Chapter 31

Liam is good company, it transpires. Some part of Rafael wants to dislike the man, but he’Liam is good company, it transpires. Some part of Rafael wants to dislike the man, but he’s clever and charming, his accent unrepentantly thick but his tongue wickedly agile, with a bent toward eloquence and poetic overstatement that Rafael can’t help but rise to meet. His Romeo is more interested in charm and slipping in jokes than the emotional state of the character, but it’s such a surpassing delight to have someone who can read with him again, Rafael isn’t inclined to judge. Even Rich, on the coaxing of his charming little countryman, is eventually convinced to make his way through one or two bit parts.

Conversation creeps in from the edges of the impromptu rehearsal. Liam tells of trying to seduce the stagehand who helped with his costume change, and taking too long to sensually strip out of his clothes such that his entry to a scene was a full handful of seconds late, leaving him to stumble on half-dressed and flustered. Rafael, in turn, tells the tale of an ill-advised dalliance with a lighting technician at a theater his troupe stopped at, where unfortunate timing and positioning saw his beau coming over the side of the catwalk in the midst of the show.

“No,” says Liam, delighted.

“Yea, indeed,” Rafael says, with dignity, “unto the audience.”

Rich gives a full-throated, hearty laugh at that like the loveliest peal of thunder, and Liam laughs as well, hoarse and somewhat flagging but delighted. “Please tell me it was a comedy, at least,” he says. “I’m sure if it was some sort of drama, a tragedy or somethin’, you woulda been center stage tuggin’ everybody’s heartstrings.”

“I have been known to move a man most deliciously to tears,” Rafael says, a tone of coy flirtation entirely on reflex in response to Liam’s tempting smile. Then he catches himself and looks to Rich, uncertain. He already doesn’t understand his place in this strange trio, but flirting with Rich’s… sex-friends… seems ungallant. Rich doesn’t look bothered, though—he doesn’t even seem to have noticed there’s something he might be bothered about.

“I never did many tragedies, when I was lightin’ up the stage!” Liam is saying, equally unconcerned. “Did you ever do, whassa one all the actors say’s cursed. Macbeth?”

“Yes,” says Rafael, confused and charmed in equal measure. “Yes, I’ve performed the Scottish Play many times. Othello, Titus Andronicus…”

“I don’t know those!” Liam says brightly. “What’s the other one?”

“King Lear?” Rich suggests, scrolling down a sectioned list on his screen.

“Yeah, sure!” says Liam, cheerfully oblivious to the cold, aching shock that just seized Rafael’s heart. “I’m sure you’d be an excellent King Lear, hon, whoever he was. You got a regal face.”

“Ah, well, I,” Rafael says, far from himself and stumbling over the words, ungraceful with the sudden pain. “I was never… I’ve never played the king, himself. That was my—my father. That was his—”

The words choke themselves to nothing in his throat under a weight cold and pressing as the ocean’s deepest pits. He stood on stage in Cordelia’s guise with the smell of the old, sun damaged brocade, and the maddening scratch of the one broken plastic stay that always worked its way out of the bodice, just at the side of his stomach, and drew blood if he bent too far to catch the raving king in his collapse. How cold his father’s hands were, on opening night. How thin. His tired eyes had been full of stage light stars, even as the medicine had done nothing but yellowed the whites of them. Rafael had never complained of the damn broken stay or the cluster of little scratches, not with the way his father smiled at him, dying, had strode the stage, dying… Had been full of stars, even dying.

Here, now, there are two men watching him, ready smiles slowly falling as Rafael fails to answer his thrice-damned cue. Rafael clears his throat and manages a thin imitation of a careless laugh, waving the question away; behind the blank, pleasant mask of a smile, he scrambles to scrape together the fragments of his heart, to put the old agony away to whatever corner of his soul it normally sleeps in.

Sudden and quiet, before Rafael can manage a line, Rich says, “My dad died six or seven years ago.”

