Playing a Part – 15.10
Author: Wildbow

Playing a Part – 15.10 | Pale

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Sunday Morning

She regretted making the video call as soon as she’d submitted it, but with the way the video call system worked, it sent out an email, and emails couldn’t be taken back.

She wasn’t sure exactly why she regretted it.  The impulse of it, maybe.  The fact that it felt a bit like a betrayal of Wallace.

She checked her phone.  She’d sent texts yesterday morning, followed by an email with photos of what she’d been up to with Mia, and more put-together thoughts than what she felt like was appropriate for texts, then she’d immediately regretted bombarding him, because it felt like it made anything good about what she’d sent a bit much and anything bad just got compounded.

The heart at the end of the ‘thinking about you’ text messages dangled there, mocking her.

When she’d last talked to Dr. Mona about Wallace and the impending surgery, Dr. Mona had suggested a ‘support in, vent out’ mentality.  Wallace was closest to the crisis, so support was supposed to go in, to him.  If she had frustrations, she was supposed to aim them out, say, to her mom.

Probably the coolest thing about therapy was getting things like that.  Before therapy, she’d been grasping for stuff and inventing rules and coming up with stuff like being ‘bulletproof’, to quiet her own anxieties about clothes and stuff.  A lot of the time, she wouldn’t even know if she was hitting the mark or doing something wrong, somehow.

The downside was that sometimes the rules failed.  She didn’t feel like her supporting in was even being heard and she didn’t feel like she had anyone to vent to in the other direction.  Her mom, maybe, but that felt like it’d fix things now and still somehow make it feel like the relationship was less her and Wallace and more of a kid thing with her mom holding her hand.

The video call thing popped up, but the screen remained black.  She sat up a bit, putting the phone aside.  She checked how she looked in the little window with her face.  She hadn’t wanted to dress up, but she’d pulled on a top she hadn’t slept in and fixed her hair.

“Hey, Ellingson,” Tymon said, in the second before the video call caught his face.  He wasn’t looking at the camera.  “Answering now so I don’t miss you, just give me two minutes.”

“Sure.”

“Dreg is here if you want to say hi.”

He twisted the webcam around, showing one end of a room with what looked like expensive art on the walls, smokey lines outlining figures both male and female.  Practically lying down in the window, in the midst of a cloud of smoke was a guy in his mid-twenties, who had a pipe clamped in his teeth.  He had sandy blond hair and white skin, if his skin could be called ‘white’.  He looked like a guy who’d dressed up for a date with a nice white button-up shirt, suspenders, black pants, shiny shoes, then crawled into an industrial washing machine with a load of bricks.  Bruised, hair stuck up, clothes frayed or torn in places.  Blood vessels were visible in the skin all around one eye, turning the skin reddish.  In other places, the glare of the sun and smoke around him hid too many details.  Like the man was a partially finished drawing.  Or a drawing that had been abused by an eraser.

“Hi,” Dreg rasped.  Long fingers held the pipe, and Lucy felt like part of the reason he smoked was to have those fingers on display, even if they were a little battered and bruised.  He’d been a doctor or medical student, right?  She had to check her notes more before calling people like this.

“Hi Dreg.  You all healed from this summer?”

The man nodded.  “I heal fast.  We left school, came home.”

“So I gathered,” Lucy said, feeling awkward with the unexpected small talk.

“The parents decided the costs and possible issues were worse than the hassle of having us around,” Tymon said, offscreen.  Lucy could hear him typing a lot.

“So we’re back at the Leos family manse,” Dreg said.

“Manse.  That’s a fancy word.”

“It’s a fancy place.  Here.  Give me the camera doohickey.”  Dreg dropped feet to the floor and leaned forward to the camera.

“Don’t pull on the mouse cord.  Dreg!  The cords are tangled, if you pull one-”

“The boy is playing a game,” Dreg rasped, as he picked up the webcam.  “Don’t think too badly of him.”

“I’m playing a game with a friend, online.  I’d quit and talk to you if it was anything else, but I don’t want to ruin the last forty five minutes of trying out of nowhere.”  Tymon’s voice sounded like it was close, suggesting it wasn’t connected to the webcam.

“It’s okay.  I called you out of nowhere,” Lucy said.  “You said to call anytime today, and I don’t know what the rest of the day will bring.”

“It’s fine, really no problem.  Just excuse me taking another minute or so to wrap this up.”

“Totally,” Lucy said.

Dreg pointed the camera outside the window.  There was a- was it called a courtyard?  The property extended out, with stones in varying shades of gray all along the walls, which went up two or three stories, and those walls totally surrounded a garden type area.  Four paths extended from the fountain in the middle to doorways on each wall that enclosed it, and the rest of the space was grass, hedges, and garden.  It looked like some sports stuff had been left out in the rain by some kids or by Tymon and Leos.  Whoever maintained the property had left a soccer goal fallen in the corner.

“I thought the center of the property had some dark spirit in the center?”

“Degenerate spirit,” Dreg replied, voice scratchy.  “Yeah.  This isn’t the center of the property.  You’d come in to the main hall over there, maybe to an evening party here in the one courtyard…”

He shifted it to point at one doorway, then to the courtyard again.

“There’s an area where the guests can mingle indoors, over there…”

Going straight through the courtyard to the door opposite the entrance.  Lucy was getting the impression that the property was large enough that if it was dropped on Kennet, it would extend from where her house was to where Verona’s house was.

“And if you keep going that way you’ll hit the center.  Roughly.”

With the camera moving, Lucy could see more of the space.  She was very quickly getting the vibe that the Leos family had a lot of money, hadn’t known what to do with it, and had bought this place.  Maybe expanding it with practice?  And they had people to do maintenance, but the rest of what the family was sort of clashed with it.  Opposite the corner with the sports equipment left on the grass was a dismantled stage with a tarp thrown over it.

“Out that way, there’s a shrine, bathhouse with connected pools, main library, show library…”

Dreg’s finger, scabs in the folds at the knuckle, pointed in vague directions as he said each.  His voice sounded a bit far away despite him being closer to the camera.

“…which are both separate and distinct from the study, which is connected to the parents area, all the way-”

“Okay, Dreg, enough.”  Tymon took the camera back.

“Thanks for the tour, Dreg,” Lucy said.  She hadn’t missed that the topic of Tymon’s parents had been when his patience had cut short.

“No problem,” Dreg said, offscreen.  Tymon momentarily twisted the camera around to show Dreg settling back into the window, slouched against the frame, one leg propped up, puffing on his pipe, then fixed it again to face him.

Tymon still had that aesthetic that had caught her attention at first.  Like he’d just woken up, in a way she didn’t tend to get to see boys.  It made her think a bit of Booker, even though the similarities didn’t extend that far.  He wore a wrinkled tee and a chain at his neck.  He was skinny, still, with narrow lips that made her think of a curly bracket on the keyboard, with the way the pointy bit at the center of the top lip pointed out more than it usually did, just enough it was cute, and messy black hair long enough to cover his ears, that he’d pushed back into a semblance of order.

“Did you win?” she asked Tymon.

“Not that kind of game.  We were working together to map an area, leveling in cartography.  It’s dumb, don’t worry about it.  You called for a reason?”

This was part of why she’d regretted calling.  She hadn’t sorted out her thoughts yet.

The reason she’d probably really called was more just… wanting a friendly voice, and not knowing who she could get away with bothering.

“I messaged you yesterday asking in general because there’s a situation I’m trying to wrap my head around.  I thought maybe you had expertise on a few fronts?”

“About what?”

“Shit, I don’t want to stereotype you, based on what your family does, but it’s sort of a gang leader type thing.  Cult leader.”

“I got an early education in that stuff.  Run it by me?”

“Can you maybe not tell people about this?  I think some local Others would take issue if people started talking about it too much.  Verona would too.”

“I won’t.  Just uh… Amara, hey.  Get lost?”

There was a pause, Tymon looking off to the side.

‘Amara’ stepped into view, leaning over the back of Tymon’s chair and over Tymon’s shoulder to look at the screen.  She had bedhead as bad as Tymon, but way more hair.  A bit older than Tymon- maybe sixteen.  She leaned in to whisper something in his ear, and he shrugged her off, looking annoyed.

“Go on.  Take the books, bring them back.  But go.  Family business, kind of.”

Amara said something in another language- no.  In English, but the accent was so strong Lucy couldn’t begin to guess what the words were.

Lucy blinked as Amara left the room, a bunch of thin books with glossy covers under one arm.  Amara wore a t-shirt and striped underwear.

