the scenes which hold the waking world

by greenTeacup

Summary:

Thirty million dollars for a secret. That's the payout for Kaz Brekker, the most dangerous, ruthless, and talented extractor in the dream industry — if he can manage it.

But to have a chance, he needs the best. That means finding a team willing to attempt the impossible: a knife-wielding cat burglar, a college dropout with perfect aim, a sullen ex-Navy SEAL, a drop-dead gorgeous former Soviet spy, and the estranged son of their rich employer.

If they can avoid killing each other, they'll go down in history. If they can't, none of them may wake up again.

Notes:

• Translation into Русский available: the scenes which hold the waking world by felinn

in which six of crows meets inception, that is, 'in which kaz's emotional baggage makes cobb's look like a handbag,' or rather, 'in which inej is the only one remotely qualified to be doing any of this and she should be kept as far away from it all as possible: an essay by greenTeacup and kaz brekker'

Chapter 1: don't talk to strangers

It was Jesper’s dream, Inej could tell.

The water beneath the mangrove trees was a green so dark it was almost black, and knives of light stretched through the canopy from the setting sun. Their canoe drifted down a narrow waterway between avenues of trees, passing gnarled cages of mangrove roots. A weak lantern spluttered buttery yellow light at the prow.

She drew Sankta Alina and spun it. The weight was comfortable, perfect, flawlessly balanced. If she loosed it, it would fly straight and true — and not, as it did in real life, with the slightest pull to the left, where an imperfection in the metal had left an error in the balance.

At the prow, Kaz glanced back and saw what she was doing. “Daydreaming, Inej?” he said quietly.

She supposed that was his idea of a joke. He had an odd sense of humor. He almost certainly knew they were dreaming, too; Kaz wore his totems everywhere, asleep or awake. They covered his hands even now, folded neatly over the head of his cane.

“Apparently,” she said. He did not smile, but her answer did draw a sort of suppressed twitch from the corner of his mouth, which was as good as a hearty chuckle where Kaz was concerned.

Inej could almost always tell when she was in someone else’s dream. A long time ago, the Menagerie had taught its girls how to find the inevitable slips made by even the most talented dreamers: a mistaken scent, errors in light and color, the telltale influence of dream-physics on weight and momentum. With Jes, though, it was easy to tell. His dreams were simple things, full of water and trees and sunlight, and the odd flash of sensory detail —the distant cry of a cormorant, or the smell of wood soaked for years in brackish water. Inej liked them. She liked them than most people’s dreams, at least.

“Getting closer,” said Jesper. He stood at the stern of the boat, pushing them forward with a long pole. Inej put away her knife and drew up her hood.

The boat drew up against a splintering old dock. Inej leapt out of the boat with barely a shudder of the hull, alighting neatly on the pier, and waited for Kaz to pick his way carefully onto the platform. He had more difficulty than she did. His cane slid perilously without purchase before finding it and biting deep into the grooves of the wood. With a visible gritting of teeth, he ground the tip into the dock and stepped forward, bearing the brunt of his weight on it.

The boat surged at the displacement of his weight, and Jesper cursed. “Careful, boss,” he said.

“I am careful. Next time, dream us somewhere on solid land, Jesper.”

“Hey, it was your bright idea to dream in my head. This is what you get. If you wanted architecture, you should’ve asked Matthias.”

“If we relied on Matthias every time we needed a dreamscape, we’d never take a job without him.”

“That’s fine. Don’t know what you have against Matthias,” said Jesper. “Personally, I find it comforting to have a healthy cut of Norwegian beef following us around. Makes me feel safer.”

Inej wisely said nothing. She would have offered her hand to steady Kaz as he left the boat, but she knew he wouldn’t have taken it, and she couldn’t bear the way he’d look at her if she did.

Kaz caught her looking at him and raised his eyebrow. She matched his expression and turned away, feigning disinterest.

“Come on,” he said brusquely. “We’re burning daylight.”

The three of them strode up the dock.

At the end of the pier sat a wooden hut with a thatched roof. The door was missing, replaced by a curtain of beads, and the erratic flicker of firelight strained through the grimy windows.

Kaz paused in front of the curtain and tapped his cane twice on the dock. Jesper sighed and cocked his gun, shouldering past them both and taking up his post beside the doorframe. “I never get to have fun,” he said.

“You have altogether too much,” murmured Inej, and he winked at her. She giggled. Kaz cleared his throat irritably: they were being too loud for his liking. Jesper rolled his eyes and mimed zipping his mouth shut. Inej merely planted herself at Kaz’s shoulder and slipped a knife from each holster at her hip, the whisper of steel dwarfed by the forest cacophony of bird cries and rushing water.

Kaz lifted a hand to part the bead curtain, and hesitated. Then he whistled softly, a three-note ascending trill that meant behind me. Inej fell back and waited in his shadow, weight balanced on her front foot, ready to spring forward at the call of another trill.

The leader of the Dregs squared his shoulders and stepped into the hut. His Wraith followed.

Inside, a man sat warming his hands by the fire. A receding crop of blonde hair drew back in a punishing part from his forehead, and a short blond beard sprouted from his jaw. He had clear blue eyes that in their paleness and lack of striation seemed almost like colored glass. He wore a mandarin-collared coat with blue embroidery at the cuffs, and a pocket watch chain carved from gold laurel leaves hung over his left breast.

“Mr. Brekker,” he said cordially. “You’re late.”

Kaz stiffened. “My apologies, Mr. Van Eck,” he said. Inej traded an alarmed glance with Jesper: How does he know who we are? “Allow me to compensate for my lateness by not endeavoring to waste your time.”

The man gestured permissively at the seat across from him. Kaz did not take it.

“We’ve come to offer our services,” he said crisply.

“Your services?” said Van Eck, with poorly feigned interest.

“You need an extractor.”

Inej tensed. She hated when Kaz used this strategy: reminding the mark about dream-sharing was always a gamble, and it rested entirely on the mark not having the good sense to check their totem immediately upon being reminded. Fortunately for all of them, Van Eck made no move to do so as far as she could see.

“Do I,” he said, with mocking surprise.

Kaz stepped closer. “Let’s not demean each other with coyness, Mr. Van Eck.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“You have a job. I have a crew. I see no reason we can’t both walk out of this room happier than we walked in.”

Van Eck folded his hands in his lap. “Neither do I.”

“Good,” said Kaz. His face belied no excitement, but she knew he was pleased from the faint silky tenor his voice acquired, buried under the rasp. “Then we can make an accord?”

“That depends very much on what you have to offer,” said the man, smiling.

Kaz gestured around the room with his cane. “If you haven’t yet figured it out, you’re currently the target of an extraction operation,” he said. “You’re in great danger. Your secrets, Mr. Van Eck, are in great danger. You need someone to defend your subconscious.”

“Really,” said Van Eck, his eyes widening.

“As we speak, an extraction team is searching your mind to find your secrets. They have infiltrated your mental security and are likely close by.”

The irony made her want to roll her eyes. You do think you’re funny, you absurd man.

Wind moaned in the mangrove trees. Inej tensed at the sound, the long, hollow note so much like a groan of pain.

“Is that all?”

“We can offer you protection. At a price.”

Van Eck steepled his fingers in thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, before I consider your generous offer, I would first ask that you tell the forger outside the door to remove my head from his scope.”

The fraction of a second in which Kaz said nothing was all Inej needed to tell he had been taken by surprise. Then he said, “Very well. Jesper?” with the curt boredom of someone being mildly inconvenienced.

Jesper stepped into the room, his gun disappearing into the holster with a flick of his tailcoat. Inej noticed that he took a position at Kaz’s ten o’clock, poised to block a potential shot or swing at his bad leg. She felt a sting of gratitude towards Jesper.

“Can we proceed?” inquired Kaz.

“Impatient,” remarked Van Eck. He laced his fingers and set his hands in his lap. “What was it you said, earlier? ‘Allow me to endeavor not to waste your time’?”

Kaz said nothing to dignify that. He wasn’t the type to waste words by using them twice.

Van Eck smiled. “Well. If I were you, Mr. Brekker — which I thank the Saints every day that I am not — I would worry less about wasting others’ time, and much more about your own,” he said Eck. “Merely given how quickly it is running out.”

A flicker of lightning briefly paved the windows in white, followed moments later by a clap of thunder. Rain fluttered its fingers on the roof, steam rising where hot streaks of it met the dock.

“I don’t take your meaning,” said Kaz coldly.

“I mean that you have failed, sir. Failed in the most grievous way. For not only do I know that you are an extractor, who has violated the privacy of my mind through use of a PASIV, and presumably sent us both to this strange forest in order to steal my secrets—”

Jesper moved. Inej caught it from the corner of her eye as his hand flashed to his hip, faster than light, and by the time his fingers met metal she was already moving in the opposite direction, the two of them lashing out like twin halves of a closing clasp.

“—but I also know that you have run out of time.”

Inej threw at the same time that Jesper fired, and the one-two punch of bullet and blade knocked Van Eck from his chair in a terrible convulsion. Another roll of thunder broke, closer. The dead man sagged to the floor, and Kaz swore.

“I didn’t tell you to kill him.”

“He knew,” Inej said brusquely, turning her back on the body. “He’d figured out what we were doing. Somehow.”

Jesper knelt and tugged Sankt Petyr free of Van Eck’s chest, pressing it into her hand while she tried to swallow her nausea. Behind her eyelids, the image of his lifeless body drooping from the chair ran on a sickening loop. Even knowing that he was alive didn’t help with the tremors.

“Yes, because I told him,” snapped Kaz. “If I had five more minutes—”

“You didn’t. You don’t.”

“Inej is right. The kick’s coming,” Jesper said. He held one finger upright, and as if on cue, a third peal of thunder shattered the air. The rain came down harder, faster. “Besides, he was about to call his projections. Don’t know about you, but I like things I can kill at thirty paces. I’m not keen on a melee with Jan Van Eck’s mental security apparatus, especially in a place like this.”

“It may stun you to learn this, Jesper, but dealing with those hostile projections is in fact what I pay you for. And not, as you appear to believe, to kill my marks before I can extract them.”

“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Inej. “You heard him. The job is over. The kick is coming. We failed, Kaz.”

He glanced at her, and the look on his face was one of ever-so-slight betrayal.

“The difference between ‘setback’ and ‘failure’ is a lack of imagination,” said Kaz Brekker, just as lightning forked town and struck the hut, turning the world white.

 

***

 

Kaz woke to the sound of birdsong.

It was one of the more pleasant awakenings he could remember. Emerging from somnacin-induced sleep was normally like rising from the bottom of a swimming pool, shedding depth until full clarity returned. It was disorienting and left a coppery taste in his mouth. When he wasn’t on somnacin, on the other hand, he woke up rigid and ill-rested, usually clutching the dagger under his pillow. Rarely, he came up screaming; it had summoned Inej to his bedroom, knife in hand, at least once or twice. But it didn’t bother him often. If Kaz wasn’t on somnacin, he rarely slept.

They were sitting on a park bench somewhere sunny and green. The red arch of the Golden Gate winked through a cluster of trees; rows of pastel-colored townhouses rolled out on a series of steep hills past the park fence. Kaz breathed deep, and the air tasted like wet grass and city.

Beside him, Inej was already up and kneeling on the ground, packing up the PASIV. Jesper stretched with a roar of a yawn, arching his back like a cat. Between them on the bench, Jan Van Eck still slumbered, his mouth slightly askew.

“Bugger,” said Jesper, kicking the sleeping man’s ankle. “Should give him a wet willie before he wakes up.”

“Or a bruise.” Kaz loathed people who wasted his time. In particular, now, Jan Van Eck — CEO of Van Eck Solutions, devout Catholic, and one of the last men on the planet you would expect to dabble in the highly illegal and dangerous industry of dream stealing. How he’d been able to recognize an extraction team at first glance, he had no idea, and he was furious at himself for not knowing. How could you miss that? Did he have training? A friend in the business? Divine revelation?

“Well, I think anything that goes that badly deserves a drink for a chaser,” said Jesper. “Who’ll join?”

“It’s eight in the morning.”

“I’m still on London time.”

“What’s the play?” said Inej. Her dark brown eyes focused on Kaz with an intensity that was almost physically warm.

They had another five minutes, maybe, before Van Eck woke up; they’d calculated his somnacin dose to give them a getaway window. To leave would be to cut their losses. They would lose the money from the job, but there would be others. There would always be others.

Kaz pinched out his IV and tossed it away. He took three seconds to think. Three seconds was more than he needed, but he used the extra two for contingency planning.

“Jesper,” he said, holding out his hand.

Jesper stared at his outstretched fingers, then him. Hesitantly, he reached out his own hand.

“The gun, Jesper.”

Jesper visibly relaxed. “Ah,” he said. He unholstered the Walther at his hip and slapped it barrel-first into Kaz’s palm.

“We’re in broad daylight,” warned Inej, looking over her shoulder. The park was empty this early, but handfuls of roaming joggers still trailed the edges of the field, and a couple were playing with their dog in the meadow adjacent.

“I’m aware.”

“Shoot him and security will come running.”

“I’m aware. Keep packing up the PASIV. Once he wakes up, we’ll need to move fast.”

She tucked the IVs back into their box and shut the PASIV case. From the outside, the machine resembled any other black leather attaché, down to the silver clasps and embellishments, though anyone who tried to pick it up would immediately notice the difference in weight. Kaz had commissioned the model himself. It had come at a hefty cost, but it was worth it to have the benefit of stealth.

Van Eck stirred, his eyelids fluttering. He drew his head up from where it lolled on his neck and yawned, smacking his lips. When his gaze met Kaz’s, the beginning of a self-satisfied smile grew on his fat mouth.

Kaz pointed the gun at Van Eck’s knee. He fired.

The scream tore through the park in deafening tones. Every jogger on the path stopped to stare. Jesper winced. Inej looked away.

“Who told you we were coming?” Kaz asked calmly.

“Nobody! Nobody did!” Blubbery sobs tore from the man’s throat.

“Who’s your informant?”

“There wasn’t one — I can explain, I can explain, I swear—”

“I want a name. Who was it? Bollinger? Rotty?”

Kaz moved the gun to the other knee. “I won’t ask again.”

“Nobody told me! Nobody! There was no informant — none, and I tried—”

The bullet shattered his second kneecap. The sound wrenched from his mouth was a long, incoherent scream of pain.

“Who taught you about dream sharing?”

“I did,” sobbed Van Eck. “I learned — I’d heard whispers — rumors — nobody told me, they said you could steal secrets, I wanted to learn—”

“Really? A law-abiding businessman like yourself, you’re telling me you did it on a personal whim? Figured you’d pick up a new hobby by dabbling in the nightmare industry?”

“No. No! I wanted to hire… I needed an extraction, I had a job… I had to know what I — what it was…”

As one, the joggers turned and began to run towards the sound of the second gunshot, their faces blank and movements brisk.

“Kaz,” warned Inej.

He ignored her. He pointed the pistol at Van Eck’s sternum. “You knew we were coming. There were four people on the world who knew we were running a job today. Three of them were on it. One is me. I didn’t tell, and I know these two didn’t. Who told you?” 

Jesper took aim at one of the joggers and fired. She dropped to the ground, but she was replaced in the line by another. More poured from the trees at the edges of the meadow, a veritable swarm. Inej drew her blades.

“Kaz,” she said, now less a warning than a plea. He glanced at her to show he’d heard.

With visible effort, Van Eck lifted his head. Snot and tears ran down his face in rivulets. “There was no informant,” he repeated.

“Your loyalty to a rat is as surprising as it is tedious.”

“There is no rat. Remember? Four people knew,” he rasped. “You said four, Dirtyhands.”

“Yes.” Kaz frowned. The idea occurred to him at the same time as Van Eck spoke.

“You vouched for three,” he said, in tones strained from the pain. “Did it never occur to you to wonder about the fourth?”

The joggers were close enough to see the whites of their eyes. Jesper fired, and fired again, but there were too many for him to keep at bay for long. Their faces were empty of emotion, and their dead sprint across the meadow was unnerving in its speed. They made a ring around the bench and closed ranks.

“The client was the fourth,” said Kaz.

Van Eck managed a sweat-stained smile. Blood strained between his teeth from where he had obviously bit down on his tongue.

One jogger came close enough to lunge for Jesper. He put a bullet between her eyes and whirled around to tag the next one in her throat, but there were too many, too fast. Inej dropped the PASIV and leapt to his defense, blades out, and cut down a third before it could grab him.

“Yes,” said Van Eck. “He was.”

This time, it was Kaz’s turn to kill him.

 

***

 

Afternoon light strained through the curtains of the hotel room. They twisted and flapped in the breeze from the open window, giving the impression of wings straining to achieve flight. The Royal Suite of the Plaza Hotel waited in silent luxury, serene, untouched by the disturbed dreams of the four bodies that lay on its floor.

Kaz sat up and tugged out his IV. Jesper and Inej followed almost immediately. Privately, each checked their totems; out of politeness, he turned his head, though of course he already knew what they were. Inej’s was something to do with the balance of her knife, and Jesper his gun. Kaz never asked to know more than that, and they never told. It didn’t matter. Neither of them would ever be permitted to dream in his head, so he would never have to forge their totems anyway — and anyway, they had both done him the politeness of never asking about his. Courtesy and chivalry did not feature often in Kaz’s life, but when they did, he saw no reason not to repay them. Debts of gratitude were nearly as onerous as those of credit.

Without speaking, they sprang to work: Jesper removed his IV and Van Eck’s, careful not to stir the man, while Inej wiped down the coffee table for prints. Kaz rose to his feet and straightened his coat. Jesper handed him the PASIV.

They were at the door when Van Eck said, “I’m impressed, you know.”

Inej whirled around. The knife was in her hand without Kaz having seen her draw it.

“But I’m surprised.” He pushed himself up from the floor and staggered to his feet. His eyes were slightly dull, his reflexes slow. The residual somnacin was clearly still working through his system. He must have forced himself awake. Kaz was, reluctantly, impressed. It was a hard thing to do, and he ought to know.

“It’s out of character for a good businessman to leave without collecting his paycheck,” he added.

Kaz paused. “I only expect to be paid for jobs that are completed, Mr. Van Eck.”

“And you don’t regard this as complete?” Van Eck looked around with mocking wonderment at the hotel suite. “Are we dreaming still?”

“Decide for yourself,” said Kaz. “But the extraction was incomplete.”

“I disagree,” he said in surprise. “After all, you extracted it, did you not? The secret?”

“What secret?”

“That I hired you.”

Kaz hated feeling like a fool. He loathed it. He loathed it most when his enemy was someone so undeserving of the honor. Stupid pigeon, you let this man trick you? You were outplayed by this pathetic white-collar buffoon? You deserve to be conned if this is all it takes. You green idiot, you credulous waste of a pulse, if you were any more stupid you’d be clinically braindead.

Somewhere, a clock tolled four times. Noise wafted up from the street below, a medley of car horns and distant crowds. Kaz held Van Eck’s gaze.

 Jesper checked his watch. “Not for nothing,” he announced, “but this guy gives me the creeps, and we’ve got a plane to catch.”

“I’ll compensate you for the tickets,” said Van Eck easily. “Or I’ll buy the airline. Whichever is less time-consuming. Stay, why don’t you? Have some breakfast. I’ll order room service. Can I get you some coffee?” He looked at Inej. “You can keep that knife handy, if it makes you comfortable. I assure you, you have nothing to fear from me. In life, as in dreams, I’m quite harmless.” He smiled. “You have the most marvelous aim, by the way. Wherever did you learn?”

Inej set her jaw and said nothing. Kaz decided he wanted Van Eck never to smile again, especially not at her. In fact, he wouldn’t mind if Van Eck never looked at her again, either.

But he wouldn’t walk away from a payload they’d earned twice over. He refused to be afraid of a balding venture capitalist who’d already once screamed for mercy at his hands.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what, Mr. Brekker?”

“I thought we agreed not to be coy.”

Van Eck’s smile grew. “You mean, why did I offer you three million dollars to extract a secret I already knew?”

Kaz said nothing, merely tilted his head back and blinked.

“Because for the job I need, I can only use the best,” he said. “And despite the strength of your reputation, I had to make sure, Mr. Brekker, that you were the best.”

“And?” said Kaz coolly. “Have I met your standard of performance?”

“Met and exceeded,” said Van Eck. “A dream within a dream… ingenious concept. I’d read papers, theories, but never heard of it being done in the field. How did you balance the somnacin formula to achieve it without risking limbo?”

Not easily was the answer, not that he’d give Van Eck the pleasure of hearing it. Nina had worked for seven months to get the compounds right, and it still didn’t perform perfectly. Jesper and Matthias had the misfortune of serving as test subjects during development, and both swore up and down it was one of the worst things Kaz had ever asked them to do — which was saying something.

“Trade secrets, Mr. Van Eck,” he said. “That one in particular will cost you far more than three million.”

“Fine. I’m tempted to ask you to name your price… but I don’t need it. The secret I want is far more valuable, anyway.”

“You’re still playing coy. If you have a job, tell me. If not, my crew and I are leaving.”

“So impatient,” said Van Eck, amused. “Do you have somewhere to be?”

“Always,” said Kaz. Which was true. Every minute spent here, every second wasted toying with Van Eck or any other client, was a moment spent away from his real ambition. They were necessary diversions, jobs — they gave him wealth, reputation, and leverage, all of which he would need in his quest — but they were not his goal. They were not his purpose.

Nobody found themselves in this industry out of choice. There were always shackles of some sort involved. Debts of finance, debts of bondage, debts of vengeance.

“I see. Then I will be direct.” Van Eck leaned forward on his knees. “Twenty million dollars. And whatever resources you need.”

Inej made an involuntary sound of shock. Jesper guffawed in delight. “What kind of secret,” he said incredulously, “is worth twenty million dollars?”

Van Eck’s smile grew wide and hungry.

“Have you ever heard of jurda parem?” he asked Kaz.

Kaz shrugged. “Is that a person?”

“Hah! No.”

“Jurda is a street drug,” Inej said quietly, surprising everyone in the room. “A poor man’s route to dream-sharing.” She spoke only to Kaz, as if Van Eck did not exist. “It’s somnacin cut with opioids. Usually morphine. Highly addictive, relatively cheap. It’s the only way to effect the dream-sharing properties of somnacin without a PASIV machine.”

She didn’t explain how she knew, and Kaz could probably guess. The glance Jesper sent her was full of concern.

Kaz lifted his eyebrow at Van Eck. “Is that what you’re referring to?”

“Not quite. Your friend is right, though her information is incomplete. Jurda parem is engineered from the same chemical base as jurda, but demonstrates extraordinary properties unlike any compound of somnacin currently on the market. If my sources are to be believed, it grants complete control over the dream-scape.”

Kaz suppressed a smirk. “How wonderful. I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

“What do you mean?”

“A trained etherealnik can control the landscape of the dream with regular somnacin. You’re describing an ability that already exists.”

“Etherealnik,” repeated Van Eck slowly.

Kaz said, “It’s a special class of dreamer. They can manipulate the fabric of reality, build landscapes, change laws of physics on a whim. What a corporalnik does to the dreamer, the etherealnik does to the dream.”

“Americans call them architects,” sighed Jesper. “You all seem to think that if you give something a different name, you can pretend another country didn’t think of it first.”

Van Eck’s eyes lit up at the term. “Ah, yes. I’ve heard of these… ‘architects’ before.”

“Then you know you’re being had.”

“Not necessarily. I know that architects exist. I also know that true architects are rare, and generally weak besides. Ones with the strength to control the dreamscape completely are almost non-existent. Unheard of since—”

“Sankta Alina,” murmured Inej.

Van Eck inclined his head at her curiously. “A fellow keeper of the faith?”

She said, “Whatever faiths you or I keep, Mr. Van Eck, I very much doubt we are fellows in them.”

He accepted this without comment. “But you know the stories.”

“Every dreamer who ever stole two hits of jurda knows the stories,” Kaz snapped. “What you’re describing is snake oil. Etherealki are born, not engineered. Nobody knows where they come from.”

“That was how it used to be,” said Van Eck. “Jurda parem will change all that.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Are you sure?” He leaned forward on his knees, bringing his eager face closer to Kaz. “How would you like to be an etherealnik, Kaz Brekker? To wield the power of a true architect? To bend every dream to your whim?”

Kaz shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “Either way, it won’t matter if the drug you’re describing doesn’t exist.”

Disappointment flickered across Van Eck’s face. He did an admirable job of putting it away, though, and straightened his back. “Well, then,” he said. “How would you like twenty million dollars? I trust you believe in that, at least.”

Kaz felt Inej’s hard stare without looking. He had sometimes felt that she could read his thoughts, which was alternately a comfort and a terror, and usually both; now, he wished that she could, if only so he could avoid her disappointment when he explained it to her. Twenty million is not having to work again, maybe ever, certainly not for a while. Twenty million is Pekka Rollins in the palm of my hand. Twenty million is your freedom from the Dregs, from this life.

“Fifty,” he said.

Van Eck burst out laughing. “You are a remarkable boy, aren’t you? They said you had gall — they never said you had cheek. No. Twenty.”

“Fifty.”

“Twenty-five. As a reward for amusing me.”

“Fifty.”

“At the risk of souring the mood, there are other extractors, Mr. Brekker.”

“Hire them, then. It’s no difference to me. They won’t do it for less than seventy.”

Jesper said, “And good luck finding someone stupid enough to take it on, either. You think idiots of our caliber come cheap?”

Kaz wondered, briefly, what it would be like to push Jesper out of a very high window.

Van Eck considered, and then he sighed. “Thirty,” he said. “Because you’ve made me laugh, and because Mr. Fahey makes a salient point.”

Jesper gave a quiet hoot of glee. It was a better offer than Kaz had expected. Nevertheless, he let the silence stretch out as long as he needed, watching the discomfort settle in. He enjoyed watching Van Eck squirm.

The businessman extended his hand. “Do we have an accord?”

Needless to say, Kaz did not shake it. Instead, he sat down in the armchair opposite Van Eck and crossed his legs.

“Tell me about the job,” he said.

Chapter 2: don't walk into danger

As a rule, Nina Zenik took a cup of coffee with breakfast, a flute of champagne with lunch, and a glass of wine with dinner. When she heard the name of the man who’d come to visit her, she called for the wine early.

Summer in Budapest meant the streets burned to the unclothed touch, and the sky was the pale blue of shallow waters. The windows of her townhouse yawned open, gasping for a hint of breeze. Sunshine scorched the narrow streets outside them. Persian rugs sprawled over the floor as if they’d collapsed there after a wrestling match, and tapestries in luscious reds and oranges cloaked the exposed brick walls.

Sprawled on a velvet chaise, Nina took a moment to adjust the neckline of her red slip. Sweat had turned large portions of it transparent, which was an effect she liked and pretended not to notice when she wore it around her clients.

A knock came at the door. She gave a considering look to the client who still laid on the bed behind her. He was a squarely built man of forty, perhaps forty-five, with fine salt-and-pepper hair and a soft, ample chin. In sleep, his face was open and childlike in its pleasure, his arm laid limply across the duvet and trailing an IV to the PASIV beside him.

“Come in,” she called.

The doors swung open. In strode Kaz Brekker and his shadows, both armed to the teeth. She did not rise.

“So you’re alive, then,” she sighed.

“Sorry to disappoint.” He planted his cane in the middle of the room and leaned on it, his posture as close to easy as it ever was — which was not very close.

You’d think a trip to the chiropractor would kill him. Actually, she reflected as she studied him, it very well might. But more likely the chiropractor.

“I’d only be disappointed if I’d believed it,” she said.

“I’m flattered by your faith in me.”

“It’s hardly faith. If you went down, you’d have taken everything in a ten-mile-radius with you. The whole world will know when Kaz Brekker leaves it.” She added, “It’ll probably throw a party.”

The Wraith lifted her chin. It was the only sign of displeasure she gave, aside from the hard flash of it in her eyes. Kaz merely nodded, acknowledging Nina’s words as the truth, and perhaps a compliment.

“So,” she said, reaching for her wineglass. “What dark hole in the earth have you been in for the past eight months, and why did it take you so long to crawl out of it?”

“Here and there. New York. Detroit. San Francisco.”

“Ah,” she said wistfully. “The states.”

“Do you miss them terribly?”

“Don’t tease me.”

“Not teasing. Asking.”

“What do you want, Kaz?” she said, more sharply than she meant.

Kaz didn’t answer, a decision which made her want to pull out every hair on his head one by one. He jerked his chin at the client on the sofa. “Who’s that?”

“As if you care,” she said scornfully. Then: “Don’t even think about it, Jesper.”

Jesper turned from where he’d been fingering an expensive porcelain vase, his expression only vaguely guilty. “Sorry. I was just admiring it.”

“The nice thing about the eyes is that you can use them to admire at a distance.”

“Ah, but the fingers are so much more fun to admire with,” he said lightly, grinning.

She let out a snorting giggle and beckoned him. “Come and greet me properly, Jesper. You’ve spent so long with this crew you’ve forgotten your manners.”

He swept forward and planted a smacking kiss on her cheek. “I’d never forget how to treat a lady.”

She took him by the chin and kissed the air beside his cheekbone. “You want something from me.”  

“Now who’s forgotten their manners?”

“Manners are for dealing with gentlemen. Not dream thieves with sour attitudes and schoolboys who kiss hello like an unbroken puppy.”

Jesper clasped his hands to his heart. “Harsh words, Nina. Did you miss me so much?”

“I’ve not missed any of you,” she said, “but between you all, I’ve not missed you the least. What do you want, Kaz? I’m with a client right now, as you’ve obviously noticed.”

“He doesn’t seem to be bothered by the interruption,” Kaz observed.

It was true. Her client would sleep soundly through their conversation, none the wiser. It was what he had paid for, after all: three hours of perfect lucid dreaming, courtesy of Budapest’s only resident corporalnik. Her somnacin compounds were the best anywhere this side of Berlin, and even then, the Germans were ahead by a hair, if that. Technically she didn’t need to be in the room while her clients slept — she didn’t dream with them, normally, and tacked on an extravagant fee for the service if asked — but any chemist worth her salt would never leave a dreamer wired into a PASIV.

“Even so,” she said, “I am working, so let’s make this quick.”

His cheek twitched. “Do you normally drink on the job?”

She scowled and set down her glass of wine. “No. You manage to bring out the worst in me.”

“I’ve been accused of that before, and by far worse people. Nina,” he said, “I want you for a job.”

“You want my somnacin, you mean.”

“No. You. Dreaming with us, not just as a chemist. This is going to be bigger than anything we’ve tried before, and I need a heartrender in the field for what I’m intending.”

She was shaking her head before he finished the sentence. “No. No. I don’t do that anymore.”

“Nina—”

“I’m retired. I don’t dream, and I certainly don’t do extractions.”

“What if I gave you an obscene amount of money?”

“No.”

“No? You haven’t even heard what your cut would be. It’s a very pretty number.”

“I’m a chemist,” she said firmly. “You want to buy my compounds, go ahead. But I don’t work at night anymore.”

“Not for four million dollars?”

She hated him then, this smug little boy who thought he could buy half the world and bully the rest. Not everything is for sale. Someday, you’re going to find something you cannot buy, and it may break you. “Not for love nor money, Kaz.”

He grimaced. She actually didn’t know what the expression meant. Most of his faces were some kind of grimace. She supposed that reflected his emotional range in general.

“Well,” he said, “in that case, I won’t bother with my second offer.”

Nina frowned for a moment, not understanding. Then she did, and she sat bolt upright.

“Pizdabol,” she snapped.

“Not about this.”

“You found him.”

“With difficulty,” he said. “The Americans buried him deep.”

“Where is he?” She leapt up from the sofa, ready to pace. “Where did you look? I searched for months. I had records from every prison, every holding facility, every embassy — I thought they must have killed him—”

“Ah, ah, Nina. It takes away the magic if you explain the trick.”

“I want to see him.”

For a second she thought he was going to try and bargain with her, and she honestly thought she might have screamed at him. But instead he simply said, “Helvar.”

The door to the bedroom swung open. Nina spun on her heel, and watched in slack-jawed wonderment as Matthias Helvar strode back into her life.

He seemed taller than she remembered him, although that was probably because no memory could do his size justice. His hair was longer, a slightly sloppy shock of pale gold that hung around his face and in his eyes, and a ragged beard had sprouted to hide the lower half of his face. From under the hard ridge of his brow, ice-blue eyes glimmered with all the warmth of a Norwegian lake.

He wore light-wash jeans and a worn charcoal leather jacket, both too small for him. A silver cross hung from around his neck, and without thinking she touched her own, which was bare. He could have walked out of a greaser movie from the 1960s, or one of her more lurid dreams. 

“Matthias,” she said. She knew how hoarse she sounded, how desperate. She didn’t care.

“Nina.” His voice was low and rough, his accent almost gone — but not quite. He said her name in the same lilting way, a musical pair of notes in the back of his throat.

She stepped forward, halting. Matthias folded his arms.

“I — how are you?”

He narrowed his eyes.

“I haven’t seen you,” she said, in choked tones. “In so long. I wondered, often, how — how you were.”

She had wondered more than that. When she dreamed, it almost always carried her back to the same place, to that white sailing ship off the coast of Greece, where they’d shared a bed for nine days and nine nights on the way to Morocco. They’d spent the days swimming and exploring the neighboring archipelagos, using their bodies to the point of exhaustion, and in the evenings, she’d slip them each a line of somnacin, and they’d fallen asleep sharing a PASIV, to explore for what felt like days in the space before they woke.

“Matthias?” she ventured, when he still said nothing. She made to come closer, and he moved suddenly. Metal flashed in his hand, and then Nina found herself staring down the barrel of a gun.

She staggered back. Before she could speak, Jesper had a gun nestled against the side of Matthias’ head, and Inej had drawn steel.

“Remember our agreement, drüskelle,” Kaz said sharply.

“I remember.” Matthias stared her down with naked hostility. “Not one hair on her head, you said.”

“That’s right. Not one hair. I used small words, so you have no excuse.”

“Then do not scold me, demjin. I have not touched one hair.”

Kaz was not amused by the technical point. “Point that gun somewhere else, then. You’re not going to shoot her.”

Matthias’ fingers tightened around his gun. “And what if I do?”

“Then Jesper plants a bullet in your prefrontal cortex, and I have to find a new chemist and a new architect.”

“Worth it, maybe,” he said. Nina’s heart thundered. She wanted to keep her eyes on the gun, but they kept straying to Matthias’s face. Please, she thought. Please, don’t. The set of the man’s jaw yielded nothing. He was carved from stone again, like when she’d met him.

Kaz snorted.

“You don’t believe me?” Matthias cocked the pistol. “You, who dreams only of his own vengeance? You think I lack your nerve?”

“Firstly, yes,” said Kaz. “Your country obviously doesn’t train its soldiers to bluff. I don’t think you could shoot her in an empty room with the doors locked, let alone in broad daylight with a gun to your head. Secondly, when I have my revenge, I intend to savor it for more than the three milliseconds it takes for a bullet to rip through my skull.”

Matthias made a sound of disgust. “You think of nothing but your own pleasure.”

“Whereas you’re pointing a gun at Miss Zenik for the good of the nation? Don’t make me laugh.” Nina might have remarked on the absurdity of this idea, had she been capable of speech. “Put it away, Matthias, or I’ll have Jesper force your hand. There’s a lot of you to shoot that won’t kill you.”

Matthias slowly lowered the gun, but kept his white-knuckle grip. Kaz cleared his throat impatiently.

“Vær så snill, kjære,” Nina said quietly.

“Shut up,” Matthias snarled. “You have no right.”

The room shimmered from the heat. She blinked it away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Through the tears she saw his face soften long enough for a glimpse of surprise.

Kaz stepped between them. “Enough. There will be plenty of time for you to resolve your personal issues on the plane to Amsterdam.”

“Amsterdam?” She finally tore her eyes away from Matthias. “What the hell makes you think I’m going to Amsterdam?”

“Because that’s where we’re going. I have a friend who lives in the Netherlands, and he’s generously offered to let us make use of his house. I expect you’ll find it exceedingly comfortable.”

Kaz did not have friends, and the significance of his choice of words did not escape her. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Excuse me, but I haven’t agreed to go anywhere.”

“No,” he agreed, “but you will, anyway.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“Because otherwise I give the CIA a quick ring and tell them I have Matthias Helvar in custody, waiting for them to collect.”

Nina balled her hands into fists. “You wouldn’t.”

“People are always saying that to me,” he said. “I thought you of all people would know better.”

“She won’t do it,” said Matthias harshly. “I told you. Nothing would give her greater pleasure than to watch you send me back to the Americans in chains.” He smiled at Kaz, and it was an ugly expression. There was no love lost between them, but there was no hatred, either; Kaz was the kind of predictable evil that Matthias could understand, and likely even appreciate.

“That’s not true,” said Nina lowly.

“Prove it,” suggested Kaz. He held out his hand, a slip of paper extended between two fingers. She took it. It was a plane ticket.

“We depart in four hours,” he said. “Plenty of time to pack your bags and say your goodbyes, and to deal with any… residual business.” He indicated the client behind her with a nod. “If you’re not there when boarding starts, I make a call at the gate, and the CIA will be waiting for us in Amsterdam.”

“And if I am?”

“Then both of you get what you want. For you, four million dollars and a guilt-free conscience; for him, the same, and a plane ticket to Oslo, where he will be admitted into the country without difficulty.” At Matthias’ suspicious look, he added, tiredly, “I will personally assure it.”

“You made an oath, demjin.”

“Which I well recall. You made me put it in writing.”

As if his paper was worth any more than his promise. “Matthias,” Nina said, desperately. “Listen. Whatever deal you’ve made with him, it’s a bad one. He’s cheating you somehow. You won’t be safe, not even if the job works, which it may not. Listen. Stay here. Stay with me. I can keep you safe. I will keep you safe.” Not like last time. This time, she wouldn’t let him go.

Kaz lifted his eyes to the ceiling. Jesper gave her a sad, sympathetic smile.

Matthias slowly shook his head.

“Jeg vil heller dø,” he told her, the words falling like heavy stones from his lips.

I would rather die.

Nina swallowed around the knob in her throat. Wordlessly, she turned back to Kaz.

“Four hours?” she said quietly.

“A little less, now. But yes.”

She nodded. Then she tucked the ticket into her cleavage and straightened her shoulders, sucking up a quick breath.

“You’re a cruel bastard, Kaz,” she said.

“This is no time for flirting, Nina dear.”

“If you hurt him,” she said, “or even allow him to be hurt — if, at any time while in your keeping, any harm comes to Matthias Helvar—”

“You’ll kill me?”

“Not a chance.” She smiled grimly, and if it wasn’t her imagination, Kaz hesitated for just a heartbeat. “I know what your dreams look like, Dirtyhands. And if I were you, I would be far more scared of heartrenders.”

 

***

 

It was a rule among the Dregs, often exercised but never discussed, that when there the three of them had to share a car, Jesper ended up in the backseat.

The road wrapped along the side of a river, a fat ribbon of blue that sliced a quavering pattern through the trees. Inej drove smartly and briskly, taking the corners only a little slower than Jesper would have liked, and the Bentley purred at her touch. They were making good time out of Amsterdam, where he’d had all of fifteen minutes to enjoy the amusements of the city before Kaz had hustled them both into the car and sent them racing out to the countryside.

“You said your friend lived in Amsterdam,” Jesper had complained, not bothering to hide his disappointment.

“No, I said we were flying to Amsterdam,” Kaz said. He sat in the passenger seat, flipping through some sort of book. “And I said my friend lives the Netherlands. Any inferences you made were your fault.”

“I wanted to visit the red-light district.”

“Why, Jesper, you should have told me. Naturally, your entertainment is my highest priority.”

Jesper flopped sideways across the backseat, a pathetic picture. “I hope you get carsick.”

“Fine. It’s going on your shoes.”

He sniffed, and suspiciously drew his feet up onto the seat.

When they were about an hour east of Amsterdam, Inej pulled off the main road and onto a narrow slip of gravel that pinged and rattled at the Bentley’s undercarriage for the better part of two miles. They cut through a small forest, the light dimming under a canopy overhead, and when they broke out of the trees they were soaring down a long sun-lit driveway. A vast plain of well-kept lawn bracketed the gravel, its color striped in the manicured style of golf courses, and rushed up to the foot of a tall brick estate which sat on the banks of a lake.

The house was massive: a stately cherry-red-brick Georgian with a gabled roof and cream-white quoin, bearded with green ivy. Four separate chimneys crowned the roof, all merrily piping steam. A wrought-iron terrace extended from the western side of the building and wrapped around the back, overlooking the glassy waters of the lake. A separate three-car garage sat at a distance from the house proper, in front of which was parked Nina’s red Porsche, its mirrors glinting in the sun.

On the way in, Jesper glimpsed other structures through the trees: a red clay tennis court, fenced with turquoise chain; a greenhouse with panes of glass so clear it might have been diamond; a grassy paddock where, he could have sworn, he saw a pair of horses.

“Saints. Is your friend some kind of prince?”

Kaz shrugged. “After a fashion, I suppose.”

“Hey, Kaz?”

“Mm.”

“I’ve decided to forgive you for not putting us up in Amsterdam.”

“I thought you might.”

Inej pulled the Bentley up next to the Porsche. Jesper launched out of the car with a hoot, his boots crunching the gravel. “Dibs on the best room,” he hollered. “I want the master suite. Also, I want to go swimming. Is the water warm? Scratch that, I don’t actually care.”

Kaz and Inej followed at a more sedate pace, Inej carrying their luggage. Both traveled with only a single suitcase, which in Jesper’s opinion was a sign of some shared vein of sociopathy and probably meant they were made for each other. Not that either of them would ever admit it. Kaz, in particular, would let someone pry all his nails off with a butter knife before he’d even admit to liking what he had for breakfast. If someone asked him outright about Inej, he might keel over from the shock.

Five years he’d known them — their friendship, if you could call it that, was nearly older than the dream industry itself. Five years ago, when news of the Morozova Job had first leaked, and the possibilities of somnacin had been revealed to the world, Jesper had been a freshman at Trinity with a gambling habit and a way around a pistol. He remembered rushing to the computer lab with his friends to read the declassified report in the New York Times, how all they’d talked about for days after that was the legend of Agent Starkov.

Sankta Alina, the First Architect, Patron Saint of Etherealki. The transcripts of the Morozova Job called her Sol Koroleva.

And better still than ghost he remembered the headlines that ran for weeks afterward: LEAKED KGB FILES REVEAL ILLEGAL EXPERIMENTATION WITH REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY… UNITED NATIONS DECLARES DREAM-SHARING A VIOLATION OF GENEVA PROTOCOL AGAINST CHEMICAL WEAPONRY… FDA RECLASSIFIES SOMNACIN AS SCHEDULE I…

Two weeks after the report dropped, Jesper turned in his last paper, packed a bag, and left Trinity. He’d met Kaz Brekker in an underground somnacin den in Manchester, and he’d never looked back.

He flung open the doors to the house and swaggered into the foyer, a massive antechamber with lacquered mahogany floors and two sets of curved staircases. He cupped his hands and yelled, “Nina! Darling, I’m home!”

“I’m not Nina,” said a flat voice.

He pivoted on his heel. Emerging from one of the nearby drawing rooms was a small, slender blond boy not much younger than Jesper, with a face that might have been pretty when it wasn’t so pinched. He dressed like some of the tossers on the polo team at Trinity: a dress shirt with a collar so crisp you could cut yourself on it, a wine-colored cashmere polo sweater, and spotless brown leather Oxfords. Hair artfully mussed, a fringe which hung carelessly but not sloppily over his eyes. The boy could have strolled off the set of a photoshoot for Aristocrats Monthly.

Jesper slipped his hands into his pockets. “You’re certainly not. Which raises the question of what you’re doing here, sunshine. Who are you?”

The boy’s face, if possible, grew even more pinched. “I live here,” he said. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?”

“I’m sorry, you didn’t order a pizza?”

Kaz’s cane made a clear hard crack against the hardwood floor as he entered the room. “Good, you’ve found each other,” he said. “This will save time. Wylan, Jesper. Jesper, this is Wylan Van Eck.”

Jesper raised his eyebrows. “No relation?”

