The instant the words left Louise's lips, Mary was struck — body and soul — as though by a bolt of lightning, frozen utterly to the spot.
Those sea-blue eyes, which only a moment ago had still carried the trace of a faint smile, in that instant contracted sharply — as though a tidal wave had just risen up behind them.
Time, in that single moment, seemed to stretch itself out into infinity.
This passage — this very story — was one she had heard before.
But not from the mouth of that insufferable Phantom Thief.
It had been, instead, in a tiered lecture hall at Imperial College, some three weeks ago — from a certain drowsy-eyed boy slumped across his desk.
In that distinctive, lazy drawl all his own, he had explained to her this ancient proverb that came from the distant East.
And now — that very same story, from someone else's mouth, in a place entirely unconnected, a place where it had no business surfacing at all, was ringing out a second time.
A coincidence?
No.
When two points that appear utterly unrelated are connected by a single line — precise, and one of a kind — it is no longer a coincidence.
It is evidence.
Evidence powerful enough to overturn every rational analysis she had built; enough to paper over every lingering doubt; enough, even, for her to fire the arrow first and paint the target around it afterwards.
His being late to the Icebreaker Party.
Those love letters that had stripped every shred of dignity from Timmy Roy in public.
The 'chance' encounter at Lloyds Bank.
...
Countless fragments she had dismissed as meaningless now rushed together — like iron filings drawn by a magnet — gathering, rearranging, snapping themselves into place at a furious pace.
And in the end, they formed an outline that was at once absurd — and unmistakably clear.
Russell Watson.
That fellow who could never quite be roused from his sleep in class.
That fellow who, every time she had set out to test him, simply dodged the matter with a wisecrack.
That fellow who, at her most desperate hour, had — in the most impossible manner imaginable — kept his promise to her.
Was Moriarty.
"Sister Mary? Is something the matter?"
Louise's voice pulled her back out of that churning storm of thoughts.
Looking at the sudden pallor on Mary's face and the faint vacancy in her eyes, the girl couldn't help asking with concern.
"You don't look at all well."
"I'm perfectly all right, Your Highness."
Slowly — very slowly — Mary set the teacup, which her hand was on the verge of failing to hold steady, back down on its saucer.
The clear, crisp clink of white porcelain meeting saucer rang through the room — and along with it, the heart that had been thundering near to bursting out of her chest finally began to settle just a fraction.
"It's just... that I suddenly recalled something about my university lessons,"
She raised her face as though nothing had happened at all, the impeccable, gentle smile already restored to her lips — as if that single moment of slipping composure had never occurred.
"University, hm..."
Louise blinked, her eyes brimming with the wide-eyed bafflement of someone peering into wholly unknown territory.
"It must be very tiring, mustn't it?"
"Actually... it's not so bad." Mary said with a smile, her bearing and expression settling once again into that warm, attentive older-sister mode.
"It rather depends on how interesting you find the subject — and... on how interesting your study partner happens to be."
"Study partner?"
"Something along those lines." Mary smiled and lifted her cup, taking a small sip.
Louise nodded, half understanding and half not.
"Oh — by the way, Sister Mary,"
Louise leaned in once more, as though something had occurred to her, and asked with curiosity:
"Mr. Moriarty — what does he look like? The one you saw, I mean."
"I couldn't see clearly either." Mary shook her head — and this time, she wasn't lying.
"He kept that mask on the entire time. His build was perfectly ordinary, too. Nothing especially remarkable about him."
She paused. Her gaze drifted, almost without her noticing, out through the window.
"Even so — I rather think his eyes must be very lovely."
"His eyes?"
"Mm." Mary inclined her head ever so slightly, the corner of her mouth curving into a small, knowing arc.
"A pair of black eyes — like polished obsidian. Most of the time they look perfectly listless, as though their owner hasn't had nearly enough sleep.
But the moment he turns serious — they become brighter, more sharply focused, than anyone else's in the world."
"That sounds..." Louise considered for a moment. "That sounds awfully handsome."
"Handsome?" Mary gave a soft laugh, neither confirming nor denying it.
"Perhaps so."
