Level 20 should have been special. Adelheid had expected Level 20 to be special. But it wasn’t. Why? She didn’t understand. Wasn’t 20 a whole new decade… or was it decimal?

  Whatever! It was a milestone, as her big sister would say. It should have been special.

  Now, Adelheid was Level 21. She hadn’t gotten to talk about it, with her sister so busy with her own Skills. The disappointment had gotten easier to ignore, but she remained mad, deep inside. Anna Franziska had told them all about how feelings could be weird like that, during one of their latest classes, but that was one more thing that made no sense to Adelheid.

  How was it that she could forget all about it one moment, then when she thought about it, it all came back? Were feelings just things you put inside a hidden inventory and pulled them in and out depending on the time?

  That wasn’t how her teacher had said it, but unlike the version in their lesson, this explanation actually made sense!

  Had she been there, her great-grandma would have probably told her everything would be okay… or maybe that Adelheid needed to calm down. It was either one or the other, and without talking to her, it became harder and harder to tell.

  Since Malwine had given her great-grandma all those gifts, guessing what she would have said had gotten… weirder. Especially since she couldn’t visit her anymore. Had Adelheid been more into reading, like her sister was, maybe she would have had an easier time explaining it to herself.

  It tired her more learn all the things her great-grandma didn’t say, now, and every day was worse than the last.

  …But it was good practice, as Malwine would say.

  The numbers for those things called Affinities kept going up, and that made Adelheid very happy. And she really, really wanted to tell her sister all about it… but she just knew it would make her sad. Malwine’s own numbers had been getting bigger lately, but she didn’t seem to have an easy time with it, not like Adelheid did.

  Maybe it was because her sister had more of them to improve—maybe it was because Adelheid was a natural, like her great-grandma would have said if she could have.

  Adelheid wouldn’t say it, because it would be mean, but she’d noticed her sister’s biggest problem with learning and getting better was… well, Malwine herself. It was the same as when she’d tried to convince her to talk more to Franziska and everyone else.

  Talking to other people wasn’t that hard, but Malwine looked like she’d just tried to eat a snack that tasted really bad every time she tried to speak to anyone. Adelheid thought she must have had that same problem with Affinities. She treated them like some book she had to read over and over to learn what it was about, when really all she had to do was let them be. Use them and let them be.

  That was why she’d been thinking about how to explain {Implicit}. So that if her sister asked, the explanation would be ready, and it would be right.

  For Adelheid, speaking with people wasn’t the same as it would be for others. She did know that, even if the way other people worked sounded so weird and confusing to her.

  She imagined there was a wall between herself and whoever she was talking to. That wall had a hole in it, and Adelheid’s words would go through it, to reach the other person. That was how she spoke, how she asked questions.

  Replies would go on the other way around, but that was where {Implicit} started being important. When people answered her, it was easy. Their response would go through that hole in the wall, just like her question had, in the opposite direction.

  And if they didn’t answer? If they never actually said what they would have?

  Just because they didn’t answer didn’t mean that hole disappeared.

  Adelheid just went through it, then. The answer was never spoken, sure, but it was still on the other side of that wall.

  All she had to do was look.

  There was one thing her great-grandma had never answered, not even in a non-answer sort of way. Well, there were many things she hadn’t answered, but one was more important than the rest.

  Do you know what I don’t tell you in the same way I know what you don’t tell me?

  Adelheid wasn’t dumb—she couldn’t think of many reasons for her not getting an answer… other than it being a plain ‘yes’.

  Duh, as her sister said sometimes.

  She’d been wondering, lately, if anything would change with her time away from her great-grandma. If her great-grandma would change her mind, and finally admit the truth.

  But something told her that wasn’t going to happen.

  So instead, Adelheid had started to think about something her sister hadn’t said.

  The butler from the census had known her great-grandma. Adelheid couldn’t get many details, just pieces from what wasn’t said. Her sister had done something with her Skills. And that was how her sister had found out.

  Hildegard fon Werruin wasn’t strong. Not like her great-grandma, not like the super old forest man her sister had been trying to get more lessons from.

  Speaking of that guy, Adelheid had laughed so much after he and Malwine had left. All the things he didn’t say were just different ways to say ‘not my problem, not my problem, not my problem’, and she found that so funny. Whenever she was around the other people from Malwine’s census—those ‘staffers’—it always felt like they didn’t like her.

  But with Anna Franziska, she knew the ex-maid—as her sister called her—wanted to tell Adelheid she felt sorry for how people treated her. It was weird. That wasn’t Anna Franziska’s fault, so why was it that all those things she never said were full of apologies? Did she think she had to apologize for the others or something?

  Now there was that guy, Malwine’s second teacher. He really thought Adelheid was weird—and she thought he was weird!