It’s utterly astonishing how a man so uncalculated, so artless, can so precisely destroy any chance of pretense. Rafael stares at him, heartsore and startled, and Rich’s voice is a soft, brave rumble when he says, “Mom went earlier, when I was real small, I barely remember her, but Dad… it was outta the blue. And so fucking unfair. Detroit bombed a peace treaty thing in Chicago. He was a reporter, our Fleet’s reporter, he was always traveling, calling home, explaining the outside world to us. Then it killed him for trying. Wasn’t anything to bring home. Whole Navy Pier just fell right into the lake… Hear it’s a rookery, these days. For selkie babies.” His hand comes to rest heavy and warm on Rafael’s back. “I still miss him. Like I’m still just waiting for him to get back from his business trip to being dead. I guess, maybe I’m always gonna miss him.”

“Yes,” Rafael says, quiet and thin. “I’m afraid that part doesn’t change.” He has so many pretty quotes on grief, he’s read so many poets’ and authors’ words about it, but none of them seem adequate when he remembers the boundless, depthless, wordless horror of his own long-ago loss.

“D’you wanna talk about it, hon?” says Liam, and puts his own small hand on Rafael’s knee, squeezing gently.

It’s possible that he should. Rafael sighs and shakes his head, in helplessness rather than denial, passing a hand over his eyes and making an attempt to gather himself again.

“He and my mother each fell ill in turn,” he says, as though the simple words can describe his father’s slow and steady march to the grave, or his mother’s quick and brutal fall from health to—nothing at all. “The wonders of modern medicine are as nothing to those who cannot arrange a timely enough intervention. And the troupe made ends meet, day by day, but we were never comfortable. There was never so much of anything we could spare the money to prevent, and not merely react.”

Rich gives a soft, rumbling chuff. “I heard that about landside,” he says, darkly. “How they make you pay for Medical, even if you really need—”

“Rich,” says Liam quietly, with a sharp pat to one tree-trunk arm, and looks back to Rafael, patiently waiting.

“Yes, well, so,” Rafael says, at once painfully self-conscious and obscurely defensive. “The cancer pills, the only ones within our means, at least—they rend the mass, the renegade cells, but the body is left to clean the remains away, and even a healthy man would have struggled to… Whether it began in his kidneys, or invaded there, his body couldn’t…”

His voice meanders into silence. His mother had held his hands as she explained to him, tracing the lines of fate and life and heart across his palms. The only time he saw her buckle under the agony of unfairness, the only time she allowed herself to cry in front of him. Then she had kissed his forehead, murmured a blessing of unknown provenance, and held him for a long time. And then she had straightened her spine and swept back to the stage.

“His final days would be either fleet and kind, or a bare few extra weeks at the price of his suffering,” Rafael says in the guise of a man recounting some distant tragedy, a fiction. Holding himself as proud and pragmatically as his mother ever did. “He gave one great and final performance, and shortly afterward he was gone. My mother followed—months later. A viral attack that took her practically before we knew her health was failing at all. We were timely enough, at least, to keep my little sister from the same end, and I… I had care of the twins, thereafter. A comfort, and a joy…”

“Every pair of twins I know’s fun as hell, and twice as much trouble,” Liam says, gently coaxing, and Rafael allows the man to win a smile, however painful it is to wear at the moment.

“They were an absolute matched set of terrors, start to finish,” he says to the palms of his hands. “But… we needed one another.”

Rich blows out a slow breath. “Shit,” he murmurs, and cups the back of Rafael’s neck in his palm, squeezing with fantastic gentleness. “I’m really sorry, man.”

“And you?” Rafael says to Liam, with a pleasant composure dragged together by his fingernails. If he meets Rich’s kind eyes he might keep speaking, and he doesn’t need the old, returning pain on top of every other hurt in his life at present. “I don’t suppose we’re a trio of tragic orphans, there would be a book about us by now.”