“Uhhh… arranged marriage?” Lucy asked.

“Cousin.”

“Marriage to a cousin?”

“We’re not that type of family.  No.  Regular, sometimes annoying, sometimes cool cousin.”

Amara shouted something, presumably in Greek, from the hallway.

“Mostly cool,” Tymon amended, voice raised a bit.

“Your cousin just hangs around in your room with no pants on?”

“She’s been reading my graphic novels.  You might see other, more extreme stuff in the background.  It’s… my family, basically.  Do me a favor and don’t sweat it.”

“Okay.”

“So.  Gang leader?”

“Kennet’s knotted, like we’ve talked about, if you remember.”

“I remember.”

They’d talked to Tymon a bit about what to expect and how to deal with it, both in the run-up to summer ending and after the knotting had intensified to what it was now.

She went on, “He’s one of the more natural, twisted humans to emerge from that.  Sort of a cult leader, all about fertility, patriarchy, some involvement in drugs, but that’s mostly secondary.”

“Is he the sort of guy you’re trying to figure out how to cooperate with, or the sort of guy you’re trying to figure out how to deal with?” Tymon asked.

“The second one.  I’m not sure what it would look like if I asked for the first.”

“Depending, I’d set up an appointment between you and my dad.  Our family is pretty involved with some knotted places, cities out of time, beyuls- hidden sanctuary type places, that sort of thing.  I guess it really helps to keep things simple, if you’re dealing with a single location and not having to worry about rival gangs, shifting alliances, or anything like that.”

“Appointment to what?”

“Since you made the appointment, you’d get the credit and you’d handle being the person in the middle and the person my dad talked to, but there’d be expectations.  You’d talk to this guy you’re concerned about, talk to my dad, pass on a shopping list to us.  Drugs, weapons.  My family would deliver.  We’re solid on delivering, our product is pretty stable in quality.  But stuff does fluctuate naturally.  Bad harvests, I think there was a thing with witch hunters back when I was around eight, that stalled all our deliveries.”

Lucy felt depressed, hearing that.  She couldn’t help but think of Marlen and what Marlen had done.  Tymon seemed to be the same.

“…You’d have to smooth things over with your guy if he was unhappy, and trust our word and our oaths that we tried our best.  And my parents would need a pledge that there would be ongoing business.  If your guy gets replaced, the knot changes, or the market dries up for whatever reason, you’d get some leeway, more if you’re paying my dad the regular amounts out of your own pockets, but my dad would be pissed if he invested people and effort into you and then it stopped.”

“You know a lot about this,” she observed, mostly because she couldn’t think of many good things to say.  She kinda liked Tymon as a person and she really hated this… business, really.

“I’ve been around it for years.  My parents go from wanting to forget we exist to wanting to prepare us, which means sometimes I’ll be listening in and watching and my mom will come at me all at once, out of nowhere, how would you do this?  What does this mean?  What’s your instinct on that man I was just talking to?  Here’s the plan, what’s the next step?  And if we get it right they’re proud and it’s cool and we’re included and if we get it wrong or, hell, if we do anything that’s too much like a kid, it’s like, go ask the nanny to make you lunch.”

“That sucks.  That it’s so conditional.”

“It’s kinda cool?  The nannies give us what we need in terms of love and the rest of that, I think?  I dunno.  I feel like if I didn’t want to be part of the family business it’d be fine, you know?  They don’t want us to be a part of it if we’re not going to be serious about it.  If I wanted to go do research or live somewhere it’d be fine, mostly.”

“Or non-practitioner stuff?”

“Tougher, that.  I’d have to do some practice.  I’m rooted into Black Gutter.  I’ve got Dreg.  Some stuff chases you.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s cool.  Get what you get, right?  The Blue Heron used to be one of the times it felt like they actually felt like they knew what they were doing with us.  Sending us away and getting us equipped.  Except that went to shit, Durocher went on one of her trips, it’s all guest teachers, our parents didn’t like how shaky stuff was with the gainsayings, us being introduced to teachers who our family might not like, without any real direct oversight.  So they pulled us out.”

“That sucks.  We’re sort of in contact with a lot of people and it seems they’re all pretty unhappy with how things went with the Blue Heron.”

“Anyway…” Tymon said, sitting back.  “That’s depressing.  If we were going to do your thing, let me give you a bit of a sales pitch, we’d also need a lot of info on the knot, how things are, how they’re changing, so it didn’t change up on us, you know.  We could send our own experts and contacts to help you research it or even stabilize it, depending.  With oaths to protect your end of things.  We just want the business, we don’t want to invade or take over.  We get a cut, you three become essential to your client, your client becomes a lot harder to shift, so you get a lot of other benefits and expertise.”

“A lot of that sounds like it’d be helpful but the rest sounds nightmarish.  Giving this guy that kind of clout?  No offense.”

“Nah.  Thought I’d make the offer.  There’d probably be other parts in it I’d wait until later in the pitch to throw at you.  Like my mom might want one of his people worked into your family or local council setup.”

“Right, yeah, that wouldn’t be great.  A lot of it wouldn’t be great.”

“So… back to what you really wanted.  Dealing with this guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Without knowing more about him, I guess I’d go to something a cousin told me.  That these guys are insecure.  It’s why they’re so touchy, a lot of the time, they can’t let the little stuff slide.”

“There’s a bit of that.  I’m not sure I’d call this guy insecure, though.”

“I can’t remember who taught me this, was back when I was a kid and someone was giving me hell on the playground.  But a lot of the time these guys give themselves away.  If they have to come up with threats a lot and they come up with things to do on the fly, it’s either going to be stuff they learned from the guys who taught them… less common here, right?”

“Right.  He’s only been around for a short time, didn’t have a mentor.”

“Right, yeah, so if it’s not what they learned from whoever taught them, it’s from their own heads.  They have to think of the worst thing they can do to someone, and they think of the sort of thing that’s the worst to them.  They kind of tell you what they’re most scared of.”

“Any ideas?”

“He’s planning to castrate most of the men and boys in his territory.  Then later he’ll throw a feast and eat the parts they cut off, apparently.  Coincides with a mass-birth event.”

Tymon frowned, then shifted his position in his seat.  “Well, if you did decide to do a bit of impromptu surgery… at least you have a good grounding for thinking he’d hate it.  More than usual.”

“I’m not a lunatic.  I don’t think I have that in me.”

“Ah, okay.”

“He unloaded a lot of his people on us, I think he’s having them pretend they’re fleeing his territory.  Puts us in the position of taking care of them but not being able to trust them.”

“Sounds like he’s trying to bog you down.  I’d expect that to lead into something else.  Some plan?”

“I think it might be him biding time before the big castration, feast, mass birth event.”

“Hmm.  You don’t want that to happen, I guess?”

“Yeah, no.  We don’t.”

“Support someone to replace him?”

“Maybe.  Short time limit, and the way the twisting works…”

“Having power makes them powerful?”

“Yeah.”

“Scratch that, then.”

The mention of supporting someone to replace the Family Man reminded Lucy of her own goal.  Replacing Charles.  Finding someone.  She wanted to ask if Tymon knew anyone, but asking out loud might risk Charles finding out.

“Got any aggressive but cool Others in your area?” she asked.  “Someone willing to relocate?  We could maybe use one for an enforcer.  Depending, we could support them.”

“I think most of the aggressive but cool Others are cool because they’re really comfortable where they are.  I can think of a couple but they wouldn’t move if you promised them three wishes, no holds barred.”

“Damn.”

“Sorry.  So… hmm.  I don’t know what your comfort level is, but if not castration… what about simple assassination?”

“I dunno.  He’s tough.”

“A raid, an attack?  Just… remove him?”

“There are a lot of innocents in the way.”

“Covert?  Slip in, dead of night…?”

“He changes things up.  Relocates every night, hides.”

“You can handle that with practice.”

“Maybe.  But handling it with practice and making sure we get him?  We know he’s twisted, he’s really strong, I think, plus fertile, some physical mutations.  I don’t want to set him on fire or shoot him and then find out that his heart’s in the wrong place or the fire doesn’t stop him.”

“We’d just blow the roof off, hit them so hard it doesn’t matter.”

“But we don’t have giant drug spirits to call on.”

“Right.  Hmm.”

Jorja appeared in the doorway behind Tymon.  She wore pyjama pants and a black t-shirt with graffiti on it.  She peered in, saw him, and knocked on the open door.  Her familiar flowed into the room from behind her, baseball cap, trenchcoat, eyes with whites only, no iris or pupil.  He moved like he was sliding on the ground or gliding instead of walking.

