Chapter 7 #3
Bastian's lips twitch. Just barely. The ghost of something that, on a less dangerous man, Emery would call a smile.
"You want to keep your cards close to your chest," he says.
"I want to stay useful," Emery replies, which is the truth stripped down to its barest components.
Bastian leans back in his chair. He looks at Emery for a long moment, long enough that Emery can feel the weight of it on his skin, long enough that the rest of the room seems to be holding its breath along with him. Then he nods.
"I can't deny a man the right to play his hand as he sees fit," Bastian says.
The tension in the room doesn't break so much as rearrange itself.
The copper-haired woman exchanges a look with the one on the stool.
Corvin sets his charcoal down. Hask, by the door, makes a sound that might be amusement or might be a quiet exhalation, and Emery can't tell which because the mask covers everything below his eyes.
Emery is baffled. He expected pushback. He expected anger, or at the very least the cold, clinical persuasion of a man accustomed to getting what he wants.
He did not expect acceptance. He did not expect Bastian Kane, crime lord, Vesper, the man whose name makes people lower their voices and check the exits, to shrug and say fair enough with the easy grace of finding defiance more interesting than obedience.
He doesn't know what to do with that. He files it alongside everything else he doesn't know what to do with and moves on.
The rest of that day, and the days that follow, are spent in a state that Emery can only describe as integration, which is a word that implies a deliberate process and doesn't capture the much messier reality of stumbling into a world that doesn't quite fit and finding, to his discomfort, that it's making room for him anyway.
He meets Bastian's crew properly, which is a different experience than seeing them blood-spattered and efficient in an alley at midnight.
In daylight, or what passes for daylight in the compound's enchanted-panel approximation of it, they are a small and carefully chosen collection of people who have, as far as Emery can tell, either no capacity for judgment or no interest in exercising it.
Corvin, the part-giant, turns out to be exactly as large as Emery thought and roughly twice as gentle.
He ducks when entering rooms, a habit so ingrained that he does it even in the corridors where the ceilings are high enough, and there are special chairs for him in every communal space in the compound, wider and reinforced and positioned slightly off-center so he doesn't block sightlines.
He does, in fact, a great deal of the dirty work that Bastian's operation requires, but between jobs he is an avid painter and sketch artist who spends his hours with charcoal and canvas and produces work that is, by any standard, unreasonably good.
Emery catches him sketching in the common room one afternoon, his enormous hands moving over the paper with a precision and care that would make a surgeon envious, and the image taking shape is a view of the gorge from above, all light and open air and the bridges strung between the walls, threads of a web catching the light.
A place Corvin probably rarely sees. A place he carries with him and puts on paper when he misses it.
Emery understands that more than he'd like to.
Tessa, the copper-haired woman, is fierce and direct and speaks with a bluntness that has never found a use for subtlety.
Her outfit has more buckles and pockets than Emery can count, and she seems to use each one.
She is close with Corvin, not in the way of friendship but in the way of people who have survived things together, which is a bond that goes deeper than the skin and sits closer to the bone.
She doesn't ask Emery why he's here. She doesn't ask where he came from.
She asks him if he plays dice, and when he says he hasn't in years, she tells him that's pathetic and gestures for him to sit anyway.
Sera, the short-haired one, has a temper and zero patience for small talk, which she treats as a waste of perfectly good silence.
She is a scout and a messenger, the fastest of the crew, and she treats the compound's corridors as her personal highway system.
She nods at Emery once, on the second day, which he takes as either acceptance or acknowledgment of his physical existence, and either one is fine.
They don't ask him personal questions. None of them do.
They don't ask him why he's here or what he did before or what his arrangement with Bastian involves.
This is not because they aren't curious.
Emery can see the curiosity, especially in Tessa, who watches him with the attention of piecing a puzzle together from the edges inward.
But they don't ask, and the not-asking has the quality of a practiced restraint, a group agreement forged by the shared understanding that everyone in this compound came from somewhere they'd rather not discuss.
It is absurdly, disarmingly easy to be around them.
Emery has spent his entire adult life among people who wanted something from him.
The guild wanted his kills. The Hollow's patrons wanted his body.
Sander wanted his blade. Everyone he has ever known has interacted with him through the lens of what he could provide, and the moment the provision stopped, so did the interaction.
These people are not asking him to provide anything.
They are dealing him into card games and offering him cider, which Tessa brews as a hobby and which is stronger than it has any right to be, and asking him whether he's ever been Above, which he hasn't, and telling him stories about the time Corvin got stuck in a doorway during a raid and Sera had to climb over him while Tessa gave directions from the other side.
He understands why it's easy. He understands it immediately and precisely, because he recognizes it.
These people have come from the same places he has.
The same dark corners, the same desperate arithmetic of survival, the same history of doing whatever was necessary and carrying the weight of it afterward.
They have all been the person in the room that nobody asks about.
They have all been the disposable one, the expendable one, the one whose absence would be noted on a ledger and nowhere else.
Bastian collected them. Found them, or they found him, and he gave them a place, and the place came without questions because the questions don't matter when you've already been through the worst of it and what matters is whether there's a chair at the table and food on the plate.
Emery sits at the table. He eats the food. He plays dice with Tessa and watches Corvin draw and tolerates Sera's silence and drinks cider that makes his eyes water and listens to stories about people who have found, against all probability, something worth staying for.
And then he meets Avery.
Avery is in the kitchen when Emery comes in for a late meal, perched on the edge of the counter with his legs swinging and a bowl of something in his hands.
He is exactly as the compound's unofficial gossip network has described him: slight, dark-haired, with his hair tied in a knot at the back of his head and bangs that fall in his face, and features that are fine and soft in a way that makes people underestimate him, which Emery recognizes because people have been underestimating him for the same reason his entire life.
Avery looks up when he enters. His dark eyes are sharp and quick, assessing the room and everyone in it in the time it takes most people to blink, and they settle on Emery with an interest that is not hostile but not passive either.
"You're the one from the Hollow," Avery says.
It is not a question. It is a statement delivered with the directness of not seeing the point in pretending not to know things he knows, which Emery immediately appreciates, because he is so tired of pretending.
"Yes," Emery says. "I was working there for a time."
"So that's how you met Bastian."
The first person to ask him so bluntly. Everyone else has danced around it, treating the information as gossip rather than fact because the source hasn't signed off on it. Avery doesn't dance. He walks straight to the center of it and plants his feet.
Emery has already warmed to him, which is fast, even for someone as skilled at reading people as he is.
But the warmth is earned. He recognizes in Avery something he's only ever seen in mirrors: the sharpness that comes from being small and pretty and used and deciding, at some point, that you're going to be sharp enough to cut back.
"I went there looking for him," Emery says. It is, depending on how you look at it, completely true.
Avery huffs out a laugh. It's a real one, brief and surprised, and it changes his face entirely. "Most people are trying not to find him." He takes a spoonful from his bowl and chews thoughtfully. "Must have worked out, though, if you're here."
They sit in the kitchen and talk. Avery is street-smart in the way that Emery is street-smart, the kind of intelligence that doesn't come from books or training but from years of navigating situations where a wrong word or a slow reaction means something much worse than embarrassment.
But he is also kind, genuinely kind, in a way that is hard to find in the Underground, where kindness is usually a prelude to a transaction.
Avery's kindness doesn't come with terms. It comes from the same place as his sharpness, from the understanding of what it's to go without, and the decision that, given the choice, he would rather be the person who shares than the person who hoards.