“Oh, no,” says Liam, with a wry smile. “I’m a fixer, I like to fix things, so when I was about eight I convinced my parents to divorce before they killed each other and they’ve been much happier ever since. They can see each other for about five minutes at a time, and then I gotta pry them apart with a stick.” He rolls his eyes. “Because they’re fightin’ or because they can’t keep their hands to themselves, dependin’ on the day. My mother’s from a long line’a babydoll mods, y’know, we’re real passionate.”

Rich gives a game, slightly shaken chuckle, having clearly heard all this before but more than willing to put the sadness away again. “A long line of three, right? Your grandma’s one of the first batch?”

“Oh, Ashleigh Beaker would’n ever dream of being less than first in anything,” Liam says, with an affected air of affront. “My parents tried real hard to keep me from findin’ out about that particular family history, but all I hadda do was look her up.” He shakes a fist, puts on a militant growl. “Ashes To Ashes! Drug Kingpin Displays Business Rival’s Gem-Covered Skull! I mean really, his family sold her the skull inna first place, she told ‘em what she was gonna do with it.”

“Mm… hm,” says Rafael with careful diplomacy. “Yes. Passionate. I see.”

Rich snickers. “Babydolls are like that,” he tells Rafael, aiming a fond look down at Liam. “You should hear him whenever someone treats him like a kid! He actually threw a flower pot at the last guy.”

“The last guy asked if I could run and get my dad to sign off onna delivery, because obviously the guy in the middle of the lab, with the lab coat on, up to his fuckin’ elbows in mutant turnips, couldn’t possibly have been the residential botanical engineer,” Liam sniffs contemptuously. “And it was only a plastic flower pot, anyway. It bounced right off.”

“Bet it convinced him you were a real big boy, too,” Rich smiles, and gets a firm swat on the arm for it. “Ow, hey, hon, you know I’m delicate!”

“Oh yeah, delicate as the Washington,” Liam says, poking one solid bicep. “You’d keel over for a heavy sigh, I just bet.”

Rafael sits quietly, listening as Rich and Liam fall into reminiscing. They’re eager to explain things to Rafael, tell him about Liam’s boat and plants and Rich’s hoverboards and artificial intelligences, give him context for the conversation, but he’s still grateful when it’s late enough that he can bow out gracefully and leave them to their night together.

He makes himself turn on the light in Rich’s room instead of preparing for bed in the dark, and he goes about his evening routine well aware of the vast emptiness of the bed with no welcoming figure waiting for him in it.

It’s obscurely embarrassing even with no audience to witness; a one-man farce, a man fracturing into jealous, lonely little pieces, mired in his own frustrated tragedy, playing at being a grown man capable of caring for himself.

But Rafael is an actor, and the show must go on. So he takes a breath, and onward he goes.

–

LOG: MADAM BEAKER’S OFFICE, LATE OCTOBER

Basil would have liked to imagine that their first big breakthrough would be because of hard work and relentless research, because he’s sure as hell putting both of those things in. But the first break is a letter, as unexpected as a fish throwing itself onto the deck with a slice of lemon in its mouth.

A scan, specifically, of a longhand letter written on what looks like a page ripped out of a book. It’s in the heavy-handed uppercase letters of a guy who came up in Maintenance and Repair, where things had to be labeled legibly and unmistakably and a missed digit or letter could be a disaster. Rich mostly types these days, but he still writes like he works in a garage bay.

Because it is Rich’s handwriting. He’s alive.

Basil’s been holding onto the thread of hope for so long, it feels like he shouldn’t let himself admit to the enormous wash of relief that goes over him when he sees the careful, printscript hand. But he does have to sit down, holding the scan of the letter.

“That’s—” Lee reaches out and takes a copy of the screen, splitting it with the thoughtless ease of someone who’s grown up with implants, staring just as intently. “Okay. So he’s still—Okay.”

To Bella Beaker (PRT, Completion) and Leo Troy (SMT, Loaded Question), please forward to Liam’s landside grandma ASAP.