“No, go away,” Tymon told her.  “You’re annoying.  Go find Amara or… Lourdes?  I think she’s working today.”

Jorja entered the room regardless, pausing to wave at Lucy.  Lucy waved back.  “It’s the parents.  They want to talk to you and Talos.”

Lucy could hear Dreg and Jorja’s familiar talking in the background, quiet.

“About?”

“Keeping busy.  I don’t know.”

Tymon groaned.  “I thought I had today off.  Sorry, Lucy.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ll think about your puzzle and what to do.”

“Thanks.  I guess I owe you one.”

“It’s no big.  Buy me a donut or something the next time we cross paths.”

“Donut?  Sure.”

“Or a burger.  I gotta go.  I should get dressed to be presentable to the parents and anyone else they want me to see.  You, Jorja?”

“Yeah, after.  Do you know where Talos is?”

“Nope.  You should hurry.”

Jorja ran off.

“Talk to you later,” Tymon told Lucy.  “Is it a problem if I tell my dad I made a sales pitch and it wasn’t workable?”

“Uhh, is it a problem?  Would he get mad or…?”

“Shouldn’t be,” Tymon said.  He’d gotten out of his chair.  “I just think he’d appreciate I tried.”

“Okay.  I guess.  No details if they’d get out to Musser or Musser’s group.”

“Deal,” he replied.  “Hanging up.”

“Bye.”

He disconnected the call.

No options except for trying to scare him by crossing lines for myself, or extreme power?

She wasn’t sure what to do with herself.  There was nobody left to call, nobody to turn to.

She swiveled in her chair, then hopped to her feet.  She crossed her room, got the guitar, then returned to the chair.  She pulled the necklace out from under her top, setting it out so the dog tag and ring were out front.

“Hey John,” she murmured.  She plucked a few chords experimentally.  “Hi Yalda.  Keep me company a bit?”

Images of the Family Man darted through her mind’s eye, followed by the Arena, Charles emerging.  She didn’t try to push them out, but she did try to drown them out.  She reached over to her computer and put some music on, then turned it up.  She’d listened to it too much lately, and was desperately awaiting October’s delivery of new and interesting music, from the subscription.

Still, familiar wasn’t bad.  She turned it up, then strummed with more vigor, finding the chords.

She knew she’d get called away, or if she didn’t, that she should go handle stuff.  But for now, she vented to her room and its occupants.  To John, who might’ve been her familiar, if the world was more just.  Or at least been her friend and mentor.  To Yalda, who John described as so different from Lucy, who she would have really liked to know, because she’d played a big part in John becoming who he was and Lucy liked who John had been.

It took until the second song was partway through before she found her groove and didn’t need to concentrate on her fingers to sing along.

Singing sort of badly, but that was appropriate, given her audience.  With every forward movement of her upper body, her arm reaching on the guitar that was a bit large for her, the dog tag clicked or rasped against the guitar’s edge.

Sunday Afternoon

“Gamdis hebesamenchic!  Abbarbe!  Notherine ineineine elelelelelelelelelelelelelelelelelelel…!”

Marlen shifted in her seat.  A bike lock was wrapped around her hands as makeshift shackles, connected to a thin metal cable, about a pencil’s width, that was tied to a beam that stretched across the ceiling.  It had enough slack she could sit with her hands in her lap, or stand with her hands lowered, but the cable was too stiff to be used as an improvised weapon or to be looped around as a noose.  Another bike lock connected her ankles, letting her hobble.  Both the wrist locks and ankle locks had papers attached, limiting practice.

“Morost termanek jabba!  Abba!”

“Is this torture?” Marlen asked.  “Making me listen to that?”

“Not torture,” Lucy told her.

It was Nibble and Chloe’s factory, but the windows were covered, as was one hole in the roof.  Chloe had done a lot to clean up the place, it seemed, and dust had been swept away, clutter moved to minimize how much space it took, and some colorful blankets had been thrown over some things, adding a bit of life to the space.  Kitchen appliances had been plugged in where heavy machinery had been, and worktables were set up side by side to form a series of counters, one board removed from each worktable to make them sit flush against the wall.

Which was cool, they had a kitchen, but Lucy was pretty sure she didn’t want to check in the fridge.

The railing by the stairs had been repainted, and it all did a lot to make the space look like a living space.  Marlen didn’t have a ‘cell’, so much as she had a chair in the middle of the room and if she dragged the cable, with some tugging, she could get it to run about half the length of the factory, down to a wall at the one end that had been knocked down last night.  Stepping through, she could pull on a shower curtain that had been attached to a pipe, give herself some privacy, and use the facilities.

Jabber ran across the room, followed by Nat, Butty, and Bangnut.  He looked like he was going to hug Marlen, but she lifted her feet up, blocked him, and redirected him with a light kick.  He ran over to the wall, babbling incoherently, chased by the goblins.

“It’s meant to help you.  Kind of.”

“How?”

“If your protections fade that means you’ve been gainsaid.  If you’re gainsaid enough you can’t help Musser, then we can let you go.  Or if you’re forsworn.  Not that I want that to happen.”

“The other option-” Miss spoke.  She was on the stairs, standing by a vertical pillar, “-is that you swear oaths.”

“If I swear oaths that contradict what I promised others, I could be forsworn on the spot.”

“Think of a way,” Miss told her.

“And if I can’t?  If Abraham makes contracts too airtight for that?  Or the Family Man does?  How long are you keeping me?”

“How long is Musser going to be engaged in this takeover?”

“No!” Marlen shouted.  She tugged on her bonds, walked a few paces, and jerked to a stop.

“We should get her a bed.  She shouldn’t sleep in the chair again,” Lucy noted, to Miss.  “My mom makes me get up a lot if I’m doing homework, because of clots that build up in the leg or something?  Like I’m not sitting in a chair most of the day at school.”

“Let me go!”

“No,” Lucy told her.

“How would you do a bed?” Miss asked.

“Maybe a worktable?  Layer some stuff on it?  Maybe if we nailed the sheets to the table, partially?  So she can’t use them for anything or tear them up?  We should fix it firmly to the ground, and make sure it can’t be dismantled.”

“Sheets!” Chloe exclaimed, from upstairs.  “We have sheets!”

“Okay!” Lucy called up.  Then she turned to Miss again.  “Or maybe there’s a ward to protect the fabric.  Or an enchantment.  Verona would know this stuff.”

“Perhaps ask, when you next get the chance, or we can hope she’ll return to us tonight, ready and able to spring to the task,” Miss said.

Marlen tugged on the cable.  It squeaked as it dragged along the beam.

“We should get regular checks on the cable and shackles,” Lucy said.  “Make sure the cable isn’t wearing down or anything.”

“On her wrists and ankles as well,” Miss noted.  “Sores might develop if she keeps up with this sort of activity.

“Good idea.”

“Fuck!” Marlen shouted.  Not at anything they’d said, but at the general situation.

Chloe came from upstairs with a pile of sheets in her arms, followed by Nibble.  Some had caught on the jutting bits of bone-like growth at her hands and elbow.  She nearly tripped in her hurry to descend the stairs.  “Sheets.  For the bed.  When we have one.”

“That’s great.  Handy,” Lucy said.  “Put them aside for now?”

“They’re nice sheets.  They have a high threadcount.  I was saving them for a special occasion.  Maybe if one day I can get my joints more normal, so I don’t tear them up.”

“Let’s use them today,” Nibble said.  “It might be a while before your hands return to normal, longer than the sheets would last.”

“Vacuum storage.  Most things last a long time in vacuum storage.  Get big plastic bag and suck the air out.”

“I will buy you really nice new sheets if we get that far, how’s that?”

Chloe nodded.  “You get my current nice sheets, Marlen.”

“Let us figure out how to use them first, okay?” Lucy asked.  “We don’t want her improvising a weapon or laying out threads to make a rune or something.”

Chloe nodded.

“Eedle angel eck mo,” Jabble chanted, taking a very deliberate step with each word.  Biscuit could be heard repeating him somewhere up above.  He broke into another run.

“I don’t want you to feel horrible while you’re our guest,” Chloe told Marlen.  “You can use the downstairs TV-”

Nibble grunted, unhappy.

“-and we’ll get you set up for sleep, the rest of the bathroom stuff.  Baths too.  I like baths.  There’s no running water.”

“It’s a once-a-day thing for Chlo,” Nibble noted.  “She times the baths so she isn’t around when I’m watching certain shows.”

