Chapter 16 #2
They are led to a carriage waiting in a side corridor off the main junction.
It is nondescript, dark wood, curtained windows, drawn by a pair of draft horses that look underfed and overworked, and a driver sits on the bench with the hunched posture of not asking questions and not wanting to know the answers.
Brennan opens the door and gestures them inside with a gallantry that would be comical if it were not revolting.
The windows are dark. Heavy curtains, pulled tight, blocking any view of the route they will take. Standard precaution for a paranoid man who has survived this long by ensuring that the people he invites into his space cannot find their way back uninvited.
Brennan and Royce ride on the outside, Brennan on the bench beside the driver, Royce on a running board at the rear, which gives Emery and Avery a moment alone before everything happens.
The carriage lurches into motion. The wheels rattle on the stone floor, and the sound echoes off the tunnel walls and settles into the rhythm of travel, and Emery leans back against the bench seat and lets out a breath he has been holding since the toll bridge.
The interior of the carriage is small and close and smells of leather and lamp oil and something underneath, something musty and organic, the smell of a vehicle that has transported things other than willing passengers.
Emery files this away without comment. The lamp hanging from a hook on the ceiling swings with the carriage's movement, casting shadows that shift and sway, and in the moving light Avery's face is a study in controlled composure.
"How do you stomach it?" Avery asks. His voice is low, pitched below the noise of the wheels and the hooves and the rattling of the carriage frame.
He is looking at his hands, which are resting on his knees, and the bangles on his wrists catch the lamplight.
"A week of letting those neanderthals touch you. "
Emery is quiet for a moment. The question is honest, which means it deserves an honest answer, and honest answers are the currency he has been learning to spend in the company of people who handle his honesty with care.
"It used to be easier," he says.
There is a pause. The carriage rocks. The lamp swings. Avery looks at him with the attention of having heard the space between the words and knowing exactly what lives there.
"You mean before Bastian," Avery says.
Emery purses his lips. He thinks about not answering.
He thinks about deflecting, or joking, or changing the subject, or deploying any of the dozen conversational techniques he has developed for the specific purpose of avoiding exactly this kind of vulnerability.
He does none of these things. He is sitting in a dark carriage heading toward a man who wants him dead, beside someone who has volunteered to fight beside him, and the circumstances do not lend themselves to deflection.
"Yes," he says. "Because of Bastian."
The admission is simple and it is enormous and it costs him something he cannot quantify, some portion of the armor that he has been wearing so long it has fused with his skin, and peeling it away leaves raw places that the air stings.
Avery nods. He does not flinch from the admission and does not inflate it. He receives it the way Bastian receives Emery's truths: quietly, completely, without judgment and without advice.
"I've been with Bastian for four years," Avery says. His voice is measured but not guarded, choosing to share something because he believes the sharing serves a purpose. "I've never seen him keep a lover. Take them, yes. But never keep them."
Emery is quiet. The carriage rattles on.
He thinks about the word keep and the weight of it and the way it sounds different when applied to a person than when applied to an object, and the difference is the distance between ownership and choice, and he thinks about Bastian saying you can leave, you can stay, I will not chase you if you do not want to be chased, and the saying was the opposite of keeping.
The saying was the deliberate, painful, necessary act of opening a hand and trusting what was in it to stay.
"I kind of got that," Emery says. He inhales, and the breath rattles slightly in his chest, and the rattling is the sound of something loosening that has been tight for a very long time. "It goes both ways. I've never had anyone either. I've never wanted to be kept."
The past tense of wanted hangs in the air between them, carrying the implicit present tense that Emery does not say: until now.
Avery hears it. Emery can see him hear it, in the slight softening of his expression, the way his dark eyes warm with something that is not pity but kinship, the recognition of one starving person by another.
Emery inhales sharply and shakes his head, a small, self-conscious gesture. "I have sort of guessed that, based on your looks and your skills, you've probably spent your life a lot the way I have."
Avery is quiet for a long moment. The carriage takes a turn, the wheels grinding against stone, and the shift in direction sends the hanging lamp into a wider arc.
In its moving light, Avery's face passes through shadow and illumination, and in the shadow he looks older, the fine bones of his face sharper, the softness of his features replaced by something leaner and more honest.
"I did a lot of things I wished I hadn't had to," Avery says.
"Before Bastian took me in. I sold myself however I could to keep myself fed and I'm not proud of any of it.
" He pauses. His fingers find a bangle on his wrist and turn it, once, twice, the unconscious motion of touching a familiar object for grounding.
"Bastian saw me for who I am, not who I was. That meant everything to me."
The words are simple and they land with the weight of a truth that has been lived rather than constructed, and Emery receives them and holds them and adds them to the growing collection of evidence that the people in Bastian's compound are not there because they were recruited or conscripted or threatened into service.
They are there because someone saw them, the actual them, and said stay.
And the staying was a choice, and the choice was honored, and the honoring created the kind of loyalty that does not break under pressure because it was not built from pressure in the first place.
Emery watches Avery's profile in the lamplight and asks the question he has been carrying since the Hollow, since the night Hask would not look at Avery and Avery's cheeks turned pink and the space between them hummed with something neither of them would name.
"What about Hask?" Emery asks.
Avery hesitates. The hesitation is brief but complete, a full-body stillness that lasts less than a second and says more than an hour of conversation would. His fingers stop turning the bangle. His jaw tightens.
"What about him?" Avery asks, and his voice is careful in the way that a locked door is careful, functional, deliberate, designed to keep something in rather than something out.
Emery turns to look at him. He raises an eyebrow. The expression is not pushy. It is patient, and knowing, and carrying the gentleness of recognizing the thing being locked away because he has his own version of it, and the recognition is not judgment but solidarity.
Avery looks at his lap. He does not answer.
The silence stretches. The carriage rocks.
The lamp swings. Outside, the muffled sounds of the Underground filter through the curtained windows, distant voices, the echo of other wheels on stone, the ambient hum of the Depths growing fainter as they move through what Emery estimates is the upper level of the tunnel system.
After a few minutes, the silence between them shifts.
The weight lifts, not completely but enough, and the air in the carriage becomes something they can both breathe again.
The moment has passed. The unspoken thing has been acknowledged without being dragged into the light, and the acknowledgment is its own kind of intimacy.
"The moment Sander sees my face," Emery says, turning to the practical because the practical is the ground they both stand on most securely, "the charade is up.
He knows what I look like. He had me in that room on my knees.
He's not going to see a dancer. He's going to see the assassin who failed to kill Bastian and then stabbed a letter opener through one of his men's eyes. "
Avery lifts his head. The operational shift settles over him, his posture straightening, his expression sharpening, the dancer dissolving into the operative with the practiced ease of switching between versions of himself for as long as Emery has.
"Then we only need to buy enough time for you to put a blade in his ribs," Avery says. His voice is steady, the emotion of the previous minutes filed away in whatever locked room he keeps it in, and the steadiness is professional and absolute. "Bastian's crew can finish the rest of the riffraff."
Emery huffs out a laugh. The sound is genuine, surprised out of him by the pragmatic economy of Avery's assessment, and the laughing feels good the way all real laughing feels good, a release, a loosening, a momentary reprieve from the weight of what is coming.
"The best laid plans," Emery says.
Avery laughs too. It is a brief, warm sound that fills the small space of the carriage and makes it feel, for one moment, less a vehicle carrying them toward violence and more a shared space between two people who have found, against all odds and in defiance of all their respective instincts for self-preservation, that they trust each other.