What Remains
OLIVER
Winning left Oliver cold, wet, and under arrest in three different administrative senses.
Only one appeared personal. Lieutenant Commander Venn had placed Halvek under naval guard, Anchor House under quarantine seizure, and Oliver under what she called continued witness availability.
Kelm insisted the third category had been invented because Venn enjoyed preventing ships from leaving.
Venn had informed him customs law had produced far worse inventions without her assistance.
Oliver believed both of them. By dawn, Saint Orra had acquired another field ward.
The old chapel held the survivors brought up from Anchor House and two naval engineers who had discovered, with professional disappointment, that ancient stone did not become less heavy merely because it was historically interesting.
The laundry gallery still housed civilians awaiting transfer inland.
Halvek occupied the quarantine surgery beneath three armed guards because Venn had decided a bullet through the shoulder did not qualify him for privacy.
Somewhere beyond the southern wall, the sea continued filling the lower rooms of Anchor House as though the building had finally remembered what coastline meant.
Oliver sat on the steps outside the old signal office wrapped in a wool blanket that smelled faintly of vinegar.
He was beginning to resent vinegar personally.
His ribs hurt. His right hand had stiffened inside its bandage.
A headache lived behind his left eye with the patient confidence of something paying rent.
None of those things frightened him as much as the shadow beneath his feet.
The nearest lamp stood on the wall to his right. His shadow fell directly forward. It had been doing that for several minutes. Oliver lifted his right hand.
The darkness tightened before his fingers completed the movement. He stopped. The shadow stopped. He let the hand fall.
The darkness loosened around his boots.
"Do that again."
Marin's voice came from above him. Oliver looked over his shoulder.
She descended the signal-office stairs carrying two tin cups and wearing the same coat she had worn out of Anchor House.
Someone had cleaned the blood from the collar without improving the coat.
Her left palm had been freshly wrapped. A bruise darkened one cheek where Seraphine had struck her during the fight.
Oliver had noticed both injuries repeatedly and had succeeded in not becoming unbearable about either for nearly fourteen minutes. He considered this evidence of growth. Marin stopped beside him.
"The hand."
"You could at least pretend you came bearing coffee out of affection."
"I came bearing coffee because you become philosophically unstable before breakfast."
"Affection, then."
She handed him a cup. Oliver smelled it.
"What crime did the beans commit?"
"Drink."
He did. The coffee was terrible. Bhodi liked it.
The realization arrived without language.
Bitter heat crossed Oliver's tongue, his own dislike following immediately, and beneath both came another shape of attention.
Not pleasure exactly. Interest. The bitterness became more vivid because he had reacted to it.
Oliver nearly spat the mouthful onto the stones. Marin saw his face.
"What?"
He stared into the cup. Steam moved between them.
"It liked that."
Marin did not look at his shadow first. He appreciated her for that.
"Bhodi."
"Probably."
"Probably?"
Oliver took another, smaller sip. Bitter. Warm. Offensive.
His. Then the faint pressure beneath the sensation, attending to the dislike because the dislike belonged to him.
"Or I disliked it," he said, "and felt something become interested in the fact."
Marin lowered herself beside him and warmed both hands around her cup. She did not take his away.
"Can you distinguish its attention from your own?"
"Sometimes. Direction, perhaps. No words. No command."
"Compulsion?"
Oliver watched early light collect over the broken Cut. Water moved through the ruined gate in long black seams, carrying splinters from something the tide had decided no longer belonged to Saint Orra.
"No more than wanting normally compels me, which is unfortunately not a small category."
"That is not reassuring."
"I have never advertised myself as reassuring." The joke arrived by habit and died when Marin kept looking at him. Oliver let the truth stand without decoration. "No. I do not feel commanded."
Her thumb moved once against the tin rim. "Can it move your body?"
"No."
"Alter sensation? Create appetite or preference?"
He looked at the coffee again. There was a useful cruelty in her grouping the questions together. Bhodi did not need to make bitterness taste sweet to change him. It would be enough if the attention made Oliver care about a bitterness he would otherwise have forgotten.
"I don't know."
Marin accepted the limit without turning it into an emergency. Her gaze moved instead to his bandaged hand, which gave Oliver permission to retaliate. He nodded toward hers. "Your palm."
"Stitched. Painful when flexed. Functional."
"And your cheek?"
