"Ahhh..!"
Aim said it quietly, three blocks from the church, when the cold air had finally reached him.
Isolde looked at him.
"Heiter is gone. The other branch is the priority. But if we leave now—few days from when we arrived, right after meeting members and before the evening rite it wouldn't be good." He didn't look at her as he spoke. He was watching the street. "We need them to remember us as devoted, not interesting."
"So we stay?" Isolde considered this and did not disagree.
"We stay."
"Hmm, maybe four days or some?"
They turned around.
They were almost back at the door when a young woman in a scarf came out at a fast walk, saw them, and waved both hands.
"There you are!" she said, breathless. "Come, come—the rite is starting. The new ones go first."
She did not wait for a response. She steered them inside by the elbow with the cheerful insistence of someone who had been told to fetch others back in and was relieved to have succeeded.
---
The space behind the main dusty hall had been opened up—a curtain pulled back to reveal a smaller chamber that Aim had not realized was there. A second altar at the front, smaller than the main one, lit with candles in red bowls. A line of new members was already forming along the side wall, perhaps twenty in total. The air was warmer here with the kind of pressing density that comes from too many people standing too still in not enough room.
A second priest had appeared near the side of the altar—older, robed, with the patient expression of someone who had performed this ritual many times.
"For our new brothers and sisters," he said, in a carrying voice that did not need to be loud to fill the chamber, "the Rite of Receiving."
Aim took his place near the back of the line. Isolde slotted in just behind him.
"In this rite," the priest started, "The officiating brother will look into your past—the moments you have lived, the truths you have carried, the burdens you have not yet set down. By the gift of Agares, the elder priests of each branch carry a portion of the Eye Beyond Time. Brother will read whether the faith ahead of you will burn long, or briefly, or not at all."
A murmur of approval. Several people near the front bowed their heads.
"Pss" Isolde started quietly
"What?"
"You know what."
Aim replied with a nod.
His focus increased.
"Each of you will receive the priest's blessing and a word of guidance—a gift from Agares, spoken through his servant. This is the first step into our family."
Aim's stomach went cold.
Look into your past.
He kept his face neutral the way he had learned to keep his face neutral at the South Gate—the practiced empty politeness of someone processing a queue. He did not look at Isolde. He did not need to. He could feel her go still behind him.
He bent his head slightly downward.
What he was actually doing was making sure no one in front of him could see his face.
The line moved forward by one.
---
Someone clapped him on the shoulder.
Hard.
Aim almost dropped his composure entirely. He turned.
Emil was behind Isolde, dressed in the worn coat of a working class man and a scarf that was slightly too clean to be properly authentic.
His eyes were not friendly at all.
He squeeze the shoulder harder. A lot harder.
"Good to see you," he said, in the warm tone of a casual greeting. Then, more quietly, with the friendly smile still in place: "Even if I'm still annoyed about the cheekbone."
Aim's throat closed and reopened in approximately one second.
"Eh sorry about that," he said. He even meant it. He scratched the back of his neck once. "Genuinely."
Emil's expression did not change for the watching members, but his eyes flicked across Aim's face and softened just slightly—the small private acknowledgment of a man who had decided that the hit had been part of the plan and was choosing not to hold it against him for longer than half a conversation.
He turned to Isolde. "And you, his Aim's—."
She squeezed his hand back.
"We are Thomas and Eliza here."
"Ahh Thomas's pretty friend," He try shooking his hand of the grip "long time no see."
She let it go.
She glanced once toward the front of the line.
So did Aim.
---
The line was moving faster than he wanted.
Aim's eyes scanned the chamber. Two men against the far wall workers' clothing, scuffed boots, the slightly-too-neat slouch of people who had been told to look casual and had practiced. Their shoulders were too square. Their stance was the stance of soldiers attempting not to stand like soldiers.
Isolde had already noticed them. He could tell by the careful stillness of her gaze when it passed over the wall.
She had been through the same training he had—the basic infiltration course every Royal Cadet have went through and also an optional class for RMO Trainee, the one about what real slum dress looked like and what state-trained slum dress looked like.
She did not say anything.
Neither did Aim.
The line moved again.
Six people ahead of them now. Then five.
Aim could feel his pulse rising. He was not going to be able to do this. He could think of three lies he could tell to walk out of the line and none of them would stand up to a priest who was about to look directly into his memory of the last six months.
Emil leaned forward, fixed his scarf, and said, in a voice pitched so low that only the two of them would catch it: "Don't worry. I overheard something useful from our department's dearest broker."
Isolde's head turned by exactly one degree. "Useful how."