“Well, that would be an extraordinary coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re working for my father,” said Wylan. He lifted his chin, as if daring Jesper to say something about it, which he obviously didn’t know was a bad idea, since Jesper had yet to find a dare he wouldn’t take.

“So Van Eck’s letting us use his house?”

“No. Van Eck doesn’t know we’re here.” Kaz stripped off his overcoat and held it out to Inej, who gave him an innocently inquiring look, like: I’m certain I have no idea what you expect me to do with that. He sighed. “Would you please hang that up for me? Thank you.”

“Well done,” she said, and took it.

“Don’t push it. Anyway, Wylan is joining the team. He’ll be a tourist, shadowing Matthias.”

“You’re kidding,” Jesper gasped. “He’s twelve.”

“Twenty!” snapped Wylan.

“Twenty, you’re serious? Saints. He’s not old enough to drink in the states, and you want to bring him dreamside on the biggest job of our lives?”

“Nineteen,” Kaz corrected. Jesper threw up his hands, as if to say: My point! At Wylan’s wince, Kaz added, “It’s not that I begrudge you your secrets, Wylan, but as a rule it’s a bad idea to lie to people you intend to dream with… You have to be very good at it, and it’s a skill you acquire with experience.”

“Kaz, you’re not serious,” said Jesper. “Believe me, I’m not normally one to say this, but this is a serious operation. We don’t have time to deal with the bumbling of a spoiled undergraduate who fancies playing dress-up criminal for a weekend.”

“Hey!”

“I think Wylan may prove more convenient than you give him credit for,” Kaz said mildly. “He’s already made himself quite useful to me. Don’t you like the house?”

“We don’t need to take him under with us to use his house.”

“No, Jesper. Well spotted. We take him under to make sure his daddy doesn’t double-cross us.”

Jesper’s anger vanished like smoke in a strong breeze. He grinned. “So you’re collateral, then,” he told Wylan. “You should have said so.”

“I’m a member of the team,” he said, his cheeks burning.

“Sure. And I’m the grand old Duke of York.”

“I am!”

Oh, no, Jesper thought delightedly. Blond and fresh and easily flustered. Kaz, darling, you shouldn’t have.

“This is no place to squabble,” said Inej, and Jesper backed off from Wylan, slightly abashed. “We should regroup with the others and talk of plans. Where are Nina and Matthias?”

Wylan hesitated. “That’s the pretty one and the big one?”

“Yes,” said Jesper.

“I believe they prefer to go by their names,” said Kaz.

“He’s lying, he has no way of knowing that.”

“That’s enough, thank you, Jesper.”

Wylan turned towards Kaz, deliberately and obviously ignoring Jesper. “They’re both here. He arrived last night in the helicopter — I put him in the room you picked, at the far end of the west wing. He’s been there ever since. I’ve had his meals sent up to him, but I don’t know how much of them he’s eaten.”

“That’s fine. And Nina?”

“Got in this morning. I gave her my mother’s suite, like you said. She’s been out since, but she hasn’t tried to go into the west wing.”

“Good. What’s the size of your staff?”

“Er — ten, plus the garden crew. Three maids, a cook, head housekeep, stablehands—”

“That’ll do. Send them away.”

“What?” Wylan blinked. Confusion looked adorable on him.

Kaz signed something with his hands.

“I — I don’t understand that.”

“No? My mistake. I make a point of speaking clearly. I presumed if you had trouble understanding, you might be hard of hearing.”

“I heard, but I don’t understand. Why do I have to send away the staff?”

“Because I prefer my walls without ears,” said Kaz, starting up the spiral staircase, “and a house this large almost invariably has them. The fact that they’ve seen Matthias and Nina enter the house is already a problem, since now they’re witnesses to the three of you meeting, but if you’ve been smart and haven’t been chatty, they’ll assume you’re having friends over from university.”

“I never went to uni.”

“No? Neither did I. You’ll have to ask Jesper about it. Tell them to be off the premises by nightfall, or they’ll be taking a far more indefinite leave of absence from your employ.”

“I — all right, sure, but for what reason?”

“I don’t know,” called Kaz, reaching the top of the staircase. He turned and looked down at them, and Jesper almost suspected he had picked that position on purpose, so he could deliver orders from ten feet above, like Caesar commanding his army. “Tell them it’s a vacation. A paid one, if you want, it’s no concern of mine. Or don’t. I thought the main appeal of having servants was not having to negotiate.”

“Tell them you’re having an orgy, and you need the house to yourself,” Jesper suggested.

Wylan stared at him. “Are you drunk?”

“Not presently,” he said. A fantastic idea struck him. “Saints, this place probably has a massive wine cellar, doesn’t it?”

Wylan folded his arms. It made him look like a grumpy cherub. “Yes. And a massive padlock to go with it.”

“In the words of my cherished ex-boyfriend,” said Jesper, “you had me at ‘massive.’”

“Not tonight, Jesper,” Kaz called. His voice rang lofty and almost celestial in the high-ceilinged room.

“Aw, boss.”

“Another night,” he allowed. “But not this one. I need you sharp. We’re having an all-hands meeting in the drawing room at midnight.”

“That’s kind of late for an all-hands, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be busy until then.”

“Busy with what?” he called.

Kaz did not answer. “Have the staff bring my bags up before you dismiss them,” he said, and then he disappeared down the hallway, leaving a cool silence in his wake.

At length, Wylan spoke.

“You know, he’s sort of a jackass,” he said.

Jesper traded an amused smile with Inej. She didn’t bother to disagree, and he doubted she even would, if asked. He said, “You’re only saying that because you’ve just met.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Wylan dryly. “He’s better once you get to know him?”

“Ach, nae,” said Jesper cheerfully, slapping the kid on the back. “He’s much worse. Now let’s see those wine cellars, quick, before he remembers to check.”

 

***

 

Matthias’s bedroom faced the lake. It was a pretty view. Its face was cool and blue and so clear it looked drinkable. Sometimes he got up at night to check that the water was still there.

He did not like his rooms in this place. It was all too much. His bed, for instance: king-sized mattress on four-poster bed, under canopy of gold brocade. Wallpaper: crimson with pattern of gold fleur-de-lis. Curtains, the same. Full wardrobe stocked with clothes all tailored to his size, suits, jeans, leather jackets, polo shirts, all in rich colors and fine fabrics, as if the person shopping for him did not know his style and so simply allowed for all possibilities. The bathroom: club-foot tub, double vanity (for what did one man need two sinks?) and a new shaving kit placed in the medicine cabinet. It was far too much. Nobody needed so many things.

It was too much space, also. Matthias had lived his whole life in small rooms. He did not like having so much emptiness around him. It reminded him of the desert.

That was where Brekker had found him. He had been undercover at the time. He did not know the name of the place exactly. The people who smuggled him out of Texas had kept him in the trunk of a car. He laid there for seven hours in the heat and musk and sweat, his limbs wracked with cramps. At some point they had to have crossed the Mexican border, because only then did they allow him to get out and use the bathroom and drink some water. Then he went back in the trunk and they drove another four hours until they reached the safe house.

It was not good safe house. Matthias could have told them this, if his cracked tongue and parched throat could have then made a sound: it was not secure, not clean. Only an adobe shack in the middle of the desert, its walls plastered upright with sun-cracked white clay. Twelve miles from nearest gas station. No roads except the dirt path leading to the highway. They left him there with two weeks of canned food and drove away.

Alone, on the badlands, with no way of knowing when or if he would see another human being, Matthias had slowly started to go insane.

At first it was not so bad. One benefit of long-term serious somnacin abuse — and there were not many — was you lost the ability to dream. He slept soundly through the first night dry, and the next. The nightmares took a week to arrive.

They were always the same: he was on a boat in Greece, and there were Russian helicopters in the air above them, turning the sea to chop; and Nina Zenik had kissed him, a kiss that was smoke and saltwater, and with the taste of it still on his lips she named him a traitor.

When Kaz Brekker came walking out of the desert dressed all in black, for a moment, Matthias had believed he was the Devil. And Matthias felt hope for the first time in months, because he knew the Devil could give him what he wanted, and no Saint ever could.

Kaz would still give him what he wanted. Though he seemed intent on putting Matthias through hell, first.

But Matthias had seen hell, and Kaz did not even know the shape of it. Hell was Nina being wrapped in a shock blanket and shepherded into a helicopter while they cuffed him and hauled him into the brig. Hell was imagining the taste of her skin while he laid in the cell where she had sent him. It was a place Matthias knew well. It was a place he would show her, when the job was done.

At a quarter to midnight, a knock came at his door. It was the young one, the boy. Willan.

“There’s a meeting downstairs in fifteen,” he said. “Kaz sent me to fetch you.”

“Very good. I will be there.”

Willan nodded. He whistled, rocking back and forth on his heels.

“Goodbye,” Matthias added helpfully.

The boy cringed, and massaged his wrists. It was a nervous tic. Someone should tell him about it. It was not good to have so obvious a tell.

“Right,” he said. “Um, I might as well show you down now, though. So you don’t get lost. It’s a big house.”

Matthias studied him. “He told you to escort me,” he said.

Willas sagged. “That’s correct.”

“I do not need shepherding.”

“I know.”

“I can find my way downstairs.”

“And I told him that.”

“He is not worried I will get lost.”

“No, I don’t think so, probably.”

“He is worried I will go looking for Nina.”

William dithered. “Well,” he said.

Matthias clamped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, deliberately close to the pulse point. “Take him this message, Wilfred.”

“Um. Okay. Actually—”

“He wastes his time,” growled Matthias. “I have no wish to see Nina Zenik. I will not seek her out. Not until the job is done.” And I can have my vengeance.

“Sure,” said Wilson. “That’s… fair enough, I guess.”

He clearly understood nothing, but that was good. It meant Kaz had told him nothing. Matthias respected the demjin’s discretion. He was a creature of bottomless evil, but like all evil creatures, he was slave to his own selfishness, and he would not humiliate Matthias unless it suited his interests.

The boy had not left. He looked vaguely sick. He had likely never failed to fulfill an order from Kaz before. Matthias rolled his eyes.

“You may follow me downstairs,” he told the boy.

“Okay.”

“You are not leading me. You are accompanying me, because we are both going in the same direction. I am not summoned like dog.”

“No. Of course not.”

They went down to the drawing room. Matthias made the boy walk behind him.

The three Dregs had already claimed their seats. The drawing room was big like the rest of the house, paneled in dark wood, furnished with thick green drapes and bookshelves that spanned floor to ceiling. A grandfather clock by the door finished chiming as Matthias came in.

Kaz stood by the grand fireplace, leaning on the mantle, and made a show of peeling back his sleeve to check his watch. “You’re a minute late, Wylan,” he said.

“Sorry, sir.”                                                                         

Matthias said, “He did not bring me. I came myself.”

“…Whatever difference you think that makes, consider it observed.”

In an armchair that dwarfed her, Inej sat with her legs neatly crossed, sipping from a mug. It smelled of lemon and ginger, and she had wrapped her hands around it for warmth. “Something to drink, Matthias?” she said. “We’re still waiting for Nina.”

Jesper, spread sideways on the other armchair like a lordling taking his ease, gestured extravagantly with his wineglass. “Yes, Van Eck’s proved himself a more than generous host. What’s your poison? Tea? Juice? Something harder?”

Matthias shook his head and sat down on the empty sofa. Before the silence had time to cool, Nina hurried into the room, her arms full of folders.

“Sorry,” she said. “Had trouble finding these. I didn’t mean to hold everybody up.” She dumped the files on the coffee table, and he could see her deciding where to sit. There was a chaise on the other side of the room, by the piano, but near the hearth there was only one open spot, and it was on the sofa beside them.

No. Stand. Sit on floor. I do not want you close to me, dream-witch.    

She made up her mind, and planted herself on the sofa beside him. He shifted away from her. If she noticed, she didn’t show it.

“Never mind,” said Kaz. “If we’re all here, we can begin.”

He drew a small vial from the inside of his jacket. It contained what appeared to be orange dust. “This is jurda parem,” he said. “By now, you should all know what it is.”

“You have some,” said Nina in surprise.

“Yes. Jan Van Eck was willing to part with one dose of his supply for our purposes, when I explained the situation.” He tossed it up in the air and caught it. With a quick sleight-of-hand, it disappeared somewhere back into his coat. “It’s worth about twelve times its weight in gold per ounce. So far, it has yet to be replicated anywhere outside the laboratories of Bo Yul-Bayur.”

Jesper raised his hand.

“Chemist. Works out of Shanghai,” said Nina, without looking up from her folder. “He and I did our doctorates together.”

Jesper lowered his hand. Matthias stared at Nina. She gave no sign of feeling anything at the knowledge that her former schoolmate was responsible for bringing such a vile substance into the world. He doubted she cared.

“I didn’t know Shanghai had dream labs,” said Wylan.

“It doesn’t,” said Matthias.

“How would you know?” snorted Nina.

He turned to her and smirked. “You are not only one who works in this industry, drüsje,” he said. “Chinese government does not permit dream-sharing. It is forbidden. This is known.”

“Forbidden like it is in the United States?” she said coolly. “Yes, it is. And where’d you learn to do it, again?”

Matthias scowled. She smiled brilliantly at him.

Kaz tapped his cane on the floor to order a regroup. “Regardless of whether the Chinese government wants to admit it, both the laboratory and the drug very much exist,” he said. “We know because some upstanding treasonous young techie leaked the documents online four months ago. Chemists the world over have been scrambling to reproduce it ever since, but apparently the substance is wretchedly difficult to keep stable. Apparently only the Russians have gotten close — which tracks, seeing as Moscow chemists have a long history of embarrassing their international comrades where innovation is concerned.” He spared Nina a quick, dignified nod. “But our bankroller would rather not waste his time with all that. He has a simpler strategy: we find someone who already knows how to make jurda parem, and steal the information.”

Matthias barked a humorless laugh. “Brilliant!” he said. “Good luck. You call this strategy simple? Bo Yul-Bayur has just become the most important man China. Their government will have him under constant lock and key. We will not be the first to attempt an extraction on him.”

“I happen to agree with you,” said Kaz. “That is why I have no intention of attempting an extraction on Bo Yul-Bayur.”

He paused. Jesper and Nina swapped confused glances. Matthias tapped his foot impatiently. Inej smiled into her teacup. 

“All right,” sighed Jesper. “You win. You’re cleverer than us. Tell us whatever it is we don’t know.”

“I’m sorry, but I simply don’t have that kind of time,” said Kaz. “In the meantime, however, I’ll tell you this: we’re not performing an extraction on Bo Yul-Bayur because he’s not the mark.” He reached down and flipped open one of the folders on the coffee table. On the first page was a glossy two-by-four of a young Chinese boy with long hair and glasses, smiling brightly for what appeared to be a school photo.

“That’s the mark,” he said. “Bo’s son. Kuwei Yul-Bo.”

Matthias wrinkled his nose. “This is a mere boy, Brekker. He still has spots.”

“Not to agree with the Jolly Blond Giant, but he has a point.” Jesper’s tone was unimpressed. “What makes you think the kid knows how to manufacture jurda parem? He’s makes Young Eck over here look like Rip Van Winkle.”

“I’m twenty.”

“Oh, he almost certainly doesn’t,” said Kaz. “He’s still in prep school. Even if he were his father’s protégé, he would still lack the experiential knowledge to reproduce something as complicated as jurda parem in a laboratory setting.”

“At the risk of missing the point,” said Nina flatly, “what, exactly, are we then supposed to be extracting?”

Kaz did not smile. But he did tilt his head and close his eyes for just a moment, like a sommelier savoring a sip of particularly excellent wine. That was how Matthias knew he was enjoying this.

“That’s your mistake,” he said. “Because we’re not running an extraction. We’re going to be performing inception.”

Chapter 3: in the strangest dreams, walking by your side

There was a moment when Matthias found deep comfort in the knowledge that everyone in the room was thinking the same thing.

We’re all doomed. Kaz Brekker has lost his mind.

Nina gaped soundlessly. That, too, pleased Matthias. He preferred the sight of her without that self-satisfied smirk. Wylan glanced uncertainly between Kaz and the others, clearly out of his depth.

Jesper was the first to speak. He did so slowly, as if addressing a child. “That’s impossible, Kaz.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“You and I both know it. We’ve looked into it, remember? The theory is sound, but the practice—”

“It’s been done before,” said Kaz.

“By a saint, you blockheaded numpty, not by six idiots with a death wish.” He paused. “Sorry, Inej. Five idiots and a chaperone. Also with a death wish.”

“The Starless Saint was also a man, once.”

“Planning your ascension, Brekker?” Matthias said, enjoying himself. Now he knew it did not matter what Kaz had planned for them: it would not work, and more than likely it would get the rest killed in the offing. That was fine. All Matthias had to do was survive. He felt sorry for Jesper and Wylan and the Wraith, who now were surely realizing they had bound their fates to a madman’s, but he owed nothing to them.

Kaz said, “Possibly. What’s it to you, Helvar?”

“Sorry if this is a stupid question,” blurted Wylan, “but what are you going to, you know — incept?”

Kaz pointed at him with the head of his cane. “That, Wylan,” he said, “is the first intelligent question I’ve heard since I got here.”

He swept Kuwei’s file out of the way and picked another, which he tossed open on the table. It was a map of the Amsterdam airport.

“You’ve never dream-shared before,” he said. “This won’t make sense to you, at first. Try to keep up.”

Wylan huffed. “I know my way around a PASIV.”

“You’ve experimented. Independent dream construction is very different from shared dreaming.”

“Not that different.”

“No? Explain the difference between a corporalnik, a tailor, and a forger.”

Wylan fell silent, turning pink. Jesper chuckled under his breath.

“It’s a trick question,” Inej said, before the quiet could get too brutal. “They’re the same thing. Corporalki are Grisha dreamers who can manipulate the dreamer’s body. Tailors are corporalki who can change the dreamer’s appearance, either their own or others’. Americans call them forgers.”

“So like Nina?” Wylan said.

“No,” said Nina and Matthias at the same time. She startled and glanced at him. He glared at her.

“No need for such surprise,” he said.

Her lips tightened into a pout. “Just surprised that your thick head can retain that much information,” she said. “Between the blind rage and jingoistic rah-rah patriotism, I hadn’t realized there was leftover space.”

“Only you would see loyalty as a flaw.”

“Only you would fail to consider the possibility.”

“Ty nichego ne znayesh’ o vernosti, krasnyy pauk,” he said harshly. She whirled and loosed on him a current of furious Russian:

“I eto vse, chto ty znayesh’, amerikanskaya sobaka!”

“Vy oba,” Kaz snapped, cracking his cane on the floor. “Zatknis’.”

Their mouths snapped shut and they fell silent, both scowling at him.

“Wylan, Nina is a heartrender,” said Inej. “A different kind of corporalnik. She controls the dreamers’ vitals, not their appearance. She’ll keep your heartbeat down, your breathing steady… your emotions stable, if necessary.”

“Not in real life, though,” said Wylan. “In the dream, right?”

“Oh, it’s quite real,” said Kaz. He did not sound pleased.

Nina rounded on the boy and smiled. “Have you ever woken up from a dream with your heartbeat racing?” she said. “Sweat coursing down your face? A little moisture in your trousers?”

“Y—yes. Of course. But that’s psychological, it’s got nothing to do with—”

“Your dream?” she said. “The brain is a part of the body. Psychology is biology. Let that be your first lesson in heartrending.”

Wylan’s mouth fell slightly open.

His awestruck stare must have irritated Jesper as much as it did Matthias, because Jesper slumped further sideways in his armchair and muttered, “Don’t look so moony, Eckling. You’d think you’d never met a Grisha before.”

“But that’s incredible,” he said to Nina, who preened. “You must be one of the most powerful dreamers alive.”

“Don’t get ideas,” said Kaz shortly. “Nina is an extraordinarily talented corporalnik, but every dreamer is dangerous. And each is only as strong as their own self-control.” To Nina almost as much as Wylan, he added: “Let that be your first lesson in dream-sharing.”

“Anyway,” said Jesper loudly. “Now that we’re given our tourist a crash course, can we talk about the actual job?”

“With pleasure.” Kaz placed the tip of his cane on the map of the Amsterdam airport. “This is Luchthaven Schiphol. In four days, Kuwei Yul-Bo will be traveling through this airport as he flies home from his school in England to visit his father.” He tapped one room in the section labeled Departure Hall Three. “His flight gets in from London at 13:00 hours, and he departs for Shanghai at 16:00. That gives us the space of three hours to find him and complete the job.”

Jesper raised his hand.

“Yes, Jesper.”

“Why not get on the plane with him?” he said. “That’d give us more time. And it’d make him easier to find.”

“Because every one of us is a dead man in Shanghai,” said Kaz, “with the exception of Nina and Inej, who are, in fact, dead women. And if something happens to go even slightly wrong—”

“Then Kuwei wakes up, reveals us all as dream-thieves, and we’re stuck on a plane into a country where that’s punishable by death,” said Inej.

Kaz nodded. “Precisely. I, for one, have no interest in seeing how they decorate cells in Chinese prisons.” He rapped his cane on the table. “So. Three hours. Adjusted for time dilation, that gives us around sixty in the first level.”

“First level,” said Jesper, perking up.

“Yes. Inception is far too sophisticated for a single level of dreaming. We’re going to need multiple.”

“Goody.”

“Hold on,” said Matthias, sitting up straight. “Hold on. This is forbidden.”

“Yes, Mr. Helvar, it is,” said Kaz, dry as bone. “Dream theft is illegal. In related news, the sky is blue, and I am not a patient man.”

Matthias curled his lip. “I mean multi-level dreaming. It cannot be done.”

“It can.”

“Not safely. This is day two, day three, in military training. You never accept a PASIV line while dreaming. You try to kick—” He mimed a gun, two fingers pointing at his temple, and jerked his head to the right. “And bang! Straight to limbo.”

“It’s not so simple as that,” said Nina. “Sedation has to increase with each level of the dream because small disturbances in the upper levels are magnified the deeper you get. Two levels is theoretically stable on a normal somnacin dose, but it’s tricky, and you have to be sure there are no shocks coming from the upper layers...”

Inej politely cleared her throat. Nina broke off, flushing. “But a synchronized kick is still effective, even with deep sedation. Anyway, you have me — I can soft kick any of you on command, so as long as I’m always on the bottom level, we’re safe.”

“So we must put all our faith in you?” Matthias couldn’t believe it. He tried to appeal to Kaz, silently, to see the stupidity of this plan. She was a heartrender. A Grisha-dreamer, a witch, a trained spy. A man like Kaz could not be so stupid as to entrust his mind entirely into her keeping.

Kaz said, “Is this going to be a problem?”

Matthias heard the threat, as doubtlessly everyone else did, too. Kaz didn’t care about Matthias’s opinion. His inquiry actually meant: If you’re out, then say the word, and I can have you on a plane back to America by daybreak.

Matthias found himself the subject of five cold stares. He sank back into his seat. “No,” he said lowly.

“What a good answer. So you are smarter than you look.” Kaz flipped the page over from the airport map, and unfolded a large sketch of a bull’s eye. “We’re working in a tiered structure. Level Zero —” he placed his cane outside the exterior ring. “Reality. Amsterdam. We find Kuwei, sedate him, and put him under.”

“Who’s the dreamer?” said Jesper.

“Wylan is Level One.”

No one could have been more surprised by this than Wylan, who nevertheless stood a little taller at the news.

Jesper spluttered. “You’re making him host? On his first job?”

“Would you prefer I bring him two levels deep?” said Kaz. “On his first job? No. Wylan hasn’t cut his teeth yet in dream sharing, but he’s experimented with dream construction, and his landscapes are stable. I’ve tested them.”

This was news to everybody. Wylan lifted his jaw, a little defiantly.

Privately, Matthias repressed a shudder. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to dream with Kaz alone. Perhaps the boy had more mettle than he thought.

“Do you even know your own dream class?” said Jesper to Wylan, almost helplessly.

“That’s not my fault,” Wylan said hotly. “I was never tested.”

“I — well, why not? You’re clearly mad about dreaming.”

“My father didn’t let me.”

“We don’t need to take him to the Little Palace,” said Kaz, his impatience obvious. “He’s a born architect. That’s why he’s shadowing Matthias.”

“He’s doing what?” said Matthias.

“He’s doing what?” echoed Wylan.

“I see you have complaints. Be advised that this will move a lot faster if you remember that I don’t care.” Kaz tapped the second ring of the bull’s eye. “Jesper will host the next level, then Nina on the third. Inej is taking point on all three, and she’ll be responsible for infiltrating Kuwei’s mental security. When the time comes, she’ll be the one to plant the idea.”

“Just Inej?” said Wylan skeptically.

Kaz’s replying look was utterly without warmth. “You’ll find her more than up to the task.”

“I’m not doubting her, but—”

“Don’t worry,” she said simply. “Dreamers find me hard to notice.”

Kaz nodded. “Inej and I will concern ourselves with the inception itself. You three only have to focus on keeping Kuwei calm — that is, receptive. That means the dreamscapes have to be convincing. You’ll work with Matthias to design them, since he has architecture training.”

“Not much,” grouched Matthias. “Some. For a proper architect, you want etherealnik. I can design your dreamscapes, but they will be fixed. No changes, once we’re under.”

“Wow,” said Nina. “Almost as if a Grisha can be useful.”

“We don’t have a box of etherealki lying around,” Kaz said flatly. “You’ll do. Nina, you’ll split your time between working with Matthias and preparing the somnacin. You should have everyone’s medical records.”

“She does?” said Jesper.

“She does?” said Wylan.

“I do,” said Nina.

Jesper raised his hand.

“Yes, Jesper.”

“Sorry, one problem,” he said. “Still unclear on the answer to Wylan’s original question. What’s the inception?”

Kaz said, “To steal the formula for jurda parem.”

He laughed. “And what, give it to us?”

“Yes.”

“Why the hell would he do that?”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re mean bastards, and we shouldn’t be trusted with it?”

“He’ll give it to us because we’re going to tell him to,” said Kaz. “Because he’s going to think it’s his idea. And he’ll think it’s the only way to save his father’s life.”

He laid the tip of his cane on the center of the bull’s eye. “I promise you this: one way or another, Kuwei Yul-Bo is about to have a very, very convincing nightmare.”

 

***

 

When Nina saw her rooms in Hendriks House, she had nearly kissed Wylan on the mouth.

Her bedroom could have fit a full-sized basketball court. Walled on one side by a solid sheet of bay windows, the room’s high vaulted ceilings contained not one, but two diamond chandeliers, and a wrought-iron balcony extended from one wall over the lake. The reflection of sunlight from the windows on ivory furniture and cream-colored rugs gave it a pale, airy feeling, as though the room were made of glass and light.

They were too nice to be guest rooms, even in a house like this. From the size and quality of the dresses in the closet she suspected the rooms had belonged to Wylan’s mother, but going by the dust on their hangars, that woman — wherever she was — hadn’t lived there for a long time.

Nina took a sip of coffee and watched a kingfisher dive over the lake. She sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, now doubling as her office, surrounded on all sides by rings of paperwork and scratch. Reading from the laptop balanced on her knees, she scribbled notes with one hand and held a coffee mug with the other, periodically pausing her reading to slurp from it.

A knock came at the door. She made a noise and swallowed. “Mm! Come in.”

It creaked open and in came Inej, holding a tray. She’d traded her usual blacks for a charcoal-grey blouse and a pair of high-waisted pants, her hair left in a casual plait down her back. “Lunch,” she said. “Wylan asked it be brought up to you.”

“Aw, you shouldn’t have.” Nina reached for the tray. It held a steaming plate of golden fried cod with a white sauce and a side of grilled asparagus, their stalks a rich green. She speared a piece of fish and dunked it in the sauce, then popped it in her mouth, then moaned. “Oh, my God. You’re a wizard.” The crisped layer of skin broke open and the delicate, rich flavor of the fish rolled over her tongue, sweetened by a hint of lemon from the sauce.

“Oh, I didn’t make it,” said Inej. “You wouldn’t be able to digest it if I had. Wylan cooked.”

“Wylan did this?”

“He’s been in the kitchen every day since the staff left.”

“He can make food like this? And lives in a house like this one?”

Inej shrugged.

Nina took another bite of cod and sighed. “I’m going to marry him.”

“Mm-hmm. I wish you happiness.” Inej crouched to read from her laptop over her shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Research.”

“What for?”

Nina nibbled an asparagus stalk. “The somnacin dosage required for this sort of dream is a lot,” she explained. “Otherwise, the dream will start collapsing after two levels. I’ll basically be putting you all in mini-comas.”

Another person would have found this information alarming. Inej, whose relationship with danger was both inspiring and probably unhealthy, held Nina’s gaze and nodded in agreement.

“But somnacin, after all, is still a sedative. It slows your body down. Take too much, and…” Nina held her hand up palm-down by her head, then lowered it to the ground. “Everything starts shutting off. A normal amount of sedation will lower your resting heartrate to whatever it is while you’re sleeping; this will slow them past that. We’ll have about two or three minutes of sleep before it starts to affect blood circulation to the brain.”

“And our bodies slowly start dying?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it. I’m going to keep your hearts beating manually while we’re in the dream using heartrending.” She handed her a stack of the notes she’d made so far.

Inej nodded, scanning through. “How much concentration will that take?”

“Concentration? Pah! Heartbeats are easy. If we were dreaming, I could take your heartbeat and stop it like this.” She snapped her fingers.

Inej withdrew one of her knives from the holster at her arm and spun it idly, perhaps an anxious habit. “As you say.”

“The heartrending isn’t the tricky part. Even six at once, as long as you don’t go too far from me… The main issue will be timing. In each level of the dream—”

“Time passes differently. Faster on the lower levels.”

“Yes. But your heartbeat in the real world has to stay the same, regardless. If I go too slowly, you start to die. If I go too fast—”

Inej splayed her fingers in front of her chest. “Pop.”

“Pop,” agreed Nina.

The Wraith sat back on her haunches, flipping through the notes. “This is good work.”

“Why, thank you, Initchka.” Nina knew, but it was still nice to be told. She hadn’t been the finest chemist to grace the Little Palace since Genya Safin for nothing.

Inej smiled. “Certainly — Ninichka?”

Nina burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. Inej had sounded so earnest.

“No.”

“All right.”

For a minute they sat together, saying nothing, while Nina ate. Inej closed her eyes and tipped her head back to savor the sun. She seemed at peace there, sitting in a puddle of sunlight on the floor of the beautiful room, the rays catching the glint of her knives where they were strapped to her body. When they’d met, she’d been a small thing, barely enough muscle to fill out her pants, and holding the one knife she’d had back then with a white-knuckle grip. Eating little, speaking less, never straying more than a few meters from Kaz’s side. Now she was taller, stronger, more at ease. More dangerous, too, but in this business that was only another mark of growth.

In one graceful movement, Inej rose as if to leave. “I’ll leave you be.”

“No. Stay. Talk to me. I haven’t seen you in almost a year. The last time we worked together was… it was San Salvador, wasn’t it?”

“The DeKappel Job.”

“Yes. How did that end up, by the way?”

Inej lowered herself back to the floor, folding her legs neatly beneath her. “The extraction went well. The painting went for millions, just as Kaz expected.”

“How many of those millions did you see?”

“Enough.”

“And Kaz? He saw ‘enough,’ too?”

“We both got the cut we were promised,” said Inej, with a vein of iron in her tone.

Nina sighed and bit off the head of another asparagus. “Inej,” she said, gesturing with the stalk, “here’s the thing, and not for nothing, either: you are far too good an extractor to still be running point for Kaz Brekker.”

Inej drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees. She frowned. “I know,” she said, surprising Nina.

There were a lot of things that Nina didn’t understand about Kaz. She didn’t pretend to have the first idea what went through that little egomaniac’s head, and she didn’t want to. Why he used a cane, why he wore those gloves, why his accent sounded like a London skinhead crossed with a South African diamond trader. But of all the things she didn’t understand about Kaz, by far the most baffling was how he had won the undying loyalty of Inej Ghafa — polite, humble, deeply religious, and the best human being among them by a margin too far to gauge.

“Well, then,” she said after a moment. “Why not leave?”

Inej shook her head. “I can’t.”

Nina felt anger rise like bile. “Inej, if he’s somehow forcing you—”

“He isn’t.” Inej’s head snapped up, and she sounded upset. “He doesn’t make me do anything. I work for him. He pays me. We’re a team.”

“So you’re… what, his employee?” Nina arched her eyebrow.

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“It sounds unhealthy.”

“It’s not.”

“It sounds awkward.”

“Sometimes. We manage.”

Nina held out her hand, palm-up, on her knee. After a hesitation, Inej placed her own in it. Nina squeezed it, and then slid her fingers down to rest over Inej’s wrist, wrapped around her pulse point.

“Look me in the eye, then,” she said, “and tell me, and I will know if you’re lying. If you went to Kaz right now and said you wouldn’t do the job — that you wouldn’t dream ever again, no matter how much he paid you — and that you wanted to walk away from the industry right now, would he let you?”

Inej did a strange thing, then: she smiled. It lit up her face like a bonfire on a summer’s night, and Nina could only marvel at how lovely she was, the crinkled-up arch of her scalene nose, the flecks of gold in her eyes sparkling as if kindled by some internal fire. She wondered if Kaz had ever been on the receiving end of one of those smiles. She wondered how he could have possibly withstood it.

“Do you know what Kaz told me, once?” she said, and Nina didn’t miss the way her heartbeat tripped a half-step forward on the word Kaz. “He said in this world, there are no such thing as promises, and there’s barely such a thing as bargains. If you want something, you have to take it, usually by force.”

Nina shuddered. “Sounds like him.”

Inej nodded, her expression inexplicably pleased. “And then he gave me this.” She tapped the knife strapped to her left hip. “And he told me whenever I wanted something, I should take it. From him, or from anybody else.”

Her pulse thrummed, steady as a drumbeat.

“That,” said Nina, “although it is kind of sweet, in a disturbing, emotionally-repressed kind of way, does not answer the question.”

Inej withdrew her hand from Nina’s and stood. “The day I want my freedom from Kaz, I’ll take it,” she said. “In the meantime, he doesn’t ‘let’ me do anything.”

“And what do the Saints think of all this taking?” Nina said, unable to resist.

Inej stopped in the door and spoke over her shoulder. “My father heard that question somewhat often. When he had a drink, or smoked a cigar, or fed me too many sweets. My mother would ask him, ‘What would the Saints think?’ And my father would say, ‘Asla öğrenmememiz için dua edelim.’”

“I don’t speak Turkish.”

“Let us pray we never learn,” Inej said softly, and left without a sound.

 

***

 

Wylan had lived in Hendriks House his whole life. In terms of adventure had had not much, and in variety it offered little, but it meant that when it came to his house, there was nothing he didn’t know. There wasn’t a room in the place he couldn’t find with his eyes closed, and not a single creaky floorboard he couldn’t identify from its pitch and volume alone. Back when his father lived here, he had set about memorizing all the different ways to get to the kitchen from his bedroom without passing the main study.

Now, the only person in that study was Kaz Brekker, who used it for a war room. He’d been in there for three days of concentrated scheming, which was more thought than Wylan had ever put into anything that wasn’t a bomb or a personal shortcoming, and he showed no signs of emerging before they left for Amsterdam. Wylan had been happy for him to take the study, though. He was less scared of the place now that it only held a gang lord, with whom he was now involved in criminal conspiracy, than when it had been the place where his father read business emails.

Nevertheless, he took the back stairway to the ground floor. Old habits, et cetera.

It was long after midnight, and light still glowed beneath bedroom doors. The house sat empty as it ever was while he had lived there alone, with only the wind to soften the silence. It was an odd change of tone. For three days, it had been alive and bustling and almost unrecognizable now that it had people in it: Wylan would come downstairs to find Nina reading in the library, or Inej training in the gym, or Jesper and Matthias arguing about architecture in the drawing room. Voices carried in Hendriks House, and for the past three days it had been impossible to leave his room without hearing someone’s conversation drift through the airy hallways or climb up from the vents.

If the study was his father’s room, the kitchen was his mother’s. Jan Van Eck never came into the kitchen, if he could avoid it, which meant Wylan and his mother had the place to themselves whenever they wanted to bake. Baking had been Wylan’s first excursions in chemistry, the pantry his first chemistry set: watching his mother’s long, deft fingers measure out quantities of flour and sugar and butter, he’d sit on the counter and ask questions. Why flour? Why butter? Why sugar? How much heat? Why the oven, not the pan? What happens? Why?

And she’d answered him while she worked: Because it’s a leavening agent. Because it’s a lipid. Because it’s a bonding agent with water. However much the dough needs to rise. So it cooks evenly. Why don’t you come see?

You didn’t need letters to understand chemistry. It was symbols and numbers, the movement of energy along a balanced equation. But where Wylan’s mother used chemistry for sweets and cakes, Wylan grew up and made nightmares.

He let himself into the kitchen. For a second he stiffened, recovering from the instinctive shock of seeing a virtual stranger rooting through his cabinets. Then he sighed and said, “Jesper.”

Jesper cursed and spun around, sliding the wine bottle behind his back. “Van Sunshine,” he said cheerfully. “What’s a boy like you doing in a place like this?”

“I live here.”

“That,” said Jesper, “would do it. You came at the right time. Maybe you can tell me where the corkscrews are, and we can split the takings of our endeavors.” He waved the wine bottle, grinning.

Wylan crossed the room and opened the refrigerator, taking out a carton of orange juice. “I don’t know,” he lied, grabbing a glass from the cabinet.

“You don’t know where you keep things in your own kitchen?”

“I’m not the staff. I don’t usually cook for my guests.” These were facts. Being tactically deployed in defense of a bottle of his mother’s favorite Cabernet Sauvignon did not, in Wylan’s opinion, make either any less true.

Jesper sauntered around the center island. He’d shed his jacket, and now seemed rather exposed in his shirtsleeves and red trousers. Both articles of clothing were somewhat tight. Not indecently tight, just… fitted.

“You’re telling me you’re such a helpless lamb,” he said in a low voice, “you couldn’t open a bottle of your own wine, in your own kitchen? You’d have to ring for help to come find your bottle-openers?”

Wylan opened his mouth. He closed it and glared at Jesper.

“Give me that.”

“Attaboy, love.”

He snatched the wine bottle and tugged open the nearest drawer. He tore off the foil on the bottle and popped the cork with a hard flex of his wrist.

“Get two glasses,” he told Jesper. “And put the orange juice away.”

When Jesper didn’t move, he added, “This is a 1998 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, and we are not drinking it from the bottle. No matter how much it would piss my father off.”

Jesper’s eyebrows quirked, but he didn’t complain. He trotted to the cabinet and fetched back two wineglasses.

Being without chairs, they sat on counters. The bottle rested between them, and Jesper made a game of trying to kick Wylan’s ankles while pretending he wasn’t.

“Immaculate,” Jesper sighed, lifting his glass.

“It ought to be. That glass costs about two hundred euros.”

Jesper considered this, and then tossed half of it back in a mighty slug. “That’s the third most expensive thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”

Wylan made a disbelieving noise.

“It’s true. The second was a bottle of 1901 Moët Impérial. Kaz had me entertaining a minor personage from the House of Lords, and I was meant to keep the mark distracted and feed him enough sedatives for us to wheel him out of the dining room and stick a PASIV line in him. ‘Keep him drinking,’ Kaz said. He gave me a credit card for the occasion.”

“What did he say?”

“Not a word. But the next job we ran an extraction in a sewer pipe, and he had me crawl through four miles of pipeline with only a penlight and a radio.” Jesper smiled. “Vengeful bugger,” he said, inexplicably fond, and downed the rest of his glass. Wylan poured him another.

“Why do you work for him?” he wondered out loud. “He seems…”

“Cold?”

“Yes.”

“Cruel?”

“Yes.”

“Insensitive to the emotional needs of others, and utterly indifferent to them even if he wasn’t?”

“I was going to say ‘an acquired taste.’”

Jesper laughed. “Yeah. I’m still waiting to acquire it, myself. But Kaz is… Saints, I don’t know. He’s immutable, is what he is. Other people are complicated. You’ll always be worrying if they like you, if they don’t, if they’ll give you what you want, what they want in return. There’s none of that with Kaz. You know what he wants. You know it doesn’t matter if he likes you, and he probably doesn’t. Wouldn’t make a difference if he did. He’ll give you what you ask for if you can pay the price. And he always has the same price.”

“What price?” said Wylan, curiously. He itched to press, to dig his fingers in and wring out Jesper’s secrets, to memorize and balance them like an equation. But he didn’t go too far. He didn’t dare, not when Jesper seemed to have momentarily forgotten his fondness for mocking Wylan.

“Loyalty,” Jesper said. For a moment, there was no humor in his voice.

“That’s all?”

He shook his head. “Not the way you’re thinking. He means perfect loyalty. Religious loyalty. Old Testament loyalty.”

“’I am the LORD your God,’” quoted Wylan. “‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’”

“Now you’re getting it.” Jesper bumped Wylan’s ankle with his own. “The only allowance he’s ever made where dedication’s concerned is Inej and her Saints, and even then, I think it’s a point of tension between them.”

“He sees God as a rival,” Wylan deadpanned.

“Kaz doesn’t have rivals. God is just the guy hogging all his crush’s attention.” Jesper took a long, savoring sip, and then hopped off the counter. “Well,” he said, “it’s been lovely, Van Sunshine. Ordinarily I’d race you to the bottom of that bottle, but if I turn up hungover tomorrow, Kaz will find some way to have me climbing up incinerator shafts for the next ten jobs after this one.”

Wylan suppressed a twinge of disappointment. He leaned back on the counter and said, “Why do I get the feeling it would take more than one bottle to give you a hangover, Jesper?”

Jesper threw him a fiendish grin. “Because you, a mhuirnín, are a very smart cookie. All the same.”

He drew his pistol and snapped open the cartridge, glanced at it, then snapped it shut, spun the barrel, and holstered it again.

“What’d you do that for?” said Wylan curiously.

“This?” Jesper drew the gun again and spun it in his hands. “This tells me I’m not dreaming. Always a risk, around pretty boys.”

Wylan ignored the second part, though his cheeks heated as a reflex. He hated his blush, but his coloring left him more or less defenseless to it. “Your totem?”

“Mm-hm.”

“What part of it is different? When you’re dreaming, I mean.”

Jesper smiled with a hint of condescension. “Ah, ah, ah. A real dream-thief would know that’s not a polite question to ask.”

“Maybe,” said Wylan recklessly. Perhaps he’d had more wine than he thought. “I’m still asking it.”

Jesper sighed. “You’re lucky I think nosiness looks good on you. Bit of fair warning? Don’t try that question with any of the others. They won’t be nearly so loose with the answers.”

Does that mean you’re not going to tell me? Wylan almost said, but then Jesper beckoned him. “Come here.”

He slid down to the floor and padded over to Jesper’s side. “Quick lesson in firearm safety,” Jesper said, grabbing Wylan’s arm. He settled the pistol in Wylan’s palm and maneuvered his fingers around it: four gripping the frontstrap of the gun in a vise, his index outstretched along the barrel. “Hold it firm, hold it tight, don’t squeeze. Your finger stays off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.”

“Okay.”

“Other hand comes up,” said Jesper, and reached around Wylan’s back to grasp his wrist and guide it into position. It was a sort of embrace, Wylan thought, and then blushed. “Fold your left fingers over the right, there you are. Thumb goes ’longside the barrel for balance. It’s a bit different with one hand, but if you want a chance in hell of actually hitting anything as a beginner you’ll be using both. Point it at the floor. Mind your feet, obviously. Now it stays there until you’re ready to fire. Never point a gun at anything unless you’re ready to shoot it.”

“Got it.”

“All right. Now take your left hand, get your thumb and forefinger, pinch the back end of the muzzle. Like that. Good. Give her a tug.”

Wylan tugged. The muzzle slid back, revealing a silver round. He let go, and it snapped back into place.

“There. You just did your first press check. She’s ready to fire.”

“Cool,” said Wylan. Jesper’s hands still hovered around his elbows, and it was slightly distracting. He shook his head. “What does that have to do with your totem?”

“That is my totem. When I’m dreaming, neither of them are loaded. And yet they still fire.”

