterfront land a few months after the tragedy.
The genealogy of ash and of gold, just as she had asked of Mathieu.
The document itself was a mortal danger.
Leaving it in this room, however luxurious, was unthinkable. Valerius's servants were discreet, but they were his eyes. She had to hide it. She inspected the room, searching for a flaw.
Not under the mattress, too obvious. Not in a wardrobe. She ran her fingers along the walls, the baseboards, the fireplace mantel.
Finally, she found it.
Behind the heavy wall tapestry depicting a mythological hunt, a stone in the wall was slightly loose. Using the fruit knife from her meal tray, she patiently scraped at the mortar until she could pry it out.
Behind it was a small, empty space, just large enough. She slipped the carefully rolled report inside and replaced the stone.
The tapestry perfectly masked the seam. The secret had returned to the silence of the stone.
The day came to a close.
She knew Valerius would return soon, hungry for her company, her "visions," her body. She went to the grand mirror to prepare herself.
She looked at her reflection.
The face was hers, but it felt distant.
The Oracle's mask was in place, serene, mysterious. But today, something had changed in the way she perceived it.
Before, she had felt the difference between the role and herself.
Now, the line was blurring.
To prepare for Valerius's arrival, she had to decide which emotion to display.
The pain she had felt was real, the most real thing she had known in years. But she couldn't show it to him. Not in its raw form. It had to be distilled, transformed into a performance.
Her mind, cold and analytical, went to work.
He will expect his Oracle to be affected by the powerful visions she has had. A distant sadness would be appropriate. An air of mystical preoccupation. It will make him feel protective. It will drive him to comfort me, which will give me another opportunity to probe his thoughts, to strengthen his attachment.
She practiced.
She emptied her face of all expression, then let a shadow of melancholy touch the corners of her lips, let a cloud of distant sorrow pass through her eyes.
She repeated the gesture, adjusting it, perfecting it. It was a technical exercise. Her own, real grief over her dead sister had become a theatrical prop.
She looked in the mirror one last time.
The face staring back was perfect.
The sadness was palpable, yet beautiful, ethereal.
It was a work of art. But looking deeper into her own eyes, for the very first time, Catherine had a terrifying thought: who, exactly, was the one looking back?
The actress or the role? She could not answer. And the worst part was, a part of her didn't even care.