The Dimming

# Chapter One: The Weight of Names

The trick is to be invisible in your own garden.

I've gotten better at it. Three years of being nobody was excellent practice, and the skills transfer more cleanly than you'd think. Bare feet on cold stone. Weight on the balls, not the heels. The third floorboard from the door creaks if you step on the left side, so you step on the right. The latch lifts with a slight upward pressure before it turns, Cob fixed the mechanism last month but the habit stays in my hands.

Bramble doesn't look up when I ease the door shut behind me. She's already on the stone bench at the herb beds, a compact mound of reddish-brown fur in the pre-dawn gray, her ears aimed at nothing in particular. The kits are nowhere to be seen, Coal is probably asleep on Cob's pillow, Glint curled in Thistle's herb-drying basket, and Spark could be literally anywhere. Spark's relationship with predictability is adversarial.

"Good morning," I say.

Bramble's ears rotate exactly thirty degrees in the direction of indifference.