"Bruised." She looked at his ribs. "Yours."
"Attached."
"Oliver."
He surrendered with poor grace. "Bruised. The physician found no new fracture."
"The physician who met you while conscious?"
"An avoidable methodological flaw."
Marin's mouth moved. A small thing. Enough. Footsteps sounded from the signal office.
Seraphine stopped at the top of the stair. She had changed into dry clothes borrowed from someone broader through the shoulders. The sleeves had been turned twice at the wrist. Damp silver hair lay against her neck. For once she did not pretend coincidence had brought her there.
Her eyes went first to Oliver. Then Marin. Then the bruise on Marin's cheek.
"May I sit?"
Oliver looked at the wide stone step below him.
"It remains public property."
Seraphine descended. She did not take the place beside him. She sat one step lower, leaving an arm's length of empty stone between them. Oliver noticed. Bhodi noticed him noticing.
That had become one of the morning's less welcome patterns. Seraphine folded her hands.
"Halvek's field case came up from Anchor House."
Marin straightened.
"Intact?"
"No."
The answer changed the air around Marin more effectively than danger.
"How bad?"
"Half submerged. One inner compartment stayed mostly dry. The rest is soaked. Pell says several inks are already bleeding."
Marin stood. Oliver stared at his coffee.
"We are being summoned by dying paperwork."
"Apparently."
"Father would be delighted."
Seraphine's face changed. Oliver regretted the line just enough to resent regretting it. She rose.
"Venn has sailors separating the pages."
"Where?"
"Old plague intake."
Marin started up the steps. Oliver remained seated. Seraphine waited. He looked at her.
"About last night."
Her shoulders tightened.
"I am sorry."
Too fast. The apology arrived prepared. Oliver disliked it immediately.
"For which part?"
Seraphine's gaze went to Marin's cheek again.
"Several."
"Choose one."
Marin stopped three steps above them. She did not intervene. Seraphine breathed through her nose.
"For deciding my fear gave me authority over your choice."
Seraphine left no defense attached. Oliver looked down at the black coffee. Bhodi gathered faintly at the cup's shadow.
"That one will do."
Pain moved through Seraphine's expression. Oliver let it. Then added, "For now." She nodded.
Nothing repaired itself. He had grown suspicious of anything that repaired too quickly. A bell rang from the lower ward. Once.
Twice. Then a third time. Not alarm. Medical summons.
Kelm appeared beneath the arcade, coat open and hair still wet from Anchor House.
"Hawkins."
Oliver closed his eyes.
"Everyone knows my name this morning."
"The thing downstairs won't eat."
Marin looked toward the lower isolation house.
"The Maw?"
Kelm's mouth tightened.
"Physician wants someone who has seen its Hollowfang feeding records."
Marin changed direction immediately. Venn could lose paperwork without her for another five minutes. Oliver stood. His ribs objected.
The shadow rose with him. Seraphine saw it.
Her face tightened and, for once, she let the reaction end there.
They crossed Saint Orra while morning assembled around catastrophe.
Two cooks carried soup toward the chapel.
A naval rating hauled three baskets of clean linen past a customs officer using the ruined fountain basin as a desk.
Children from the western annex had discovered that blue evacuation flags could be tied into a rope and were being prevented from strangling one another with it by a woman Oliver vaguely remembered threatening someone with a pigeon.
A carpenter hammered boards over a broken gallery window. Nobody stopped because the occult research program had suffered a setback. Oliver found the competence almost indecently comforting. The Maw occupied the old stone isolation house below the quarantine terraces.
Someone had opened every exterior shutter.
Cold sea air moved through the room. The creature lay on its side behind an iron inner gate, enormous body curved beneath a sailcloth blanket.
Most of the restraint cradle had been dismantled.
One loose cuff remained around an ankle because the quarantine physician had not yet decided whether removing it was kinder than forcing the creature to tolerate another person close to its feet.
The physician was a narrow woman in her sixties with white hair braided tightly beneath a cloth cap. She held a bowl. The Maw ignored her.
"Excellent," she said when Marin entered. "People with opinions."
"I have several," Oliver offered.
"I wasn't asking you."
He liked her immediately. Marin went to the gate.
"What has it taken?"
"Water."
"Food?"
"Yesterday, broth twice. Meat once. Refused grain mash. This morning it refuses everything."
"Vomiting?"
"No."
"Temperature?"