Shadows on the Wall

by Mithrigil

Summary:

Notkin and Khan stopped playing with dolls long ago.

Didn't they?

Notes:

Illustrated by the amazing Domirine - thank you dearly for bringing this vision from our imagination to the silver screen!

*

The dream threw him out. The floor of the Polyhedron was papery and cold, and Notkin’s palms left prints on it, big primitive ones built entirely of his own sweat.

He needed to leave. Now. He couldn’t get to his feet fast enough, or up the stairs fast enough, or past the sentries fast enough to –

“Something got you spooked?” Khan asked.

Notkin froze with most of his weight on one leg. Of course Khan was at the entrance. The exit, now. Notkin at least had the excuse of having to adjust his stance so that he didn’t have to turn around. Didn’t have to look at him. Didn’t have to show him.

“I need some air,” he said. Not going to answer you, that meant.

The cool shadow at his back nodded, tangibly, because they were still inside the Polyhedron and the absence of light had mass. A hand reached out to clasp Notkin’s upper arm; looking down at the loose, pale, scar-less fingers, yes, it was Khan’s. He knew those hands well. Too well. Not well enough.

“I’ll walk with you,” Khan said. Low. Gentle, but still a proclamation. A command.

Before Notkin could stop himself, he said, “Please, don’t.”

For the next several months, Notkin would ask himself, nightly, if he’d take those words back if he could. As world-ending proclamations went, please, don’t seemed petty and stupid. Small words. Plain words. They opened the door to a fight that would have shaken the foundations of the Polyhedron if it actually had foundations, if it wasn’t a hovering abomination of blueprints and starstuff. Khan hated those words. That was just common sense. Khan hated the idea that someone had to ask, had the nerve to ask, had the possibility of saying no. He hated the idea that something was prohibited, impossible, taboo. He hated that someone, somewhere, wasn’t just capable of denying his authority, but capable of asking him to deny it himself. Those words must have hurt Khan even more than the violence that followed.

And when Notkin replayed that memory like prayer every night, he decided that please and don’t were the most important words in the world.

*

Notkin used to dream such simple things.

He’d be out in the Steppe, loading the guns while dad and grandpa shot geese. He could kneel in the grass and not hurt when he got up. Mama was there too. She always looked a little different, since he’d never seen a picture of her. Dawn would come, all slow and golden, and the geese would fly in formation that was perfect until bang!, grandpa would nail one on the very first shot, and that was dinner enough for the four of them. Sometimes it fell to the earth already plucked and cooked. Everyone ate. Everyone smiled.

Hunger would wake him, eventually.

Out here, when he slept, he didn't dream at all. Or at least, if he did, he didn’t remember where they took him. Old Man Burakh said that’s because he didn’t sleep enough.

“I slept plenty when I was up there,” Notkin said to him, hands folded around a cup of herbal tea with too much milk and flower bits still floating on the top. “Maybe I’m awaking up for lost time.”

Old Man Burakh laughed with his mouth shut, a little rumble that shook his jowls. He set down a saucer of milk for Jester on the floor and then coiled himself into the creaky parlor armchair. “Maybe,” he agreed. “Have there been any other developments?”

“No,” Notkin admitted. He tried not to lie as a general rule, but he never lied here. “No, I haven’t felt...like I’ve been pushed. I think he’s just not thinking of me. Or if he is, it’s not me, not really.”

“You’ve know I’ve spoken to him as well, of course.”

Notkin fought down the swell of betrayal in his chest like a fish swimming up the Gorkhon. “But he hasn’t spoken to you?”

Old Man Burakh shook his head and sipped his tea. “He comes only to listen.”

“That’s like him.” Notkin’s murky reflection in the teacup looked angrier than he meant it to, so he drank it away. “Know thine enemy.”

“I’m not his enemy, and neither are you.”

“Tell that to the Dogheads who broke my leg.”

“I will, if they come here. But of them, only Khan does. I want you to consider that, Notkin. He may not have anything to say to me yet, but he does come here.”

Notkin drank more tea, then set it down, and reached down to absently run his hand over Jester’s bristling back. The saucer was already empty.

*

Six months later, Old Man Burakh was dead, and two weeks after that, almost everyone else was too.

Notkin was one of only two people in the Town to have caught the Sand Pest twice and lived twice. The other was Burakh’s son. Burakh’s son who wasted precious powder on Notkin before there was even a cure and then came back to heal him again with the living blood of the earth. He stayed only long enough to make sure it would work before he had to head out to the Nutshell because Khan had come down with it too, just the once.

Still reeling and weak from exhaustion and pain, Notkin had staggered after Burakh the Younger – Burakh the Only, now – and grabbed him by the pocket of his leather smock. The bandages slipped and wrinkled in his palm. “Why me?” he asked. “Why bother with me?”

“You started healing this town before I even got here,” Burakh said, a soft subterranean quake that felt like a smile. “It needs you just as much as it needs me.”

“Khan more,” Notkin said, stupidly. “It needs him more. And Capella most of all. Why me?”

“Because I want to,” Burakh said, like it was the easiest thing in the world. “I want you to live. Is that so hard to believe, kid?”

Notkin might have passed out, because he didn’t remember answering that.

But he wasn’t surprised when the Polyhedron fell and woke him up.

*

Khan wasn’t at the Nutshell, after. That was fine; Notkin had been prescribed long walks in clear air, exercise and space, and the air, while still fanged with the edge of twyre, was as clear as it ever got.

He wasn’t at the tombs either, by the time Notkin got there, when the sun had finally begun to set.

If Notkin knew anything at all about Caspar Kain, it was that he would never willingly walk through the doors of the Crucible. Which left him standing with his back to it, staring over the pile of rubble and across the Gorkhon like there was still something there to see. The cannonade hadn’t even left enough scraps to dam the river, and the low orange clouds of twilight caught on the stones of the pedestal, turning them to nearly a mirror. It still smelled of blood. The doubled light stretched Khan’s shadow out behind him, and Notkin was walking in it long before he could reach his rival’s side.

The Sand Pest had hit him hard, same as it had Notkin, and he’d been cured the same, but somehow Khan’s body still held the weakness he so hated. His dark hair was slick where it was shorn shortest, and the tendons in his neck stood out translucent where the sweat beaded above his open collar. He wasn’t scarred and pocked the way Notkin was, at least not anywhere over his clothes, but there was a new roughness to him, a chalkiness to his skin that made him look older. Worse, he was beautiful for it.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Khan, paradoxically, said.

“That’s fine,” Notkin said, settling in beside him. “You can listen, then.”

Khan didn’t tell him to clear out, so Notkin didn’t. He looked where Khan was looking, for a while, out into the middle distance, into the emptiness. He felt, intimately, inexorably, how close Khan was beside him, how tense his shoulders were, how tight his fists.

He didn’t question it. It felt real.

“I’m going to start working for the Olgimskys,” Notkin offered. “I’ll still have the Soul-and-a-Halves, but...there’s fewer of us now, because there’s fewer of everyone. I want to make the Town better, so I’m going to make sure all of my people have what they need to keep going. If that includes you, it includes you. You don’t have to turn to your family if you don’t want to. You have me if you need me.”

Khan shut his eyes, but otherwise didn’t move.

Jester stalked up ahead of Khan and sat between him and the pedestal, tail fanning against the cobblestone, so that he cast a shadow of his own that reached the tips of Khan’s shoes. “That goes for any of your men as well,” Notkin went on, beside him. He couldn’t help fidgeting with his collar. “Unless they do what Lika did, they’re welcome anywhere we are. I think you and I can agree that moving on is more important than anything else, right now. Too many people have been hurt, have gotten sick. And you...I’m glad you’re better too, but I know not everyone could stay inside. If you’ve lost anybody, I can help. I’d be happy to help.”

Khan kept his eyes shut, but they crinkled so tight that they almost had teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Notkin said, because it was true. “I know how much it mattered.”

“No, you don’t,” Khan said, which was also true.

Notkin looked at him sidelong, even if he wouldn’t look back. “Maybe I don’t,” he said, to be fair, “but it mattered to me too. But it’s not here anymore, so we have to move on. And I’ll help if you want it.”

Khan never said whether he did or not. In the end it didn’t matter, since Notkin just stood there until it got too cold and too dark, and Jester started heading home without him, so he had to follow.

*

When the trains started running again, Khan spent a lot of time at the Station. Notkin knew this because that’s where the Olgimskys posted him, when they figured out Notkin could remember where everything was supposed to go and count boxes better than anyone who was still alive enough to work for them, and if the numbers were wrong at the Station it meant fewer trips to the warehouses, fewer broken backs. Maybe if he were laboring harder, he’d sleep easier, but the work was good, and getting to keep an eye on Khan was...a bonus, he supposed.

For the first few weeks, Khan would just sit and stare down the tracks. He’d bring a book, a kerchief lunch, some blank paper, a cluster of nuts, and leave them forgotten at his right hand. Notkin would say hello or goodnight or looks like rain specifically to snap him out of it, then go back to work, because those boxes weren’t going to count themselves.

Capella said – because of course Notkin asked her – that it was fine. That Khan needed time, and something more than time, but that the magic of the Kains had crossed the river with them, that she couldn’t feel Nina or Simon encroaching on their scion. Depressed, not possessed. Notkin honestly thought possession might have been easier to fight.

That stacked up, though. Notkin hadn’t felt anyone at the edge of his dreams for months, now. Of course, that was because the Polyhedron was gone, but also because dreams...weren’t really something he was having.

Then, one hazy day in late spring, instead of a kerchief lunch, Khan brought a suitcase. A small one, like the Bachelor’s. Just small enough to not be sure if it was everything he needed for a week or everything he couldn’t afford to leave behind.

Notkin let his board clip and pencil fall almost out of his hands and bolted over, weaving through workers and under cargo and nearly off the edge of the loading dock. “You’re supposed to stay,” he said, because forget hello.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Capella does.”

“Not yet she doesn’t.”

“Have you even checked with her?”

“What do you even care?” Khan enunciated, eyes narrow, as sharp as his nose.

Notkin had stared down sharper. “You’re supposed to make this place better. That’s why you’re alive.”

“And you think I can’t do that from out there?”

“No, I don’t.”

The silence that followed was only between them; there were crews unloading, and whispers in the tall grass, and children playing not ten feet away, catching beetles and planning war. The clouds threatened rain, dust and cracked flowers kicking up in whorls and squalls. They’d stared down death together; they knew what it sounded like, and it wasn’t unlike this. Notkin, resolutely, did not shiver, because Khan’s clear blue eyes showed no fear either, and Notkin wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of baring his throat.

“I’ll come back,” Khan said. Like it was that simple.

Maybe to him, it was. “When?”

“Don’t know. Before the end of summer, I think, but other than that, I don’t know.”

Please, don’t, Notkin had said a year ago, when the Polyhedron still stood for him to leave it. Khan had been offering to walk with him, then; Notkin had needed to be alone, after what he’d dreamed, seen, done.

Notkin had to accept this. Practically, because the delivery team was calling him; every other reason, because it was Khan. “All right,” he said, not sure whether to nod or shake his head and winding up somewhere in between. “I’ll hold you to that.”

The numbers added up, and the train went back the way it came, with Khan somewhere inside it.