“Such annoying voices.  It’s always the same voice actors,” Chloe protested.  “They’re industrial washing tubs from the factory next door but they’re really good for lying in.”

“We’ll have to take a lot of precautions before you unhitch her to take her to a bath,” Lucy told Chloe.  “At least having some Dogs of War nearby.  Strict management of the shackles and cable.  Maybe some practice to limit her movements too.”

Chloe gave her a thumbs up, with a thumb more dangerous looking than some knives.  “Oh!  And food!  I never really learned to cook before I became a ghoul.  We’ve got a microwave!  And hot water!  And a hot plate!  We put the hot plate on sheet metal so it’s less likely to burn the factory down if I forget about it.”

“That’s a very specific precaution,” Lucy said.  Is that John’s old hot plate?

“I get spacey if I don’t eat.  But I’m eating pretty well lately.”

“I still thought it was a good idea,” Nibble said.

Lucy nodded a little at that.

Marlen tugged again on the cable, straining against it with all her strength and weight, which didn’t seem all that considerable.

“Oh, and Marlen!  We got spices!  I can cook you things.  What do you eat?”

Marlen jerked on her bonds.

“We’ll need to clean the cutting board really well,” Nibble told Chloe.

“Right, yes.  We got you, Marlen, you’ll be taken care of.  We’ll scrub the cutting board really well.  Or we’ll get another!  We can get things now, it’s so cool.”

“Let’s get another,” Nibble said.  “So there’s no cross-contamination with human flesh.”

“Help!” Marlen shouted, top of her lungs, as if she hoped someone outside the factory would listen.  “Heeeeeellllllppp!  Help me!  Fuck!”

“Rude,” Chloe said, sniffing, before going to try and fold the sheets and set them aside.

“Nottect uff!” Jabber proclaimed, stopping in his tracks.

Biscuit could be heard repeating him somewhere above.

“Jabba!” he turned, looking for Biscuit.

“Help!” Marlen shouted.

“I set up silence runes last night,” Lucy told Marlen.

Marlen stopped shouting and redoubled her tugging and pulling.  The cable squeaked against the beam as it stopped, then shifted abruptly, stopping again.

“And I set up wards,” Lucy added.  “Anti-scrying stuff.  So they can’t find you.  I know Wye is pretty spooked at the idea of Nettlewisps, I set up something similar.”

Marlen stopped, panting for breath.  She glared at Lucy.

“You were going to traffic in humans,” Lucy said.  “Don’t give me that look.”

“Coerced,” Marlen replied.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you were in contact with those who do that kind of business, you were able to make that oath because of those contacts of yours?”

Marlen tugged on her bonds again, tried to walk, but found she’d cinched the cable too tight.  She had to waggle it to loosen the loop at the top and be able to walk away from Lucy.

“You’ve referred business to those people?  Enabled them?” Lucy asked, following Marlen.

“It’s not like you’re probably imagining.  They’re people who want to get away from their home countries, they’re hard to employ, Canada is hard to get into.  We get them in, we give them work, room and board.”

“And pay?”

“Sometimes.  A lot of them send money back to their homes.”

“And protection?  Public identities?”

“Sometimes!  It depends on the buyer, I don’t exactly associate with them.  But it’s better than prostitution, isn’t it?”

Lucy shook her head, turning away.  “Fucking sometimes.”

“I have contacts I was thinking about using, I was going to fulfill the word of the deal but trap him.”

“How?” Lucy asked.

“I know someone, they can call certain Others.  Ones that can puppeteer bodies, or emulate them.  If I’m tricky with my wording, I can get him to accept them and fulfill the deal, even if it’s inexact.  Asking ‘is this acceptable to fulfill my oath’ and insisting on a yes, then… he brings them into his home.  They could subvert his whole operation, if we used one that spread.”

“Were you going to?  Can you swear you were going to?”

“I was going to try.”

“And if you failed?”

“I don’t know,” Marlen replied.  “But there are other things.  People I could have talked to.”

“Rook said she’s smart,” Lucy told Miss.

“Yes.  She should put that intelligence to use figuring out a way to swear an acceptable oath to us.”

“Fuck!” Marlen swore, top of her lungs.

“Was this person that uses Others to control people Florin Pesch?”

Marlen paused, startled.  “Right.  Damn it.  Of course, one of you is in Thunder Bay.”

“If you can arrange the deal so the Family Man isn’t getting usable weapons, drugs, and no innocents are harmed, that gets us a good chunk of the way,” Lucy told Marlen.

“I signed contracts.”

“Do you have them?”

“No.  You’d have to let me go and get them.”

“Try to remember the contents.”

Marlen started furiously tugging at the cable again.  Her shackles jangled.

Squeak, squeak, rattle, jangle, and periodic screams.

“…he had three piston cups.” Bangnut was telling Jabber a joke.

“Gatta?”

“An’ the other guy asks, ‘you did what in the cup!’?”

“Gatta.”

Nat shoved Jabber, and he broke into a run, stuttering and repeating syllables as he ran.

Lucy walked over to Chloe and Nibble.  “Thanks for putting up with this.”

“We sleep like the dead.  Having others come and go to help watch her is more annoying than having her there,” Nibble said.

“You think you’re better than me, little girl!?” Marlen shouted.  “You associate with cannibal undead!”

“Rude,” Chloe told Marlen.  “Someone might have just lost their lemon pepper privileges.”

“Downstairs TV privileges,” Nibble muttered.  Chloe carefully laid a hand against his cheek.

“Doe’s taking the next shift, extending overnight,” Lucy told the ghouls.  “The Dog Tags mentioned they haven’t had proper home-cooked meals before.  I know it’s an imposition, but maybe you could use Doe as part of your test run into cooking?”

“Yes!”

“If it’s- is it okay?  No offense, but I’d want to check it’s edible.”

“Our taste buds are different,” Nibble said.

“How something dies and what it feels when it does matters more than what you do to it after,” Chloe explained.

“But even if she spaces out, Chloe isn’t an idiot.  Beethoven was deaf and he composed.”

“Maybe go easy.  Better to underdo it and leave room for salt and seasoning after, right?” Lucy asked.

“You cook?” Chloe asked.

“Yeah.  When my mom’s at work.  Usually pretty simple.  She teaches me bit by bit when she’s home.”

“Nice, what a good mom,” Chloe said.  “I can’t remember what mine did but I don’t think it was great because I can’t cook much at all now.”

“I’d say we could do a dish together but I’ve got other plans.”

“Another time, yes please,” Chloe said.  Her head jerked toward Nibble.  “We need vegetables!  How do we get vegetables?”

“We could send Doe if you’ll babysit,” Lucy suggested.

“Yes!  What to get though?  Recipe book!” Chloe said, before hurrying off to the kitchen to pull drawers open.

“It sounds lame, but she’s loving getting domestic, making a space, being able to have guests.  Or even… guests,” Nibble murmured, glancing at Marlen.  “We’ve been talking about other hobbies, now that we have the time and a place, but I think that for right now, at least, she’s really happy covering the really basic stuff and getting elaborate with it.  It’s been a long few years where we couldn’t, you know?”

Lucy nodded.  She watched Marlen drag the cable over to the bathroom, pulling the curtain around the L-shaped pipe.  The cable had to slide through the narrow gap between where the pipe ended and the wall started.  Lucy didn’t take her eyes off the cable and curtain, and she kept listening, just in case.

She turned her head just before the door to the factory opened.  Bracken and Doe.  Doe looked like she could be Bracken’s older sister more than Doyle looked like he could be Bracken’s dad.  A lot of it came down to the looks in their eyes.

“Hey Bracken, hi Doe.”

“Yeah,” Bracken replied.

What the heck kind of response to a greeting is ‘yeah’?  Are you that unwilling to give me a basic civility back?

“Yeah,” she replied back.

“You!  New person!” Chloe declared.

“It’s Bracken.”

“Good name.  Do you want food?  Can I try cooking for you?”

“I think Bracken and I are leaving,” Lucy told Chloe.  “But I mentioned Doe… Doe?”

“I’ll eat,” Doe said.

“I might be bad at this,” Chloe told Doe.

“I’ve dug MRE’s out of mud and chewed on the mud-caked packets of powders.  I can’t imagine worse than that.  I don’t think I can die from poisoning.”

“Just what we want in a test subject,” Nibble said.  “Immortality and low standards.”

Chloe made happy noises as she got sorted around the kitchen.  “We need someone to shop.  Can you go?”