Wylan frowned. “That’s not physically possible.”

Jesper laughed. “No, but it’s imaginable. Which, in the dream, means it’s possible.” He tapped Wylan on the nose, and Wylan spluttered. “If you want to hack it in the dream-sharing industry, you’ve got to start thinking like a dreamer. That means the only rules are the ones you like.”

“Uh huh,” said Wylan, thinking. His own totem was a hollow rook he’d filched from his father’s chess set in the library, which at the time had felt like a very daring act of self-righteousness, but in retrospect probably hadn’t even been noticed by his father anyway. It worked fine, but Wylan hated carrying it around with him. Chess didn’t mean anything to Wylan, and it wasn’t like they’d ever played together. The rook was just one of many objects his father had once owned.

I think about him enough without a reminder in my pocket, thought Wylan. Then he had an idea.

Jesper dropped his arms and stepped back, and Wylan marveled at how cold his back felt without the heat of another body warming it. He handed Jesper back the gun. “Thanks,” he said. “For showing me. And, you know — for the lesson.”

“Anytime,” said Jesper lightly. He holstered the pistol and clapped Wylan on the shoulder. Then he sauntered towards the door.

As his footsteps receded, a thought struck Wylan like a raindrop falling unexpectedly from a clear sky.

“You didn’t need to give me a whole lesson in order to show me your totem,” he accused, rounding on Jesper. “You could have just told me.”

Jesper paused in the doorway. Wylan couldn’t see his face, but his head cocked to one side, and Wylan would bet every cent of his father’s fortune that he was grinning.

“I could have,” he said. Then: “And any time you minded, you could’ve said so.”

Wylan’s breath hitched. Jesper’s laugh rang long and loud down the hallway as he strolled out of the kitchen.

 

***

 

It was almost daybreak by the time Inej found Kaz.

She never slept the night before a job, and she knew he didn’t, either. Everyone on the crew had their own ways of girding themselves before a job. Matthias went on a five-mile run and then drilled until the exhaustion forced him to sleep. Jesper usually went out to get a good hard drink and something pretty to flirt with. Nina made herself waffles for dinner, ate them with lakes of syrup and chocolate sauce, then popped two melatonin and went to bed. Inej didn’t know what Wylan did, but he also hadn’t dream-shared before, so if he was anything like Inej had been, he’d be lying awake in bed, sweating bullets and praying to Sankt Petyr for deliverance.

Kaz’s bedroom was empty, though.

Inej checked the study and came up empty, by which point worry had started to gnaw at the bottom of her stomach. A full search of the house gave no sign of him. The exterior doors were all locked from the inside, and she was on the verge of raising the alarm when she passed an open window on the second story and saw a small bead of light gleaming across the lake.

He was sitting on a bench among the reeds when she arrived. The night was warm and smelled of flowers, and the lights from the house shone across the water, scalloped reflections on its glassy face.

“Wraith,” he said.

She sheathed Sankta Marya and stepped into the moonlight. “I thought you were gone,” she said. It wasn’t a reprimand, but it was.

“I wanted air.” It wasn’t an apology, but it might have been. It was close enough, for Kaz.

She sank onto the bench. “May I join you?”

Kaz waved to the seat. It wasn’t a very expressive gesture, she thought. It could have meant Yes, or it could have meant You already have, or Do what you want, I don’t care. Probably it was the third.

They sat without talking for a while. She felt herself relax, her body filled with a deep content like syrup. With most people the quiet would have made her uncomfortable, but with Kaz, silence never turned stale or heavy the way it did with the others. If he wanted to speak, he would. He was a strange, vicious, greedy man, but he never lied, and his temper was visible from space. Nobody could doubt when he took issue with them. That was why she trusted him. Tante Heleen would lay kisses on your cheek one minute and backhand you the next. Kaz had no kisses to give, nor affection of any other sort, but if Inej was sitting by his side, it was because he wanted her there.

She remembered the first time she’d ever seen him. Six years ago, she’d snuck into Tante Heleen’s dream parlor and found her mistress wired in with a new client. He was man like none she’d ever seen, dark hair and dark gloves and dark circles under his eyes.

Inej didn’t know what had possessed her to draw closer, much less take a chair of her own, inject her own IV, and sink into the dream with him. It just felt like the right thing to do.

They’d been in one of Tante Heleen’s favorite dreamscapes, a faux Arabian palace modeled after the castle in Aladdin. Mughal turrets, onion domes, colorful silks, dancing girls. Cliché upon cliché. Inej blended in with Heleen’s projections so well that neither of the dreamers noticed she was following them until she caught Kaz’s sleeve in one of the palace’s many dim, smoky hallways.

I can help you.

He’d pulled away, but she never forgot the shock on his face. Are you a dream? he’d said. She’d never forget the way he said it, either: his rasp full of incredulous wonder, as though he’d just heard the voice of a Saint he claimed not to believe in.

She’d shaken her head, and then, before Tante Heleen could notice her, leapt neatly out the window.

Inej sighed in satisfaction. Despite the pain of the kick, it was a good memory.

By and by, Kaz broke the silence. “Matthias says Wylan struggled to memorize his dreamscape.”

Of course, he wanted to talk business. Inej reached around her head and started plucking the pins out of her bun. “Wylan is a first-timer. He’s never had to work with a layout that isn’t his own creation.”

“That may be. It won’t matter if he nukes the first level because he forgets where the rooms are.”

“My understanding is that Matthias didn’t give him a particularly easy dreamscape to memorize.”

“It’s not Matthias’s job to go easy on him. He said he could handle being on the team.”

“I agree. He’s also a first-time dreamer trying to learn a difficult dreamscape within a week, which unbeknownst to him is much less time than industry standard, and nevertheless has failed to complain even once to anyone about it, or about anything else.”

Kaz huffed. “If tomorrow fails because of his mistake—”

“Then I imagine many of us will be asking whose idea it was to put a first-time dreamer on a job this important, in the first place.”

Kaz’s mouth tightened into a moue of displeasure, and he turned to address her fully. Then bemusement flickered across his face. “What are you doing?”

She tugged her plait free from the coil at her nape and twisted it over her shoulder. With deft movements, she began to unravel it. “Taking down my hair.”

“I know, but why are you doing it here?”

“Because it’s late, and I usually take my hair down before I go to bed.”

Kaz appeared uncertain of what to do with this information. “I’ve seen you sleep hundreds of times. You keep the braid in.”

“When I’m on a job. When I may have to wake up and run at a moment’s notice. I don’t normally sleep with it, though.”

“So you re-do it every morning?”

“What did you think I did?”

“I don’t know. Not re-do it every morning.”

She smiled. “Why is that so startling?”

“You have a lot of hair. I imagine braiding it all takes a lot of time and effort. There are better things you could be doing.”

“How long do you think it takes to braid my hair, Kaz?”

“I can inform you honestly that I have never dedicated a moment’s thought to the matter,” Kaz said tightly, “and I never will. This is an idiotic conversation.”

Her smile widened. “What did you think I did when I showered?”

“What did I think… you did… with your hair. When you shower.”

“Yes.”

“Inej, I want you to try — and I mean seriously try — to imagine what I choose to spend my limited time on this earth thinking about. Make a list.”

“All right.”

“Now ask yourself if ‘what Inej does with her hair when she showers’ lands on that list.”

“It’s possible,” she said, hiding her smile behind her hand. “My braid is clearly on it. Doesn’t seem like such a leap.”

He shut his mouth and turned away abruptly. She laughed and back to work on her braid.

As she tugged out the last few rungs, the locks slipped free and fell through her fingers like silk. She ran the tips of her fingers out from the root and shook until it tumbled free down her back.

“The sun will rise soon,” Kaz said.

“Mm-hm.” She combed through her hair with her fingers.

Kaz drew the tip of his cane in a slow circle in the mud. “Will you sleep before then?”

“Likely not. Will you?”

“Not if I can avoid it.”

“Bad dreams?” she said quietly.

Kaz withdrew his cane. The figure he’d drawn was a series of concentric circles, peppered with lines and breaks — a labyrinth. He examined it, then scrubbed it out with his shoe.

“Is there any other kind?” he said.

If he were anyone else, Inej would have reached for his hand. But he wasn’t, and so she merely gave a short sigh and drew her legs up to her chest, and they sat together until sunrise.

Chapter 4: it is the hole you impose upon your life

They rode to the airport in two cars. Nina drove Kaz and Jesper in the Bentley, while Inej took Matthias and Wylan in a black Mercedes-Benz borrowed from Jan Van Eck’s garage. It would minimize the risk if they didn’t arrive together.

Some left with more regrets than others; Kaz wasn’t sure whether Nina or Jesper was closer to tears.

As Nina pulled up by the terminal, Kaz noticed the Mercedes parked at a distance down the curb. Matthias and Wylan stood together in crisp black suits, both holding briefcases, the picture of respectable modern businessmen. Matthias’s case held the PASIV. Wylan’s was a normal attaché. To get the machine through security was the first hurdle, and one they’d need to clear with flying colors before they even set eyes on Kuwei.

Inej handed the keys to the valet and picked up her own suitcase. She, too, was dressed as a young professional, in a black pencil skirt and a dove-grey cardigan with a single emerald brooch for color. Her hair was smoothed into a bun at the nape of her neck. He wondered how long it had taken, and then felt irritated at himself for wasting time on the thought.

Jesper hauled his bags out of the car and slammed the trunk shut. “You know, I think we’re early,” he said. He’d dressed like a wealthy tourist returning from vacation, white pants with a rose-pink collared shirt and a tan suit jacket with a sunny yellow pocket square. He glanced up at the security camera over his aviators. “That’s got to be some kind of record.”

Nina, immaculate and attention-grabbing in a strapless yellow sundress and hoop earrings, flung the keys in the general direction of the valet and didn’t check where they landed. Her character was meant to be rich, and she had fully inhabited the role. “It would’ve been even faster if we took my Porsche.”

“The Porsche was too flashy,” Kaz said absently, scanning the terminal. No sign of Kuwei yet. That was to be expected, though. They were early.

“The Porsche was my baby, and now I won’t have it for a month because Wylan has to have it shipped.”

“Keep your voice down.” He couldn’t believe he had to remind her. What’s the point of taking separate cars if you’re going to announce your connection to Wylan to the whole damn airport? 

Nina rolled her eyes and mimed zipping her mouth shut.

Kaz had worn a suit. As a concession to Nina’s pleas for character, he had worn a grey tie instead of a black one, and allowed her to give him a gold tie pin. He permitted nothing more. Every accessory was something a witness might notice and remember, and they couldn’t afford to be remembered.

Jesper offered Nina his arm. “Shall we?”

She took it and fanned herself with her passport. A fake one, incidentally, which made her brandishing it hell on Kaz’s nerves. “Volons, mon amour.”

“Oui, allons-y.”

“You’re not French,” muttered Kaz, following them at a distance.

“My character is French-Canadian,” said Jesper.

“No, he isn’t.”

“He is now.”

“Jesper—”

“My character is Belgian,” said Nina happily. “She’s a florist. She only speaks French and Swahili, though she’s picked up a little English from her husband, whom she’s cheating on with the pool boy. She kept the secret for months, but now she’s pregnant, and she has to find a way to tell him it’s not his.”

“I would like my character to also be sleeping with the pool boy,” said Jesper.

“Fine. Just stop talking about yourselves in the third person and you can be whatever you want.”

“Entends ça, chérie?” Nina cooed to Jesper, rubbing his arm. “Nous sommes dans un mariage raté.”

“Just as my Da predicted,” Jesper said grandly, and lead her through the doors.

The six of them walked into the terminal.

Jesper and Nina split off from Kaz to take a separate line through security. Across the room, he watched Matthias and Wylan shed their shoes and place their briefcases in trays for the conveyor belt. Inej had vanished into the crowd, probably through already and well on her way to the gate. Kaz

The tray holding the PASIV rolled into the X-ray, and then Kaz was at the front of the line, having to fumble through the indignity of hastily removing his shoes in public. The security agent in his line gave the cane a discerning once-over, and poked at his gloves, but that was the worst of it. Kaz limped through and wrenched his gloves back on, quelling a pang of nausea at the idea that someone had touched them.

When he finished, Matthias and Wylan were still waiting to clear. The first briefcase came through without issue, and Matthias grabbed it.

The conveyor crawled forward and stopped, beeped. An agent in a bulky black jacket came over and removed the other briefcase from the X-ray tunnel.

“Do pardon me,” said Wylan, his tone a perfect tenor of polite, wealthy boredom. “Is er een probleem?”

The agent peered at the X-ray readout and frowned. “Sir, it appears your attaché has a lead lining.”

“Ja. This is for protection of my documents.”

“Certain that it is, sir. Do you mind if we take a look?”

Wylan folded his arms and leveled a cold stare down the bridge of his nose. It gave him a chilling resemblance to his father.

“Why?”

“To make sure it’s safe.”

“Safe? I told you what is inside. It is documents, private documents.”

“I’m sure you’re telling the truth, sir. But I still have to check.”

Wylan tossed his head. “Very well!” he said shrilly. “Do your search. But when my father hears about this—”

“Of course, sir.”

It was quite a convincing performance. If Kaz didn’t know better, he’d say the kid was enjoying it.

The agent set the briefcase on a side table and waved Wylan over. “You can come back here, sir.”

Wylan and Matthias both made to go around the conveyor belt. Another agent stopped Matthias before he could.

“Only the young sir,” she said pointedly.

“He’s with me,” Wylan said hastily.

“Sorry, sir. It’s another security measure.”

Wylan glanced across the room at Kaz. Kaz wanted to shoot him. Don’t look at me, you idiot! What am I going to do about it from over here? Solve the problem! Think!

“He’s my bodyguard,” Wylan said, clearly improvising wildly. “I can’t go anywhere without him. I’m not safe.”

“You’ll be very safe with us, sir.”

“No, I mean I won’t feel safe,” he babbled. “I need him. Otherwise I’ll have a panic attack. Oh, God. I think I feel one coming on, now. Matthias? Where are you, Matthias?”

Matthias’s face was pained. “I am here,” he said, in what had to have been the world’s least comforting show of emotional support.

Wylan clasped his arm. “Please,” he begged the agent weakly. “Don’t make him leave my side.”

The agent recoiled. “All right, sir. He can come back. Just don’t either of you touch anything.”

“Touch anything? I am on the verge of nervous breakdown! You think I am, what? Going to steal the fucking X-ray machine? Your shitty little hat?”

The agent led them back to where the PASIV sat. Once the agent’s back was turned, Wylan sagged in relief, and he leaned on Matthias for support. Matthias shrugged him off.

Kaz curled his fingers around his cane. The agent tugged at the lock on the briefcase, and turned to Wylan to ask him to open it.

An siren went up on the other side of security.

Shouts broke out. The agents at Wylan’s station ran towards the source of the noise, shoving his way through the crowd of agitated travelers, who made his job none too easy: as soon as the siren went up, a storm of harried cries and nervous babbling exploded like a clap of thunder. People ducked under conveyor belts and pushed towards the exit.

In the center of the chaos stood Jesper and Nina, screaming at each other at the top of their lungs.

“This is your fault!”

“It is not! I told you not to pack it! I told you and told you!”

“I only put it in because you were complaining!”

Nina brandished her finger in his face. “I never told you to bring it! It is so like you to avoid the blame—”

Jesper threw up his hands and roared, “Oh, of course, make it about me—”

“—now we’re going to miss our flight—”

“—Saints forbid, you have to wait a few more hours to get home—”

“—because you do not listen to me! You never listen to me!”

“Because you never have anything useful to contribute! Complain, complain, that’s all you ever do!”

“Ne me pointez pas du doigt! N'ose pas pointer ce putain de doigt sur moi!”

Jesper cast around furiously, as if driven to his wit’s end. “C'était vraiment bien!” he shouted. “Maintenant gifle-moi!”

“Ça va!” Nina dealt him a mighty slap to the face. Kaz winced.

Two agents hauled them apart. They both struggled, and two more agents ran over to help restrain them. Wylan’s agent was one.

Back at Wylan’s station, the PASIV sat unattended. Kaz waited until every agent was preoccupied with — or, at least, watching — the brawl between Nina and Jesper, then gave the signal: he tugged his right earlobe. Wylan, who had been watching him, swiftly seized the PASIV and hauled it off the table, where Matthias replaced it with the other briefcase.

When he saw the switch was done, Kaz turned to Jesper and pulled his other ear. Jesper saw it and stopped struggling.

“Let go of me,” he cried. “Let go. Let go! I haven’t done anything. Search my luggage, if you like. Search me. Search her! We’re going to miss our flight.”

“Yes, sir. We intend to. What did you pack?”

The agent unzipped Jesper’s suitcase and tossed out ream upon ream of colorful clothing. Jesper watched his shirts fly through the air with a slightly mournful expression.

“Well, you see, I have sleep apnea,” he said matter-of-factly. “Terrible snoring. The doctor prescribes me use of a machine while I sleep, so I can get good rest. I wouldn’t have brought it, but someone never shuts up about how the snoring keeps her awake.”

“And this machine is large enough to set off the bomb alarm?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. Take it up with the engineers.”

The security agent snorted in disbelief. Then he peeled back the final layer of clothes, and blinked in surprise at the reveal: nothing more or less than a normal sleep apnea machine, packed neatly between a shaving kit and Jesper’s socks.

“I told you,” Jesper said, shrugging.

“Fils bâtard d'un enculé,” spat Nina. She feigned struggle with the men holding her by the wrists, though Kaz knew if she actually wanted, she could be free of their hold in seconds. “Lâchez-moi, ou je vais vous baiser le cul avec le tampon usagé de votre sœur.”

“Sir, please calm your wife,” one agent said to Jesper.

“You’re the one holding her against her will,” said Jesper nastily. “Perhaps she would calm down if she were not being held quite so closely by all these big men. Hey! Don’t you touch her there!”

The agent, whose hands had been nowhere in the vicinity of indecency, nevertheless paled and slackened his grip long enough for Nina to pry free. She spun around and hugged herself, looking haunted. “How dare you,” she gasped.

“What do you think you’re doing, touching her like that?” Jesper surged forward and pulled her into his arms, where she promptly burst into sobs. “Pervert! I could sue!”

“Sir,” the agent said, hastily stuffing the clothes back into the bag. “It’s all right. You have to go.”

“No. We’re not finished here. I want to make a report. I want to see someone fired! Who’s your supervisor?”

“I mean it. You really have to go, sir. You’re holding up the line.”

“I’m holding it up? I didn’t grind security to a halt just so I could feel up your wife—”

“Sir, please,” said the agent, apparently near tears.

“Darling, let’s just go,” Nina blubbered. “I want to go home. I want my bed. I want my clothes.”

“All right, bubelah. We can go. Let’s go.”

Jesper accepted his suitcase from the security agent with a sniff. The agent shoved it at him as though he couldn’t wait to be rid of it. He and Nina stalked out of the hall without a backward glance.

A few minutes later, Wylan’s agent came back to his table. “Sorry about that,” he said apologetically. “We had a false alarm.”

“Well, better that than a real one, I suppose,” Wylan said, massaging the bridge of his nose in an admirable impression of bourgeois impatience. “Can you please search my case now and done with it?”

“Certainly, sir. I’ll endeavor to be quick.”

Wylan unlocked the briefcase on the table and stepped back. The agent flipped up the top and scanned the wholly uninteresting contents: a few articles of neatly folded clothing, a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and a stack of manila folders.

The agent poked through without much enthusiasm, digging just far enough to ensure there were no hidden packages or unidentified lumps, and snapped the case shut and handed it back to Wylan. “Seems in order.”

“Thank you,” Wylan said snidely. “May I go now? Or would you like me to bend over and cough?”

“That won’t be necessary, sir. Have a nice flight.” The agent’s tone indicated he wished anything but.

Wylan took the briefcase and straightened his tie with a righteous tug. Then he sped-walked out of the security room, moving only a hair too fast for Kaz’s liking — but his pace was well enough explained by impatience, not anxiety, that he doubted anyone would suspect. Matthias followed with the PASIV. On the way out, he brushed past Kaz, almost hip-checking him off his feet.

“Pardon me,” he deadpanned.

Kaz bit back a snarl and gritted out, “No problem.”

Careful, Helvar. I have a man at the American embassy who’s waiting for my call.

But the first hurdle was cleared. There was no time to celebrate as they’d like to. Now they had to find Kuwei Yul-Bo, and every second wasted was time they lost in the dream.

Kaz dug a hand in his pocket and pulled out a small plastic earpiece, which he slipped in his ear. “Talk to me.”

“He’s at a bar across from the gate,” said Inej’s voice, smooth and tinny. “Alone. No flight companions.”

“Bodyguards?”

“None. The Chinese probably judged it too conspicuous. He keeps looking at the cameras.”

“Amateurish of him. Is he wearing a baseball cap?”

“And sunglasses.”

“Adorable.”

“We can’t all be me,” she said, and the corner of his mouth tugged, despite himself. “Is the PASIV through?”

“It’s en route to the lounge. Jesper and Nina are on their way. Send them his location and then meet at the rendezvous.”

“Roger that. No mourners,” she said, and her line clicked off.

“No funerals,” he said to the dead line.

Kaz turned up his collar and disappeared into the crowd. 

On his way to the terminal, he passed Nina and Jesper, who were still relishing their performance as the most hellish couple that ever lived. As they reached the gate, the two of them peeled off to the nearby pub, where Kaz caught a glimpse of a small Chinese boy in sunglasses and a baseball cap sitting by himself at the end of the bar.

“Ah, bonjour, stranger,” he heard Nina call. She slipped into the seat next to Kuwei, beaming with flirtatious charm. “Can we buy you a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

To her credit, she didn’t falter. She leaned further on the bar, doing all but pointing to the line of her cleavage. “Oh, come on. One drink. What do you like? Beer? Whiskey? Myself, I like a strong glass of something sweet.” Her foot found its way over to his and nudged it.

He pulled away. “No, thank you. I don’t drink before flights.”

Kaz’s irritation flared. Come on, you little shitheel. Take the bait. She’s miles out of your league, what’s the problem?

“I’m sure he doesn’t want us bothering him, Nina,” Jesper said, even as he sat down on the other side of Kuwei.

Kuwei turned. His eyes ran up and down the length of Jesper, slow and unmistakable.

“I don’t mind,” he said at last.

Kaz relaxed infinitesimally. That, he thought, would explain some of the shyness.  

Nina, adapting flawlessly, backed off and slid out of her seat. “Jes,” she said, “tell him what happened to us in security. It’s a great story, he’ll love it. In the meantime, I’ll go rustle us up some drinks. Your usual, darling?”

“Thank you, gorgeous. And I suppose… a water, for our young friend?” Jesper held out a hand to Kuwei, who straightened up a little.

“I’ll have what you’re having,” he said, holding Jesper’s gaze.

Jesper smiled. “Good choice.”

Kaz left them to it.

The VIP lounge sat on the second floor of the terminal, overlooking the gates through a screen of tinted glass. A dark glass bar stretched along the back of the room, unattended. Rows of reclining chairs sat vacant and waiting. He’d told Wylan there was no need to rent out the whole thing — in fact, the Crows were less noticeable if they weren’t the only ones seen coming in and out of the lounge — but the boy had gotten it through his stubborn head that this was a way for him to be helpful, so he’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Kaz would ordinarily punish him for stepping out of line, but there was no time for that now. Anyway, it was convenient to have a center of operations within the airport.

Kaz was the first one in the lounge. Matthias and Wylan were the second and third, soon followed by Inej, who greeted them with a cordial: “My knives.”

“What?”

She hid it well, but she was on edge. Her tells were few, but he knew them. She rested on the balls of her feet, ready to flee at will, and immediately upon entering the room she put her back to the wall. “I want my knives back.”

“All right. Give us a second,” grunted Matthias. He set the PASIV down between two recliners and flipped it open, revealing the glowing bed of boxes and wires. He started unspooling the IVs. “Don’t worry, they’re all intact.”

“I want them now. Please.”

“I said give us a second, Wraith.”

“Give her the damn knives,” Kaz snapped, feeling irate with Matthias for no particular reason. “It won’t take more than a second.”

Matthias grumbled mutinously, but he dropped the IVs and reached instead for a hidden spring-plate in the top of the PASIV case. At the press of his hand, a secret drawer popped out, and he opened up the compartment to reveal Inej’s knives, as well as Jesper’s guns.

“There, you see?” He handed them over, and she immediately went about strapping them on. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Keep setting up the PASIV,” said Kaz.

“Am trying, demjin. Let me work.”

Inej finished setting the final quick-release trigger on her forearm, and then turned to Wylan. “I heard you did well getting through security.”

He shrugged. “Nina and Jesper were the real show.”

“Don’t be modest,” she chastised him. “Your performance made the switch possible. Without you, we wouldn’t have the PASIV, and there’d be no job at all.”

He pinked. “Thank you, Inej.”

“If we’re done with the hand-holding,” Kaz said meaningfully.

Inej folded her arms, much more at ease now each sported a blade. “There’s nothing wrong with a little positive reinforcement.”

“We don’t have the time to reward basic competence. We don’t have the time to reward exceptional competence, either, not that I’ve seen any.” That wasn’t true. Inej was always exceptionally competent, but there weren’t enough hours in the day to commend her every time she over-performed. If he tried, his schedule would consist of little else.

“Kaz,” she said. There was some chagrin in it.

“Get ready,” he said brusquely.

Matthias had pushed together seven of the lounge recliners in a circle, with the PASIV lying on the floor in the middle. Inej and Wylan took their seats next to each other. Matthias unraveled two IVs and approached them. He reached for Inej’s arm first, but she withdrew it.

“I’ll do my own,” she said.

He shrugged and handed her the IV. Working efficiently, she stripped off the needle cap and slotted it into her vein without fanfare. The cord went in seamlessly, and she sat back, placing her free hand neatly in her lap.

Matthias offered the injector to Wylan next. “Um,” said the boy, turning faintly green. “I wouldn’t… I mean, I’ve done it before, but the thing is, finding the vein, it was… it always got kind of messy? And I don’t care, but this is a nice suit. I’d hate to stain it.”

Wylan was clearly bracing himself for a scolding, but Matthias chuckled. “In the special forces,” he said, rolling up Wylan’s sleeve, “they make you do your own IV, the first time. All new entries in the program must. So you can be self-sufficient in the field.”

He squeezed the base of Wylan’s forearm, forcing the veins to pop out. “How long it takes a grown man to find his own brachial vein, you would not believe. By the end of the day, the inside of the clinic looked like a crime scene.”

“Really?”

“You were hot shit if you could do it in one go. You could tell those guys because they only wore one band-aid on the arm when they came out. Called them one-and-done-ers.” Matthias slapped Wylan’s forearm, drawing blood to the surface. “The opposite of those guys, we called keelers. Keelers got no respect. Worst thing you can be, I mean absolute worst. They’re the ones who …” He mimed falling over with his hand.

“Ouch.”

“Yes. Worse. If a guy gets caught keeling, the others would get together and shave him while he slept. Whole body, too, not just hair — beard and chest. Is this a normal thing to do, you ask, well, maybe not. But this was in the way of advertising. If a guy is walking around the compound bald, everyone knows he dropped like a pissbaby during his first IV.”

“That’s terribly humiliating,” Wylan said.

Matthias shrugged. “Good incentive not to be pissbaby.”

“Were you one of the best guys? I mean, a one-and-done-er?”

Matthias smiled. “No,” he said.

“Were you a keeler, then?”

“I should say not,” he said indignantly. “I stayed upright. Took me seventeen tries to find the vein, granted. But I was no keeler.”

Wylan laughed. Matthias patted his hand and stood up. “It’s in,” he said. Wylan looked down in surprise, and found the IV tucked into his wrist, not a drop of blood spilled.

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Well done,” said Matthias. “You are no keeler, either.” Then he turned and went to find his own seat on the other side of the circle.

Kaz remained standing. He ignored Inej’s gesture to sit. He checked his watch. “They’re going to be late.”

“They have three minutes left,” Inej said.

“We were fifteen minutes early when we arrived.”

“It’s a job. ‘Late’ means on time. ‘On time’ means early. ‘Early’ means go back, you forgot something.”

“I never forget anything.”

“Explains why you’re never early,” she said.

A retort sprang to his tongue, but someone interrupted him by pounding on the door. Matthias rose and crossed the room, making to open the door, but Kaz held up a hand.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“Your mother,” said Jesper tightly, his voice muffled through the wall. “I’ve decided to elope with Jan Van Eck.”

Kaz set his jaw and jerked his head at the door. Matthias opened it, and in staggered Nina and Jesper, balancing the body of Kuwei Yul-Bo between them. His head lolled, unconscious. With a mighty effort, they hurled him into the chair.

“What happened?” Kaz snapped, sweeping over to inspect the mark. He appeared unharmed, though his cheeks were flushed and hair slightly tousled. “He was supposed to be drowsy, not out cold.”

“Change of plans,” said Jesper. “He hit the juice faster than we thought.” Matthias handed him his pistols, and he brightened. “Oh, wonderful. Come to Da.”

“He almost collapsed in the bar,” said Nina, breathing heavily. “Near the end, he could barely walk by himself.”

“Did anybody see you?”

“I don’t know. I expect so, we practically had to drag him down half the terminal unconscious.”

Kaz swore. “Cameras?”

“Tried to avoid them, but some couldn’t be helped.”

“God damn it. Did no one object to you carrying him out of the bar?”

“He came willingly from the bar,” said Jesper, and there was a twinge of not-quite-embarrassment in his voice. “Had a bit of trouble starting in the bathroom, though.”

“The bathroom?” said Wylan, frowning. “What were you doing with him in the bathroom?”

“Trying to keep his hands out of my trousers, mostly. Might have had more success with it, too, if I hadn’t had to worry keeping him alive and upright. Kaz, I’m charging you a handling fee.”

Wylan said, “Wh—”

“Sit down and get wired in,” ordered Kaz. He didn’t have time to banter with Jesper now. Not that he usually did, but if there was less urgency — if there hadn’t been a sizable risk that someone from security had noticed and followed Kuwei — then he could have tolerated it. He ripped open Kuwei’s sleeve and jabbed the needle deep into his forearm, not bothering with the swab or the tourniquet. The sharp landed true and sank deep.

Jesper found his seat and inserted his IV. Nina knelt by the PASIV, fiddling with the dials. Matthias sat down and made some sort of religious gesture, muttering under his breath.

“T-minus thirty to infusion,” Nina said, flipping three switches. One by one, a series of lights blinked on in the PASIV. Kaz sat between Matthias and Jesper, across from Inej and Wylan. He accepted his line from Nina and put it in himself, slipping it into the sliver of skin between glove and sleeve.

Nina popped in her own so neatly it might as well have been an afterthought. “Totem check,” she called.

There was a rummaging of limbs and clothes as everyone reached for various objects on their person, with the exception, of course, of Kuwei, who laid motionless and peaceful in his chair. Kaz flexed his fingers. Inside his gloves, the tips of his fingers met the tiny slits he’d cut in the lining. Not dreaming.

“T-minus twenty,” Nina said.

“Are you ready?” Inej asked Wylan quietly. He nodded, his knuckles white on the armrests.

Jesper slid a pink sleeping mask out of his pocket and snapped it over his eyes. “Goodnight, everyone,” he said. “See you all on the other side. Or in hell, I guess.”

“T-minus ten,” Nina said. “Nine. Eight.”

Inej whispered something in Wylan’s ear. He nodded again. His fists unclenched.

“Seven. Six. Five.”

Matthias said, “If you’re wrong about any of this, Brekker, these will be our last waking moments.”

Kaz pulled the brim of his hat low. “Then I suggest you find something more pleasant to think about.”

“Four. Three. Two.”

Nina hit the diffusion button. The central bulb of the PASIV lit up green. Kaz leaned back, closed his eyes, and dreamed.

Notes:

Shorter chapter today because 5 is where the dream starts, and things get twisted real fast.

Chapter 5: when you're out, loneliness, it crawls up in the crowd

Truth be told, Jesper hadn’t ever been big on opera. But he could learn to like it, if it meant he got to dress like this more often.

The Dresden Semperoper was a monument to Baroque glory carved from marble and gold. Tiers of balconies rose like layers of a fat white cake from the main floor, the last sitting almost parallel with the behemoth crystal chandelier. Red velvet curtains four stories tall descended from the ramparts to the stage, in front of which sat the orchestra pit, sunk to rest half beneath the main floor. Projections in glittering clothes and white furs moved in a lazy orbit towards their seats as the orchestra went through its warmups.

Jesper wore a midnight blue tailcoat shot through with bolts of silver thread, and when he moved they caught the light like a parade of shooting stars. His shirt, bowtie, and waistcoat were all a soft black, and he wore a bowler hat that matched his coat. Checking his reflection in his watch, he noticed dangling from his ears a pair of silver earrings in the shape of crescent moons.

“All right, Van Sunshine,” he murmured, reluctantly impressed. “That’ll do.”

Without warning, he swayed and clung to the nearest seat, his head going hazy. For a moment, the Semperoper swam. His heartbeat sounded in his ears, getting slower.

A moment later, it was like something snapped, and he heard his own heartbeat kick up into gear again. He gasped for air, and his vision cleared.

“There we go,” said a low female voice. He turned and saw Nina, dressed in a splendid scarlet ball gown whose skirt flared wide and trailed behind her. Her hair tumbled down her shoulders in an artful spill of chocolate curls. She snapped her fingers, and his heartbeat settled into rhythm the music.

“Saints,” he said, shuddering. “That’s unnatural.”

“Be nice,” she warned him. “‘Unnatural’ is keeping you alive.”

“Did I say ‘unnatural’? How odd. This stutter, I swear. I meant ‘duly appreciated.’”

“I thought you might have.”

Jesper checked his totem. The chamber of the gun was empty. He snapped the muzzle back and didn’t bother to holster it, scanning the massive orchestra hall for one handsy teenager. “Do we have eyes on Kuwei?”

Nina hiked up her skirts and started walking. “He’s on Level Three, Box Four.”

“And the others?”

She paused and closed her eyes. Her head cocked to one side, as if she was listening.

“Kaz is in the lobby,” she said. “Wylan’s on the stairs. Inej is in the vents — I don’t know how she got there, she wasn’t a minute ago. Matthias is backstage.”

Jesper blinked. “Did you… hear all that?”

“Only your heartbeats,” she said absently, climbing up the aisle. “I can’t really tell one person’s from another, but based on where everyone’s supposed to be… let’s just say I’d be pleasantly intrigued if it was Matthias crawling around in the walls.”

“…Fair enough.”

Nina took a flight of stairs up through the mezzanine and rounded a landing, her skirts stuffed in one fist. He followed, leaping two at a time. “So, I know the plan was for you to honeypot and I’d help Van Sunshine with setting up the kick, but in light of our new information—”

“We switch,” agreed Nina. “You go find Kuwei, I’ll find Wylan.”

“Okay. Does he know where—”

As they climbed past the second floor, a door banged open so fast it almost caved in Jesper’s nose.

Wylan careened into the stairwell, his hair askew. “You!” he said. He pointed at Jesper. “Where have you been?”

“Me? I’ve been—” Jesper looked him up and down. “First of all, hello.”

Wylan wore only his shirtsleeves and a waistcoat the pale blue of the sky on a bleached-out summer afternoon, with gold thread tailoring the hems. His strawberry gold curls were bound back with a velvet ribbon, and a cheerful yellow tie decorated his throat with a Windsor knot. Even his cufflinks were nubbins of gold.

“What?” said Wylan, staring.

“Nothing. Just saying hello, Sunshine.”

“Well — hi.”

Jesper slipped his hands in his pockets. “Hi, indeed.”

“Everybody focus,” snapped Nina. She clapped her hands in front of Wylan’s face, and he startled and reared back. “Jesper, Wylan’s ass will still be there when we wake up. Wylan, ditto for Jesper. Can we work?”

“Yes,” Wylan said, turning red. “Aren’t you going upstairs?”

“Change of plans. Wylan, you’re going to show me how to lay the C4 under Kuwei’s box. Jesper is going to head upstairs and meet up with him instead of me.”

Wylan, to his credit, showed immediate observance to Jesper’s First Rule of Dreaming, which was shit happens, don’t think about it. “Okay,” he said. “It’s fairly simple. We’re still in good time. With four hands, it won’t take fifteen minutes.”

“Good. When does the opera start?”

He gave her a blank, panicked stare. “I don’t know.”

Nina took his face in her hands. “Wylan,” she said calmly. “You’re the dreamer. Yes, you do.”

His brow furrowed. It knitted his whole face into a cute ‘I’m thinking very hard’ expression.

“Yes,” he said in astonishment. “I do.”

“That’s right. When is it?”

“It’s in five minutes.”

“That’s good.” She turned to Jesper. “Go up and find him. If I’m not in Box Four by the time the music starts, set up the PASIV without me.”

He didn’t waste time arguing. “What do we do if you’re still not there when it’s time to go under?”

She gave a huff of irritation kicked off her heels. They went tumbling down the stairs. Barefoot, she evoked a belligerent Cinderella, armed and ready to go tear the head off a stepsister or two.

“Sub Matthias in for me.”

“You’re joking. Neen, he’s a narc.”

“I’m not. He’s my understudy. You’re already dreaming Level Two, and Matthias is the only one who knows my dreamscape, anyway.”

“Hang on. You’re acting like Matthias will be the only person on Level Two besides Jesper,” Wylan pointed out.

“Yes, but—”

“There are two others, aren’t there?”

“Kaz and Inej don’t dream for the group,” said Jesper shortly.

“What? Why?”

“Because nobody wants them to, least of all us. It’s not negotiable, Wylan, drop it.”

Wylan dropped it. “Fine,” he said. “Does someone want to let Matthias know he’s on deck?”

“I’ll tell him when I see him,” said Jesper. The orchestra swelled suddenly, and when the air calmed, there was a prickly tension that hadn’t been there before. A projection knocked into his shoulder on her way up the stairs. He turned, and she levied him with a cold, kohl-lined stare.

“Projections are getting hostile,” Nina said grimly.

Wylan fidgeted with his hands. “Is something wrong with my dream?”

“Not yours. Kuwei’s. They’re his mental security, they know we’re not supposed to be here. The closer you get to Kuwei, the angrier they’ll get.”

He turned to Jesper. “Will you be all right?”

“I’ll have to be. Be a bit of an anticlimax if the whole job went kerplunk on level one, didn’t it?” He spun his pistol in the air and caught it. “Don’t worry about me, kid. Take care of yourself. Stick with Nina, you’ll be fine.” That was almost true. Nina could manage herself and then some, and Wylan Van Eck wasn’t hard to protect. They’d be fine. They were still in the black. It was only Level One, after all.

“Good luck,” Wylan said. If he wasn’t wrong, the kid was just a bit worried. That was adorable.

“No mourners,” he replied.

Nina planted her hands on her hips and smirked. “None of your gangster courtesies, Jes. Wish me goodbye like a gentleman.”

“But Nina,” he said, grinning, as he sauntered backwards up the stairs. “I am a gangster.”

“Prick,” she called, but he was already running.

The projection who’d bumped into him earlier stood on the landing, holding a glass of champagne, and she stuck out her foot as he dashed past. He cleared it, and then ducked under the arm of another projection in a tuxedo attempting to clothesline him. Halfway up to the third floor, a set of three women in silk gowns blocked the stairs. Instead of pushing through, Jesper simply leapt onto the bannister, and channeling Inej, scrambled like a lemur up past them. One lunged for the hem of his coat, and he snapped it out of her reach.

“Ladies,” he called over his shoulder. “Please. It’s polite to ask first.”

Rounding another landing, he ran into a foursome of men in white tie. They were the first projections so far to be armed: each carried a mother-of-pearl brass derringer in one hand and a martini in the other. Even their weapons are snooty, Jesper thought. Wylan really was a perfectionist.

He paused on the stairs and drew his other pistol. “It appears you fellows have the higher ground,” he said. “And strength in numbers. That’s not very fair, you know. I think we ought to trade.”

In unison, the projections raised their guns. It was an eerie effect.

“Come on, boys. This is a fire hazard. You’re blocking the exits. It’s not safe.”

He checked around for cover. There wasn’t any, on the stairs, which left two options: up or down.

Jesper chose up.

The first round of bullets shattered the air where his head had been. Jesper ducked and fired both of his pistols at once. One projection caught a bullet in the temple and dropped immediately. The other shot went wide and caught another man in the leg, who toppled to his knees. Jesper surged forward and leapfrogged over his back, only to violently dive for the ground as a second round of bullets ripped into the stairs. He landed on his stomach, then flipped himself over quickly.

The two men still standing advanced on him. He flipped up his legs and kicked one in the stomach, sending him tumbling down the stairs. The other sidestepped his comrade’s flailing limbs, cocked his derringer, and brought it to rest between Jesper’s eyes—

Only to look down at the smoking hole in his chest where Jesper’s bullet passed him through.

“Made you look,” said Jesper. He stood up. Then he kicked him down the stairs.

The projection’s body hurtled to a bone-cracking stop on the third-floor landing. Jesper laughed and continued up to the third floor.

His blood pounded from the adrenaline of a fight. The orchestra was playing something high-spirited and fiery, probably Wylan’s unconscious doing, and Jesper whistled along to it as he cleared the third-floor landing. It was a fine, fine night at the opera, and his guns were warm, and he felt like singing or laughing. A winning fight was like a shot of fine whiskey or a lucky spin at roulette: a man could get drunk from it.

A thunder of footsteps came from the stairs. He whirled, and at least a dozen ushers in tailcoats emerged onto the landing beneath, wielding usher’s batons. Behind them came also the girls on the staircase, and the woman in kohl, and the man in a tuxedo, as well as a growing number of other guests, all of whom were climbing the stairs with the same intent pace. Their eyes, empty of emotion, settled unerringly on Jesper.

He suppressed a groan and lifted his pistols. “All right, lovely people, one at a time,” he chirped. “As one dandy said to the other: Let’s do this like gentlemen.”

Bottleneck, he thought. Force them into the stairwell, that’s where you have the ground advantage.

The projections surged up the stairs. Jesper lowered his sights and cocked both pistols.

A silver gleam flashed through the air. A low whistle pierced through the orchestra music, and abandoning the shot, he lurched to the wall.

Inej dropped down from the stairwell above, landing on the banister, and sprinted along its railing on the balls of her feet. A blade reached from each hand like an extension of her arm. One ripped through a line of projections like a hot knife through butter, leaving a row of bodies like fallen dominoes in her wake. The other, clasped in a backhand grip, swung around and cut down one of the women in silk, catching on her pearl necklace. String ripped, and pearls flew through the air like a flurry of cherry blossoms, or perhaps shrapnel.

Inej whirled, bent low at the knees. She wore a forest green jumpsuit with a lattice of gold embroidery twining from the hips up over the shoulders and down to her wrists, like a gilded shirt of chain mail.

“Keep moving,” she called. She slid sideways out of one projection’s grip, caught his wrist, and flipped him over the railing, sending him hurtling down three flights to the ground below. Another lunged for her legs, and she merely clicked her heel. He impaled himself on the blade that emerged from her boot.

“Everything handled?” he said.

She grinned over her shoulder, and it was one of those rare moments when Inej seemed almost magical: balanced on the railing amidst a storm of pearls, knives bloodied, teeth bared in a smile, a picture of death’s loveliest face.

Then she executed a backflip off the banister, landing neatly on the second-floor landing. She whistled. The projections peeled off and followed her in a thunder down the stairs.

Jesper shook his head. “Hog,” he hollered over the banister.

“Keep moving!” she shouted, breathless and full of laughter, and darted out of sight, projections in pursuit.

He checked his guns again, and did.

The third-floor hall was a dimly-lit, narrow passage in rich red carpet, with entrances to the various boxes lined up along one side. Jesper counted them off.

“Mr. Fahey. Do my eyes deceive me, or are you running on schedule?”  

His head snapped up. A man stood at the end of the hallway in black tails. He had lusterless red hair and mottled skin, boding the onset of middle age. Sideburns fresh out of a Regency novel bracketed his square face. He held a fat brown cigar between his fingers, and the smoke from it, combined with the dull light of the hallway, gave his silhouette a blurry quality, like an oil painting or a grainy photograph. 

