Sebastien

Month 1, Day 31, Sunday 9:00 a.m.

Sebastien took her first dose of the beamshell tincture immediately after her morning meal on Sunday. She had eaten every bit of her food even though she wasn’t hungry and had even started to gag. This ongoing lack of hunger was foreign to her, since, despite the cafeteria food’s lack of flavor, her normal appetite usually left her feeling only semi-full.

Sebastien went into the bathroom, then, and following the usage instructions very carefully, she used a toothpick to measure out approximately one tenth of a gram and mixed the crumb-sized piece of paste into a cup of warm water, which she chugged. A decigram wasn’t even a full dose, but she was being cautious.

She clamped her mouth shut around the renewed desire to vomit. As her stomach settled, it began to tingle, as if the tincture inside her were crackling with lightning. This electric energy quickly spread outward, rushing up to her head and down to her toes, filling her with a flush of warmth and vibrancy.

Sebastien suppressed a giddy laugh.

With the new energy fizzing inside her, she headed to the library to fix her life.

One unoccupied table caught some spillover light from the shimmering spelled glass that made up the library’s domed ceiling. She sat down and paused, basking in the brightness for a moment. The tincture had left her feeling buzzy and flighty, but she forced herself to stillness, considering her goal.

‘It’s time to take control and figure out my problem. I need a real plan, and a schedule to implement the plan.’ When she felt composed and calm, she opened her eyes and pulled out some note-taking supplies.

‘I will list all of the problems first before trying to come up with solutions to them.’ She scribbled a list of bullet points.

‘The coppers can still use my blood to scry for me, unless it was destroyed in the explosion.’

‘I still owe the Verdant Stag almost eight hundred gold crowns of the original one thousand debt. Interest is a devil.’

‘I’m feeling awake at the moment, but this will do nothing to stop the nightmares, which are the real problem.’

‘Damien needs a sense of purpose, focused on something that has less chance of getting me caught.’

‘I’ve got to maintain good academic standing in general, while also completing Professor Lacer’s auxiliary exercises, and to prepare something that will earn at least fifty contribution points in the end of term exhibitions.’

She paused, staring at the list, then continued.

‘It’s also possible that there could be incoming repercussions from Tanya’s University faction, or from the coppers, for my involvement in the Aberrant incident, even in my Sebastien Siverling identity.’

She hesitated, wondering if she’d covered everything. ‘If I solved these problems, would my life be fixed?’ She considered Ennis for a moment, but decided that she did not, in fact, care to do anything about his imprisonment, and would be fine even if he was sentenced to work in the celerium mines for the rest of his life.

Finally, she added one last bullet point.

‘Do something about the Raven Queen’s reputation, and/or clear Siobhan Naught’s name?’

That would be ideal, but how she might go about doing that remained nebulous.

She mulled over the problems, trying to find issues she hadn’t dredged up, but finally decided that if she could deal with the whole list, it would be enough. Be that as it may, neither the list’s size nor severity were trifling.

‘First, the danger of repercussions from the University or the coppers.’ She wasn’t sure what she could do to mitigate such an indefinite threat. She would keep her eyes open and gather any relevant information, but her power here was limited. Oliver had plenty of contacts in law enforcement, and she had Damien, so there was a non-trivial chance that she would learn of danger to either identity before it became critical. Beyond that, she had to hope that the important people believed what she had told them about her—Sebastien’s—involvement and thought her harmless. The coppers’ investigation was still ongoing, but if they found something to implicate her, she would have to deal with that when it happened.

Sebastien could, however, anticipate that the things that could go wrong, would go wrong, and attempt to prepare for that eventuality. She might need to run, hide, or even fight. She needed contingencies in place for the worst possible outcome. If she had done this before, actually taking the safety of herself and those around her with deadly seriousness, and planned accordingly, maybe Newton would still be alive.

Her grandfather had told her once that it was hard for people to imagine experiencing the kind of catastrophe that had never affected them before. People in flood or storm zones only wanted to pay for wards strong enough to protect them from the strongest disaster in their own memory, not the strongest that could realistically affect them. People read about accidents, illnesses, and crimes in the newspapers, but didn’t believe those things would touch them or those they cared for. If they did, every house that could afford it would have anti-fire wards, and people would carry defensive artifacts when they left their homes, and would go to the healer at the first worrying sign of illness. Children thought they were immortal, because they’d never experienced death firsthand.

