Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 013

By six in the evening, the light coming through the windows of the small house had gone amber and low, and Evan had finished telling his story.

Noah sat across from him with his elbows on his knees and his jaw tight, the kind of stillness that comes from trying very hard not to say the first several things that come to mind. When Evan finished, Noah let out a long breath through his nose.

"Those absolute sons of," he said, and left it there.

"I'm not planning to come back," Evan said, with a short, humorless laugh. He wrapped both hands around his tea and looked at the table. "Ever, if I can help it."

"I'll contact the consulate," Noah said, reaching for his phone. "Get them to send someone for you. In the meantime, don't go out. The Blake family has people all over this district. If they're looking for you, the street is the last place you want to be."

"Hold on." Evan put a hand on his arm. "There's something else. Soren can't go back home. He's got a situation in the mainland. He needs another way out, somewhere else, doesn't matter where, just out of the Frontier Republic. Do you know anyone who handles that kind of work?"

Noah looked at Soren with the frank, assessing gaze of someone revising his estimate of the situation. Then he scratched the back of his head. "That's not really my world. But my dad works the port. He knows people." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "I could call him now, ask him."

"Let's wait until he's home," Soren said. "Better to talk in person."

Noah accepted this without pushing back. The instinct made sense to him even if he didn't know the reason for it, which suggested he'd spent enough time in Port Morrow to understand that some conversations were better not started over the phone.

"He'll be back around midnight," Noah said. "You can sleep in my room if you want. I do game streaming overnight anyway, so I'll be up. Just ignore the noise."

________________________________________

The hours between evening and midnight passed with the particular slowness of time spent waiting for something that couldn't be hurried. Soren slept for two hours, lightly, the way he'd learned to sleep in environments where sleeping too deeply was a liability. Howard dozed in the armchair. Evan sat with Noah and watched him stream, occasionally asking questions about games he didn't understand, filling the time with the determined sociability of a person who needed noise to keep the events of the day at a manageable distance.

At some point, the three of them wandered through the garden and into the church itself. It was large for the neighborhood and almost entirely empty, the pews clean but dusty at the edges, the candles at the altar burning for nobody in particular. The stained glass was modest but intact, and the silence inside was the particular silence of a space that had been built to hold more people than currently used it.

"Quiet place," Howard said.

"Quiet city," Soren said, and they went back to the house.

________________________________________

Just past midnight, the front door opened and Michael Hale came in.

He was a broad-shouldered man in his mid-fifties, wearing a port worker's navy coveralls with the kind of deep tiredness in his face that came from a long shift and a longer commute. He stopped when he saw the living room occupied by four people he didn't recognize, and then Evan stood up.

"Uncle Mike. It's Evan."

Mike looked at him for a long moment, the tiredness in his face giving way to something warmer. "Evan? Lord, look at you. When did you get here? Where's your mother?"

"Back home. It's a long story." Evan sat him down and told it, the abbreviated version, the one that covered the essential facts without dwelling on the parts that would require more time and emotional energy than the hour permitted. Mike listened with the focused attention of a man who had heard difficult things before and knew how to receive them.

When Evan finished, Mike was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Soren.

"And you're the one who got him out."

"We got each other out," Soren said.

Mike nodded slowly, as though this confirmed something he'd already decided. "Noah said you need passage out of the country. Somewhere other than home."

"Anywhere outside the Frontier Republic. The specifics are flexible."

"I know people at the port," Mike said. "Men who move cargo and sometimes other things, if the price is right. I won't pretend I know exactly what they charge, but it's not cheap. For somewhere like the Sunvale Republic or Aurelia Dominion, you're probably looking at ten thousand dollars minimum. Europe or further, considerably more."

Soren kept his expression neutral. Ten thousand dollars. The cash they'd taken from the highway was all local currency, and there wasn't close to that amount even if the exchange rate had been favorable, which it wasn't. A thousand dollars in equivalent value would have been optimistic.