Jesper lifted his guns. He didn’t recognize the man, which in the dream meant only one thing.

“Out of my way, fella.”

“Well, that’s no way to greet a stranger,” said the man, smoke and condescension dripping from his mouth. He spoke in a cavernously deep brogue that reminded Jesper of his Gran. Idly, he strolled towards Jesper. “Especially one who only wanted to congratulate you on a perfectly adequate performance. I know Kaz Brekker expected less.”

Kaz. There was the name. Shades tended to be obsessive, almost consumed by the dreamer that created them. Living in someone’s head would do that to you, Jesper figured.

“Do you know he predicted you’d be late?” the man said casually, wandering closer. “He built your shortcomings into the plan, in fact. As soon as he learned you and Ms. Zenik had switched duties, he sent Mr. Helvar to secure the box, on the notion that he would certainly reach Mr. Yul-Bo before you did.”

“And he told you all about it, of course.”

“He doesn’t need to tell me,” said the man indignantly, tapping ash from his cigar onto the carpet. “There’s no hiding it. When it comes to the workings of Mr. Brekker’s mind, I’m… shall we say, riding shotgun.”

Jesper snorted. “Bit of a backseat driver, aren’t you?”

“I get my kicks where I can.”

“Yeah, clearly. Why do I get the feeling you’re not talking about a night at the opera?”

“Because you, Mr. Fahey,” he said, with a ghoulish smile, “are a very smart cookie.”

A chill skittered down Jesper’s spine. He stepped forward, then caught himself, flexing his grip on his pistols. “Why’d you say that?” he demanded. “Where did you hear it?”

“This is Mr. Van Eck’s dream, is it not?” The shade gestured around with his cigar, enjoying himself. “It may be someone else’s architecture, but at the end of the day, it is, as they say, his party... If you spend any amount of time in someone’s head, you can overhear all sorts of delicious things.”

“What were you doing in Wylan’s memories?”

“Well, I was only trying to get my bearings, Mr. Fahey. After all, I didn’t choose to be here. It’s not as though Kaz explains any of his plans to me.” He paused, fingering his cigar. “Though perhaps you might be able to sympathize with that.”

He obviously wanted Jesper to ask who he was. Jesper, however, wasn’t about to give the arrogant tosser the satisfaction.

“I don’t give a rat’s arse what Kaz does or doesn’t do,” he said. “Or who you are. There’s four million dollars waiting for me behind one of those doors, and you’re just some unlucky sonuvabitch standing between us.”

Jesper fired. The bullet struck the shade square in his chest, a perfect shot.

The man sighed. Mockingly, he looked down and patted his chest, as if checking for a wound. There was no sign of Jesper’s bullet. Not a drop of blood, not so much as a hole in his shirt.

“You know that’s not how this works,” the shade told him.

“Jesper!”

At the sound of his name, Jesper made a mistake. On reflex, he turned his back on the shade.

Matthias emerged from the stairwell. He was in full military dress uniform, his black tie knotted in a neat half-Windsor, gold epaulettes mounted on the massive span of his shoulders. A whole trophy cabinet of decorations spanned his left breast pocket. To Jesper’s absolute ecstasy, he had included the beret.

“What are you doing?” Matthias demanded. “Where is Kuwei?”

“I’m—” Jesper turned. The hallway was empty. “Damn it!”

“We don’t have time for this.” Matthias brushed past him. “The charges will soon be set. Nina said you were with the mark.”

“I was trying.”

“Try harder.”

“Hey. Don’t get snippy with me, Mr. January. We’ve got a shade, all right? I got distracted dealing with it.”

Matthias’s horror was obvious. He pulled up short. “A shade? Whose?”

“Kaz, by the sound of it. I’ve got no clue what it wants, but it’s been rooting around in Wylan’s memories, and there’s no telling how much it knows. Maybe everything.” Jesper tugged Matthias by the arm to get him moving again. “We’ve got to find Kuwei.”

“Kaz can’t have a shade,” Matthias said incredulously. “He would never have dreamed with us. He would never have endangered the job so badly.”

“Uh, I’m sorry, have you met Kaz? He would sail a kerosene lake on a boat made of matchsticks if he thought he could turn a profit on it. No, he knew what he was getting into.”

Matthias tugged Jesper to a halt once more. “Jesper. You know Kaz.”

“A complicated assertion which we lack the time to fully examine, and even if we didn’t, the answer would still probably be ‘no,’” Jesper said, full of jitters. “What’s the deal, here, big guy? Can we keep moving? Box Four’s right there.”

“You know him better than I do.”

“Fine. Qualified yes.”

Matthias stared him down with eyes of chilled permafrost. “Does he have things under control?”

Jesper opened his mouth and flailed his hands helplessly.

“I don’t — I haven’t — Saints, Matthias, search me! It’s Kaz! Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t! It’s not like we have a lot of bloody heart-to-hearts!”

“I want your best guess,” said Matthias. “If you say yes, you and I go find Kuwei. If not, then I go to Nina, and I tell her to stop our hearts, and we all wake up in the airport again.”

“He’d annihilate you,” Jesper said immediately. He didn’t know the answer to Matthias’s question, and it bothered him, but he was certain of that much. “If you cross him like that. He’ll end you. He’ll call the Americans and you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life. Which will be short, considering your swift and untimely death by prison shanking.”

“Perhaps. Still better that than living out my days as a vegetable because his foolery sent me to limbo. How do you not see the danger he has placed us in? Jesper, if Kaz has a malignant presence living in his brain, we cannot take him into the second level.”

Jesper scanned Matthias’s face and found not one ounce of hesitation. Brilliant he was not; charming, he was not; but Matthias Helvar lacked nothing in resolve, and he did not bluff.

He made a decision.

“Kaz is the malignant presence living in his own brain,” he said, “and I’d bet on that miserable fucker against any monster your or my subconscious could dream up. If he says he knows what he’s doing, he knows what he’s doing. Bottom line is, none of this works if we don’t trust him.”

“And if he’s lying?”

“Then we’ll all have it out in Hell,” Jesper snapped. “There won’t be much else to do. Until then?” He tugged open the doors to Box Four and plastered on his prettiest smile.

“Kuwei Yul-Bo! If black tie doesn’t suit you, it doesn’t suit anybody. Am I dreaming, or do you look lonely?”

 

***

 

The projections weren’t supposed to be this hostile.

Guests and staff chased Inej through the halls of the Semperoper with a determination that bordered on vengeful. It would have been easy to evade them entirely, but that wasn’t the point. She was meant to draw them away from the others. Which meant she had a balancing act: good enough to avoid them, but not so sly they’d lose the scent.

She lead them up and down narrow stairwells, in and out of smoky lounges, luring them wherever possible away from the upper levels of the building. As long as she was running, they were paying attention to her, and not Wylan, Nina, or Jesper. That was how she liked it. She could handle them. An inexperienced dreamer’s projections were protective, but not dangerous.

Or, at least, they weren’t supposed to be. As a bullet splintered the back of the marble column where Inej hid, she decided to reevaluate her opinion.

Was it possible Kuwei had dream-shared before? Perhaps. His father was a somnacin specialist, after all. But he’d never been sent to the Little Palace, nor done any military service, and if he’d dipped his toes in the dream-sharing underworld, Kaz would have heard about it. Besides, even if his father had wanted to teach him, when would he have had the time? Kuwei had spent most of his waking life in boarding schools.

She decided to report to Kaz. He might have some insight into the situation, and if he didn’t, it was still information he’d appreciate.

He wasn’t in the lobby, the mezzanine, or any of the boxes. He wasn’t in the bathroom or the orchestra pit. For all that he was supposed to be a She wished she could ask Nina, but Nina was preoccupied laying C4 with Wylan under Kuwei’s box, and she didn’t want to risk leading any projections back there.

She ducked out of a slender passageway near the back of the Semperoper and found herself backstage, staring up at a mass of ropes, cables, and floodlights. She made a quick decision and, gripping the red fabric of the stage curtains, hoisted herself up and started to climb.

Near the top, she let go and dropped lightly onto a grated catwalk that ran above the stage. She could look down and see the whole theater from here, resplendent and full of music.

That was when she saw Kaz, and he almost gave her a heart attack.

He’d traded out his normal tie for a cravat, but that was the only difference: from cane to gloves to overcoat, his silhouette was unmistakable. His outfit wasn’t her problem. Her problem was his location.

He was standing on the stage, poised at the center as if waiting to deliver the opening aria, and doing absolutely nothing. Strategically, it gave him nothing. Visually, it gave him nothing. If she had to list the most vulnerable places in the opera house, his choice would only take second place if ‘swinging stark naked from the chandelier’ was included.

Inej wanted to scream. Get out of there! What are you doing? You’re a sitting duck!

The clatter of heels on metal caught her attention. A projection appeared on the rafters across from her. It was a woman in a black sheath dress, her lips painted red, yellow hair coiffed into voluminous curls. Had it not been for the gun in her hand, she could have been a theatergoer who had strayed from her seat.

And normally Inej would have thrown a knife and been done with her. And normally she would have melted into shadow and left the projection gaping at nothing, safe out of sight. And normally she would have never hesitated, because there was no time to hesitate, on a job. Hesitation got you killed.

But the thing was — and it was the yellow curls, or maybe it wasn’t; and it was the red lipstick, or maybe it wasn’t; and it was everything and maybe it wasn’t, but for a second Tante Heleen faced her down from the end of the catwalk with a smile like an unwanted caress.

Inej drew her Saints. The projection pulled out a Beretta. Inej feinted left.

The gunshot missed her and caught one of the cables suspending the walkway over the stage. Kaz startled and looked up.

With a terrible groan, the catwalk lurched to the left. Inej ran forward, her footsteps light on the grating, and launched herself at the projection with blades outstretched.

They danced. The woman had no armor, but Inej couldn’t get close enough to make a cut without putting herself in point-blank range of the gun. The catwalk swayed back and forth with every shift in her body weight, forcing her to mirror the projection’s movements to avoid capsizing the length of it. The blonde lurched and clung to the railing, obviously uneasy.

Inej flung one blade high in the air, its tip spinning end over end. The projection’s head snapped back to track it, and that was when the second blade sank into her throat.

Hand still outstretched from where she’d released it, Inej exhaled slightly in relief. The first knife dropped hilt-first into her waiting palm, and she sheathed it.

The woman’s body collapsed, sending the catwalk swinging violently, and Inej somersaulted forward to tug the blade loose of her throat. As the catwalk sagged dangerously in one direction, she hopped up onto the railing and leapt into the air, snagging one of the cables that drooped to the stage, and slid down it like a fireman’s pole.

The catwalk groaned. With a snapping of cables, the catwalk swung free and crashed to the stage in an explosion of screaming metal and leaping sparks.

Her hands burned from riding the cable, but she held on until she was ten feet from the ground, when she let go and dropped the rest of the way onto her feet. Kaz was already hurrying towards her, and she didn’t bother to sheath her blades as she strode forward to meet him. “What are you doing?” she snarled.

Admittedly, it knocked him for a loop, so badly that his shock momentarily blotted out his anger. “Me? I’m not the one bringing down half the Saints-forsaken opera house on top of you—”

“No, you’re only sitting around like the broad side of a barn, waiting for a projection to take a lucky potshot at you!”

“—in a shocking display of foolhardiness and total disregard for discretion—”

“Discretion! Discretion? You want to talk about discretion, when you decided to scope out the view from center-stage?”

“—kind of thing I would expect from Jesper or Nina, Inej, but I would have thought better of you!”

“Don’t you dare compare us that way, I know what you’re doing, and it won’t work. And I don’t like what you just implied about Nina or Jes.”

“Did I imply something? Sorry, let me be clear. I had thought you were beyond the kind of self-interested and narcissistic feats of showmanship that both Nina and Jesper adore in dreaming, and the only thing I’m ‘trying’ to do is express the depth of my displeasure at being wrong. Here’s another more-than-implication: if you’re incapable of keeping a low profile—”

“Don’t.”

“—then you’re of no use to me, Wraith.”

Inej flinched. She saw Kaz’s mouth snap shut, as if he were trying to stop the words before they could slip past his teeth.

She twirled Sankta Alina. The balance was perfect. Dreaming. Dreaming, but this is still the real Kaz. In her dreams, he was never kind, but never so cruel as this.

He loomed over her, obviously trying to use his height to his advantage, but she didn’t care and the tactic only enraged her further. It made her do an uncharitable thing. She stepped further into his space, knowing him, he’d flinch and move back — and was surprised when he didn’t.

“I know you’re trying to threaten me,” she said lowly. “But though it may surprise you, even a girl from the Menagerie can dream of better things than being useful to powerful men.”

She’d known it would get a reaction, but she hadn’t been prepared for the kind of reaction it would get. Kaz looked suddenly ill, as if his stomach were giving him trouble. His grip tightened on his cane for support. His shoulders tightened with the effort of a poorly suppressed convulsion. Maybe he’d gotten food poisoning from something at the airport. She hoped not. She didn’t want to have to carry him up all those stairs to Box Four.

They were so close she could count the threads on his shirt. She was breathing heavily, flyaway hairs slicked down to her forehead with sweat, and didn’t want to think how she smelled. He was breathing heavily, too, probably from the jolt of almost having a catwalk dropped on him. She would probably have to apologize for that. Later.

“Inej,” he said. His voice was so low it was barely a word.

“Don’t,” she said, suddenly anxious, speaking calmly despite the heat in her face. The job, the job, focus on the job. Back to what you’re good at, you’re safe there. “It’s fine. We can be professionals. What is it you say? ‘In business, you can be emotional, or you can be rich’? You were right. Kaz, let’s just — go be rich.”

The orchestra pitched a somewhat insistent tune. Wylan must have been impatient.

For some reason, Kaz seemed unpersuaded by one of his own lines. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Well, I’m sure we’d still both rather be one than the other. Come on. We have to go find Kuwei and Jesper. This is Level One, we’re burning time.”

“You need to listen to me. I mean that wasn’t what I meant.”

“I don’t care what you meant. I told you, we don’t have time. We don’t have anywhere near the time.”

“No, but—”

“But, what? It’s fine. You’re right, I’m wrong, you’re strong, I’m weak, you’re smart, I’m not. Is that all? Can we move?” She felt brittle, like a pinch would fell her, like a touch would unspool her. She hated the feeling. It had been so long since she’d felt this way around Kaz.

“I have no interest in hearing that.” Kaz sounded unhappy, which usually meant angry, but when he was angry he got cold, and he wasn’t cold now. “I don’t know what makes you think I wanted to hear any of that.”

“Tell me what apology you do want, then, so we can get off this accursed stage.”

“Keep your apologies. I never asked for them.”

“Fine. In that case, we can’t help each other.” She stormed past him to the wings.

“Inej,” he said. He followed her, but she was faster than him and didn’t use a cane, besides. “Inej. Inej!”

She gripped one of the stage ropes and used Sankt Petyr to slash the cord binding its counterweight to the ground. The pulley spun, and the rope hauled her up into the rafters, the stage shrinking beneath her feet.

“You take the stairs,” she called to Kaz, and was soon too high out of earshot to hear his reply.

 

***

 

It took Wylan very little time to decide he didn’t like Kuwei Yul-Bo.

They were all waiting in Box Four for Kaz and Inej. It was not a big box, especially when Nina and Matthias didn’t appear capable of sitting within five feet of each other, and Kuwei had solved the problem by sitting far too close to Jesper for propriety’s sake. Wylan wasn’t a prude, but there were rules of courtesy involved when everyone was sitting in such close proximity. He was just saying.

“So this is all a dream, you’re saying?” he said. He talked like a villain from an American spy movie, that particular breed of British that leant itself so well to sipping whiskey and stroking white longhair cats. “How wonderfully fantastical. I had no idea such things were possible. I confess, it beggars belief.”

Very likely. Your father works with somnacin for a living. Wylan rolled his eyes.

“It’s true. You can check — pinch yourself, look. See how you don’t wake up? That means you’re in a sedated dream.”

“I’d much rather you pinch me, Mr. Fahey.”

Jesper laughed, though not very convincingly, in Wylan’s opinion. “I’m here to protect you, remember? I don’t think pinching falls under that purview.”

“My brave dream guardian.” Kuwei gestured around the box. “And the rest of you as well, yes? You’re all here to protect me from the dream thieves?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Wylan shortly. “Some of us are here for the opera.”

Jesper sent him a warning look and draped his arm around Kuwei. Wylan stood up and went to sit by Nina, who was fussing with the PASIV.

“Tell me how this works,” he said.

She glanced at him. “The PASIV, or the somnacin infuser?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Two years of practical training and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology.”

“Dealer’s choice.”

She smiled. “The somnacin infuser is what controls the level of sedation for each dreamer,” she said. “I fill the cartridge and set the timers to cut off the drip when we’re ready to wake up.

He held out his hand. She gave him a considering look, but handed him a cartridge anyway. He locked it neatly and correctly into the infuser, copying her movements. Nina made a pleased noise, and handed him another.

They worked quickly. He made note of everything she did: the double-tug safety check on each line before letting it go, the way she tapped each cartridge with her fingernail to make sure the contents were level. Nina noticed him watching, and by and by she started to narrate what she was doing out loud, eventually tossing in the odd editorial or item of trivia — “And now, this isn’t industry standard, but a recent paper out of the Little Palace showed fifteen percent greater dream yield if you use semi-hourly infusions instead of a steady drip” — for his benefit. Wylan just listened, sometimes chiming in if he’d read the paper in question.

“How did you learn to dream on your own?” she said finally. It came on the heels of a comment he’d made about Doctor Safin’s research on metabolic rates in multi-level dreams, and she sounded delightedly bemused. “I think twenty people in the world read that paper. And maybe ten understood it. But you didn’t train anywhere — I would’ve remembered you, if you’d been to the Little Palace.”

He flushed. “I bought the somnacin myself. One of my father’s business partners drank too much at a dinner party, and I overheard him talking to my father… afterward I cornered him, and I convinced him to sell me some. For recreational use, I said. I don’t think he really knew what it was, because otherwise he wouldn’t have parted with it. Anyway, I didn’t know that machines like the PASIV existed, so to use it, I just…” He mimed injecting his wrist.

Nina shuddered. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah, I know that now. I think it was a really weak dose, or maybe it was cut with something, I don’t know. The dreams weren’t very vivid.”

From where he leaned against the wall, Matthias spoke without raising his head. “What did your father think of you purchasing black-market somnacin?”

“Hm? I don’t know. Probably would’ve been impressed I had the stones,” Wylan said absently, and snapped in the final cartridge.

Nina and Matthias traded a look. “Does he not know?” said Matthias.

“My father barely knows how old I am,” said Wylan idly, his attention absorbed in unspooling an IV line from the box. “And even then, sometimes I think he only remembers because his assistant reminds him… he spends most of his time in the states, so it’s not as though he keeps abreast of my activities. I bought the somnacin with money from my mother’s trust. He can’t touch that fund, not for lack of trying.”

“Your dossier says you went to school in New York,” said Nina. Her hands had stilled on the PASIV instruments. “It said you lived together there.”

Wylan didn’t bother asking where they’d gotten that information; frankly, he’d assumed that Kaz had told them a whole lot more. He felt a brief flare of gratitude toward the gangster for not telling, although he’d probably just kept it secret to use as leverage later.

“I didn’t go to school,” he said. “Pass me the needle cap?”

She did. He fitted the needle to the IV, fingers working deftly with the slender cables.

“What do you mean,” she said quietly, “you didn’t go to school, Wylan?”

“Just that. I had private tutors. Dad kept a spot reserved for me at Exeter, and he paid tuition, so I was technically enrolled, but I never actually went. Bit of a trial to keep up the ruse, honestly. The tutors all signed NDAs. That lasted until I was fifteen.”

“Why?” said Matthias.

“Well, officially, I tested out of high school and started college online. Think he got sick of paying to keep up with the ruse.”

“Is that what happened?”

Wylan laughed humorlessly. He hit three switches at the back of the PASIV and snapped the failsafe lever into place. “Matthias, I got an 800 on the SAT. I failed sixth-grade English — in eighth grade. What college would have me?”

“Wylan,” said Nina. “Look down.”

He looked down. The PASIV lights blinked, ready for infusion, its center button winking.

“Who taught you how to set up a PASIV?” said Matthias.

“Nobody,” said Wylan. “I just watched Nina do it.”

“Once,” she said softly. “Matthias, he watched me do it once.”

“I — well, yeah, but you did it correctly,” he said, stuttering. He caught his hands fidgeting and stuffed them in his pockets. “I just memorized it.”

“You got an 800 on the SAT?” said Matthias, intrigued.

“Yeah.”

“And where did you lose the points?”

Nina’s head whipped around.

“I didn’t do the English section,” Wylan said shortly, standing up. Matthias’s expression was hard to read. “Flat zero. I would’ve been guessing on every question, so it didn’t seem worth the effort.”

“To be clear,” Nina said, “on the other section, then—”

“Perfect score. Big whoop.” He shrugged. “Who cares. When your composite score is three digits, colleges don’t really care what the breakdown is.”

“Boy,” Matthias began.

“Wylan!” Nina leaned forward, her face alight with excitement. “Have you ever been to see a child psychiatrist?”

Wylan recoiled. “I’m not slow,” he snapped.

“I know that, dear. I mean, have you ever been tested? When you were a kid, did someone ever come in and give you a sheet of things to read, and then watch and take notes?”

“I never read anything in front of anybody. Dad was very clear.”

“Oh! Matthias,” said Nina excitedly, tearing her eyes away from Wylan. “Matthias, don’t you think—”

The door to the box swung open, and Kaz and Inej swept in. “Let’s move,” Kaz said, and his voice was dark with impatience. Inej said nothing, but dropped immediately into her seat and rolled up her sleeve. Nina closed her mouth with a squeak of frustration.

“Why, hello,” said Kuwei, turning to greet them. “Are you also here to protect me?”

“Yes,” said Kaz, who was obviously not straining to convince anybody. “Jesper’s filled you in.”

“I suppose so. I confess I still don’t fully understand — we need to dream together? In order to escape… what was it?”

“An extractor,” supplied Jesper. “Dream-thief. He’s in the dream right now, in fact, trying to steal your secrets. But if we dream a level deeper, he’ll be out of his element. Then we have him on your turf.”

“And in this dream-within-a-dream,” Kuwei said, blinking and clasping his hands, “you’ll dispose of him? That is, you won’t require anything of me?”

“No. All you have to do is lie back and think of England, darling. Leave the rest to us.” Jesper reached out and tucked a curl of dark hair around Kuwei’s ear. Wylan quietly scoffed.

“All right,” said Kuwei, and smiled. He had a very fetching smile — friendly dimples, nice teeth. “Then I suppose I have no choice but to sleep with you.”

Somewhere in the orchestra, a violin screamed, breaking the rhythm. The orchestra lurched into a jarring and loud series of chords. Everyone in the box winced, and Kuwei actually clapped his hands over his ears.

“I think we’d better get a move on,” said Wylan loudly, over the noise. “We’ve only got a few moments before—”

The lights dimmed. A spotlight dropped onto the orchestra pit. The music faded out. Pages rustled as the musicians sorted their sheet music.

“—it starts,” Wylan finished. The music began. A sweet, regal chorus of violins teased out the opening notes.

“Oh!” said Kuwei brightly, rising from his seat. Jesper made a fruitless grab to haul him back, but the boy dodged him and dashed to the edge of the box. “Tchaikovsky! My favorite. We must stay for the first act.”

“No,” said Kaz. He, Nina, Matthias, and Inej were all busy themselves in. “We’re on a schedule. Wylan, is the kick prepared?”

“Yes, sir.” Twenty pounds of C4 lined the ceiling of the box below them; Wylan slipped a hand into his pocket and withdrew the detonator remote, flashing it to Kaz, who nodded shortly.

“You know what to do?”

Wylan said, “The opera will take three hours. When the music stops, I press the detonator. You’ll know the kick is coming because you’ll be able to hear it coming in the dream.”

Kuwei was still being intransigent. He wanted to hear the orchestra.

“Sort of pressed for time, here, darling,” tried Jesper.

“But they sound so lovely. Can’t we just wait a few bars?”

“How I wish we could. You know what, when we wake up, I’ll take you to the real opera,” coaxed Jesper. “Top hats and champagne, the whole thing. It’ll be even better, promise.”

A roar of applause erupted from the theater. They turned, and the conductor was taking the stand. He was a curiously well-defined projection: a tall, square-faced man with red hair and sideburns.

Wylan squinted. Is that a cigar in his hand?

Kaz said, “Jesper, put the brat in his seat, or I’ll nail him to it.”

“Saints,” Nina mumbled. “What crawled up your ass and died in it?”

“I’m sorry, did you have something to add?”

Wylan squinted. The conductor was making no move to — well, conduct. He was just standing there, like he was waiting for something. “Kaz,” he said, “I think there might be something wrong.”

“It’s your dream, Van Eck. Sort it out.”

“No, I mean — there’s a problem with the orchestra.”

“We’re about to go into Level Two. I don’t have time.”

“Could you humor me? It’s giving me a bad feeling.”

Kaz’s stare was scathing. Wylan, however, who had been developing a tolerance to disappointed male authority figures practically from birth, simply pointed towards the orchestra pit.

Sighing, Kaz reached for his IV. The music wobbled up into a tense, unresolved series of ascending chords.

Suddenly, Jesper shot out of his seat. He roared, “Kuwei, move!”

Wylan whirled around. The conductor was staring at him.

He grinned, and a gold tooth glinted in his mouth. He lifted the gun in his hand and fired two shots at Box Four.

Nina screamed. Jesper dove for Kuwei. Something warm and wet splattered the front of Wylan’s shirt, and he clutched his chest, heart seizing — but there was no pain. The blood wasn’t his.

It belonged to Kuwei Yul-Bo, whose shirt had sprouted a dark red stain like a blooming rose.

Thanks to Jesper, the bullet had missed his head and struck him in the shoulder. But in shoving him out of the bullet’s path, Jesper had pushed him against the railing of the box, where he now tipped forward, flailing for balance.

Someone was shouting. Wylan heard it as though through deep water: he was transfixed by the sight of a bleeding Kuwei, his young face naked with terror, losing his battle with gravity, and falling out of Box Four.

Chapter 6: it's what you feel but can't articulate out loud

Wylan didn’t have time to think. He just hooked his foot over the railing and threw himself forward, burying his hand in the front of Kuwei’s shirt.

“Wylan!” screamed Nina.

He lurched over the railing, the weight driving the air from his lungs. Kuwei hung from his grasp, his legs churning the air. The fabric of his shirt, dampened with blood, hung taut, the fabric straining more the more he thrashed.

“Hold still, idiot!” Wylan fumbled to grasp his hand, but their palms, both slick with blood, slipped past each other.

“Pull him back up!”

Hands closed around his legs and hauled him back to the safety of the box. Kuwei came with him, still screaming.

Bodies crowded him in. Time seemed to move slowly: he was all but carried back to his seat, where his hand had to be pried out of Kuwei’s shirt, and then someone was wiping the blood from his fingers — that was nice, he thought distantly. There was a ringing in his ears. He couldn’t get his eyes to focus. What was all the fuss about? There was so much noise. He wished everything would just slow down for a second.

One of the voices, harsher than the others, said: “Nina.”

Hands cupped his face. Someone bent over him, their breath sweet in his face. He blinked blearily.

A hard shock coursed through his skull, and every nerve in his body caught fire.

His spine arced up, and a breathless gasp tore from his body. His teeth clacked shut around a grunt of pain.

The pain relented, and he slumped into his chair. The fog around his head disappeared, replaced by a bone-deep ache. He could see and hear again, which would have been nice, if his body didn’t feel like he’d just gone ten rounds with a meat grinder.

“Sorry,” whispered Nina, patting his cheek. “You’re the dreamer. We can’t afford to lose you.”

“What,” said Wylan, still breathless, “was that?”

“I turned off your endorphin receptors,” she said, with the decency to look guilty about it. “Just for a second! Just to bring you back to reality. It stops you from drifting.”

“Oh, my God. I didn’t know my body could feel like that.”

“You’re beginning to understand why most dreamers are terrified of heartrenders,” said Jesper, pocketing his bloody handkerchief.

Kaz shoved his way around Nina and loomed over Wylan, his expression impassive. “Who was it? Did you see?”

“You could stand to thank him, first,” objected Nina. “He just risked his life for all our sakes, and that was before he had part of his pineal gland soft-rebooted, so it wouldn’t be out of order—”

“Now, Wylan.”

Wylan dragged “Um. I don’t — the conductor. It was the conductor.”

Kaz turned to Inej, but she was already moving: a dead sprint to the edge of box, where she hopped up, leapt over the lip, and was gone. But Wylan knew it was too late. The conductor was gone, and somehow he doubted Inej would find him.

“I’ve been shot,” Kuwei said, lifting his bloody hand in wonderment. “I’ve actually been shot. I’m dying.”

Everyone looked at him as they remembered his existence, each with varying amounts of guilt.

“Nina,” Kaz ordered, but she was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking.

“Kaz, I can try, but I can tell you just by looking that it won’t do any good. I’m not a healer, and even if I was, there’s too much blood for the bullet to have missed his artery. He needs reconstructive surgery, and probably a transfusion.”

Kaz, to his credit, didn’t argue with her. “Can you keep his heart going?”

Nina wrung her hands. “Again, I can try, but even I can’t produce blood from nothing, and he’s lost a lot of it. And I can’t do anything at all if I go down to Level Two with you.”

“Which she has to,” Matthias reminded him. “She’s the dreamer for Level Three.”

“Unless Matthias substitutes,” said Jesper.

“I can’t. I am not qualified.”

“You have the second most formal training of anyone here,” Kaz reminded him.

“Which is still a pitiful amount compared to hers.” He pointed at Nina. “I have no forger’s certification. No chemist’s certification. Not to mention I am not drüsje. What happens if we are injured, or if we have to hide our faces? Our luck will not improve in the deeper levels. What would have happened if she had not been here to help Wylan? She is our tank, our forward artillery. If we dream without Nina, we are lost.”

Kaz massaged the bridge of his nose. Jesper said, “Saints, just kiss her, would you, I’m growing old over here.”

Matthias glowered at him, but Nina might as well not have heard. She was staring at Matthias. Her lips were slightly parted.

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Kuwei. “I would like to revisit the fact that I am currently dying. I feel its role in the conversation was not given adequate emotional weight.”

“Shut up,” said Wylan and Kaz at the same time, and it was hard to say who was less happy about it.

Inej reemerged over the edge of the box and vaulted the railing with a grunt. “The conductor’s gone,” she said grimly. “The pit’s empty. There’s only projections.”

“What kind of projection was that?” Wylan said incredulously. “I didn’t think they were supposed to be that hostile.”

“They’re not,” said Inej.

“It wasn’t a projection,” said Jesper. He folded his arms and glared, inexplicably, at Kaz. “It was a shade.”

Kaz stiffened. “Tread carefully, Jesper.”

“No, it was. It was your shade, Kaz. I spoke to it earlier.”

Inej said, “You have a shade?”

“No,” he snapped. “I don’t. I would know if I did.”

“It knew your name,” said Jesper.

Kaz rounded on him. “And how long were you talking to this projection, exactly? What kind of a wasteful detour was this?”

“You’re deflecting because you know I’m right,” Jesper gasped. “You know you have a shade, and you know it shot Kuwei! You’re trying to cover for yourself!”

“I said carefully, Jesper.”

“Carefully? ‘Carefully’? You arse! You’ve put the whole job in danger, and you won’t even admit to it!”

“Sorry,” said Wylan, who desperately wanted to not intervene, but saw no way around it. “Really sorry, but — ‘shade’?”

“Rogue dream construct,” said Inej, who was fixated on Kaz. “An inverted projection. It attacks the subconscious that hosts it, instead of defending.”

“They are curses,” supplied Matthias. “Evil sprites. Punishments visited on dreamers for their sins.”

Kaz curled his lip. “If I am being punished for my sins,” he said, “then my curse is being surrounded by so many obstinate, short-sighted people. This is Level One. Time is running through our fingers. Are your sensibilities offended? Are you feeling scared? Take it up with your therapist after the job. Take it up with ten therapists, you’ll certainly be able to pay for it. In the meantime, I beg you to locate your god damn backbones. I lack the luxury, to say nothing of the patience, to sit here and hold your hands.”

There was a beat where no one said anything. Jesper was on the verge of exploding, Wylan could tell, and the next words out of his mouth would almost certainly tip Kaz off whatever steep precipice he teetered on. In the interest of avoiding that, as well as the sight of Jesper getting beaten to death with a crow’s-head cane, he spoke up.

“Well, okay,” he said lightly. “Now, give us the bad news.”

Kaz’s mouth twisted like he’d bitten something sour. Inej hadn’t stopped staring since Jesper accused him. But Nina laughed, more out of relief than anything else, and Jesper joined her, if somewhat reluctantly.

“Listen, without missing the point, Kuwei isn’t dying that fast,” he added. “And we’ve got two levels of dream left in play. Maybe this shade thing is a deal-breaker for you, I don’t know, I’m not the person to ask. But my dad is offering you all a lot of money to do this, and if nothing else, I’m going to be very sad if I never get to see the look on his face when he realizes he actually has to write you a check for thirty million dollars.”

Jesper snorted. “Never met a kid so ready to throw away his inheritance.”

“Probably because it isn’t my inheritance,” said Wylan coolly, and he didn’t elaborate, despite Jesper’s appraising look.

Kaz folded his hands over his cane. “If I didn’t know better, Wylan,” he said, “I’d say you sound like a man driven by spite.”

Wylan lifted his chin. “So, what?”

“Nothing,” said Kaz. “Just an observation. In my experience, it makes us extraordinarily productive people.

“We proceed with the plan as expected. Kuwei is dying, so we’ll need to move faster, but that is all that will change. Jesper, you’re still Level Two. Nina, Level Three. Wylan stays and delivers the kick. We go in. We do our work. We leave.” He looked around. “Do I have your cooperation?”

There was not one face in Box Four which evinced any kind of enthusiasm for the prospect. But nobody disagreed.

“I said—”

“Yes, boss,” said Jesper tiredly. “Saints preserve me, but you do.”

“When we get out of here, every one of you is buying me a drink,” said Nina.

“Nina, if we can complete the job without any more pointless arguments, I’ll buy everyone their own vineyard.” Kaz sat down and reached for his IV. “Sleep well, everyone. And yes, that is an order.”

 

***

 

Jesper was wearing a train conductor’s uniform. With the hat. He checked his appearance in the window, and saw his reflection mirrored across a snow-capped landscape of craggy mountain peaks.

His level was a train through the Alps. It was a cozy affair, not too detailed, either. The carriage rocked gently back and forth on the tracks, and the drivers chittered cheerfully under their feet, causing the floor to thrum. Lacy patterns of frost clung to the windows, but inside, the luggage compartment was warm. It smelled of fine leather and smoke from the engine room next door.

“I thought we had discussed the matter of the hat,” he said to Matthias, who was back in civilian clothes, his broad silhouette exaggerated still further by an enormous fur-lined overcoat. Jesper was the only one in costume as train staff. The others were dressed up as passengers in winter clothes.

Matthias said, “It is more realistic.”

“It’s silly, is what it is. I have a hat.”

“Train conductors do not wear bowler hats.”

“Oh, really? Who died and made you king of trains?”

“I don’t know why you assume trains are a monarchy,” sniffed Matthias, and then then stared into the middle distance with a haunted expression as he appeared to process what he’d just said.

Kaz rapped his cane on the wall, drawing the room’s attention. “Totem check,” he ordered. “Then we move.”

Jesper’s guns had taken on a different appearance with the new level. They’d transformed into double-action revolvers, sporting expensive mother-of-pearl handles and an old-fashioned brass casing on the barrel. He spun them a few times, admiring, before snapping back the muzzle and checking the empty cartridge.

He holstered them and noticed Matthias subtly tucking some kind of pendant back into his shirt. He squashed his curiosity. The soldier’s totem was probably some kind of standard-issue trinket from the special forces. Everything else about the way he dreamed was textbook, after all: typical architecture, typical kicks, typical safety measures. His dreams were photorealistic and dull as dirt. Matthias had probably never broken protocol in his life.

Well, Jesper reflected, except that one time. Guess it was kind of a biggie. He glanced at Nina, who was adjusting the collar of her crimson overcoat. It’s hard to imagine. He doesn’t seem the type. Not that she does, either… she gets off on serving the Little Palace, and he’s such a bootlicker that six months in prison couldn’t drum it out of him. If they were born on the same side, they’d have been perfect little zealot soulmates.

That was the trouble with loyalty to a cause, though: vows of that kind were always blank checks. Sign away enough pieces of your soul, and soon enough you’d have nothing left to offer when your creditors came to collect. Nina and Matthias were both proof enough of the dangers of that. Jesper was smarter. Jesper was loyal to Kaz Brekker, and the day Kaz stopped paying his bills, he’d take back his leash and go find someone who could.

Keep telling yourself that, said a nasty little voice that sounded a lot like Wylan. Say you don’t care about him, or Inej, or even Nina. Drink and gamble and crack jokes and pretend you don’t care about being liked. Do you think that’ll make it easier when we leave you?

Inej drew back the hood of her fur-lined cloak. She wore furry earmuffs under the hood, which were frankly adorable, and Jesper would have told her so if he didn’t have a healthy fear of being stabbed. “We need to decide what we’re going to do about the shade,” she said.

“I’ll deal with it,” said Kaz. “You, Matthias, and Nina stick to the plan. Like I said. Jesper will set up the kick—”

Inej ignored him. “I think I should go hunt him,” she said. “I’ve thought about it. It means you all will have to deal with projections on your own, but that’s a sacrifice we have to make. The shade is a more serious threat.”

“No,” said Kaz immediately.

“I like that idea,” Jesper offered. “The Wraith is here as security, right? So let her do it. I mean, Inej will eat this thing for dinner.”

“No, she won’t,” Nina said, though her tone was gentle. “Inej, that’s not how shades work. Kaz is the only one who can touch it. Even if you kill it, it’ll just keep manifesting as long as Kaz is in the dream.”

“So I kill it again, and then again, if I have to,” said Inej. Her tone was like a silver dagger, cool and beautiful and sharp. “I’m happy to give it as many deaths as it wants.”

“I don’t know why this conversation is still happening,” Kaz said tightly, “when I distinctly remember saying no.”

“It’s still a monumental risk,” argued Nina. “Even if you’re the better fighter, the shade only needs to get lucky once. And we’re on Level Two, don’t forget — if you die, you don’t wake up in the opera house with a crick in your neck. One lucky shot, and the shade can send you on one-way trip to Limbo.”

“Which is why it’s probably going to go after Kuwei or Jesper the first chance it gets. I don’t know why none of you seem to realize I’m your best option,” Inej said, and in her irritation for a moment she sounded a startling amount like Kaz. “I’m not the dreamer for Level Two, I’m not going to be the dreamer for Level Three, I’m not the heartrender, and I’m the best equipped dreamer to handle a hunt. I’m security. Let me be security.”

“This idea is monumentally stupid,” Kaz said coldly. “I mean astonishingly, staggeringly stupid. You’re not hunting the shade alone, and you should put the idea out of your head.”

Inej didn’t look at him. She said, “Nina, tell Kaz he doesn’t get a say in this until he comes up with a better plan for dealing with the shade he locked in here with us.”

Jesper’s eyes bugged. Matthias cleared his throat. The two of them traded identical looks of: What the fuck?

“Nina,” said Kaz, in velvety tones, “tell Inej that if she continues to act like a child, she will spend the rest of the job sitting on her ass in the luggage compartment while the rest of us carry out the plan.”

“Tell Kaz that if someone wants to talk about acting like a child—”

Nina let out an aggrieved noise and slashed both her arms. Kaz and Inej both gasped for breath at once as the air was driven from their lungs, and they fell silent.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said fiercely. “We’re going to work this like we planned, alright? I’m going to find Kuwei. Jesper’s going to set up the kick. Everything goes well, and we meet back here in an hour. As for the shade: Inej, you’re not going after it alone, this isn’t Predator. Kaz, you’re not handling it by yourself, either, that plan is dumb, and your tone isn’t helping anything. Matthias?” She paused. “Stop… standing there all funny-looking.”

“That was unprovoked.”

“Your face provokes me. Are we all on the same page or not?”

“I still think we should be on the offensive,” Inej said.

“I agree,” said Matthias, surprising Jesper. “I will join the Wraith in her hunt.”

Nina hesitated, then nodded. “You’ll watch each other’s backs?”

Inej shrugged in agreement. Matthias said, “I will not allow it to kill her.”

Kaz began, “Drüskelle—”

He held out his hand. “Trust your crew, demjin. Trust my skill, if you do not trust my oath.”

Kaz raked a disdainful eye over Matthias’s outstretched hand. “Fine,” he said, without touching it. “On your head be it, Helvar.”

Jesper clapped. “Good team meeting,” he said brightly. “You know what they say! Teamwork makes the… well, anyway. One hour on the clock, ladies and gentlemen. All aboard the Nightmare Express.”

“I’d thank you to curb the dramatics, Jesper.”

“You know, boss, I’m sure you would.”

 

***

 

Nina didn’t like how quiet the train was. An opera house was bustling, noisy, and nobody paid attention to an extra pair of footsteps coming down the hallway, or bury a gunshot in a swell of horns. The train carriages were silent except for the hydraulic breaths of the engine and the wind moaning lonesome at the doors. She tilted her head, listening: six heartbeats answered her, one slower than the others. That’s Wylan, up in Level One. She checked that they were all in rhythm, and moved on.

She surveyed the winter landscape outside the carriage. They were winding slowly into the mountains, winnowing back and forth across a series of stark cliffs, and snow fell in a soft curtain on the windows. It reminded her of Russia. In the summer, her cohort at the Little Palace would travel to St. Petersburg for a visit to their satellite academy, and it had been a tradition to sneak out and go skiing at the end of every stay. Nina had never been a great skier, but she’d still gone. In retrospect, the thrill she’d gotten out of sneaking out of their dorm was perhaps too prescient, considering what she’d eventually make her living in.

It was those girls she thought of now, though, as she wandered through Jesper’s dream. Zoya, Genya, Lada, Yelena. A pack of the scrappiest girls you’d ever met, dreamers and scholars and scientists, all too clever for their own good. She’d shared her first dream with Genya. Build her first landscape with Zoya. Done her first extraction with Lada and Yelena — one of Zoya’s exercises, a game of capture-the-flag up and down the canals in Lada’s dream of Venice. Saints, what fun they’d had. How good they’d been.

Zoya never talked about the Morozova Job. But people whispered, and the Little Palace had thin walls. The First Extractor, Inventor of the PASIV, the man who unlocked the secrets of somnacin... left comatose after a botched inception.

Nina shook herself out of reverie. She slid open the door to the dining carriage and swept her gaze over the cabin.

Kuwei sat at a table near the back of the car, staring out the window. His dinner remained untouched, and he had a slightly melancholy expression, as if lost in memory. One of his hands toyed with the stem of his wineglass. His right arm was in a sling, and a bandage was bound tight around his shoulder, but already small inkblots of red were seeping through the white.

He’s still dying, she thought. We’ve bought him time, but not much.

She sat down across from him. He glanced up, drifting back to earth, and a flicker of recognition spanned his face at the sight of her.

“Do I know you?” he said.

Nina smiled. “Maybe,” she said. She tossed her hair back and tousled it, flashing a grin. “Do I look familiar?”

“Yes. Somehow. I can’t remember… I have the strangest feeling I’ve seen you before.”

“I do have one of those faces. People are always telling me I look like Grace Kelly.” She smiled, leaning her chin in her palm. “What do you think? You be the judge.”

He considered her face. “No,” he said finally. “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

Well, fine. She’d try a different tune. She snapped her fingers. “I know what it is. You’re Kuwei Yul-Bo, aren’t you? The son of Bo Yul-Bayur?”

Kuwei relaxed into his seat. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he’s my father.”

“Well, there you go. I’m Doctor Nina Zenik, I work with the Little Palace. Your father and I trained together. Briefly, that is. He’s a great chemist.”

“Oh,” said Kuwei, without conviction. “I suppose that’s probably it.” He turned back out the window.

Nina feigned disappointment with a poorly disguised note of hurt. “He never mentioned me?”

