Chapter 526: 526. Meeting The High Priestess Again (Today Is Where She’ll Be My Bitch)

He walked toward the back of the house.

The back sitting room had the quality of a space thoughtfully arranged to maximize the natural light at different times of the day. The east-facing window captured the morning sun and retained warmth well into the afternoon. The furniture was arranged not for aesthetic appeal but for practicality, with chairs positioned to facilitate genuine conversation rather than to look inviting from the doorway.

Amelia Brightsoul was in it.

She looked up when he entered, her expression reflecting what often happens when desire levels reach ninety percent: an immediate and warm orientation toward the specific person responsible for that feeling. There was a pleasure in the unexpected arrival, which felt familiar because part of her had been anticipating this moment all along.

"Oh my... Rex," she said, and her voice had the quality of someone who has been thinking about someone and has now had that person appear. "I’m so glad to meet you again, my dear..."

"I can’t believe it... it’s been... so long..." she said while twitching.

"Glad that your husband, Cassius, ran into me in the street," Rex said.

"He does that," she said, with the specific affection of someone who has been with a person for decades and has a particular fondness for their patterns even when those patterns involve sending people to the back sitting room. "He has been mentioning you more frequently than he usually mentions people."

"And for my husband, Cassius... that’s a significant signal."

"What kind of signal?" Rex said.

"The kind where he’s decided someone is worth keeping track of," she said. "He doesn’t do that often."

"He has very specific standards for what constitutes a person worth keeping track of, and most people don’t meet them without knowing they’re being evaluated." She looked at Rex with the warm, direct attention that was her default mode when she had decided a conversation was worth having properly. "He also thinks you held back in the canyon."

"Apollo said the same thing to him," Rex said.

"Apollo notices things when they’re directly in front of him," Amelia said. "Cassius notices the things around the edges."

She gestured toward the chair across from her. "Sit down and tell me about the canyon from your perspective."

Rex sat next to her, clearly ignoring her gestures, and she didn’t mind that at all. The afternoon light came through the window and put color on the side of her face, and she was looking at him with the particular quality of someone who has a genuine question and is waiting to see how much of the real answer she will receive.

"What do you want to know about it?" Rex said.

"Apollo’s account had gaps in it," Amelia said. "It was not that he was hiding anything; rather, he was unconscious for most of the events, and during the times he was awake, he understood the least."

She looked at Rex steadily. "He came home changed in a specific way... well, not worse... but changed."

"It’s like something had been confirmed for him that he had previously only suspected."

"What kind of thing?" Rex said.

"That the world is bigger and more serious than the version of it he had been operating in," she said.

"He is a very good person, and he has been a very effective Apostle, and he has been doing those things inside a frame that sensed him." She paused. "The canyon didn’t break the frame... but it showed him the edges of it in a way that I don’t think anything had before."

Rex looked at her. She was describing her son with the specific precision of someone who had been watching him closely for a long time and had a very complete picture of what she was looking at, including the parts that were difficult.

"He handled it," Rex said.

"He did," she said. "He always handles things."

"That’s one of his qualities." She said it without irony and without the specific warmth that would have softened it into a compliment, just as an observation about a person she knew thoroughly. "What I’m asking is whether he handled it because it was within the range of things he was equipped for, or because you managed the parts that weren’t."

Rex considered the question.

"Both," he said.

Amelia looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who has asked a question and received the honest answer and is sitting with it.

"That’s what I thought," she said quietly.

She was quiet for a moment, and the quality of the quiet was not uncomfortable. It was the quiet of someone who had received information they had needed and was giving it its proper weight before moving forward.

"Thank you for telling me that directly..."

"Most people would have given me the version that was easier to hear."

"You asked directly," Rex said. "Giving you a softer version would have been a waste of the question."

She looked at him with the expression that had been building in its intensity since the first time they had had a real conversation, the warm, focused attention of someone who has found a person who operates by principles they recognize and respect.

"Tell me about the reconstruction methodology," she said. "I’ve been reading the reports Elizabeth filed with the Academy, and there’s a gap between what the fragment composition suggests and what the current surface-level understanding can account for."

’It seems like Elizabeth tells almost everyone about this, huh...? Either it’s her or Valentina.’ Rex thought. ’But eh... it won’t change anything other than trying to have a chance to talk with me.’

’I see through it all.’

"The gap is real," Rex said. "The dimensional compression requires a substrate that doesn’t exist in any material accessible from the surface."

"But it exists somewhere," she said.

"Yes," Rex said.

She looked at him with the specific expression of someone who has just confirmed a hypothesis they had been developing privately.

"You already know where," she said.

"I have a direction," Rex said. "Not a confirmed answer."

"But you’re going to pursue it," she said.

"That’s what I’m leaving for in a few days," Rex said.

She absorbed this.

"Alone," she said.

"Yes," Rex said.

She looked at him for a moment with the expression that sat between professional concern and something else, the specific expression of someone at ninety percent who has been managing the something else for several weeks and finds the management increasingly effortful.

"You’re very calm about going alone toward an uncertain answer to a problem that hasn’t been solved in recorded history," she said.

"I work better with limited variables," Rex said.

"That’s a very composed way of describing what sounds like a significant risk," she said.

"Most things worth doing involve a significant risk," Rex said. "The assessment is whether the risk is proportionate to the outcome."

She was quiet for a moment. "And in this case you’ve decided it is."

"In this case I’ve decided it is," Rex said.

Amelia looked at him with the full attention she gave to things she considered genuinely important, and the expression had both layers in it now, the analytical and the other, sitting alongside each other without either one apologizing for the presence of the other.

"I want you to come back safely," she said.

It was a simple sentence and it came out in the register she used when she had finished managing what she was saying and was simply saying it.

Rex looked at her.

"I will," he said.

She held his gaze for a moment, and something in her expression shifted, the specific shift of someone who has received a simple answer and found it sufficient in a way they had not expected it to be.

"Good," she said quietly. "Now tell me about the second fragment."

"Elizabeth’s report mentions a lattice scoring inconsistency and I have three different theories about what it means."

Rex looked at her.

"How many of them are right," he said.

"Probably one and a half," she said, with the specific dry honesty of someone who has been doing serious academic work for long enough to accurately assess their own accuracy. "Tell me which half I’m missing."

Cassius, true to his word, had something to attend to and left the household quietly approximately thirty minutes into the afternoon. Rex heard the front door close and heard Apollo and Mireya’s voices continuing in the front room, low and domestic, the sound of a conversation that was pleasant but circling around something neither of them had said directly yet.

He stayed in the back sitting room with Amelia telling everything.

And of course... that topic will end at some point.

Just to move on to the real topic that Rex anticipated.