"I don't know if it'll help. But there's a unit currently embedded among the senior cultist—RMO, undercover. Word came in to my unit just before I left. Apparently one of them got drunk at the underground branch meeting and somehow bypassed this eye beyond time thing. But like all of the embedded officer did that same thing so they all get suspect unfortunately. They've made him as an outsider as i heard. They are probably being beaten in a cellar somewhere now. But—"
He produced, with the practiced sleight of someone moving something quickly under a coat, a small flat flask and pressed it briefly against Aim's hand. Strong-smelling. Cheap. The kind of liquor that did its work fast.
"No one would notice right?"
"Hide it," Emil whispered. "Both of you."
Aim slid the flask inside his coat with the efficiency of a man who had done worse things in worse coats.
"Hide it for what,"
"Hide it for now. Quiet."
The line moved.
Aim was three back.
His mind, which had been on a single track since the priest said look into your past, spilled sideways onto a second one.
Liquor.
Why would liquor matter.
The priest at the front placed his hands on a young man's head and spoke softly. The young man's face went blank with reverence. The priest spoke a few more words, smiled gently, and gestured him to the side of the altar where the other newly initiated were gathering.
It had taken thirty seconds.
Thirty seconds was not enough time to look into anyone's past in any real way.
If The Seer had the full sight—the Eye Beyond Time, given by Agares and so those priests must had only a fraction of it, then what if!
"Next."
Aim's head jerked up.
The line had moved. It was his turn.
He had been standing still for several seconds.
"Just overthink." he said aloud, slightly too loud, with a small embarrassed laugh — the laugh of a new member who had been overwhelmed by the moment and had momentarily checked out.
Emil and Isolde both turned to him.
"Huh?"
"Huh?"
He met their eyes for one half-second.
"Trust me" he murmured.
---
He did the first thing he could think of.
He turned to Isolde.
"Quick game?" he said. "Rock, paper, scissors. Loser walks up first."
Isolde stared at him. "What."
"Nah" Emil said.
"Come on. Loser first. Occupy our thought too."
"Nah!" Isolde said.
"Thennn." He grinned widely. Suspiciously wide.
She glared.
Then her eyes narrowed and she said, very softly, "Don't you dare."
"Remember the time Madam Voss made you read your love letter infront of class because you sent it to—"
"Aim—"
"—Rosevill even though they forbid sending explicit letter acrosss boys and girls dorm and you said the first line you wrote—"
"I WILL CHOKE YOU RIGHT HERE!"
"And then you got so red you—"
The flush was already up her neck. She covered her face briefly with one hand. The anger in her eyes was real anger, the bright furious annoyance of someone who had carried a specific embarrassment for a decade and had not expected it to be dragged into a religious ceremony.
Emil, watching this, took approximately a half seconds to understand.
His eyes lit up.
He turned his face away from the altar and stared at the floor and started thinking very hard about the time his mother had made maccaroni and chese for the first time after his father got shoved into prison—the way she had forcing smile and cried at the same time when she set down the bowl. The way she had—
He cut himself off before the memory landed properly. He was thinking about it. That was enough.
He started thinking about his first trip to the eastern coast as a child. The way the sea had smelled. The vendor who had—
Cut.
Different memory. Different angle. Keep the mind moving. Don't sit on any image too long.
---
"Step forward, brother."
Aim stepped up onto the small platform.
The priest was perhaps sixty, with the kind of face that had spent a long time being warm at people. He smiled at Aim. Aim smiled back, with the small overwhelmed smile of a man who had decided he was a new convert ten minutes ago and was still adjusting to it.
"Do you, brother, accept Agares — the Turner of the Wheel, the one who answered when no other did — as the one true god, above all other names and all other thrones?"
"I do," Aim said.
"Do you set aside the false gods, the silent of them, and their thrones in the foolish's books?"
"I do."
"Do you walk this path with a steady heart, in faith, and in service of the wheel that turns?"
"I do."
The priest raised both hands and placed them on Aim's head.
Aim closed his eyes.
He thought, very deliberatel.
---
In the investigation room of the Eastern District Military Police office, in the late hour when most of the building had thinned out, Const sat in a chair against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
He had been staring at the ceiling for thirty minutes.
His hands were folded in his lap. He was not asleep. He was not reading. He was simply present in the room with the kind of stillness that people developed when they had been running on a single thought for so long that the thought had stopped feeling separate from them.
Rafael was at his desk across the room, writing a report. He glanced up once.
This pale hair dude had not moved.
Rafael glanced up again three minutes later.
Still nothing.
This weirdo just come and beg Emil to go support those two friend of his this morning.
But when will he go back? And why is he staying at all.
He looked back at the clock. He's been staring at the ceiling for half an hour. Half an hour. What is going on with this guy.
He shook his head once, almost imperceptibly, and went back to his writing.
Whatever. None of my problem.
The lamp on the desk burned. The pen scratched. Const did not move.
The ceiling remained the ceiling.