“No.”

“I guess he made more of an impression on me than I did on him.”

“I wouldn’t take it personally,” he said unconvincingly. “My father doesn’t introduce me to his colleagues. We don’t see each other often, anyway.”

“No? He’s on this train, isn’t he?”

Kuwei blinked, and frowned at her. “What?”

She gestured around. “He’s traveling with us. On the train. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? We’re going to an academic conference.”

“I… don’t think so.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to any conference. And he wasn’t… he wasn’t with me, he couldn’t have been… I was going to…”

Why was he so stubborn? New dreamers were, as a rule, impressionable as hell. They would accept the sky was made of cheese if you told them so with enough confidence.

Nina hated to do this, but she didn’t have the time to waste charming him, and he wasn’t cooperating. “You’re so silly,” she said sweetly. “Of course he’s here. He wanted to show you his work. Why else would you have come?”

At the same time as she spoke, she closed her fist under the table. Kuwei’s heartrate slowed, and a small flood of endorphins emptied into his veins. The muscles of his jaw and back unclenched as his body sank into a state of perfect calm.

A smile dawned on his face, pacific and accepting.

“Yes,” he said dreamily. “Yes, my father’s here.”

“That’s right, darling. Because we’re going to a conference.”

“We’re going to a conference.”

“And you know where he is.”

“I do know where he is,” he agreed readily.

It wasn’t hypnotism, not exactly. Genya had described it as a sort of diminished attentive capacity, a willingness to accept one’s environment and not question it. You’re not taking away their free will, she’d coaxed an unreceptive Nina. You’re just calming them down. A totally relaxed dreamer will be willing to accept the occasional idiosyncrasy in her surroundings. She becomes suggestible, pliable. What’s unethical about it? Think of it like giving her a nice, thorough massage.

Nina leaned forward and took his hand. “Will you tell me?” she said kindly.

Kuwei nodded. His eyes were glassy. “He’s in Shanghai.”

She flinched. “No,” she said, keeping her tone even. “He’s not, remember? He’s here, with us. On the train. Does this look like Shanghai to you? No. Because it’s not. We’re on a train, and your father is here, and you know where he is.”

“Okay.”

“You know his carriage number.”

“Okay,” he said, though she wasn’t sure if he actually agreed or if the response was automatic. That was the trouble with doing this. The dreamer got much slower on the uptake, lost all sense of urgency.

“Can you tell me what it is?” At his blank gaze, she repeated, “His carriage number.”

“Oh. I don’t know what it is.”

She debated with herself, and finally gave in. She made another fist, and a small aftershock of endorphins unspooled in his head. In her mind’s eye, she could see the nerves lighting up like a suburban Christmas display. Kuwei sighed at the sensation, his face blissfully lax with pleasure.

“You do know what it is,” she said firmly. “What’s the first number that comes to your head?”

“I … Saints, that’s nice. I don’t know… three?”

“Three? Yes, car three, good. Next?”

“Before,” he said.

“Before? Before what?”

“That’s it.” He nodded to himself. “My father’s carriage… three, before.”

“Oh! B-4, okay. Section B, compartment four. Three-B-four.” She bit back a sigh. Either she hadn’t dreamed in a while, or this was harder than it was supposed to be. “That’s excellent, Kuwei. Thank you. You did a great job.”

He beamed. The waiter, a blank-faced projection in a waistcoat, appeared with a plate of pearly seared scallops on a bed of greens, and the boy squeaked in happiness.

“Dinner!” he said, shaking out his napkin. “Oh, you have to try these, they’re my favorite. Thank you—”

Nina snapped her fingers, and he collapsed face-first into the scallops.

“Sorry,” she told him, with genuine regret. “But you’re dying, and it’s quicker this way.”

He gave no answer but a riotous snore. She snagged one of his scallops and popped it in her mouth. The buttery, light flavor of the meat melted on her tongue, and the skin crunched, releasing flavors of garlic and rosemary. It was very good. She’d use part of her four million dollars to get some when they woke up.

Sucking her fingers clean, she made to stand up. An iron hand appeared on her shoulder and pushed her back down, gentle but unyielding.

“Ah, what a mess you’ve made of him,” said the man behind her, in a deep, guttural engine-growl of a brogue. He gripped a handful of Kuwei’s hair and hauled him up, revealing his sleeping face: covered in butter and garlic, pieces of the salad stuck to his cheeks.

He clucked his tongue. “Really, you couldn’t have allowed the poor lad a spot of supper first?”

Nina tried to slide free of the projection’s grip. “Excuse me,” she murmured.

“Don’t be rude, Miss Zenik,” said the man idly. He looked down at her, and she saw his face: a shock of red hair oiled close to his scalp, long sideburns, a neatly trimmed auburn beard. He wore a brown three-piece suit and a matching overcoat, all tailored immaculately; his eyes were shards of sea glass.

Nina sank into her seat. Her heartbeat raced.

The shade smiled lazily. “Just because we’re at cross-purposes doesn’t mean we need to forget all our manners. Here, I’ll demonstrate. Fair lady, would you do me the most gracious honor of allowing me to join you?”

Then he sat down beside Kuwei and draped an arm along the back of the seat, effectively boxing him in.

“I believe you’re supposed to let me answer first,” she said, glancing at the exits. There were waiters posed at either. Not hostile yet, but that could change. She’d need to move fast — but there was no chance of that, so long as she had to carry an unconscious Kuwei.

Matthias could have done it. Matthias would have picked up the boy with one arm, like a sack of potatoes, and simply body-checked the waiter into a wall. Saints, he was strong.

Where the hell was he? Where the hell was Inej?

“A fair criticism,” said the shade. “You can still say no, if you like. I would never dream of imposing my company on a lady contrary to her desires.”

It was deeply mocking. She tried to keep her tone steady as she said, “The seat is yours if you want it. But my husband and I were just leaving. Excuse us.”

“Nina, you and I both know that boy’s not your husband, any more than I’m the Leader of the Opposition,” said the shade indulgently. “Now, let’s get down to business. What are we going to do about Kaz?”

So it was Kaz’s shade, then. Jesper hadn’t been wrong.

“We’re not going to do anything,” she said. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”

He sighed. “How boring. Don’t tell me — industry protocol, isn’t it? I suppose this one of those holdovers from Little Palace. Don’t talk to shades! They’ll steal your teeth and drive you mad!” He waggled his fingers sarcastically. “Well, forgive me for hoping you were more creative. Here’s the thing about shades, Miss Zenik: we’re just dreams. Projections like any other.”

Nina folded her arms. “Oh, so we’re doing ‘I’m not bad, I’m just dreamed that way’? That’s the best you can do?”

The shade spread his hands humbly. “The truth is the best we can ever do, Miss Zenik.”

“Please, spare me. You think you’re blowing my mind or something? Every shade I’ve ever met has one of these lined up. Does it sound less like total bullshit coming from the other side? I’ve always wondered.”

“You sound like you’re fostering some strange prejudices about us. We’re not evil. In fact, I can be rather helpful, when I’m in a cooperative mood.” He accepted a menu from a waiter. “Kaz certainly thinks so.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah. Just so you know? That’s how I can tell you’re full of it. Kaz wants you gone, as do I.”

The shade giggled. “Is that what you think? Did he not — of course he didn’t tell you. What am I saying?” He laughed out loud. “Did he pretend to be surprised, when Jesper raised the alarm? Scoff and bluster, act offended? He’s a marvelous actor, isn’t he? I am proud of him.”

“I think you should stop talking,” said Nina, beginning to feel nauseous.

“Have I offended you? Forgive me. Let me just say this: Kaz Brekker is a great dreamer. He, like myself, knows that part of being an extractor is knowing when to keep custom and when to break it. Take me, for example.” He tapped his own chest. “Kaz is smart. He knows his own mind. He realizes he has a shade. Industry protocol is to stamp me out, kill me dead. But what does he do? Does he shoot on sight, throw away the opportunity? No. He makes me serve him. I’m his instrument. Now he has a second self to command in dreams.”

Nina hated dealing with shades because they didn’t have bodies. There was nothing for her to manipulate, nothing for her Grisha powers to touch. Out of desperation, she reached for his heartbeat anyway, and found nothing.

“I can see I’m not reaching you, here,” sighed the shade. “I had hoped you would see reason. You’re dreaming with a somewhat close-minded group of people… but you and I both know they don’t give out sainthoods for obeying industry protocol.”

“You’re a fool,” she said. “You picked the wrong person to lecture. I don’t need your help.”

“Don’t you?” said the shade, his eyes glittering. “Would you stake your life on it? Would you stake another’s, drüsje?”

Nina stood up, and the shade reached for his gun.

The shade’s head was snapped hard to the side as a gun barrel jammed into his temple.

“My apologies,” Matthias said coldly, thumbing down the safety. “Perhaps I am a confused foreigner, but in my country, you do not speak to a lady of letters this way. You may call her ‘madam,’ or ‘Doctor Zenik,’ or simply ‘Doctor.’ And you will remember to do this, for in my country, we have an old-fashioned way of teaching manners.”

The shade grimaced. “Mister Helvar,” he said. He turned around and smiled with disdain. “What a rather big surp—”

Matthias fired. The bullet passed through the shade’s head. Shooting Nina a meaningful look of disappointment, it flickered and disappeared.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You should carry a gun,” he said simply. He holstered his own and slung Kuwei effortlessly onto his back. “You rely too much on Grisha magic.”

And there went her gratitude, right out the window. She shoved back her chair, bristling. “It’s not magic, it’s science.”

“You snap your fingers and stop a man’s heart. I call them like I see them.”

“If you’d pay attention to me when I explain it, you’d know how it works.”

“Nina,” said Matthias, with a world-weary sigh, “of all the many things you can accuse me, you cannot say I do not pay enough attention to you.”

That would have been sweet, if she didn’t know he meant all the time he spent daydreaming about killing her.

She met his eyes. His expression couldn’t rightly be described as angry, but it was a little defiant, as if he was challenging her to say what they were both thinking.

She remembered the color of the Mediterranean ocean, blue like topaz, blue like his eyes—

“Argue about it after,” she suggested.

“Yes. Are you ready?”

They left the dining car. Nina touched up his adrenaline levels to make carrying Kuwei easier. He held the door for her on the way out. They were professionals, after all.

 

***

 

Nina and Matthias dragged Kuwei into the luggage compartment, and Jesper spared a mite of sympathy for the kid, who sagged peacefully from Matthias’s arms with pieces of what looked like spinach sticking out of his hair.

“We found the shade,” Nina said breathlessly, dropping to her knees in front of the PASIV. “Matthias shot it, which bought us a minute or two.” She pointed at Kaz. “Have you seen it before?”

Kaz narrowed his eyes. “What kind of question is that?”

“Is this the first time it’s appeared in your dreams? And remember, I can hear your heartbeat when you lie.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re lying!” Nina said in horror. “Oh, Saints, you’re actually lying. We’re screwed. You’ve been playing house with your shade—”

“Nina, I warn you, you’re approaching a very thin line at a very high velocity.”

“—and Kuwei got shot because, surprise surprise, it went rogue! Because it’s a shade, and that’s what shades do! What were you thinking?”

“Dangerously close to the line, Nina.”

Jesper didn’t understand what they were talking about, and to an extent, he didn’t care. He had more pressing questions. “Where’s Inej?” he said.

“She disappeared,” Matthias said. “We were searching the steerage. I turned and she was gone.”

“Weren’t you supposed to be watching her back?”

“I looked away for a second. One.”

Kaz plucked an imaginary speck of dust from his suit and flicked it away. “That was your mistake,” he said, and if Jesper didn’t know better he’d say it was just the littlest bit proud.

“Well, who’s going to go find her?” said Jesper. He pointed at Kaz. “Can’t you use your weird nonverbal soulmate-telepathy thing to call her?”

The look Kaz gave him made Jesper glad he was in a dream. At least here, the worst Kaz could do was send him to Limbo. If they were still in the airport, he doubted he’d still have all of his fingers.

“You know,” he said helplessly, gesturing. “That thing you guys do, where you go ‘Inej,’ and all of a sudden she like, apparates into the room?”

“Jesper?”

“Yeah.”

“Shut up,” said Inej, who was sitting on a stack of suitcases near the front of the car.

Jesper jumped. Matthias swore high and loud in Norwegian.

Nina used her teeth to pry off a somnacin cap — a patented technique from the Little Palace, Jesper was sure — and said, garbled, “Glad you’re alive. Help with this, would you?”

Inej leapt down neatly and knelt by the PASIV, helping Nina fill the IVs. “The shade regenerated after you shot it,” she told Matthias. “I was following it.”

“We knew that would happen. Where is it?”

“It was heading towards the back of the train. I saw it go into the caboose. Then I came back.”

“It wasn’t following us?” Matthias frowned.

“No. In fact, it was going in the opposite direction.”

Matthias and Nina looked at each other in identical confusion. It was kind of cute. “What’s it doing in the caboose?” said Nina. “There’s nothing there for it, except—”

“Oh,” Jesper said, feeling queasy.

On cue, an explosion rocked the train. The luggage car shuddered violently on its wheels, suitcases flying from their racks, and Jesper was hurled forward onto his hands and knees. Inej slammed against the wall, uncharacteristically graceless. Nina flung herself onto the PASIV, holding it down.

Kaz drove his cane into the floor and held his ground, gripping the luggage rack. As the car settled in the aftermath, he said, “I’m assuming that was—”

“That was the kick,” Jesper said miserably. “I put C-4 in the last three carriages. It was supposed to detonate once you were done in Level Three.”

“Well, if it was trying to kill us, it missed,” Matthias said.

“It’s not trying to kill us. It’s trying to trap us,” said Kaz darkly. “It knows we won’t dream into Level Three without a kick, so it’s trying to keep us here until Kuwei bleeds out and goes to Limbo.”

“Why?” said Inej.

“It’s a shade,” Jesper said, shrugging. He didn’t know much about dream theory, hadn’t trained like Nina or Matthias and hadn’t worked as much as Nina or Kaz, but he did know that shades wanted one thing only: trouble. “It’s going after Kaz. That’s why it exists.”

“Why not try to kill Kaz, then?” said Nina, staring at Inej as though her remark had sparked an idea. “Why try to trap us here, instead of letting us dream deeper? Why not go after Jesper, since he’s the dreamer? Why Kuwei?”

Another explosion shattered the air. It was closer than the first, and more violent, but they were better prepared. Jesper ducked as a suitcase sailed over his head and burst open against the far wall. Kaz barely moved.

“Jesper, do we have an emergency kick?” said Inej.

“I think we just felt it.”

Kaz stood. He drew himself up to his full height, which though considerable, always surprised Jesper because it was shorter than his own — Kaz seemed so imposing that he must tower over everyone in the room, but Matthias had him by four inches, and Jesper had him by two or three.

“We keep going anyway,” he said. “Down to Level Three. Nina, how long does Kuwei have, on this level?”

She grabbed the boy’s wrist and listened, then grimaced. “Not long. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes, maybe.”

“Fine. We’ve only got half an hour until Wylan’s kick, anyway.” He checked his watch. “Jesper, fend off the shade for as long as you can. Then kick us with the last of the C-4.”

A third explosion rocked the car, the strongest yet. Jesper’s head smacked against the wall. Kaz’s cane slipped, and he listed to one side. Inej dove for him, but he seized the luggage rack and righted himself before she could.

“I think that was the last of the C-4,” Jesper said.

“And you’ve got twenty-nine minutes to figure out what you’re going to do about that.”

Jesper stayed silent. He’d grown adept at telling when Kaz could be argued with: sometimes, if you caught him in the right mood, he would tolerate a little backtalk, and maybe even enjoy it, like a feral cat deigning to be petted. This was not one of those moods. When Kaz was like this, the best strategy was to shut up and do what he asked of you, even if it was impossible.

Luckily, doing the impossible happened to be a Jesper talent.

He turned to Inej. “Good luck,” he said. “Don’t die. Don’t kill each other.” He held out his hand, and she clasped it.

“No mourners,” she murmured.

“No f—”

“Don’t say it,” said Nina irritably. “Oh, don’t say it.”

Jesper rolled his eyes. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he mouthed the rest back to her.

Inej smiled in amusement. She dropped a light peck on Jesper’s cheek and then went to put her IV in.

“Kaz,” said Jesper, turning to him, “I hate you desperately.”

Kaz lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Jesus wept.”

“I mean desperately. I’m naming a hemorrhoid after you. No. Two hemorrhoids.”

The corner of his mouth jerked treacherously. “Jesper, does the fact that I have the kind of life where people tell me what they plan to name their hemorrhoids not suggest I’ve been punished enough?”

“No,” said Inej.

“Why do you plan on having multiple hemorrhoids?” said Nina.

“Why do you plan on naming them?” said Matthias.

The train rocked. The five dreamers hurriedly knelt around the PASIV. Nina hit the diffuser and Kaz said, “Move fast, Jes.”

“Good night, sweet prince,” said Jesper.

Kaz was asleep before he could retort. Jesper sighed in contentment. He won so few altercations with Kaz that he had to savor his victories where he got them.

He rubbed his hands together. The first thing to do was secure the carriage. He grabbed a large trunk and hauled it up against the door to the carriage, then stacked two more suitcases on top of it. He kicked a heavy hard-shell trunk against the room and laid it up against the others. Then he dragged a whole luggage rack in front of the door and tipped it over, sending its contents tumbling into a pile.

When he was done, half the luggage in the room formed a messy barricade over the carriage door. That wouldn’t keep the shade for long, but it would fend off normal projections and give the crew some time.

Next, Jesper hauled open the window. Cold air surged into the compartment, along with a handful of snowflakes and a roar of engine noise. He winced and blinked it out of his eyes, then steeled himself and hopped up onto the windowsill, leaning out of the train.

They were racing along a bridge between cliffs. The piers of the bridge were so tall that he couldn’t even see the ground, only a soup of fog below where they disappeared. Banks of mist rose from the tracks ahead, opaque and churning, making it seem like the rails disappeared.

He was so cold his teeth were chattering, literally chattering — he’d thought that was only a thing in books — and he wished Nina had stayed on Level Two. She could warm him up at a touch, and for once, that was not a euphemism.

A ladder ran up the side of the car onto the roof. Jesper peered down, and two hundred feet of mountain cliff leered back at him. The wind snatched his hat from his head, sending it spinning into the depths below. He made a pained noise.

“What was so wrong with mechanical engineering, anyway?” he muttered, easing onto the ladder. His core muscles screamed at the indignity of being asked to perform so suddenly after a lifetime of leisure. “Okay, so you don’t like math. Big whoop. Doubt your calculus professor would ever ask you to scurry around on top of a bloody train—”   

A gust of wind almost tore his hands from the ladder, and he flattened himself against the side of the car, gasping. When it passed, he remained there for a few moments, clinging to the wall for dear life.

He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the icy metal. He thought of Inej. He missed her already. She could scale this effortlessly. In worse weather than this, even, she could scale it. Blindfolded and with one hand behind her back.

Come on, Jes, she might say. This is all it takes to best you? It’s five feet up onto a flat surface. You even have a ladder to help.

He grunted and hauled himself up. He crawled onto the roof, flopped onto his stomach, and then pushed himself upright.

Two cars away, the shade came striding over the rooftops of the cars to meet him. The wind snapped the gangster’s coat behind him in a dark flickering ink-stain, and the snow blurred his silhouette. Jesper could just make out its eager laugh, the sound lost to the howl of the elements. Then it pointed behind Jesper.

A shadow fell across the cabin roofs. Jesper turned around. A mountain loomed over them, and the train shot towards a narrow tunnel carved through it.

Jesper dove to the ground and flattened himself to the roof. The train sailed through the tunnel, and the felt the cold radiating from the stone tunnel roof seep through his shirtsleeves, mere inches away. He heard his own breath rasping in his ears, his heart thundering.

The train emerged from the tunnel and he shoved himself up on wobbly legs. The shade reappeared and continued his stride towards Jesper.

On instinct, Jesper drew his guns, but faltered before shooting. His bullets wouldn’t kill it, only slow it down. It was Kaz’s shade, not Jesper’s. What do you do when you’re fighting something you can’t negotiate with and can’t kill?

That one was easy. You ran.

But there wasn’t anywhere to go. He was on top of the car holding his crew, and if he ran away, he’d abandon them to the shade. He’d promised to keep them safe. He’d promised.

They bet on me. Kaz gambled the mission on my ability to keep this thing at bay. He trusted me. Like Da did.

The shade emerged from the fog and snow like a phantom forged from smoke.

Jesper squinted and tried to get a clear shot through the fog. On top of a moving train, in violent wind and snow, with poor visibility and terrain that shifted every moment, the shot was impossible. He’d made harder trick shots before. The thing about trick shots, though, was that the shooter almost always had something up his sleeve — a hidden mirror, a rubber bullet, a sleight of hand.

Luckily Jesper Fahey was not entirely out of tricks.

He holstered his guns and reached out with both hands. The metal of the joint connecting his car from the next was old, pitted from the elements, and rusted over from age. His awareness extended into the imperfections in the metal: the grains where the welder cut corners, the weak veins where cracks would form under pressure. He focused until he could feel, like a physical sheet under his fingers, the crystal structure of the molecules and the bonds between them.

Digging his fingers into the invisible fabric, Jesper wrenched it apart.

The joint shattered. Metal pieces flew. The pin fastening both carriages slipped out, and the locomotive pulled ahead, sailing along faster than ever now that it had shed several hundred tons of deadweight. The severed cars slowed, the distance between them steadily growing.

As he realized what Jesper had done, Rollins’s face contorted in fury. He lifted his gun and fired, sending three quick shots across the gap. Jesper stepped back, and the bullets glanced harmlessly off the carriage roof.

The fourth bullet sailed past his shoulder. The fifth would have clocked his head, had he not dropped to one knee. The distance wasn’t growing fast enough to make the shot impossible. If the shade got lucky — or hell, even if it was just good — it could still hit Jesper, and then everyone caught the bullet train to Limbo.

Jesper twisted over his shoulder and felt hope. The locomotive was fast approaching a curve in the tracks. Once they rounded it, he’d be out of Rollins’s reach. He only had to hold on for another minute.

Rollins tore back the muzzle of his gun, and a discarded cartridge tumbled down the cliffs below the tracks. While he reloaded, Jesper stood up. He drew his pistols and spun them. The shade took aim.

This town ain’t big enough for the both of us, he thought, ludicrously. Then he giggled.

They drew.

Jesper’s shot landed square and true, slotted into a berth between collarbones. The shade flickered out of sight.

What remained, however, was the bullet he’d fired a moment before, which was dead set on Jesper.

The world slowed. Jesper closed his eyes. He reached out again and felt the bullet hanging in the space between the carriages, spinning lazily. He focused until it dissolved into metal alloys and bonds between molecules. It was just matter, really. And what was matter if not changeable?

He thought about the bullet’s trajectory, gliding towards his heart. He admired the aerodynamic spin of the bullet, the grooves in its sides where the wind rushed through and hastened its journey. He considered the clean straight line of its trajectory, a course marked from initiation. Then, he suggested an alternative.

The bullet swerved to the right. It struck the mountain and caused a small avalanche of snow, which poured onto the tracks and swiftly buried them. Jesper let his hands fall and breathed in the aching cold air.

All right, Kaz, he thought, as the wind howled. There’s the river. The showdown’s all you.

Chapter 7: all you want is someone onto whom you can cling

Notes:

Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.

Seriously, though, thanks for the wait. I hope it was worth it. As you can tell by the updated chapter count, we've got rails on this bad boy now, and the end is in sight. Buckle up and please keep all arms and legs inside the vehicle.

The jeep tore across a white desert. Nina drove.

Kaz checked his totem. Black was a poor choice for gloves in this heat, but it couldn’t be helped. The others weren’t much better off, either: in the backseat, Inej and Matthias were dressed in dark fatigues, their eyes hidden by mirrored aviators. Kuwei sat between them, wearing a white linen suit and smoking a cigarette.

“Totem check,” Kaz said.

“Done already,” said Inej.

She still wasn’t looking at him. That was fine. The lines around her mouth were hard in the particular way that meant she was electing not to say something on purpose. This, also, was fine.

He did not have time for sentiment. His or hers. 

“Bogeys at eight,” said Matthias. He hefted the enormous AK-47 in his arms and twisted around in his seat.

“Deal with it,” said Kaz, and Matthias squeezed the trigger, and dealt with it. Kaz did like it when the people in his employ were competent at their jobs. It happened so rarely.

In the west, a grey square of concrete broke the horizon line. The compound swelled gradually as they crossed the desert to meet it, its black windows sharpening into clarity, its brutalist lines rising to abrade the pale blue basin of the sky. It was an ugly place, fit for ugly dreams, but the world around it had an austere sort of beauty: a cornflower sky patterned with doilies of lacy clouds; a ghostly pale tongue of earth, lanced here and there with olive spears of cacti; a single hawk, gliding noiselessly in parallel with the flightless twin of its shadow. The barren simplicity of Matthias’s architecture was made elegant by Nina’s dream. It felt right, somehow, in the way that well-constructed dreams always did.

“Signs of the shade?” said Inej.

“None,” said Matthias, though he kept his eye flush to the scope of the AK.

“Nina?”

“Can’t sense him,” she said. Her hands white-knuckled the wheel. “We’re flying blind. Kaz, if you can detect—”

“I can’t.”

She drew a calming breath. “All right,” she said. “Then we do what we planned.”

Kuwei blew a jet of smoke into the air near Matthias’s face, and Matthias gave Kaz a look that longed for violence. Kaz made a small quelling gesture with his hand. Matthias put his head down and kept watching the horizon, because he was a professional. 

Kaz appreciated that about him. He appreciated most things about Matthias. He was, after all, the fruit of a far more professional training than most people in the industry ever had, and it showed in his professionalism. He would be an almost perfect operative — obedient, skilled, discreet — if it weren’t, of course, for Nina.

Then again, if it weren’t for Nina, Kaz would never have gotten his hands on such a prize as Helvar. He supposed he should thank her for that, though Matthias ought to thank her more. She’d taught him just how dangerous it was to leave your heart in play with an industry like theirs. Matthias would never make that mistake again, and for that he should have gone down on his knees to thank her. It wasn’t often a man could call himself invulnerable.

Kaz could. Kaz kept his heart out of play. And true to his word, he would thank the man who taught him that lesson, dearly, before he slid the knife into his throat.

Inej said, “Are we still going with the original plan?”

She had two of her knives drawn, Sankt Whatever and Something; he never could remember the blasted names. Inej with a knife was like a bird in flight, he’d always thought — or a shark in the water; a tautologically perfect state. He had known it since the moment he met her. He had seen the wiry strength of her arms, the dancer’s balance, the graceful and deliberate placement of her feet, and he’d thought: That hand needs a blade in it.

And so he’d pulled her out of hell — out of something worse than hell — and taken her—

Well. Nowhere better, but somewhere different, which for reasons he’d never understood seemed to be good enough for her. A better man would have given her what she deserved, but all he could ever offer her was what she wanted.

“Kaz?”

“No changes,” he said.

She was looking at him now, which was a pleasant change, though her obvious worry was not. Inej could not suffer a problem to live, which was a fantastic quality to have in a partner when attempting a complicated heist and also an annoyance like no other. He wanted her to stop looking at him. He also hoped she wouldn’t. Kaz wanted many things, and at any given time he could only bear to look half of them in the eye.

The Jeep pulled up to the gates of the compound. A guard came out to check their identification, and Nina flashed the lanyard around her neck.

“Doctor Nina Zenik, from the Little Palace,” she said. “I’m here to meet with Doctor Yul-Bayur. I was assigned to escort his son.”

She smiled. Many things could be said of Nina Zenik’s smile: it had been called alluring, breathtaking, paralyzing, heartstopping. And sometimes figuratively, too.

A glaze of beatific pleasure ran over the guard’s face. He waved her through without glancing at her ID. 

He reminded himself, sternly, that it was not magic: limiting serotonin reuptake could convince most people to smile and agree with just about anything, and anyway, they wouldn’t hand out Ph.Ds for something unless it was reasonably scientific. Not that Kaz actually had any experience in higher education to verify that assumption, but he had it on the word of people who ought to know.

They drove through the gates, and the black cars chasing them on the horizon disappeared. They had slipped within the mindscape proper, now, and the projections would be momentarily off their guard. The next minutes were crucial.

Nina parked the Jeep and vaulted out while Matthias ushered Kuwei from the vehicle. “Right this way, Mr. Yul-Bo,” she said brightly. She offered him her arm, and Matthias flanked him with his rifle. She glanced back at Kaz, meaningfully, as if to say: Don’t fuck up. Then she led the boy inside.

A pair of guards slammed the doors behind them. The sheet metal rattled, hard, such a final sound.

Inej slipped into the driver’s seat with an elegant twist of her hips, and he clambered ungainly after her into the passenger’s. She revved the engine and they jetted off around the side of the building.

She didn’t talk, which was good, because he didn’t want to. But by and by Inej’s not-talking lapsed into a sort of directed silence which grated on his nerves even more, because it was equally distracting and yet incapable by nature of doing anything to resolve the problem which she so obviously had.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He turned off the radio, which Nina had tuned to some anachronistic jazz station from the 1940’s. “Say it.”

To her credit, she did not condescend to him with I don’t have anything to say, or worse, demean them both with the likes of I don’t know what you mean. Even at the pinnacle of her anger, Inej did not pay him the insult of pretending not to understand him.

This was not to say she was thrilled, either. “Now?” she said. “Now, really? We’re going to do this right now?”

“I would prefer not to, but it seems to be your preference.” 

“I said nothing.”

“Yes, and you said it very loudly.”

“I apologize for that,” she said coldly, “but you should figure out whether or not you want me to talk or not, because right now, it seems you’re of two minds about it, and I can only do one or the other.”

“Oh, please. You know perfectly well you’re free to talk.”

“So I can do as I please?”

“Of course you can. You’ve always — Inej.” He felt a first wash of prickly irritation. “What is this.”

“I just want to make sure I’m of use,” she said. 

Which was more or less the worst thing that she could have said. He could have drawn up a list of things Inej Ghafa could have said to him, ranked them by intensity and duration of discomfort, and that particular remark would have emerged verbatim without having to skim very far down the list. It lost out, by a razor-thin margin, to Goodbye.

As sensations went, the one happening in Kaz’s stomach was about as pleasant as exfoliating with fibreglass. This exasperated him to no end.

“Don’t be domestic,” he snapped. This was not what he meant to say, or at least he was fairly sure it hadn’t been when he opened his mouth, but it was what came out.

Inej shrugged. She was devastatingly calm. Nothing touched her, least of all the cruel whining of a petulant boy. “You’re the one bringing feelings into it, Kaz.”

“Do you want an apology? Is that it?”

She laughed dryly. “I would never ask you for that.”

“I said, do you want one? Will that get you off this miserable fucking subject?”

Her spine stiffened. “I am not going to beg you for compassion—”

“ Beg me, you haven’t even asked me—”

“—if you can’t muster the forbearance to offer it of your own free will. I have no desire to watch you feign humility for my sake. The idea repulses me.”

“Fine. You don’t want me to apologize, you don’t want me not to. Who’s of two minds, now?”

“I am trying to do a job,” she said, her voice calm and professional and terrible. “You decide what you want to say. I don’t have time to write you a script.”

He should have said, I didn’t mean what I said to you in the operahouse. I never meant it. I would not have said it if I knew what you would hear.

He could have said, also: I was afraid. You had done something very dangerous, and you’d drawn the shade’s attention. Forgive me for my weakness, if you can.

“I was trying to draw out the shade,” he said instead, tonelessly. “Center-stage. It was obvious, and predictable, and far from everyone else. I knew Rollins would come for me at the first opportunity, so I put myself in a location where — there would be negligible risk of casualties.”

Inej mulled this over, her head canted to one side. 

She said, “Rollins. That’s your shade?”

He nodded shortly.

“You knew it would be there, then.”

“There was always a possibility,” he said.

Inej hummed, acknowledging it, but did not reply.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Does that suffice?” he said. “Are you satisfied?”

Inej turned to look at him, and the disgust in her eyes could have flayed skin from bone.

“I don’t see how you think that’s better,” she said, “since you’re already using our lives as collateral against your shade.”

His shade. Everything came back to the damn shade. 

He checked his totems again, not because he really had any doubt that he was dreaming, but because he wanted affirmation of the layer between his fingers and the world. A nervous tic. A weakness, but one he permitted, because it staved off a greater one.

“Pekka Rollins is my concern,” he said.

“He was,” she agreed. “Then he shot Kuwei. Now he’s mine.”

“An oversight. I thought I had him under control. I will not make that mistake again.” He added, “And your life is not collateral. In this or any other gamble.”

“But it is. You bet our lives on being able to control the shade, and you couldn’t.” Her matter-of-factness was far crueler than malice would have been. He would have preferred her angry and spiteful, but that was not how Inej’s anger burned. Where others went hot, she went cold. She was never spiteful, never the least bit unfair, and that was the worst insult — to be deemed not worthy of the effort of her indignation.

“I can. I will. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The next time I see it, I’m going to kill it.”

“Really? How?” She parked the Jeep. They had come around to the back of the building. “And don’t lie.”

“It’s an extension of my mind. I shoot it, and it dies.”

“That’s not how it works.” She slammed the door and waited for him, her foot drilling an impatient drumbeat in the dust. “You can’t just pull a trigger and have it be gone. It is a part of your mind, which means there are deeper things at play.”

“Please, continue to educate me on how my mind works.”

He was being flippant with her, and he loathed it. Nothing about this conversation was right. He should have cut it off at the pass, and murdered this horrible awkwardness in its infancy, before it had the chance to do the same to his dignity.

She seemed equally unimpressed. Drawing the grappling gun from her backpack, she aimed for the roof. “Fine. Deal with the shade however you think best. But you can’t choose how I feel about you putting my life at risk.”

He very nearly grabbed her shoulder. It was a close thing: he took three quick steps into her space, and then the conscious part of his brain wrenched the handbrake, and he jolted to a halt with his hand floating in the unambiguous space by her arm. He did not touch her — he might have been proud of that, if he were more capable of any feeling but unalloyed humiliation — and if she did startle, at least it was not from fear.

She stared at him. 

“Inej,” he began. But of course there was no end to that sentence, so he allowed it to limp quietly off into the silence.

She cocked her head to one side. “Kaz?” she said. There was no more anger, but a bright, inquisitive confusion sparkled in her eyes. Dark brown, festooned with gold. Amber striations. It reminded him of a remarkable kind of whiskey he’d once tasted at a castle in Scotland, a blend so smooth and rich it was burning his chest from the inside before he realized he’d swallowed it.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and it meant: Yes, of course, and Yes, always. Because she was Inej, and he was Kaz, and when he called, she answered; and sometimes it was just as simple as that.

She fired the grappling gun. It latched onto the edge of the roof, and she gave the rope two sharp tugs, to test it. Once it met her satisfaction, he gripped it and began to climb.

They scaled the building slowly. He could actually climb at a rather decent pace, when he had a rope — it was all upper body strength, and his leg couldn’t hinder him as it did on land — but they moved at a snail’s pace to avoid detection by Nina’s mental security, which patrolled the roof and the perimeter. Inej could have been up and inside the building in a fraction of the time, of course, but she insisted on taking up the rear behind him. “I don’t want you scaling a building without a spotter,” she’d said, and when he pitched a fit over it, she’d added: “Or I could carry you up on my back,” which was both entirely within her capabilities and also the kind of suggestion to which he could not reply and keep his honesty and his dignity both. At any rate, it was slow going, and it slowed even further when the wind kicked in.

It was a hard, sadistic desert wind that came racing off the plain just when they were far enough up for the drop to hurt them. The rope swayed uneasily in the breeze. Kaz gripped it with both hands and willed himself not to look down, where three stories of distance yawned between himself and the ground. His stomach flipped. He ignored it. He turned his face to the sky, grit his teeth, and hauled handful over handful of rope until he could count the fence posts along the roof.

They came to a halt over a wide bay window on the uppermost floor. Inej clicked her heel, and a blade sprouted from her boot. Dangling from a single rope, hundreds of feet in the air, Kaz found himself spontaneously and immensely grateful for the practicality of a blade which did not require hands to wield. What had that been, a Christmas present? Two years ago? Three? He’d get her its twin for her next birthday. He’d get her a pair for every occasion, so she could walk around the flat in cozy slippers and still have a pair of blades ready to spring if her hands got tied. She’d like that, he was certain.

She kicked off the window gently, giving herself a little bit of space, and then brought the knife in her boot down hard on the glass. It cracked, and with another swing, she shattered it, leaving a hole large enough for her to swing through. She landed on the floor inside and did a neat roll to work off her momentum, springing up and turning around to help him through. He eased himself in more slowly, white-knuckling the rope, while she stood at the ready with her hands free and legs braced, prepared to catch him or dive to haul him back in.

Neither was necessary. He landed hard on his feet. Glass crunched beneath his boots. He tugged his suit straight with sharp flicks of his wrists, and then he turned to face the room.

It was an old-fashioned dream sharing laboratory. Kaz had never actually been in one before, though he knew well enough about them. He’d read the Morozova Report like everyone else. He supposed Nina must have trained in one like this: white linoleum floors, black-top tables gleaming matte under fluorescent lights, and a chamber in the corner where the stationary ASIV sat. He marveled that he’d never given consideration to how big the old ASIVs were, before the portable ‘briefcase’ model came out. The one in this lab was the size of a small glass closet, housing a vast white throne that fed out hundreds upon hundreds of wires, like a midcentury mod-fashion take on the electric chair.

Exactly like Nina’s actually, in all likelihood, since this was her dream. Inej touched a red jacket that someone had left strewn over a nearby chair, and he cleared his throat. 

She stepped away, suddenly all business. “I’ll go search the hallway,” she suggested, and stepped away. Before she could get far, though, the elevator pinged. Kaz tugged the Beretta from his breast pocket, and a blade sprouted in each of Inej’s hands. He wished he had his cane, but it wasn’t like she’d let anyone get close enough for him to need to run.

The elevator slid open. A man in a white coat stepped out, holding a coffee and a brown paper bag. Middle-aged, Chinese, with salt-and-pepper hair and familiar cheekbones. Like his son, he wore glasses.

“Doctor Yul-Bayur,” said Inej politely, a courtesy somewhat wasted by the fact that she was pointing a knife at him.

The doctor looked up and startled, dropping his coffee. “Jesus,” he said. “What the hell are you two — this is extremely not allowed. Oh, hell,” he said, noticing the broken window behind them. “Is this a robbery? Is that what this is?”

“Not quite,” said Kaz. In swift order, Bo Yul-Bayur visibly assessed Kaz, his gun, and his probability of hitting a target at nearly point-blank range. His inferences from these data were obvious.

He lifted his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “All right,” he said thinly. “Listen, maybe it’s better if I — I don’t really have to know. It’s for the best. Just take what you want, and I’ll get insurance on the phone.”

“We’re not really here to steal,” Inej said, amused.

“Is it a kidnapping? I’ve been kidnapped twice, I’m insured for it. Again, let me hop on the phone. We can have this over and done with by lunch.”

Kaz said, “Doctor, where is Kuwei Yul-Bo?”

This, at last, touched sides. Bo Yul-Bayur straightened and the trappings of exasperation gave way to something like genuine fear. “What do you want with my son?” he demanded.

“Allow me to explain something. When a room holds two men and a gun, the man who answers the questions is very much determined by which end of the gun is pointing at him.” Kaz removed the safety, which in the quiet room gave a very satisfying click. “I’m afraid that man is not me.”

“He’s — he’s not here,” said Bo Yul-Bayur, quickly. “He’s in boarding school. Hundreds of miles away. You can’t reach him.”

So they hadn’t crossed paths yet, then. Which meant Matthias and Nina were running late. 

“Inej, go find the doctor’s son,” he murmured.

An argument was foreshadowed in the set of her jaw. He braced himself for it. The oncoming spat never had the time to materialize, because the elevator chirped again.

Inej moved to put herself between the doors and the men. It was a wasted movement. When the doors opened, it wasn’t security, but Kuwei Yul-Bo.

He strode out of the elevator with an insufferably fluorescent grin. “Hello, Mr. Brekker,” he said. “Ms. Ghafa. I don’t know what you’re doing here, you’re not doctors.”

“Kuwei,” Inej said in surprise. “Where’s Ni— Doctor Zenik?”

“Her? Oh, I’ve no idea,” he said. “I ditched the escort in the lobby; I do so hate heartrenders.”

Inej froze. Kaz’s grip tightened on the Beretta. It was not possible. He couldn’t know Nina was a heartrender. He didn’t even know he was dreaming. Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t know.

“Kuwei?” said Bo Yul-Bayur, confused.

Kuwei’s mouth twisted in an unhappy curve. “Father,” he said. “I’m sorry about this.”

And before either Kaz or Inej could react, he drew a gun from his jacket and shot his father in the head.

 

***

 

Because she was a professional, Nina waited until Kaz and Inej were out of earshot to drop a selection of choice phrases from her mother tongue.

Matthias said, “I know soldiers who would blush at that, Nina.”

“American soldiers are pansies. They don’t normally act like this, you know.”

Matthias said blandly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But of course, she knew he did. He wasn’t stupid, Matthias Helvar, and it took far fewer brain cells than he kept within his admittedly thick skull to deduce that something was awry with Kaz and Inej. She didn’t know why she was surprised, either; for two people whose grips on their respective personal issues oscillated between ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘none,’ the middle of a high-stakes job must have seemed like the perfect time to have it out with each other. She doubted they’d ever had an honest conversation that didn’t involve intoxicant-levels of adrenaline and endorphins. They probably counted shootouts as couples therapy.

Inside the facility the hallways were cool and windowless. Concrete walls boxed in narrow hallways, bending in unintuitive and ribboning patterns as they wound deeper into the center of the building. Naked bulbs dangled from cords in the ceiling, and it smelled of moisture and recycled air.

Kuwei led the way as if he’d been there before, taking corners at cheerful speed. This was the simple genius of Matthias’s maze: it used the mark’s own subconscious as Ariadne’s thread, drawing the extraction team into the heart of their dream. It didn’t matter if the center was empty. Put a dreamer in a maze, and they would fill the center with whatever they thought belonged there. The more complex the maze, the deeper the secret. All Nina and Matthias had to do was follow Kuwei’s lead, and he would hand over the keys to his mind.

Or, in this case, Bo Yul-Bayur.

Inej and Kaz would hold Bo Yul-Bayur hostage, and Nina and Matthias would bring Kuwei up to meet them; and then it would be suggested, in delicate terms, that Kuwei offer up the secret of jurda parem in exchange for his father’s life. This many stages deep in his subconscious, an idea like that held powerful sway. If Kaz were to be believed, and he generally wasn’t, then it would carry over when he woke up. 

It was a simple enough concept to implant, and it wasn’t even a lie. So long as he holds the formula for jurda parem, your father’s life is in danger. 

The rest, Kaz had assured them, Kuwei would take care of himself.

Kuwei took another corner, whistling. She risked a grin at Matthias. The corner of his mouth twitched. He knocked her arm with his elbow, gently chiding. Stop smirking, drüsje. Horrible jinx. He was more superstitious than a midwife, truly. On the ship in Greece, he had made her lower the ship’s sailing flag every evening, even when they were the only vessel around for miles. Bad luck to fly a flag after nightfall. Is the same as raising the flag for the devil.

You think I’m a devil, she’d laughed.

Why you think I am worried? You are plenty. Cannot deal with more than one. Will kill me.

She reached for his heartbeat and felt it. Matthias’s heartbeat ran slow and even, the drumbeat of a funeral march, so steady she could set music to it. How she loved that heartbeat. She loved its rhythm and its fidelity. She loved that it never raced for anyone but her.

When this was all done, she would corner him, and they would talk. She would make sure of it. She would settle her debt to him, in whatever kind of payment he wanted.

Another circuit of hallways, and the elevator came into view. Instead of buttons, it had a panel with an alphanumeric keyboard, crowned with a red blinking light. Kuwei stepped aside and slid his hands in his pockets, waiting.

Nina stepped up and took a guess: she punched in 3B4. It chimed. The light over the elevator doors turned green. The doors slid open.

