The Past
Opening his eyes, he saw Ava, naked in the window. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained skylight. One pane had been replaced by wooden slats. For a moment, he watched her dressing, the sweep of her flank defined with the functional elegance of armor. Her body was spare, neat, with muscles like a dancer's. He rolled away. She always had worked hard to prevent any sort of maternal feeling or child-like reaction to their working relationship. A working relationship was all they had ever had.
The room was large. He sat up. The room was also empty, aside from the bed and their packs laid out beside it. Blank walls, no windows but for the one, and a single white-painted fire door. The walls were coated with countless layers of paint, which only looked tacky. It was an industrial space. He knew this sort of room, this sort of building; the tenants would operate in the liminal space where art wasn't quite crime and crime wasn't quite an art.
Oren was home.
He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered another city—Cathenian or had they crossed borders? Another room in an older city with buildings centuries old. Ava back from the canal with breakfast. Galeas off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past a square to a bar she knew on the thoroughfare. Then another city, a blurred dream. Shopping. She had taken him shopping.
He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black trousers that lay at his feet. The cut of them was decidedly not Cathenian. Kneeling beside the bags, he explored. The first was Ava's: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking toys. The second was stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: a book, bootblack, and clothes that placed them somewhere else—Auris? Beneatha a green tunic, he found a flat package wrapped in fancifully patterned paper.
The paper tore in his hands. A bright, nine-pointed star fell to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
"Souvenir," Ava said. "I noticed you were always looking at them." He turned and saw her sitting cross-legged on the bed, sleepily scratching her stomach with lacquered nails.
***
"Someone's coming later to secure the place," Galeas said. He stood in the open doorway with a key in hand. Oren didn't know if they were locked in or he just had a way in. Ava was making coffee on a little stove she pulled from her bag.
"I can do it," she said. "The kid can help."
"No," he said, closing the door. "I want it tight."
"Ever a constable, Galeas?" Oren asked, from where he sat, his back against a wall.
Galeas was no taller than Oren, but with his broad shoulders and military posture, he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore somber attire and carried an expensive bag. The handsome, inexpressive features offered a sort of routine beauty that might come alive if he showed some humanity. The glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask. Oren began to regret the question.
"Lots of soldiers wound up constables, I mean. Or bodyguards," he added uncomfortably, his investigation having gone awry. Ava handed him a steaming mug of coffee. "That job with the Mystic, that's some routine."
Galeas closed the door and crossed the room to stand in front of Oren. "You're a lucky boy, Oren. You should thank me."
"Should I?" He blew noisily on his coffee, his bravado fragile with these two."
"Your organs were failing. Fixing them fixed your dependencies."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying the dependency."
"Good, because you have a new one."
"How's that?" Oren looked up from his coffee. Galeas was smiling.
"You have several remembered artefacts tucked into various parts of you. Some of them will help you with the tasks at hand, some of them will keep you focused, keep you loyal. Those ones are dissolving and will eventually release some things into your body that you might remember fondly from when you stole from me."
Oren blinked up at the smiling mask. His bile rose in response to his atavistic revulsion. "You put dead shit in me?"
"You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Oren, but that's all. Do the job I can give you what will make it all safe inside you. Otherwise, the prizes inside degrade and you're back where I found you. So you see, Oren, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter."
Oren looked at Ava. She shrugged.
"Now go downstairs and bring up the cases you find there." Galeas handed him the key. "Go on. You'll enjoy this, Oren. Like New Year's morning."
The Present
The couple blended right in with the crowd in this Hahseu dive bar. Between his tricks, Aurin had them looking like entirely different people and masked their auras such that they seemed to be on the aetheric level exactly as his glamours made them look. It required some concentration, so he was nursing his drink. Elwes did the same, though she didn't particularly care for alcohol anyway. They drank enough to keep the bartender from throwing them out, and looked chummy and dangerous enough that nobody bothered them as they nattered on about nothing for hours.
This was the place Aurelio had described and he couldn't imagine what had brought the Avialae youth down here in the first place. Men with wings ought not to go underground. They had wings for a reason. He had a job at Slayer's Keep, as well. There was no good reason for him to be down here in the first place and Aurin had a mind to pull the giant bird man over his knee and beat some sense into him. Of course, he didn't know if Aurelio would bend to his will and his wisdom in the longterm; hence he was down here already investigating, imagining he wouldn't have the patience to play things safe for very long.
"Fucking heroes," he muttered.
Elwes eyed him sharply, then laughed. She wasn't the best actress, but she took advantage of the masquerade all the same.
"Sorry, mind wandering."
"Can't hold your ale anymore." She scoffed. He scoffed. They sipped their drinks.
It was a long job, dropping hints here and there without seeming like they were casting out lines for information. But key words had been dropped from time to time: wings, profit, interested parties. Key names had been dropped from time to time: Rezferia, Aurelio, Aurin. Elwes had been unsure about the last, but Aurelio had said the fox Rathari had mentioned him by name. People down here weren't meant to remember him from his earliest days in Kalzasi. He wanted to get to the bottom of that, though dropping his own name while playing another person was a bit more ham-handed than his usual ways of finessing information out of a crowd.
They hadn't yet mentioned Cenethira, though if nothing came to light within the next few hours, that might be a parting gambit.
It was getting near that point when a man walked out from a back room—a Mortallen with a scar on his eye and a tattoo of a ship on his left arm.
"Gotta piss," Aurin said, standing up and heading toward the door on the Mortallen's trail.
"Eh, gotta go... I'll settle up. You're good for it." Elwes paid the bartender; she would be on Aurin's trail soon enough.
Outside, Aurin followed the Mortallen but instead of turning into the nearest alley to relieve himself, he made sure nobody was around to watch and slammed his fist into the giant's kidney. Big men were less wary, he had found. Giants even less so. The knuckledusters preserved and concentrated the punch's force by directing it toward a harder and smaller contact area. The giant grunted, but Aurin had punched him twice again before he could truly react. As he turned, Aurin caught him in the jaw hard enough to snap bone.
When the Mortallen staggered toward the alley, Aurin kicked him, adding to the momentum and sending him stumbling into the fetid dark.
"Gonna fucking kill you," came from that darkness, and then Elwes rushed past him, a needle flashing. "Bitch."
But she had danced away. The Mortallen started scooting backward, farther into the darkness. Aurin pulled a blade and followed while the serum took effect in his blood.
"Did you give him enough?" he asked.
"You quessstion my exsspertise?" her hiss sounded through his illusions, probably due to his attention being split in so many directions.
"He's a big fella. I don't know."
"You don't know."
"The fuck you do to me...?"
"A little something to make you chatty, and then to make you forget. Now tell me everything you know about an Avialae named Aurelio, a fox Rathari named Rezferia, and someone named Cenethira. Don't make me wait or I'll start cutting on you."
