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Sorcha was quiet on the flight home. Nightingale got the sense that she was a woman of few words. She could also tell that Sorcha was reasonably young. Her face was youthful, her hair had the shimmer of fresh beauty, and her skin was unlined. But it was her eyes that made her seem older than she must have been - eyes that were wide and full of the melancholy that could only come from suffering.

"So, Sorcha," said Nightingale, trying to make conversation. "Where are you from, exactly?"

"Nowhere in particular. Belfast at first, then Blackpool, then Edinburgh, then Derry, then Weymouth, then London. Other places, too, temporarily or so long ago I can't remember," said Sorcha. "Moved around a lot with Rory."

Nightingale wondered at the bond between Sorcha and Rory. It was evidently one that was very close and extremely intimate. They were evidently far more than detective and agent - and now, they had lived together? Were they lovers? Rory was at least thirty years Sorcha's senior. Though Nightingale could hardly judge anyone for that.

"Ah. Well, that explains-" began Nightingale.

"My accent? Yes. I guess it does," said Sorcha. She smiled at Nightingale. "What about you? Where are you from?"

"Shithole called the York Bordello," said Nightingale. "Not too far from here, actually."

Sorcha flinched back at the semi-veiled hostility in her voice. Nightingale felt only partly guilty - surely Sorcha had enough brains in her fucking head not to ask her a question like that. Then again, Nightingale knew Sorcha was half Inamorata and had asked her where she was from anyway.

"Why didn't you leave, then?" asked Sorcha.

That was a reasonable enough question, though the real answer to it - David Beckett had used her love of Rose to press-gang her into serving on his team and now she didn't feel like leaving - was not something she thought she should share with Sorcha.

"I'm married to someone who lives here," she explained. It was not really a lie. She would have gone anywhere to follow Robin, though she had the distinct sense he would have said exactly the same thing if one had asked him. She gestured to her home, which had just come into view.

Sorcha stared out the window and gave little gasp. She seemed no less enthusiastic in her wonderment as Nightingale climbed out of the hovercraft and lead her inside the house. 

"Nightingale, my absolute joy, you're home early and it's made me very - oh, who's this?" Robin had begun with his standard affectation and charming pretension but, having seen Sorcha, lapsed into a sweet smile. He came forward, proffered his cheek for a kiss and looked very smug when Nightingale kissed his mouth instead, and then turned his attention to Sorcha.

"Robin, this is Agent Sorcha Brennan. Sorcha, this is my husband, Robin Brightely," she said, waving between them.

Robin somehow seemed to understand that he shouldn't try to shake Sorcha's hand, so he made her a half-bow instead.

"Agent Brennan," he said, and his wild hair flopped as he righted himself. Even that simple gesture was so full of grace that Nightingale was stuck between wanting to admire it and wanting to climb on top of him and enjoy the other things in which he was so ineffably graceful. "A genuine pleasure to meet you."

Sorcha smiled, bright and blushing pink and obviously completely taken with Robin. "Thank you, Mr. Brightley. It is a genuine pleasure to meet you, too. I've studied your work with the abolition movement very closely."

Robin smiled in reply. "Oh, please," he said, with a disparaging wave of his hand. "I did absolutely nothing except piss away astonishing amounts of money and give a few speeches. I can take no credit for being wealthy, I'm afraid. That's my father's fault."

Nightingale heard Sorcha laugh. She was infatuated with him - every sensible human being was. 

"If you would like to study someone who truly made a difference, you need look no further than this miraculous creature," said Robin, and he gestured to Nightingale. 

Nightingale rolled her eyes. "He's too modest."

"About everything except you, darling," he said. He looked like he was about to go on, but then he spotted someone at the top of the stairs. "Colm, why don't you come down?"

Nightingale turned to see her son hesitating at the top of the flight. One of his slim white hands was holding ever so gently to the railing, and he was staring down at the scene. When Robin waved, he tiptoed down the stairs, shy as he always was with strangers, and then came to Nightingale when she held out her hand for him. He settled with his back to her thighs, close enough that she could pull him flush to her if she needed to.

