Never once did I think to challenge that semblance of equality, to search for that one variant, that one mimic cleverly made up to resemble the others, but actually of a different species altogether. (She was just another student in so many ways. You shouldn’t think that she was other, or different. I was the mimic, if anyone was. I threw off the balance in that place.)

Mary’s presence, when I look back, first resonated as a faint music vibrating through the strings of my golden metaphor: a resonance neither sinister nor angelic. In that respect, she reminds me of a character in a novel by Sirin. She exists on the edges of the pages, in the spaces between the words, her name unwritten except in riddles: a woman’s green-and-gold scarf on Duncan’s apartment desk, sudden honeysuckle in a glass in his school office, a puzzling hint of cologne during lunch. A half-dozen passive yet sensual details a jealous wife might hoard—or that a sibling might half-remember with amusement, but later revisit harshly.

Duncan never mentioned Mary during that time. (She was my student, for Truff’s sake! Why would I mention her? You make this all sound so tawdry yet ethereal. Is it possible she just escaped your myopic powers of observation? Is it possible you were so continually drugged and drunk that you noticed no one? You should strike all of this from the record. There’s no reason for it and no one cares. I don’t even care anymore, except the now-dulled sting that you tried to undermine my relationships rather than support them.) Curiously, though, Duncan’s postcards began to contain more personal information than our lunchtime conversations, possibly because of Bonmot’s presence.

Sometimes the postcards consisted of odd lines that told me he had reopened his investigations well beyond Blythe Academy:

Even the flies have eyes, Janice. Eyes for them. There is no corner of this city they cannot see in some form. But it’s too much information. They cannot review it all at once. I imagine them down there, in the fungal light, reviewing intelligence gathered a decade ago—awash in information, none of it useful to them because it overwhelms them. And yet—why? Why attempt to gather it?

If Dad had actually studied Tonsure’s journal, I wonder if he would have found what I found. Even more important—what would he have done with the knowledge?

Sometimes they gather around my door. Sometimes they burrow up from below. When they get in—which isn’t often; I’ve learned some of their tricks—they watch me. Observe. It is more unnerving than if they were to hurt me.