This is Richard Merrill (IST, Reliant). I was in Norleans with Liam Beaker (BGE, Genesis) and we were abducted. Known details:

• “Arthur Carraway” cpt/CEO of “Excalibur Security” Mixed “Lykoi” soldier mod, landside “white”, medit. dscnt? 50s-60s? Huge residential “compound” (staff, guards, galley, harem, admin but no industry) somewhere in “Kentucky” territory and surrounded by forest out to horizon. Exact coordinates unknown/antimemetic.
• Military garrison aboard, security/guards, lots of “Hastings”. I don’t have access to the crew count and they cycle thru postings ~30-50?
• Our implants are off, Liam is kept in isolation. We are alive and not badly hurt, fed regularly, I have found useful work, but it’s bad here. We need out. I am so sorry for endangering Liam and take care of him as best I can. *SOS ASAP*
• Carraway keeps a harem, all abductees, 12 total: Connor Campbell (Tennessee territory), Señor Solace King (Manhattan, patrician), Android Strega (Brooklyn), Rafael Caro (Bread And Roses traveling theater in Southern/Central territories), Hunter…

Basil’s eyes are burning. He closes the screen and flops back in his seat, staring up at the ceiling—tries to knuckle at his eyes and then curses as he almost punches himself with the stupid gauntlet for the hundredth time since it was replaced.

“He wrote it out like it was a fucking IST repair ticket,” he says, to nobody. “He always hates getting a badly written repair ticket.” He laughs, and then has to brace his elbows on his knees and cover his face for a minute as his eyes well embarrassingly over.

A harem. Twelve total. Rich only lists ten, and Liam ‘kept in isolation’. And the guy who took him from the box was even bigger than him…

Basil’s never gotten the whole story of what happened to Rich on his first posting, the bad ship, the one where he got his knife scars and his drinking problem and all his heartbreaking habits and assumptions. How he came back to the Reliant flinchy and grim and believing sex was something you owed people for favors, how he still hates showering with other guys there. How he locks up when people get too pushy flirting with him, or how he drank himself blind and sick after one of the Reliant’s mechanics smacked his ass at a party.

“Beaker got this too, right?” says Lee.

Their face is painfully set when Basil looks up; they know, they have to have figured it out, they can do math too. But they don’t ask. And Rich hates when people talk about what happened to him, when they pity him for it.

Basil pulls himself together with an effort, sniffs hard and pulls up his screens, and then startles hard at the ringing alert of an incoming call.

Mitch is pacing in rapid circles around the Mall’s landing deck when Basil picks up the call, which is the only reason Basil has time to hastily re-focus his own screens to make absolutely sure there’s no sign of his new prosthesis. Mitch glances up, does a double-take when he sees his call has gone through, and there’s a second or two of awful lag before he says “Basil,” in a tone that might be relief or might just be anguish.

“I know,” Basil says. “I know. I read it.”

“Did you see,” Mitch starts, and then catches as Basil’s words make it through and reaches up to run his hands through the close crop of his hair. “Okay. Okay. Sorry. I know it’s hard for you to take calls out there, I shouldn’t be—”

“It’s okay.”

“—In the middle of the day, I just, I’m just, I’m losing my mind—”

“Mitch, it’s okay.”

“It’s fucked!” Mitch snaps, so sudden and loud Basil flinches back from his screen. He doesn’t think he’s heard Mitch curse at somebody like that in… maybe ever. Or if he has, it’s sure as hell never felt this bad. “You’re a million miles away trying to find some monster that locks people up to—” Mitch strangles on the words, swallowing convulsively. “Rich was getting better!”

“I know,” Basil says again, because there’s nothing else to say. “We’ll find him.”

