The evening air was cooling, and for once, I didn't feel the need to check the window for grey cloaks. Avaris had declared it a "Restoration Night." In any other house, that might mean a party. In ours, it meant we all sat in the living room and engaged in our most intensely boring hobbies.
I was hunched over the coffee table, happily cataloging a new set of soil pH samples from the North Bank. "Look at this, Arin," I said, holding up a small glass vial. "The acidity is practically nonexistent. It's the most neutral dirt I've ever seen. It's almost... invisible."
Arin was sitting on the rug. He was eight, so naturally, he had a set of wooden blocks in front of him. But he wasn't building a castle. He was practicing the "Verne Stack."
Using the "Percolation Theory" we discussed on Sunday, he was placing the blocks one on top of the other so gently that the wood didn't even click. He was moving his hands with the slow, liquid grace of a cat.
"Neutral is good, Father," Arin said, eyes fixed on a particularly wobbly cylinder block. "Neutral doesn't get tested."
Avaris entered from the kitchen, carrying a tray of honey-ginger tea. She watched Arin for a moment. Most mothers would be worried their son was being too quiet. She just looked satisfied. She sat down next to me, her hand resting on the back of my chair.
"The porridge spoon survived the day, I see," she remarked, nodding toward the table where the Wooden Spoon sat in its place of honor.
"It did," Arin said. He reached out and tapped his tower of blocks. It should have tumbled. Instead, it swayed slightly and stayed upright. He had distributed the weight so perfectly that gravity seemed to be having an argument with itself. "I didn't break a single thing today, Mother. Not even a law of physics."
I chuckled, dabbing a bit of pH-strip on a sample. "Physics? My boy, you're eight! The only law you should worry about breaking is your bedtime. Though I must say, your coordination has improved. No 'tripping' once you got home?"
"The air is thicker at home, Father," Lysa said from the corner, where she was "reading" a book (though I noticed she was actually counting the number of times the house-crickets chirped in the garden). "It's easier to stay upright when the pressure is consistent."
I looked at my family—my brilliant, "dull" family. "You know, I was thinking. Since the children did so well at their 'Aptitude' test, perhaps we should do something special. Avaris, what do you say we open that jar of preserved peaches from the high-summer harvest?"
Arin's eyes lit up. For a second, the "Sentry-in-training" vanished and a genuine eight-year-old appeared. "The peaches? The ones with the heavy syrup?"
"The very ones," I said, standing up. "It's a celebration of the mediocre! A toast to the C-minus!"
We sat around the table, eating peaches that tasted like bottled sunshine. I talked for forty-five minutes about the history of peach-pit carbonization, and for once, nobody sighed or tried to change the subject. They listened with an intensity that would have intimidated a university professor.
"Ilyas," Avaris said softly, her hand finding mine under the table. "You're a good teacher."
"I just like dirt, Avaris," I said, feeling a bit bashful. "And records. And consistency."
"That's exactly what I mean," she replied.
As the moon rose over the garden—right above the spot where the Crossed Circle was hidden beneath the hydrangeas—I watched Arin. He had taken his peach pit and was spinning it on the table. It spun with a humming, perfect balance, centered exactly in the middle of a wood-grain circle.
He wasn't an eight-year-old weapon. He wasn't a "Null Signal" on a sensor. He was just a boy, safe in his home, enjoying the fact that for one more night, the world thought he was nobody.
"To being nobody," Arin whispered, echoing my toast from before.
"To being nobody," we all replied.
The only sound in the house was the gentle tick-tick of the hall clock and the steady, rhythmic breathing of a family that had mastered the art of hiding in plain sight.
The house was silent, wrapped in the heavy, velvet stillness of a late autumn night. Only the floorboards groaned occasionally, settling into the earth like they were sighing in their sleep.
I lay awake, the moonlight slicing through the curtains and painting a silver ribbon across the bed. Beside me, Avaris was motionless. Most people breathe with a ragged rise and fall; she breathed like the tide—constant, rhythmic, and impossibly quiet. Even in sleep, she looked like she was guarding something.
I turned on my side, propping my head up on my hand. I just watched her. The way the light caught the sharp line of her jaw and the faint, silvery lines of those scars on her wrists that she usually kept hidden under her sleeves. She looked ethereal, yet grounded—like a mountain peak caught in the stars.
"You've been staring for six minutes, Ilyas," she said. Her voice was a low hum, barely a ripple in the silence. She hadn't moved a muscle. Her eyes were still closed.
I jumped slightly, my heart doing a little dance. "How do you do that? I wasn't even breathing loudly."
"I can hear your heartbeat," she murmured, finally fluttering her eyes open. They were dark and deep in the shadows. "It speeds up when you're thinking too much. Why are you looking at me?"
"Because you're too beautiful," I said, and I meant it with every fiber of my scholarly soul. "It's statistically improbable that a man who spends his life looking at dirt should end up with a woman who looks like she was carved from moonlight."
Avaris softened. The "General" posture she carried all day seemed to melt into the mattress. She reached out, her fingers brushing my cheek before she pulled me down for a kiss—soft, lingering, and tasting faintly of the honey-ginger tea from earlier.
When she pulled away, her hand stayed on the back of my neck. I looked at her, and the question that had been fermenting in the back of my mind for years finally bubbled to the surface. The peace of the night made me brave.
"Avaris," I whispered. "When are you going to tell me?"
Her thumb stopped moving against my skin. "Tell you what?"
"The truth. About the past." I leaned in closer. "I know you think I don't notice. I know I play the part of the oblivious scholar, and I do love my ledgers... but I see the way you stand. I see how you look at the Grey Cloaks. I see how our eight-year-old son can suppress his weight because he was 'trained' to do it. You weren't just a soldier, were you?"
Avaris stared at the ceiling for a long time. The silence stretched until it felt like it might snap. She took my hand and placed it over her heart. It was beating steadily—not a single skip.
"Ilyas," she said, her voice sounding like it was coming from a great distance. "In the North, there is a saying: 'The wind doesn't talk about the storm it once was; it just enjoys being a breeze.' If I tell you everything, the breeze ends. The storm comes back into this house."
"I'm a master of irrigation, Avaris," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I know how to handle a storm. I just... I want to know who I'm sharing my life with. Not the 'General'—I already know her. I want to know the woman who had to leave it all behind."
Avaris turned back to me, her eyes glistening. For the first time, she looked vulnerable. "Not tonight, my love. Tonight, let me just be your wife. Let Arin just be a boy who likes peaches. But I promise you..."
She pulled me close, her lips against my ear.
"...when the Empire stops knocking on the door and starts trying to kick it down, I will show you exactly who I am. And you might wish I had kept the secret."
She kissed me again, more fiercely this time, as if she were trying to seal the secrets back inside her soul. I held her tight, realizing that while I might be the one who studies the soil, she is the one who has been buried in it.