Unable to sleep, Indirk rose at the first sliver of light in the haze outside the window. She got up on her knees beside Mardo, staring at him in his sleep. His fur covered all the marks she’d left on him, the pull of her claws, the marks of her teeth. But there was still a red stain on his hands, blood that he’d failed to clean off the night before. Hado’s blood. Somehow, she’d gone the whole night without noticing it.
She put on her clothes, scooped Avie up, and left.
Indirk went out into the mud and walked back to where she lived at the boundary between the Angolhills and the Slowrise Estates, the little sliver of middle-class apartments. Here, the roads were broad and paved with stone, the windows clean, the brick facades kept well, and here and there grew trees in little green squares of grass and shrubs. Indirk had never thought about Mardo’s poverty before, but she thought about him hiding that he was othrizen, about supporting Hado, about what he’d mentioned about his family’s debts to some cartel in Idylmir. What had he said about being a Stone Lion? Something about responsibility? Providing for the family?
She stood outside her apartment building, staring at it for almost an hour. Then, looking down at Avie in her hands, swinging the little creature back and forth, she said, “He’s got a whole lot going on, and along I come to blow it up. Shoot it right in the face, fuck him for a night, and sneak out. Is that who I wanted to be? Is that what I was fighting Amo about?”
Ten minutes after that, she was back in Mardo’s tenement, standing in front of his door, knocking gently on the wood like a stranger.
When opened the door, he looked down at her in surprise. “Indirk! I thought, when you weren’t here, that you’d gone home.”
She met his gaze with a frown. “Can this be…?” She shook her head. “That is not how I rehearsed asking that.”
He stood there in his uniform like he’d been preparing to go to work. His brother died yesterday, and he still had to go to work. “Maybe you should come inside.”
“Don’t invite me in yet.” Indirk took a breath and said, “I don’t want to go back to my apartment. Ever. I know I’m a wreck right now. I’ve always been a wreck. I know I fucked up everything here. I’m fucking horrible no matter what.” She closed her eyes, unwilling to look at him, holding Avie tightly to her chest and pretending like she was just talking to little thing. “But I don’t want to be alone. I want to live with someone in a tiny apartment with a bed that’s too small and I know I can’t make up for what happened, but I want to help him send money home to his family and it doesn’t need to be anything complicated, and it doesn’t need-”
“If it doesn’t need to be complicated, then stop making it complicated.” With his big fingers, Mardo pinched the front of Indirk’s coat to pull her inside.
Eyes snapping open, Indirk panicked and pulled back. “How can you trust me?”
Mardo paused, holding her like she was going to fall. He said slowly, “I don’t,” and watched her fearful expression for a moment, his own face just soft and unreadable. “I didn’t let you stay here because I trusted you. I wanted you. I still don’t trust you. But I still want you. I’ve never been very good at trust, or at wanting.”
With a shaking, anxious breath, Indirk huffed, “Me neither. Both those things.”
“We can work on it as we go,” he said.
Indirk kept herself leaning away, listening to the wind outside shake the panels of the building’s wooden façade, listening to the floor creak beneath Mardo’s weight. It was hard, so hard to breathe, to exhale the word, “Yeah,” and let herself be drawn inside. But she did.
* * *
Wednesday, November 6th
Amo chafed against the familiar stink of the fishmonger’s shop, quietly wishing for the hundredth time that the spies could’ve just met in someone’s apartment or something. By then, several of them had secured comfortable places to live out their cover-stories, all humble enough but at least less pungent than this place. Nymir was, unfortunately, too good at leading a convincing double-life, the man’s leathers still sticky with week-old fish guts from his hard work.
“Indirk’s going deep under,” Amo was saying, keeping one hand close to their nose, for all the good it did. “No contact at all until she surfaces again. Which might be awhile.”
“What horrible timing,” Phaeduin grumbled, dimming the lamp on the table. They’d taken to meeting only at night lately, since Phaeduin was under increased scrutiny from his superiors.