  It was just so funny. Adelheid liked this being different, she noticed. That at least some people who weren’t her family members didn’t dislike her from the moment they saw her.

  The butler, meanwhile, was harder to make sense of. Hildegard fon Werruin didn’t like seeing Adelheid, not at all. But she could tell it was way more complicated than that.

  She’d told her sister she’d go exploring, yes—Hildegard’s tiny room was still unexplored!

  And today, Adelheid had woken up in the mood to ask questions.

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  She moved, and she was where she wanted to be, just like that. The butler was sitting on a desk, reading. Maybe she’d get along with Malwine. They both read a lot.

  Hildegard looked up, so quick it barely looked like she’d moved. She’d basically just moved positions between Adelheid’s blinks.

  “You’re the butler,” Adelheid said. She crossed her arms like her sister did, so she could look serious. “Hildegard.”

  “I am,” the butler was giving her a weird look, but she did answer, before Adelheid had to go looking. One of her hands remained on the book’s pages. “What do you want, child? These visits grow tiresome.”

  “Visits can grow?” Adelheid asked, but then she remembered her real reason for coming here. Had she not continued, Hildegard wouldn’t have said anything about how confused that question had left her. “The truth is, I just want to know something.”

  Hildegard squinted, and Adelheid tried to make sense of her silence. She was suspicious—maybe.

  “I heard the adults talk about how you knew Mom’s family,” Adelheid decided that wasn’t a lie. She’d checked after she first hadn’t heard of this, and the responses adults didn’t give—even if she was very careful to not ask directly—told her they also knew about it.

  The butler’s non-response would have also confirmed that.

  There was a phrase, a string of words Adelheid had seen both Anna Franziska and her sister actually speak—something about the moment of truth.

  If there was anything Adelheid would have said that for, herself, it would have been the question she was about to ask. “Butler Hildegard fon Werruin, what is it that people won’t tell me about Mom’s family?”

  The butler’s mouth opened and closed. As she kept making faces, a few times it looked like she might actually answer. Adelheid held her breath.

  Here, one way this could go was obviously better than the other—she didn’t want to be given an answer that might be just what Hildegard thought she should hear. She wanted to look through that hole in the wall for herself.

  And Adelheid got her wish.

  After all, Hildegard would have never told Adelheid about how a Saint had walked in and… killed them. What? “Who were they?”

  The explanation that would never have come, there, was an easy one. Even if the butler in reality was probably going to think that had been part of the first question. That easy non-answer was that they had been many. Her mother had siblings.

  Adelheid could have had aunts and uncles!

  But she didn’t.

  “It isn’t something you’d like to hear, child,” Hildegard spoke softly, then. “I would wish… and I know your mother wishes the same. We never wanted you to grow up afraid.”

  Adelheid frowned. “Afraid, why?”

  The weird thing was that Hildegard smiled—no, even weirder yet, was that she seemed sad, even though she was smiling. And she would have said it was because of all the things that weren’t said.

  Adelheid jumped in place, her eyes getting wider. She stared at the butler.

  “I know not what you’ve surmised, and truth is, I’d rather not talk about it at all. But I can guess you’ve found out somehow, anyway,” Hildegard said, using strange words. She looked sadder still. The book on her table disappeared. It probably went into her inventory.

  The butler pulled an even larger book out, and waved at Adelheid. “Come, child. It should not be me who you have this conversation with, but I am no fool. You could have it with none else.”

  Still frowning, Adelheid moved closer. She didn’t move with her feet. She leaned to the front, trying to see what was on the pages. There were strange cutouts, like squares on top of beige paper. Something glossy was over them.

  Each of the squares had a face or a body in it. Someone. Sometimes they were standing, sometimes they were sitting, but there was always someone on the square.

  “Not everyone is here, certainly not your younger cousins,” Hildegard explained. She kept speaking so softly. First, she pointed to a picture of a man. He had a weird hat with spikes to its sides. Everything he wore was a different color, and he was surrounded by… circles? “His name was Mark, and he was the Champion of {Implicit}. Summoned young, and a long time ago. If his House back in his other world had a name, he didn’t remember it.”

  “Summoned?” Adelheid stared at square, at the man in the square. Staring didn’t help her understand any better. She could see the man had blonde hair. He was really thin. But that didn’t explain anything, even if she could tell Hildegard wouldn’t have told her it meant he’d been brought over from another world. That was what it meant.

  “Yes. The Saint who summoned him, they called him—they call him—the Tacit Saint. Saints usually have… nicknames like that, and I never knew his real one. Her,” Hildegard pointed at another square. There was a woman in it, her face larger. She took up a bigger part of the square, as if she were closer than the man had been. “Mark’s wife.”