He didn't say any of this out loud.

"I appreciate it," he said. "Can you make the introduction? I'll handle the rest."

Mike nodded. "I'll reach out tomorrow."

"Soren." Evan's voice had the careful tone of someone who had been thinking about how to say something for a while. "About the money. I know we don't have it right now. But we'll figure something out."

"I said I'll handle it," Soren said. "You and Howard take the consulate route. Get home. That's the sensible option."

Howard cleared his throat.

Soren looked at him.

"I don't have much waiting for me back home," Howard said, with the measured calm of a man who had thought this through before speaking. "I've been out here for ten years. I'm not sure I'd know what to do with myself back in the mainland." He paused. "I speak seven languages. Frontier, English, Thai, German, and passable French and Russian on top of Mandarin. Wherever you're going, I can make myself useful. I'm not asking for anything in return. I just want to keep moving forward, and I think my chances of doing that are better with you than without you."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Then Evan leaned forward. "You know I'm coming too. You saved my life. I told my family before I left that I was going to make something of myself, and I meant it." He met Soren's eyes directly, without the easy deflection he usually hid behind. "I can't do that on my own. I've already proved that. But with you, I think I actually have a shot. I'm not much in a fight, I know that. But I'm adaptable, I read people well, and if it ever comes down to it, I'll take a bullet for you before I run. That's not a figure of speech."

Soren sat with both of them for a long moment, looking at the table.

He was in a world he didn't know, in a body with a history he hadn't lived, with a fugitive's identity and no money and a local crime family already looking for him. The rational assessment of his situation was not encouraging. But the rational assessment also acknowledged that he was going to need to navigate all of it, and doing that alone in a country where he didn't speak the language, with no contacts and no resources, was a considerably harder proposition than doing it with a polyglot translator and a man who knew how to read a room.

"All right," he said. "You both come. But I'm not making promises about outcomes. If things go badly, I save myself first. If I can save you too, I will. That's the honest version."

"That's good enough," Evan said.

"More than enough," Howard agreed.

Evan relaxed back into his chair with the expression of a man who had been bracing for a harder answer, and then grinned. "You know, worst case, we go to Chinatown somewhere and open a Chinese restaurant. You run the front, I cook, Howard manages the floor. He can handle complaints in six languages."

"Seven," Howard said mildly.

Before anyone could respond, a sound came from the direction of the church gate: heavy, rhythmic, the unmistakable impact of something metal against iron.

"At this hour?" Evan said, frowning toward the window.

Father George Whitman's voice drifted through the door, unhurried and apologetic. "Mr. Hale, I noticed your light was on. God willing, perhaps today was a better day at the port."

Mike opened the door with the expression of a man who had been expecting this and had not been looking forward to it. "God bless you, Father George. I'm sorry, the port still hasn't paid out this month. The rent..."

"I understand completely," Father George said, with genuine sympathy and equal genuine difficulty. "But you know how it is. The church hasn't had much in the collection plate lately. People here put their faith in other things. I have expenses to cover, and I'm afraid I really do need..."

Evan caught Soren's eye. Soren tilted his head slightly toward the door.

Evan stood up, pulled a folded stack of local currency from his jacket, and walked to the entrance with a smile. "Father, whatever my uncle owes, let me take care of it. Consider it a thank-you for letting us use the path earlier."

Mike started to object. "Evan, you don't have to do that. You need that money."

"Call it a finder's fee," Evan said. "You're helping us find what we need. It's the least we can do." He pressed the cash into Father George's hands before either man could argue further.

Father George accepted it with the dignified gratitude of a man who had learned not to let relief show too plainly on his face. "God bless you. All of you."

He turned to go, and Soren, who had moved quietly to the doorway while the exchange was happening, looked past the priest toward the church gate.

His expression didn't change. But something in it went very still.

The sound at the gate had stopped. In its place was a different kind of silence, the kind that had people in it.