Marten had moved. Not that Rafe had expected anything different. It had been ten years, after all, and Marten had been trying to find himself a place in a better area of the city even back then. Finding Marten’s new place wasn’t that hard, since Rafe knew the kind of work Marten did and he knew Marten’s previous address.
Ten years might have passed, but for Rafe, it felt like it had only been a few weeks since he’d been pulling beams out of the ocean with the man.
Marten took one look at Rafe, cursed, and slammed his roughly painted door in Rafe’s face. Marten’s new place might be in a better part of the city, but it was in one of the least improved buildings in the area.
Rafe banged against the pitted metal again, not letting up until Marten yanked it open.
“What the hell do you want?” Marten said.
“I need to talk to you.”
Marten eyed Rafe suspiciously, then let his gaze wander over Rafe’s shoulder to Agg. His gaze narrowed.
Rafe had to admit, Agg looked striking in his new Thrifty Threads shirt. He’d kept the open neck look and added the glinting buckle, but he’d picked out a rich fabric that looked so fine it could have cost as much as the rusty wheeler the kid had run up on the edge of the sidewalk outside Marten’s building and Rafe wouldn’t have been surprised.
“What’s this about? And who’s the companion?”
“Let me in.”
“Why?”
“You owe Berto. He—”
“You two left me in the lurch for a job with a tight deadline. I don’t owe you or your brother shit. Besides which, he collected years ago when he came around asking for help to look for you.” Marten’s gaze turned suspicious again. “I thought you went missing. What an inconsiderate prick, letting your brother think you were dead like that.”
“Forget all that. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all. Have you seen Berto lately? He’s back in the city and I need to find him.”
“Haven’t seen him.” Marten tried to shut the door again.
Rafe braced his forearm on the door. “Let me in, I need to talk to you.” He glanced over his shoulder at the empty hallway. “Definitely not in public.”
“This is a private building.”
“Not private enough for what I want to talk about. Trust me.”
They were on the third floor, and Rafe hadn’t seen anyone since he and Agg had crowded onto the liftcage, but there could always be someone listening. What he wanted to talk about didn’t need to be overheard.
“I don’t trust you. I don’t even know you. I hardly knew you back when, but I sure don’t know you now.”
Rafe leaned in. Quietly, he said, “This is about Dontan Narvo.”
“Dontan Narvo?” Marten said, his expression closing down. He shoved hard on the door. “I don’t want anything to do with anything connected to Narvo.”
Agg reached around Rafe and pushed back on the door. His greater strength easily defeated Marten’s effort to close the door in Rafe’s face again.
Marten’s mouth tightened noticeably, even in the shadows cast by the light at his back.
“I’m not asking you to get involved,” Rafe said. “I just have a few questions, that’s all. I’ve been out of the area for a while. I just need a little information. Berto could be in trouble.”
“Look,” Marten said, gaze flickering between Rafe and Agg before settling firmly on Rafe. “I don’t know anything that could help you. Talk to Aiden. He knows all about Narvo and his bunch. He spent a few years working for the guy. But don’t expect him to be happy to see you.”
“I can pay.”
“Pay him. I don’t want involved in whatever this is. I’ve got a job to get to in the morning and you’re keeping me up.”
“Fine then. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry we bailed on you.”
“Yeah, that’s what your brother said. It didn’t mean a lot then, and it doesn’t mean anything now.”
Rafe stepped back, pulling his arm off the door. He bumped into Agg, but Agg just put his arm around Rafe and released the door.
Marten stared at them both for another moment, then slammed the door.
Rafe cursed. He started to knock but the door opened again before he could.
Marten glared at Rafe. “You should know Aiden won’t be happy to see you.”
“I never liked him either. He was an asshole.”
Marten blew out a low, tight breath. “It’s not because you two were always bitching at each other. You left in an awful hurry, damn you, and I had to find somebody to replace you fast or we were going to lose a huge piece of the pot. The guy I found didn’t know shit about what he was doing. He hit Charlie with a beam. Killed him. Aiden left after that. Didn’t want the reminder, he said. He blamed me, but he blamed you and your brother too.”
Rafe had known there would be consequences for his and Berto’s sudden departure from the second canton. He’d known, but he hadn’t expected something so direct. His stomach churned.
“Charlie was a good guy,” he said.
“Shoulda been Aiden,” Marten said, cold and hard. “That prick traded places with Charlie that morning, and I let him. Not that it was his fault Vento didn’t know what the hell he was doing. But I always liked Charlie.”
“I’m sorry,” Rafe said.
“So was Berto.” Marten scratched at his chin for a moment and Rafe noticed the first hint of gray in the scruff there. “Look, I can tell you where you can find Aiden, but that’s all I’m offering.”
“Got it. I won’t ask for anything else.”
“None of that was your fault,” Agg said from the bed Rafe and he had crashed in earlier. The moonlight was fading, being replaced by the rising sun, but Rafe was still having trouble getting to sleep because he couldn’t stop thinking about Marten and Charlie.
“You say that, but you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
They were alone in the room. The kid had refused Agg’s offer of his own room for the night in the out-of-the-way lodge; he’d said he wasn’t letting anyone steal his wheeler and then he’d locked himself inside it. Rafe had debated breaking in and dragging the kid out, just to be sure the brat didn’t take off in the night, but he’d decided against it. He could find another wheeler if necessary, and… the kid had a right to want to protect what was his. Rafe understood what it was like to have very little and how strongly that had made him want to hang on to what he did have.
