Chapter 12
The next day at Vella's passes without incident.
Sander's men do not appear. The patrons are the usual assortment of grasping hands and loose coin and Emery moves through them automatically, his body performing the routine while his mind sits somewhere else entirely, counting hours and running through contingencies for an operation that has not yet been given a date.
He dances. He smiles. He lets a dwarven merchant with a braided beard pull him close enough to smell the ale on his breath and murmur something about private rooms that Emery deflects with a laugh and a redirect that leaves the man feeling flattered rather than rejected.
It is mechanical. It is easy in the way that things are easy when you have done them so many times the doing no longer requires the participation of the person inside the body doing them.
Hask is in his corner. The drink in front of him might be the same one from yesterday.
Emery cannot tell, and suspects Hask cannot either, and suspects further that the drink is not the point.
The point is the table and the sightline it provides to every entrance and exit in the room, and the way Hask's pale, light-swallowing eyes move in a slow, continuous sweep that misses nothing and reacts to less.
When the night ends and the last of the patrons have been ushered out, Emery changes in the back room and meets Hask at the rear exit.
The corridor beyond is dark and cool and smells of lamp oil and damp stone, and they fall into step together with the ease of two people who have been walking this route long enough for the walking to become familiar.
"I know your track record," Hask says, unprompted, as they turn into the wider passage that leads toward the descent into the Depths.
His voice is flat and unhurried and carries the dryness of a man who considers small talk a waste of oxygen but is making an exception for reasons he has not disclosed.
"I'm not entirely convinced my services are needed. "
Emery laughs.
It surprises him. The sound comes out of his chest before he has a chance to evaluate it, genuine and unguarded and carrying a warmth that he did not authorize, and he realizes, with a start, that it is one of the few real laughs he has had in weeks.
Not the performed kind. Not the kind he deploys at the Hollow to make patrons feel clever.
The kind that happens because something is actually funny, or because something is actually honest, and in Emery's experience those two things are so rare that when they occur simultaneously the body does not know what to do except laugh.
"Despite my abilities," Emery says, and the laughter has loosened something in his voice that he would normally keep tight, "I still struggle to earn a living in the Underground.
So either my abilities aren't as impressive as my record suggests, or the system I'm working within is designed to keep me scraping by regardless of how good I am. "
Hask glances at him. The half-mask hides the lower half of his face, but his eyes carry the expression of having just heard a person arrive at a conclusion he himself reached a long time ago and has been waiting, with varying degrees of patience, for the rest of the world to catch up.
"That's the price you pay when you work for a guild," Hask says. "They take their cut and leave you with what's left. And their cut is designed to keep you dependent on the next contract, and the next, and the next. You can't save enough to walk away because walking away is not in their interest."
Emery opens his mouth to argue, to say that without the guild he would have no safety net between him and the clients who hire him, no structure, no protection, no recourse when a contract goes sideways, and then he closes it again, because the words taste stale, something he has been repeating for so long that he stopped checking whether they were still true.
"The guild is supposed to protect me from exactly what happened with Sander," he says instead, and the sentence comes out with less conviction than he intended. "A client who turns on the operative. That's a violation of guild law. The guild is supposed to handle it."
Hask raises an eyebrow. It is visible above the mask and it communicates exactly how much faith Hask places in the guild's willingness to handle anything that does not directly benefit the guild.
"And how is that safety net working out right now?" Hask asks.
The question lands with the soft, precise impact of a blade slid between ribs.
Not painful so much as clarifying. Emery thinks about his room at the guild, the one Sander trashed, the one with his books and his meager belongings and the threadbare bed he paid too much for, and about the fact that the guild's response to Sander violating their laws was to tell Emery to lay low, which is not protection so much as abandonment dressed up in professional language.
He thinks about the years he has spent paying his keep and his dues and his cut of every contract, and about the fact that when the moment came, when he actually needed the safety net he had been paying for, it was Bastian who caught him. Not the guild. Bastian.
"You make a fair point," Emery concedes, and the concession costs him something, though he cannot immediately identify what. Pride, maybe. Or the comfort of a delusion he has been carrying so long it had started to feel as though it were a conviction.
Hask inclines his head. He does not gloat. Gloating would require more energy than the victory warrants, and Hask is nothing if not efficient with his expenditures.
They walk in silence for a while after that, through the transitional layer where the upper Underground gives way to the Depths, the lamps thinning and the bioluminescence creeping back along the walls. The hum returns. Emery feels it settle into his jaw, his chest.
Hask's shadow is doing something strange again.
It stretches ahead of them in the thin blue glow, longer than it should be, and occasionally it moves independently, a subtle shift to the left when Hask moves to the right, a pooling in a corner they have already passed, the shadow checking behind them with a diligence that borders on paranoia.
Emery watches it from the corner of his eye and does not comment, because commenting would invite an explanation he is not sure he is ready for.
They reach the compound. The iron door opens. The warmth inside is immediate and welcome, and Emery breathes it in and hates how much it feels as though he is coming home, because home is a word that does not belong to him and borrowing it will only make the eventual return more painful.
Later in the evening, Emery plays cards with Sera in the common room.
She is sharp-tempered and quick-fingered and cheats with a brazenness that Emery finds oddly endearing, because she does not bother to hide it and seems to consider the hiding unnecessary.
He calls her on it. She shrugs and says if he can spot the cheat he deserves the hand, and if he can't then she deserves the pot, and either way the system works.
He concedes the logic and loses three rounds of copper before he starts cheating back, at which point Sera grins at him with the first genuine approval he has seen from her and says he might be alright after all.
Tessa joins them partway through and deals herself in without asking, and the conversation shifts to the kind of easy, unstructured talk that happens between people who have spent their lives in the Underground and share a common vocabulary of experience.
They do not ask Emery about his past. They do not ask him where he came from or why he is here or what his relationship to their boss is, because these are not the kinds of questions that people in the Underground ask each other, not because they are not curious but because they understand, innately and without having to be told, that the past is a private country and trespassing without invitation is a good way to get knifed.
They talk about the operation instead, obliquely, in the way that people who work in Bastian's line discuss upcoming violence: with the casual detachment of professionals and the underlying tension of people who know that plans, no matter how carefully laid, have a tendency to develop opinions of their own once they make contact with reality.
Tessa says she has been running supply routes through the eastern tunnels and that Sander's disruptions have made the work twice as difficult and three times as dangerous.
Sera says the message networks have been compromised in three districts and that she has been running herself ragged rerouting communications through back channels.
Neither of them complains. They state facts and adjust and move on, and Emery sees in them the same pragmatic resilience he has built his own life on, the understanding that the world is not going to become easier, so you might as well become harder.