“Don’t call Trimmer,” Mitch says abruptly. Still with that strange, savage energy. “Before you ask. He got, he saw. It. He’s smarter’n me and a whole lot less, less… okay. Angela’s barely talking him down. If he gets any kind of line on one of you guys on the outside, if he, I don’t know. She’ll probably have to tie him to the mast to keep him from going over the side. To swim out there himself. To do something.” His dark, warm eyes go flinty for a second, and his mouth presses into a hard, pained line. “…I know the feeling.”

“Yeah, well,” Basil says. Fuck, he doesn’t want to have this argument again right now of all times. Shit. “Look, I don’t know what Commander Bane can get out of this, but whatever she gets I think we’ve got to be moving somewhere soon. Even if either of you made it all the way over here from the Mall, and you didn’t get stabbed or, or shot or something halfway here, or somebody awful didn’t see Trimmer’s feet and do something fucked up about it—the last thing any of us needs is to be chasing each other around the continent!”

Mitch glares at him and starts pacing again. “I hate this,” he says tightly. “Rich is so—you know what this is probably doing to him, what if he’s gone right back to how messed up he was when we met him? Or worse!”

It’s not like Basil hasn’t been thinking the same thing, but hearing it from another person kicks a lagging part of his brain into gear. Sifting through the shit for sparks of good news, he’s gotten a lot of fucking practice at this over the last couple of months.

“Actually,” he says slowly. Carefully. “I don’t think he will be. He got this letter out, Mitch. His siblings never even knew about the Sympatico shit until it was all over, Rich never told anybody, even though he was right there on the Fleet—but this time he’s the guy sending up flares. You know how much longer people can tread water when they know there’s a rescue coming, and—he knows what it’s like to be rescued now, he knows it’ll happen. I don’t think he’s gonna sink, this time. He’s not some clueless cut-off kid with one horrible little jackass friend in the world. Not that we’re not grateful for all of Joseph Trimmer’s heroically prosocial endeavors— ”

Mitch gives the exact wry snort Basil was hoping for.

“—But he called for help. He knows it’ll come.” Basil takes a silent, steadying breath and meets Mitch’s eyes through the screen. “Now I just need you to know that too.”

“I want to be that help.”

“Well, stand by,” Basil says, and squares his shoulders every bit as heroically as any Hastings might. “You just stand by, and be home when we come back.”

“Okay,” Mitch says, and sniffs. “Okay, then.”

“Basil,” Lee says, a pained, grinding rumble. “Beaker’s copied in on this. We gotta get up there and see—”

“Yeah,” Basil says, and blinks hard, catching himself just short of reaching up to rub his eyes with his clumsy new prosthetic. “Okay. Mitch, I love you. I’ll be safe. I’ve gotta go.”

Mitch nods, just once, and terminates the call.

Lee gives Basil a grace period of a minute or two, and then reaches over a huge hand and pats awkwardly between his shoulderblades as his breath starts to steady.

“Come on,” they say. “Let’s go see what kind of shit Liam’s granny’s flipping.”

By the time they get to Madam Beaker’s office, she’s throwing things.

Commander Bane isn’t stopping her. She tracks the woman patiently around her office, and whips out a huge white hand to catch the shinier or more delicate knick-knacks out of the air with a chillingly superhuman speed and coordination, setting them safely back down on her employer’s desk as she curses and tears her office apart.

“—Piece of shit thinks he can put his filthy paws on my grandson, I’ll flay him from the feet up—”

Commander Bane twitches as the door opens, and turns with a thunderous expression on her face. When she sees who it is, her expression gives a painful twist and then smooths out into impassivity.

“Out,” she says.

“What?” says Lee, outraged. “No! This is huge, we’re not going to wait in the passage like—”

“We’ve got a name,” Basil cuts in, breathless from the jog up the stairs, and winces as Madam Beaker smashes a fragile little fist directly through the front of a display case and hurls an expensive-looking plate toward the wall. Commander Bane snags it by her fingertips and sets it carefully down, massive shoulders taut.

“We, so,” Basil stumbles on, “what are we gonna do? What can we do?”

