Veil of Shadows

Departure

The traffic from Victoria Island to Murtala Muhammed was the kind that had opinions.

‎Their driver — a Meridian contractor named Felix who communicated primarily through the medium of his horn — navigated it with the resigned creativity of a man who had made this journey many times and had stopped being surprised by anything Lagos put between him and an airport. Zara sat behind the passenger seat with her carry-on between her feet and watched the city do its evening thing through the window.

‎Lagos at six p.m. was a negotiation. The workday releasing its grip on the roads all at once, everyone going somewhere, the air thick with exhaust and heat and the particular energy of a city that treated rush hour not as an inconvenience but as a contact sport. Street vendors moved between stationary cars with the unhurried confidence of people who understood that the traffic wasn't going anywhere and neither were they. A generator somewhere close rattled into life. The sky above the rooftops was doing something spectacular with the last of the daylight — orange bleeding into purple, the kind of sky that had no interest in being subtle.

‎She looked at it and thought about London, where the sky at this hour would be grey and noncommittal and entirely unsurprised by itself.

‎Kael was in the seat beside her. He'd been on his phone since they left the office — low voice, clipped responses, the tail end of something operational she wasn't supposed to hear and wasn't trying to. He finished the call as Felix swung onto the airport expressway and put the phone in his jacket pocket and looked out his own window at his own version of the city going past.

‎Neither of them spoke for a while.

‎It wasn't uncomfortable. That was still the thing about their silences — they had never quite managed to be uncomfortable, which was its own kind of problem.

‎The airport was busy in the way of airports on Friday evenings — the particular density of people going somewhere for reasons that mattered to them, the collective forward momentum of a building full of departures. Felix pulled up to the international terminal and they got out and Kael took both bags from the boot before she could reach hers, which she noted and didn't comment on.

‎Check-in was efficient. Security less so — a long queue, the specific airport shuffle of removing shoes and laptops and the accumulated small objects of a life carried in pockets, the fluorescent overhead light that made everyone look slightly unwell. She went through the scanner. Waited on the other side while Kael repacked his bag with the systematic efficiency he applied to everything, and thought about the six weeks ahead and what London would require of her and how many layers of herself she'd need to keep managed simultaneously in a building where the people at the top already knew things she didn't know they knew.

‎She thought about Nora Vane's name on the briefing document. The photograph — silver-haired, composed, the kind of face that had learned to perform warmth so thoroughly it had become indistinguishable from the real thing.

‎She thought about Marcus.

‎She put it away. Not here.

‎Their gate was at the far end of the terminal — a long walk through the particular retail ecology of international airports, the duty free and the overpriced coffee and the rows of charging points occupied by people staring at devices with the focused inwardness of the about-to-depart. They found seats near the gate with forty minutes until boarding and the specific suspended quality of airport time, which moved differently from regular time and always had.

‎She bought water from a kiosk. He already had coffee — black, from somewhere, she hadn't seen him get it.

‎They sat.

‎The gate area filled gradually around them. Families, business travellers, a group of students with the particular energy of people going somewhere for the first time. The departure board updated with a soft mechanical click. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows the tarmac was lit amber in the dusk, planes moving in their slow, deliberate choreography.

‎She was reading — or performing reading, which was the airport version of the same thing — when he spoke.

‎"Do you miss it?"

‎She looked up. He was looking at the window, coffee cup loose in his hand, and his voice had the quality it got sometimes in the small hours — lower, less managed, the professional register relaxed into something that simply sounded like him.

‎"Miss what?" she asked.

‎"London." A pause. "You've been here three months. Before that, years there. Do you miss it?"

‎She considered the question. It was the kind of thing that didn't sound like him — not operational, not assessment, not the careful gathering of information that characterised every other personal question he'd ever asked her. It sounded, specifically, like curiosity. Like a man sitting in an airport at the end of a long week asking something he actually wanted to know the answer to.

‎She decided to answer it the same way.

‎"Parts of it," she said. "The river. The way the city sounds on a Sunday morning before it wakes up properly." She paused. "The cold, sometimes. Lagos is beautiful but it never gets properly cold and I didn't realise how much I needed that until it was gone."

‎He looked at her then. Something in his expression she was starting to be able to read — not the professional face, not the operative stillness, but the version underneath that came out in low light and tired evenings.

‎"Accra gets cold," he said. "Not London cold. But in the early morning in the dry season, before the sun has decided what it's doing — there's a quality to it." He looked back at the window. "I haven't been back in four years."

‎She turned that over. Four years was a long time to be away from somewhere that sounded, from the way he'd just said it, like it mattered.

‎"Why not?" she asked.

‎A beat. "The work."

‎She understood that in the way she understood several things about Kael — not fully, but enough to know that the work was doing a lot of carrying in that sentence, and that what it was carrying was something he didn't put down often enough.

‎"The work will always be there," she said quietly.

‎He looked at her. "Yes," he said. "It will."

‎Boarding was called twenty minutes later.

‎They joined the queue with the rest of the economy of movement — bags, documents, the patient forward shuffle toward the gate. She was behind him in the line and looked at the back of his head and thought about Accra at dawn and four years and the particular way tired people tell true things in airports when the defences are down.

‎Business class. Two seats — aisle and window, the middle seat empty between them, which on a six hour night flight was as close to privacy as a commercial aircraft offered.

‎She took the window. He took the aisle without discussion, which meant the empty seat between them was a choice they'd both made simultaneously and neither of them acknowledged.

‎The plane filled around them. The safety demonstration. The cabin lights dimming as they taxied. Lagos falling away beneath them as the aircraft lifted — the city at night from above, the bridge lights on the water, the sprawl of it illuminated and vast and alive, and then cloud, and then nothing but dark.

‎She leaned her head against the window.

‎Beside her she heard him shift — settling in, the soft sound of a jacket folded, the particular stillness of a man who had learned to sleep in transit the way soldiers did, quickly and without ceremony.

‎She was almost asleep herself when he spoke again.

‎"Zara."

‎Low. Quiet. The cabin dark around them, the engine hum the only sound.

‎"Mm," she said, which was not quite a word but was enough.

‎A pause. Long enough that she thought he'd changed his mind.

‎"I'm glad it's you," he said. "On this assignment."

‎She kept her eyes closed. The window cold against her temple. Lagos somewhere thirty thousand feet below and London somewhere ahead and six hours of dark in between.

‎She didn't trust her voice enough to use it.

‎So she said nothing, and he said nothing, and the plane carried them north through the dark, and the empty seat between them felt like the most honest thing either of them had managed in weeks.

‎[END OF CHAPTER 12]

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