*

Despite the humid air and the persistent threat of rain, Notkin took the long way home that night, around the marsh instead of across the bridge, passing by Burakh’s workshop. Mud caked his boots, familiar and comfortable. Jester pounced on voles and crickets along the way, getting his paws just as filthy, like he had something to prove. Or maybe he was just trying to fill his belly, knowing it wouldn’t be pleasant for him outside soon.

Burakh’s Half was grazing too, it turned out. He loomed by the side of the building, head buried in the grass, tail swishing like a ticking clock. He looked up when Jester got too close, crushing a tuft of grass in his efforts to kill the bug somewhere in it. The bull pushed out with his nose; Jester didn’t flinch, so Notkin didn’t either. He even chanced a few steps closer, offering his knuckles the way he would to a smaller Half. That, the bull didn’t react to at all.

“Try singing,” Burakh said, behind him.

“No way,” Notkin laughed, to cover up how startled he was. Then again, Burakh’s preternatural ability to sneak up on people was well-documented. “No one wants to hear that.”

Burakh, chuckling, continued locking up the workshop. Notkin had never been inside, but of course he knew that there was priceless equipment down there, too big to move safely. He still had people patrol here sometimes, in exchange for Sticky fixing stuff up and Burakh fixing people up. Not that Burakh made people pay to get fixed up, but it made Notkin feel better, not taking something for nothing. Not anymore.

“You need something?” Burakh asked.

Notkin shook his head, or started to, but then Jester leapt up onto the bull’s horns, clambering a few times and leaving streaks of mud up the beast’s brow and then down its back where it sat. He sat imperiously in a plump pyramid between the bull’s shoulders, tail curled down for balance. The bull snorted but didn’t buck him off.

“Guess I do,” Notkin sighed.

“Come for supper,” Burakh said, nodding like it was that simple, pocketing his keys and already turning to the Town. Notkin followed him up the road, and Jester bounded down from the bull’s back and followed Notkin. But the bull rounded the other way, head bowed, with one long low of goodbye.

“You’re just leaving him?” he asked Burakh, incredulous.

“He doesn’t eat what we eat,” Burakh shrugged. “And he prefers it out here anyway.”

Notkin spared another glance over his shoulder, back at the workshop. The bull was gone.

“That obvious, huh,” he thought aloud.

But he tossed the revelation away, and trailed Burakh home. The man could cook, and his old man had known what to do for insomnia, so maybe the younger did too.

*

The panacea hadn’t been painless, and the plague had been terrible, but nothing Notkin had ever felt before or since compared to the powder. There was a word for thinking your body had been colonized by ants, but he’d forgotten it, and feeling was worse than knowing anyway. On the worst nights, he could follow its ghost under his skin, flashes of crackling heat followed by cold no blankets or socks could keep out. Every scar felt new.

It left echoes behind.

Burakh couldn’t help with this. He went through it too, he said. The best he could do was knock himself out when he absolutely had to, and unless this was an emergency the chemicals he used for it wouldn’t be safe until Notkin stopped growing. That was fair. So he’d grow.

Sticky, speaking in strict confidence, said that even if he knocked himself out, Burakh sometimes had nightmares of what he’d done to stay alive. Notkin understood that part as well. And that part of him was a little glad that he didn’t dream, now. The real world was hard enough to deal with, after all.

But lying awake...lying awake, in the afterimage of pain, he remembered when it had been painless. Simple. Clear. When there had been a Polyhedron and he’d been in it, of it. When he’d breathed ideas and making things better had taken no effort at all, as long as he lay there and played like the child he was.

Making things better now meant standing up. Working. Sweating. Dreams wouldn’t help him. Dreams wouldn’t help anybody.

Why couldn’t Khan see that? For all that he kept looking out, away, anywhere but here, why couldn’t he just see that?

*

Spring came and went. Summer came and went. Harvest came fast and charged headlong into the edge of winter, and the trains stopped, and Khan had definitely broken his promise. Had he promised, though, or was Notkin reading between the lines?

“Where is he, anyway?” he asked Capella, because Capella would know, and wouldn’t ask why Notkin cared because she already knew everything.

She looked up from her bowl of soup – they met for supper once a week at her request, because she wanted to practice entertaining and trusted that Notkin would never judge her – and put down her spoon, upside down like a mirror. “If he hasn’t told you, perhaps I shouldn’t,” Capella said. A year of ruling the town had only solidified the ease of her convictions, the perhaps evaporating almost as soon as she said it.

“I didn’t ask him,” Notkin admitted, looking down at his mostly-empty bowl. Getting food set out one dish at a time was generally a good idea, he thought, since it made things last longer and helped him understand how hungry he actually was, but he still couldn’t get used to eating slowly. Especially since the food at the Olgimsky house was good even when it was strange. This time the soup had been both creamy and bright green, and he hadn’t asked what was in it or how it got here. He supposed, as payment in kind for not judging her entertaining, she didn’t judge his indiscriminate tastes. Or his best sweaters and shoes being the wrong size for him. Or what he thought about her fiance.

“Then there’s your answer,” she said, with that Mistress smile she was growing into so well.

He had to accept that, he supposed. “Does he write to you?”

“Not often, but yes, he has. I know he’s safe, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s part of it.”

“And the rest?”

The cook came in to clear the bowls, even if Capella was only halfway done. Notkin kept silent, because he didn’t want to say this around people who might get scared. Jester, smelling food that was no longer on the table, trailed the cook into the kitchen, whether to have a go at the scraps or stand watch, Notkin wasn’t sure.

But once they were alone again, he caught Capella’s eye, and she nodded, so he went on, keeping his voice down. “What happens to the Town if he doesn’t come back?”

“He will,” she said.

“But what if he doesn’t? He’s needed for the balance you saw. And for that he needs to be helping rebuild, and he’s not helping if he isn’t here.”

She leveled her eyes at him, and they flashed like the beads at her throat. “Is that truly what you think?”

Before he could answer, the cook returned, this time carrying two small plates of pale fish drizzled in a black sauce. One seemed to have a little less than the other – Jester had been at it already, Notkin was sure. Once these were set down, and the cook gone, Notkin took up his fork and had a bite, both because it was polite and because he was avoiding answering that. And because it was food.

But Capella continued to search him from across the table, and eventually he had to swallow both the fish and the pride.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. He took a sip of water to get the fish off his teeth, and tried again. “He’s not helping the way we are. If he’s off learning something like Burakh was, maybe that’s helping in a way, but couldn’t he do that later? At this point if he comes back he might not recognize the stones in the streets. He definitely didn’t put any of them down.”

“A Kain shouldn’t be building this side of the river, and he’s still a Kain for now,” Capella said.

Notkin flinched. Caspar Victorovich Olgimsky sounded wrong in his head. Then again, it was still a world less terrifying than another Mistress with the surname Kaina. “Did you tell him that?”

“No, that part was his idea. And a good one.” She lifted her fork, and put it against the fish, but didn’t quite spear it through. “You trusted him, once.”

“I still do.”

“Do you? You don’t sound it.”

He ate more fish. The sounds of cutlery on china filled the room, coming only from his direction.

When he’d finished what was on his plate, and had no more excuses, Capella was still looking at him, her food untouched.

“I know what he used to dream,” Notkin finally said. “I know because I used to dream it too. And I’ve been trying to make that place, or something like it, the only real way I know how. But the way Khan knew how won’t work anymore. Is he learning a new way? Does he not want to try like we are, like I am? Or is he just trying to find what we took from him and bring it back?”

Capella took a dainty bite of her fish, then wrinkled her nose as she swallowed. Her fork came down immediately. “You didn’t ask him. That’s your answer. Ugh, you can finish this.”

“Thanks, I thought it was fine. What’s in the sauce?”

“Whatever it is, there’s too much of it. Khan’s not going to like it either.”

“He’d eat it anyway, if he were here,” Notkin pointed out.

The crinkle in Capella’s nose took on a different, smirkier cant as she passed her plate across. “Only if you were here too, for him to show you up,” she said.

*

The twyre was in bloom, and the late summer sun whited out the blue of Khan’s eyes as he stepped out of the cargo hold, and Notkin almost dropped the crate he held because he couldn’t breathe.

Khan carried the same small suitcase he’d left with, but had brought back another, larger and on wheels, and two pristine black crates as high as his waist, and under his right arm he carried cylinders and canisters, at least five of them, shorter but thicker than paintings or scrolls. He had new dark clothes that matched from neck to ankles, a sharper haircut, a freshness to his face that made him shine. And those eyes, fuck, those eyes, more like the crisp clouds than the sky behind them.

“Notkin,” he said. His voice was a little lower now, too.

“Khan,” Notkin said back, because that was all he could say. He felt his roughness like a bludgeon; the flush on his cheeks, the sweat on his neck, the scuffs on his bare arms from misjudging a roll of chains an hour ago, the thick reek of twyre in his hair.

“Spare me a few men to help carry these to the theatre.” Khan cocked his chin to indicate which men he’d meant, which made sense, since his hands were all full, but it still put Notkin in mind of the king he’d used to be, the Khan he still, evidently, was.

It was better than him being depressed, surely. And better even than that, he was here. But with that imperious command, every fiber in Notkin’s body went taut, every hair poised to bristle.

“Ask them,” Notkin said, giving no ground whatsover. “Then pay them.”

Khan blinked, and his lips slackened apart. After that, his eyes did not leave Notkin’s as Notkin put the crate down in its proper place, then straightened up to his full height, shoulders square, chin high. Khan’s expression was no more readable from this angle, but it had changed. Charged. His throat thickened for a moment. So did Notkin’s, but Notkin at least knew why.

“Done,” Khan said, eventually. And then did as he promised.

*

Years passed. Years, of Khan disappearing for months at a time and coming back with his new strange cargo in tow. Years of Notkin rising through the ranks of the new Enterprise and making sure Vlad the Only didn’t forget that the Town came first. Years of rebuilding and restructuring and repopulating, though neither Notkin nor Khan had a hand in that last part. Years of there being fewer and fewer Dogheads in the streets, because they unraveled their hoods to make gloves or darn sweaters, and half of them worked for Notkin now anyway. Of Khan growing elegant and angular and hard. Of Notkin just growing, now that he was well-paid and well-fed, and only stopping when he could look even Burakh in the eye.

Years, of Notkin sleeping no more than five hours a night, and remembering no dreams at all.

*

Pain woke him, as it so often did. An excruciating fit starting deep in his chest and settling in his knees and throat, too swollen to shudder, too thick to scream. He rode it out, nails and heels buried in the sheets, until he’d cooled down enough for Jester to take notice. The cat hopped up on the bed, plonked himself on Notkin’s chest, and admonished him with perfectly yellow eyes for waking him up too.

“Not my fault,” he croaked.

Jester continued to glower.

He fumbled in the dark for the pocketwatch he kept beside the bed. It had been a gift from Capella two birthdays ago, true gold, engraved with a map of the town on the inside cover. And according to that, it was half three in the morning. Too late to try and sleep again, too early to be awake, and anything was better than just lying here in his own sweat.

Settled, then. Clear air and a brisk walk it would be. He got some water, threw on some pants, his boots, and his coat, scratched Jester on the scruff of his neck and told him to stay put, and set out.

It was a night balanced precariously between winter and spring. The coat he’d chucked on over his undershirt was enough to keep the cold out, but just barely. He’d head north along the Gullet, kill time until just after sunrise when Burakh or Sticky would be awake and not think this was an emergency. Because it wasn’t an emergency. Merely picking something up before work. Not worth breaking the door down. Just slightly worse pain than usual.