The pleasant Afternoon tea soon drew to its close.
Mary politely declined Louise's invitation to stay on for dinner, citing as her reason that "it's getting late, and Father will worry" — and so took her courteous leave.
She stepped out of that golden, glittering palace and settled into her family's carriage.
The wheels began to turn slowly, rolling out along a tree-lined avenue blanketed in golden fallen leaves.
Mary leaned back against the soft cushions and closed those sea-blue eyes — now brimming with exhaustion and disarray.
The carriage interior was very still. There was nothing but the monotonous, rhythmic rolling of the wheels against the road.
How long passed, she could not have said — but at some point, a small, exceedingly soft laugh slipped out of her, so faint it was very nearly inaudible.
Once home at the family estate, Mary was stopped by a servant.
"Miss — the cook has asked me to inquire what you would like for dinner this evening."
"Let Father decide." Mary said.
"The master will not be dining at home tonight. He's going out to meet a guest."
At that, Mary's brow lifted just a fraction.
Someone from The Guardian, no doubt.
That particular bullet was finally on its way to finding its target.
Well — no matter. If he wasn't coming home this evening, all the better. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't trouble itself with.
She thought for a moment, then said:
"Tell the cook to do as he pleases. Just keep the flavors on the lighter side — nothing too heavy.
I'm going to spend some time alone in my room. Don't come and disturb me before dinner."
"Yes, Miss." The servant nodded and stepped aside.
Mary returned to her room.
She pulled open a drawer and drew out the card written in lipstick — the one so absolutely brimming with provocation.
The young woman's fingertips traced over that elegantly-written name. Then, as though something had caught her notice, she drew the card a little closer to her face.
At the very end of the name — there was a dot, about the thickness of a pen tip, pressed down by that man with his lipstick.
It looked like the sort of habit some people developed in their writing — a final, almost involuntary tap of the pen on the paper, neither heavy nor light, at the very end of a stroke.
In Mary's experience, the number of people with that particular habit was hardly small.
It was the kind of unremarkable, universal little tic — much like the way some people twirled a pen between their fingers while thinking, or nudged at a monocle while they read.
On the strength of a single dot alone, it would have seemed impossible to pin any one person down in this vast city teeming with hypocrisy and crime.
But if one were going to shoot the arrow first and then paint the target around it after — then everything looked rather different.
Mary brought out her own notebook and turned it to a particular page.
What lay there was the record of her in-class wandering — those little written exchanges with Russell, passed back and forth on paper.
The young woman's gaze settled on Russell's handwriting.
Plainly, going by penmanship alone, she would never have been able to tell anything — otherwise she would have worked it out long before now.
Russell's hand was sloppy and offhand, lazy with a careless sort of indifference — utterly removed from Moriarty's elegant, knife-edged artistic flourishes. The two were entirely different styles.
But...
Within those sea-blue eyes, the little period at the end of one of those scrawled lines magnified itself out to infinity.
A small, all-but-negligible ink dot — and yet, once one looked, impossibly clear.
Exactly the same as the mark on the lipstick card.
One coincidence is a coincidence. Two coincidences are still a coincidence.
But three? Four? More than that?
Mary's gaze settled, at last, on the end of the passage Russell had written.
The pad of her thumb brushed gently along the edge of the card, and the playful glint in her eyes slowly solidified — congealing into the far more concrete image of a particular person.
That bullet, once fired, had not only struck Lloyds Bank — it had struck her, too.
"Mary — did you take notes? Let me copy yours..."
That lazy, infuriatingly slappable voice seemed still to be echoing at her ear.
Mary closed her eyes gently, and then, just as slowly, opened them again.
The cold that had filled those deep-blue eyes had melted away entirely — turning instead into a pool of laughter so deep one could not see the bottom of it.
She placed the card softly back where it had been, and quite without reason found herself thinking of the assessment she had once delivered of him — back in the cafeteria, when the two of them had only just met.
At the time, perhaps, it had been nothing more than an idle, throwaway remark. Yet she had never imagined that today — so very soon after — it would resound in her mind once again.
"Chameleon."
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