"Our son, Colm," said Robin. He smiled down at his child but Colm wasn't looking at him. "Colm, this is Agent Brennan."

"Hello, little dove," said Sorcha. She knelt to Colm and smiled at him. He, with a smile, bowed his head.

"Hello, Agent Brennan," he replied in his high, chirruping voice. He looked up at her, his half-Inamorata beauty as fey and fluid as Sorcha's. 

"Your name means dove, did you know that, Colm?" she asked, and now her tone slipped into a distinctly Irish lilt. Based on her name and her origins in Belfast, Nightingale wondered whether this was Sorcha's native tone.

"Yes," he replied. It was true. When Colm had asked, back when he was still very small, whether he could be a bird like his parents, Nightingale had kissed him, half-weeping with love, and told him that he was already a bird. And then, narrowing his eyes at Sorcha, he said in his high voice: "You look like mummy, Agent Brennan. You're beautiful like she is."

Robin looked very proud of Colm and he ruffled the boy's hair with one hand.

"Really?" asked Sorcha. Her accent shifted now; distinctly less Irish and far more one from the Western Union. From the north of the Western Union, too - an accent shockingly like Robin's or Nightingale's, though still with pulls on the vowels and hisses on the consonants from other accents.

"I don't know why, but you look like her. Or like me," said Colm. And then he, suddenly shy, hid his face against Nightingale's hip and refused to come out.

Sorcha smiled all the same as she straightened up. Her long hair swung and then said:  "Aithnithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile."

"Now that's something I've never heard before," said Robin. His gaze flickered to Nightingale for a moment and she gave a small shrug. His expression was open, pleasant, and full of a smile that was not yet curling at his mouth.

"I just mean that he must recognize me because I'm half Inamorata like hi-" she began.

"Colm, would you mind running upstairs to see if one of the guest rooms is available for Agent Brennan?" said Robin. His expression had changed instantly and his voice cut in smoothly over Sorcha's and Nightingale watched her fall silent instantly. She stood, contrite and mute, as Colm, with a little huff of indignation for his father, went off up the stairs.

Sorcha said nothing and so it was Nightingale who spoke instead.

"We don't talk about Inamoratas with him," she explained. "Not until he's older."

"Oh," said Sorcha. She coloured pink with embarrassment. Nightingale couldn't be angry at her. "I'm so sorry. I had no idea."

"Not to worry," said Robin. He smiled at Sorcha once again. "No harm done. Now - would you like to eat dinner with us, Sorcha?"

Sorcha flinched. "Um. No," she said. And then, apparently desperate to qualify what she had said, she began to babble: "It's not that I'm being rude, or not intentionally anyway. I just came to observe Nightingale and I thought I'd watch her in as close to her natural habitat as possible. Is that all right? I'll just sit somewhere and watch."

"Well, I think we can deal with a bit of voyeurism, hmm?" said Robin. He turned to Nightingale and brushed a hand up her arm. He was genuinely asking. If she disagreed he would not force it.

"Of course," said Nightingale.

It ended up being really quite a bizarre experience. Nightingale, Robin, and Colm all sat in their usual places at the dinner table. Sorcha was perched the furthest away possible. Nightingale very nearly forgot about her, sitting way over there, but every so often she would catch Sorcha mimicking an action and it would unnerve her so much could hardly speak.

If it had been Sorcha's intention to see Nightingale in her "natural habitat", she was only getting so close; neither Robin nor Nightingale spoke naturally, or at least not explicitly. Had it been a natural conversation Nightingale would have told him every detail of her day. As Sorcha was in the room, she could not.

They managed through dinner, during which time Colm was completely silent (as he was shy of strangers), Nightingale perturbed and nervous at intervals, and Robin blithely but cunningly unaware of Sorcha, except to politely ask her whether she'd like something to eat.