But instead of due north, his feet took him west. Across one bridge. Then another. Then past the observatory. As west as he could go, and still be here.

The pedestal stones had been eaten away, smoothed and submerged, and the bend of the Gorhkon sharpened. The old Crucible to his right, the Cathedral to his left, the faint lights of the new town on the far shore, these repelled him, but the absent structure called.

He sat on the pedestal and told himself it was exhaustion. Never mind that if he was so exhausted to begin with he’d have stayed home instead of letting his feet drag him to the complete wrong side of town. He took off his boots and socks, rolled up his pant legs, and put his feet in the water. Making an excuse for that was easier because his leg was, honestly, still bothering him, and coming up here had been potentially idiotic for more than one reason. The water was cool and gentle, lulling; some parts upstream might still be frozen.

Overhead, a thin strip of night sky showed through the clouds, like a chunk of glass had fallen out of a broken mirror. Velvet black crept in from beyond with pinpricks of stars. Some were close enough that they had color to them, haloes of red and gold.

Tilting up to see them led to lying back. Which led to him flat on the stone with his feet in the river, collar denting against his pulse, arms akimbo overhead. And staring at the stars led to staring past them, to the planets beyond, the emptiness beyond them, the dark in the hollows of his skull.

As his eyes looked forward and up, every other sense lurched downward, into the still-healing wound that the Gorhkon now filled. The river rolled, but under it there were caverns and veins, flush with water where blood had once been. Some of that blood was in Notkin now. Less of it was in the earth, where perhaps it should have been. But it was in everyone in the Town who had been healed, in Capella, in Sticky, in Grace, Murky, Taya, Burakh...in Khan.

And Khan wasn’t here.

You cannot bring him back like this, said something familiar, a ringing ghost, a distant siren.

“I’m not trying to,” Notkin muttered, maybe aloud, maybe not.

You cannot bring him back like this,

said something else, the buzz of twyre, the fading drum of a heart.

“I’m not trying to,” he said again, definitely aloud this time, with the bite of chattering teeth.

Then why lay yourself as a bull on the altar?

asked the second voice, entwined with the first, Why chase the dreams you cast aside?

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

Yet you come to the place where once you dreamed.

Yet you come to listen to that which is past.

A sigh rattled out of him. The stone and the air were equally cold through his coat, and the river was ice on his shins. “I don’t want what’s past. I want us all to move forward together.”

Yet you call him back,

said both voices at once, but then came the tangle, trapping him against the stone, suffusing him as much as pain.

You who deny miracles.

You who shun dreams.

You who mire yourself in our earth with one breath and damn it with another.

You who strive for a better world yet burn its blueprints.

You have lamed yourself.

You would clip his wings.

And yet you summon him,

summon us,

beg for the means you fear to use.

You still turn your back on the earth.

Your heart still aches for the sky.

Hypocrite.

Coward.

Beast.

Tyrant.

You fled the world of miracles.

It did not cast you out.

You created a world that forced him down to your level.

And you have always wanted him beneath you.

“Notkin?” a true voice rang out, echoing in his skull.

His eyes flashed open and his shoulders scraped the stone. Scrabbling and twisting and kicking up water which suddenly felt much more cold than it was, he managed to right himself, sit up, turn around. “Murky? What the hell are you doing awake?”

“I had rehearsal,” she said, so simply it had to be at least half true. “It went late.”

Never mind that the theatre was, like everything else in Town, in the opposite direction. “What are you doing all the way out here? For fuck’s sake, let me walk you home.”

She nodded, maybe one too many times. For all that Burakh was supposed to be supernaturally good at cutting things, Murky’s hair still seemed forever in her face, even after all these years. Cleaner, sure. And she’d grow into the rest of herself eventually. But while she stood waiting for Notkin to put his boots back on, she looked an awkward, shuffling pile of limbs. The way he had, at her age. He wondered what the other half of the truth was.

But once he’d put himself back together, he just offered her his arm, already elbowing in the direction of her father’s house. If she wanted to tell him, she’d tell him. And if she didn’t he’d get it out of Sticky later.

“What show is rehearsing this late?” he asked, when the silence of the streets started weighing on him.

“Not a show,” she said, as much to the cobblestones as to him. “A dance.”

“A d—,” he stuttered, guessing what she meant. “A dance. Does Burakh know?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t told Papa. And it’s not a real dance yet. But I’m learning.”

They passed between streetlights. She might not see him nod, but she’d be close enough to notice even if she wasn’t looking, and there was no one else to look at. “Do you think he won’t be proud?”

Her hand tensed on his coat cuff. “He says I’m too young to know what I want.”

She was thirteen, maybe fourteen. Notkin couldn’t tell her she was wrong. He’d be a rotten hypocrite if he did.

But when he didn’t say anything for long enough to cross another light, turn another corner, she went on. Soft, like she didn’t want even the earth to hear. “The Brides talk. They told me about the one who promised herself to him so he could save us. I saw her, you know. When she was alive. She’d come to the workshop and sit on the drums outside. She was pretty. Her heels would swing back and forth. I used to do the same thing. And she’d dance. And then he...”

Notkin hadn’t heard this story before, but he could guess how it ended.

“He went into the cave, and I never saw her again,” Murky finished. “The others told me what they did. Not then. A while ago. Papa didn’t tell me himself. I asked Grace, but she said the Bride wasn’t there for us to talk to. ‘Cause she wanted it.”

They crossed the bridge into the Spleen. The river was almost still, and the trees on either side didn’t rustle. Murky let go of his arm to put both hands on the bridge rail and stare south, toward the Steppe. He stopped too, casting a couple of cautious glances at either shore to make sure that no one dangerous was about.

“We’re trying to make it so that no one has to do anything like that again,” Notkin told her. He’d meant it to be reassuring, but it wasn’t quite working on him, let alone her. So he said it stronger. “No more sacrifices. Not like that.”

“Not even if they want to?” Murky asked softly, not much more than wind.

Notkin blinked. “Why would they?”

Murky shook her head, then pushed some of the hair out of her eyes, still staring down at the water. “I know I’m not gonna do what she did. I don’t think I’m promised to anybody. I don’t even know if I want to be a Bride. But I do wanna learn. How they dance, what they do, how to make twyre come up from the earth. And hear their stories. The ones Papa won’t tell. Someone should know. I want it to be me.”

“I think that’s good,” Notkin said honestly. “But you really shouldn’t be out this late at night.”

“You are.”

“I’m twice your size.”

“Not when you’re lying on the street where anyone could just, I don’t know. Stab you. And no one messes with me because they know who my Papa is.”

She had a point, but he still laughed. “Well, no one messes with me because I’m me.”

“And ‘cause Khan’s not here,” Murky said.

The chill night air immediately penetrated Notkin’s coat. Every hair on his arms fanned up like caterpillar legs.

Murky must have picked up on some of her father and brother’s perception skills, or else she was just twitchy; her hands tightened on the bridge rail, but the rest of her stepped back, and twisted to look up at him. “You were trying to reach him. I heard you.”

“I was not,” he said, like he’d said it for the fourth time that night.

She shook her head. “I left the Tower too, you know. When I figured out it couldn’t bring my parents back. Not too long after you did. So I know. I know what you gave up.”

“So you know it doesn’t work.” He couldn’t keep the defensiveness out of his voice, but too late now. “I wouldn’t do something that doesn’t work. And I gave it up.”

“Then why were you there?” Her eyes had no right to be this hard on him, not looking up like that. “I know,” she said. “I know it’s hard.”

“It’s not,” he said, because it had to be true. “I have everything I need to do everything I can. And we’re doing well. I wish he were here, yeah, I wish he were doing his part instead of whatever the hell he’s doing, but he’s doing it out there, and it’s none of my fucking business. And even if it were, miracles aren’t real.”

He hadn’t meant to raise his voice, the same way she probably hadn’t meant to wince. Both happened anyway.

He apologized. A moment later, so did she, coming away from the rail. She even took his arm again, just the elbow. Her hands were warm, probably because under his coat, Notkin was still freezing.

The rest of the walk to the Burakhs' place passed in silence. And Murky let him in, and showed him where they kept the tea, so that he didn’t have to wait for the others to be awake. He made it, but didn’t drink it, because he passed out in a plush parlor chair until sunrise.

*

Which, of course, meant he showed up late to work. Because Sticky was quiet as a goddamn snake and Burakh had actually shivved at least a dozen people in the dark before, and neither of them cared that Notkin was asleep in their parlor chair because all Burakhs are completely insane, and Notkin didn’t wake up until he smelled breakfast, and then he had to have said breakfast or he’d pass out again, and then he had to tell the menkhu and his crazy sneakthief apprentice why he’d shown up at their place at four in the morning (without ratting Murky out, because he wasn’t a narc, goddamn it), and describe his symptoms, and argue about whether he’d finished growing yet (he hadn’t), and then he had to panic when they told him it was already almost nine and bolt all the way south and not even bother stopping back at his apartment to put on a fucking shirt because what if the train arrived on time.

It had arrived on time.

And his people were already unloading Khan’s shit, because Notkin hadn’t been there to count the Olgimsky’s shit.

He valiantly did not pant or collapse when he made it to the top of the loading dock. He also didn’t dignify any of the jeers, laughter, or Steppe-inflected joshing at his expense when he skidded to a halt right at the mouth of the open boxcar.

“Careful with that one, it’s fragile,” Khan was commanding, because of course he was. His voice echoed off the metal walls, and the grunts of the four or five people hefting cargo between him and Notkin did nothing to dampen that sound.

“They have work to do,” Notkin snapped.

“Yes, and I’m paying them. That’s your rule, isn’t it?”

Notkin stood aside to let the workers and the boxes through – more enormous, anonymous black crates, not labeled FRAGILE at all – and Khan followed them out. Notkin’s heart was already pounding from the long run and his vision had already blurred at the edges, so Khan looking so smart and crisp and regal hit him even harder than it had the other five times. Apparently well-made dark clothes weren’t enough now; he’d upgraded to a suit. Black, with thin grey stripes that shifted like heat distortion in the sun and made him look taller and leaner, though even with a hat on he only came up to Notkin’s nose. He carried a leather coat over one arm and more of those cylinders under the other. And Notkin thought for a panicked second that as long as he was going to be late he should have asked Burakh or Sticky for a shave, because despite having just gotten off an overnight train Khan’s was somehow perfect. And then he wouldn’t have had to see this and stare like a stuck pig.

“Well?” Khan asked, not turning his body, just cocking his head in Notkin’s direction and somehow turning having to look up into looking down his nose. “Unless you have any objections.”

Notkin finally found his voice again, and managed a simple “Fine.”

“Good,” Khan said. And then he had to get out of the way as well, because more black boxes were coming through, and an odongh was actually carrying Khan’s suitcases for him. The worm nodded, Khan nodded back, and a faint thank you hissed through the air as he set off ahead of the rest of the cargo, making for the Town. Khan was still a King, even if he hadn’t been here for months. Again.

Something about that plain didn’t sit well with Notkin and he didn’t mind showing it. The inside of his coat and the underside of his collar were dripping in sweat from the long run, and the sun was smacking him in the neck and chin, so he peeled the coat off and chucked it onto the nearest bench with what was a sigh, thank you, not an effort to catch his breath or not look at Khan. “How long are you back this time?” he asked, because for some reason Khan hadn’t set off after his supposedly precious cargo.