Nymir sat on the table he used to butcher fish, sharpening the knife that tore through their guts and stripped their scales. He’d been trying to grow a beard, but it was coming in patchy and ugly. “What’s wrong with the timing?”
“She knows more about what happened at the Sickle-Sough festival than she’s told us. I had questions.” Phaeduin ground one plated hand into the other, yielding the unpleasant sound of scraping metal. Amo had been watching the old alpin’s hands lately, noticing how they shook, how his wrists seemed more rickety by the day. Phaeduin went on, “I’m still looking for the people who went missing at the Festival. I’m the only one in the Watch who is. The Captain’s staring daggers at me every day, but hasn’t said anything yet. I’ve moved into the Slowrise Estates. People are still going missing there, more every day. Still, nobody looking. Still, no leads.”
“Any profiles on the missing people?” said Adishesk, a littorn carnivate who had once been a Ranger of the Laines. There had been some exchange of personnel with a spy cell based in outer Cradsoun; it was normal for spies whose covers weren’t sticking to move around and seek fresh ground to do their work in.
The Gray Watch cell had sent seven of their own and gotten four in return, leaving their current count at ten: Amo, Indirk, Nymir, Phaeduin, Myrel, Edner, this new littorn Adishesk, a pair of sollin youths name Efferes and Aganti, and a quiet alpin woman named Brass.
Adishesk was as littorn as they came. To Amo, it felt like looking at everything Indirk was not. Indirk had a darkness to her, the sharp teeth and claws and strength of a carnivate, but she walked upright on five-toed feet like sollin did, like Amo themself did. Adishesk, on the other hand, was hunched and perched on his chair with the gripping claws of his toes. His hood was held off his head by angular horns that stabbed forward with one pair of tines and then swept back into another.
Gesturing with one bleak hand – his claws were even longer, his knuckles studded with boney spikes – Adishesk spoke in his low murmur. “If we know what the kidnapped have in common, a couple of us can volunteer as decoys.” His cover was the life of an undertaker for a farming district in Claywrought. His earthiness – gray rags and hood above his midnight complexion, his black-laced chestnut hair hanging long beside eyes that gleamed like silver coins – suited his cover, as did the patient swing of his narrow, pointed tail.
“No,” Phaeduin grumbled, then sighed. “No, thank you. It hasn’t come to that yet. But, if it does…”
“I’ll be your first volunteer when it does,” Amo said. “Don’t ask anyone else except me.”
Nymir slid his whetstone loudly across his knife, making it ring in the dark, singing alongside the rumble of the night sea outside the windows. “Old man, where’s Myrel? Why do they keep missing these meetings?”
“They’re busy,” Phaeduin muttered back, seeming unhappy, or just tired. “Working. An angle that they can only work, it seems, on nights when the moon is just right.”
* * *
Tuesday, November 12th
Indirk awoke to the smell of breakfast, pushing herself up in Mardo’s bed. Her body was hot at night, so she slept on top of the covers, filling the little sliver of bed that was available with Mardo’s great bulk taking up the rest of it. He was always up before her, cooking meat, not just because he was being kind but because he’d quickly learned it was the only way to make sure she awoke in time to get to work at the Admiralty office.
This had become a quick, comfortable routine, awakening to coffee and spiced meat, getting dressed quickly, and then walking through the brisk morning with her arm brushing Mardo’s arm the whole way. The most novel part about it was how reliably warm he was, how nice it was to know that she could just step up against him and feel more comfortable for the fact that he was there. He never pulled away, never even commented about how she was always leaning into him. She found herself smiling in the mornings. An easy, real smile that she wasn’t used to.
At work, agents put files in her hands, or sometimes the Commodore themself handed Indirk some important pile of forms, which she dutifully processed, transcribed, and delivered hither and thither. She didn’t make copies of any or pocket any ill-gotten information. She did her best to remember nothing she was not meant to remember. For now, at least, she wanted to take a break from knowing any of Gray Watch’s secrets.