Sorcha had declined, stood up, and left the room.

"Oh, thank God," said Nightingale.

"Don't be uncharitable, darling," said Robin. The pair of them had kept their places at the table, across from one another. Colm, who had been between them at the head of the table, had now abandoned them for the floor and was ignoring everything in favour of making a folded crane from a napkin.

"I'm not. I'm just relieved. Did you see her imitating me? She's frighteningly accurate," said Nightingale.

"I tried not to notice her, my love," he said. Implied in that was that he had still noticed Sorcha.

Nightingale nodded. "How was your day? Now that we can talk more normally."

"Oh, good enough. Had a conference with the EPRC again, which is both tiring and enriching. How about yours?" he asked.

"Tiring, too. I haven't worked out that hard since I qualified for the force. But enriching in the sense that I had a lot of fun beating the shit out of various male colleagues," said Nightingale. She twitched a little smile for Robin, who returned it.

"Was David one of them?" he asked.

"He was," said Nightingale. "It was fun to watch him squirm."

"You don't mean that," said Robin. He was laughing, however.

"You know I do," she replied. She had not felt so light all day, but now she smiled and laughed, buoyed up by happiness. Even the twinges of anxiousness and sadness could not touch her at that moment.

"Ah, my Nightingale. So vicious. So lovely," he said, and gave an over-dramatic and lovesick sigh.

Nightingale smiled. Her eyes flickered to where Sorcha had disappeared. She suddenly wondered what it was she was doing. Perhaps she was eavesdropping.

"You're dying to go talk to her, aren't you?" asked Robin. He was eyeing her shrewdly, those dark eyes alight with brilliance. 

"I am. But she can wait," said Nightingale.

And she did. It was over two hours later, when Robin had taken a drowsy Colm up to bed and promised to read to him before he fell asleep, that Nightingale sought out Sorcha.

"Sorcha," said Nightingale. She had joined the agent in the living room, noting how Sorcha sat curled up on the sofa, tablet in hand. Out of it babbled a voice. Rory's, if Nightingale was not mistaken.

Sorcha immediately switched off the device and smiled up at Nightingale.

"Yes?" she said. Shy as always.

"if it's not too personal, I wanted to ask-" she began as she wound her way to the floor and crossed her legs. 

"About my mimicry?" guessed Sorcha. She too had crossed her legs, in perfect imitation of Nightingale's posture.

"Yes, but also about your-" she began again, trying not to be unnerved by the eerie similarities between them. Sorcha's gift for mimicry was indeed impressive in its accuracy, and Nightingale got the sense that Sorcha was only beginning to craft the persona she would use to imitate Nightingale.

"Parentage? Well, they're one and the same, sort of. What do you want to know?" said Sorcha.

"You're half Inamorata." Nightingale made it a statement, not a question.

"Does that surprise you?" asked Sorcha. She blinked her grey-blue eyes and then let their gaze wander over Nightingale's head and out to the vista beyond.

"I've never met a half-Inamorata," Nightingale admitted.

"Your son is half Inamorata, though," Sorcha countered. There was no rudeness in her voice, only passive correction.

"A natural-born half-Inamorata, then," Nightingale amended. She waved her hand and watched Sorcha study the gesture. "Colm wasn't natural-born. Or at least not entirely. I can't naturally conceive."

"How did you conceive him, then?" asked Sorcha. She cocked her head, again a perfect replica of Nightingale's motion.

"Hormone treatments," Nightingale explained. She had explained this so many times it came to her very easily. "I'm infertile because I lack luteinizing hormone. I've been supplemented twice in my life - once when I was growing in a Corporation cocoon, so I could develop as any natural-born female, meaning I would develop the secondary sex characteristics my clients liked so much-"

"Breasts and hips, yes?" supplied Sorcha.

