You are not expected to get much out of this unless you've read the preceding ~200k words of my Quiesceverse novels; it is entirely self-indulgent. Set at, and including spoilers up to, the end of Throughlines.
"She's not coming."
The visitors' room. About to do battle. Amanda on the far side of the glass.
Amanda. A child. A star in the firmament. I am Crucible; and so is she, a buried seed, waiting for the day I am extinguished. And a child, still: she thinks that Crucible is something one does, something that she can decline.
She's been encouraged to believe so, of course.
Always Amanda; and then, and then, my lover, my killer, my Leonard Cohen poetry feelings — "What's she doing?"
Fieldwork, obviously, although she shouldn't; the children she's training are out doing The Work, and she's out there with them, risking her life, grinding her shattered bones to powder and grief rather than leave them without a shepherd. Amanda is supposed to be their shepherd; what kind of terrible thing has Quiesce done now, that means she can't come today but Amanda is left loose to come and visit her dear incarcerated mother, the only relative she has, the one she sent here, the —
"No." Amanda pauses, mouth twisting, a tell she picked up from my beloved, as easily as the extreme selectivity with the truth that's about to masquerade as not precisely lying. "She's not — she's gone, Mom."
Which can't be, because no light so bright, no star so high is snuffed out without a noise. There would have been news, there would have been — no, Amanda would have straightforwardly said. This is not —
— something is very wrong.
"— some kind of fuckery with Frame," Amanda is saying in the background, every word an ugly sledgehammer designed to demolish the distance from quiet to comprehension. I taught her better. I taught her subtler. I taught her nicer.
But then, I am a hypocrite, because the terrible lessons Quiesce teaches are my drug, too.
"Stop. Stop," I protest, hand raised, almost touching the glass — (and lord, don't forget yourself and touch the glass, not again, they don't like that here — ) "What? What's happened?"
"Oh, for god's sake, Mom," Amanda says bitterly, "what are you doing, living under a rock?"