For a brief moment when Darius Miranda first approached, Theo had actually been annoyed. They don’t have time for this. They need to find Griff and update her on what’s happening, Tair and the Iveroa Stone and this plan to find Diana Ontiveros in order to learn how this supposed weapon actually works. They need to tell her about all of that, and they need to arrange for backup. Then they’ve got to double back around to the Regio Marina to meet Tair, and do what they can in the meantime to make peace with a descent back down to that place where they swore they’d never return.
“Don’t do this,” they had told Arran quietly in their apartment, out of earshot of his sister and Tair, who—thank Terra—seemed to have no idea they knew anything about the Iveroa Stone, and evidently no intention of revealing their real identity to Selah Kleios.
“I have to,” had been his response. “She has the Stone, but it’s worthless if she can’t activate it.”
“Griff might know—”
“She doesn’t. You said she doesn’t.” Damn him, but he was right. “And if Tair really is being blackmailed over it, that means someone else knows about it, too. We need to know who so the Revenants can cut off that loose end.” And then—“You’ll come with me, right?” The growing knot in Theo’s chest had tightened. “You’ve been there before.”
It wasn’t a question, and saying no wasn’t an option, because Arran was right. They have to go back. Theo feels bile rise in their throat at the prospect, but it is what needs to be done. That, at the very least, is grounding. So they had made their plans, and then made their excuses, because Griff needs to know what’s happening before anything else.
So, yes, when Darius Miranda first materialized out of the bustle of the Fourth Ward like a pasty, self-important shadow, Theo had actually been annoyed to see him. Now, they’re more than a little freaked out.
Because Una. Stubborn, freeborn, entirely-too-noticeable Una.
He doesn’t actually know anything. Theo is clinging to that. Darius Miranda has no idea that Una is one of their canaries, or even remotely related to the Revenants. He’s come to her a completely different way. But he knows who she is, knows her by name, and that is a fucking problem. It’s one of the reasons servae make such good spies. No one’s supposed to notice them. There’s nothing more dangerous for a serva than being noticed, never mind the reason why.
So now it’s Theo’s job to make sure Darius Miranda forgets that Una exists.
Theo is a good actor, but they don’t like trading the light jabs and smiles of comradeship with Darius fucking Miranda. They don’t like entertaining that gleam in his eerily pale eyes, the one that says, Yes. What an excellent choice I’ve made. What a good investment you’ll be. Others have looked at them that way before. But they need this. They need his trust. They need his utmost confidence for when they convince him that he’s chasing the wrong lead.
Questions unasked and unanswered carry them from the Plaza Capitolio to the Arborem by hired rickshaw, Darius Miranda next to them, because he’ll agree to stay out of sight but he won’t be shaken from their side. These questions carry them up the winding road to Breakwater House and around the back to the kitchen entrance, where they send a preteen stableboy up to fetch Una. They carry them in small paces back and forth across the gravel, as Darius retreats to the tree line some thirty yards away, until the quick shuffle of steps alerts them to Una’s arrival.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses, but Theo jerks their head and hopes the message comes across. Shut up, for just once in your life. Darius Miranda is out of earshot for the moment, but he may not stay that way for long.
“Relax,” they hiss, and their mind has been working overtime on the way here, gears whirring hot to figure out the best way to play this off. “I have a cover here. If anyone asks, I got lost and you were giving me directions back to the main road. Just follow me and act natural, and do as I say.”
“What’s happening?”
“Blackbags.” They glance sharply over at the tree line, because they don’t dare anything more obvious than that, but it’s enough. Una’s shrewd gaze follows the line to its obvious conclusion.
“They’re here?”
“One of them. He thinks you might have something to do with the Historian’s death.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry, he’s not accusing you. Just thinks you might know something, and I have to get him off your tail. Did you—?”
“I haven’t done anything. Haven’t even been off the estate since you saw me last.” There’s something mutinous in Una’s expression, and it’s only then that Theo realizes how terrible she looks. Cheeks hollowed, swaying slightly on her feet. “Stared at some fucker a second too long at the viewing. The senator told the domo to take care of it, and Imarry . . . took care of it. I’ve been on quarter meals all week.”