“Until s—” he started, and then something, evidently, cut him off. He was looking at Notkin like something shocking or offensive. Clearly Notkin must have something on his face. Or – right, he’d forgotten to put on a proper shirt. Too late to take it back now and no point in letting Khan see he was embarrassed. “Summer,” Khan finished quietly, turning away again. His cheeks were no longer so pale. “As far as I know.”

“Three months.”

“Yes. Five at the outside.”

Notkin nodded. “We’ll try to get the council stuff in order before you go, then. Debating a dam, mostly.”

“I’ll be there.”

As if you’d care, Notkin thought, uncharitably. And seriously considered saying it aloud.

But then someone called, cheerfully, “Khan!” from the service road, and Capella was walking toward them, waving as gently as her red hair in the breeze, her freckled smile like an open sky.

Khan took off immediately, shoving his cylinders and coat at Notkin, who was too gobsmacked to not take them. He stood there like a complete idiot while Khan and Capella pretended they weren’t running toward one another, met at the end of the passenger stairs, and stopped just far enough apart that Khan could take her hand and kiss it. His hat hid his face in shadow, but to Notkin’s eye, Capella was absolutely beaming.

“Mistress,” Khan said, nearly all breath. Notkin heard it as if there weren’t three dozen laborers hefting cowhides not ten feet away.

“On time, this time,” she teased.

“Always,” he countered, straightening up with a smirk.

When he let go of her hand, she raised it to touch his cheek. “Welcome home,” she said.

Notkin wasn’t sure whether to feel jealous or relieved, until he realized that he had absolutely no control over which emotion won the fight in his gut.

Whatever they said to each other for the next two minutes or so, he didn’t hear, and then he decided they deserved privacy so he’d turn his attention to his actual job. Or he meant to, but couldn’t, because he was still holding Khan’s cylinders and coat like a damn flunky, and now that Capella was here he couldn’t just fob them off on someone else. It wasn’t as existentially uncomfortable as organ failure or plague, but emotionally, it came pretty close.

Eventually, Khan nodded at something she said, twice, slow. They ascended the stairs toward Notkin, Capella just slightly ahead. “Thank you,” she said to Notkin, probably so Khan didn’t have to. “Join us for supper tonight, if you can.”

Notkin blinked as she took Khan’s coat out of his suddenly rather coatrack-like arms. “But he – your fiance just got back.”

“Yes, and there’s more than one meal in the day,” she said. “Khan and I will get our personal business out of the way long before that. Please, join us tonight.”

Even though Capella was, strictly speaking, the ruler of this town, Notkin knew he could beg off. If he truly wanted to, he could say no, and she’d probably be mildly disappointed, but it wouldn’t wreck either of their lives or make things more uncomfortable than they already were. But there was Khan standing beside and a little behind her in his sleek suit, arms crossed in front of him but hands twitching, looking anywhere but Notkin.

Khan had just agreed to this, whatever it was. Which meant no, Notkin couldn’t back down.

He thrust the cylinders back at Khan, but told Capella, “I’ll be there.”

*

Two courses in, Notkin knew for certain that this was already the most awkward supper the Town Upon the Gorhkon had ever seen.

Six years of being Capella’s practice dummy for matters of class just bounced off him like his skin had just been polarized against crystal and china. He dropped his spoon in the onion soup, sloshed a drop of wine onto the tablecloth, screeched his knife on the steak plate loud enough to spook Jester, and managed to monologue about the Termitary renovations for five whole minutes with white sauce on his chin. He’d also tried to take care with his appearance, really, he had, but there was only so much he could do with the canvas he had when he’d shown up late to work, then stayed late, then scrambled into the sharpest clothes he’d had available only to realize that his best sweater was too tight in the shoulders now. About the only thing he didn’t mess up was the forks, because those went in order from the outside in, and when he wasn’t making a mockery of a proper supper he spent a good amount of time avoiding his own scratched-up, lummoxy hands and laughing off as many of his mistakes as possible.

Because the alternative was staring at Khan, who hadn’t changed out of that suit. It was a small consolation that Khan seemed just as uncomfortable with this as Notkin was, if not with the process of dining itself. All right, perhaps not so small. No, what threw Khan off wasn’t wine and courses, it was conversation. Capella and Notkin had been discussing business over food once a week for half a decade, so the conversation fell to that naturally, and Notkin being perhaps a little too smug about actually knowing what was going on in Town had evidently led Khan to have his wine glass filled a couple more times than either of the others. Which in turn led to Khan flushed and fidgeting, constantly loosening his tabs and darkening his blue silk tie with sweat and condensation.

If Khan being all flustered hadn’t looked good on him too – maybe better than him all put together – maybe Notkin would have been even smugger.

Eventually, Capella, who was clearly inoculated against awkwardness if not naturally immune, invited them to take dessert and twyrine in the parlor. Out of habit, and determined to make up for the decorum he’d been fudging all night, Notkin stood and offered her his arm – a split second before Khan offered his, on her other side.

Capella laughed – almost a giggle, really – and turned first to Khan. Notkin figured, yes, there was a pecking order in the Olgimsky house, and tried not to be sullen about it, but all Capella did was nod and smile to Khan, indulgently, if anything. And then she took Notkin’s arm, and let him stand aside and lead her from the dining table.

Notkin had no time to process this, or the look in Khan’s pale blue eyes (which seemed to be directed at him, and not Capella), before he had to put his money where his etiquette was and actually escort Capella where she meant to go. Upstairs parlor. Overlooking the Gut. Notkin had only sat down in this room a few times, never wanting to overstay his welcome, but he knew that Capella’s preferred chair was the new, plush green one by the picture windows with curling cherry arms. By the time Notkin turned around, Khan had taken the chaise by the far wall; he wasn’t lying on it, just sitting at the edge, leaning down to open the adjacent liquor cabinet with cavalier familiarity. That left Notkin the piano bench, which was fine. Everything except the fact that Khan was still looking at him was fine.

“So what’s this about a dam?” Khan asked, already setting out three stemmed glasses on a silver tray.

Capella answered him, presumably so Notkin didn’t get to set the scene. “The Gorkhon’s gotten somewhat thicker just before the bend, and twice last summer it flooded the up to the Cathedral steps.”

Khan poured, nodding. He’d chosen deep red twyrine without asking the rest of them; maybe it was Capella’s favorite, or something innocuous like that. “Does anyone still live over there?”

“Yes,” Notkin said, pointedly. “People still live everywhere.”

Khan narrowed his eyes and stalled his pouring a second too soon, so one of the glasses was shorter than the other two. “I thought most of them – ”

“Yeah, most of that type moved across the river. But not all of them, and those are good houses. You’d know that if you lived here.”

Eyebrows knotted, Khan corked the bottle and set it back in the cabinet with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary. Notkin couldn’t help but smirk at that. But the way Khan picked up two of the glasses by the stems and headed to Capella was all elegance, and Notkin felt his smugness fading, though the anger remained.

“I do live here,” Khan said, extending the second glass to Notkin like it was a dare.

Notkin took it. Took both, really. “No, you don’t.”

“Gentlemen,” Capella said, an obvious warning from the Mistress of the Town that Notkin conceded would work. For now.

Khan backed off first, all the way to the chaise again. He sat, picked up the third glass – the one he’d poured short – and raised it, just one pulse. “Cheers.”

“To timely reunions,” Capella said. Pointedly.

All three of them took a long sip.

“New ventures,” Khan added.

Another sip.

Since it was clearly Notkin’s turn, he toasted, “To whatever the hell you’re doing out there.”

“You could have asked,” Khan snapped instead of drinking.

So Notkin didn’t drink either. “That mean I can’t ask now?”

“You could if you cared.”

“Yeah, and you could have stayed.”

“Gentlemen,” Capella said again, even more pointed this time.

Khan was the one to ignore it, fingers pinched tight and pale on the stem of his glass, just like the knot in his forehead. “Stayed and done what? Killed time? Stood in line like a bull about to be made an ox?”

“It’d suit you,” Notkin snarked back, but Khan already wasn’t hearing him.

“Or what, joined you? To the victor, the spoils, right? I should have just disbanded the Dogheads and let you call the shots in my life? Unacceptable.”

“The victor of what? Last I checked we called a ceasefire because we were all too sick to fight.”

“And when it was over at least you still had a home.”

Notkin toasted to that and downed the rest of his glass. If Khan had been any closer maybe that gesture would have flattened his nose. “So you admit this isn’t your home now. Thanks for the honesty.”

For all that Khan sounded like he was rolling his eyes, they stayed level, two tight points of blue like the heart of a flame. “Just come out and say it, Notkin. You think I should’ve crossed the river with the rest of them.”

“No,” Notkin was all too ready to admit. Maybe the twyrine had snuck up on him, or maybe the wine at dinner had been a little strong, but he either way, he’d say this and welcome. “No, I think you should have stayed. Capella wanted you to stay. Old Man Burakh wanted you to stay. Burakh wanted you to stay enough that he healed you before he healed the rest of the Town – before he even knew he could heal the rest of the Town! And you took what they gave you and just fucked off to wherever the hell it is you go and left the rest of us to pick up your slack.”

“You have no idea what I’ve been doing.”

“No, I don’t!”

“You never asked.”

“Because it’s none of my fucking business, Khan.”

“You sure are acting like it is,” he said, with the cool edge of a snarl that reminded Notkin of the hound Khan had once been. “You think you’re the next Böos Vlad, do you? You think everyone in Town belongs to you and you’re the only real person in it?”

“How dare you.”

Khan, evidently, didn’t hear him. Maybe he’d said it too quietly. “You sure as fuck thought that when we were children. Not a house you didn’t break into, not a kid you wouldn’t kill if he crossed you. Same shit, different year. I’m not surprised you didn’t grow out of it.”

“I didn’t grow out of it? You’re the one who’s skiving off! You have responsibilities here, we all do! And you don’t get to talk about what I’ve done after you and all your cronies in the Tower killed this Town from the inside for years!”

“The Polyhedron saved so many lives – ”

“Saved whose lives, Khan? Yours? Burakh saved your life! And he saved it so you’d be here to build something real!”

“Boys!”

Capella set her glass down on the windowsill. The crystal rang, and rang, and rang.

Notkin’s chest was heaving almost as hard as this morning, when he’d run late across the whole of Town. Khan wasn’t looking much calmer. But Khan still beat Notkin to sitting back down (when had he stood? When had they stood? When had they gotten so close?), reclaiming his glass, and draining the rest with his throat to the gas-lamps. Notkin sank into the piano bench. The lid, behind him, was open, and his elbow caught on a discordant cluster of keys as he raised his hand to his hair. The back of his neck was burning, under the tall folded neck of his too-tight sweater and the weight of the collar beneath it. He gripped it, tight, to calm down. Maybe it worked.

The cook’s assistant chose that moment to walk in with a tray of little cakes and marzipan fruit and a pitcher of cool water. In complete silence, she set these on the little table in front of Capella, curtsied, and backed out of the room as if she wasn’t sure whether to flee for her life.