“I’d rather stand guard like I was asked, but I’m open to negotiation,” Doe said.  She turned to Lucy.  “When’s the last time someone set eyes on her?”

“About thirty seconds to a minute before you came in, I think?”

“Can you hear her?  Grandfather mentioned your earring.”

Lucy heard trickling.  “I hear peeing, I think.”

Doe frowned.

“Prisoner!” Doe shouted.  “Stop and start your stream or I’m coming in!”

Lucy heard an interruption in the stream, but there was a splash involved.  It wasn’t a number two type of splash.  “Go!”

Doe broke into a run, shoving the curtain aside.  Lucy had a glimpse of Marlen, hands and shackles shoved into the sink, which she’d filled.  The Drifter pulled hands and shackles out, stepped onto the sink, and then leaped up, catching the cable.

She’d buried her shackles underwater until the water-warding part of the power-dampening paper had burned out.  Hands and ankles still shackled, Marlen climbed the metal cable.  Doe leaped for the dangling cable to catch it, but Marlen was pulling the cable up behind her.

The cable was not the sort of thing Lucy would have anticipated climbing.  It was the sort of thing that would shred hands, with the individual strands being so thin, and it would also be slippery.  Marlen managed.

Lucy glanced back at the toilet, where the trickling continued.  Marlen had pulled out the tube from the tank of the toilet, that was supposed to refill the tank, and had rigged the interior to keep the water going, pumped out over the front of the tank and into the bowl.

Marlen was using something- it might have been a chunk of drywall or a piece from the edge of the demolished wall- she was writing.

Lucy reached for a spell card.

“Biscuit!” Miss called out.  “Peckersnot!”

The two goblins were already upstairs, already on the beam, at opposite points.  As Marlen approached the top, getting an elbow up onto the beam, Peckersnot reached her, and snorted a load of snot into her face and onto whatever it was she’d been inscribing.

Lucy could only barely see, backing up a few steps to glimpse over.  She saw Marlen, guck on her face, using a thumb to claw a hole in the mucus so she could breathe through it.

“Bisca!” Jabber bounced on the spot.

“Bisca!” Biscuit repeated.  She dropped something, smashed it, scooped it, up, and then blew the contents into Marlen’s face.  It coated the mucus and flowed in through her mouth as she sucked in the first big breath, after forming a mouth-hole.  “Got ya!”

Marlen coughed.

The various goblins who were supposed to be on guard duty scattered.  Bangnut went directly below Marlen, tool in hand, while Nat raced up the stairs.  Butty stopped halfway up the stairs, poised and ready, smiling that smile that he had to have cultivated to be as shit-eating as it was.

Nat reached the middle of the second floor and leaped from the second floor railing that overlooked the ‘living room’, currently Marlen’s run of leash, onto the beam.  Metal hand scraped on metal, and Nat clawed her way on, moving toward Marlen, menacing.

“Go easy, Nat!” Lucy called up.

“Down!” Nat barked at Marlen.  “Get down!  I’ll punch you!”

Marlen let herself slip down, then grabbed the cable.  Still coughing, she found it with her feet and used the two feet clamped together to ease herself back down, sliding down the length of the cable, until she could drop the remaining fifteen feet.

Lucy started on another practice-nullifying card.

“Got her!  I got her!  We got her!” Biscuit cheered.

“What was that powder?” Lucy asked.

“Pills!  Goblin pills smashed up and turned into dust!” Biscuit cheered.  “Special Barney dose!  Toadswallow taught me!”

“To do what?”

“Make her groggy!” Biscuit cheered.  “And a special corked up sort of constipated.”

“I’m going to regret asking but I want to make sure she won’t die or anything.  Corked up?”

“Yeah!” Biscuit said, as she arrived at Lucy’s feet, looking up with overlarge eyes.  “Some drugs make you all stopped up in the bumhole.  This makes it so you got the one bit that’s stopped up but then the rest is all churning up, up above, ready to go shwaaaaa.  Bwaaaaah!”

“Okay.”

“So you finally squeeze the cork out and you’ve undammed the brown river from lake aho!”

“Okay, Biscuit, don’t need details.  Except about the grogginess.”

“Making mierde into mayday.  Shit into shiiiiiiiiiiit,” the small goblin went on, excited.

“Maybe you could ask Toadswallow?  And report back?” Lucy asked Miss.  “Since Biscuit doesn’t seem to know her stuff?”

“I could.”

“I know!” Biscuit protested.  She punched Lucy’s shoe.  “I know, don’t say I don’t know!  I’m learning this stuff!”

“Then tell us.”

“It’ll make her dopey and sleepy and it’ll give her a headache.  If you’re a Todd and you’ve got a Barney type Aware you’re supposed to keep their binge going, and this is like a big shot of downers, for if they get too up, or if you time it right, they fall asleep but they’ve got enough in their system they wake up with stuff still in their system and it’s a big recharge, see!?  And this is a way to put them down for a nap at the right time!  A quick night’s rest without ending the binge!  Except then you gotta have a detour now so they can absolutely wreck a bathroom stall, and traumatize anyone who can hear.  It’s great!”

“We have very different definitions of great,” Lucy said.

“It’s an art!” the little goblin protested.

Marlen sagged, leaning forward, holding onto the cable to keep from falling.

Doe caught Marlen around the shoulders and steered her into the bathroom.  The veteran Dog Tag told the prisoner, “Wash your face.  And let’s have you sit on the toilet until the medication’s out of your system.”

Marlen, partially blind with the mucus, let herself be led, a bit defeated, stumbling.  Doe’s grip was strong enough to keep her upright.

“Run this stuff by us before trying them on prisoners, okay, Biscuit?” Lucy asked.

“I did good!”

“You did okay.  But let’s not do horrible things to prisoners.”

“I’ve got stuff to plug her up if you want.  But theys got side effects too.”

“Let’s keep it simple for now.”

“She’s fallen asleep,” Doe reported.

“If she’s still asleep in a bit, maybe have Nibble and Chloe watch her, go shopping?” Lucy asked.

“Okay,” Doe said.

Lucy finished the spell card, with adjustments to avoid the same submerge-in-water trick Marlen had pulled, and then walked over to stick it onto Marlen’s cuffs.  Doe pushed Marlen down into a sitting position on the toilet and used a wet washtowel to clean up the mucus that crusted the woman’s face.

“Nice work,” Lucy said.

“I was meaning to talk to you next time we got a chance,” Doe said, daubing at Marlen’s face.  “I guess this counts as a chance.  Sorry if the timing’s bad.”

“Why?  What is it?”

“You made Grandfather anxious, yesterday.”

“Anxious?”

“He trusts John like crazy.  Lot of them do.  And John thought you were good, so they want to think you’re good.  But to Grandfather, to me, a bunch of us, aside from a few times we were summoned to fight by the Leonards who caught us, it feels like it was a little over a month ago practitioners like you bound us.  That’s hard to shake.”

“That’s not what I want to do, at all.”

“Yeah, maybe, but it’s still hard to shake.  It’s like falling into dying, with these quick, violent little moments where we’re brought up to the surface and we’re there again, but we’re not free, we do something for the person that caught us, and then it’s oblivion again.  You see little things that tell you time has passed in the meantime, changes in clothes, the stars, the seasons.  And you never know if the next time you’re pushed back into oblivion will be the last time.”

“I don’t want to bind him.  Or stress him out.”

“Then talk to him.  Reassure.”

“I can try but I’m not sure I can give him answers.”

“Then go easy?  About pressuring him, or singling him out?”

“I-” Lucy started.  She sighed.  “Yeah.”

“You go.  I’ll look after this one and the ghouls.”

“Thanks, Doe.”

Lucy left Doe to look after things, feeling bad in a hard to articulate way.

“Exciting,” Bracken told Lucy, in a deadpan that was very different from Verona’s.

“We good to go?” she asked, asking both Bracken and Miss.

“I’ll try to keep things in order,” Miss said.  She sat with one leg folded over the other, atop one of the piled up bits of junk with a colorful throw-blanket tossed over it.  The lights in the interior didn’t reach her.

“Bisca!” Jabber shouted.  “Bisca bisca bisca bisca!”

“Jabba jabba jabba jabba!” Biscuit chanted back, holding one of Jabber’s hands with both of her own, bounding in a circle around him that turned him around and around.

Nibble, standing next to Chloe at the kitchen counter, frowned.

“If that’s possible,” Miss added.

“Good luck.”

“You too,” Miss told Lucy.