Theo winces, because they’ve been there. But someone always tried, at least, to squirrel them away some extra food. It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s an unspoken rule—while the world may turn its back, you try to have each other’s. But it doesn’t surprise them somehow to know that Una hasn’t had great luck making friends. She’s always been more concerned with her own skin than looking out for anyone else.
“Fucking patricians,” they say, and she looks gratified by that, at least. “Don’t worry, this’ll be over quick. Just play dumb and he’ll move on to the next lead.”
Una nods, and lets herself be led closer to the tree line. Theo can see the vague outline where Darius Miranda has knelt down amid the brush, but only because they know to look, and not for the first time they can appreciate that he is decidedly excellent at his job.
But this will be quick work, because he, like all blackbags, has one fatal, deadly flaw. He doesn’t really believe that someone like Una is capable of using her brain in the first place. And that isn’t his fault. That’s the same inherent believed decency of a man who upholds the law. Darius Miranda is not a bad person because he is an evil one, a sadist who relishes in the pain and misery of others. Darius Miranda is a bad person because he has been taught to use his talents for the sake of bad works. Of the two kinds of bad people in this world, that’s the one Theo has a harder time reconciling.
Evil men are so much easier to hate.
The two of them approach the tree line, and Theo opens their mouth, but Una gets there first: “He’s not wrong, though.”
Her voice rings loud and clear through the gathering dark, and Theo’s heart nearly leaps out of their chest. Has she completely lost her mind? Darius Miranda is right there, and Darius Miranda is listening.
Deathly quiet, they whisper, “Una—”
“You fucked me over. You promised me freedom.”
“Una, be quiet.”
“No,” she snarls, and that mutinous glare has become a storm, and Theo realizes with a plummeting jolt that it’s not for some faceless majordomo, it’s for them. “You promised me freedom in exchange for information, when you never intended to hold up your end. And now that the blackbags are onto you and the Revenants, you’re just gonna let me take the fall instead? No. I don’t think so.”
Theo is falling, falling fast and hard and wild, so why are they still standing on their own two feet? This is going sideways fast. “That’s not what this—”
“I saw you at the viewing, Theo Nix. I know all about your little cover story here, you goddamn thremid, and I know that blackbag in the trees has no fucking idea who you really are. But I do. I know you. I see you. And I am not taking the fall for you.”
“Shut. Up,” they hiss, bruising hands darting out to catch her wrists, and if Terra is actually up there somewhere, if she’s listening, then she’ll have placed Darius Miranda too far inside the brush to hear a thing.
This is bad. This is really, really bad.
“Una, you have got to trust me. Not Griff, not the Revenants, me. The blackbags don’t suspect you. They don’t even suspect me, that’s not what this is. He just wants to know—”
“Like I can trust a fucking word you say.”
“You can. I’ll get you out of here, I swear. I will get you past the legionaries at the gate, and I will personally guard you along the Imperial Road myself, but only if it means you shut up right fucking now. He only even knows you exist because—”
Click.
“I think,” says a voice, that smooth patrician cant gone glacial, “that the time for staying quiet is over, Miss Arlot. Or rather . . . Nix, was it?”
And there, taking shape from the trees, blond hair flying away at the temples, Darius Miranda is aiming an honest-to-god pistol dead straight at the pair of them.
Theo’s heart catches somewhere in their throat.
Gunpowder is an Imperial-regulated substance. They’ve never seen it in their life. Not outside the random distant firework. But they’ve heard the stories, the warnings of destruction, how a single shot from a handgun can burrow a narrow path clean through a person’s brain in under a second, and they have never stared down the barrel of one before. They understand the phrase, now.
But Una just raises her chin. “Officer.”
He nods, curt and courteous, and they could be meeting for a meridiem date. “Una. Thank you for your candor. I think your companion there was going to lead me on a fool’s chase, but that confession just sped up my investigation by a considerable amount.”
“They’re not my companion,” she spits, like the word could be poison. “And of course I confessed. I’ll confess to whatever you want.”