Capella picked up her twyrine glass again and raised it to her lips. Both young men watched her and would say nothing until judgment came to pass. Such was the power of the White Mistress. She took a long, slow, spare drink, leaving half of what had been, and set the glass down again, quieter this time.

“Notkin,” she said, training her grey eyes on his soul like distant cannons. “If you want to know what Khan has been up to these last several years, you may ask him.”

He nodded, heart bulging out of his throat. He somehow knew it wasn’t time to speak yet.

She turned to Khan next and called him by name in the same level tone. “Khan. If he asks you, I suggest you answer, even if that answer is no. Please also refrain from insulting the memory of my late father in his own home.”

“I apologize,” Khan said immediately. He somehow managed to lower his head without looking cowed. More like a bow. A concession, but not a surrender.

“It’s fine, I know exactly what you meant by it,” Capella said. Then, like nothing was wrong, she picked up one of the tiny cakes and ate it. “Oh, yes. Definitely. I’d also recommend having one of these. The sugar will settle your tempers.”

Maybe this is what she’d really been practicing on Notkin all these years, because it worked immediately. Not all the tension in the room was gone – some of it had nowhere to go – but the simple gesture of Victoria Olgimskaya eating a little French cake in a single bite brought it back down to dining table levels.

Also, Notkin would never turn down an offer of food. Ever.

So after one quick look at Khan, he made the first move, getting up from the piano bench and crossing to the table and the tray. He tried not to slump and sigh too much, especially when Capella raised her eyebrow at him and, again, indicated the cakes. He crossed his arms.

“Notkin,” she chided. “I assure you, asking is worth the risk.”

Not if it’s just putting more power into his hands, he thought, loudly. Sometimes, Capella heard those things.

Whether she did or not, her only reaction was to prompt him, again, with the tray of sweets.

With a sigh, he took his cake and looked it over before he ate it.

It was almost like an overlarge freshwater pearl, no bigger than a curled thumb, the surface paper-smooth but for a little fresh flower on top. And when he bit down, summer swarmed his senses and lingered on his fingertips and tongue, then burst behind his eyes like high noon. He honestly had to stand there and savor it, incredulously, for who knew how long. He had never tasted anything so good.

She giggled. “Thought so.”

“Capella, this is amazing,” he managed when he could find words again. He couldn’t help touching his lower lip to his fingertips a couple more times, just to make sure that had been real. “What the hell is in it?”

“Rose syrup from the South. And a great deal of sugar, honestly. It might just be the twyrine that’s making it overwhelm you like this, but I knew that flavor would work on you.”

His head struggled to regain its balance on his neck and he braced one hand on the back of her chair. “Victoria Vladislavovna Olgimskaya, if you serve this during a business negotiation they’ll bow to you.”

She kept laughing, some of that Mistress posture loosening as she sprawled back on the chair and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll keep that in mind. Khan, come try one! There’s marzipan as well. It came here on the same train you did, after all.”

Since she was looking at Khan now, it felt safer – not safer, more tactical – for Notkin to turn and do the same. Khan, however, had not gotten up, and was staring at something – at Notkin – with his eyes wide and his jaw hanging loose, like he’d been punched in it. But the moment passed with a toss of Khan’s head, and he got up, coming to the table to stand beside Notkin and bend to pick up a dessert of his own.

Before Khan could bite into his cake, Notkin asked. Why then, why so quick, he wasn’t quite sure. But the words came out just as Khan’s eyes shut and lips parted just enough to show teeth, “Where do you go, when you’re not here?”

A ripple of hesitation grounded down from Khan’s shoulders. For a second, he froze. He then took still more time to eat the little cake, and his reaction wasn’t nearly as powerful as Notkin’s, maybe because he’d had something like this before. But eventually, after he’d chewed and swallowed, and nodded approval at Capella as well, he looked up to Notkin, head just slightly at a cant.

“It’ll be easier to show you than tell you,” he said.

Notkin raised an eyebrow. “That’s not an answer.”

“Yes it is. I’ll show you tonight.”

“How? On what train? There won’t be another until three days from – ”

“Notkin,” he said. Somehow, his voice had taken the other three seasons into it, the rustle of autumn, the firmness of winter, the promise of spring. “I’ll show you tonight.”

For more than half of Notkin’s life, he’d defined himself by that voice. Even when he’d opposed it, even when he’d flouted its commands, he still measured his own power against it. And here it was, asking him to meet that power with his own.

There was nothing he could say to that but “All right.”

Khan nodded his acceptance, and reached down for another sweet. A marzipan fruit, this time, almonds shaped like oranges.

Notkin smiled. “Remember when nuts had souls?”

“Still do,” Khan said, surprisingly, though he ate the marzipan anyway.

The three of them found other things to talk of for an hour or so more, and finished the cakes eventually (Notkin ate four), and most of the pitcher of water. Khan, glancing out the windows, said that they’d have to go; Capella saw them to the front door. She helped Khan into his long leather coat, even adjusting the open lapels in front with a gentle tug.

“It will be fine,” she said, as if she could command him.

Khan took one of her hands in his and gave it a squeeze, and thanked her like a gentleman.

She then turned to Notkin, who had forgone a coat and thus had nothing to do but leave and thank her for her hospitality. He got halfway through that part when Capella put her hands on his shoulders, stood on her tiptoes, and pressed a chaste kiss to his forehead. Her lips were cool and dry, and made barely a sound on his skin.

“I promise you,” she said, not a whisper but still just meant for him, “it’s all right.”

He blinked. Twice. “What’s all right?”

She sank back down to her heels, still holding his shoulders. “Trust him.”

“I do,” Notkin said, because it had always been true.

Capella raised her eyebrow at that. But her smile overrode it, and before he could protest, she shooed them both off into the night.

*

“It’s not far,” Khan said, probably because the silence was as excruciating to him as it was to Notkin.

Notkin nodded and kept pace, stuffing his hands in his pockets. Jester trailed behind them in fits and starts, since this was the opposite direction from every sense that pointed home.

The night had turned out to be clearer than last; instead of blanketing nearly all of the sky, there were only a few faint clouds, like the stars were unfinished. The parks were abandoned, and while there was some activity and firelight coming up from the warehouses, here in the Gut there were only a few people about, ones and twos, quiet drunks and couples. Not that he and Khan fit into either of those categories; the twyrine had more or less faded to a subtle buzz for Notkin, and when they nodded at him as he passed, he could still see clearly in the dark. Some of the passersby seemed to recognize Khan as well – one watchman on his rounds gave him a quick salute, to which Khan tipped his hat – but otherwise, all was as Notkin thought it should be. The peace and health he’d worked for.

Because he was walking with Khan, they arrived at the theatre precisely as the clock tolled midnight. The doors opened from the inside before Khan even touched them, fanning out the hem of his coat and rustling Notkin’s hair.

The theatre had never been on Notkin’s list of favorite places. He only attended shows here when close friends had parts in them, and even then, he wouldn’t linger. Something had been impressed on these walls, maybe even someone, and no matter how many lights they shone Notkin always felt a creeping dark making a home at the back of his neck.

This time, the feeling was no different, but the theatre was; it wasn’t made up for a show at all. No costumes, no makeup, no colored lights. A bare-beamed space. A wooden frame. Not too different than how it had been as a hospital, with all the ugly house fixtures bathing the space in yellows and browns, absent the choke-hold rows of the dead. Stacks of chairs lined the walls where the beds and bodies had been, and stagehands in perfectly normal clothes with perfectly normal brooms swept the balconies, kicking up clouds of paint chips and dust.

“Seriously?” Notkin couldn’t help asking, but was interrupted by a much more intent projection.

“Caspar Kain, my dear boy! So kind of you to grace us with your presence,” Mark Immortell said from just off center stage, rapping the butt of his cane on the floor once like Capella’s dance master. “And how is our King of Infinite Space?”

“No longer bounded in a Nutshell,” Khan chuckled, coming forward and taking off his hat. “I’ll be heading downstairs, if it’s free.”

Immortell’s answering laugh was different by its very nature, and Notkin had no time to parse just how. “For a patron of the arts, no art is free – but your investments were made long ago. Thus, upon your return, your returns are here.”

“Good. I expect we’ll be several hours.”

“We won’t be rehearsing anything on this level until tomorrow afternoon, so fear no interruptions – from us, at any rate. And we all well know that no Kain overstays his welcome.”

The wince that rippled down Khan’s jaw was only evident to Notkin because he was, at most, a foot away. “Thank you. Good evening.”

Khan headed immediately for one of the doors beside the stage. Notkin had no time to give Immortell more than a quick “Thanks” before following.

He made it five steps before the director called him by name – the name no one else used.

Since this was definitely someone else’s territory, Notkin turned around to face him carefully. However tall Notkin had grown, Immortell was actually on the stage, and thus loomed over him like a giant, the lights behind him masking his silhouette into an inhuman cloud. “Director.”

“The surplus of your soul is welcome here, but I cannot be held responsible for what he should find on his hunts,” Immortell said. “Not every rat here is prey.”

Notkin didn’t know whether to be wary or impressed; people Immortell’s age rarely acknowledged Jester. Then again, he had no idea how old Immortell actually was. Wary, then. He’d already been walking that edge. Not that he’d let them see it. “I think he can take care of himself,” he settled on. “Thanks for the warning.”

Immortell stepped back, bowed deep, and swept out his free hand for the stage left door. If there were ever a signal that the conversation was over, that was it, so Notkin legged it out, past the Dark Mistress and then, backstage.

Khan had already gone on ahead, but from the way the corridor was lit, Notkin spotted the open cellar hatch immediately. Khan had said downstairs, so Notkin ignored the spiral staircases and ladders leading into the dark overhead and went down into the cellar. He remembered lowering a shrieking Lika down that well in Vlad the Only’s place and fought back a chill. Someone had to have dug this space into the earth. There weren’t many basements in the Town to begin with: other than the Broken Heart, which had been an uproar when the Stamatins carved it, Burakh’s dark garden and the jail were the only two he could think of off the top of his head, and even those two only existed in the shallows because the first floors of their buildings were elevated. Notkin hadn’t even considered that the theatre might have one, let alone one that went what felt like a storey and a half down.

But the way was lit. Someone, presumably Khan, had left some bare red bulbs on at posts along the way, lining the handrail. Notkin only tripped once, on the corner of some setpiece or other that was sticking out just before the bottom of the stairs. Once there, the trail continued, the bulbs mostly red, some scraped white, half-illuminating ratty patterned couches with exposed gashes of batting and rolls of frayed canvas. A piano that had seen better days was half-buried under the staircase with an upturned bucket instead of a bench. Here and there, there were stacked wooden beams with naked whorls, or cages full of paint cans, or thick coils of rope, or the barest glimpse of a concrete wall. He passed a cage as big as any jail cell stuffed with costumes on racks, the beaked headdresses stacked so high they disappeared into the ceiling dark.

But the lights came to a stop before a closed white door washed pink in the strange light, between two of those tall black cargo crates. A costumed Tragedian crouched atop one, pinching the end of the cord of red bulbs in their black-gloved fingers.

Their mask faced Notkin as he approached. Red light chased the white lacquer into every ding and crack. “My master claims he is no longer bound within the confines of his childhood,” the actor said.

“Excuse me?” Notkin said.

The Tragedian stretched both spindly arms forward, cradling a drape of red bulbs between them like the pennants and lanterns at Notkin’s old warehouse. “The shell cracked from within shall spill forth fruit, but cracked without invites infection in. He knows not which he is, and seeks your eye, as ever you have been upon this ground.”

