BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 9: Same Day

The restaurant had plastic chairs and a laminated menu with a photograph of every dish on it. Kestrel ordered for both of them without asking, and when Silas finished the first plate he ordered a second one, and Silas ate that too. He had been told to eat at fixed intervals, and arguing cost more than chewing.

Silas paid at the register on the way out. Kestrel let him.

Out on the street Kestrel stopped at a stand with a line at it.

"Two," he said. "Extra sugar."

Everyone ahead of them in the queue asked for half. The girl at the counter asked him twice, and got extra sugar both times.

Silas paid. It was faster.

Kestrel drank his walking, through the straw, and every few meters he turned his head to check that Silas had seen him drinking it. Silas had seen.

"Best day of my life," Kestrel said, to the street.

It would be restful to be that stupid. He did not say it out loud. Anything said out loud turned into a conversation.

"Hey." Kestrel stopped and held the cup up between them, straw angled at Silas's mouth. "Try it."

"No."

"You've never had milk tea."

"I've had tea."

"Not this." He did not lower the cup. The straw was bent where he had been chewing it.

"No."

"Don't tell me you've—" He stopped, and looked at Silas, and there was real pity in it, the kind you give a man who has never heard music. "It's good. It's really good."

Silas took the second cup off the counter. He carried it the length of the block without drinking any of it, and handed it back the next time Kestrel held the straw out.

"Carry your own."

Kestrel stood there with a cup in each hand. Then he sorted himself out and fell in behind and drank, and he said nothing, and that lasted eleven steps.

Nobody on that block had looked at either of them twice all evening. Plain clothes, no insignia, a private car in a public lot instead of the one with the plates, a commercial district out past the last tram line — he had arranged all of it before he agreed to come out at all, and it had held.

Eight hundred meters used to be a problem between the two of them. Silas could remember standing on a dock at that distance and being able to hear his own pulse. Now the man was close enough to hand him a straw, and neither of them had checked where the other one's hands were.

Nine months of this, at minimum.

"Thief!" someone shouted up ahead. "Stop him, that's my bag—"

Silas was running before the shout finished. He did not decide to. His coat was open, the pavement was going past under him, and his body had gone off on its own the way it used to, without ever asking him first.

Down the street, past the bus queue, past the fruit stand, someone was running flat out with a bag under one arm. Too many people between here and there. Too many corners. If nobody closed the distance in the next ten seconds the man was gone into the next street and that was the end of it.

Behind him, Kestrel said, "Oh, you have got to be—" and then he was not behind him anymore.

He came past on the outside, faster than a man who had spent two weeks on a couch had any business moving, cut in front of Silas, stopped dead, and shoved everything in his hands into Silas's arms. Two cups. The straw still in one of them. All of it against his chest.

"Hold these."

Then he was gone, out into the middle of the road, standing in the open with his hands out of his pockets.

A hundred and forty meters up the street, the thief went down.

Not stumbling. Down — mid-stride, face-first onto the concrete, one arm still hooked around the bag, and then not moving at all.

Something came off the street after him, thin as a change in air pressure, and the hair on Silas's forearms stood up, and a woman at the bus stop turned around to see what had happened to the weather.

The crowd had him in about four seconds. The owner of the bag got there after them, and there was shouting, and the traffic on the far side slowed down to look.

Kestrel came back across the road with his hands in his pockets again. He was grinning. He looked nineteen.

"Well? I'm good, aren't I."

Silas held the cups out. Kestrel took his own and left him with the second one.

Suppression. A top-tier Alpha could do that at a distance where nobody could see what he was doing. There was a clause in the Federation code about where he was allowed to do it. A public street in front of a fruit stand was not it.

Two months ago Silas had been able to do it too. From farther off, and no one had ever turned to look at anything.

He walked back to the car and did not look behind him. There was no need; the man always followed.

He got in, put the second cup in the holder, put both hands on the wheel, and sat there.

Sixty meters. He had gone sixty meters down a public street at a flat run, and his body had spent all of it telling him what a mistake that was, and there was nothing to do about it and nothing to file and nobody to file it with. His heart had not come down by the time the passenger door opened.

Kestrel got in, put his cup in the holder, and did not say anything at all.

Under two months from a top-tier Alpha to what he was now, and less time than that since anyone had told him. He had gone through his own file looking for the mistake in it, and then he had stopped.

He drove. It was forty minutes home, and Kestrel talked for nine of them — the tea, the sugar in the tea, a kid in the queue who had stared at him — and then stopped in the middle of a sentence, and watched the city go by on his side, and stayed like that the rest of the way.

His own gate opened for the car and closed again when he went past it, and he parked on the street under the wall and cut the engine.

It was in the car before his hand came off the key. Peaches, cold and new, the way fruit smells in a shop before the door is open.

He sat. The inside of his chest had been screwed down since the street, and it came loose by degrees — jaw, shoulders, the two hands on the wheel — and he breathed through his nose and did not look over.

Kestrel did not say anything. He did not turn his head. He got out with his cup, went up the steps and into the house without once looking back, and left the door standing open behind him.