"Yes," Nightingale affirmed, her lip curling at the memory of the way those had been enjoyed by clients. Too small, some had said, though most had liked the curves of her body. "And once again when Michael Castleman helped me conceive Colm. With supplements I managed to menstruate, then conceive."

"So Colm wasn't grown in a cocoon like you were?" Sorcha sounded surprised. She continued to press Nightingale for details, which would have made her snap and tell her to mind her own goddamn fucking business had she not known Sorcha needed these details.

"No. God no. No," said Nightingale, remembering the shifts and changes in her form so many years ago. First there had been the blood, so much blood, that had marked the supplements as a success and then, later, a period missed as evidence of her pregnancy. That pregnancy had seen her form change and shift, her breasts grow heavy with milk and her belly with child. "No. Other than weekly hormone supplements, Colm was conceived naturally."

"Why did it matter to you that it was natural? Surely it would have been more comfortable to have him carried in a synthetic womb instead of in your own?" Sorcha went on.

"It's illegal." Nightingale coughed the response out through her teeth because it was half a lie.

"That was the only reason?" Sorcha had caught her in that lie.

"No. But I...wanted him to be as normal as possible." She confessed it guiltily, but also with a strain of pride. She had given her son what she had not had - a true birth.

"And you see yourself as abnormal?" asked Sorcha. She tipped her head to the side in a mannerism so strikingly like Nightingale's that for a moment she could not speak. That was well enough since Sorcha went on, a deep and soulful pity in her voice. "You're not abnormal, Nightingale. Only different."

"Natural-borns with heterochromia are different, not Inamoratas who can't-" she said, her words choking off with a little snarl of grief. She hadn't been sure what she was about to say - Inamoratas who couldn't age, couldn't bear children.

Couldn't die. Or not in any natural way.

"You think you're not human," said Sorcha, pity contracting her brow. Nightingale very nearly jumped at the resemblance - Sorcha's emotion, but portrayed by Sorcha's face in Nightingale's exact manner.

"I'd still be fucking my way through a bordello if I thought that. I'm human. But I'm not natural," replied Nightingale. She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice - poor sweet Sorcha seemed to mean well - and failed.

"Don't you think you're better than natural, then? Your engineering has given you advantages - in health, for instance," said Sorcha. Her low voice, with its curious accent, took on 

"I suppose," said Nightingale. "If you can ignore the purpose of that engineering, which was to make me ideal to fuck."

There was a silence. Sorcha seemed chastened and Nightingale felt sorry for it. She had not meant to wound Sorcha. And with her head hanging and her eyes lowered, Sorcha managed to look exactly like Rose when anyone spoke harshly to her.

Was that because Rose had learned the expression from Nightingale?

"May I ask you something, Sorcha?" she said, in her gentlest, sweetest tone.

Even Sorcha was not immune to Nightingale's charm. She looked up instantly, colouring with a blush at having earned the winsome affection in Nightingale's voice.

"Of course," she said. The words came babbling out.

"Your mother was a slave, wasn't she?" she asked.

"Yes," said Sorcha. She did not flinch except in her eyes. She was serene except for a tiny contraction that told of a pain she tried hard to repress.

"She fell pregnant?" asked Nightingale.

"Yes," Sorcha affirmed. She waved one hand and that was not one of Nightingale's gestures. "Not all Inamoratas were engineered to be infertile, as you were. There was no Corporation where I'm from, and their high standards - if you can call it that - didn't make Inamoratas like you."

Nightingale stayed quiet as Sorcha went on.

"My mother, for instance, was more than capable of having children. She had me by a client who would've felt guilty if he'd made her get rid of me," Sorcha explained.

Even her sweet face became twisted with bitterness as she went on. "But that doesn't mean he loved me. Neither did she, though I can't really blame her for that," she amended. The bitterness was gone - that was for her father, not her mother.

"The result was that I was tossed out onto the street when I was eight and could no longer hide behind furniture. I was a half-human mongrel, neither slave nor human. No one wanted me, I wasn't legally a person. I was left to die until Rory found me. He found me, took me in, and cared for me."

