Chapter 13 #2
He does not go to his room. He runs down the hall and past the closed doors and around the corner and through the common room and out the door and into the dark, because he does not know what the consequences of stabbing one of Bastian's crew are and he is not going to wait around to find out.
The thought process is simple, and fast, and driven by the part of his brain that has kept him alive for twenty-five years: he has just injured one of Bastian's people, one of his own.
However justified, however warranted, however much Fredan deserved the blade and more, the fact remains that Emery is a guest in this compound, an outsider, a former assassin, a man who was literally sent here to kill the boss, and he has drawn blood.
The calculus is not complicated. Loyalty is the currency in Bastian's world, and Fredan, for all his faults, has been part of Bastian's crew for longer than Emery has been alive in any version of this arrangement.
If Bastian has to choose between a man who has served him for years and a man who has been sleeping in his bed for weeks, the choice is obvious.
The choice is always obvious. Emery has been the one who gets discarded in every configuration of this equation his life has ever produced, and the pattern is so consistent that expecting a different outcome would be not just naive but delusional.
He runs.
The compound door closes behind him and the Depths open up ahead, dark, humming, indifferent, and Emery moves through them on bare feet and instinct, navigating by the bioluminescence on the walls and the memory of the route he has walked with Hask enough times now to retrace without a guide.
The stone is cold beneath his feet. The air is thick with the low, ambient vibration that lives in the deep places, pressing against his skin, and Emery pushes through it and does not slow down.
He does not think about Bastian's room. He does not think about the bearskin rug and the fire and the singing and the way Bastian said you are not a whim with the calm, absolute conviction of meaning it down to the marrow of his bones.
He does not think about any of it because thinking about it now, while he is running through the dark with an empty hand where his dagger should be and the imprint of Fredan's fingers on his throat, would break something inside him that he cannot afford to have broken.
He has survived twenty-five years by not breaking. He can survive this too.
The Depths give way to the upper Underground.
The lamps return. The corridors widen. People appear, late-night vendors, drunks, a pair of women arguing in a language Emery does not recognize, and Emery moves through them, bare feet silent on the stone, his face blank and his body coiled and the bruise forming on his throat hidden by the collar of his shirt that he pulls up without thinking, the automatic gesture of years spent hiding evidence of other people's violence on his body.
He makes it to the Hollow.
Vella opens the door.
She is still dressed, which means she was still working, which means the Hollow is still turning over the last of the night's business.
She takes one look at Emery, barefoot, breathing hard, his hair wild and his eyes carrying the brightness of running on adrenaline with a crash imminent, and she steps aside without a word.
She does not ask questions.
This is one of the things Emery has come to appreciate about her, one of the things that makes the Hollow something more than just a brothel to him.
Vella has the instincts of decades spent managing people in crisis, and her instincts tell her that the person standing in her doorway needs a warm meal and a locked door and the mercy of not being asked to explain himself, and she provides all three with the serene efficiency of considering this a basic function of her role rather than an extraordinary act of kindness.
She gives him his old room. The bed is made.
The lamp is lit. A tray appears, bread, cheese, a bowl of broth that is hot enough to steam, and Emery sits on the edge of the bed and eats mechanically, without tasting, because his body needs fuel and his body is the part of him that still functions when the rest of him has gone somewhere he cannot follow.
He is back where he started.
The thought arrives with the heavy, inevitable finality of a stone dropping into water.
He is back where he started. He did not kill Bastian.
He did not kill Sander. At least one of those men wants him dead.
He is sitting on a rented bed in a brothel in the Underground with no dagger and no plan and no one who is going to come looking for him, because the person who might come looking for him is the person he just ran from, and the running was not rational, it was reflex, the deep, ingrained, bone-level reflex of leaving before you are left.
He finishes the broth. He sets the bowl aside.
He lies down on the bed and pulls the blanket over himself and stares at the ceiling, which is draped in fabric the way all the Hollow's ceilings are, dark cloth with small glass beads sewn into it that catch the lamplight and scatter it in pinpoints, a cheap approximation of stars for people who live too deep to see the real ones.
It takes him a long time to fall asleep.
When he does, he dreams of dark skin and white hair and a voice low and vast, carrying the ache of something calling to him from a distance he has created himself and does not know how to close.
***
The next day he dresses and gets back to work.
The routine is the same. The bangles, the low-slung trousers, the bare skin, the earrings.
He pulls his long hair back and looks at himself in the mirror and sees the bruise on his throat, purple and finger-shaped and vivid against his pale skin, and he adjusts the fall of his hair to cover it and does not look at it again.
Even if Bastian sees him as a traitor now, he is still going to finish the contract.
Not Bastian's contract. Bastian is not a contract.
Bastian is a catastrophe that Emery walked into with his eyes open and his arms down, but the one that led him here.
Sander is still alive. Sander's men are still looking for him.
The operation is still in play, even if Emery has removed himself from the team that was supposed to execute it, and Emery has never given up on a token.
The guild taught him that. The guild taught him that a job taken is a job finished and that the only thing worse than a dead assassin is a failed one, and Emery is not dead and he is not failed and he is not going to start being either just because his personal life has become a disaster of a complexity that would be impressive if he were not the one living through it.
He goes to work.
The night comes slowly. The Hollow fills and empties in the rhythm Emery knows, the early crowd of curious newcomers and lonely merchants giving way to the later crowd of regulars and serious spenders who know what they want and are willing to pay for the privilege of getting it.
Emery dances. He moves through the room on practiced feet, lets the music carry his body through the shapes it has learned, and the shapes are the same as they have always been but the body performing them is different in a way he cannot quite articulate.
He is sharper. More precise. More present in his movements and less present in his performance, the part of him that used to smoothly disconnect from the work having been dented, not destroyed, but damaged, a mechanism that still functions but no longer functions quietly.
Sander's men do not show.
He is between sets, crossing the floor with a drink he does not intend to finish, when he sees white hair against dark clothes.
His feet stop moving. His heart, which has been behaving itself with reasonable discipline for the past several hours, abandons all pretense of professionalism and begins hammering against his ribs with the frantic urgency of something trying to escape.
Bastian is sitting at a table near the back of the room.
A drink is in front of him that he is not touching.
He is alone, no Hask, no crew, no formation, no entourage, and the aloneness of him is significant in a way that Emery does not have the bandwidth to fully process but registers instinctively, because Bastian does not go places alone.
Bastian goes places with Hask, or with his crew, or at the very least with the ambient understanding that his people are nearby and watching.
The fact that he is here, by himself, in a brothel in the upper Underground, with an untouched drink and his dark eyes scanning the room, means something.
It means he came here for a reason and the reason is not the drink.
He is looking at Emery.
Emery considers running. The thought is there, quick, automatic, the same reflex that carried him out of the compound last night, and it fires through his nervous system and reaches his legs before his brain catches up and tells his legs to stay where they are.
He does not want to run. The realization is surprising in its clarity.
He does not want to run from this man. He has been running from everything and everyone for his entire life and this is the first time his body has told him to stop, and the stopping is not resignation.
It is choice. It is the most deliberate, conscious, terrifying choice he has ever made.
He crosses the room.