she pictures a soul with no leak at the seams

Evelyn Origo has only ever wanted one thing - and no, it isn't some silly little-girl wish like "I just want everyone to be happy," though that's not necessarily only silly and small. I'd imagine it's what most of us want, at heart.

But what Evie wants, in specific, is for the fabric that has seemed to wrinkle her miniature, insular life since the very day of her birth, if not before, to snap straight.

She has a mother and a brother, both with freckles and both with generally sunny dispositions. Well, Mama tries, anyway. It must be difficult, when--

And herein lies the wrinkle. Evie's carefully-ordered stodgy-toddler mind (even years after, grown on, it feels perpetually this way) wants the word that follows "Mama" to be "Papa" - and wouldn't you? Her father would.

Her father is Minoth. She has his darker skin, his unruly not-quite-wavy hair in Flora's darker shade, his jagged eyebrows, and blue eyes that capture the sky like her mother's...but glimmer with the teal of ether, like her father's.

Xander, her brother, has Mama and Papa, who are actually his parents. He also has an Uncle Minoth.

Evie doesn't have that. Evie has something else.

Xander's hair shimmers with the ashy side of brown, inflected gray from his father. Evie's hair has crowning braids that evoke her mother, once again, but the rest of her is all Minoth.

She's determined - she thinks - that Addam doesn't resent this - how could he? The less she looks like Flora, the less he has to complain about, if he has anything. But it's not that he complains about her, aggrieves himself of her presence.

It's that Xander was born right after Torna fell, probably in Leftheria. Evie was born in Leftheria, point-blank.

(Addam was born probably-in-Leftheria, too.)

Evie is Minoth's daughter, but she's Addam's living reminder of their collective failure, much as his innermost soul would in any other circumstance jump for joy at the idea that someone begotten of Minoth is walking the earth, smart and serious and many other things, besides.

People say things about that girl, how her reflexes are sharper and her memory is keener and she is so relentlessly herself, except when she's not, and the peerless inmitability falls away.

It's just like a story Papa would write. But he doesn't like when they say those things. And he's madder at himself than he is at them. Of course wise little Evie knows that much just from a glance.

So she's quick on her feet, accurate with every motion, categorical in her memory and ineffable in her logic. So what?

She's a child. But she has no future.

Flora was a teacher. Addam was a prince, turned farmer, if you could call it that.

Minoth is, was, a Blade, which is half an occupation, depending (on the Titan, on the Driver, on the age), but besides that he's a playwright.

Depend though she might on writing poems to process her outsize amounts of childhood love and grief, Evie's no writer. She can embroider, and well, and she can get along with fishing if it's what she needs to ensure Beat Shrimp once a week (cooking is fine, too, but it ebbs and it flows, along those same tides of grief, and her mother's, and her fathers', and her brother's, and whoever else, like endless moons orbiting a black hole of nothing at all), and she can do every thing a child is supposed to do, eating and drinking and playing and sometimes talking, sometimes not, but what does it matter?

She's the child of a Flesh Eater failure and a Tornan success, the ward of a Tornan disgrace. Her brother follows his father, of course, and picks up where leaving off becomes inevitable. Evie can't do that, even if Minoth isn't a layabout.

All this potential, and nothing to bloom it in; nothing to cast, rising, into the wind.

A house of dead-eyed stares perches on the shore, permanently faced to the depths.

All their futures, gone. All our futures, wasted.

And isn't there anything we can do about it?

All Evie wants is for it to start making sense. Maybe she got that from her mother, or maybe she got it from her father.

But she dies, and he keeps living. She is forgotten about. She never existed.

And he changes his name to Cole, and that chapter of Minoth's story is gone, too.

In some ways, quite like that of a Blade.