Maris Dalewood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Maris Dalewood walked off a paid job last week, and she still had not opened the letter that fired her for it. She was thirty. She had spent most of those years reading other people's eyes to learn what they thought of hers — left part blue, right brown — and she had decided early that the flinch told her everything. Now she wanted something the flinch could not give her. She wanted to know where the eyes came from. No one in her family had them. The records she had found before quitting the contract said other people did, in a line, marked. She climbed to the perch she had claimed in the upper market: a sealed metal pod hung on cable, with one-way ports facing out. From inside she could watch the crowd without being watched back. She came here to study faces. Today she came to study one face in particular. A small woman with a white streak in her black curls had been seen near the spice stalls three mornings running. Maris had paid a runner to confirm it. She opened the journal she carried everywhere, the one with the clasp that caught the light in shifting colors. Inside were lists. Names of strangers with split eyes. Towns. Dates. A page for the market woman who had grabbed a child's wrist twenty-three years ago and walked away without speaking. Maris had hunted that woman once and got nothing. She did not expect more today. She expected the next name on the list. The woman with the streak stopped below the pod. She tilted her head up at the cable, then at the ports, as if she knew exactly which pod was occupied. Maris held still. The woman crossed the lane and climbed the service ladder. She knocked twice on the hatch. Maris opened it. The woman was her height almost exactly, deep brown skin, a wedge of blue in the left eye, brown in the right. She did not flinch. She looked straight at Maris and held it. "You're Dalewood," the woman said. "I'm Delaine. We share a grandmother. There are eleven of us I've found. I came because I heard you walked off a job over the bloodline records." She passed up a folded sheet. "That's where the rest of us are. Some won't talk to you. Two will." Maris took the sheet. Her hand stayed steady. She had spent thirty years deciding her eyes were not a flaw, and now a stranger with the same eyes was telling her they were a map. She climbed down after Delaine. She left the pod open behind her. The next name on her list was no longer a stranger's, and the question had changed from who am I to which of them will tell me the truth.