Commander Bane opens her mouth, but it’s Madam Beaker who answers, whipping around with blood on her delicate hands and gold jewelry, eyes flashing with a familiar white-hot rage that makes her look more like her grandson than she has since they arrived.

“We’re going to hunt him down like a dog,” she says, and Basil can’t help taking a step back as she steps forward. “I’m taking my grandson back and if he tries to hold on I’ll feed him his fucking fingers.”

She claps her hands together. Some of the bloody gold rings on her fingers must be data rings, because a screen with ornate custom embellishments around the frame springs up between her hands and she immediately starts digging through some kind of directory app Basil’s never seen before.

“Madam,” says Commander Bane steadily, but there’s an edge of pained resignation in the grim set of her jaw. “A frontal assault will just hamstring us later. Please take a moment to think this through—”

“Take a moment to shove it up your ass, Bane,” Madam Beaker snaps, and clicks through a few subheadings in quick succession. “Excalibur—I’ve seen that name. Carraway, Carraway…”

“You’re just gonna call him?!” says Lee, who looks about as alarmed as Basil feels. “Hey, shouldn’t we—”

Madam Beaker jabs at a contact name so hard her screen almost shorts out, and a call screen pops up already ringing.

It opens quickly to a figure sitting at a desk looking almost offensively normal, a bland pale brown-haired guy in an office, his face startled but professional. Basil pulls up a screen of his own, hastily piggybacking onto the call: the number Madam Beaker is calling is as featureless as a bulkhead, blocked and masked into a complete dead end.

“Excalibur Security Solutions,” says the man at the desk. “How can—”

“Get me Carraway,” says Madam Beaker with the haughty rage of an avenging god.

“Wh—Ma’am—”

“That’s Madam Beaker to you,” Madam Beaker says. “Ashes Beaker, of Flask and Beaker Pharmaceuticals. If you don’t know my name, then you’re an even bigger idiot than you look like! Carraway, now.”

On the other end of the call, the man’s face goes very pale very fast. “Ma’am—Madam Beaker, yes, of course, I’m so sorry! I don’t have the authority to directly contact—I could forward you to our complaints department?”

“I’m going to burn his company to the ground,” says Madam Beaker. “I intend to tell your rabid mongrel of a boss this to his face. And you’re going to direct my call to him, because I have a picture of your face, you little idiot. You’ll be much easier to find than he will, and I will find him. Now, put me through, or I’ll make you regret that you were ever fucking born!”

“I’ll, oh, I, alright, please just, uh,” says the man, who looks like he might be regretting it already. “One moment to, to route your call please, madam.”

The screen flickers and jumps as it reroutes, redirecting and then redirecting again, then blurring and distorting in a way that makes Basil, still riding on the connection, wince and shake his head. Then there’s a ring. And another. And another…

The comm rings for an endless minute, and then there’s a click, and the call terminates from the other end.

“Lost signal?” says Commander Bane, as her employer stares at the screen, face set in icy disbelief.

“No,” says Basil. “He uh. He definitely hung up.”

Madam Beaker doesn’t curse or scream this time. She dismisses the first part of the redirection in one derisive twitch of her wrist and redials the final comm line, and it rings again, and hangs up after the first ring. Again. And then again. And then the call stops going through at all.

“I think he blocked you,” Basil says—as meekly as he can, because he may not work with dangerously wealthy people often, but he’s seen enough to know now is not a good time to be flippant. Madam Beaker is staring at the blank screen with wide, cold eyes, lips pressed thinly together and nostrils flaring as she takes deep, fast, furious breaths.

“…Madam,” says Commander Bane, firm and steady as stone. Nothing else.

Madam Beaker stands there for another few moments, motionless. Then she breathes out through her teeth and force-quits her screen with a vicious slash of her glittering, bloody hand.

“You’re not going to let me burn the entire Kentucky Territory down, are you?” she says, and she says it almost like a joke, but there’s something genuine and deeply, poisonously resentful in her voice.

