Chapter 10 #3
The dagger stills. Hask looks up. His pale eyes move across Emery's face with the careful attention of reading a document for information the author did not intend to include, and whatever he finds there he files away without comment.
He stands, pulls the dagger from the table with a smooth, practiced motion, and sheathes it.
He leads Emery to a quiet hallway behind the kitchens, a narrow corridor that smells of cooking grease and lamp oil and is far enough from the main floor that their voices will not carry.
They stand across from each other in the close space, Hask leaning against one wall and Emery against the other, and Emery gives him the full report.
The names. The references to supply routes and territory.
The invitation to meet the boss. The timeline.
Hask listens without interrupting. When Emery finishes, he nods once.
"I'll relay it to Bastian."
"Good."
A pause. Hask's eyes move over Emery's face again, that careful reading, and then he says: "It is not safe for you to stay at the Hollow alone tonight. In case they come back."
The words are reasonable. The tone is measured. The logic is sound. Emery's reaction to all three of these things is immediate, visceral, and entirely disproportionate.
"I am not Bastian's lackey," he says. The words come out harder than he intends, sharpened by nights of unwanted hands and the slow accumulation of being managed, directed, positioned on a game board, no matter how kindly the hand that moves him. "And I am not his kept pet."
Hask holds up both hands, palms out, the universal gesture of I am not the enemy here and I would appreciate it if you stopped aiming at me.
"You are neither of those things," he agrees, and his voice carries the patience of having been on the receiving end of misplaced anger before and having learned that the most effective response is to let it pass through rather than deflect it.
"But a dangerous crime lord is actively hunting you, and you might not want to sleep with one eye open indefinitely. "
The corridor is quiet. The sounds from the main floor are muffled and distant, the pulse of music and the murmur of voices reduced to a texture rather than a sound.
Emery leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes and breathes, and the anger drains out of him the way it always does, quickly, completely, leaving behind the hollow, tired thing that lives underneath it.
Hask is right. He is right and Emery knows he is right and the knowing makes it worse because it means that the person he is actually angry at is himself, for needing protection, for accepting it, for the slow and terrifying slide from independence into something that has other people's fingerprints on it.
He built his entire life around not needing anyone.
The structure of that life was simple and clean and kept him alive for twenty-five years, and now the walls are developing cracks that he cannot patch because the cracks are shaped like people, Bastian, Hask, Avery, and people are not the kind of damage you can fix with stubbornness and silence.
He opens his eyes. Hask is watching him with an expression that is impossible to read below the mask but that, above it, in the pale strange eyes, carries something that might be understanding.
"Fine," Emery says.
Hask inclines his head and pushes off the wall, and they leave the Hollow together through the back entrance, into the dark of the corridor beyond, and Emery follows him back toward the compound through the lamplit tunnels and does not speak, and Hask does not press him to, and the silence between them has the quality of two people who understand that some things do not need to be said to be acknowledged.
The walk back is longer than the walk there, or perhaps it only feels that way because the night has settled into Emery's bones and made everything heavier.
The upper Underground thins as they descend, the crowded corridors and leaning structures giving way to older, quieter passages where the lamplight grows sparse and the stone reasserts itself.
The vendor stalls are shuttered. The children are asleep, presumably, in whatever carved-out nooks their parents call home.
A drunk sits against a wall near a junction, singing something off-key and mournful in a language Emery does not recognize, and Hask steps around him without looking down and Emery follows.
They pass through the transitional layer where the upper Underground bleeds into the Depths, and Emery feels the shift again, the hum returning to the stone, the air thickening, the bioluminescence creeping back along the walls.
The temperature drops. It always drops in the Depths, though Emery is not sure whether that is geology or magic or the ambient presence of whatever lives in the deep places that no one talks about except in warnings.