“Good job, Peckersnot!” Lucy called up.  “Stay alert while you’re on watch, okay!?”

The one eyed goblin that was sitting on the beam above them waved down at her.

“Keep it up, Biscuit, just with less horrible afflictions, okay?  Bye Nibble, bye Chloe, enjoy your evenings and cooking experiments.”

Stepping outside made Lucy very aware of how warm and loud it had felt inside, just past the bounds of being comfortable.  The cool air prickled at her skin.  She breathed out experimentally to see if her breath fogged up.  Nope.  But it felt close.  It was maybe five or eight degrees out?

Bracken stepped out with her.  He wore an adult’s jacket that was just slightly too large to fit his large frame, exactly, but that somehow made it suit him.

They walked in the brisk cold.

“How’s your guy?” he asked.

“My what?”

“Boyfriend, whatever.  Mel said he was at the hospital.”

“Mel, huh?  I haven’t heard from him in a few days.”

“There’s probably a reason.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure there is, but I’m worried about what that reason is.”

“Mmm.  Mel said she doesn’t think you fit well together.”

“‘Mel’ can be a tit sometimes, and a pain in the ass other times.  I think this time she’s being both a tit and a pain.”

Bracken smiled.

“It’s good you’re talking to her.  Getting some points of contact and stuff.”

“Totally unrelated, I wanted to ask.  The Family Man.”

“What about him?”

“Did he make any threats a lot?  Besides the castration?”

“Not really.”

“Anything?  How did he punish people?  A friend of mine thought it might reveal weaknesses or secret fears.”

“He mostly left it up to others to handle.  Kept groups separate, so if he ordered something to happen at one house, we didn’t hear about it next door.”

“Darn.”

Bracken shrugged.  “He doesn’t have fears.  He’s a monster.”

“No.  There’s gotta be a way.  Maybe I’ll ask Alpeana.”

“Do what you want.  Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“Uhhh… yes?  Very much?”

“Right,” Bracken replied.

They walked in silence for a minute.  Down past factories and other abandoned properties, to a few scattered houses a little further down, at the tail end of Kennet.

“I was really only asking to be sorta polite.  I really don’t care that much about what you want.  I’m going to smoke,” Bracken said.

“If you are, then do it downwind.  And get, like, five feet away from me.”

He grunted, but he got a cigarette out, cupped a hand for the lighter, and lit it.

“How’s Bag?” Lucy asked.

“He’s a kid.  Feed him, give him clothes, he can entertain himself with a cardboard box and a stick.  Or just a stick to hit things with.  He’s good.  He can’t wait for school on Monday.  Put a bunch of rocks together to be his ‘class’ and pretended to be a teacher for a good hour.”

“That’s super.”

“It’s okay,” Bracken countered.  At least, it felt like a counter.  A verbal equivalent to a block or defensive move in a fight.

“Only okay?” she asked.

“Feels like he’ll get to where he forgets about where we came from, mostly.  He’s young enough.”

“The Bitter Street Witch said that some of the white sheep who got down to the undercity got dyed black.  Is Bag getting bleached white, you think?”

“I guess.  I don’t know how you go all the way white, with a shitty name like Bag.  Shitty family like ours.  Unless I give him up.  Let people take him, maybe.”

“That’s a… pretty huge call.”

“If I did something, it’d have to be sooner.  Thought about it the other day, hate it.  Hate thinking it.  Because now I’m twisting myself up inside, thinking if I don’t do it, I’m wronging the little shit.  If I do, I’m abandoning him.”

“I don’t think there’s as much of a rush as you’re thinking.  Kids adapt like crazy.”

“Forget I said anything.”

“I’m a younger sibling.  My big brother is-”

“I said forget it,” Bracken told her, angry now, intense.

“Listen, please,” she said.

“Fuck off.”

“Hey!  Don’t tell me to fuck off!” she shouted.  She grabbed his sleeve, and he pushed at her hand, but she didn’t release her grip.  He looked for a second like he was going to punch her.

She forced herself to calm down.  “He’s about four years older.  My big brother.  And he’s great.  I think even you’d have to admit he’s super cool.  I have a high standard for big brothers.  I’m not sure I even like you, Bracken, but I think you’re a good big brother.”

He scowled at her.

“You got Bag out of a nightmare situation.  More than one.  I don’t know why you’ve been helping out more this weekend, but I get the impression it’s for him.  Don’t… don’t devalue that.  It matters.”

“You ever think maybe I don’t want your input?  Maybe I was partway on my way to convincing myself to do the right thing.”

“Do what you’re going to do with all the info.  This is one piece.  In that little guy’s world, you’re a hero.”

He tried to jerk his arm out of her grip.  She didn’t let go.

So he exhaled smoke in her face.

She brought a fist around to his gut, a feint of a punch to distract him as she darted her other hand up to catch his cigarette out of his mouth.  She flicked it to the ground, ahead of them on the path.

He pushed her away, hand near her collarbone, pressing the dog tag hard into her skin, though he couldn’t have known where it was.  It hurt, but she didn’t let him know that.

She resumed walking, away from him, and stepped on the cigarette on her way.  She had to resist coughing.

Once she was sure she could talk without coughing mid-word, she told him, “Light up another while you’re walking with me and I’ll take that one too.”

He fell into stride beside her once again.  He didn’t light up another cigarette.

“You can fight,” he said.  “Quick hands.”

“Yeah.  A Faerie gave me some lessons.”

Bracken snorted.

“No joke.”

“Will she give me any?”

“He.  And I’m not sure you’d want them.  He’s in a weird place right now.  He’d probably train you but make you want to die in the process, or something.”

“Perfect.”

She glanced at Bracken.  Yeah, he would think so.

“Wouldn’t count if it didn’t,” Bracken said.

“I mean, it would.”

“Has to be good if it’s that tough to get through.”

“Probably is.”

“Introduce me to them.  Do I have to pay?”

“I don’t know what payment would be expected… let me look into it.  It might be super dangerous.”

“Don’t care.”

“I’ll look into it… and if it’s okay, I might introduce you.  If you make some promises about how you’ll use that ability to fight.  Like not using it on me.”

“Hmph.”

“And not hurting innocents.”

“Whatever.”

They walked to one of the last houses on the southern outskirts of Kennet.

Bracken did the special knock.  Grandfather opened the door.

They stepped inside.

Twenty-two ‘refugees’ from the Family Man’s territory were inside.  Mattresses were spread out, along with some makeshift beds, cots, and sleeping bags.  Those that got mattresses had to share them, sleeping side by side.  The girls were spread out through the ground floor, many sitting and talking quietly.  The guys were upstairs, in the two accessible rooms.

“How are they doing?” she asked.

“They all gave the same story about why they left,” Grandfather said.  Bracken nodded agreement- he’d been here earlier in the day, helping to watch them.

“Same details,” Bracken muttered, under his breath, with some vague resentment in his tone.  “All the same details.  Like they’re not even trying to have convincing stories.”

Lucy sighed, looking across the ground floor.  At people who glared at her, at people who pretended to look innocent.  At those who looked innocent and guileless, but might have been really good at pretending, unlike the others.  All were still denizens of the undercity.  All were a little off from the baseline.  Like their starting point was something different from people above.  More aggressive, more impulsive, more… whatever.  The Family Man had brought them into order, but those qualities were still there.

Twenty-two people mostly dressed in white, at least some of whom were pretending to be victims, while biding their time.  It lent the entire house a quality of vague menace.  Like any one of them could leap to their feet with a knife in hand and stab Lucy before she could react.

“It’s going to be hard to feed this lot after lunch and dinner tonight.  We don’t have a lot to spend,” Grandfather murmured.

“Let’s at least get started?  We’ll get there when we get there.  I’ll help,” Lucy told him.

Sunday Evening

Click.  Click.  Clickclick.  Click.  Clickclick.

Lucy rose to her feet, stretching.

Clickclick.

The house had an old television but no connection to cable, but they’d managed to find some ancient VHS tapes with kids movies and some action films on them, so they’d put them on in the living room.  About half the people in the house were gathered, sitting on or in front of the couch, or leaning over the back of it, to watch on a grainy, massive television with worse quality than literally any monitor or television Lucy had seen in her life.  They barely seemed to care.  The rest were hanging out.  Tashlit leaned against the far wall, watching the group with some of her eyes, the dining room with others, and the television with a few more.

They’d done homemade pizzas, since the oven worked and they could put on two at a time, and they were easy to put together on a decent budget.  The crowd had polished them off.  A handful of people were sitting around the dining room table, the last pizza sitting on a cutting board in the center.

