The job that night was meant to be simple. A storehouse near the quarter's eastern edge, lightly guarded, holding goods that Cassian had assured everyone would be easy enough to move once lifted. Ivy had agreed to it the way she had agreed to most things over the past three weeks, the particular momentum of habit carrying her forward faster than any deliberate decision could have managed.
She was inside within minutes.
The storehouse was dim, lit only by a single lantern near its far entrance, and Ivy moved through the stacked crates with the old fluid silence that had once made her the fastest hands in this quarter, her fingers already finding the latch of the nearest crate worth investigating. She did not hear the small footsteps until they were nearly on top of her.
LEA: Hey!
She turned sharply, old instinct snapping her into a defensive stance before her mind had fully processed the size and posture of whoever had spoken, and found herself looking at a girl, perhaps nine or ten, standing in the storehouse doorway with a lantern of her own held aloft and an expression of complete and immediate recognition spreading across her face.
LEA: I know you!
Ivy straightened slowly, the defensive posture easing as the lack of any real threat became clear, though something else, something less easily dismissed, began to settle into her chest instead.
IVY: You should go home. It's late.
LEA: You're Ivy! From the war! You fought with the heroes, with Noel and everyone, I've seen the drawings!
The girl's voice carried an excitement that filled the dim storehouse entirely, bright and unguarded in a way that felt almost violent against the particular quiet Ivy had been moving through.
IVY: I think you have the wrong person.
LEA: No I don't! My papa told me about you. He said the heroes saved everyone. He said Noel especially, that Noel could have killed him once but didn't, that Noel chose to protect instead of destroy, and that's why we're alive, my whole family, because Noel chose mercy.
Ivy went very still.
LEA: He talks about it all the time. Says it's the most important thing anyone ever did for him. And you fought alongside him, didn't you? You're one of the heroes too.
The word landed in the dim storehouse with a weight that felt entirely disproportionate to its size, and Ivy stood among the half opened crates of stolen goods with a child's bright unguarded face looking up at her with something close to wonder, and felt the particular vertigo of being seen, suddenly and completely, exactly as she had once been and exactly as she currently was not.
IVY: I'm not who you think I am.
LEA: You are though. I've seen pictures. You have the same eyes.
She said it with the simple certainty of a child who had not yet learned that people could become unrecognizable to themselves without changing their face at all, and Ivy felt something curl tight and ugly in her chest, recognition tangled with shame tangled with something close to disgust at being caught here, in this exact moment, by the one person whose family's entire existence depended on a mercy Ivy herself was actively betraying.
IVY: You should leave.
LEA: Why are you in here? This is the Hendricks' storehouse. They're not bad people.
IVY: That's not your business.
LEA: It is my business if you're stealing from them!
The girl's voice had shifted, the wonder curdling rapidly into something sharper, the particular fierce indignation of a child who had been raised on stories of heroism and was now confronting a version of that story that did not match what she had been told.
LEA: You're supposed to be a hero. Heroes don't steal from people. Heroes don't sneak into storehouses in the middle of the night and take things that don't belong to them.
IVY: I told you. I'm not a hero.
LEA: Then what are you doing with their things in your hands?
Ivy looked down. She had not noticed, in the chaos of the encounter, that her fingers had remained closed around a small bundle of goods, the old habit completing itself even while the rest of her attention had been entirely consumed by the girl in the doorway. She felt something close to disgust at herself.
LEA: You're throwing it all away. Everything they fought for. Everything Noel and Maeve and Johann and all of them gave up. You're just throwing it away to steal from people who never did anything to you.
The names landed like individual blows, each one carrying weight Ivy had spent the past three weeks trying to avoid feeling, and she stood in the dim storehouse with stolen goods in her hand and a child's righteous anger filling the space between them, and something in her chest, long buried beneath weeks of comfortable regression, began to crack open in a way the mirror's fracture had only suggested.
IVY: You don't understand what you're talking about.
LEA: I understand plenty! My papa said the heroes were supposed to be better than the people who hurt us! He said that's what makes them heroes! And you're standing here being worse than the man who almost killed him!
IVY: I am not a hero.
She said it again, louder this time, the words arriving with a desperate finality, as though repeating them firmly enough might make the conversation stop, might make the child's righteous fury subside, might erase the particular reflection she was being forced to see in a girl's furious unguarded eyes.
LEA: Then prove it.
She set her small lantern down on a nearby crate with a decisiveness that startled Ivy, the particular fearlessness of a child who had not yet learned that confronting adults carried genuine risk, and raised her fists in a clumsy, untrained approximation of a fighting stance.
LEA: If you're not a hero, fight me. Prove you're just a thief who doesn't care about anyone.
IVY: I'm not going to fight a child.
LEA: Why not? Are you scared?
The provocation was absurd, a girl barely a third of her size and with no training whatsoever issuing a challenge that should have been laughable, and yet Ivy felt something in her chest twist at the dare anyway, the particular sting of being called out by someone too young and too righteous to understand the actual stakes of what she was demanding.
IVY: This isn't a fight you want.
LEA: It's the only one I've got.
She stood there in the lantern light, small and furious and entirely unafraid, and Ivy looked at her and felt the full weight of everything the girl represented settle over her at once, the mercy that had built this child's entire understanding of what heroism meant, the legacy she was actively dishonoring with stolen goods still clutched in her fist, the particular collision of who she had been and who she had become finally, after weeks of avoidance, refusing to be avoided any longer.
End of Chapter 228
"Leah"
[ Children believe in heroes because no one has yet taught them how complicated heroism actually is. Sometimes that simplicity is exactly the mirror an adult needs. ]