A curious smile seems to edge at the corner of Darius’s lips, something hollow and ugly haunting the edge even as his eyes dart briefly to Theo and back. But he doesn’t lower his pistol. Simple, he must think. A simple native savage. But Theo is starting to get a terrible feeling they know what Una’s playing toward. He’s not wrong, though. That’s what she said, at the start of this fucking mess.
They don’t know how to get themself out of this. They don’t know how a gunfight works.
“Accommodating of you,” Darius says, and gets straight to it. “Are you a Revenant?”
“No. But I pass Griff information, sometimes.”
“Could you lead me to him?”
“Her. And no. But I could point her out if she’s around.”
Theo wants to scream. Wants to take the knife strapped inside their duskra and slash Una’s traitorous Ynglot throat and watch the blood pour out. They brought her into this. They recruited her. They’re the one who found a captive in enemy territory and offered her the chance to work her way back home. It would be an adventure, Theo had thought. Once Griff gave the go-ahead. There are no free Ynglots in Sargassan cities, but Theo would find a way to smuggle Una through the city gates and past the legionary checkpoints of outlying agricultural villages all the same. They’d stay with her until the terrain began to look familiar, or until they came upon more Ynglots who might know where her family were. The Imperial Road would be too dangerous to just abandon Una to it, noxious mists and tales of rabid hybrid wildlife still a threat even to a solo Ynglot raider. Theo had planned on that. They had made a promise and they had meant it. And here Una is, repaying Theo by throwing all sense of self-preservation out the window, and both their lives out with it.
“Did you buy water hemlock from Tobin Persie’s apothecary?” Miranda asks. The questions just keep coming.
“Every month to the day.”
“And did you use a portion of those orders to distill parcae?”
“No.”
“Then who else had access to—”
“I just crushed it up as is. You Sargassans make everything so much more complicated than it needs to be. And yes, I used it to kill Alexander Kleios, too, if that was about to be your next question.”
For a moment, Theo thinks they hear a small sound come from somewhere in the trees, something like a strangled halfway hiss. But they must have imagined it, it must have come from their own heart skipping a beat, because Una killed Alexander Kleios and wait, what?
Darius Miranda is regarding her now with an air of solid triumph, and Theo wonders how quickly they could draw their blades and bury them in his chest, but they have no idea how fast he can cock and shoot that gun.
“Why?” It’s simple, the final question. “Why confess so freely?”
“Because,” says Una, smiling now, “you can’t arrest me. The Consul wouldn’t let you.”
Darius Miranda cocks a brow in perplexed surprise, but Theo feels their heart jolt. Because if the sinking feeling in their gut is at all on the right track, then Una hasn’t lost her sense of self-preservation at all.
Here is the bad news, what Theo has always known: no one is coming to save you.
Here is the good news: you can always save yourself.
Except when a gun’s involved, it turns out, because Theo is frozen where they stand and they don’t know what to do to get out of this mess, but in the end it doesn’t matter.
He comes out of nowhere.
So this is what it feels like, they recognize dimly, as he comes barreling out from the trees and slams a granite rock over Darius Miranda’s head with a sickening crunch. This is what it feels like to be saved. This is what it feels like to have someone come back for you. The Deputy Chief of the Cohort Intelligentia drops like limp dappham to the ground, and Arran Alexander turns to face the woman who murdered his father.
This is how it is, to be Theodora Nix at twenty-seven. This is how it is, to have been on their own for a very long time.
It’s to never have guessed someone would stay all along, moving unnoticed and unseen at a distance, through crowded limestone plazas and quiet wooded brush. It’s to feel the natural rhythm of two separate minds working as one, their hands scrabbling for Darius Miranda’s gun as he bleeds out from the skull, dying fast where they roll him inside the tree line, Arran’s own hands working to pin Una’s wrists behind her back even after she’s gotten a solid punch in.
It’s their thumping heart and thumping footfalls running through the forest in the falling dark. It’s to know that this is a stolen freedom, and they’d accept no other kind. It’s their eyes meeting his, a quiet thank you unsaid but loudly heard.
No one has ever come back for them before.