Caius
We did not talk.
That's the first thing to record about the morning after movie night. Lucien had mouthed we need to talk across a sleeping woman with all the gravity of a man scheduling surgery, and I had nodded, and then dawn came and I performed the bravest act of my distinguished career.
I ran away.
Oh, it had paperwork. Everything cowardly does. The badlands tracking data needed to be reconciled with Darius's southern investigation, that part was even true, and it needed doing in person, that part was invented at six in the morning by a man stuffing a duffel bag in the dark like a burglar robbing himself. I left a note. The note said back in a few days and deployed the word logistics. Lucien found me in the courtyard anyway, because of course he did, materializing beside the
