Chapter 264: Old Sins.
I walked out of the building and the man from the elevator followed me the whole way, not in body but in every thought I had between the doors and the parking lot.
Mute. Brahim. Whatever the thing underneath that face actually answered to. Because one truth had come out of that elevator with me and it wouldn’t leave.
I did something to him.
Something bad enough to outlast his own death. Bad enough to drag him back into the world wearing a stranger’s skin with my name in his mouth.
The question underneath it was worse.
How. When. Where does a boy from the plain wrong a man who died before the walls went up.
I searched for it and found nothing.
Our lives didn’t touch anywhere. The only ground old enough to hold the two of us was the plain, and the plain had never given me a person to hurt. It gave me the infected. It gave me hunger and distance and a sky that didn’t care whether I got up in the morning. It didn’t hand out grudges in human shape.
Nothing about him fit anything I remembered. And that gap was its own kind of threat.
There was exactly one person alive who could reach into my past and pull the answer out of it.
I pressed my comms. The plastic was warm from my palm.
"Hey."
She answered before the first ring finished, like she’d been holding the device in her hand.
"Is this Venna?"
Across the lot, Mercury sat behind the wheel of her car, watching the world through the windscreen. Late light laid a hard yellow stripe across the glass and turned her profile into silhouette.
"Yeah, this is she."
"It’s Abram."
"Abram." Not a beat of hesitation in it. "I was waiting for you to call."
"You free now?"
"Yes." Something almost pleased underneath it. "I did warn you. The past is addictive."
I started toward the car. Gravel shifted under my boots. "You’re not wrong. Where are you?"
"You don’t need to know where I am." Light. Unbothered. "Meet me at Abuela’s."
"Okay."
I hung up as I reached the car, knocked once on the glass—sharp enough that the sound carried—then came around the front and let myself in. The interior held the day’s heat and the faint chemical sweetness of lipstick.
Mercury was fixing her mouth in the mirror. Unhurried. The lipstick moved in short, precise strokes. As though the last few hours hadn’t happened at all.
"Let me guess." She didn’t look over. "Sinn sent you to bring me back."
"No." I pulled the door shut. It closed with a solid, final sound. "He knows better than to send me. He’ll come himself or he won’t come at all."
"So what are you doing in my car?"
"Making sure you’re alright."
"You already know I’m not." Still working the mirror. Her eyes stayed on her own reflection, dark and steady.
"Then tell me how to help."
She capped the lipstick with a soft click and finally turned to look at me. The red on her mouth was clean and sharp against the tired lines around her eyes.
"Only one thing helps when I feel like this. Good sex. That something you can offer?"
"Nah."
We both broke, laughing, and it was the first real one since we’d walked out of that yard full of bodies. The sound bounced off the glass and the dashboard and for a second the car felt less small. It fixed nothing. It wasn’t supposed to. But it let some pressure out of the space between us, and after the day we’d had, that counted for something.
"You want a favour." She dropped the makeup box back into the drawer. The plastic rattled. "I can smell it on you. Out with it."
"A ride."
She cut me a look. One eyebrow lifted.
"Knew it." The grin came in slow, pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Off to see a girl."
"Yeah."
I handed her the answer she was hunting for. It cost me nothing and it lit her up—shoulders easing, eyes brightening for the first time since the yard—and she’d earned an easy thing today.
"Okay." She popped her door. Some of the old Mercury came back into her shoulders, the set of them less rigid. "Give me a second."
"Don’t disappear on me."
She looked back over her shoulder, raised a middle finger without heat, and went inside. The door swung shut behind her. Her boots clicked once on the asphalt and were gone.
***
She kept her word. Back inside a minute. The driver’s door opened again and she slid in, bringing a brief wash of cooler air with her.
Then she drove me out across the capital with the noise slowly returning to her, her running commentary on everything and nothing picking up somewhere around the second junction—delivery vans, bad drivers, the colour of the sky—and I let her have it. It was better than silence. Silence had a man with no heartbeat standing in it.
The old building rose ahead of us, low and dark against the thinning light, and she pulled in. Tyres crunched over the same cracked pavement that had always been there.
Venna’s car was already there. She’d come early. The paint caught the last of the sun in a dull metallic glint.
The two men held their places at the door, exactly as they had yesterday—still, upright, watching—and through the windscreen the whole place sat outside of time, untouched, the way it had always looked and probably always would. Stone the colour of old bone. Windows that reflected nothing useful.
"What are you doing at a fossil like this?" Mercury took the building in with open suspicion, eyes narrowed. "You screwing somebody’s ancestor?"
"Mercury." I opened the door. Heat pushed back in. "Thank you."
"Want me to come back for you?"
"No. I’m good."
Middle finger. Then she pulled away and rolled on down the road, and the sound of her engine took a while to leave—fading into the city’s low, constant murmur until there was only the quiet of the lot again.
The two men watched me approach without a word.
I climbed the first step.
For the first time in my life...I was afraid of my own past.