Now Nightingale understood Sorcha's fondness for Rory. But something occurred to her as Sorcha paused.

"Is Rory your-" she began.

"Rory's not my father, no," said Sorcha. She shook her head vehemently. "He was very keen to tell me that. I'm sure my father doesn't know I exist, or if does, he won't contact me."

"And your mother?" Nightingale asked after a pause.

"Freed with the rest of the Inamoratas," said Sorcha. " Less than no interest in seeing me."

"I'm sorry," said Nightingale. She had thought never knowing her mother was the worst thing imaginable; it had never occurred to her that knowing your mother hated you was far worse.

"Don't be," said Sorcha, and she seemed genuinely pleased by Nightingale's pity. "I pity my mother but I don't love her. Even when I was with her in the bordello she didn't love me or want to see me. Besides, Rory is all I need." 

They were silent again for a moment.

"You've been mimicking me," said Nightingale. She felt better for having expressed it.

"I have. Has it been bothering you?" said Sorcha.

"Yes. Only because it's accurate, though," Nightingale clarified.

Sorcha blushed pink again. "I'm pleased," she said, and she sounded it. "I am glad that you think it's accurate. I've been trying to see you and be you. I've only just started."

"See me and be me?" Nightingale asked. She cocked her head and then stopped because Sorcha was doing the exact same thing. It made Nightingale wonder how often she used certain mannerisms.

"I see you as you are and then imitate it. It's how I mimic," Sorcha explained. Nightingale felt a growing nervousness begin to claw at her stomach. She was not sure she necessarily wanted to know how well Sorcha must have known her to imitate her with such accuracy. "Would you like to know how I see you, Nightingale?"

"I - I don't know," she said. She didn't. She was curious. She was also afraid of hearing her flaws. She knew them and hated them, and did not want to hear them.

Sorcha nodded. "Instead, would you like me to tell you how Robin sees you?"

"Why? Is that how you define me?" asked Nightingale. She was fairly confident she knew how Robin saw her. He said it often ehough.

"No." Sorcha shook her head. "The way Robin sees you tells me far more about him than it does about you."

"You think Robin doesn't see me as I am?" said Nightingale. She frowned a little.

"No." Sorcha shook her head again, more vehemently this time. "I think he sees you exactly as you are - he is the only person to do so, I think. And he loves you. He can see every aspect of you and loves you for them all."

"And that tells you what about him?" Nightingale was breathless and trying not to weep. She knew that, recognized it in Robin every day and every moment and loved him for it and loved him for everything that he was, but to hear it said was nearly too much.

"What do you think, Nightingale? It tells me of the unfathomable depth of his kindness," said Sorcha.

Nightingale smiled and said nothing.

"How you see Robin?" asked Sorcha.

"Because it'll tell you more about me than it does about him?" asked Nightingale.

Sorcha conceded with a nod of her head. Nightingale was silent for a moment.

"I love everything that he is," she explained. "I love every inch of him, body and soul. He is the most beautiful creature and the sweetest soul ever to grace creation with his being. I adore him."

Sorcha smiled. It was a beautiful expression, since it began in a fire in her eyes and, as the warmth of that expression spread, set her skin glowing her her mouth curling like a flame.

"That tells me quite a lot about you," she said. Her voice was thick with tears. Nightingale was not sure they were only an imitation of her own. After a moment, she went on. "And how do you see David?"

Nightingale was so overcome with devotion for Robin that the confusion and anger and affection - yes, affection, it was there - she had for David took her by surprise. "I can't answer that," she said.

"Why not?" pressed Sorcha.

"Because I don't know how I see him." It was the honest truth. Nightingale did not know how she saw David. She could explain pieces of it, all of which were confusing in contradictions, but she could not explain the whole.

Sorcha got a strange little gleam in her eye. "Oh. Well, that certainly tells me quite a lot about you."