Bracken sat on the top stair, keeping an eye on the group upstairs.  Reggie paced up and down the upstairs hallway.  It was meant to be only guys upstairs, but the crowd had mingled, and Bracken watched or listened.  Reggie patrolled.  They might’ve been taking turns.

Click.  Click.  Click.

“Things okay?”  Lucy ventured up the stairs.  Toward the sound.

“Some weren’t feeling well, they’re sleeping it off,” Bracken told her.  “Rest are keeping quiet.”

She glanced around the upstairs.  Some rooms were out of sight, but things were quiet.  There were some whispers, a sister shushing a little brother.  Two girls were talking about a boy that was downstairs.

One girl sat by the entryway to one room, almost sleeping in a sitting position.

Pretending to be almost sleeping in a sitting position.

Click.  Click.

It only happened when Reggie moved away from the far bedroom.

“Alright.  Listen, I think I’m going to go,” Lucy said.

“Whatever.”

Click.  Click.

“There’s a bit of pizza left.  Kind of a miracle, considering.”

“It’s not great.”

“Screw off,” she told him.

“It’s decent.  But it’s not great.”

She sighed.

Clickclick.  Click.

“Going?” Grandfather asked.  He was watching the main group, pacing here and there.

“Yeah,” Lucy said, and she pointedly glanced at his gun.

“Want company?”

“You should come back here after, but sure.  For a bit?  Just to be safe?”

He nodded.

They stepped outside, closed the door, then Lucy motioned.  They moved out into the early evening, the sky dark, the moon low in the sky.

Grandfather followed her around the house, the two of them staying close to the base of the house, below the windows.

They circled around to the point the clicking had been coming from.

Lucy checked.

The window that faced the south end of Kennet illuminated.

A flashlight.  It turned off and on without any particular pattern.

“Want to deal with them?” Grandfather murmured.

“Let’s deal with whoever they were signaling.”

The man nodded.

The grass was tall, off this way, and trees gradually got thicker.  Lucy told herself that it was too cold for ticks, and ducked through.

A bit of High Summer glamour…

She slipped into the shape of a fox, and she dressed herself up not as one made of smoke, but a quadrupedal fox that wore some limited armor.

She slipped past Grandfather’s legs to let him know she was there.

“No guns,” she said.  “They’d draw too much attention.”

“You’ve got to make it hard, hm?”

The flashlight kept flicking on and off.

And way off in the distance, in the midst of the trees, dressed in white linen shirts or pants mixed with other clothing, especially store-bought jackets, were some of the Family Man’s agents.  Armed and waiting.

One of them flicked on a flashlight, and Lucy ducked deeper into the bushes.

We should call for help, she thought.  This group is… twelve?  Fifteen?  That’s a lot for two of us.

We should call for help.

She wasn’t sure why she didn’t call for help.

A feeling inside her was tense, taut, afraid.  She thought about trying to put her finger on it, but other things took priority in this moment.

She let Grandfather go in first.  He was silent, stealthy, and really good at using the environment.  He had a knife, and he went straight for the two men who were using gaps in the trees to hunker behind, rifles poking through those gaps.

It wasn’t until he moved on to the fourth of the men that the rest stirred.  One hacked at Grandfather with a cleaver.  Grandfather stabbed him.  A good ten men remained.

As soon as they started to get smart and realized Grandfather wasn’t going down like he should, Lucy acted.  One man went for the gun.  She bit the back of his leg, felt cloth between fangs, felt how solid the flesh was, until her teeth shifted and sawed in.  She pulled away before she could taste too much blood.

One straggler ran.  She circled around, racing forward, and bit at his heel.  He staggered, unable to run anymore, and she pounced on him, driving him to the ground.  He clubbed at her with a makeshift cudgel, and the armor glamour broke away.  Through his sleeve, she bit at his forearm, crunching down until something gave.  The shock of it made more of the glamour peel away.

He maybe wasn’t one of the ones who’d eaten well, to have bones so fragile.  He groaned in pain.

She backed off, checking the situation.  She saw him try to get to his feet and run, but with one hand and one foot working, he couldn’t really rise to his feet that easily, and he couldn’t move fast or far when he did.

The rest of those who remained had mobbed Grandfather.

Lucy darted in.

What am I doing?  Biting?  Tearing?

This is brutal.

Why didn’t I call for help?  Why did I let this be just the two of us?

It felt like she was proving something to herself.  The comment from Doe had stung.  About needing to leave Grandfather alone.  The assumptions about her.  Maybe she needed to prove something to him.  To the Dog Tags.

That she could help him in a fight.  Fight alongside him.  Them.  That had to matter, right?

It mattered to her.  The phantom of what she and John could have been dogged at her, nipped at her heels, and added a weight to every moment that she wasn’t able to go into a fight with a trusted, reliable fighting partner by her side.  A John Stiles.

Maybe in this fight, she was chasing that.

She dragged claws down the back of one of the bigger guys.  He fell away from Grandfather, freeing the man’s fighting arm.

Another kicked her.  The glamour broke away.

Lucy was surprised by the expression she was wearing when she became human again.  How tense it was.  A grimace.  Like she’d been wounded, when she hadn’t.

She used the weapon ring, and immediately made the guy regret kicking her by being way more dangerous as a human than she’d been as a fox.  She wasn’t as hidden in the tall grass, but she didn’t have to hold back.  Her weapon became a spear, jabbing at lower legs as a group of two stabbed forward.  One stepped on the point of the weapon, and she tossed it aside, drawing another pen to turn into a whip.  She cracked it and turned it into a pole-hook at the moment of impact, a spear with a hook on the end.  She caught them at the shoulder, hauled them forward, changed the weapon into a club, and smashed his elbow, making it bend the wrong way.  He dropped his weapon.

Each change and each moment of use cost her, but that drive to prove something was providing some kind of fuel to her Self.  She wasn’t sure what it was or what the cost would be after, if she’d find herself spent, but for right now she wanted, needed to go all out.

She turned her weapon into a spear with a long tattered banner on it, like the ones she saw in her Sight, brandished it, and roared inarticulately at the group.  She used her Sight and she knew they saw the flash in her eyes from her expression.

Five left.  She faced down one, moving quickly, keeping the weapon in the grass, forcing him to watch carefully to track the movement of it in the evening gloom.  Here and there, she pulled it back, adjusting her hold on the pen, then turned it into a spear again.  It was like she was a snake charmer, the spear like the moving flute, hypnotizing, deceiving.  Weaving an illusion.

Grandfather dispatched one guy, but the biggest member of the group caught his arm.

Lucy used the moment of her target’s distraction to slip in.  He reacted, went looking for the spear, it wasn’t where he thought it was, and the spear-point jabbed him in or behind the kneecap.

Of the three who weren’t injured, two caught Grandfather at a low position, lifting him up, one holding one leg and his knife hand.  The big one lunged in.

Lucy lunged in too.  She went for the big guy, but his angle of approach was weird.  She quickly went after the one holding Grandfather’s knife hand.  Jabbing him in the calf.

The big guy swept in, arm outstretched, and shoved Grandfather’s head into the tree.  A jutting, broken branch punched into the side of the soldier’s head.  He went limp.

That’s why he’d chosen that angle to jump in from.  He’d planned that.

Lucy hurried to dispatch the one other who’d been holding Grandfather, because he was the easiest target and she had to deal with the big guy.

He had twisted, like some of the major leaders had.  It suggested he was pretty close to the top.  Maybe a number two.  No neck, muscles where there shouldn’t be muscles.  In the cold night air, Lucy could almost see the shimmer of heat coming off him, as if his body temperature was feverish.

He turned, and jogged off toward the house.  Toward the ‘refugees’.

Lucy pulled out a card, and she clapped her hands together, before clutching the card.

“Don’t walk away from me,” she whispered to the card.

The Arena swept out, the usual colors taking life.  Pink hair, the grass became bright green, the sky electric blue.  The moon inflated in size.

The expanding circle of altered color and environment caught the running bastard.  It helped he wasn’t really a runner’s physique.

He hit the boundary.

“You and me,” Lucy told him.  “I’ve only got one hand, because of how the arena practice works.”

He smiled.

“But… I’m a duellist of fang and smoke.  This is my fang…”

She held out a pen, and let it become a blade, then let it become a pen again.

“Let’s add some smoke,” Lucy told him.  “Added terms for our little contest.”

She pulled a paper from her back pocket, held it out, then spat.  Her spit.  The blood that she’d gotten near her mouth when in fox form.