But she… She should have known better. Her life with Ennis might have been relatively safe and mundane compared to her current circumstances. She might have gotten used to not being able to prepare for everything due to lack of knowledge, funds, or most often both. But she knew how dangerous, how horrific, how absolutely devastating life could really be. She should have tried harder to be ready for it, taken the danger of what they were doing more seriously, rather than assuming things would somehow just work out.

Sebastien had known better, intellectually, but she could see now that she hadn’t believed things could really go so wrong. If she had, she would have been much more cautious. And maybe, even now, even if she did everything right, there was something she couldn’t see waiting to destroy this new, precarious life she had built. There was not even an ounce of fairness in the world, she knew that well enough. Catastrophe could and would fall on those that did not deserve it, and it could come with all the power and shock of a meteor fallen from the heavens. It was up to her to decrease the chances of such an event as much as possible, and that meant preparation of the kind that didn’t come naturally to a human brain. Preparation for the things that could go wrong, not just things that had already gone wrong.

She added more bullet points to the list.

‘Make preparations for if I am caught.’

‘Imagine various doomsday events and ways that I might avoid or navigate them. Run drills?’

‘Train myself to be less foolish.’

The thought spurred a horrible realization, one that might have been hiding in the back of her mind for some time now, waiting for her to acknowledge it. ‘I shouldn’t have gone back downstairs for my bag. There is nothing in it so valuable that I should have willingly faced the Aberrant.’

Her grip on her pen tightened at the thought. ‘If I had left the bag, the worst possible thing that could have happened was them realizing that Siobhan Naught and Sebastien Siverling are the same person. Perhaps, if things escalated, I would have had to escape Gilbratha. But the worst-case scenario leading from my decision to go back and retrieve it is that I could have died—or become a second Aberrant.’

She let the pen drop to the table as a full-body shudder rolled through her. She understood the concept behind calculating worthwhile risks. It was based on a simple formula of desirability vs. likelihood.

Dying or becoming an Aberrant were the worst possible outcomes, with a value of negative ninety-nine and negative one hundred, respectively. Getting caught and giving up her schooling would be horrible, but if she were alive, she at least had a chance to overcome somehow, so that outcome had a value of negative seventy. At the time, getting kicked out of school had seemed totally unacceptable, but when compared to the threat of dying, it was immediately obvious that school wasn’t nearly as important as her life.

Then, to pick which option she should have gone with, she only needed to multiply the likelihood of each event with its desirability value. If the coppers had found her bag and the bracelets on Newton’s arms, she guessed that Sebastien Siverling had a seventy percent chance to get caught, making the overall utility value of that choice negative forty-nine. It would have been smartest to just give the whole ruse up as a lost cause and escape preemptively, but there was still a chance she could have continued on if she played everything right.

Going down there to confront the Aberrant face-to-face had almost killed her. If not for the flash of a waking nightmare, it would have. In truth, she was ridiculously lucky to be alive to have this realization right now. And the decision had still almost gotten her caught. If she’d been just a little slower, instead of finding Sebastien escaping, the Red Guard would have found the Raven Queen, insensate and basically captured for them.

With a ninety-five percent chance of a break event or death, with an additional chance of capture even if she avoided the first two, the value of that choice was negative ninety-five, at least.

Her calculated utility values could be off, because factors in the real world didn’t come in discrete, whole numbers, and there were many variables and potential outcomes that she couldn’t anticipate. But there was almost no way that facing down the Aberrant had been the correct choice.

“Why am I so stupid?” she whispered to herself as tears pooled in her eyes, burning like acid. Before they could fall, she tilted her head back, opening her eyes wide and staring at the ceiling until they subsided. Perhaps the Aberrant’s hums really had been affecting her judgment, as she had claimed to Professor Lacer and the Red Guard. She almost hoped that was the case, because the alternative was that something was deeply wrong with her judgment. Though she didn’t believe she was suicidal, her actions suggested differently.

Sebastien took a few deep breaths and swallowed her shame. “I just have to do better. I can do better,” she said to the ceiling.