“You’re not responsible for that beam hitting your friend. You weren’t even there.”
Rafe stared up at the lodge’s dingy ceiling.
“That’s the thing. Charlie wasn’t my friend. I barely knew him. We don’t make friends, Berto and me. Wicker was the first time—well, she was different, for Berto. I knew it after the first week.”
Agg leaned over Rafe on his elbow, a frown visible in his blue eyes, although how that was, Rafe couldn’t have said. “I don’t understand, then,” Agg said. “If he wasn’t your friend, why does his death bother you so much?”
“Because I started the chain of events that caused it. Everything we do has consequences. I know that. Sometimes it’s easy to pretend those things are out of our hands, but they’re not.” Rafe pushed his fingers into his hair and left them there, his arm resting over his head. “When my parents died, we had nothing, but somehow Berto found work, and pretty soon we were doing pretty damn well for a pair of orphans. One thing led to another, the way they always do, and we found ourselves doing some really questionable things. Then the guy we were working for decided he needed us to clear out a city block he wanted to reclaim. There was a community there, people who’d turned the area into their home. We took down the power for the entire block, thinking he was going to go in and break a few things, scare a few people that weren’t even supposed to be there, and yeah, he did that.”
Rafe breathed through the tightness in his chest.
Agg’s warm hand landed heavy on Rafe’s naked chest. Rafe covered it with his own hand and squeezed.
“Yeah. He did that. He set fire to the whole block. That was when me and Berto said enough. We’d become the people who’d killed our parents. It was a tough few weeks. I blamed Berto for turning me into that kind of person. Berto kicked my ass a few times when I got stupid, and then we moved. And we kept moving, because we have a reputation and it follows us everywhere we go.”
Agg rubbed his palm over Rafe’s chest. Rafe pushed Agg’s hand lower.
Agg obliged.
“We don’t do that shit anymore,” Rafe continued, more breathless than before as Agg’s fingers curled around his cock. “Or we didn’t. I can’t let Berto do it again. He won’t want to be that kind of man, but he’d do it for his family. I know he would.”
“My lovely Rafe…” Agg said softly. “You really are such a gentle soul.”
Rafe choked out a laugh as his body responded swiftly to Agg’s touch. “You don’t know me at all, do you?”
“I know everything I need to know about you. I love you.”
“You love this ideal you’ve created in your head. You’re going to be sorely disappointed when you realize the truth, pal.”
“Never.” Agg lowered his head and kissed Rafe.
Making contact with this Aiden that Rafe had known was going to be trouble. Agg stared at the location on the commcast with pursed lips and debated which of his adopted nestlings he should contact.
Gregory knew the criminal world. Ilson knew… other things. Possibly things that could help Agg with this particular issue.
He glanced at Rafe sitting beside him in the small draftery next to the lodge where they’d spent the night, two hands on his fruitbread sandwich, his eyes on the room at large. Horace kept side-eyeing Rafe, as if he had something he wanted to say, but wasn’t ready to say it yet.
Soon, Agg thought. Rafe liked to pretend the kid annoyed him, but Agg knew the truth.
Agg gestured over his shoulder, toward the short hallway under the sign that said “Facilities” and caught Horace’s attention. “Don’t touch my food.”
“You going to pay if I order another?”
Agg sniffed and looked at the two bowls Horace had already emptied.
Rafe shoved his uneaten bowl of thick stew toward Horace. “Don’t make yourself sick.”
“You’re not my boss, gerk.”
Agg huffed and pushed away from the table. The chair’s legs hardly screaked on the greasy floor. “I won’t be long.”
Rafe frowned up at him. “What?”
Agg gestured, drawing attention away from the commcast in his other hand. “In the facilities. I won’t be long.”
Rafe nodded and went back to eating.
Hmm. Rafe really wasn’t at the top of his form today. Agg had expected him to be at least a little suspicious.
Agg made his way to the facilities, waited his turn, then went inside and locked the door. He wrinkled his nose at the smell, then stepped on the lever that flushed extra water through the squatter.
He entered Ilson’s code and waited impatiently for the connection.
Ilson appeared surprisingly quick. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s well.” Agg swirled his fingers over the viewer. “What do you make of this?”
Ilson’s eyes lowered for a moment. “Ah,” he said. “Now that’s interesting. Haven’t seen one of those out in the open in a while.”
“Does it mean what I think it means?”
Ilson smiled, teeth on full display. “Probably. You’ve always liked those commcast dramatizations.”
Heat radiated into Agg’s face. “They’re educational.”
“You could say that. You recognized that symbol because of them, right?”
Agg cleared his throat. “Yes.”
“Well, it’s exactly what you think it is, although most of the dramatizations get one thing very wrong.”
“What’s that?”
“The humans who go in don’t always come out in one piece.”
“But—”
“There are Yeeru who are just as anti-human as there are humans anti-Yeeru. Don’t forget that. Places like this offer the perfect opportunity to express some of that sentiment with very few repercussions. Humans aren’t that fond of humans who like fucking monsters. The authorities have a tendency to let accidents slide, to keep the peace.” Said with an emphasis on “accidents” that completely changed the meaning of the word.
A shiver of foreboding made Agg lose his hold over his human form and his monster slipped free. By the time he’d reverted to human, Ilson had gone.