Between being underground, being at the goddamn theatre, and being underground at the goddamn theatre on the tail of Caspar Victorovich Kain, Notkin had, perhaps, let fear catch up with him a little. “Your master’s upstairs and he said we wouldn’t be interrupted.”

“My master is within,” the Tragedian corrected, cocking their head and somehow making the tiny eye- and mouth-holes appear a deeper black. “You are without.”

“Right,” Notkin said, with more teeth behind the word than he intended.

“Yet which is cracked and which is poised to grow is aught no boy or man is given to know,” the actor went on, their pose morphing as their hands stretched up, the right entreating higher than the left, like the grasping tumor tree in Spin-a-Yarn Square. “He fears he might be both, the same as you.”

Notkin’s breath caught. “Then that depends on what he’s here to do,” he whispered.

The Tragedian yanked the cord free from some confine, and every light in the cellar turned off at once – except what crept out through the cracks around the door in front of Notkin, now a frame of brilliant white.

He fumbled for the knob and opened it with more alacrity than – okay, fair. That actor had spooked him. He’d admit it, if just to get out of the hall faster. He swung himself in and shut the door behind him.

“Good,” Khan said. “Immortell didn’t keep you.”

Notkin was about to retort to that, but what greeted him in this new semidarkness was almost as strange, if not quite as eerie, as the rest of the cellar had been. Khan’s black crates and cylinders were organized along the far wall like a bookshelf. Atop one of those crates, in the corner, sat not one but two phonographs, their curved bells poised to play into the center of the room. The floor was piled with dozens of discarded cushions from more mismatched couches, heaps of thick cloth that sucked in all light – rolled curtains, Notkin guessed – and empty water bottles. Khan had thrown off his coat and jacket and pushed up his white sleeves, and stood beside a machine that looked like an upended bicycle vised to another black crate. But the black metal wheels had no rubber on them, just open faces like a waterwheel, and where the seat would be there was instead the brightest white light Notkin had ever seen, blasting in one direction and growing into a massive cone. A spotlight – no. Something else.

“Hang that sheet,” Khan said, too casual to be commanding but still a command, pointing in the same direction as the light. “You can reach it better than I.”

If it weren’t for the last part of that statement, Notkin might have talked back. Strange; Khan’s mother had been amazingly tall, but Khan’s height was the only unremarkable thing about him. Maybe his father’s genes were stronger. For all their sakes, Notkin hoped that was true.

As it stood, the combination of flattery and dumbfoundedness turned him toward that far wall. There was, in fact, a large white sheet with links sewn into the corners. In the circle of white light, the hooks in the wall that matched those links cast sharp, obvious shadows. Notkin could reach the upper corners easily. Stooping to affix the lower ones wasn’t much harder.

Once he was done, he turned back to Khan. He was tinkering with the machine, putting some kind of frame over the light to change it from a circle to a rectangle. His head was bowed intensely, almost lovingly, to the task. Not for the first time, Notkin’s breath caught, following the sharp planes of light on Khan’s smooth cheek and neck, the feet at the corners of his eyes. He worked for a few minutes more, connecting some sort of dark tape between the machine’s exposed wheels.

Distortions appeared on the white screen that Notkin had hung, projected by the light.

Notkin must have made some sound, because Khan looked up, straight to him. Even in the harsh light, his smile was as soft as Notkin had ever seen it.

“Like your lamp in the Nutshell,” Notkin realized.

“Better,” Khan said, smile glowing. “Sit back and watch.”

Something giddy and alien curled in Notkin’s chest, then reached up through his neck and made him nod. There were no chairs, so he sunk down and sprawled on a pile of the cushions and curtains further into the room. Old habits pulled him to where he could still see the door – if that Tragedian was still skulking around, he wanted line of sight – and keep his back to the wall of crates and phonographs. He could settle in on in this pile of cloth and stuffing easily. If anything, it would be less painful, more freeing, than a theatre chair.

Khan flipped some sort of switch, and the symbols on the screen became numbers, a countdown, a list of names and titles. With brisk efficiency, Khan stepped over Notkin to turn on one of the phonographs at precisely the right time.

For the second time that night, Notkin’s senses were flooded; this time, almost literally.

Khan had brought the sea into the Town upon the Gorkhon.

Waves crashed, and an orchestra sang warning. Notkin almost missed the words that came up on the screen afterward, because his eyes had glazed over and his ears were brimming and his mouth simply would not shut. Salt and spray beat against jagged rocks, and it was here, it was real. A story unfolded: sailors being abused by officers, an altercation over rotten meat, a captain covering the rebel men with shrouds and trying to force a firing squad. Mutiny. A horrific priest. A martyr hung over the churning waves with a broken back. Distantly, when the orchestra was low, Notkin could hear Khan shifting about behind him, changing reels, tilting horns, but he could not take his eyes off the screen.

He had no idea how long he sat there. It could have been minutes, it could have been weeks. In the story, it was days before the mutineers came to a city in the West and shared their pain with the people. A riot began on the city’s steps, then crushed by a machine of soldiers. It unfolded in a series of scenes playing all at once, braided together like a crown. A child was trampled to death, dozens more shot and broken, a pram rolled down the entire stone staircase and toppled an infant out and Notkin remembered scouting out the Skinners during the plague, the sound and the stench through the walls of the Termitary, Death in its country house. He stopped breathing, if just to keep the bile down. His eyes had been open too long if they were straining and wet at the corners.

The story ended as happily as it could have, given the way it had started: no cannons fired. The virtuous sailors lived and their ideals spread, though so many in the city they inspired were dead. The world was cheers and smoke and the sea, the cresting of trumpets and a title card reading The End.

It had been beautiful, almost a miracle.

The tape ran out and slapped against the wheel, and the screen was white again. The music stopped. Everything stopped. Khan was standing beside and above him, his shined shoe close enough to Notkin’s shivering hand that it had to be intentional.

This had all been intentional, Notkin realized. This was Khan, finding what he’d lost the day the Polyhedron fell. The control, the perception, the reach. He’d found them all again. He’d gone out into the world and found them all again. And he’d just done it to Notkin, had captured his mind and heart as completely as the Tower ever could.

When Notkin’s breath came back to him, he nearly choked on it. Twice. A third time, trying to slow it down in his throat and chest. He pitched sideward without meaning to, away from the screen, needing the steady dark. Khan had to back away and nearly kicked Notkin in the chin. Dust swirled up from the curtain and stung the back of Notkin’s mouth, setting him to a coughing fit.

“Are you going to be sick?” Khan asked, honestly, too startled to be faking the concern.

“No,” Notkin croaked, waving him off and hating how weak he sounded. “No, wait – just dust – ” He managed a few deeper breaths and tried not to curl up on the floor like a pathetic shit.

A moment later, the cushion on his other side sank, and Khan was there, shoving a bottle of water into Notkin’s face. The glass dinged his forehead, but the signal worked, and he pulled himself up enough to take it. Sit. Drink. Breathe. Stay.

Khan knelt next to him until he’d finished. Until he’d let the empty bottle, and his hands folded around it, sink down into his lap. Until he turned back and looked Khan in the eye.

“Did that really happen?” Notkin asked, his voice still rough from coughing.

“Yes and no,” Khan said, glancing once at the machine, but addressing Notkin seriously. Sweat had beaded on his neck again, over the loosened collar and silk tie, and everything shone. “There really was a ship like that, before we were born, and the crew really did mutiny. And people really were killed like that, in Odessa, around the same time, and maybe on those stairs. They actually tried to blow up a theatre – the film doesn’t show that part, you can probably guess why. And those were real people too, in the pictures. But they weren’t real soldiers and real peasants and none of those people are dead. This was put together and staged, like a play, except here the director can really control what you see. So, yes and no. And yes, because it really felt like that, felt something like that, for the people who were killed. The director just found the perfect way to sum it up so that we’d feel it too.”

“And that’s why the war,” Notkin said. “That’s why my father went to war.”

“Probably,” Khan shrugged. “Enough people feel like this, so we’re fighting against the people who don’t. You know how that works.”

“This is where you go?” Notkin knew anger and how it felt, intimately, had no idea why now, why this made his heart pound the way only plague and powder could. “You disappear for a year at a time and this is what you do?”

“Yeah,” Khan sighed, and fuck, he was smiling again, looking at the projector and its light instead of Notkin and his heat. “This is what I do. At first I was just learning about it, and sharing it, but now, I’m helping make it. And soon I’ll be able to make my own. I’ll be able to show people what it’s like out here, and what it used to be like. They’ll be able to see what we’ve done. Maybe if I get all the way to the top I’ll tell the world about the Sand Pest like this and they’ll be able to see the plague without having it, and know how to stop it and what happens when you try.”

“You want to do that to them? To real people?”

“Better that than living through it.”

Notkin’s head would not stop shaking and neither would his half-curled fists. “Even that’s not fair. No one’s supposed to go through that again. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

“But it won’t be real,” Khan said, like it was so simple. “I’d give them the feelings without them having to suffer. That’s all. You’re not really living through it now, are you?”

Notkin’s breath had mostly stabilized, but his heart and aching eyes were just catching up. He stared hard at Khan’s forehead until Khan actually looked back at him. They needed to be eye to eye when Notkin said this.

“I live through it every day,” Notkin said. “That’s what reality is.”

He watched as Khan processed that statement. To Khan’s credit, he let those words settle, and searched Notkin’s eyes for long enough that he had to remember to blink. But then Khan nodded, twice, his face half-lit at an angle, and said with equal seriousness, “But it doesn’t have to be like that.”

It was entirely possible that Khan didn’t remember how often he’d said that before. Maybe it was just something he said, something he’d felt, some inherent Khan-ness like the command in his voice or the way he held his chin.

“You used to say that in the Polyhedron,” Notkin pointed out. “Sometimes it even worked.”

Khan tensed from the jaw down, throat thickening against his shirt. “It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it, though? You’re still showing people the way you think things should be, and choosing which parts of it they see so it’ll work. So it’ll make them feel how you want them to feel. That’s what just happened with me, isn’t it? That’s what we did up there in the Tower. And we were kids who didn’t understand anything – ”

“It was the adults that didn’t understand.”

“ – and we had no idea that what we wanted was messing with people. We chose what they saw. We made them powerless. We made it so that they couldn’t see what we saw either, so they didn’t have to. So they’d just accept what we told them was real. How is this not that? What if I hadn’t asked you whether it was real?”

“You did,” Khan snapped.

“What if I didn’t? What if I was too busy feeling what you were trying to make me feel to ask how it got there?”

Khan’s eyebrows tautened. “Then I’d call that a job well done. Wouldn’t you? That’s what you’re doing, running the Town like this, running your workers. You didn’t tell your Soul-and-a-Halves everything back then, just like I didn’t tell my men, and you don’t tell your workers everything now, because they don’t need to know. They don’t get to sit at Capella’s table. They don’t have to.”

“They give me permission for that. They signed up for that.”

“So do the people who come to see these films.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know what I was getting into at all.”

“But you trusted me, didn’t you?”

Notkin froze.

“You trusted me,” Khan repeated, sitting straighter where Notkin had crumpled in. “You stayed, and you asked your questions after. And you could have gotten up and left. I wasn’t holding you hostage. All I did was do what you asked the best way I knew how. You put your heart in my hands, Notkin. You can take it back. You’ve done it before.” You did that when you left, he didn’t say.

