The smell of smoke gave way to the smell of bread.
I stood in a house on the outskirts. Ordinary rain pattered outside the window, and an IOU bearing a paid seal lay on the table. Father sat by the lamp mending a belt, while Mother sliced apples.
I knew it was a trap.
Knowing did not help.
In my memory my parents existed only in fragments: hands and voices from laboratory records, signatures in the debt archive. The Crown had assembled them into people who moved, breathed and knew my name.
Mother saw the blood on my sleeve.
"Went in alone again?"
She took out a strip of cloth and began bandaging the wound. Her touch was warm. I did not remember how my mother had touched me in real life, so I could find no flaw.
Father asked about my classes at the academy. Awards stood on the shelf. The swarm captains waited behind the house, but none of them was hungry. The Li family had lost its power, Lenny avoided this street, and Kane was on trial.
Everything I had fought for had already happened.
Styx sat in a glass enclosure by the window. Her wings had grown larger, her armour shone, and open tubes of blood lay around her. The door was closed, but there was enough room inside to fly.
"Why is she in there?" I asked.
Father did not look up.
"It is safer this way."
"For whom?"
Mother tightened the bandage.
"For everyone. She wants for nothing, and she will never leave you."
There was no threat in those words. That was what made them more dangerous than Kane's command.
I approached the enclosure. Styx followed my fingers with her gaze, but sent me no hunger, irritation or image. Between us was a perfect bond without a single objection.
An owner's seal burned on my hand.
I had only to touch it to know where every brood was. I could open the city gates, stop Leon's dragon, erase any family's debt. No one would ever again be able to hand my prey to another man and call it law.
Kane had not lied: the Crown really could make me invulnerable to the humiliations of my past.
I opened the enclosure door.
The illusory Styx did not fly out.
"You can," I said.
She stayed where she was.
Through the bond, the real Styx drove her sting into my shoulder. Pain passed through the house. For an instant the walls turned transparent, revealing white threads behind them.
I looked at Mother again.
"What was in the letter to the orphanage worker?"
She smiled but did not answer.
The Crown knew only the records Kane had managed to steal. It did not have the last letter.
"You are not my mother."
The woman kept hold of my hand.
"What if I am saying what she would have said? Is that not enough?"
I wanted to agree. I wanted to spend even one evening in a home where my parents had not become someone else's archive.
Styx touched the bond again. This time an image came: a grey egg and an open door. Not a request to destroy the illusion. A reminder that there was a way out.
I raised the lid of the enclosure all the way.
The house began to come apart, and Father vanished first. Mother held my wrist for several seconds more.
"You will be alone again."
"No."
I looked at Styx.
"But she will be able to leave."
The enclosure cracked. The illusory Styx flew out and dissolved into the real one.
With her came a short fragment of a recording. Mother was holding the grey egg before a man in an orphanage uniform.
"Do not tell the boy who it came from. If the egg does not respond, find him another home, so that he does not choose out of obligation to us."
The recording ended. There were no instructions for victory, no secret destiny and no ready-made bargain.
My parents had not left me a weapon.
They had left me the option of walking away.
The Crown took the home from me, but it could not turn my chance encounter with Styx into an appointed fate.
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