  Adelheid couldn’t see her body beneath the shoulders, so maybe that was why. And she looked like her mother. The butler’s finger remained there, on that face. “Her name was Maria. She was the only one left in her own family. So when they met, and fell in love, they decided they’d rebuild her family together.”

  Hildegard pointed to another square next, and Adelheid almost jumped again. She looked different—she was standing and not missing any parts. But it was her great-grandma. “One child was all they had, before Mark died. He was your great-great-grandfather. Your grandfather’s grandfather, and this was his daughter. Her name was Adelheid—just like yours.”

  She knew that, of course. Her great-grandma hadn’t told her, so she’d found out a long time ago, when she’d looked. The first Adelheid fon Hūdijanin, the first to have the name that was hers now.

  “And Mother named me after her,” she said, not really thinking about it.

  Hildegard nodded—her smile was a little less sad this time. “You heard that, didn’t you? Wave take me,” she started shaking her head, and her smile disappeared. “I liked it—it was a way, to remember her by. But here, now, you remind me so much of her. Nothing ever truly went unsaid when she was around.”

  Adelheid didn’t tell her she was wrong—that she’d heard that from her great-grandma. Not from Hildegard. She didn’t want to, didn’t need to.

  “She married a man named Dietrich, and they had a son named Dietrich,” Hildegard started talking again, flipping the page. She pointed at two other squares, but those were less clear. Adelheid could make out pale skin and dark hair, but the squares looked like they’d gotten wet somehow. The faces were off. “Your namesake and her son… He ran away from home, over a disagreement. We— She did not wish for him to marry your grandmother—the girl was too young. She told me, and I remember, ‘I don’t want a child raising children’. She thought they would be inept, if born to a woman in her bare twenties. Adelheid—your great-grandmother—thought it was a mistake. She wouldn’t have minded grandchildren, she said, but not with her as their mother.”

  Hildegard started waving her hands around. “I apologize—I do not have pictures of her. Johanna was her name, your mother’s mother. We only reconnected with Dietrich—the son—much later,” she pointed at a larger square, one that took up an entire page. There were many people in it, but they were also all squiggly and wrong. “Six children, they’d had by then.”

  Not squares—pictures, Adelheid thought. Distantly. The butler started listing names, but it was as if she couldn’t hear them. And she wasn’t Malwine. She didn’t have any nice panels she could call up and write on to remember them all.

  Adelheid had started shaking. She didn’t know why. It was like {Implicit} was telling her to prepare for something.

  For something bad.

  “Your mother was the youngest by far, and the first child in the family to be born without potential. Terrible news then, the best news later—not that we’d known that,” Hildegard let out a lot of air through her nose. “I… Look, the feud had started long before. And it was inane.”

  “What’s inane?”

  “Stupid. Dumb,” the butler said.

  “Hey!” Adelheid got sad. “I just don’t know what the word means!”

  The butler’s eyes went wide. “Oh! Dear, I meant, the word means stupid, it means dumb.”

  “…Oh.”

  Adelheid definitely felt dumb now.

  “The Tacit Saint outlived your great-great-grandfather, and at some point, it became clear your great-grandmother was his Second. If he died, if he stopped growing, she would take his place.”

  Adelheid tipped her head. “Why?”

  “Because Saints are those who are the most attuned to Affinities,” Hildegard went quiet, and Adelheid didn’t have to ask anything to know she would have explained what Affinities were. She thought Adelheid might not have known. And she also had practice at this. “I do not doubt she would have reached that point—Adelheid, your great-grandmother, was always his better. She only lagged behind as his Second because he was older by far.”

  The butler made a sound. It wasn’t that she started crying, but it was close. “We always considered, that it might come to blows. That he may seek to fight her, once his lead proved insufficient. And yes—we did consider he might kill her.”

  Adelheid frowned. That last part was… no.

  “But we never considered,” Hildegard breathed a lot, and she started sounding angry—angrier than she’d sounded, even all those times Adelheid had snuck into her room to use [Identify] on her. “We never thought that psychopath would go after her children. After her grandchildren. Because the only thing he thought, when he and his goons teamed up to kill the one who would soon surpass him, was that they might do the same someday even with her gone.”

  The butler stopped talking, then. She was shaking, too. But she was angry. She was shaking because she was angry.

  Adelheid didn’t know what she felt or why she was shaking. She almost wished she could have asked Anna Franziska about it, to ask for the words, but Hildegard wouldn’t have told her it meant she was afraid, so she didn’t need to.

  She still didn’t understand. Not really.

  All Adelheid knew, now, even as the world turned a prettier green, was that her mother’s family wasn’t missing. They hadn’t just disappeared. She could have had a bigger family.

  But she didn’t, because a man had gone and taken them away forever.