By Her Full Name

Lacey's voice is still in the room when I stand. It is the only thing that moves me, that small careful voice run out of weather, because Elliot Sayer has just asked me the one question a founder cannot answer and the silence after it was going to be the answer, and then a phone rang and put my sister's name into the chair's office, and the body is on its feet before I have decided to be.

"We'll finish this," I tell Naomi, and the cello does it, even and unbothered, while underneath I am nothing but a woman who has heard the one name she cannot afford to hear. "There's someone in reception I have to see to myself."

"The pack," Elliot says, mild, not letting go, because he is a man who finishes his sums. "By Friday."

"By Friday," I agree, and I leave the unanswered question on the table behind me like a knife I have decided not to pick up yet, and I do not run, because Cosima does not run, the founder strolls, the founder is never late because the world waits, and I have to make this body stroll while my whole chest is a stairwell going down.

Joss is in reception.

I count the lift down because I have to put the dread somewhere. One floor. Two. The numbers fall and I fall with them. Three things, edged, so I do not go down with them: one, my sister is in this building, the one place in the world I most need her not to be, asking for the woman who erased her sister by her full name. Two, she does not know me. To her, the doors are going to open on Cosima Wilde, the famous thief, the enemy, and she has come here on purpose to stand in front of that enemy and not leave. Three, I cannot find the third thing, again, the comforting third, because the body answers the count from under the breastbone, soft, fond, almost kind, oh, this is the one you've been afraid of, isn't it, and I take the count back and I do not give it the satisfaction of a third.

The doors open on the ground floor and the glass atrium is full of grey river light and there, by the long reception desk, small and furious and entirely herself, is Joss.

She has come straight from somewhere. Her coat is wrong for the weather and her boots are the cheap ones with the heel worn down on the outside the way she has worn down every pair since she was fifteen, and her hair is up in the clip that is always sliding, and she is standing the way she stands when she has decided not to be moved, weight back, chin up, both hands in her pockets so no one can see them shake. I have watched her stand like that in a headmaster's office and a hospital corridor and the bad flat we grew up in. I could pick that stance out of a crowd, better than I could now pick my own face, because my own face is upstairs in a man's pocket and this one is a stranger's.

The receptionist is doing damage control in a low voice. Joss is not lowering hers.

"I don't need an appointment," Joss is saying. "I need her. Cosima Wilde. I'll wait. I've got all day. I've got the rest of my life, actually, I'm not exactly busy."

All I wanted, walking out of that lift, was the smallest thing there is and the only kind that survives a lobby: get her out of the public glass before she becomes a story, and find out what she knows, and not, whatever it costs, let either voice in this mouth say the thing it is dying to say. Whether I can do the first two without failing the third is another matter, because the third is the whole war, the third is the one wall I cannot afford to lose, and my sister has come here specifically to take a hammer to it without knowing it is there.

And then she sees me.

I watch it happen. I watch my sister's face turn toward the lift and find the founder's face on it and do the thing faces do when they meet the person they hate, the small flinch back, the jaw setting, the eyes going hard and bright, and there is no recognition in it, none, not a flicker, because there is nothing of me to recognise, I am wearing the woman she came here to fight. It is the cruellest thing the body has done to me yet, and it has done a great deal. My sister looks at me and sees her enemy, and she is right.

"Joss," I say, and the cello nearly ruins me, because it says her name the founder's way, smooth, placeholder-warm, the way you say the name of a problem you intend to handle, and underneath the real voice, the one I keep in my chest and never spend, is screaming her name in the only register that means it, and neither of those is the one I am allowed to use. So I take my mouth back, the way I take it back from the smile, and I say it again, plain. "Joss Frost. You wanted me."

"You know my name." She says it like an accusation, because it is one. "Of course you do. You took everything else of hers, why not the surname."

That lands somewhere there is no armour, and the body does not have a line for it, and for one bad second neither do I. The receptionist is looking between us. There is a security man drifting closer with the slow professional casualness of a man deciding whether this is a thing. I cannot have this in the atrium. I cannot have Joss Frost making a scene in the lobby of Halcyon, on cameras, on the day Naomi Adler is finally wavering and Elliot Sayer is adding me up, because Joss in a lobby is a story, and a story about the founder and the missing junior's sister is exactly the story Damien would pay to have told.

"Not here," I say, low, and I mean it as Talia and it comes out as Cosima, clipped, controlling, and I see her hear the control and decide to fight it.

"Why not here." Joss takes a step toward me. "Scared of your nice lobby? Worried I'll smudge the glass? I'll go wherever you want, love, I'll follow you into your lovely office and your lovely chair, but you are going to look at me while I say this." Her voice cracks, just once, on the next word, and it is the crack that nearly puts me on the floor. "Talia."

The atrium does not change. The river light does not change. But everything in me stops, and I press both palms flat against the cold seam of my own coat pockets the way she has her hands in hers, two sisters in a lobby holding their own shaking hands still, except she does not know she is doing it with me, because she has said the name like the dead say it, like a thing that is already gone, and she does not know, she cannot know, the murder is weeks ahead, the body out there is still walking around, and Joss is talking about her in the past tense.

"My sister," Joss says, and now the hands are out of the pockets and they are shaking and she does not care who sees, "is not picking up. Three weeks. She's not answering, she's not at the flat, the flat looks like nobody lives in it, and before that she was wrong for months, she went flat and far away, she stopped sounding like herself, my own sister stopped sounding like herself on the phone and I told myself it was work, I told myself it was you grinding her down, and the last person anyone saw her with, at that studio of yours, the old one, the one I stood outside this morning watching your builders gut on sudden money, the last person, Cosima, was you."

I stand in the grey light and I count, because the dread is past anything I have a wall for and it has to go somewhere. One: she is not talking about a murder. She is talking about now. Three weeks ago the body out there went quiet, and Joss has been alone in it for three weeks, ringing a phone no one is home to answer. Two: the old studio. She has connected the gutting of the riverside studio, my one real move to keep the murder from having a room, to her sister going dark, and she has drawn the only line a loving sister could draw, straight to the founder. Three: the last person seen with Talia at the old studio was Cosima.

Three counted facts and not one of them a comfort, because there is no comfort in this count, there never is. The body has gone very still, the way it goes when the sleeper is listening, and under my breastbone, where the appetite lives, there is no want at all, only a cold attention, a recognition, the way you recognise your own handwriting, and the sleeper says, quiet, almost wondering, so that is where she's been, and I do not know, I genuinely do not know, standing in my own atrium in my enemy's skin, whether the thing in me that just answered was guessing, or remembering.

"Where is she," Joss says, and it is not a question any more, it is the only thing she has left. "What did you do to my sister."

And the security man stops drifting and puts a hand on his radio, and the receptionist says my name, my borrowed name, the question in it, do you want him to, and Joss's chin is up and her hands are shaking and she has come all this way to fight an enemy and the enemy is me, and I open the mouth that is the only mouth that knows, and I have no idea, none, which woman is going to use it.