Never Grow Smaller #3
Oliver picked it up. Corrections filled the margins. Questions. One dry insult directed at an author who had confused confidence with evidence. He smiled before he meant to. The note sounded exactly like her.
Oliver read it again and closed the book.
"Marin?"
No answer. The room held everything she left behind. Her coat, her knife, her handwriting, the hollow in the mattress where she had slept. Oliver turned. His counterpart stood in the doorway.
"Where is she?"
The answer reached him more as certainty than language.
Here.
Oliver's smile disappeared.
"No."
The mask waited.
"You have her coat. You know her handwriting. You know how she takes tea, which side of a room she'll choose, where she puts a knife when she sleeps."
The dark at the man's feet thickened. Oliver stepped closer.
"What does she want?"
Nothing came back. A long, exquisite nothing. Oliver laughed under his breath, without triumph.
"You can't give me that."
The mask's face remained Oliver's. Beautiful. Patient. Almost affectionate if Oliver became careless enough to promote familiarity into feeling. He walked past it. Downstairs, the party continued at three seventeen.
The card cheat won another hand. The pianist had begun another song. The wounded sailor laughed with both shoulders whole. The black cylinder waited on the bar. Oliver rested both hands beside it.
He wanted to open it again. Recognition of the flaw had not killed the desire. If it had, the entire exercise would have become disappointingly simple. This thing knew him better than that.
It knew how deeply he resented people who treated appetite as evidence of immaturity.
It knew how often responsibility arrived disguised as someone else's demand that he become quieter, safer and easier to predict.
It knew how fiercely he protected the part of himself that still loved locked doors, dangerous water, beautiful strangers, forbidden questions and the first glimpse of a coastline he had never seen.
Oliver had no intention of surrendering those things because adulthood preferred men whose appetites could be scheduled. The black cylinder gleamed beneath his hand. He picked it up.
"Yes."
The shadow at his feet deepened. Oliver turned the brass between his fingers.
"I want this."
The room seemed to listen.
"I want the clue. The ruin. The part where the reasonable answer is apparently swimming through black water before breakfast."
Amusement touched him from somewhere close.
"I even want the version of me who still thinks that's an excellent idea."
The mask leaned against the bar. Oliver looked toward Golden Sands.
Gideon had once cared about payroll. His father had inspected rigging when captains reported trouble.
He had argued that a company profiting from risk had no right to become surprised by its consequences.
Oliver knew those things because parts of Golden Sands had survived him.
Then Seraphine vanished. There had been no single morning when Gideon became the man Oliver spent years resenting. Oliver could remember no declaration that wages, maintenance, friends or sleep had become beneath him.
Only more questions. More things that could not wait. More reasons to finish the ordinary work later. Oliver looked through the impossible doorway at Maeve. For the first time he wondered how pleasant each postponement might have felt from inside it.
His counterpart lifted the cylinder slightly.
Another?
Oliver looked at it. His body answered before judgment.
Yes.
He smiled. "Tomorrow."
The mask stilled. The harbor clock read three seventeen.
"Show me tomorrow."
The piano continued. Oliver waited. Nothing changed.
"Four in the morning, then."
A card struck the table.
"Breakfast."
Rain moved along the glass.
"Maeve discovering I forgot payroll."
The office remained bright and content.
"Someone furious with me because charm has failed to repair whatever I broke."
The mask watched him.
Oliver's smile sharpened. "Marin should be easy. She has extensive practice."
The shadow shifted.
"Show me the sailor after the rescue when he cannot sleep."
No answer.
"The capstan when someone finally puts load on it."
The room held.
"The widow when the money is actually gone."
Silence. Oliver set the cylinder down.
"Show me something after I stop finding it new."
The mask's expression altered by the smallest amount.
Oliver saw it. He felt no victory. He still wanted the next room.
The knowledge made his mouth dry. His counterpart remained behind the bar wearing the same face, the same curiosity and the same hunger for movement.
Here was an Oliver from whom every obligation capable of surviving long enough to become inconvenient had been removed.
No one had diminished him. Nothing had been allowed to keep him, either. Oliver did not yet know what to do with that distinction, and for once he resisted the urge to make it prettier.
The room went dark. Every lamp vanished at once. The piano ended between notes. Cold moved across Oliver's skin. Stars appeared where the ceiling had been. His shadow stood in front of him.
The borrowed clothes and familiar expressions were gone.
Only Oliver's outline remained, cut from darkness deeper than the space around it.
Attention gathered close. He thought of Corren's chart.
An afternoon preserved inside him long before the shadow on Saint Orra learned how to imitate Marin's hand.
"I don't know how you found that."
The shape leaned nearer. Oliver's pulse increased.
"But you did."
Pressure entered his chest.
Want.
It carried no command, only appetite recognizing appetite. Fear came first. Something warmer followed.
Oliver's mouth curved. "You really do have terrible taste."
The darkness pressed closer. Oliver woke.
Saint Orra returned by degrees. Cold stone.
Old medicine. Rainwater ticking from an eave.
Boots in the corridor. Someone downstairs dropped metal and swore, and a second voice informed him naval property deserved greater respect.
An argument immediately began over whether seized Hollowfang equipment qualified as naval property merely because someone had recently put a seal on it.
Oliver smiled into the pillow. His right hand hurt. His ribs hurt when he breathed too deeply. His body had remembered yesterday.
Marin slept beside him with one side of her face pressed into the pillow, dark hair across her cheek and the wrapped left hand curled near her mouth. At some point during the night she had taken most of the blanket and left Oliver enough fabric to qualify as a legal defense rather than warmth.
He watched her. Nothing about Marin was available merely because he wanted her.
In perhaps an hour she would wake, inspect his hand without admitting she was inspecting it, remember three institutional crises, become irritated by something he had done and refuse at least one perfectly reasonable suggestion because it had come from him.
Oliver found the prospect deeply attractive. He also wanted the black cylinder. The ruin. The impossible grammar. Another room waiting behind the first before good sense could make curiosity respectable.
That desire had come back with him intact. Marin shifted without opening her eyes.
"You're staring."
"Impressive work for a sleeping woman."
"I have talents."
"So I've noticed."
One grey eye opened.
"How long have you been awake?"
"Unknown."
"Useful."
"You're becoming cruel."
"Bad dream?"
Oliver looked toward the floor. Morning light entered beneath the curtain at an angle that should have thrown his shadow toward the bed. The darkest part of it gathered near the door.
His amusement thinned.
"Interesting one."
Marin opened the other eye. Oliver would tell her, but the experience still felt too close to turn immediately into a clean account. He wanted one minute in which it could remain ugly, attractive and unresolved before language began pretending it understood what had happened.
Outside, Saint Orra's bell rang for morning custody. Four strokes. Another four answered from the pier. Marin followed his attention toward the floor. She saw the shadow by the door.
Her expression sharpened. Oliver listened until the final bell faded. Time moved on without asking whether he had finished with the night. The shadow did not.