She let it fall.

The paper touched the grass, and it took effect.  The grass turned black, the sky gray, swirling, the moon red.  Black, gray, some limited white for the details that mattered… she imagined her earring was included, and red for more accent.

“Every injury comes with a small curse.  A choking, blinding, burning curse.  Up for it?” she asked.  “You can say no.”

He wasn’t the type to say no.

He charged her, tacitly accepting the contest.

She kept nimble, the spot where she’d been kicked hampering her slightly.  Ducking, moving aside, crouching.  He had two hands, he had a baseball bat, she had a weapon ring.

A slash of a rapier at his wrist.  He backed out of reach and she pressed him, not letting up, rapier becoming a spear.  He backed up more, she used a whip.

Each wound smoked.  He hit the wall in his retreat, and in the doing he coughed, and he coughed out smoke.

He rubbed at his eyes, then charged her, partially blind.

He was as big as Guilherme in his large size, but he was nowhere near as fast.  Lucy ducked to one side, anticipated the pivot, and met the shift in footing with a spear.

With her Sight, she could see the wound to his foot flare up, the watercolor darting up his leg, body, and neck to his head, where it seized eyes and mouth.

Two or three more…

She didn’t get impatient, as anxious as she was, but she didn’t give him a moment to recover either.  She used the whip again, cracking at the air.  He flinched at the first, realized they weren’t connecting, ignored the next two-

Spear again, while his defenses were down and he couldn’t see.  She held it near the butt end, and when he lunged forward, it drove the spear into his lower chest, tip grating against rib and getting pulled at by flesh, but he moved forward at the same time and it also drove the blunt end of the spear shaft against Lucy’s chest.  She grunted, and felt the curse grip her.  She blinked and coughed, and the clear air didn’t find her throat, the clarity didn’t find her eyes.

Still, she’d got him, and she’d got him dangerously deep.  A hit to or near the lungs had to count for more, given the curse.

You get one hit, she thought.

She didn’t waste the necessary breath on voicing it.

Instead, she remained wary, watching him.

He reached for her.  She cut him across the fingers.

He lurched to his feet, and she used glamour to create a sword as part of her arena, sticking out of the earth.  As he stood straighter, she stepped up onto the handle for the extra height, and leaped upward, clubbing him under the chin in the same motion.

They hit the ground at the same time.  Her with her feet.  Him with his whole body.

He coughed, wheezing.

Then he slumped.  Passed out.

She canceled the Arena and ended the curse.  Moving quickly, she pulled Grandfather off of the tree with a full-body tug, then left him behind, moving over and around the injured and unconscious.  For the straggler she’d left with an injured hand and leg.

“You can crawl back, or you can crawl back after I’ve smashed your good leg,” she told him.  “Back to the others.”

She didn’t really want to bash his other leg.  Hurting people left her with a shaky feeling inside she knew would feel way worse later tonight.  It was catching up with her past the need to prove herself and go all out.

She was quietly relieved when the guy crawled back to the group.

Grandfather was slowly recovering.  He got to his feet just fast enough to put his foot on a guy that was doing the same, and, leaning against the tree for support, Grandfather used his foot to shove the guy back to the ground.

Lucy remained silent as she met Grandfather’s eyes.  She walked over to the big guy, who continued to wheeze, touched his blood, and then got more glamour.

She dressed herself up as the big guy, copied his clothes.  Didn’t copy his wounds.

When she was done, she turned to Grandfather, walking over.

She fished for a silence rune, then pressed it to his gun.  She used her own voice.  “Keep them put.  We can call for help after.  This will silence any gunshots.  I’d rather you didn’t have to, but…”

“Matthew mentioned you don’t like killing.  After yesterday.  I avoided it.  They should be alive.  Some might need immediate care.”

“Thank you,” she told him, meaning it.  “Give them that care.  But watch your back.”

“You going to be okay?”

She nodded.

She left Grandfather to watch over the fallen group, and with a body four times the size of her regular one, she lumbered through tall grass toward the house.

A face in the window peered over the flashlight.  She turned, calling out.

Four faces total, in the window.  Two girls, a boy, and the girl lookout, who glanced out, then returned to her post, presumably before Bracken could get up and check on them.

They looked excited.

Lucy made sure she had memorized the faces.  Then she let herself into the house.

Expressions throughout the space changed.  She kept track of those too.  Many were hard to read.  Shock, alarm.  Maybe they’d been ordered to come but hadn’t been given orders or details.  Others had a bit of fear in their eyes.  One or two with a light in their eyes.  A similar sort of excitement, barely suppressed.  There were glances at Tashlit.

“Tashlit,” Lucy said in her own voice.  “Her.  And her.”

She pointed.  Tashlit grabbed one.  She grabbed the wrong one the second time, and Lucy corrected, pointing.

The group was too thick for the second one to easily slip away.

Bracken had climbed to his feet, eyes wide.

“It’s me,” she said, shucking off the glamour.  “Get Reggie.  Back, south bedroom.  Three girls and a boy.  One of them’s the lookout.  Watch out for weapons.”

“Fuck,” he swore.

There were protests, screams.  Fighting.  But the girls and the boy weren’t really fighters.

One night at least, was handled.

Barely into Monday, half past midnight

“Can’t sleep.  Scared myself a little, I think.”

“I can’t sleep either.  I’ve got this really annoying affliction of a friend who calls when I’m fast asleep.”

“Ronnie.”

“I’m joking.  It’s annoying but it’s also cool.  What happened?”

“Raid by the Family Man.”

“How bad?”

“We dealt with it.  Grandfather and me.  I think I get a bit of what you’ve been doing.”

“Nice to hear, I think.”

“Could use you.  If you came to the edge of Kennet, I think I can guide you in.  Marlen had a way through the folds.”

There was a pause on the other end.

“I might need this, with my mom.  How badly-” Verona stopped.  “I don’t want to sound like I don’t want to help.  I do.  But I worry I’ll be useless.  I drained myself too much.  I got power, I got some prizes, but I’m worried I screwed things up for Ave.  I- I hit a point where I could barely walk, I was so burned out on Self.  Then I kept going.”

I need you.  I’m feeling like I can see how easily I can get mean if I don’t have my usual touchstones.  I need you to balance me out.  I need Avery too but that’s unrealistic.  I need something.

The emotion of it rocked Lucy a little, lying in her bed with her phone at her ear, sore where she’d been kicked, sore where the spear had slammed into her upper chest, alarmed that she’d tasted blood, alarmed that she’d hurt so many people.  Al- not alarmed, there was no alarm, no red light whirling, no jangling bell.  Disquieted that she’d seen people die yesterday and that it hadn’t affected her nearly as much as it had when Alexander’s head had split open.

How fast it all happened.  How close the feeling in the now was to the days after the end of Summer.

She reached over to the side of the bed and touched John’s dog tag.

She worried he wouldn’t have wanted this.

“Luce?” Verona asked.

But Verona had been pulling away.  Verona’s whole thing was that every time people around her exposed vulnerabilities, it became a burden, a penalty.  If Verona exposed a vulnerability, it became something for her dad to latch onto.

It took a lot for Verona to confess to not being able.

“Stay.  I’ll manage,” Lucy whispered.

“You sure?”

“No, but stay.  Take care of yourself.  Recharge.  And give me a hug when you get back.  Remember when you talked about how we hugged a lot more when we were younger?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s do that.  Close that gap between us.”

There was a long pause.

She wondered why it had to be a pause.  What Verona was doing or thinking.

Why couldn’t it be an easy yes?

“Okay,” Verona told her.  “Deal.”

“I don’t think the Family Man will let things sit.  Just so you know.  I might have to act.”

“I’ll be back late tomorrow, if things go okay.  You can call if you need anything.  Might be a nice diversion.  Otherwise it’ll just be me and my mom in a hotel room, with internet, shitty television, bonding.”

“Is it nice?” Lucy asked.

“It’s nice.  Try not to let him do anything?  I’ll jump in to help when I can.”

“Are you okay with me doing something if I have to?  I know the undercity has been your thing.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Verona said.

Lucy closed her eyes, feeling weary.

“But I understand if you have to.  It’s an ego thing, you know?  I’ll deal.  I trust you.”

I trust you.

“I’ll let you go back to sleep, kay?”

“Kay.  Love you, Luce.”

“Love you, Ronnie.”

Lucy hung up, and remained like she was, lying on her side, phone in one hand.

With those words, trust and love, she was asleep before the phone went to sleep from being idle.

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