Silas sat in the dark with the smell still in the car. Then he counted to sixty, and got out, and went in.

At nine he wrote the day up for Ward, which was the arrangement. The mall, the dinner, the tea. The street, the distance, what he had been doing when the shout went up. The time it had taken his pulse to come back down.

The last paragraph was about the pheromone. He wrote it four times and sent the fourth one.

[Ward] A top-tier Alpha's pheromones will do that. Not that fast.

[Ward] I keep rereading that paragraph, sir. It doesn't match anything I have.

[Ward] There's one thing that would explain it, if you want it explained.

[Vance] Say it.

[Ward] A pairing test. Compatibility. Yours and his.

[Vance] No interest.

He sat and watched the screen.

[Ward] All right.

[Ward] For what it's worth, it might point the whole study somewhere new. Half an hour for the numbers.

[Vance] How long does the draw take.

[Ward] Ten minutes.

[Vance] Come tomorrow.

[Ward] Both sides, sir. I need a sample from each of you.

[Vance] I said come tomorrow.

[Ward] You'd have to ask him.

Silas read that one twice.

[Ward] Sorry. I mean he'd have to agree to it himself. It's his blood. I can't take it off a person who hasn't said yes.

He typed He'll sign it, and deleted it. He typed it again, and deleted that too.

[Vance] I'll handle it.

[Vance] Seven.

[Vance] Does he need to fast?

[Ward] No, sir.

[Ward] I'll bring the form. Both signatures.

The printer in the study put out three pages. The first was what the test was for. The second was what would be done with the numbers afterwards, and where they were kept, and for how long, and at the bottom of it a line for a signature and a date. He read both, and signed the line on the second, and closed the folder on the third without turning it over. Nothing on the second page had asked him to.

The light was on under the door on the third floor. He knocked once and went in.

The bed was under clothes. All nine pieces, out of the bags, dropped wherever they had landed, and Kestrel standing at the end of it with his arms folded, looking at them the way an officer looks at a map.

Silas held out the folder and the pen.

"Sign this."

Kestrel came around the end of the bed. He looked at the folder, and then at Silas.

"Federation paper?"

"Yes."

"No." He went back to the clothes.

Silas stood there with the folder in his hand. The trade came out of him before he had time to price it.

"If you sign it, I'll wear what you picked out. On the same day you wear yours."

Kestrel turned around.

"I like paperwork," he said. "I've always liked paperwork. I kept a diary when I was a kid. I won a prize for an essay in school." He took the pen out of Silas's hand, flipped the pages, and signed all three, first page, second, third, his name at the bottom of each, and did not ask again what any of it was for.

Silas took the folder back.

"Same day," Kestrel said.

"Same day."

He went out and pulled the door shut behind him.

Kestrel waited until the door shut. Then he waited ten more seconds, which was how long it took to be sure the man was not going to come back about something.

Then he stood at the end of the bed, got all of it into the frame, put two fingers up in the corner of the picture, and took it.

# sent me clothes again (^_^)

milkfat_alpha: ?????

marriedwithkids_dnd: ??????????????????????

soren.k: what, you don't own shirts?

ratline: boss. BOSS. two weeks. not one message. we've been looking for you 😭

pike: who is it. sending the boss clothes? that's saying he can't dress himself. who'd dare.

pipeandslippers: who'd be blind enough to take you in, you stray.

He blocked pipeandslippers.

— replying to soren.k: if you don't need your eyes, other people do.

— replying to pike: get your eyes looked at first.

Shay Corbin came in on private a minute later.

shay.corbin: two weeks off the grid and now you're posting like a man who wants to be asked about it

shay.corbin: is it real? or are you running something on somebody

shay.corbin: I can't picture it, that's all. you, gone over someone. it'd be embarrassing to watch

Gone over someone?

I'd die first.

peaches_best: who said I like him

shay.corbin: you're posting presents

peaches_best: I post what I want

shay.corbin: nobody's telling you not to. where are you? rory's been going off about you two weeks straight. says you dumped the whole roster on him and went off somewhere to live soft

peaches_best: I'm being kept. not coming back for a while 🛋

peaches_best: tell him to work harder. I'll double his bonus at the end of the year

shay.corbin: 😨

shay.corbin: kept. YOU. name them. who has the money to keep you

peaches_best: long story. if you live long enough, you'll find out

shay.corbin: don't say that kind of thing to me. I've got a thousand years in me. I'm in my prime

peaches_best: goodnight, old monster. I've got night duties. my keeper's orders

shay.corbin: WHAT.

shay.corbin: night duties? is that what I think it is? is she rich?

peaches_best: guess

shay.corbin: introduce me to her friends. I'm done working too

peaches_best: he's an Omega

shay.corbin: an Omega's fine, I'm not picky

peaches_best: you're too ugly. you're not getting in the door

shay.corbin: ADRIAN KESTREL—

He put the terminal face-down under the pillow. Then he got up again and shut the window and pushed the latch down with two fingers, and got back into bed.