“You first, sir,” she said, bowing and indicating the cabin.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” announced Kuwei. “Do either of you know where it is?”

Matthias snorted. Nina sighed. The cost of feeding him all those drinks in the airport, she supposed. “I’m sure it can wait, Mr. Yul-Bo.”

“I hesitate to elaborate in the presence of a lady, but it really can’t.” He smiled apologetically. “I’ll be quick! I bet the men’s is just around the corner. Wait for me here.”

“Sir—”

He slid out of her grasp, fingers splayed in a lazy surrender. “Seriously, Doctor. Any longer, and I’m going to embarrass both of us. I’ll hurry back.”

She reached for Matthias’s cuff, but he didn’t need prompting. “I’ll join you, sir,” he said politely, stepping forward.

“Oh, tosh. You don’t really need to do that, and I absolutely cannot go while someone’s watching. It gives me anxiety.”

“My apologies, but I must insist, sir.”

“As must I,” she said, and infused her voice with a syrupy undercurrent of Grisha compulsion. “Matthias is quite discreet. You won’t even notice he’s there.”

“My goodness,” he said, frankly unaffected. “What’s a fellow got to do to relieve himself in peace, around here?”

Damn. The compulsion ought to have worked, but she could push harder, if she needed to. Nina opened her mouth, readying for a full-throated bombardment of the boy’s nerve endings, when footsteps interrupted her from the other side of the hallway.

“Doctor Zenik,” called a familiar smoker’s baritone. 

She heard the shade before she saw him. She reached for her gun, but Matthias was faster. In an instant, she found herself staring at the small of his back.

Kozyol, she thought, furiously. Get out of my sight line, you big stupid man.

“Doctor Zenik?” said Kuwei. “You know this man?”

The shade strolled forward. Nina ducked out of Matthias’s shadow, and he moved to cover her. With a grunt of irritation, she drove her elbow into his abdomen, ignored his grunt of pain, and shouldered out in front of the boys. “Kuwei, get in the elevator,” she said. “Matthias, take him and go.”

Matthias gave her a look that clearly and calmly inquired if she were out of her mind.

“Heroics!” said the shade delightedly. “ Je l’adore. You charm me endlessly, Doctor Zenik — now, don’t you go scowling, Mr. Helvar, don’t you see I’m minding my manners? I’ve not forgotten your parting advice from our last visit.”

Matthias hefted the AK and fired. The shade flickered, phasing in and out of being, and the bullet cracked the cement behind him.

“You did that last time, too,” he said, pouting. “I’m beginning to think you’re not much of a conversationalist.”

“Bloody hell,” said Kuwei, horrified. “You just shot him.”

Nina swore. “I — oh, damn it — Kuwei, trust me, he’s a bad man. Get behind us.”

“Who is he? Why is he here?” Kuwei leveled a quivering finger at the shade, halfway to hysterics and accelerating. “He’s not with you?”

“Kuwei,” the shade said fondly. “Oh, you poor, poor boy. You have no inkling of how badly you’re being used.”

Kuwei said, “I don’t happen to like that tone of voice at all.”

“It’s not pity, my boy. It’s sympathy. You do know you’re dying, don’t you?” He tapped his chest. In tandem, Nina and Kuwei looked at Kuwei’s arm, which hung limp at his side. Flecks of red had bloomed on the linen.

“Yes, he is. Because you shot him,” Nina said sharply.

The shade lifted his hands in an ostensible show of humility. “True. Mea culpa. But only out of benevolence, I swear. Lad, if you had died on Level One, the worst that would have happened to you was waking up with a crick in your neck.” He waved a hand disparagingly at Matthias and Nina. “They signed your warrant when they took you a level deeper. They chose to risk Limbo, not I.”

“Hold on. You shot me?”

“I tried to kick you,” the shade said, with a sickly sweet gentleness. “It didn’t work.”

“I don’t like any of you people,” said Kuwei, “but I like you least, strange man. Doctor Zenik—”

“Elevator, Kuwei. Now.” She leaned hard on the command of it, and the order was so thickly layered with Grisha compulsion that the air seemed to shimmer. Matthias’s grip on the gun slackened, ever so briefly, before he shook himself. 

Kuwei staggered towards the elevator, seemingly out of instinct, but then caught himself on the door.

“Hold on,” he said raggedly. “I — wait. Stop.”

“I said go.”

“No,” he said thickly, squeezing his eyes closed. “I won’t… I’m not…”

The shade cocked his head. “Fascinating,” he said, with genuine intrigue.

“I am not… your puppet… Grisha.”

With a groan, Kuwei hauled himself upright and propped himself against the wall, his face flush and contorted with the effort of resistance. “I am not,” he gasped. “I am my father’s… my father’s son.”

“Nina,” Matthias muttered urgently.

“Kuwei, whatever you’re doing, stop!”

“No,” he said weakly. Then he smiled. “Sorry, Doctor Zenik.”

Then he snatched the pistol from Matthias’s thigh holster and shot her point-blank in the leg.

Everything happened at once: the compulsion snapped, her concentration broken; she dropped to her knees and bit down on a shriek of pain; Kuwei dove into the elevator; the shade disappeared, leaving only the echo of a low, hearty laugh in his wake.

The elevator doors shut. She rocked forward and keened, hands clamped to the growing red puddle on her thigh.

Large, rough hands pried her wrists away. “Nina.”

She shook her hand, biting down on her tongue. Blood beaded on it.

“Nina.”

“Fuck!” She gasped and snapped her jaw shut, but the cry slid through her teeth, an animal whine of: It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

“Nikolina Feodorovna Zenika, min kjære, please. Look at me. Look at me.”

She opened her eyes. Through a fog of pain, she saw blue, pure blue, the blue of the Mediterranean.

“Yes. That is right. Thank you. Count with me — don’t look down. No. Looking is bad. Look at me. Up. Up, up, up. I am tall, Nina, you have to look higher than that. What is it you like to say? ‘My eyes are up here.’”

She let out a short burst of laughter, though it phased into a groan. “It hurts,” she said. “I — oh, fuck. Matthias.”

“Yes. I know. Shoosh. Don’t look at it. Look at me. I am right here, Ninita.”

“I’m going to… you have to go. Matthias. You have to go. Get Kuwei. Warn Kaz and In —ah—”

“Nyet.. I’m not going anywhere.” He let go of her wrists and she clamped her hands down on the wound, or attempted to, before he snatched them again. “No. Your hands, full of germs. Infection. Let me.”

“I’m not going to liv-v-ve long enough to worry about inf-f-f-fection. Got to stop the bleeding.”

“Then stop it. You are not thinking, Nina.”

“I’m trying! You won’t let me!” she spat. She thrashed against his grip — it did nothing, his hands were like stone — and kicked him with her free leg. He absorbed the blows unflinchingly into his abdomen. “Let me go! Perhot’ podzalupnaya! Idi umri v yamu, urodlivyy sukin syn!”

“Since when,” he said, “does a heartrender require her hands?”

She stopped thrashing and snarled, “Since it fucking hurts! I can’t concentrate! I can’t just snap and make it knit together, it’s not magic, I told you and told you and you never listen—”

“Okay. Listen to me. You must calm down. Forget healing. We will count together. Count with me, yes? You remember? I go first. Dyes-yat.”

Her breath rasped in her throat. She closed her eyes and her head lolled back. Dizziness swarmed to take her.

A hand smacked gently against her cheek. Her eyes flew open. “Nina.”

“Nine,” she said tightly.

He clucked his tongue and let go of her wrist, just briefly, to flick her nose. “Pfft. This is not the game, you know it.”

“We haven’t played that game in a long, long time, Matthias.”

“Have you forgotten the rules?” He squeezed her wrists. “Or perhaps the words? After I labored so long to teach you? You would break my heart.”

“Now you’re — ahh — being sweet to me? Now?”

“When better?” he said. “You are always loveliest when you want me dead.”

She glared at him and said, “Ni.”

He nodded. “Vo-syem.”

“Sju,” she said. The corners of the wound prickled and stretched, the skin knitting itself together.

“Sheist.”

“Ha! It’s shest, numbskull,” she said breathily. “Shest, like best. Remember.”

“Shest. Yes.” He patted her shoulder. “You are doing so well.”

“Shut up. Don’t condescend to me.”

“I apologize. You want to count more?”

“No,” she said through gritted teeth, “no, I’ve got it,” and a messy patch of skin sealed itself over. The wound still wasn’t pretty. A ring of bloody sutures encircled the new flesh, flushed and tender. Blood had soaked through her clothes and darkened her pants down to the ankle, leaving rosy stains on her fingers and Matthias’s.

“Good girl,” he said approvingly, and she hated how her cheeks turned warm. “Magnificent work. Master Grisha, queen among drüsje.”

“I know all that,” she slurred. “You don’t have to... tell me.”

“But you like to hear it.”

“Don’t be charming. I’m not in the mood.” She struggled to sit up, and his hands bore down on her shoulders, rooting her to the floor. “It makes me think you — fuck — think I’m going to die.”

“You are not going to die.”

“Then stop acting like you don’t hate me,” she snapped. “Stop worrying over me. I don’t want to — to wring forgiveness out of you with pity.”

Matthias did not answer directly. Instead, he wrapped his arm around her waist and slid the other beneath her knees. “We need to move. I’m going to lift you. On three.”

“You are most certainly not!”

He most certainly was. She was hoisted up gracelessly, in a fireman’s hold, because (as he’d once told her) it was more sustainable than a bridal carry, and between the two of them, no one could have ever accused Matthias of being the romantic.

“Now what,” she said sourly.

He tried calling the elevator, but it didn’t work. “I need to climb,” he decided. “You go on my back.”

“I do what?”

“You cannot climb in your state. You must come with me. So, I will climb the elevator shaft, and you will hang on my back.” He set her down and turned, kneeling, to offer her purchase on his shoulders. “Come on.”

“No! No, Matthias, I am not letting you haul me up three stories in an elevator shaft!”

“I am more than capable,” he assured her. “I am strong. I carried you farther than this, once. Remember? On Milos, in the mountains? You sprained your ankle while hiking, and you made me give you a piggy-back ride all the way down to the boat. Then: a miracle! All better.”

“That was different! And stop — bringing things up from back then, you’re confusing me!”

He had the decency to appear chagrined, but he nevertheless said delicately: “I am simply making a point.”

“It doesn’t matter! It’s a ridiculous idea. You’re insane. You’re madder than I am! No. I quite simply refuse.”

 

***

 

The elevator shaft had a draft.

They hadn’t any harnesses, so Nina had to literally hold on to Matthias for dear life. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and hitched her uninjured leg around his hips like an unusually opinionated backpack. The AK-47 was slung over her back. If it bothered him, he had yet to give any sign of it. He scrambled briskly and happily up the elevator cables like a lemur on steroids, the muscles in his back rippling pleasantly against her chest. (She did not pay attention to that. Nor did she pay attention to the way her knee was hooked snugly around his hipbone, which mattered not at all and did not affect her in the slightest.)

“You bastard,” she muttered, more or less directly into the back of his neck. “You’re not even out of breath.”

“You know, in the special forces, we had a training exercise very similar to this,” he informed her, matter-of-factly. She’d been right; he wasn’t even breathing hard. “Part of physical conditioning. Cadets broke into teams of ten. They strapped some chains to a log, and each cadet had one chain strapped to their back. Then, all ten had to climb a rock wall together. First team to get their log to the top won.”

“Did your teammates even bother pulling? Did they just sit on the log, let you pull them up?”

“We won every time,” he agreed cheerfully, hauling them up by another handhold.

“You disgust me.”

“You are lying,” he said, with truly unbearable confidence. “You may hate me, but I have never disgusted you.”

A wry remark dissolved on her tongue. “I never hated you,” she said, struck with surprise.

He snorted.

“I didn’t.” She paused, and in the silence, the rumble of the air conditioning was earsplitting. “I never… Matthias, at the risk of bringing up a very touchy subject at a moment when you have me in a very dangerous position, I never wanted you in harm’s way.”

He paused, hands coming to rest on the elevator cables. His shoulders rose up and down, and she felt, rather than heard, his sigh.

“We do not have the time,” he said tiredly. 

“I know. But it’s important. I want you to understand.”

“Nina.” His fingers curled and uncurled on the cable. “You said you did not want me to forgive you because I thought you were going to die.”

“I didn’t. I don’t.”

“And that is fine. Can you imagine that I might not want your apology for the same reasons?”

“But I always wanted to apologize to you,” she said helplessly. “Even as I was doing it, I wanted to apologize. I never meant to leave you. I was going to come back and get you — I didn’t think they’d trade you to the Americans, I thought I’d get to barter you back—”

“You should have told me . Better still, you should have asked.”

“I know! I know, and I’m sorry! But you have to understand—”

“You have a problem, Nina.”

She bristled. “Oh? Do tell,” she said archly.

“You think you are the best at all you do,” said Matthias, not unkindly, “and you are so often right, that you — forget, I think, how severe a thing it is to gamble with another person’s life.”

Nina fell silent. She put her head on his shoulder, hiding her face, though he could not have seen it anyway.

“I am sorry,” he said, after a moment. “That was out of line.”

“No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t.”

He waited for her to say more, but she did not. 

“I will not speak of it again,” he said stiffly, and they climbed another story in silence.

 

***

 

Nina Zenik was twenty-one when she met Matthias Helvar. She hadn’t been very happy to see him.

She’d been fresh out of practical training at the Little Palace, starting work on her doctorate. Zoya had sent her on a research trip to the United States. Someone with an underground dream lab in Houston had claimed to produce a strain of somnacin that could stabilize multi-level dreaming, and because she was young and untested and barely tried in the field, she hadn’t realized it was a sting until the SWAT team came through the window.

She’d incapacitated seven members of the special operatives single-handedly, and she maintained for years afterward that Matthias only caught her because he got lucky.

He locked her in three pairs of handcuffs and put them both on a train to Dallas. She broke four of his fingers, a collarbone, and a thumb. He swore at her in Norwegian and English; she swore back in Russian and French. He would not touch her except to chain her to the radiator while he slept. She wanted him as soon as she laid eyes on him.

You have a strong accent, for an American.

I am not American.

Where are you from?

Oslo.

I love Oslo! It’s pretty. Why’d you leave?

To hunt drüsje. Like you.

Norway didn’t have a dream-sharing branch of the military. Years later, it still didn’t. Then, as now, America was one of the few countries that had investigated its military applications. Which Nina always found ironic, considering it had started as an army operation. Most people forgot that the Little Palace was originally a military base.

You don’t know anything about dream-sharing.

I know enough. I know you are a witch and a liar. I know you have committed grave violations of law and human goodness.

You know nothing more than what they’ve told you. 

That’s enough.

Dream with me, then, if you’re certain. I’ll show you what I do, and you decide if I deserve to die for it.

It took two weeks of travel for her to convince him to share a PASIV. Another month of dreaming together before he kissed her. 

A month after that, he came to her cell in the middle of the night and told her if she loved him, she’d take his hand and run. So she did.

They fled the country. She couldn’t take an American operative home to Russia, defector or not, so they’d run to Greece instead, where they sailed from island to island on a boat she bought with her last check from the Little Palace. She stopped replying to Zoya’s communiques. He cut ties with the army. To her superior, she was reported missing in action; he was confirmed dead.

She never knew exactly how long they spent on that boat in the Mediterranean. Between the time distortion from the dream-sharing and the way their sun-drenched days blurred into each other, it could have been weeks, or months, before the Russians found her.

It had been assumed, not without reason, that he’d kidnapped her. It had been assumed, not without evidence, that she’d been his captive. And it was assumed, by Zoya in particular, that the bruises on her thighs and her throat after months at sea were evidence of crimes far beyond the scope of the law.

To this day, she remained convinced that if she hadn’t said something, Zoya would have killed him. She would have killed him without hesitation nor authority nor permission, and she would have stood trial for his murder with her head held high. Nina had to say something. 

So she’d told them the truth, or a version of it they could believe: that he was a traitor, but she wasn’t. That she’d seduced him, not fallen victim to him. That he’d given up state secrets, information about the American dream-sharing program, special confidences whispered between the sheets. That he’d likely tell her still more, if they kept him alive. And of course, there was a spoonful of truth in every lie, to help it settle, but she’d never thought that Matthias would believe her, too.

Anyway, it hadn’t mattered. The Russian government traded him back to the Americans for three prisoners of war, and Matthias Helvar vanished off the face of the earth.

And Nina — well, Nina lived on. There was nothing else to do.

She went back to the Little Palace and completed her doctorate. Zoya attended her dissertation defense and her graduation. Genya handed her the diploma. There were parties; she drank champagne. She went to work in the field as an extractor, and then left it, once she realized that all her dreams had started to look like Greece. That didn’t stop her from working. She traveled. She wrote papers. She steered clear of the States. She gave a wide berth to the Mediterranean. She outright refused to set foot on boats. She took other lovers, had other flings, boys and girls and a healthy selection of neither from every sparkling corner of the world, big and small and uniformly lovely, and not one blond among them.

 

***

 

At the top of the elevator shaft, they found the elevator itself, still stationed at the top floor. Matthias used the butt of his gun to hammer open a panel on the bottom of the elevator, and it dropped out, letting him scramble up into the cabin.

She slid off his back and slumped to the floor, breathing hard, as if she’d been the one to scale three stories.

“I dreamed of you, you know,” she said. “All I ever dreamed about was you.”

“Nina,” he said unhappily.

“I mean it. All my dreamscapes turned into islands. My projections were blond and blue-eyed and had horrible thick accents.”

“Nina, you should not say this.”

“I went to Greenland for a work trip and all I could think about was how much you’d love it. The landscapes, the fjords, the cold beauty of it all. It would have made you so happy. And. And there was this sushi bar in Kyoto, and then there was this tea shop in Marrakesh, and — and everywhere I went, whenever anything good happened, I wanted you there. Even if you didn’t like it, I wanted to know, I wanted to hear what you thought about it. I wanted to watch you see it for the first time. That was my favorite part of traveling with you. It always was. If we’d been to a hundred countries together, you would still have been my favorite part of every one.”

“Stop. I beg you.”

Reluctantly, she did. 

“I thought that might mean something to you,” she said quietly.

He knelt and took her hands in his. She grasped them, and he pulled her to her feet.

“It means a great deal,” he said solemnly. “I will never forget it. Thank you.”

Then, without another word, he pulled open the doors and stepped out of the elevator.

 

***

 

Inej was so preoccupied with Kuwei that she barely noticed Matthias and Nina coming into the room.

The cooling body of Bo Yul-Bayur laid on the floor. She muffled a yelp of shock. Kuwei, grimacing, re-holstered the gun and stepped over it. “I would have preferred not to do things that way,” he admitted. “Nevertheless, I find that when dealing with projections, the old methods are the best.”

“Explain yourself,” Kaz snarled.

“Oh, please, stop waving that thing around as if you’re going to shoot me,” said Kuwei, a bit snippish. “We both know perfectly well you’re not going to send me to Limbo.”

Inej stepped forward with outstretched hands, though at a glare from Kaz, she hesitated. “Kuwei — tell us what exactly you think you know.”

“What I know? About dreams? Do you have a few years to spare ?” Kuwei gave a high, humorless laugh. “My father was the most brilliant dream scientist in the world. He did things with somnacin that other chemists lacked the courage to imagine. He invented jurda parem! And you think he never told his son what he did?”

“You knew the whole time?” Matthias demanded.

“Since the opera. I didn’t get around to checking my totem for a while. And then I wanted to figure out what you were after, so I didn’t raise a fuss. But I didn’t realize until this level that you had a shade in here with you.” He added, somewhat nastily: “And honestly, what kind of professional extraction team don’t vet for shades? That’s a juvenile mistake.”

“Was,” said Kaz softly.

Inej turned. He was still pointing the gun at Kuwei, somewhat needlessly, she thought. He repeated, “You said your father was the most brilliant dream scientist in the world.”

“Oh,” said Kuwei. “Yes. He’s dead, you see.”

Silence fell. He treated them all to a smile like broken glass. “In the real world, I mean. Not in the dream. Three days ago. Dead as dirt.”

He spread his arms, giggling. “Surprise! You caught me on a flight to his funeral.”

Nina gave a sharp, bleak laugh.

“That’s not possible,” Inej said. “We would have heard.”

“Three days ago,” Nina murmured. “It’s recent.”

“No. He was famous. Infamous. If he’d died, we would have known.”

Kuwei spat. “Famous. Yes, my father was famous. You think the government would have advertised it? As if they were proud? My father was assassinated. Someone killed him in his bed. While he slept, if you can possibly swallow that sort of irony. They still haven’t caught the man who did it. And you come in here, you, you vultures — you, Doctor Zenik, his colleague—” Nina flinched— “and try to steal his work from me? Well, I don’t have it.” He brushed off his hands, clearing away the metaphorical vestiges of responsibility. “So you’ve wasted your time, and possibly doomed us to Limbo, if that shade is to be believed.”

“I do have a name, you know,” said a voice from the window, and Inej spun.

Pekka Rollins leaned on his cane, framed by the shattered hole in the glass. He smiled at her. “Hello, dear,” he said.

Kaz snarled. There weren’t words to it, exactly, just a sort of guttural noise of anger. It chilled her.

Rollins said, “Put that gun down, boy, you’re not intimidating anyone.”

Stubbornly, Kaz didn’t. He moved the gun away from Kuwei and pointed it at Rollins.

“Fine, then.” Rollins drew his own weapon, a long-barreled pistol in shining black. “There. Now we’ve all got our cards on the table.” He gestured sarcastically at Kuwei. “Would you like to be part of this, too?”

Hurriedly, Kuwei pointed his gun at the shade. Rollins chuckled, and turned back to Kaz.

Nina — who, Inej noticed, was carrying an absurdly large gun on her back — unholstered it and aimed it at Rollins, too. “Try it,” she said coldly. “I’ll drop you to Limbo so fast you won’t know what happened.”

“An admirable threat,” said Rollins, without glancing away from Kaz. “Unfortunately, you’ll have problems with the follow-through, as you very well know. I stay while he says, as it were.” He shrugged. “Of course, if you really wanted to get rid of me, you could give Mr. Brekker a quick double-tap with that rifle of yours, and we would both be on our merry way.”

Inej stiffened.

Kaz wet his lips. “Nina,” he began.

“I’m not going to shoot you, don’t be ridiculous,” she said brusquely. “Just — deal with the shade.”

But he couldn’t, Inej realized. Something was stopping him from firing on it. It was almost unnoticeable, but she could see a slight tremor in his right hand.

She shifted one of her knives into a backhand grip and subtly changed stance. “Kaz,” she murmured. 

“What.” He turned his head towards her without looking away from Rollins. Something was drawing them inexorably into each other’s orbit, like hateful binary stars.

“Kaz,” she repeated.

“What, Inej.”

She couldn’t kill his shade for him. But a shade could be dealt with temporarily, and doing so would buy them some time. Enough to get Kuwei somewhere safe, and to plan their next move, and for Kaz to make whatever peace he needed in order to kill it. Or long enough for them to wait out the kick, and ride it all the way back to the surface. They didn’t need a permanent solution. All they needed was time.

Inej wasn’t the dreamer. She wasn’t the architect. She wasn’t the heartrender. She was security, and this was her job. The Wraith could do what others couldn’t. It made her what she was.

The first knife caught Rollins in the shoulder. It drove him back a few paces, stumbling, his face naked and raw with shock. She had no time to savor it, for she was already running, fast as the wind on the balls of her feet, with the other outstretched.

He swung the gun around. She’d known he would. Her second knife lashed across his throat, carving what would have been a fatal wound. Not for a shade, though. No blood came out. The skin of his throat merely tore open, yawning over a black gash like a hole in a puppet’s costume.

Rollins grunted in discomfort, as if she’d landed a good punch. She feinted left and slid right, aiming for another cut along his artery.

Someone shouted — everyone was shouting, it was distracting — and then there was the first gunshot, sighing past her ear. She didn’t know whose it was.

She buried her third knife in his abdomen, and it stuck there. He stumbled back even further. His heels crunched the broken glass beneath the window. She spring-released another blade and launched into a ruthless press, ducking and weaving to avoid putting herself at the odd end of his gun.

“Inej! INEJ!”

More than one person was calling her name. Their voices chased her as she chased him, pressed back to the window, to the precipice of the fall.

“Inej,” murmured Rollins, curiously. She carved a canyon in the flesh of his chest for the presumption of using her name.

He smiled down at it, then at her. He gripped the hilt in his abdomen and pulled. Sankta Alina came free. 

He considered it, and then tossed it over his shoulder.

Her totem spun into the blue oblivion, flashed, and disappeared. 

“My dearest lady Inej,” said Rollins, with a solemnity that came close to reverence. “For you, I have only sorrow and apologies. You were worthy of more than this.”

He touched her cheek gently. Then, wrapping his hand around the back of her neck, he hauled her flush against his body. Bile surged in her throat at the feeling. Not for years had she been subject to so much unwelcome contact, anywhere, everywhere, a straitjacket of pressure and heat. She could have screamed.

She didn’t get the chance, however. The bullet ripped through her stomach and drove the air from her mouth in a short gasp.

Then he tipped back, and they fell together through the broken window.

Chapter 8: your mother warned of strangers and the dangers they may bring

Once, on a mission in Angola, Matthias’s commanding officer had triggered a landmine.

It took out three soldiers, the lieutenant, and the CO herself, who died before she could make a sound: a column of smoke erupted around her, marbled by a white seizure of lightning, and then Matthias was lying on the ground with a whine in his ears while the world slowly settling back onto its axis. Of his CO there was not left enough to bury, which was good luck, because the other boys caught in the mine had plenty left over: left over here, left over there, and left over the front of Matthias’s uniform, which he had burned later, being incapable of ever cleaning it so thoroughly it would not make him retch.

In the yawning gash of the broken window, he remembered the terrible quiet of the world afterward. There was no peace in that quiet, no serenity. It was the silence of a scratched record spinning fruitlessly after its music finished. It was the smoke plume after the flash of light, twining gently towards the sky, a peaceful finger of charcoal raised in accusation against God.

Out of respect for Inej Ghafa — for her competence, for her calm under fire, and for her sincere abnegation in the face of danger — he took not one but two moments of silence, and then he acted.

First: the mark. He caught Kuwei by the back of his collar and lifted him off the floor. Predictably, the boy tried to wrestle his way out of the hold. At least, that was what Matthias assumed he was doing. It was not actually clear. His thrashing bore no resemblance to any tactical or martial maneuver Matthias had ever seen and indeed could have been mistaken in a different context for an overly enthusiastic folk dance. 

He plucked the gun from the boy’s hand and tossed him to the floor. His gun went back in his thigh holster, where it belonged. Taken care of.

Second: Nina. Her wound had reopened. He nudged her towards a stool, and she went numbly. She was a rictus of horror. She was a woeful mask of dread. A series of broken noises kept tearing from her mouth, like hiccups. She sat down when he bid her. Her obedience was deeply unsettling and he wished she would swear at him or attempt to knee him in the groin, which would have been physically unpleasant but deeply reassuring.

He contemplated taking his AK-47 back, but she clung to it with an almost maternal desperation and he decided she could use the comfort more than he. There had been enough times in Matthias’s life when his emotional forbearance had benefited greatly from possession of an extremely large gun.

“Leg,” he reminded her, tapping the knee. When she did not respond he gave up on the matter and instead stripped some fabric from his sleeve, wound it twice around her thigh, and bound it. The pressure helped. He lifted her leg onto another stool and told her to keep it there. Taken care of. Close enough, anyway.

Third. Kaz.

He made a circuit of the room so that Kaz would see him in his periphery as he approached. He did not want to take any chances startling the man, especially since from his grip he appeared to be attempting to fuse the gun into his hand. Shell-shock and firearms made terrible bedfellows. They had bloody children.

“Demjin?”

He joined Kaz at the window with a shuffle of glass underfoot. Three stories below, a red orchid bloomed in the concrete. He stared at it as though he could read his end written in the remains, and perhaps he could. Matthias knew well what strange clarities could be found in grief.

“Kaz Brekker,” he said anyway, because there was still something unbearable about watching a man so private allow himself to nakedly mourn. It was like seeing someone mutilate themselves, and he did not believe that Kaz would have wanted it, had he been capable of understanding anything at the moment except his own loss. “You must act.”

Kaz did not utter one sound. A corpse was more vivacious.

“She made a sacrifice for us. You will waste it with inaction.”

“The shade is coming back,” said Nina. With visible effort, she reigned herself in. He was proud of her. “We have to… Kuwei.”

Kuwei finally got his feet under him and levered himself up through ample use of a table. Matthias silently pointed at him. He sat back down.

Kaz blinked at Matthias. If he understood one word Matthias had said, he gave no sign of it. “Helvar,” he said, and the word itself was not even certain, as if he could not recall for sure whether that was Matthias’s name.

“Yes,” he said. “Orders, Kaz. Orders.”

He blinked again, and his eyes drifted across the room, to Kuwei, to Nina. The urgency had leached out of him and left behind only an uncanny and drunken lethargy, like a man struggling for footing on a sinking ship. “Orders,” he said vaguely.

“We must do something. Do you have a plan?”

“A plan,” he repeated.

“Kaz, listen. Inej is in Limbo. Every second we wait could cost her days.” Matthias drew close enough to impress upon him the gulf in their heights. “You must act.”

“What,” said Kaz thickly, as though his tongue loathed to shape the words, “do you suggest?”

Matthias was not an idea man. He would be the first to admit this. He was big and strong and good at shooting things, and he had the good fortune of encountering very few problems in his life that could not be solved through one or more of those qualities, and that had never bothered him before. He knew people who fought with their minds and their wits, like Kaz, like Nina. They were more powerful, to be sure, but rarely were they happier.

A smarter man than Matthias could have probably told him a better way; but Kaz had not asked a smarter man than Matthias, and so he could only offer what he had.

He tapped the pistol at his thigh. “I will go after her,” he said bravely. “In Limbo. An extraction.”

“No,” said Nina immediately.

He said, “It is necessary.”

“Are you simple? Are you fucking dense? You are not going into Limbo, it’s bad enough with one team member.”

He said, “Inej requires an extraction. Else, her mind is lost. There is no other way.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“Nina, you are the dreamer.”

“Then we all go!” She swelled with the rancor of a beestung cat, and he welcomed the reemergence of her anger, even as it landed on his shoulders. “We can all go save Inej, together! We’ve got a better chance together, anyway!”

He chided her gently: “With so many, someone will get lost.”

“Nina is right,” said Kaz. “Not you, Helvar.”

For the first time since Inej fell, he sounded clear and present. He turned around and put his back to the window.

“Nina,” he said calmly, “make sure neither of them die. When the time comes for the kick, stop everyone’s hearts. That is an order, not a suggestion.”

An unspoken communication passed between them, of the sort that Matthias was, perhaps, not the right kind of person to understand: it was the shared understanding of two people who, when confronted with an objective, would always take the shortest path, regardless of cost.

“Okay,” said Nina. “Be… well. I was going to say be careful, or be smart, but. Well.” She lifted her chin. “Just be successful, Kaz,” she said, and there, too, passed a second flash of mutual understanding. He nodded back at her.

It was the one and only order Dirtyhands ever took. 

Without hesitation, Kaz Brekker pressed the barrel of his gun to his throat and shot himself in the head.

The shot rocked his body back on its heels, over the window’s edge. Then it tipped, and he followed his Wraith into oblivion.

 

***

 

When they had calmed Kuwei down — an effort which took twice as long as usual, because he still appeared resistant to Grisha powers — Nina sat with him on lab stools and sent Matthias to fetch them coffee.

They labored under a silence heavier than normal silences. She made them sit away from the broken window, placing the grotesquerie beneath it well out of sight. He was shivering, but he refused her offer of a jacket, so she quietly and unobtrusively ticked his body temperature up a few notches when he wasn’t paying attention. It was a small enough thing that if he noticed, he didn’t bother to resist her.

“I’m sorry about your father,” she said, by and by, when the silence thinned enough for her to speak without feeling like she’d broken something.

Kuwei shrugged.

“I really am. He was my colleague, you know. Whatever you think of me, I always liked him, and I thought he was brilliant. Knew was brilliant, really. I was very sorry to hear he had died.”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” said Kuwei, “but I think you have really done enough to me today without making me discuss my dead father.”

“And you shot me. Let’s say we can both talk about whatever we want.”

He blanched and gave her a look that was not apologetic, but an apology suffering under strains of stubbornness. “I am sorry about that,” he said, doubtfully.

She put her hand on his arm. He regarded this development as he would a mosquito landing on his sleeve, one that he couldn’t be arsed to swat. “You could have waited, you know,” she said. “Let me explain things.”

“I don’t like Grisha tricks.”

“And I don’t like being shot in the leg, Kuwei.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You didn’t mean it.”

“No,” he admitted blandly. “But I wouldn’t have hurt you if I thought I could avoid it. I’m not, like, a total freak. I don’t enjoy putting people in pain, and you seem like a decent person, for a dream-thief.”

“I’m not a dream-thief.”

His eyebrow launched a vigorous assault on his hairline.

“I’m a chemist of the Little Palace,” she said, less certain than she’d like to be and far less than she’d like to sound. “This is just a favor I’m doing for a friend.”

“For Mr. Brekker?”

“No,” she said, firmly, but not with any sort of offense. “Not for him.”

Matthias appeared with the coffee, a distraction as welcome as it was brief, and he retreated to the other side of the room to sweep broken glass. She did not for one moment think it was accidental that he had left her to talk to Kuwei in private. Sometimes she thought she was one of the few people in the world who understood how smart Matthias was, how clever, how quick. Perhaps ten people in the world had ever been able to keep up with Nina Zenik, and Matthias was three of them.

“You two,” said Kuwei, his finger seesawing between them. “How long?”

She parked her coffee cup halfway to her lips and returned it to the table. “Oh. No.”

“No?” he said.

“Not in a long time.”

Smart though he was, a performer he was not, and Matthias was utterly failing to pretend he couldn’t hear them. He was enjoying it far too much.

“Really,” said Kuwei, intrigued.

She aimed her finger at his nose, as if to ward it firmly out of her business. “Oh. Oh, honey, no. Keep dreaming. We are not getting into that, you and me, not for love nor money.”

He grinned with the eminently smack-able expression of the chronically smug. “So it’s quite juicy, I take it.”

“No! Don’t take it! Stop taking things! Stop looking at me. In fact, stop perceiving me at all. I don’t like how you’re doing it.”

“That is absurd, Doctor Zenik, and you know it.”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable request. When you find your manners, you can earn back the right to behold me.”

Matthias, who had already been poorly hiding his glee, gave a suspicious wheeze.

“Frog in your throat, Matthias?” she asked primly.

“Not frog. Dust,” he said. “Lots of it. My apologies for interrupting.”

“Apology emphatically rejected!”

“Naturally. My mistake.”

She sipped her coffee. Matthias swept up the worst of the glass shards and dumped them in the trash, then started on the dust with a vacuum cleaner. This was not only exasperating, but utterly typical. It was so like him to fuss about the cleanliness of a dream, and by fuss, she meant ‘pursue vigorously.’ In his hands a vacuum cleaner became a weapon. He served to each mote of dirt and glass an end of desolate and single-minded violence. Upon that floor he wrought a veritable genocide of dust. 

“It is a safety hazard,” he called, sensing her watching.

“It’s a dream, is what it is, darling.”

“You cannot cut yourself in a dream? No? Cannot injure yourself? Amazing! This is news to me.”

“I’m a heartrender. I’ll heal the cuts.”

“This is true. Or,” said Matthias, totally without rancor, “I can make use of the good hands and feet which God gave me, and simply sweep the fucking floor.”

She broke into a surprised laugh. She didn’t know that she liked him sarcastic, but she did find it attractive, which by all accounts was absolutely dismal news. 

“You’re a silly, silly man, you know.”

“You are a silly woman. I will accept this.”

The laboratory fell quiet except for the rasp of Matthias’s broom. The waiting was the worst part. She envied Wylan the brutal lockstep of Level One, where hours slipped past in a blink, and he had only minutes to wait until they were all awake and gasping for breath in the airport. Or they weren’t, and the knowledge would still be only somewhat worse than this.

Speaking of. She hadn’t given the actual mission a real thought since the shade appeared downstairs, and perhaps she was more like Kaz than she’d like to say, because her thoughts kept twisting back around to it like water running downhill.

“So,” she said to Kuwei, toying with the sleeve on her coffee. “Where will you go when we wake up?”

“Hm? Oh, I don’t know.” He tossed his hand over his shoulder, as if hurling away a physical totem of his responsibility. “Back to school, I suppose.”

“And then? Once you’re finished?”

“Not sure. Might travel.” He shrugged. “Go stateside. Meet a few nice boys. See the Grand Canyon.”

“Sounds nice.” She swirled creamer into her coffee in four perfect rotations with her wooden stirrer, tapped it twice, and set it aside. It tasted like shit with two dashes of cream. Matthias, dreaming or not, could not on pain of death make coffee that failed to taste like engine coolant.

Seconds passed.

“All right, what,” he demanded.

“What? What nothing.”

“What’s your problem?”

“It’s not—” She did a quarter-turn on the stool, her hands folded politely in her lap. “Kuwei. Your father was one of the best chemists in the world.”

“The best,” he said staunchly, and she plowed on, ignoring him:

“One of the best. He invented jurda parem. And then he died, which leaves you as the sole heir to his legacy, not to mention his intellectual property, and I don’t say this to put anything on your shoulders, I really don’t, but you should know that there people out there who have an interest in keeping you off the market.”

“Like you,” he said nastily. She cleared her throat and kept a firm hold on her irritation.

“Yes. I won’t lie. I do want you off the market, though not for the reasons you think. I don’t care one way or another about the jurda parem, or the money, even, but I want you to think carefully about your options.”

“What options?” he said, replete with adolescent bitterness. “Go on the run? Take my father’s old job? I have done a little brainstorming on the matter myself, you know. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.”

 She tore the coffee sleeve, slowly and carefully, along one of its creases. “Well. I don’t want you to think I’m biased, although that’s a sort of selfish desire, because I totally am. I am biased. But I also think I’m right, so. I guess what I’m saying is: you can take my advice with a grain of salt, but it’s a dish best served without.”

“Doctor Zenik? Respectfully? I have zero idea what you’re talking about.”

“Come to the Little Palace,” she suggested. “We have a pretty good chemistry program, if you’re interested. Or if you just want protection, we can offer that, too. Your father’s name… it carries a lot of heft, there. He made a lot of friends when he studied there.”

“Oh, brilliant. I move out of the country and take up with the Russians. That will solve all of my problems, Doctor Zenik, thank you.”

“One, hurtful,” she said. “ I’m Russian. Two, you have a lot of attitude for a man with not a lot of options.”

Kuwei drew himself upright and presented as intimidating a glower as he could manage, though he was shorter than her, so it did not sum to much. “My father is dead,” he said. “I would like a full week before someone asks me what I intend to do with the rest of my life.”

Nina put down the coffee sleeve and slid off the stool. “Fair enough,” she said, and deciding that perhaps he could benefit from some time alone with his thoughts, she limped over to Matthias.

He was cleaning his gun. This was not in the way of a metaphor, though she filed it meticulously away for later use in an inappropriate situation. He had the AK dissembled in pieces at his feet, and he scrubbed away at the dislodged barrel in his hand as though the paint job had wronged him personally.

“Hello,” she said. Sitting down was a game of strategy and tactics, with the constraint of one not-terribly-cooperative leg and the win condition of not falling flat on her face. After a ginger descent to her knees, she dropped with no particular grace onto her ass. “You’re quiet.”

Matthias said, “I am always quiet,” and he was. She knew few men who spoke less, and not coincidentally, few men whom she liked more.

“Yes, but this is different kind of quiet. You’re normally ‘no-thoughts-only-mission’ quiet. This is ‘many-thoughts, grrr’ quiet.”

“Would you like me to talk?”

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said, instead of humiliating herself with a yes or something like that.

Matthias tipped his chin. “That leg. It is healing all right?”

“Oh, it’s fine. Just stiff.”

“You should change the bandages,” he said. “I found a First Aid kit on the first floor. Wounds need cleaning.”

“Eh. It’ll be gone after the kick.” She patted her thigh and smiled. The smile said, See? Don’t worry about it. The muscles of her knee said, What the fuck!

“You are in pain.”

“I’ve had cramps worse than this.”

“I have seen you on your period. That means absolutely nothing.”

She wriggled closer on the linoleum, a sneaky little shuffle of her hips that he pretended not to see coming from a mile away. “You have. You always took such good care of me.”

“Nina.”

“Gosh, I was so awful, too. I made you walk all the way up to that town on Kefalonia to get me Advil and chocolate.”

“Point of order.”

“Mm.”

“Not any chocolate. Reese’s peanut butter cups. This was crucial.”

“Oh, yes. Well, I had a craving.”

“You know how I remember?” He flipped the barrel in his hands and ran the washcloth down the other side. “I came back with normal chocolate, and I told you, my love, I am sorry, they do not carry Reese’s here, because we are in a small town in the middle of Greece. And what did you say?”

“Oh, please. We don’t need to relitigate this.”

“I am merely asking if you remember. I forget the particulars, you see. Do you remember ever telling your patient lover to go fuck a shark?”

“I was barely lucid! I was about to pass out! I thought I might have appendicitis! I was basically drunk. I did not tell you to go fuck a shark.”

“You know that someone heard you from up in the town. They came down with a search party. It was thought that I was doing violence to you. Your screams should have alerted Mars of your indisposition.” He was grinning, a little bit pleased, a little bit proud.

“It’s unbecoming to hold things over me once I’ve apologized for them,” she said primly, because it was that or kiss him, and she had to keep the situation under control somehow.

The smile slipped seamlessly off his face when she inched closer, and it vanished entirely when her hand walked its way down his arm and wriggled, insistent, into his palm. He latched their fingers together anyway, but he frowned at the enclose of her tiny fingers in his.

“Nina, what are we doing?” he said.

She loathed him for ‘Nina’ and she loathed him for the question. “Sitting,” she said promptly. “Talking. Holding hands.”

Instead of pointing out the obvious pedantry here, he nodded solemnly. “It’s a good dream,” he decided.

“Oh, don’t be like that.”

“Nina, be reasonable.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t like being reasonable with you. It’s never ‘Nina, be reasonable, let’s go to Disneyland’ or ‘Nina, be reasonable, let’s have another glass.’ Whenever you ask to be reasonable, it means something is about to suck. It’s one of the things I like least about you.”

“That and my ability to scale elevator shafts?”

“No,” she sighed, “that’s hot, unfortunately.”

He smiled.

“Oh, don’t you go smirking about it. Lots of people are ridiculously cut, you’re not special.”

“But you like me better than lots of people.”

“Not at the moment!” Admittedly, she severely damaged her own point by continuing to clutch his hand as if it might save her from drowning. “Why won’t you talk about what happens when we wake up?”

“What would you have me do?”

Nina considered her cards, disliked them, and decided there was nothing for it but to go for broke.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to take Kuwei back to the Little Palace. You could come along.”

He thought about it. At length, he said, “That is something of an improvement on the first time you tried to show me your home country, I admit.”

She laughed and tipped her head against the hard swell of his shoulder. He was not a very good pillow, but she made such sacrifices.

“The Little Palace is no place for an otkazat’ska,” he said gently. “I am not of that world.”

“So? You’d be with me.”

“And that would not be enough.”

“That’s what you think. I’m Grisha enough for both of us.”

He said, with a heartbreaking and unshakeable conviction, “I know you are.”

“But?”

“But I cannot go there. It is not my place, and it is not my people.”

“Not even for me?”

He shook his head at her, sad and fond and stubborn and handsome. “It is not a fair thing you ask of me.”

“Fair,” she choked. “Well — you never loved me because I was fair, anyway.”

This being true, he nodded. He patted her hand. “Cheer up.”

“I don’t suppose — I mean, I could leave. The Little Palace. I could abdicate.” She flexed her fingers in his, as if testing the strength of her grip. “They would let me go, if I explained things. I could retire. I have money. You wouldn’t have to work. We could just travel together, not beholden to anybody.”

“You made that offer once before.”

