Cassandra Cillian's words – no, not just words, but Words – appear on the inside of her left wrist when she's seven years old.
There's two of them, which baffles her to no end, because it's supposed to be just one, right? One person, red, prime, first. Not two. She's never seen anybody with two Words before.
Jake and Zeke.
The other pieces of herself, apparently.
She touches them from time to time, traces her fingers along the letters on her skin, and wonders why they get to be yellow instead of orange.
When she's twelve, both her Words change. Jake becomes Champion; afterwards, it becomes Liar. And it doesn't change.
Zeke becomes Thief and the two flicker back and forth before settling on Thief.
A thief and a liar. What kind of person must she be to have that for soulmates?
She starts wearing long sleeves and bracelets so her parents don't see how disappointing she is, shared with a thief and liar.
Thief sometimes flicks to The Best, and she has to smile a little bit.
Liar sometimes changes to Coward, and she doesn't smile at all.
She has a tumor growing in her brain, she's no longer a person, she is just a medical condition with a human name.
Her parents recoil as if she is contagious, retreating into their own misery because everything they wanted from her – a legacy, a prodigy, a perfection – is now just a broken defect that can't even think straight anymore.
Cassandra lays there, feeling that gaping desolation yawn wide in her chest, everything she is just falling away into nothingness inside her.
She doesn't look at her wrist anymore.
Sometimes, though, she wonders what the Thief and the Liar have on their own wrists. No doubt they're just as disappointed.
Eleven years, one month, three weeks, and six days after she was told about her tumor, Cassandra is introduced to Colonel Eve Baird and Professor Flynn Carsen.
They've only just met, all of them, but there's a way in which they move around each other that suggests they've known each other much longer.
She is brought into the Library, shown a world of magic so vast and beautiful that it makes her skin tingle and her synesthesia sing to her.
And she is introduced to Jacob Stone and Ezekiel Jones.
Of course she finds a way to ruin it. She's betrayed the Library, she nearly killed Flynn, and oh, the way Jacob looks at her...
She wonders, not for the first time, if Jacob is her Jake, if Ezekiel is her Zeke. They're common enough names, sure, but the odds are so infinitesimal.
For the first time in four years, eight months, one week, and three days, Cassandra stops to actually look at her Words.
Thief is no different, though now and again the letters kind of waver, like they want to change but won't, the ghost-tracery of Jones sometimes visible underneath.
Liar is gone, replaced instead by Stone.
She sits down on her bed and cries.
Cassandra had thought she'd like being on her own, proving that she does not need them to help her. She is a Librarian, all in her own right.
She's wrong.
She's a Librarian, yes, but she's also one third of a triumvirate of power, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. She misses her boys.
Every night, she falls asleep tracing her Words.
When they get to Oklahoma, after she meets Isaac Stone for the first time, she peeks under her sleeve again, and Stone is back to Coward.
Damn it.
When they leave Oklahoma, Coward is gone again, hopefully for good, replaced with Historian for the first time.
She hugs Jacob whenever she can, using whatever excuse she can find.
They fit themselves back together after three months apart, slowly but surely.
It feels good, too, and when she's around them, she can feel herself settling into the space they make for her, a space where she is not disappointing and not a failure, but something intelligent and needed and important and worthwhile.
She is still a bit broken, but that's alright, because those jagged edges might scrape and catch and tear against everyone else, they don't catch on Jacob or Ezekiel, they fit.
The three of them are a mosaic, all of them a bit broken, but all their pieces, laid together, make a complete shape where all the parts fit and are supported by each other, a made thing but crafted and fine and none the worse for not being whole in the first place.
It's a good feeling.
Cassandra spends more nights in Jacob's bed than in her own, and it is euphoric, to be so close to him, to be trusted and valued and wanted, not because she is a genius, but because she is herself and nothing more.
Her Words has changed again, and she shows Jacob that Thief is gone and is replaced by Jones at last. He smiles back and lays his arm beside her own so she can see his wrist, for once without the leather cuff he always wears, and his Words stand out in neat relief against his skin. Jones...and Darlin'.
Jacob tells her that she used to be Prodigy, but after her tumor, she was Lost, and for a long time she was Traitor before finally becoming Cassie. And now she's Darlin', and he rumbles in her ear that he likes his darlin' a lot more than he likes a prodigy.
It makes her blush.
They don't talk about Ezekiel, at least not aloud. Mostly just in glances and code and in the way Jacob traces her Words as they lay together in tangled sheets.
Because Ezekiel (her Zeke, her Thief, her Best) is more afraid than he will ever admit of trusting someone that much, of being tied down and caged in.
She stretches up to kiss Jacob (her Jake, her Champion, her Historian), and she thinks they'll probably kiss Ezekiel, too, soon. They won't let him slip away. Approach with caution, handle with care, and eventually, he'll realise that they aren't a cage, they're a triad, holding each other up and keeping each other grounded.
He is theirs.
And they are his, too.