His heart definitely wasn’t in Khan’s hands right now, because it was trying to knock its way out of Notkin’s chest. “That easy for you, huh,” he said, which gave that drumming another way out, an open throat. “Do you think the whole Town put its heart in your hands too? I bet Burakh’s got something to say about that.”

“Blame my fucking uncle,” Khan said, but Notkin knew he’d gotten in a swing and kept going.

“He built it, sure, but we drilled it in. We proved it worked and kept it working, and you’re the one who filled it with kids and their dreams. Adults are real, Khan. People are real. You used to put masks on them like that captain so you didn’t have to see just how real they were and make it easier to do what you want with them without looking them in the eyes, because now you don’t have to. I know because I did it, I’ve done it, and I’m trying not to do it now. You made yourself a king just like Taya made herself Mother Superior, but she was too young to understand she killed her father. You just didn’t want to kill yours, you wanted to make him see you. Maybe be him a little. So you wrecked your family. You made them love the Polyhedron, Khan.”

“No.”

“You made them give it power.”

“No.”

“And that’s what you’re going to do if you start doing this.”

Khan’s pupils flared until they swallowed all but a ring of blue fire. “But it’s working, isn’t it? It just worked on you. You know things now. You’re thinking about them now. This Town isn’t the only real place in the world. When’s the last time you thought about where the trains come from? When’s the last time you wondered why your parents had to die? Or why we had to spend two weeks watching people burn in the street?”

“I wonder it every fucking day, Khan! I live here! My body reminds me every chance it gets.” He shoved the empty bottle to the ground, sat up to his full height and stabbed in with his words. “Which one of us dreamed the Plague?”

“That wasn’t us,” Khan said, too quickly. “That was the earth itself. Doctor Burakh said – ”

“How can you know? If the Polyhedron was so powerful, if we were so powerful, couldn’t one of us have just dreamed it up?”

Khan’s head tossed side-to-side, the longer sections of his hair slipping down his forehead in stalactites as the room heated up. “You’re the one that’s giving it power right now, you know. The Polyhedron’s gone, you killed it, but you’re still talking like it’s here, like it’s still ruling over us.”

Notkin couldn’t refute that. The words wouldn’t come to him, no matter how he shaped his mouth. And thus he had to watch the realization drip down Khan’s face, from the inner corners of his eyes to the sneering curl of his lips.

“You didn’t leave us because you thought the real world was better,” Khan said, soft, eyes wide, like he couldn’t quite believe it yet either. “You left because you know dreams are more powerful and it still scares you.”

“Fuck all the way off, Khan,” Notkin managed, with no real power behind it.

“No. I’m not going to sit here and let you slag on the beautiful thing that had to die so we could live.”

“More than the Polyhedron had to die.” He’d said it too softly again, but it was true, even if Khan didn’t hear him.

It was also true that he was terrified, and had been for over six years.

“That was my world,” Khan was saying, “that was my kingdom. You loved it, you were part of it. We made things better there. We made things real.”

“If you force people to feel it, it isn’t real at all!” Notkin sliced out his arm to the projection, cutting through the white square even if he couldn’t reach it. “It’s just this. Pictures on a sheet on the wall. Pictures with power. A box and a wheel. Reality is other people, other things. Things they want for themselves. Things we build, yes, but I didn’t make this theatre or the wool in this shirt. And you didn’t make this, this, this story.”

Khan showed his teeth, no longer a smile at all. “No, but I made you feel something. I made you understand something I felt, or at least I thought I did. And that’s the closest I’ve come to finally making the world I want to live in. I reached into you without lifting a finger and I made you see – and if I can do that to you, you bullheaded asshole, I can do it to anyone who lets me. I can’t break bodies but I can change hearts. I can change hearts again, Notkin. You remember that. Not just how good it felt, but how well it worked. We made things like they should be.”

“And the last person I wanted to do that to was you,” Notkin said, and then it was too late.

Caspar Kain left no weakness unexploited. It wasn’t in his nature. And Notkin had just miss-stepped and staggered, weapon broken, neck exposed. Worse, he knew it.

“What in hell could you have done to hurt anybody from up there?” Khan asked, an onslaught of spite and power. “If it’s just games, just stories, what harm could you do? Your parents were already dead. You couldn’t dream your belly full or your body fixed, you said it yourself. The most you could do was change a few minds. And you’ve never wanted to hurt anybody, not truly. So what was so bad about being up there with me, huh? What was so fucking hateful to you to actually bring into the world?”

When they were children, they’d lit candles together in the House of Death. They’d shown it due respect even while they chased it away. That’s what Notkin had always done with any foe he faced. Power was real. If you didn’t meet it with strength of your own, it would crush you utterly. Better to go down fighting. It had kept him alive, through starvation, abandonment, violence, and plague.

“I dreamed you yielded to me,” Notkin said.

There could be no strike truer than the truth.

Time stopped. Even as close as they were, Notkin couldn’t hear Khan’s heartbeat or breathing. Across from Notkin, in the projector’s light, Khan was frozen, lips parted, eyes like a doll’s. He might actually look like this if Notkin stabbed him for real, Notkin couldn’t help thinking. Betrayal, or horror, the last mask he’d wear. He’d know that Notkin was stronger than him, if only because he was a monster. It would be the last thing he’d ever know.

With barely any breath at all, Khan whispered, “What?”

If that truth had been the killing strike, these words would carve him open. Notkin felt no pleasure in this, not even relief at finally saying it. They were grisly, hateful words and open wounds and they were his and he was sorry, but, “Yeah. That’s exactly it. I dreamed that I pushed you into the ground and covered your body up with mine and you yielded to me. I dreamed you let me. It was going to get worse. I didn’t even know how much I wanted, or what of. I just wanted, and I knew that if I did that, it wouldn’t be you. That you’d never do it unless I dreamed it for you. To you. So I left. And I’ll never know if I somehow did it anyway because that’s how it worked, Khan. We shaped this town and it didn’t know it was being shaped. We changed people and they didn’t know they were being changed. And for six fucking years I’ve known that I could have forced you to grow up just because I wanted you, and it would have been the worst thing I’d ever done. I’ve killed people. I’ve crippled people. I dropped a kid into the heart of the earth and wrecked his mind. And rewriting you would still be worse.”

With nothing else to watch, he watched Khan. The shadows filled every crease and crack in his lips. His breath came back to him, and they were dry enough that Notkin could see it from where he sat, too close. Khan broke eye contact with him and that wash of middle distance came over his face again, like a hundred days at the Station, not knowing he had a future. Notkin had defeated him, possibly broken him. It could have been a moment of triumph if it happened any other way. It hadn’t. He had no desire to gloat. He felt as empty as Khan looked.

“You’re right,” Khan finally said. “I’d never have done that.”

If Notkin’s heart weren’t rotten it would break, but, there you go. “Good,” he said, already gathering himself to his feet, finding his way out of this pile of cushions. “Now you get it. So take it and go. Go wherever it is you go.” But even after that, Notkin was the one to get up and make for the door. He couldn’t look anymore; what he’d done stared back at him, even if Khan couldn’t. If he was quick he wouldn’t even leave tears behind.

Something grabbed his wrist. His hand. When he looked down, Khan was holding him, his grip as white as his shirt.

“Don’t make fun of me right now, Khan,” Notkin spat, trying to pull away.

Khan held him fast, all his weight behind it. “I’m not.”

“Then what?”

“I said I’d never have done it.”

Notkin should have been stronger. He’d worked, he’d fought, he was half again Khan’s size for fuck’s sake, why couldn’t he just break away and go? He yanked hard enough that Khan had to get to his feet, hard enough that they were on opposite sides of the projector’s light now, arms stretched between them like a frayed wire or a serrated cut. “Then what are you going to do now? What’s different now?”

“I don’t know,” Khan said, bracing his heels and not letting go, “I just know that if you pushed me down I’d fight you every second.”

“Yeah, and that’s not what I want!”

“No, I mean – not fight you. Not make you stop. I wouldn’t make you stop. But I wouldn’t yield either. Fuck, fuck words,” he said, turning away, spitting those curses onto the floor. “This isn’t working.”

“No shit,” Notkin choked out, still unable to muster the force to just yank his arm free, “It’s not. I need to go.”

“Please, don’t,” Khan said.

If those two words weren’t in Khan’s commanding tone, Notkin would have thought he’d dreamed it. Or misheard, at least. If they’d sounded like a true plea it would have been an act, a toy, and not Khan at all. Khan hated those words. That was just common sense. He’d hated them when he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, twenty-one. He hated when other people said them, and he never said them himself. And since Notkin no longer dreamed at all, he never said them there either.

Notkin turned and looked across that plane of brilliant light. It stung his eyes like dust, like needles, like things he wouldn’t let himself think about. Khan, on the far side, was staring back, his lips still parted on the echo of don’t. He didn’t want Notkin to leave. He hadn’t wanted it back then, either. The difference was that now he knew what Notkin wanted too, and said them anyway, those two words he despised. Khan was no longer a king. Whatever power he’d reclaimed, he’d just given it to Notkin and left himself open. The loosened tabs of his shirt left his throat exposed. His hair was unkempt, his eyes fixed on Notkin to the exclusion of everything else he’d brought into this room. Vulnerability without weakness. Acknowledgment of strength without surrender.

He was right. This wasn’t yielding, whatever else it was.

Trust him, Capella had said.

Notkin couldn’t look at that regal, beautiful, challenging face anymore without moving. He wrung his arm free – but grabbed Khan by both sides of his jaw instead, hauled him in, and crushed their mouths together.

Their silhouettes melded before their bodies did, but it was a difference of split seconds, split hairs. The angle was terrible and perfect all at once, but the taste made up for it, the sweet slickness and the rush of Khan’s breath past Notkin’s lips. This was real. This was right. After one stuttering moment of something like panic Khan started kissing him back, just as hard, just as frantic, and Notkin felt quick and deft fingers carding through his hair, pulling him down where Khan wanted him too.

Khan wanted him too.

Someone’s knees gave out and they both toppled to the floor. The cushions dented under their combined weight and Notkin wound up on top, keeping Khan’s face and lips in his grasp so he wouldn’t lose them in the dark. They broke for air in stutters but one always pulled the other back in, and then their bodies started to shift together, legs rearranging, chests clashing, Khan tugging on Notkin’s hair and building new shapes, better shapes. Khan was the first to slip teeth in. Notkin was the first to do it on purpose. He sucked blood to just below the surface of Khan’s lower lip until it wrung a gasp out of him, a twist, a shove, a surge of fire that started in Khan and breathed heat into him.

Khan let go of his hair all at once and forced him back, and for a moment Notkin thought he’d gone too far, but then Khan just grabbed the hems of Notkin’s sweater and undershirt together and pulled. They caught on Notkin’s elbows on the way up, so he sat up enough to yank them off, straddling Khan’s hips and just throwing the shirts into the dark, not caring where they landed. His necklaces thunked to his chest. Something creaked.

“Fuck you, that Victrola’s expensive,” Khan panted, propping himself up on his elbows, “everything in here – ” Then his breath caught, and he sank back down, his right hand tracing through the sweat on Notkin’s bare clavicle, where the buckle of his collar hung, heavy.

