Seven Lives, One Enemy

Chapter Ten: Not Tonight

He's waiting on the roof across from my building, which I only know because I've started looking there without deciding to, the way you learn to check a particular shelf for a particular book after enough visits to the same library.

I don't call out to him. I go up the outside stair instead, the one the landlord thinks is locked, and find him sitting on the ledge like it's the most ordinary place in the world for a fugitive assassin to spend an evening.

"Three days," he says, before I've even settled beside him, no greeting, straight into it the way he says everything that actually matters. "Sorin gave me three days to bring back proof I still have the stomach for this. After that he sends someone who does."

"What kind of proof?"

"He didn't specify." His jaw does the thing it does, that small controlled tightening. "With Sorin, that's usually the point. He wants to see what I decide counts."

"And what have you decided?"

He doesn't answer right away, and in the gap where the answer should be I watch him look out at the rooftops instead, at the ordinary lit windows of ordinary lives going on beneath us, and something in his stillness tells me he's genuinely weighing it, not performing the weighing for my benefit.

"I don't know yet," he says finally. "I know what I won't do. I haven't worked out what that leaves."

"You could run. Actually run, not just three streets ahead of a manhunt. Leave Aurion entirely."

"And go where." It isn't really a question. "Everywhere I'd go, the Covenant has eyes. Everywhere I'd go, I'd still be the man who was raised to end people like you. Running doesn't undo the training. It just changes the scenery I'm miserable in."

I don't have a comfort for that, so I don't offer a false one. We sit together on the ledge instead, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, not quite, the same careful distance he keeps every time, like touching me on purpose is a line he hasn't decided whether he's allowed to cross.

"Three days," I say again, testing the shape of it. "What happens to me, if the answer he gets isn't the one he wants?"

"Someone else comes. Someone who won't hesitate the way I did." He looks at me then, and there's nothing clinical left in his face at all. "I won't let that happen. I need you to understand that much, whatever else you decide about me."

"I'm not deciding anything about you." It comes out more honest than I mean it to. "I'm just trying to survive long enough to have the luxury of deciding."

Something that isn't quite a smile moves through his expression, gone as fast as it arrives. He stands, brushes nothing off clothes that don't need brushing, an old habit doing the work worry usually does.

"Go home," he says. "Lock the door. I have somewhere to be before dawn."

"Where?"

"Somewhere I need to be seen, so Sorin believes I'm still working the assignment." He's already moving toward the far edge of the roof, already half a shadow again. "Three days, Thessaly. I'll find you before they run out."

Then he's gone, the way he's always gone, and I make my way down the outside stair alone, back onto streets that feel a great deal less safe now that I know exactly how thin the reason keeping me alive on them actually is.

I notice the man two blocks from home.

He's not doing anything wrong, exactly. Walking the same direction, keeping the same pace, the kind of following that could be nothing at all if I let myself believe it's nothing, except I've spent two weeks learning what the back of my neck feels like when it's right about danger, and it's telling me now, plainly, that this isn't nothing.

I quicken my pace. He quickens his. I turn onto a street I don't need to turn onto, testing him, and he turns too, half a beat late, like he almost lost interest in pretending to be casual about it.

My hand finds the strap of my bag, useless as a weapon, and I'm already calculating which doorway has a working lock and which alley dead-ends and which of those choices gets me killed slower, when the footsteps behind me simply stop.

I don't hear him run. I don't hear a struggle, a voice, anything at all. I hear nothing, one full breath of nothing, and when I finally risk a look back the street behind me is empty, entirely empty, like the man was never there at all except for the single black feather lying in the gutter exactly where he'd been standing, too large and too dark to belong to any bird I've ever catalogued in this city.

I don't touch it. Some old instinct, older than tonight, tells me not to.

I make it the rest of the way home without incident, lock the door three times out of habit that no longer feels excessive, and sit on the edge of my bed with my heart still going too fast, trying to make sense of a night that's handed me a deadline, a rooftop confession, and a stranger's fear evaporating into nothing over a single black feather I have no ledger entry for and no intention of finding one tonight.

It should feel like being protected. Corvin watching me from rooftops, someone else clearing a threat before it even reaches me properly, a net of unseen hands apparently deciding, over and over, that I get to keep living.

It doesn't feel like that at all. It feels like discovering, one careful layer at a time, that my life has never once been entirely my own to spend, that I've been managed and minded and quietly rescued by people who never bothered to ask whether I wanted the rescue, and lying here in the dark with my pulse finally slowing, I find that the thing frightening me most isn't the man who followed me.

It's the one who made him disappear, and never once thought to let me see his face.