“Yes. I meant it then, too.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. He turned to nose absently at her hair. “I often dream of what might have happened if I said yes.”

“And what happens?”

“Oh, it varies,” he said. “Sometimes I forgive myself.” Then he dropped a feather-light kiss on the top of her head, and withdrew his hand. “But usually not.”

 

***

 

It had been a few weeks of walking by the time Kaz came upon the castle.

‘Weeks’ was as near an estimate as he could get, anyway, and he suspected ‘near’ in this case meant almost nothing. Time in Limbo was an oxymoron. He had been on the same beach since he entered, and he could walk that beach forever, until either his mind unwound under the relentless drill of monotony, or he found something.

The problem with infinity was that it lacked referents. When people said Limbo was endless, Kaz’s mind had pictured an acceptably vast sprawl of untapped dream space. He imagined cities the size of empires and empires the size of galaxies. He imagined waterfalls whose gravity reversed halfway down and spilled their silver hair into the sky, seas of champagne and islands of sugar crystal, palaces of marble and gold whose hallways spread over whole continents, and elevators that ran to the moon. Greedy men never lacked imagination, and Kaz was a very greedy man.

The fondest hopes of Kaz’s greedy heart still fell short, however, not through any fault of his own reasoning, but because Kaz’s mind had never had to deal with an infinite amount of anything before. 

It was both overwhelming and underwhelming at once: the landscape of Limbo was dishearteningly bare. There were no vast cityscapes, endless urban sprawls of depths cavernous and secrets profane, nor swelling vistas blanching to mist on untouchable horizons. It was not the seat of kings. 

It was a beach, with grey sand and black surf, and it did not end. It was that simple. It was that horrifying.

He rubbed two fingers together, a totem-check as unnecessary as it was grounding. He knew he was dreaming. It was the gloves he needed, now.

At first, it took a moment to recognize the palace, in its mournful decrepitude. It appeared to have weathered the blows of an angry giant: whole walls crumbled away, spilling cascades of rock and brick down the palisades, where islands of rubble and concrete littered the surf; windows bared fangs of broken glass and hid under fringes of ivy; the domed onion ceiling had been caved in, and listed in sad, deflated fashion to one side like a punctured golden lung. Where some segments of the wall had fallen away, some of the palace’s chambers had been laid naked to the exterior, like a row of gilded honeycombs.

Kaz picked his way up the rocks to the entrance. Where once a marble staircase had cut a clear path to the top, now age had sanded it smooth, and he tripped more than once on a sea-slick patch. Being a poor candidate for feats of athleticism on his best days and being nowhere near his best now, he asserted his dignity in these moments with a simple and heartfelt “Fuck,” which failed to move either the impassive ocean or the treacherous rock.

He found it repulsively significant that Limbo was an ocean. Infinite possibility, infinite space, infinite time, and it had to be a fucking ocean. Worse, it was an endless ocean. Cold and wet and fathomless and forever. If he could bottle his own luck, he’d sell it as a weapon of mass destruction.

The doors to the palace had been knocked ajar. One dangled drunkenly from its hinge, rocking in the breeze. It was split down to its midriff by a wide crack in the wood. The other had simply laid down and given up, a position which Kaz sorely envied. 

Over the doors, an old, stained brass plaque read: T  TE  E E  ’S M NAG   R

Kaz tugged his gloves straight — the cold had seeped through them, but he rode out the shudder, unswayed — and stepped over the fallen door.

Inside the palace reigned the gentle silence of the sepulchre. The wash of the sea fell to a muted whisper against the walls. Kaz kicked aside heaps of shattered blue and gold tile, their color leeched to a pastel palimpsest, and the sound scattered in a thousand directions like a fleeing colony of rats. 

He circled the crystalline snowdrift of the fallen chandelier, and mounted the remaining half of a double-staircase. His fingers kicked up flurries of dust wherever they brushed the banister. Torn silk streamers dangled, forlorn, from the marble arches where girls once twisted and spun like birds of paradise. He caught one in his hand as he passed under it, and the fabric dissolved at a touch, melting like sugar on the tongue.

Searching a palace of this size ought to have taken days. But this was Limbo, and Kaz was a dreamer. He picked a door at random and opened it. 

It ushered him down a narrow hallway, at the end of which laid a single room with a locked door. He tried the handle, which in the face of all his strength did not disdain to twitch at him. He slipped a hairpin out of his pocket and tried picking it, also to no avail; through a powerful conspiracy of rust and mold, the pins of the lock had welded closed.

Kaz, whose capacity for patience had been fully obliterated at the sight of Inej Ghafa’s dead body, had none left for this. He choked up on the cane and brought it down hard enough to crack the wood.

The lock shuddered. The door bucked. Splinters flew from his cane, an assault of wooden shrapnel which by some stroke of grace did not land in his eye. He brought it down again, not so much because it appeared to be making any progress as because it suddenly felt very good to hit something. And again. And again, again, again, the wood splintering further with each crack, crack, crack, an angry boy’s tantrum, hammering away as if he could knock down the door, the palace, the building; as if he could ever do enough violence to the world that he felt at home in it. 

Crack! Crack! Crack! He counted the hits, methodically, and for every one he had a wish: he wanted to be somewhere else, far away from the ocean. He wanted to watch Pekka Rollins beg for mercy, and deny it. He wanted to wake up to thirty million dollars and no need to see the inside of someone else’s head, ever again. He wanted to erase the image of a small motionless thing that was not, no matter how much it looked like it, the actual dead body of his Wraith—

He wanted Inej. Inej, his soldier, his lieutenant, dancer and warrior and queen of every kingdom worth having. Inej in armor and Inej in silk. Inej happy, Inej angry, Inej, laughing at him and taking down her hair; Inej, driving fast and demanding apologies; Inej, any way she wanted to be, any way she wanted him, just as long as she wanted him.

He wanted his girl, he wanted her now, and he was sick and tired of her being gone. It could not be endured. It was not to be borne.

The cane snapped. He stumbled, following through the swing unexpectedly, and fell forward into the door. 

He slapped his palms out to catch himself, and then tossed the broken half aside with a muttered curse.

“Inej?” he said. The sound of his own voice surprised him. The word wrestled up his throat, through weeks’ worth of phlegm, and limped hoarsely into the silence. “Inej.” 

After an appropriate pause, he added a redundant, nigh-idiotic, “It’s me.” Which was met, understandably enough, with silence.

With a distinct thought of, Here goes fuckall, he double-tapped the wood with his knuckles, rapping softly.

The bolt shrieked. With a squeal of indignity from the hinges, the door swung open.

It was a small stone cell. The ceiling forced Kaz to stoop; its floorspace was monopolized by a camper’s cot. Over the cot lay a greying piece of film which might once have been a blanket, or possibly an enterprising strain of lichen. A window no larger than a handbreadth strained a single beam of cold light into the cell, and tucked into an alcove under the window sat an old woman.

Her braid was grey; her face long and weathered; her limbs light and bony where muscle had atrophied and left behind a loose coat of skin over a birdlike jumble of bones. She didn’t stir at the sound of the door. Her head rested against the stone wall as though she lacked the strength to lift it.

“Inej,” he said.

Her head tipped back and forth like a pendulum. She hummed to herself.

“Inej.” The echo of his voice on the stone let him hear, and regret, its harshness. More calmly, he tried, “Look at me.”

“Many,” said the old woman, in a voice like something half dead and half dying. It crawled up from her chest with the wet rattle of a failing lung.

“Many?” he said impatiently. “Many what?”

“Many and many…”

“Your name is Inej Ghafa. Do you remember that?”

“Many and many and many,” she mumbled, oblivious. “Many and many and many and many…”

“You work for a man named Kaz Brekker,” he said, resisting the very present urge to simply grab and shake her. “Dirtyhands. He called you the Wraith. You were — friends.”

“...and many and many and many...”

“Stop saying that. I’m here. Look at me.” His fingers uselessly worked the air at his sides. “I shot myself in the head, you know, Wraith.”

She nodded without hearing. Her babbling susurrated in the cell.

“Then I fell out of a window. To find this place. And that was the easy part. I took the long way around Xeno’s Paradox, do you understand, you impossible woman? I scaled a cliff. I broke my cane. I watched you die, and then I crossed half of eternity to get here, and the least you could do is look at me.”

“Many and many and many and many—”

He did not, despite the temptation, shout at her. That would be unproductive. It would also, from experience, make him feel like shit, which had already been accomplished by everything else about the fucking situation.

“All right. Enough. Where’s your totem?” He stepped closer, ignored the way she flinched, which — she was out of her mind, it didn’t matter. Couldn’t. He put the feeling in a box and put the box in the incinerator. “I know you still have it. You wouldn’t throw it away, not on your life. Remember?”

He tapped the spring-release holster on her arm, and a knife slid into her hand. Her palm twitched to catch the blade and her fingers swallowed the grip, the muscle recalling in an instant what the brain had long forgot. 

She sat bolt upright, and he nearly whacked his head on the ceiling.

“It was many and many a year ago,” she whispered, “in a kingdom by the sea.”

Then: “Kaz?”

Kaz could have done several things, then. He could have hit something very hard with his fists. He could have dropped to his knees and reacquainted himself with the Saints. He could have levied any number of scathing words at her, for having the unpardonably bad taste to die before he did.

“Fuck,” he said.

He stumbled into the alcove. Inej — young, twenty-something, dark hair and muscle and warm, sharp, clear eyes — hastily sheathed her knife and scrambled to make room for him, tucking her legs neatly under body. “Kaz, what the hell are you doing here?” she said, much less happily than he would have liked, considering. “This is—”

“Limbo. Correct.”

“What happened? Did you die? Where are Nina and Matthias?”

“They’re fine,” he said, irritably. “They’re still on Level Three.”

“Did the shade kill you?” 

He didn’t answer that.

“No. Kaz.”

“I don’t know what you thought was going to happen.”

“That was wildly irresponsible!”

“‘Thank you’ is fairly easy to say, you know.”

“You haven’t helped,” she snapped. “Now we’re both in Limbo, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid! Saints, that was stupid of you!”

“Inej.” 

“Don’t ‘Inej’ me.”

She was very angry. He ought to take it seriously, and he did, but it was impossible to speak seriously through relief. 

He said, “You should change your totem.”

It knocked her wholly off-course, which was both a tactical maneuver on his behalf and also very funny to watch. “What?”

“Your totem. It’s one of your knives, isn’t it? I noticed a while ago. It’s dangerous for us to dream together, if I know what it is.”

“It’s dangerous for us to dream together, full stop,” she said automatically.

“Yes. Well.” He batted that statement, and its acres of baggage, out of the air. “If we’re going to play that game, it’s dangerous for us to dream with anybody. Exhibit A.”

The exhaustion must have been addling his mind, because he twitched back his sleeve and — suppressing a queasy peal of nausea — slipped off one of his gloves. Part of him thought that it might altogether refuse to go, but the rich leather sank from his fingers like water. He flexed his hand. Tendons pulsed. The skin was pale and wan from years of inexposure — it was a wasting, skeletal creature — but still his, and still whole.

“Here,” he said. “That’s mine.”

“Your totem?”

He dropped the glove in her hand. Naturally, she caught it. 

Her mouth made goggled shapes in the air. She cradled it like someone attempting to hold a baby chick while surrounded by hungry foxes.

After a moment, she slipped it on. The leather hung like a gardener’s mitt around her slender digits. She waggled her fingers. If he were a different man, he would have laughed.

“I cut vents in the fingertips,” he said. “Fingerprint locks. Touchscreens. Et cetera. In dreams, I don’t need them, so they’re gone.” He shook out his newly naked and clammy palm.

“You can’t dream with me now,” she said, frowning.

“Not in your dreams, perhaps, but we rarely dream in your head to begin with. This is a security measure. I thought of it while I was walking; in case I get trapped in Limbo, and forget my totem, you can remind me.”

She didn’t object to the assumption that she would follow him into Limbo. In fact, she nodded, seeming to take it as her due.

“I guess I’d better keep my totem the same, then,” she said.

He shook his head. “No. Don’t be daft.”

“No? Why not?” She said, “If you need to extract me from Limbo, it’s useful—”

“Stop right there. I never intend to be in this position again. You’re not going to allow it, and neither am I.”

She said, “In point of fact, I didn’t actually try to get myself killed, you know.”

“Next time, try harder,” he snapped. “I don’t care how dire things look up there, I’m not doing this again.”

He intended for it to sound more assertive than it did. Kaz never begged, on principle, and he certainly did not now; but he could see where someone listening to their conversation might have assumed otherwise.

“All right,” she said, after a moment.

The sea laved affectionately at the cliffside. 

The palace groaned, resettling in its foundations.

“How do we get out of here?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, I don’t know?”

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Yes, but there’s still a theory to it.”

“I imagine so.”

“Will a normal kick work?”

“Possibly,” he said. “It’s disputed. Not many people have ever been down here, and obviously, without knowing precisely how to kick, nobody wants to try. And it’s hard enough to get a stable multi-level dream going. Last year, the Lancet—”

“Right, sure,” she agreed, demonstrating a brutal disregard for the venerated process of peer review. “Practically, though. We just...?” Her finger traced the swell of her jugular. He found it equal parts charming and macabre.

“Eventually, yes,” he said.

Inej cocked her head to one side, birdlike, expectant. Patient Inej. Thoughtful Inej. He hated what he was about to say.

“There’s something I need to do first,” he said.

Her gaze was scalding in its kindness. “All right,” she said. “Where are we going?”

Where would you follow? He thought, somewhat deliriously. Perhaps he’d been wrong about not needing to rest, in Limbo; the weeks were clearly catching up to him. If I kept walking on that beach, how far would you go? We could build empires in this place. We could reign here for years. How long would you stay?

Standing took everything his muscles had left, which was not much, considering how little they’d started with. She hovered at his elbow, clearly unconvinced of his limbs’ structural integrity, until he stopped swaying.

He held out his hand to her, the gloved one. He didn’t reach. He let it sit there in the space between them, the black curve of his palm open like a question mark. 

It took her a moment to understand, but once she did, she didn’t hesitate. (Brave Inej. Lionheart Inej.) She laid her gloved hand carefully in his, slotted her palm over his own. Her thumb slid accidentally along the knuckle of his index, and it sent a roll of heat up his wrist.

Through two layers of fabric, he laced their fingers. It was almost too much, almost — and still, not nearly enough — but it was good.

She smiled at him, and several stars exploded in the sky overhead, or possibly he just cleared his throat.

He led her out of the cell.

Notes:

...And another chapter! Ahead of schedule, this time, as an apology for the hiatus.

Next one is a beastie. Then, the finale.

Chapter 9: your dreams and memories are blurring into one

“Do you know the story of Orpheus?”

Kaz made a noise of ambivalent disinterest. Inej pressed onward anyway. “Orpheus loved a girl named Eurydice,” she said idly, ignoring how the muscles of Kaz’s hand went tense. She tightened her grip. “And Eurydice loved him, too. They married and were very happy, until one day Eurydice was bitten by a rattlesnake while playing in a meadow of flowers, and she died.”

“That was the shittiest story I’ve ever heard,” said Kaz.

She laughed. “Listen! I’m not finished. Orpheus missed Eurydice terribly, so he went to visit Hades, lord of the underworld. He sang a song so beautiful that Persephone, Hades’s wife, took pity on him and begged her husband to let Eurydice return. Hades gave in, and said he would allow Eurydice to follow Orpheus back to the surface, but only if Orpheus didn’t turn around to look at her until they were in the land of the living.”

Kaz nodded. “In exchange for what?”

Inej broke off, confused. “What?”

“What did Hades get? In return for Eurydice.”

“Nothing. Orpheus was poor, he didn’t have anything except his song.”

“Why did Eurydice marry him, then?”

“Perhaps she liked music. Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?”

Kaz huffed and grumbled, but he gestured for her to continue.

“Orpheus led Eurydice out of the underworld and made it all the way to the very top. But just as he emerged into daylight, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he turned around. And Eurydice, who was still in the land of the dead, disappeared.”

Kaz was quiet for a moment.

“Is that the end?” he said, at length.

“Yes.”

“Right. That is the shittiest story I’ve ever heard.”

“What!” she said indignantly. “Why?”

“What kind of an ending is that? What kind of absurd — this wretched beggar has just walked through hell, serenaded a god, retrieved his wife’s soul, and made it ninety-nine percent of the way home, only to hit one setback and give up? That’s it, life goes on? Plenty of fish in the sea?”

“What else is he supposed to do?”

“Go back,” Kaz said incredulously. “Do it again. Get better terms, this time, or better still, don’t look.”

“What if Hades said no?”

“Come armed.”

She giggled. “You’d suggest Orpheus launch an invasion? Raze the underworld? Slay Hades and Persephone? Lay waste to the fields of Elysium?”

“He’d want to keep Persephone as a hostage, ideally.”

“Kaz!”

“Yes? What?”

“You’re absurd.”

“You said he loved her,” Kaz said, as if it were obvious.

Inej suddenly found she couldn’t look at him. Her face burned hot enough to scald water. She adjusted her grip on his hand and laced their fingers together, hoping her palms weren’t too sweaty. Her stomach kept flipping like it was her first time on the balance beam, dizzy with an amateur’s fear of falling. 

His hand dwarfed hers, and her fingers spread wide to slot between his knuckles. He held her hand in a firm grip, not painful, but tight enough that she would have to pull if she wanted to be free of it. It was not a tactical position: they had both lost use of one hand — his dominant arm, her off-hand knife. Still, she held on, anyway. She could still kill his enemies with one arm.

“We’re coming up on it,” he said, after a moment. What they were coming up on, exactly, remained unclear; the beach yielded to a studded tongue of a pier, ribbed with rotting slats. His face was as yielding as stone and told her nothing of what she was to expect.

“I see,” she said.

As they came upon the docks, a soft weeping broke the silence. It was wet and throaty, childish in its utter lack of restraint, and it grated on her ears. 

At the sound of it, Kaz’s grip slackened, as if he meant to let go. She wound her fingers around his knuckles and held steadfast.

“It sounds like someone’s crying,” she said. Kaz hummed in reply. It wasn’t quite the dull tone of Yes, obviously, which she had expected. It was Yes, I know.

“I didn’t think there was anyone else in Limbo,” she ventured, watching him carefully. No dice: no reaction, not that she’d really expected one. He shook his head.

“There’s not.”

“Who’s crying, then?”

“Nobody,” he said.

She looked at him. He kept his chin up and his eyes forward, as if the world depended on it, as if the horizon might snap in two if he failed to supervise its performance with an unloving and critical eye. 

She was no stranger to the urge to touch him — she had restrained herself, before, from such petty indulgences as a passing touch to the elbow, the comfort of a hand on his shoulder, or a friendly jostling in a crowded bar — but she was still quietly surprised at the power of her desire. Now that he had touched her hand, even through gloves, it was like some box in her ribcage had unlatched and spilled want over her insides. It wasn’t a sexual want, though admittedly she had known that too, privately, from time to time (he was a handsome man, and she was only a human being; she did not waste time feeling shame for things which happened in the confines of her own head). She merely wanted to take his head between her hands, and cradle it against her chest, and then go hunt down everything that had ever made him unhappy.

She found the box of wanting in her chest and imagined a heavy lid sliding closed over it. She held on to Kaz’s hand and told herself to be thankful for this much.

The weeping increased in volume as they approached the end of the pier. A dark shape swam out of the mist, watercolor congealing on wet paper, until it took the form of a kneeling person, a boy, bent double over a lump on the dock. At twenty paces, she discerned that the lump was also a person. At ten, she discerned who the boy was.

“Kaz.”

“Nobody,” he repeated.

Their footsteps broke the boy from his reverie. He pulled his head up — he’d buried it in the other boy’s chest — and eyes like shards of jet peered up from the ugly red moue of his tear-drenched face.

“Help,” he said.

Inej was moving before she could check herself, and she only realized it when she felt the tug of Kaz’s hand holding her back. The boy didn’t seem to see her, though; his stare settled at some point in the middle distance behind her, bleary and bloodshot, naked with pain. It was a face so young in its vulnerability that she could hardly identify it as Kaz, though the similarity in features was unmistakable. Dark hair, dark eyes, the aquiline nose, the glasscutter jaw. Already an encroachment of scowl-lines settling in around his mouth, deepening the lines that only men of fifty and sixty should have worn on their faces.

“Don’t touch him,” said Kaz.

She said, “It’s Limbo. He’s suffering. We can help—”

“No,” he said, with a tone of quiet resolution. “You can’t touch him.”

“Why?” she said. “Why not? I can help him.”

“You can’t,” he said, “and even if you could, you’d only hurt him by trying. Let him go, Wraith.”

“No,” she said. “Tell me why we can’t help him. It’s your memory — it’s our dream — it’s our world , it’s Limbo, I can save him if I want to.”

He looked at her. She repressed the urge to shudder at the intensity of that look, which cut through her as swiftly as a merciful death and filleted her heart in its infinite sorrow. He had no right to look so wretchedly grateful, so helplessly in thrall to her; it was not right for a man like him, not correct, not necessary. Inej thought kings should never have to bow. That was the point of a king.

Kaz looked away. She released a subtle breath of relief as the heat leached somewhat from her face.

“You did,” he said, very quietly.

And because she could not bear to dwell on that for more than one raw second, she squeezed his hand and tipped her head against his shoulder, without asking, but somehow confident that he would not push her away: and he didn’t, though he didn’t touch her either.

“He’s behind us,” said Kaz dully.

Inej turned around and flinched. Pekka Rollins stood on the dock, watching in perfect and polite silence as the boy wept. 

The sea spray sewed jewels of mist into his beard, and a thin layer of steam lay across his spectacles. He was unarmed, as if that meant anything. When he caught her looking, he nodded at her in greeting.

Her knife sprung into her off-hand.

“There’s no point,” said Kaz. “You know it won’t do anything, if it’s you.”

“I can do some things,” she said.

“Not enough.”

She thought: What is enough? His safety was enough; his peace of mind, that was enough; to keep the shade from looking at him for one second longer with those horrible empty eyes, yes, that too, was enough.

But what Kaz needed was not a guard dog. She could have stood between him and all the dangers of the world, and it would not have made a difference. And she understood, then, why they hadn’t left Limbo yet.

“You need to kill him,” she told him. “For the team. For the job. Or he’ll keep trying to destroy you.”

Kaz nodded jerkily. Pekka Rollins tilted his head at them and smiled, knowingly, in eerie silence.

She said, “You know you have to. Kill him, and we can go home.”

Kaz shook his head.

“It’s simple. Kaz, shoot him and we’re safe. And we can go back to the dream, and wake up together, and we’ll be with Jesper and Nina and Matthias—”

“He won’t,” said the shade. His voice was sugary, cloying, venom swaddled in downy layers of condescension.

She ignored him. “Do it now,” she told Kaz. “Do it for the others. Do it for me. Do it for you. ”

“You’re not listening,” said the shade. 

“He’s the reason we’re here. He killed me.”

“Lass, I’m trying to help you understand.”

“It’s one bullet, and we go home,” she said. “Just one. It’s simple. You can do it with your eyes closed, I’ll hold it steady for you. But Pekka Rollins has to die.”

“Perhaps he does, indeed,” said the shade mildly. “But be advised that Pekka Rollins is alive and well and very far away from here, and sleeps well knowing nothing of you or I.”

She pointed her knife at him. “Quiet.”

“I’m in earnest. Do you think he’d struggle like this before killing Pekka Rollins? The same Rollins who hurt him and humiliated him, and sent you to wither of age in Limbo? Do you think he’d hesitate for a full fraction of a second before putting him down? He knows that’s not who I am.”

“Just because I can’t kill you doesn’t mean I can’t cut out your liar’s tongue.”

“My name is not Pekka Rollins,” said the shade. He scrubbed a hand across the length of his chin, and the hairs of his beard shrank inward like retractable claws, receding into the smooth skin of his jaw. A spill of dark color wept out from the roots of his hair, turning red to black, like dye leaking from a pouch.

She tightened her grip on Kaz’s hand until her own fingers turned numb. “Kaz, who cares what he is? Rollins is a shade. He lies. It’s what he does. Shoot him, and we can go home.”

“We never introduced ourselves,” said the shade. He rolled his thumbs into his eyes, and when they came away, his irises were black instead of green. “Not properly. I know you, of course, because I know him — better than you, I’d add, though you won’t believe it. Do you know I have resented you for years? Years, Miss Ghafa. No other creature has ever robbed me of so much of his attention. Of course, I understand it now, having met you… truth be told, I feel little shame in being neglected for a prize so rare. You are quite the jewel; I’ve no idea how he’s kept you, and I doubt he does either. If nothing else, I hope this little detour of ours sends you off in pursuit of less bloody traveling companions.”

“You killed me,” she said. “Will you forgive me if I don’t accept your well wishes?”

“ Killed , feh. I delayed your revival. Let’s none of us pretend our dear boy is anything but predictable; he would never let you be free of him without throwing a proper tantrum first. Not when he’s kept me prisoner in his head for the past ten years.”

“Kaz, do it now,” she said, pleading. She might as well have knelt and begged the sea. Kaz was stone and steel, silent, unmoving. She could have wrung more comfort from a corpse.

The shade smoothed his hands over his scalp, and the last of his red hair shrank into a shag of black waves. He smiled, and the lines of his face faded from a fifty-something’s crags to a twenty-something’s becoming smile; his features were a badly drawn mimicry of something all too familiar, a counterfeit bill with the wrong watermark, a poorly rendered cover of her favorite song.

“My name is Jordie Rietveld,” said the shade. “I believe you know my brother.”

 

***

 

The setting sun jabbed long fingers of light into the dim laboratory. Matthias sat cross-legged in a puddle of shadow and watched the desert landscape descend into dusk.

All was quiet in the building. Nina had gone to set up a perimeter against projections. Every hour, a toll like the chime of a great bell reverberated through the walls, reminding them that the kick was coming. Neither Kaz nor Inej had reappeared. That was fine. He did not need them to come. (He did want them to. He did not need them to.) He would wait out the kick, and he would wake with Nina. He would feel great sorrow if his compatriots did not return. At least for Inej, if for no other reason than that hers was a less dignified death than she deserved. But so long as Nina woke, he could walk away and live with himself.

He would walk away. He had made this promise to himself.

The chemist’s boy had found a spool of copper wire in one of the laboratory cabinets, and he kept fussing with it. It was distracting. Over and around his fingers the wire went, tangling into a lattice of blood red lines, patternless, functionless. It was a waste of material. It was frivolous. Even in a dream, Matthias disapproved.

“I can hear you brooding over there,” Kuwei remarked.

Matthias declined to answer him. Hopefully the boy would conclude that he was partly deaf and cease attempts at communication.

“It’s loud. Nina was right, you think at eighty decibels.”

“Correction. My thoughts are silent,” said Matthias. “Perhaps someday you will employ this technique yourself.”

“Oh! She said you were sassy, too. I didn’t believe her.”

“Your mistake,” he said, unable to help himself, and then scowled and again silenced himself. He focused on meditative thoughts. Cool air. Warm sand. Still waters. Red hair—

“Are you really from the American special forces?” said Kuwei, hauling himself upright and sauntering over. “You don’t sound like it.”

“Americans come in many kinds. It is unmannered to judge one’s way of speaking.”

“It’s unmannered to invade somebody’s fucking brain,” said Kuwei cheerfully. “If you think I’m done playing this card, you’re dead wrong, mate. And I noticed you didn’t deny it, either. America? No. You’ve got a touch of immigrant about you, I can tell. Anyway, you’re too buttoned-up. Too straight-edge. Nina, she could be American. Maybe. But you, you’re from what, Scandinavia?”

“Not every story is yours for the taking, liten gutt. ”

“Oh, Norway,” said Kuwei, surprising Matthias. “Or Sweden? I get those confused. The Nordic languages bleed together awfully. You talked to Nina a little in Russian, so that was actually my first guess, but every time she mentions the Little Palace you look like someone shot your dog.”

Matthias glowered. Kuwei rolled his eyes. “All right, sit and mope,” he huffed, and trudged away. Matthias watched him go. He felt the familiar and alarming twinge of pity that meant he was about to do something he would later regret.

Reluctantly, he called: “Norway.”

Kuwei stopped. “I got it right,” he said, visibly pleased. “Oslo?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a beautiful city.”

“Yes.”

“Do you spend much time there?”

“No.”

“Why not? Itchy feet?”

“I cannot go back,” he said. “I am exiled. Prisoner, technically.”

“Oh,” said Kuwei, with less surprise than he might have, had Matthias been in another line of work. Luckily, the ‘criminal’ part of his job description here saved him a great deal of expository effort, which marked the first time it had ever served a convenient purpose in his life. “So you live stateside now, I take it?”

“The United States put me in prison,” said Matthias.

“Ah,” said Kuwei, understanding. “Wankers.”

Matthias grunted and resumed his meditations.

“So, to be clear,” said the boy, “your home country exiled you, and your adoptive one is currently attempting to imprison you, and so you now live...”

“Nowhere. I have no country.”

“Cheers, me either,” said Kuwei, altogether too blithely for Matthias’s pleasure. “Tough go, isn’t it? Living between places. Your situation’s worse than mine, obviously, but I’m just commiserating. I mean, I’ve got a Chinese passport, but that hardly helps me, I spent five years of my life there and I barely remember any of them. Plus, they killed my father, so I’m cultivating a very complicated relationship with the motherland at the moment.”

“Kuwei.”

“Yes.”

“You do not really care about where I am from.”

“Well, I don’t not care,” he said, shifty.

“Why ask?”

Kuwei shrugged. “I don’t know, really,” he said. “It seemed like we had… analogous positions. And you have everything figured out. And I don’t. So I thought I might as well ask you what to do.”

Matthias imagined, indulgently, how Nina would laugh if she heard someone had accused Matthias of having ‘everything figured out.’ She would throw her head back and shake out her long rust-colored hair, and give a high throaty cackle, and he would want to kiss her, which really meant nothing, because he always wanted to kiss her.

“You want to know what to do,” he repeated.

“Sure. Or at least, I’d like advice I can trust.”

“You are exceptionally unwise. What makes you think you can trust me?”

“Because you don’t give a shit about me,” said Kuwei frankly. “I trust that. Nina, she’s… something, but she really is still a creature of the Little Palace, isn’t she? She can’t help it.”

Matthias would have liked to defend her — the truth of his statement mattered rather less than the offensive audacity the child had in making it — but he could not muster the irritation at the moment, so instead he offered a merely subdued, “Yes.”

“Not that I blame her for it. I mean, you’re still obviously in love with your homeland, and I wouldn’t trust you for a moment to be neutral on the subject. And that other bloke with the cane, Brekker, I don’t know what he’s hauling around in his baggage, but I know something’s got him on a real solid leash, else he wouldn’t have offed himself over that stabby one with the knives. We’re all someone’s creature, you know.”

“And you?” said Matthias, intrigued. “Whose creature are you?”

Kuwei wrapped his hands around his ankles and rocked, slightly, back and forth. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “My father’s, I suppose.”

“Truly?”

“Maybe. I mean, I think everyone else thinks I am.”

“That does not make you what you are.” Matthias hesitated. “You are wasting your own cleverness with this dithering, you know.”

“Thanks for the pep talk. Doesn’t really help me.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Matthias said, irritated. He folded his arms. “Why do you think words can help you? What will they do? Move the air around your ears, make the problem go away? You cannot think your problems away. Act or suffer. I do not care which, but neither requires you to whine to me about it.”

Kuwei flinched. He shot to his feet, glaring at him. “That’s rather low of you,” he snapped. “And by the way, don’t think I can’t see what a hypocrite you are, with all this talk of action. I heard what you said to Nina. Just because you’ve chosen ‘suffer’ doesn’t mean the rest of us ought to.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t think you know whose creature you are, is all.”

 

***

 

Leagues away, in the Dresden Semperoper, Wylan Van Eck sat at the back of his family box, holding a detonator in one hand and a pistol in the other.

His mother had hated the opera. It bored her stiff. But they went every Christmas, anyway, because his father liked it, and they sat without touching each other in the front row while Wylan sat in the back of the box, where it was unlikely that anyone could see him.

He remembered, suddenly, her funeral: flotilla of black umbrellas gliding between the ridges of headstones, the black fingers of winter-barren trees, the rain-soft earth wet and supple under his boots. The casket spray his father sent: a fungal explosion of sugar-pink roses and baby’s breath, like a Valentine’s Day gift for a ghost. She would have loathed it. Her favorite flowers were blue irises, and her favorite color was indigo, and she had wanted to be cremated, not entombed in the cold mud of the Van Eck ancestral plot.

Cold day, wet air. A dismal gravesite that Wylan spent years regretting. The mental hospital had wanted to cremate her, but Wylan had pitched a fit. He was sixteen, then, and learning far too late how to use what little leverage he had in the world to get what he wanted. Money he had none, power he had none, and friends he had none, but he could get a surprising amount of mileage out of his father just by threatening to drive into Amsterdam and stroll down the street. It was a mistake. He shouldn’t have forced his father’s hand. It would have saddened her to know she laid at rest in the same land she spent her adult life resenting.

Somnacin addicts need institutional help. Her care lies beyond our powers on the estate.

When is she coming back?

When she’s well again.

It had been the doctor’s suggestion. One of his father’s hires, shipped in from Austria or Germany or somewhere, rambling about new research on therapeutic uses for dream-sharing. It was an excellent treatment for insomnia, he said. Promising indicators for potential effects on anxiety and depression.

Months later, in the privacy of his bedroom, Wylan had booted his laptop and had the text-to-voice software read him the doctor’s bibliography. They were Lancet studies, experimental. Not confirmed by peer review. He should have said something. Still, his mother hadn’t left the house in months. Other therapists had come and gone, with various diagnoses and prescriptions, Xanax and Lithium and an armada of pill bottles that piled up on his mother’s bedside table. At least the new doctor wanted to try something different. So he said nothing when they brought the PASIV into the house, and slipped the needle into his mother’s arm, and sleep smoothed the worry-lines out of her face.

What happened in those dream-sharing sessions, he was never sure; but increasingly his mother spent hours a day on the PASIV, either with the doctor or without him. He started to stumble upon her napping in various odd crannies off the house — the greenhouses, a butler’s pantry, a coat closet — squirreled away from the usual places that servants could find her, her sleeping body curled furtively around the IV in her arm. The wiry shell of his mother’s body, hollowed-out by months of poor eating and inactive days, wound in on itself like a yellow-haired fossil.

I’m sorry, Mr. Van Eck.

Not nearly as much as you will be.

Really, I am, I can’t express—

I should throw you out of here on your fat fucking arse. Do you know what happened this morning? My son found her in the shallow end of the swimming pool. She had a PASIV line in her arm. Her head was barely above the water. Do you know what they’re saying about her? Do you know the kind of rumors that are going around?

I’m sorry, Mr. Van Eck. It was a potential side effect— 

What’s wrong with her? Tell me.

I have, sir. Somnacin can be abused if its use is not controlled—

Take her off it, then. Cut her supply. I don’t want any more of that poison in my house.

Respectfully, mein herr, there are concerns of withdrawal to consider.

What concerns?

Mood fluctuation. Chronic insomnia. I don’t say this to alarm you, but in the interests of total honesty, the worst cases show signs of acute psychosis.

Psychosis? Like a mental patient?

It’s not as grim as it sounds. Many people with psychotic disorders live happy and fulfilling lives in public society. Given adequate treatment and support, their quality of life is generally shown to be—

My wife is psychotic.

Your wife is predisposed to psychosis as a consequence of factors in her genetic background, in combination with her current somnacin dependency. Yes. It’s not that rare. She can still have a normal life, a good life. Some estimates say up to 1% of the population—

Take her off the somnacin. Cold turkey. I want her sober.

Oh, that’s not medically advisable, sir.

A week, then. Wean her, if you must. And then I want you gone.

You don’t understand. I can’t take a patient from her level of somnacin intake to sleeping dry in the matter of a week, it won’t work. Her body won’t do it. It requires several courses of hormone therapy, and then months of sleep training just to reestablish a regular circadian—

A week. Or I’m sending her somewhere she can be taken care of without being seen.

Wylan visited her in the hospital, sometimes. She was usually sleeping. He brought her irises and told her about things he’d made. Little motor-powered gliders and puzzle boxes. A remote that let her adjust the fluorescents in her room from her bedside. A music box that played different songs depending on the amount of sunlight that struck its surface. His father didn’t visit, it would have raised eyebrows. But Wylan, who in the eyes of the public didn’t technically exist, enjoyed the freedom to come and go as he pleased, so long as he was discreet about it. A ghost could go anywhere he liked.

It needled him with guilt, but he had actually enjoyed those afternoons in the hospital, keeping her company while she slept. It had been nice in the way that most horrible things can be nice, once you accept the horror of them. Her room was large and sunny and had big windows overlooking the hospital gardens. He brought his laptop and ran Grimm’s Fairy Tales through the text-to-speech reader, so he and his mother could both listen to the stories. It was the only time he’d ever spent with his mother without the fear of his father walking through the door.

The first time he ever used somnacin, he hadn’t been dumb or naïve. He knew PASIVs existed. He just hadn’t cared. 

With two minutes to the kick, Wylan stood up and moved to the front of the box. He sat down in his father’s seat. He crossed his legs and took in the view from the box. It was fine. Not that great, honestly. His mother had been right to be bored.

He wondered what would happen after he triggered the detonator. According to the best available research, if they failed, the others would be essentially vegetables, their minds turned to soup from centuries of life in the dream-world. He would be fine, though definitely unnerved and probably in a lot of hot water with the Amsterdam police — which would be its own way of spiting his father, he supposed. If they succeeded, they would — what? Walk away with a lot of money. Or rather, they would all walk away with a lot of money, and he would walk away with a little more money than he already had.

If I didn’t know better, Wylan, I’d say you sound like a man driven by spite.

His mother’s name was Marya Hendriks. She’d been a kind and loving and good-hearted person, and he had loved her more than breathing, but Wylan was his father’s son.

When he met Kaz Brekker, the extractor’s first offer had been one of money. Lots. We’ll make you rich. Rich in your own right, not just your father’s leavings. Wylan hadn’t been interested; it was just adding more integers to his mother’s trust. The next offer was invisibility. We can hide you from your father, he suggested. Have you ever wanted to travel the world? Eat rare foods, meet new people? Live outside your family’s shadow? How would you like freedom?

And Wylan had snorted, scornfully, and hung up the phone. As if he wasn’t free to leave the estate any time he wanted. As if he didn’t know how to book a plane ticket by himself. As if it wouldn’t fulfill his father’s wildest dreams for Wylan to simply walk away into the vast anonymous world, and disappear from his life forever.

About ten minutes later, Kaz called him again. He let it ring twice before picking up.

What.

Fuck freedom, Kaz had said, without preamble. Fuck money. Fuck invisibility. You don’t care about them and neither do I. Fine. That’s smart. I’ll give you what you really want, instead.

What do you have that I could possibly want?

You know.

Wylan had waited, drumming his fingers impatiently on his knee. I don’t, actually.

I’m going to hurt your father. Very, very badly.

A pause.

Would you like to know how?

In the Dresden Semperoper, Kaz Brekker slept unpeacefully, with his hands wound tightly over the head of his cane. Four feet below him lay several tons of inert explosives, strapped to the bottom of the box.

Jesper Fahey lay sprawled inelegantly to his left, jaw slack, tongue lolling. Wylan nudged his ankle with his foot, Jesper jerked, mumbling inarticulately in his sleep. Wylan smiled.

He wondered if Jesper had ever hated anybody. Real hatred, the kind that lived in the dark marshlands of the heart, where men like Kaz and Wylan liked to dream. He doubted it.

In his pocket, he thumbed his new totem, turning it over in his fingers. Absently, he withdrew it and held it in one palm. The cork was still stained red on one side from the wine: a 1998 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, worth two hundred euros a glass.

He held it up to his nose. The smell of the cork wasn’t wine, but a rich cologne of leather and gunsmoke.

He knew he was dreaming. He’d just felt like checking.

Wylan checked his wristwatch. Thirty seconds to the kick. He pocketed his totem and looked over at Jesper’s sleeping body.

“You know, it’s very weird,” he said. “I know I’m not actually going to die, but I’m still sort of nervous about this.”

He passed the detonator absently from one hand to another. “Obviously that’s nonsense, right. I’ve checked and double-checked my totem. But it doesn’t make a difference. My brain just doesn’t like the idea of blowing myself up.”

Jesper, being stone cold unconscious, naturally had very little to offer by way of comfort to this.

“Not that I’m having second thoughts. I know how important it is. And I won’t let you down. But I wish — I do wish I’d asked you if it gets any easier. ‘Kicking’ yourself. That’s all.” He paused. “I hope I’ll get to ask you. When you wake up.”

Jesper sighed in his sleep.

“I should ask Nina, really. She’s much smarter than you. But she’s pretty busy, I guess I’ll have to settle for you.” Wylan folded his arms. “God, you’ll be insufferable about it. I can hear it already, you’re going to — I don’t know, say something flirtatious and irritating. ‘Personal questions, Van Sunshine? Ooh, buy a lad a drink first.’ No matter that I already gave you a drink, and a damn expensive one, too. Bet you’ll mysteriously forget that when we’ve woken up. You’re sort of shameless, you know that.

“I mean, I don’t give a shit, obviously, I’m rich. I’ll buy you twenty drinks, who cares. But in principle, it’s bad manners. Like, I think it’s your turn to buy me something. Not something big, necessarily. A coffee or something. That’s all. We could get one at the airport, even. It would be quick. I get that you lead a very busy life as an internationally wanted criminal, I do. Oh, and here’s where you’d make a pun about ‘internationally wanted,’ yes, ha ha, very funny. But you did sort of invade my home and steal my wine, so if we’re keeping score, I should really do the same to you. Do you even have a house? Or a flat or something? I didn’t ask.”

His wristwatch gave a bright chirp. He flipped two switches on the detonator and then hovered his finger over the button. It was a big red button. That was on purpose. Wylan liked big red buttons. He made a point of incorporating them into his designs. They were good for creating a dramatic atmosphere.

“When we wake up, you’d better be lucid, you bastard,” he said. He looked down at the detonator.

He hit the button. It wasn’t like in the movies. There was a delay as the radio signal passed over the receptor he’d buried in the C4, and the chemical reaction took a moment to build up before it tipped the threshold for detonation. Wylan tossed the used detonator over the railing and leaned his hip against it, waiting.

“You know, I’d always wondered what this would feel like,” he remarked.

A moment later, he didn’t have to wonder anymore.

 

***

 

The shade of Jordie Rietveld sat cross-legged on a crate, his hands resting on his knees, watching Inej and Kaz with rancorless interest. He made no attempt to hurt them. She supposed there was nothing he could do to hurt them, here, anyway; the shade had already achieved what he wanted. They were here. Two living minds to keep him company for as long as their sanity lasted.

“It was my idea, dream-sharing,” said Jordie. “Originally. It wasn’t his fault. He came with me because — well. He couldn’t very well let me do it on my own.”

The boys on the dock had disappeared. Or, at least, the memory of them had.

“We found an extractor willing to take us on,” the shade continued. “He goes by Pekka Rollins, now. His cover then was Jakob Hertzoon. Not a very reputable gentleman, but in this industry, it’s not like you’re spoiled for choice. You learned that lesson well and early, Miss Ghafa.”

“You’d do well to keep my name out of your mouth,” she said.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself, Wraith. Anyway, Hertzoon did what he promised. He took us dreamside on a few jobs, taught us the basics, had us running point for a few minor extractions. Enough for us to start dreaming bigger than we had any right to, as nobodies from the asscrack of nowhere. We thought, we’ll give it a few years, pay off our debts, and then we’ll break with him to start our own business. The Brothers Rietveld. Build our own crew, get our own chemist, make disgusting amounts of money. Do you know, we actually thought we were the first people to come up with the idea of a dream within a dream?

“Obviously, we got fucked,” he added. “Monaco. About six months in. We’re running an extraction on one of Hertzoon’s marks. One level, but the chemist is one of Hertzoon’s people, and we didn’t bother to vet him. Our fault, again, but there’s only one cure for stupid, and it’s pain. The guy over-sedates both Kaz and me, kicks the mark, and then dumps us in the Mediterranean while we’re still sleeping.”