“What?” Notkin asked, not sure what he’d done wrong, whether to start this all up again.

“You have no idea what you are now.” Khan cursed again, leaning back into the cushions but bringing both hands in, the heels of both palms pressing in now, then his fingers even harder, under the leather band and chains, into the threads of tense muscle that Notkin tried his best to ignore and couldn’t, now, not when they felt this good, not when Khan was taking him apart. “You don’t know what you look like – how you move – you almost wrecked me back at Capella’s. I thought you were fighting dirty but you just didn’t know.”

Capella. Right. “Are you sure she’s okay with this?” Notkin had to ask, whatever this was, whatever it turned into.

“It can’t happen if she’s not,” Khan said with all his confidence, “but yes. She is. We’ve – ” He tilted his thumbnails in just under Notkin’s shoulders, and kicked off a split-second chain reaction where Notkin gasped and sat down, which brought their groins together, which set Khan twisting beneath him to keep it that way, to keep the pressure up, yes, there, “ – we’ve talked about it before. She’s known for years.”

It was Notkin’s turn to curse, as much at the knowledge as the solid frame rocking against him, beneath him. “How long?”

Khan’s nails scraped in again. It worked just as well. “Since I came back the first time.” Not before, he was saying, don’t worry, not before.

Between that permission, the vehemence in Khan’s hands, and the unambiguous hard heat between them, Notkin knew where this had to go. So he shoved Khan back down, knocked his legs apart and slotted between them, and smothered him to the floor, grinding down hard and slow like he’d wanted to for years. The rattling hiss and hot shudder of Khan’s body under his was better than he’d dared imagine. Too much cloth in the way. Still good enough to white out Notkin’s mind and make Khan lose his words again, dissolving into breath and noise against Notkin’s tongue. He had to talk with his hands after that, tracing lines of fire down Notkin’s bare back, tugging his necklaces, clawing in below his waistband to force the pace. It worked. It made Notkin have to choose between kissing him and rutting against too much cloth, not enough Khan. He was hard under there, burning, just like Notkin. If there was a way to do both he couldn’t think of it right now, not when the struggle itself was so good, but there was more, somewhere, and he wanted it. There – Khan’s neck was bare, the tabs and tie had unraveled more, he could taste more skin, maybe even mark it –

“That’s what you want,” Khan grit out, meeting every roll of Notkin’s hips, pushing back, taunting hard, “that’s what you want, then take it. If you’ve wanted it so long, try and take it.”

Notkin bit him, right at the source of those words. They welled up as nonsense and filth. So he latched on, held him in place, fucked against him harder, peppered him with bruises that smart suit couldn’t hide. “What about what you want?”

“We’ll get to that. There’s time. You first. Fuck, there – ” he wrenched his head to the side, stretching the tendons of his throat, “keep going – ”

He did. He ran out of skin to nip and sweat to taste soon enough, but by the end he’d given Khan a collar like his own.

When Notkin pulled back just enough to catch his breath and admire his handiwork and try not to lose it right then and there, shit, I did this to him, how does Khan look so good like this, Khan immediately went to work on his tie and buttons, handling them with no more care than Notkin had his sweater. Unfortunately it didn’t bare more skin, since he had underclothes too, but Notkin still couldn’t help staring. He’d done this. He could do more.

“Help, jackass,” Khan said, thrusting his hips up against Notkin’s where they held him down.

“Right,” too much cloth. Notkin pulled back enough to fumble at Khan’s waistband. His knuckles kept brushing against steady heat the same as his own, still clothed, not fair, not even after he yanked Khan’s trousers down to his thighs. His cock distended his underclothes in creases of sweat and Notkin had to grab it, had to taste it through that last thin layer, make it his. Sour, like Khan, warm and rough like a cat’s tongue, hard like the broken moans and curses he was wringing out of him. Khan thrashed so much that Notkin had to hold him down by the thighs now, had to keep him where he wanted him, here, in his mouth, under his body.

Twice, Khan’s struggling hands smacked against Notkin’s skull as he failed at the buttons. The third time, elbow met jaw, and cloth ripped. Notkin had to move, fighting down the surge of despair that this might be over –

– he looked up the rough terrain of Khan’s body and saw him snarling, still trying to pry off torn, wet underclothes over skin he’d bared and Notkin had to force his hips down hard into Khan’s knee to keep from coming. Buttons rolled to the cushions, lost in the dark.

“You’ll have to get it repaired,” Notkin breathed, unable to keep that thought to himself. “Everyone will know what we’re doing.”

“Fuck,” Khan almost shouted, bucking his hips into Notkin’s grasp so sharply that Notkin didn’t know whether to hold him down or let him go.

“Is this okay?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s not,” Khan snapped. He arched up and pushed the cloth the rest of the way to his hips until Notkin took over, shucking him down to something flushed and raw. His chest was shining and smooth, his cock a slick and angry red, and now that he was sitting up and glowering at Notkin and daring him, “Keep going,” there was nothing in this world Notkin wanted to do more.

He let go only long enough to wrangle open his belt and force his waistband down too. No barriers now. He took hold of both their cocks in one hand and something seared, reddened out his vision at the corners and scorched his brain.

There was probably a rhythm to find, a balance to strike, but Notkin just fell into fucking the channel of his fist and Khan’s unyielding body under him. Maybe it was rough and inelegant and animalistic but it was right, and felt right, right to pulse his hand loose at the top and tight at the base, right to hammer their bodies together like they’d never been apart, right to bury his face in the crook of Khan’s neck and breathe only him. There was a hand in his hair pulling him down into the earth, a voice in his ear telling him yes, here, teeth on his neck above the collar just scraping and egging him on. He’d wanted this. He wanted more now, and here Khan was, beneath him, against him, with him.

“Please,” Khan panted in his ear, and Notkin didn’t know what he was asking for but it didn’t matter.

Orgasm hit him like a fist to the small of his back, shot straight up his spine and then back down. He came all over his hand and Khan’s hips, still thrusting, still riding it out.

Khan’s fist tightened in Notkin’s hair, “Yes, fuck, show me,” he commanded, hauling Notkin up away from him so he could look between their bodies to where he was still hard, still held in Notkin’s hand, “fuck yes, finish me off, Notkin, come on – ”

He pulled back, bowed his head, and cleaned up what he’d done. Khan nearly snatched him bald, holding his head in place, but that only made it better when he came down Notkin’s throat.

*

There were coffins behind Khan in the boxcar stacked three high and two deep. One more, on the floor, was open and empty, its lid at a cant. Khan sat on this, his canisters and black crates piled around him like the bull skulls in Taya’s yurt. His back was straight, his hands curled loosely on his knees, legs just slightly apart. His hat was discarded on the coffin lid beside him, where flowers for the dead would be, its blue band a color Notkin only ever saw in dreams. His suit, nearly as black as his hair, sucked in all the light around him, and his face cast it back out.

He looked Notkin up and down with only his eyes. They shone projector-bright.

“Are you finally going to let me back in?” he asked.

Notkin stood up and looked down to him. “What’ll you do?”

“You can’t know,” Khan said. It wasn’t a taunt, just a simple truth.

Wrong question then, maybe. Notkin tried again. “What’ll I do?”

Khan shrugged, thickening the shadows beneath him. “You decide that. I’ll decide how I respond.”

“...will it hurt the Town?”

“Probably,” Khan said. The word carved a new hollow in Notkin’s heart. At least he knew where it was, now. “But no more than anything else we’ve ever done.”

Because that’s what the rebuilding would be, wouldn’t it? It would be choices, closed doors, bodies colliding in space whether they meant to or not, whether they even knew what they were doing. It would be spit and sweat, dreams and stories, pleasure and pain.

It would be worth it.

Notkin smiled. “You’ll have to let me in too, you know. That’s how this works.”

“Then knock,” Khan told him, smirking right back.

Notkin crossed to him. Knelt at his level. Carded his fingers through Khan’s smooth, dark hair, palms flush to the sides where it was shorn short.

He brought their foreheads together, shut his eyes, and breathed.

With a rumble and a groan, the train started on its track.

*

He woke to someone not him trying not to scream in pain.

Yes, he hurt too, the way he often did when he slept, but under him Khan was sweating and shivering, his heartbeat almost visible in his chest. Notkin clambered off him, knocking the ratty cushions and ripped clothing out of the way if just to look down.

Khan’s teeth were grit into a bar, eyes screwed shut, cringing like he didn’t know whether to curl in on himself or stretch the spasms out. Notkin had never known what this looked like from the outside. He knew now.

“Khan,” he tried, quiet but urgent, “Khan.”

“It’s – fine,” Khan stuttered, shaking his head.

Notkin held him by the shoulders anyway. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” He swallowed a few times, visibly got his breathing under control, then cricked his neck and looked Notkin in the eyes. “No, it’s...I took the powder. Years ago. Not the panacea.”

Of all the things that had been said tonight, Notkin had expected this the least. “You what?”

“I couldn’t let Doctor Burakh do that to one of the little ones,” Khan said, matter-of-fact, done and dead. There was still an edge of pain in his laugh. “And you’d done it too, the first time. It was only fair.”

The blood of the earth wasn’t in him, Notkin realized. At least not until now.

He stroked Khan’s hair absently with one hand, held his shoulder firm with the other. A few more shocks, a few more ugly gasps, and Khan eventually settled into the cushions. Notkin propped himself on his elbows and knees over him; when Khan threw an arm over Notkin’s back and somehow made it not a hug, he sank down anyway, aligning them again.

“Is it worse when you’re here?” he asked.

Khan shook his head. “It’s the same everywhere. But there are ways to get...past it,” he said, quirking an eyebrow first toward the projector, and then, a glance down at Notkin’s hand.

Notkin laughed, and kissed him, because he wanted to and could.

*

They crept out of the theatre in the grey just after dawn. There were already children playing in Spin-a-Yarn Square, some still in their winter coats, others ambitiously chasing spring. Khan was covered neck-to-toes as best he could be, hiding his ripped clothes and bruises under layers; Notkin looked a complete mess, but then, he often did, and if his hair stood up at angles no one would say anything. For now, at least, it would be between them, but the Town was small, and word spread fast.

Across the square, Jester bounded down from the tumor tree. Evidently, the rest of Notkin’s soul had had an interesting night as well. Three leaps to the floor, a quick dart into the square, and then the cat dodged the children playing tag and trotted over the young men. He wreathed himself around Notkin’s ankles a few times before stopping in front of Khan.

Jester looked up expectantly.

Khan, a flush across his cheeks, knelt and offered his hand. Jester pushed his nose into it, then decided that was enough, and led the way down the steps. Notkin couldn’t help smiling; he’d wanted this too, the simple sight of his worlds meeting at last.

A rush of wind carried a twinge of dust past his ears and eyes.

Notkin’s eyes followed the gust to the west, where the Polyhedron had once stood. There was open sky there now, the sun’s rays stretching out across the whole of Town. Beyond that, beyond sight, was the new city across the Gorkhon. Beyond that, an entire world that Notkin might only ever see in pictures.

Unless, of course, he brought it here.

“Hey,” Khan said, a few steps ahead of him, suit and coat flapping in the same spring wind. He offered his hand. “Come on.”

Without any further hesitation, Notkin reached out and took it.

*

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of You Fled the World of Miracles; It Did Not Cast You Out