“I will not, Madam,” says Commander Bane, soft and crisp, and goes to a filigree cabinet to pull out an ornate little first aid kit. When she hands her employer a delicate pair of tweezers, Madam Beaker clicks her tongue but takes them with bad grace, expertly picking fragments of glass out of her knuckles.

“Fine,” she says. “Fine then. You fix it. You clean up this damn mess! I want his head, Bane.”

“Madam,” says Commander Bane, with the quiet focus of Rich with a problem in front of him, and salutes, and leads the way out.

–

Scene 4: Mansion halls.

Sol rousts Rafael out of his empty bed at the ungodly hour of six in the morning, like the vile beast he is, and Rafael stalks off to swords practice in a foul mood, and fouler because he knows it’s ridiculous to feel so bereft. He throws himself into Sol’s drills and exercises as a suitable distraction, and his mood has lightened by the time they finish, even if he’s aching in every muscle of every limb.

Sol is decent company over breakfast. Rafael knows he’s well aware of the source of Rafael’s ill temper because he has the same difficulty, and they seem to have established a silent mutual agreement not to discuss it.

This is complicated when Rich shows up halfway through breakfast. Sol flicks an ear and glances up as soon as he appears at the door, face brightening, and then Rafael follows his gaze and feels himself light up the same way, which is completely ridiculous. He catches Sol’s eye, sees the same annoyed realization there, and starts snickering.

“Stop it,” Sol huffs at him, trying to bite down on his own reluctant laughter, and reaches across the table to swat Rafael. “Cut it out, you—”

“Hopeless,” Rafael manages before getting command of himself again.

“Morning, guys,” Rich says as he comes up, smiling a little. “Looks like you’re having fun over here.”

“Shakespeare’s all mouth and no neurons, that’s all,” Sol snorts.

“As you are a paragon of good sense,” Rafael tells him, and smiles up at Rich. He looks good this morning, cheerful and well-rested, and Rafael dares to ask, “Was your night pleasant?”

“Yeah!” Rich says, putting a hand on Rafael’s shoulder to squeeze gently. “It was really nice, yeah.”

“I’m glad,” Rafael says.

“Yeah, great,” Sol says brusquely. “You getting some food or what?”

Rich snorts at him, unbothered, and goes to get himself breakfast.

When breakfast is done, Rich only has a couple of errands to carry out, and then they’re free to go find Connor and run through the gardens with him. Already Rafael can feel that he’s gotten stronger; he can run for longer before stopping, he can stretch himself without feeling he’ll break for it. It’s a lovely change from the previous week’s constant exhaustion.

Eventually, Connor tires as well. Rich dunks him one last time in a fountain, and after getting his breath back, Connor heads off toward the boys’ wing, dripping.

Rafael clicks his rings together to check the time and is disappointed to find there’s plenty of time to shower and change before work, but not enough to risk a brief dalliance, to say nothing of an extended encounter like yesterday’s. He keeps that to himself, though, as he follows Rich back into the mansion.

After a leisurely shower, Rich puts on his despised jeans and a clean shirt and leads the way towards Carraway’s office. They’re walking down the hall when Rich suddenly lifts his head and pauses, then speeds up. Baffled, Rafael jogs at his heels, about to ask what’s wrong when he hears music; someone is playing Carraway’s piano, soft and skillful, and Rich is heading straight towards the sound.

Rich heads right into the room, and Rafael follows just in time to see Omar tearing himself away from the piano so fast and graceless that he knocks the bench over, then nearly trips over the upturned legs. Rich keeps going, straight towards him, and Omar runs as soon as he’s got his feet under him: flat-out, like a rabbit bolting before a hunting dog.

“There,” Rich says, coming to a halt by the overturned bench, his hands in huge fists, his shoulders high and tight. “That should do it.”

“Do what?” Rafael asks, bewildered and a little disturbed, and then turns in a rush, cold shock shooting up his spine as Sandgren comes striding with venomous purpose through the door.