As he spoke, dark water stains sprouted on his clothes, seeping copiously through the silk as if it were spilling from his very pores. Rivulets dripped from his hair.

“Kaz woke up,” he said. “I didn’t. Interesting fact: did you know corpses float? You’re a smart woman, I bet you did. Also, the average human can tread water for about four hours before exhaustion sets in.”

He wiped a dribble of water from the corner of his mouth, and added, “They found him after fourteen.”

Inej put her knife away. It had no purpose here.

“I imagine he didn’t originally mean for me to exist,” said Jordie. “We’d dreamed together so often that he could summon my image quite well. And I was helpful to him, at first. The problem was only — Inej, you must surely understand — I loved my brother. Very, very much. But he never quite gives you as much as you need, does he?”

The ocean dragged itself listlessly up the beach, its rasp punctuated by the periodic crash of waves breaking in the distance. Kaz silently turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing down the dock.

“I wish I didn’t love him,” murmured Jordie, with every ounce of the breathtaking cruelty that Kaz Brekker would dream up for himself. He glanced at her. “Don’t you?”

With a brisk, effortless flick of her wrist, Inej’s blade arced out and slit his jugular. The skin of his throat opened like an unzipped case.

The shade sighed and flickered out of sight. Within moments, he reappeared atop another crate, unharmed, dry, and looking wryly amused.

Inej turned her back on him. She walked briskly to the edge of the dock and sat down, dangling her feet over the dark water. The spray leapt up and kissed her boots. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm, either. She barely felt it. Textures in Limbo were strange and insubstantial, like a world summoned from memory foam.

Footsteps creaked on the rotting slats. A shadow passed over her head, and then a dark shape folded itself neatly onto the wood beside her.

“May I join you?”

She waved her hand wordlessly at the place he had sat, granting his request. He arranged himself so he sat cross-legged, a process which became somewhat awkward when it involved his bad leg. It was not an elegant nor altogether comfortable-looking position, but it kept his feet clear of the spray. She didn’t comment on it. The obvious was a waste of time. Not that she had any lack of time to waste, here; for all the hours they’d spent walking on the beach, milliseconds had passed. That was only her best guess, though. Time in Limbo passed like a viscous fluid, alternately dripping from the bottleneck and then surging in a thick flow.

“Are you a dream?” said Kaz, after a moment.

She shook her head. “No.”

He cocked his head: a quiet challenge. “You expect me to believe that?”

“Yes.”

“I do remember you,” he admitted. “In the dream before, and the dream before that. But you could very well be a projection. Or a shade.”

“You don’t have a shade of me.”

“Maybe I do. What should I do then?”

She folded her arms and tucked her hands under her armpits, as if trying to warm herself, though she felt no chill from the inert sea. “Well. If that was the case, you realize you’d be asking a shade for advice.”

“Mm. Yes. It’s very stupid, isn’t it.”

“Uncharacteristically so.”

He nodded. “I shouldn’t trust you. You did get me killed, after all.”

Inej flinched. She drew her knees up to her chest, as if to put a physical barrier between the words and herself. “You came after me. I didn’t ask you to.”

“I know. That’s what would make you such an effective shade, isn’t it? You didn’t even have to try. It was child’s play, getting me to Limbo, wasn’t it? You just went, and I followed.”

She measured out a hearty portion of silence before she spoke, and her voice was as flat as still water. “Is that what you think happened?”

Kaz shrugged. “You have to admit it would make sense. Shade. Wraith . That’s, what, a bit of subconscious messaging?”

Inej flipped her legs up and sprang neatly onto her feet. He caught her hastily by the wrist, then let go, his fingers spasming as if burned.

“Inej,” he said, “sit down.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“I’m going for a walk.”

“No, don’t. Stay here. Sit.” 

“Why?”

The corner of his mouth went taut, suspiciously. “Well, for one thing, I said ‘please’—”

“Kaz Brekker. ”

“I don’t think you’re a shade,” he said. “I’m sorry. That was foolish to say. I am a naturally suspicious man, and — Inej, sit down. I know who you are.”

He said it factually, as one might describe the color of the sky, or a principle of mathematics. A simplistic proof: Quod erat demonstratum. He’d taught her that phrase, he was fond of it. He liked to say it with a certain finalistic relish, like locking a door.

“Oh, you do,” she said.

“Yes. Insofar as anyone can know who another person is, I suppose.”

“You don’t sound certain.” She lowered herself slowly to the ground beside him, and perched on her knees, reluctant.

He leaned back on his hands. The lines of his body were unusually slack and at ease. “With ten years of dreaming, I couldn’t muster a convincing shade of your pinky finger,” he said. “It couldn’t match you, not really, not even partly. A shade is a shadow, a half-self. I would cut it down for the mere presumption of wearing your face.”

“Pretty words,” she said.

“You don’t trust me.”

She folded her hands in her lap. She felt the stares of both Rietveld brothers on her shoulders.

“I do trust you. That doesn’t mean I believe everything you say.”

“Fair enough. It is the truth, for what that’s worth. Take it or leave it.”

What am I supposed to do with that? she thought, half-desperate. What am I supposed to take, exactly? I never know what I’m getting from you, Kaz, I never know what I can ask for. You give me nothing and you give too much, all at once, and I don’t know how to hold it all, I never learned—

“Let me help you,” she said.

Kaz said nothing. It was a pregnant silence.

“Do you trust me?”

He said, “That doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t?”

“Whether I do or don’t, it doesn’t matter, this isn’t a question of—”

“Then say no. But then I’m gone,” she said. “I’ll cut my throat right here and leave. I’ll ride the kick up and leave you here, I swear on the Saints. I swear on my mother and father. Say no, Kaz. Say you don’t trust me, say you never trusted me, and I will leave you here.”

She tapped the spring-release on her wrist, and Sankt Petyr’s hilt dropped into her palm.

He made a disgusted noise at the sight of it. “ Christ . Put that away, don’t be fucking stupid.”

“Say no,” she said. “Do it. Don’t be such a coward.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Actually, I’m in yours,” she said, and it was her turn to smile while he scowled. “Say no. Let me go, if you’re brave enough to do it.”

Kaz took a deep breath.

“Kaz?” said Jordie, so quietly that it was lost to the sounds of the sea.

He gripped the hem of his remaining glove and tugged, once, twice. It peeled away, and then both hands white and naked in the cold sunless light. She could count the veins like blue kintsugi carving up the porcelain of his flesh.

He extended his newly ungloved hand, palm-up, into the space between their bodies.

She reached for it without thinking and took it. Her skin met his, and she was surprised: he was warm, furnace-warm, comfortable to touch. They were soft as satin, his hands. A little dry, a little papery. But really no more or less remarkable than any other human hand. 

“Forgive me,” she said to him, and then she kissed it. Her lips tingled where they brushed the back of his knuckles.

A hard tremor ran through his body, like someone had struck him with a tuning fork. “I- nej ,” he said, startled, strained with — something, not an emotion she recognized, but one of startling compulsion.

“Thank you,” she said. “Brace yourself.”

She slammed her knife down into the slats of the dock. With a horrible groan, the wood started to crumble away beneath them, large chunks dropping into the surf with small explosions of foam. The support beams splintered and then snapped, and the dock surged forward, as if dropping to its knees.

The boards beneath them trembled and then listed hard to the left, throwing her against Kaz. Her knife spun into the ocean, lost. She didn’t care. She grabbed Kaz hard by the back of the neck and wrapped herself around him, frantically tight. They slid down the sinking dock, the wood snapping and bucking beneath their weight.

The shade let out a high wail as the dock beneath it crumbled away. A wave surged up over the side of the dock and swallowed it, and its scream melted into the roar of shattering wood and metal.

The ocean rushed in to gnaw at the dock, ravenous, its jaws gnashing like a starving creature. Another wave slapped at the dock, tossing them to the very edge of the remaining structure, where the last protruding finger of wood extended over the thrashing foam; and before she had time to draw another breath, that, too, dissolved, and they plummeted into the water.

Her body seized, once, with the shock of impact. Then she was sinking, and the pain faded again, anesthetized by adrenaline. She fought the urge to let go and strike out for the surface. Instead, she exhaled, forcefully, deliberately, and watched the bubbles rise in diamond chains over her head.

Under the waves, in the brief calm before the current took them, Kaz gripped her by the waist and buried his head in the hollow of her neck. 

She threaded her fingers into his hair and closed her eyes. Her lungs started to burn. She felt the last bubbles scamper up her cheeks, across her skull, and twine circles around the ribs of her floating braid before they fled.

The light from above them grew dim. As the world ended, Inej pressed her lips to Kaz’s head.

Chapter 10: the scenes which hold the waking world slowly come undone

One of Jesper’s favorite pleasures was that first crisp, cold swallow of air that came after rising from deep water. The taste of oxygen so long missed it left you nearly drunk, the billowing relief of your lungs swelling full. Waking from a tiered dream felt a little like that: he blinked, his heart stuttering, and suddenly felt an absurd relief to be breathing. There was a crick in his neck, which: typical. A funky taste in the back of his mouth. A lingering film of fog over his thoughts, which is why it took him a few seconds to remember everything.

He sat up. Nina knelt on the floor by the PASIV, already coiling up the IVs. Her hair was mussed and there were red rings around her eyes, but she worked fast, anyway. She was the only one awake, though across the circle, Matthias was beginning to twitch and stir.

A cold stone settled at the bottom of his gut. He tried to stand up, but his limbs — which were still very much in the process of booting up — glitched, and he sagged to his knees beside her. “Neen—”

“Totem check,” she said brusquely.

“Yeah, but—”

“Totem. First.”

He said, “What happened?”

Matthias gave a subdued groan as he woke up, rolling out of his seat. “Brekker and Ghafa,” he said. “Are they—”

“Still under,” said Nina shortly. “We won’t know until they wake.”

“Won’t know what?” The stone sank deeper in Jesper’s stomach. 

Matthias, who you’d be forgiven for assuming had never had a gentle thought in his life, gave Jesper a look that was horrifically close to sympathy.

Kaz, you son of a bitch. What did you do?

“Wait until they wake,” suggested Matthias. “Then see. No use worrying, unless.”

And oh, fuck him for that, seriously, fuck him for the audacity of telling Jesper to fucking sit tight, and fuck him for that dangling unless. “Oh! Right!” shrilled Jesper. “Good thing I’m not worrying! That would be terrible!”

“What’s going on?” said Wylan, blearily knuckling his eyes. His golden hair rose like a fluffy circus wig around his face, and a red print cut across his cheek where he’d pressed it into the back of the chair. A sleepy slur tugged at the vowels of his posh little accent, making him sound almost drunk. It was unfairly and powerfully attractive, and had Jesper not been about to swan-dive off the edge of a nervous breakdown, he would have taken a moment to indulge in the simple pleasures of a post-job flirt.

“Kaz and Inej haven’t woken up,” he said, trying to project calm. Wylan looked at him and read right through it in an instant, his brow sinking into the familiar knit of Wylan’s Problem Solving Mode. Jesper was equal parts nonplussed and proud.

“Neither has Kuwei,” Wylan pointed out. “Everyone wakes up at different paces. Dreamers in the lowest level generally—”

“Kuwei woke up ten minutes ago,” said Nina, her voice still steady but brittle with the effort of it. She slammed the PASIV shut and snapped the locks closed, one-two-three, like deadbolts sliding home. “I saw him.”

Kuwei, who had been leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, opened them and sat up. “Ruin a good performance, why don’t you,” he said sourly. “I wanted to see how long it would take them to notice.”

“Your lids were twitching.”

“I could have been in REM.”

“And you were smirking.”

“Maybe it was a good dream.” He noticed Jesper, and brightened. “Hello, again. I wonder what’s the right greeting to offer, under the circumstances? Good morning?”

“It’s afternoon,” said Wylan shortly.

That this sort of exchange was only happening while Jesper was too worried to enjoy it was injustice enough to make him weep. “Don’t you have something for them?” he demanded of Nina. “Something to wake them up?”

“It’s not about whether they’re going to wake up,” she said grimly. “It’s about if they’ll remember anything when they do.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Limbo,” Matthias said shortly. 

“What?”

“Long story,” he said, bending to take the PASIV from Nina’s hands. “No time.”

“Use short fucking words!”

(Kuwei jumped. Wylan snorted.)

Matthias lifted a finger, expression darkening, clearly preparing to open a can of military-grade ‘shut the fuck up’ on Jesper’s ass. But he was interrupted.

Kaz said, “Jesper, if you’d refrain from bringing the entirety of airport security down on us before I’m fully conscious, I would consider it a personal favor.”

Then he cracked one eye open, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

Jesper whirled on him. He opened his mouth. He lifted his hands in the air, clawlike, as if to close around Kaz’s throat. He thought of half a dozen curses, invectives, grudges, and at least ten legitimate complaints.

He said none of them. He gave a short, single, high-pitched bark of aggravation, and then kicked Kaz in the shoe.

It was a sign of Kaz’s sleep-induced lethargy and patience that he did no worse than glower at Jesper in retaliation. “Thank you,” he said dryly.

“Fuck you,” said Jesper, because it was that or hug him, and he liked his hands attached to his body, thanks ever so. “I thought you were a vegetable.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“You should be. I was going to throw a party.”

Inej, who had curled into the fetal position while she slept, gave a catlike yawn and stretched her arms. “Stop making all this noise,” she murmured.

Kaz leaned over — Jesper did a double-take — and flicked her on the ear. With his hand. Physically touching her. What the fuck. “Nap later. We’ve still got a schedule to keep.”

“Mm. That sounds difficult for you,” she said, tucking her head back onto the armrest.

“You cannot possibly still be tired.”

“What, after such a restful sleep?”

“Inej Ghafa,” Jesper said plaintively, “if you don’t get up and hug me right this instant, I’m going to walk into the middle of the terminal and scream.”

She opened her eyes, slitted and preening, and gave a Cheshire grin. “Aw, Jes. Did we scare you that badly?”

This sort of smugness was not to be born. He marched over and snatched her out of the chair — ignoring her giggling squeal of objection — and whirled her around like someone winding up to hock a discus. A musical chime of laughter burst out of her throat.

“Jesper Fahey, put me down!” Her legs kicked fruitlessly at the air. “You’re going to drop me!”

“First of all, you weigh about two stone, so I take offense at that. Second of all, you’re staying up here until you apologize for being a right little shit who takes her god damn sweet time waking up from a job.”

“It wasn’t on pur— oh, don’t trip, don’t trip, don’t trip — Jes, chair, chair, chair, Jes, mind the chair—”

He did not mind the chair.

They went down in a tangle of limbs. Luckily, Inej had the forethought and reflexes to break her fall; unluckily, the nearest thing for her to break it with was Jesper. Her weight drove hard into his stomach and shoved the breath from his lungs in a pitiful wheeze.

Kaz stood up. The only sign he gave of lingering weariness was a firmer-than-usual grip on his cane. “Pull yourselves together, would you please,” he said, in a tone more long-suffering than irritated. Jesper was genuinely floored by the apparent scope of Kaz’s good mood; usually, his tolerance for this kind of tomfoolery would have long since evaporated. “Indulge me for just a few minutes more in the fantasy of working with grown professionals.”

“Jealous,” Jesper crooned into Inej’s ear. She snorted and swatted him away, already unfolding herself from his lap.

In another move that left Jesper goggling, Kaz wordlessly offered a hand to her as she rose. Still moreover, she took it, briefly grasping his upturned palm to right herself.

Inej caught Jesper staring, and she hastily looked away.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“Full debrief to come,” said Kaz briskly. “Business first.” 

“Color me surprised,” Jesper muttered. Inej flashed him an apologetic look, and shrugged, smiling.

Kaz reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a slim white envelope. “Mr. Helvar,” he said.

Matthias, who had been leaning silently against the far wall, looked up. Nina, who had been carrying on a conversation in low voices with Kuwei, broke off in order to listen.

“Matthias, you executed your role adequately and faithfully for the duration of the job. Your conduct was appropriate. I have no complaints.”

This, from Kaz, was such astonishing praise that even Matthias appeared genuinely touched. He inclined his head graciously.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten our bargain,” he said. He held out the envelope, the cream-white paper stark against the black leather of his hand. Matthias pushed off the wall and lumbered over, his body language wary, like a hostile animal being offered food by a stranger. “Enclosed are two plane tickets. One leaves for JFK in two hours. The other is scheduled for Oslo in—” He checked his watch. “Twenty minutes. If you favor that one, I suggest you hurry.”

Matthias reached for the envelope, apparently out of instinct, but stopped himself. “And what happens,” he said slowly, “when I land?”

“You walk through customs,” said Kaz indifferently. “Same as anyone, I imagine. Unless you manage to commit another felony on the way to the gate.”

Matthias stared at the envelope. His expression was hungry. His eyes flickered between the paper and Kaz’s face.

Kaz waved it impatiently. “Take it or leave it, Helvar. It’s boarding now.”

Matthias made up his mind. He grabbed the envelope, turned on his heel, and strode swiftly from the room.

“Matthias,” Nina exclaimed, stumbling upright. “Matthias! Wait!”

“Jesus,” said Jesper mildly, watching the door swing shut in the Norwegian’s wake. “Not even a parting ‘fuck-you.’ Guy knows how to make a man feel appreciated.”

“Matthias!” Nina lunged for the door, caught it, and then paused, turning to Kaz. “Which — where’s he going? What terminal?”

“That also settles my account with you, I believe, Doctor Zenik,” said Kaz.

“What terminal? Tell me.”

“Nina,” said Inej, warning.

“What terminal, Kaz?”

“Neen,” Jes said softly. “C’mon. Don’t do this.”

And Kaz Brekker, who Jesper knew for a fact had not one single measure of warmth, pity, or basic human kindness flowing in his veins, opened his mouth and rocked the foundations of Jesper Fahey’s world for the third time in an hour.

“Concourse C,” he said. 

Nina’s mouth fell slightly ajar. Jesper’s fell more than slightly.

Impassive as ever, Kaz nodded at the door. “You’ll need to run.”

If Nina appreciated the gravity of this, she didn’t waste a second of her time goggling. She nodded back at him: accepting her reward for what it was. Then she was gone.

“Kaz,” murmured Inej, her voice soft with delight.

“This will all go faster without commentary,” he said. “If you could manage to restrain yourself.”

She just shook her head, staring. Kaz ignored this, and turned to Wylan.

“Wylan, I once said you were a born architect. I no longer consider that the case.”

Wylan deflated. It looked like the sun going behind a fucking cloud.

Jesper said, “Oh, have a fucking heart, it was his first time—”

Kaz held up a hand and spoke over him. “In my defense, I was working on incomplete information. I lacked the time to conduct a full examination. The truth, Wylan, is that you are a perfectly competent architect and a prodigious chemist. Are you interested in staying in industry?”

Wylan, whose jaw dropped so low it risked falling off, nodded mutely.

“Good. Be ready for my next call. In the meantime, I recommend you find some way to get in touch with Doctor Zenik. Even a remarkable talent wants honing before it can serve you fully.”

“Yes,” blurted Wylan. “I mean, yeah. I will. I’ll find some way to… I’ll talk to her.”

“See that you do.” 

Kaz turned, at last, to Kuwei. “The question remains,” he said, “of what’s to be done with you.”

It was like a switch flipped: they were working again. 

Inej moved subtly between Kuwei and the door. Jesper, at a glance from Kaz, sauntered around to drape one hand on the back of Kuwei’s chair. He ghosted his fingers over the barrel of his pistol.

“What’s to be done with me,” Kuwei repeated. He leaned back and crossed his legs, doing an admirable job of pretending not to be scared shitless. “If you’re taking suggestions, Mr. Brekker, I wouldn’t say no to a firm handshake and a ticket to Cancun.”

“Start talking about your father’s work, and we’ll take it under advisement,” said Jesper. His voice was friendly. The click of his pistol’s safety was not.

“Are you threatening me, Mr. Fahey?” said Kuwei lightly. “And here I thought you were enjoying our little flirtation. This is a rather rude play.”

“I’ve done worse to men I liked better,” he said.

“Heel, Jesper,” said Kaz, staring intently at Kuwei. “Bayur is dead. There’s no point.”

“What?” said Wylan, starting.

“His father. Dead, and he knows it. He told us in Level Three.”

“So the job’s a dud?” Jesper said, struggling not to convey the depth of his disappointment. It still sounded suspiciously like whining.

Kaz drummed his fingers on the head of his cane. Jesper could have set music to that rhythm: Concerto for Scheming in B flat minor.

“Leave us,” he said suddenly.

Jesper drew back, then gestured — with his gun-hand, accidentally, which elicited from Wylan a small sound of alarm — to the room at large. “What, all of us?”

“Yes. You, Wylan—” he hesitated, almost imperceptibly— “and Inej. Out. I want to talk to Kuwei.”

Jesper looked at Inej, a complaint burning on the tip of his tongue. But he couldn’t catch her eye. She was watching Kaz with a calm, considering expression. Kaz met her stare. Something passed between them.

Jesper was reminded, not for the first time, that even when the three of them were in a room together, there was at all times a language being spoken which he did not understand.

“I’m going to get coffee,” she said, after a moment. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

“It won’t take that long,” Kaz told her. “Don’t go far.”

Inej patted the sheath on her hip. “Never,” she said. 

 

***

 

“You know, it’s a shame,” Jesper remarked, squinting at the Starbucks menu. “I was going to be such a cool rich person.”

It was a decent airport café, as these things went. The line wasn’t too long, and there were a selection of linoleum-topped tables (occupied, for the most part, by reedy twenty-somethings in beanies and scarves, hunched over their laptops as if trying to defuse a bomb). The woody smell of espresso and cream hung heavy in the air. Reminded him of his uni days, a little. Working in coffee shops, chatting up the barista, shooting the shit with his classmates, grinding out problem sets until the manager kicked them to the student lounge.

Well, he hadn’t worked all that much. But the flirting and the chatting, that much he’d done.

Inej yawned, covering her mouth with her hand. “You’d have spent it in a year.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant. What would you have done with it? No, don’t answer that, it’ll probably depress me. You and Kaz would both put it in a mutual fund or something.”

“Actually, I was thinking of buying a house,” she said idly, bending to examine the pastry selection.

He glanced sidelong at her. “Really?”

“Yes.” She added, “Nothing large, it’s got to be manageable. But I’d like to spend less time in hotels, and Kaz says it’s a buyer’s market. It’d be a good investment.”

“So you’ve told Kaz about this.”

She arched an eyebrow. It was blistering.

“All right, easy, I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sure he gives great investment advice.”

“Jesper.”

“I’m just wondering, you know, at what point was I going to find out about these nefarious plans for a white picket fence?”

“Does it matter?” she said. “We’re not getting the payout. It’s a moot point.”

He heard the request underneath in her tone, and he took it gracefully. He shut up.

The line shuffled forward and spat them out at the cashier. Inej ordered — a doppio espresso and a large black Americano, full caf, emphasis on large and full — and paid. Jesper got a chocolate chip cookie and a London Fog.

“Still,” he said, around a mouthful of cookie, lounging near the pickup counter. Inej had her phone out and was scrolling idly through a news article (dreadful, he was friends with dreadful people, just the worst) while she waited for their drinks. “It’s not like Kaz is strapped for cash, you know. And he’s the one always going on about laundering our shit properly, for tax purposes. I bet he’s got a safehouse or something somewhere. In fact, he’s probably got two. Or ten.”

“Probably,” she agreed, still scrolling.

“He could afford to burn a little capital, is all I’m saying. If you wanted a house. Or like, five houses, honestly.” He popped another chunk of cookie in his mouth. He felt, rather than saw, Inej look at him.

He swallowed and said, “All right, look. I’m only saying you’ve done enough that — like, most of what you do is just generally so far above your paygrade—”

“Never mind,” she said. “Forget I said anything.”

“No, I mean it! Or like, fuck it, we could go in together, it’s not like we’re either of us poor—”

She put her hand on his arm. “Jesper,” she said suddenly, “I love you.”

He blinked. Between the bustling clamor of the airport and the whine of espresso machines, he was almost certain he’d misheard her. 

He contemplated asking her to repeat herself, but he wasn’t sure his heart could take it.

“Bite your tongue,” he said at last, with difficulty. “We’re not dying, Ghafa, Jesus. There’s no need for that kind of language.”

She smiled. “All right,” she said. And damn her for that, too, for that fond, knowing little smile, like she could have taken all the pieces of him apart and put him together again, without doubt or hesitation, in better working order than before.

He shuffled his feet. “You could have just told me to be quiet,” he said ruefully. “No need for — all the theatrics.”

“I know. This was better.” She patted his shoulder and turned away, craning her neck to see through the crowd. “Now, they just put out an order for ‘Enid,’ do you suppose that’s me?”

Without reservation, she cracked her neck and dove through the wall of bodies crowding the pickup station.

Wylan came strolling up with his hands in his pockets. He’d changed out of his suit and into a less conspicuous costume: black jeans, a blue sweatshirt, and white high-tops. A lanyard with the periodic table printed on it dangled from his back pocket. His hair had just begun to descend from its pomade-coiffed state, a few loose curls tumbling down around his face.

Jesper gave him a deliberate, leering once-over. Wylan rolled his eyes, spread his arms, and turned a full circle on his heel, offering a full evaluation.

“You’re catwalk ready, sunshine.”

“I can’t remember the last time I wore a sweatshirt.”

He meant to have something clever for that, but what came out instead was the disastrous: “You know, if you’d met me in uni, I probably would’ve tried to chat you up.”

“What do you mean, in uni,” muttered Wylan, leaning against the wall beside him. Their arms brushed companionably. It was a crowded airport, Jesper thought. Not a lot of room for personal space. “You’ve been chatting me up since the moment we met.”

Jesper scoffed. “That wasn’t chatting you up.”

“Oh, no?” said Wylan idly, checking his phone. “Disappointing.”

He glanced at Wylan, sharply, from his periphery. “No, hold on,” he said. “That’s not what I meant.That was—”

“Just a bit of fun?” suggested Wylan. “You didn’t mean it?” He glanced back at Jesper. Caught his eyes. Held them.

Contrary to popular belief, Jesper knew a bad idea when it batted its eyes at him. And true, he could think of a dozen things better for his health and career prospects than… whatever this was. Pursuing a flirtation with a blue-eyed, beautiful dream-thief in the making was what Kaz would call hazardous working conditions. He could tell by the soft pink curve of his lips alone that Wylan Van Eck would probably ruin his life.

Fuck it. If he’d wanted the safe bet, he would have been a software engineer.

“Amateur hour,” he said, in a low voice. Then he winked.

Wylan smirked. Not fazed in the least. Jesper thought about going in for a kiss, then, almost just to settle the score, but — well. 

They were in an airport café. Not exactly the ambiance he wanted when he reflected on the moment. Very little room to sweep a boy off his feet, here.

Besides, that would be too easy. He was a prize. If Wylan wanted him, he’d have to come and get him.

Inej, exercising her supernatural ability to choose the right (or wrong) moment, appeared at his side. “Hello, Wylan.”

“Inej. How are you?”

“Feeling better. Nice sweatshirt.” She reached behind his head and snapped off the tag. Wylan flushed and touched the back of his neck.

“Thanks.”

“And thank you for the use of your house, by the way. I’m not sure Kaz ever said…”

“Oh, not at all. You’re welcome to come back, if you’d like. Though I suppose you’ve got plans.”

“You’re very generous, but it’s easier if we don’t stay in any one place for too long. Anyway, I think your father would notice his new tenants eventually.”

“Have it your way. The offer stands, though. You’d be surprised what my father wouldn’t notice.”

As they spoke, Jesper’s eyes drifted over Wylan’s shoulder. It was an almost unconscious gesture, just scouting the horizon out of instinct, something Kaz would have been proud of; and he was glad he did, because it let him notice the handsome profile of Kuwei Yul-Bo, who was standing across the terminal, scanning his phone as he waited to board a flight.

“Hang on,” he said. “Where’s he going?”

He shoved through the crowd and took off for the terminal. The queue shuffled forward, and Kuwei handed his ticket to be scanned. Jesper cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Hey! Bayur!”

Kuwei glanced over his shoulder, and caught sight of Jesper fighting his way through the crowded gate. He smiled, and waved.

“Where are you going? Where’s Kaz?”

Kuwei flattened one hand over his heart. “It devastates me to admit, but I’ve no time for you, my darling. I’ve got to see a man about a dream. But you know, if you’re ever in Shanghai…”

He trailed off, eyes sparkling.

Jesper said, only half joking: “It never would have worked out between us, darling.”

Kuwei pursed his lips and sighed. “In my dreams, I suppose,” he said. Then he kissed the tips of his fingers and flicked them at him.

Oh, what the hell. Kid’s dad just died. Jesper pretended to catch it.

A beam bloomed on Kuwei’s face that threatened to blind the terminal. Then he turned around and hastened down the jet bridge.

“What was all that?” said Wylan. He popped up at Jesper’s elbow, his nose wrinkled in a familiar scrunch of confusion and distaste. “Shouldn’t we be stopping him?”

“Nah,” said Jesper. He slung an arm around Wylan’s shoulders, and with only a slight twitch of surprise, Wylan leaned into it. “If he’s gone, it’s because Kaz wants him gone. Wouldn’t have made it out of the room, otherwise.”

“It’s a risk,” Wylan pointed out. “He knows who we are. He could ruin us, if he had a mind to.”

“Eh. A minor one. Anyway, you’ve got to trust that Kaz knows what he’s doing. If he’s let him go, it’s because there’s not one chance in a thousand that he ends up doing any damage to Kaz or his interests.”

“That’s good for Kaz, I suppose, but it doesn’t reassure me.”

“It should, since you are one of Kaz’s interests.” Jesper ruffled his hair, ignoring the ensuing squawk of displeasure and ineffectual squirming. “Welcome to the club, we’re thinking of unionizing. I keep trying to sell Inej on merch: ‘I got adopted by a gang lord and all I got was this shitty t-shirt,’ et cetera.”

Wylan blinked. “That can’t be,” he said. “I don’t think he likes me at all.”

“Yeah, sounds about right,” said Jesper. “That’s how you know.”

“Thinking he doesn’t like me? That’s the tell?”

“No, thinking he might not like you. If Kaz didn’t like you, you wouldn’t have to think about it.” He slapped Wylan on the back and piloted him back towards the coffee shop. “But hey, you can ask him yourself.”

A familiar figure in black had appeared next to Inej. They made an oddly disjointed pair, the skeleton and the blooming rose: a tall, ghoul-thin boy and his warrior attaché. She was talking animatedly, gesturing with her coffee cup and sketching invisible figures in the air. His hands were clasped behind his waist, and he was bending slightly to hear what she was saying; after a moment, he nodded. 

“What do you think happened to them in Limbo?” murmured Wylan. He slipped his hand into Jesper’s back pocket, a touch which Jesper carefully lifted and placed on the Fahey holy altar of Think About It Later.

If Jesper lived a happy life — and he very much intended to — it would end, someday, without his ever learning the extent of what had happened in Level Three. He would die knowing the look on Inej’s face when he asked her, and that would be plenty.

Instead of saying so, however, he tightened his arm around his shoulder. “The usual, I expect,” he said lightly.

“Which means what?”

Inej said something into Kaz’s ear, and he touched his glove silently to his mouth. His eyes narrowed in what Jesper had learned to identify as his version of a laugh.

“Not all totems are things,” he said eventually. And then: “Come on, they’re having far too fine a time without us. Let's ruin their moment.”

As he spoke, his pocket buzzed. He dropped his arm from Wylan’s shoulder, murmuring an apology, to fish out his phone.

BANK BALANCE UPDATE, the notification read. PENDING DEPOSIT: $4,000,000

ACCEPT PAYMENT?

He swore and dropped his phone. Then he snatched it back up, swiped through the lock screen, and read the notification again. And a third time, his hands trembling, just to make sure.

“Hey,” Wylan said. “Did you get a thing that says—”

“I’m going to kill him,” said Jesper. “That asshole. I can’t believe this. What did he even — how? How? If he sold a kidney, I am going to be so mad about it.” 

“No, you’re not.”

“No, I’m not, but I’m going to pretend to be!”

He swept off. Wylan followed in his wake, laughing.

 

***

 

EPILOGUE: FIVE WEEKS LATER

 

Inej dropped soundlessly onto the fire escape. She landed on the balls of her feet and crouched to absorb the impact, riding out the jolt. When she straightened, she came face to face with a black cat sitting on the railing.

It meowed at her appraisingly. She meowed back, amused.

The London skyline still burned with a palimpsest of sunset. Shadows rose in thick healthy rushes from the canals of each street, comfortably deep. She’d flown across the city rooftops, clearing the shallow gaps between buildings with short jumps and easily scaling the uneven, pitted walls of brick. Five miles she’d covered in the time it would take her to drive one, and she was barely out of breath. 

Cars were for suckers.

The window had been left open for her. She wasn’t sure whether to be touched or mildly insulted.

“I’m perfectly capable of getting through a window, you know,” she said, hauling it shut behind her.

Kaz didn’t appear surprised by her appearance. She’d let him hear her coming, after all. He stood over the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves, a collage of paperwork spread out before him in battle formations of tiny black print. His sleeves were rucked up around his elbows, baring a long stripe of white muscle between cotton and the hem of his glove.

He beckoned her with two fingers. “Come look at this.”

“It’s just a pane of glass,” she said, padding over to the table. “You don’t even lock it at night. It wouldn’t take someone like me to get in.”

“You sleep near the window. I don’t see the problem.”

“So they’ll kill me first, is that the idea?”

He extended his arm, indicating that she should stand close, so she could share his vantage point of the table. “The kind of creature capable of overpowering you would almost certainly not be deterred by a locked window.”

“Ah. I’m your guard dog, then.”

“A very good guard dog.”

“Right.”

“A cherished guard dog. A thoroughly appreciated one.”

“Nice try. What am I looking at?”

He tapped the table. “Read this.”

It was a paper copy of the Daily Mail. She picked it up. “‘Venture Capital Tycoon Arrested on Charges of Theft, Somnacin Tampering.’ Is that Van Eck?”

Kaz’s phone vibrated. He accepted the call without glancing at the caller ID and immediately hit the mute button. “Read the whole thing,” he told her, and then walked leisurely from the room, raising the phone to his ear. “Hello. Yes, it’s me.” 

She flipped through the article while he spoke. It was a short piece, not much substance; the story was fairly new. It didn’t take her long.

WASHINGTON. Tech mogul Jan Van Eck was arrested on Monday following charges of illicit somnacin tampering in his San Francisco laboratory. Anonymous sources suggest that the experimentation occurred as a result of efforts to produce a generic variant of jurda parem, which was developed by Doctor Bo Yul-Bayur last year. Though the substance of the investigation has been largely kept under wraps, sources say that the arrest drew on evidence recovered from a massive document leak inside Van Eck Solutions. The name of the whistleblower has yet to be revealed.

Following the Justice Department’s announcement, the son of the late Doctor Yul-Bayur declared on Twitter his intent to file suit against Van Eck for violating his father’s patent, which he secured from the federal trademark office earlier this month. Speaking to the Daily Mail through his lawyers, Mr. Yul-Bo expressed his intent to recover damages from Mr. Van Eck to the order of $25 million as compensation for harms both financial and reputational.

“It’s my father’s work,” said Mr. Yul-Bo. “I just don’t feel right about letting someone else — an American businessman, no less — try to replicate my father’s work and market it as his own. It’s a question of my father’s legacy.” He added that he hoped a positive outcome in this trial could pave the way for future patent suits pertaining to somnacin formulas, which in time “might prompt the court to take a look at the dangers of mass-market somnacin in the first place.” Mr. Yul-Bo will undoubtedly reveal more about the case and his social agenda in his forthcoming interview with the New York Times.

“Thank you,” said Kaz. “Yes. That settles us.”

Inej set down the paper and followed the sound of his voice. He sat sideways on the windowsill, one leg braced on the floor, the other cocked on the sash. The black cat she’d encountered earlier was sprawled, gelatinous, over his thigh, and as he spoke he ran one knuckle absently over its neck.

“I appreciate your cooperation. Yes, it’s perfectly satisfactory. I wouldn’t worry.” 

She held out her hand to the cat, who shoved its face greedily into her fingers. She stroked its ears with her thumb while Kaz said, “You’ve been more than handsomely rewarded already. However, if you’d like to take up the issue with me, by all means. I can have my accountant at your doorstep in an hour.”

A blitzkrieg of incoherent denials cut him off. He drew the phone away from his face, disdainful, and hung up.

“Kuwei?” she said.

“Unfortunately.” He set the phone on the table and swatted the cat on the rump. It whined ruefully and skitter back out onto the fire escape. “He wanted to know if I’d read the New York Times piece. Apparently it’s something of a coup.”

“Have you?”

“Of course I have.”

“And you told him?”

“That I wasn’t familiar.”

She folded herself onto the windowsill beside him. Their knees bumped. “I suppose you’ll say you had nothing to do with this.”

“Of course I didn’t,” Kaz said. “That would be absurd. I don’t know what Jan Van Eck is doing in a laboratory on the other side of the world.”

“No,” she agreed.

“And even if I did, I wouldn’t risk my reputation by alerting the authorities. We work in the shadows, Inej. There would be nothing to gain by coming into the light.”

“No? Wylan seems to have maintained anonymity well enough.”

“You don’t think he’d go so far as this, do you?” said Kaz archly. “To his own father? They’re family .”

Inej could not, on her life, fathom how anyone fancied this man a consummate liar. “I hope you’ve got a more convincing answer prepared, in case anybody else asks. For his sake.”

He rolled his eyes so hard that his head actually moved with it. “Nobody else will ask, because nobody else thinks we’re involved.”

“And Kuwei? He’ll keep quiet?”

“Kuwei has a vested interest in keeping the spotlight on himself,” said Kaz. “For one thing, I believe he sincerely enjoys it. For another, if he doesn’t, he’ll have the pleasure of explaining to the FBI why he handed Van Eck a counterfeit version of his father’s formula nearly a full month before he filed suit for patent violation.”

She considered it. “And this is something he actually did?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know. But they were both sighted in the same airport on the same day, five weeks ago. Occam’s Razor has such a terrible bite.”

She nudged his leg with her own. “Kaz.”

“Mm.”

“What happens when Jan Van Eck realizes you set him up?”

“I imagine he’ll take to stalking and fuming around the confines of his prison cell in quite dramatic fashion. Perhaps smoke will rise from his ears like a cartoon.”

“I’m being serious.”

“When am I not? Somnacin tampering is a federal crime. It’s taken quite seriously, over there. You know how the Americans are about this kind of thing. Ask Matthias.”

She said, “He’ll want his money back, at least. He knows you cheated him, or else he’ll soon start to suspect.”

“I anticipate a strongly worded letter from the Better Business Bureau.”

“He’s a powerful man.”

“We’ve met plenty of powerful men.”

Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Nina. Have you heard?

Inej debated what to say to this. After a moment, she selected a thumbs-up emoji and pressed SEND. 

The response came almost immediately. Are you with him?

Yes, she typed back.

Three dots bounced thoughtfully at the bottom of the screen for almost a full minute.

Safe?

She glanced up from her phone, at Kaz, who was leaning against the windowsill, his head turned to supervise the ground below their flat. With an overseer’s unflinching eye he took in the black silhouetted knife of the Shard, the ridges of high-rise apartments guttering smoke like candles, and the bead chains of headlights that strung each street.

She left her answer unsent for too long, and Nina’s dots appeared again. Her finger hovered over the keyboard, absently. She picked out an emoji of a crow, and sent that. Again, the response came immediately.

That’s not reassuring.

She smiled and shut off her phone.

Kaz spoke without parting his eyes from the twilit scene beneath his window. “Jesper?”

“Nina.”

“Worried?”

“Only as much as she ought to be.”

“How did she hear about it? I thought she was in Tbilisi.”

“That was last week. She’s in Tehran now.”

He didn’t ask how she knew. He didn’t ask, either, about the whereabouts of any of the other members of the team, though doubtless he guessed that she could tell him if he really needed the information. He wouldn’t ask unless he needed it, though. That was their bargain, that was how it worked. Kaz never asked for more than she was willing to give, and she always gave him as much as he needed. 

It wasn’t a romance for the ages, their little shared understanding: it was a thorny, brutish thing, born out of a long ledger of trades and bargains and greed. But it was hers, and it was his, and moreover, it was good. Nothing else would have felt right; nothing else could have kept her attention. They took what they wanted from the world, and that included each other.

Watching the sharp lines of his profile turn silhouetted against the street lights, she thought: she would take Kaz Brekker in a hundred lifetimes. She would take him by force or wit or bargain. She would take him with an army, or without one, but she would take him, because she wanted him, and she got the things she wanted. He had taught her to do that, to take. She wondered if he’d ever expected her to take him, too.

“What?” said Kaz. It was slightly peevish. He didn’t like being watched.

“Do you want to go to Turkey?” she said, apropos of nothing. 

He tilted his head. She counted at least three questions and two complaints tallying up in his mind. That was why it surprised her when he said, “All right.”

“All right?”

“All right.” He added, “I’m assuming this is for the purpose of visiting your hometown, and not an appeal for a spontaneous vacation.”

“Yes. That is, the former.”

He folded his arms. “Terms. We leave after a week. I want twenty-four hours’ notice if we’re going to see your parents. In the event that I need to communicate in Turkish, you’ll translate what I say as I say it, and not your own interpretation. I am not, under any circumstances, going on a boat. Take or leave it.”

She stared at him, and tried hard to swallow around the bulb of warmth rising in her chest.

“What is it, already?”

She leaned in, sliding across the windowsill, not because she couldn’t reach him but because she wanted him to see her coming. His jaw went taut, but he didn’t move, just watched her sidelong from the corner of one wary dark eye. She took his hand between her own and wrapped her hands around it. It took both her hands to cover the breadth of his. Her thumbs rubbed over his index and pinky knuckles, massaging small circles into the leather. He gave a sharp intake of breath.

She moved closer, drawing his hand up and to her body, until the heel of his palm pressed the plane of her sternum. Her hands latched over his and kept it there, where her pulse thrummed like an electric current at his touch. Kaz’s eyes fluttered closed. He was so pretty, she thought. What a pretty, pretty man she’d taken for herself.

His phone kept buzzing on the sill between them. He reached for it and shut it off without checking, sliding it wordlessly into the interior pocket of his coat. She caught a flash of the notification screen before it disappeared, the mounting stack of missed calls. She couldn’t bring herself to bother. The others could wait their turn. She’d been waiting on Kaz Brekker’s heart for five years. 

“Daydreaming, Inej?” he said quietly. She thought of checking her totem, but it would have been for show. Nothing in dreams ever felt like this.

“No,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She hummed in amusement. He was teasing, she was fairly certain. 

The sounds of the street faded to a murmur below them. The building’s air conditioner kicked on, its rattle coming in fits and waves, and it reminded her of the sound of moving water, great waves folding on the sand.

“No,” she said, out of indulgence. “Are we dreaming?”

He tipped his head at her. The warmth of his hand sank through her shirt to suffuse her chest, and the leather-clothed tips of his fingers grazed gently on the skin of her neck.

The lights shone softly from below, cloaking broad swaths of his face in shadow. From behind his veil of darkness, Kaz smiled.

Notes:

Thank you for reading! This fic would never have been finished without all of the wonderful people who left kudos, comments, and general encouragement along the way. When I started, all the way back in the spring, I assumed that it would be done in a few months; I had no idea the roller coaster I was embarking on. I know that the hiatuses were long, including one that left you all on a late-stage cliffhanger, and I’m sorry for that. I’d give you the normal slate of excuses, but I figure you can probably surmise: life, work, school, ennui.

Regardless I’ve consistently been surprised and flattered by the warm reception to this fic. This fandom is a wonderful space to write in, and that’s all thanks to you.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the fic. This is the end of the story proper (though I have some thoughts about what these guys end up doing after the curtain call, which are currently sitting in a chunky document called ‘EPILOGUE??’ on my laptop. Kaz and Inej are characters who just don’t want to sit still, even once they’ve got their happy ending. But we’ll see what happens! We’ll see.) In the meantime, it’s my pleasure to (finally) mark this fic as finished, because it is.

I appreciate you all. No mourners.

Love,
GT ☕️