A waist-high bamboo fence surrounded Kai’s yard. Across the quarter-acre of grass and behind a row of palm trees stood her bungalow, pink walled and slope roofed, a clever investment in a criminal real estate auction; after a few years’ occupancy and regular cleaning, it no longer stank of weed. A dog barked down the street. A carriage rolled past, bearing passengers to revelry and the shore.
She opened the gate and stepped inside. Wards prickled over her skin, recognizing her. She swayed up the steps and leaned against the wall as she searched her purse for her keys and unlocked the door. After a slow count of ten she pushed herself off the wall, turned the knob, and lurched into her dark living room. She swung the door shut behind her, dropped her keys in the wood bowl on the table by the entrance, set her hand on the table, sagged.
Thorns scraped her wrist. She screamed and lashed out with the cane, hitting the wall. Dizzy, and without the cane’s support, she crashed back into the door. Her hand flailed for balance and struck the coatrack, which toppled onto her. She fell in an avalanche of jackets and old hats.
Lights clicked on, and the coatrack rose of its own accord. Kai blinked brilliance from her eyes. The living room resolved: white shag carpet left over from the dope-peddling former owners, ghostlights recessed into the ceiling, leather chairs and cheap tables. And Claude, standing over her, setting the coatrack on its feet. She recognized the curve of his thigh under his khaki pants, and the spread of his hips, and the swell of his forearms and his once-delicate hands, knuckles swollen by a hundred fights. He wore his uniform shirt, navy blue and short sleeved.
“What the hell.” She was panting. She hoped he didn’t mistake it for desire. She wondered what she looked like, then decided she’d rather not know. Hair stuck to her face, eyes wide.
“It’s just me,” he said, and offered her a hand, which she ignored. “Sorry I startled you.”
“I felt thorns.” She found the cane where she’d dropped it, and pulled herself into a crouch. “Something grabbed my wrist.”
Claude ran one hand through his cropped hair, and grinned. He had a broad face, with large front teeth. She’d loved his grin, once. She followed the direction of his eyes, and saw, on the table by the door, a dozen roses bound in purple crepe paper. “Oh, hells.” A sweater remained on the floor. She bent, cursing from the pain, picked the sweater up, and hung it on the rack.
“Jace told me you’d be back tonight.”
“Did he.”
“I thought I’d come, you know, say hi. Welcome home.”
“This is my house. You don’t get to welcome me back here.”
“You were hurt. I thought you could use a friendly face.”
“And you think you qualify?”
“We were friends, once. I thought, even after everything…” He stopped. “I’m sorry. It was a bad idea.” As if he’d just realized this.
She considered keeping her back to him, but felt like a punished child staring into the corner of her own living room. With the lights on, she saw more signs of his presence. His jacket, folded over the arm of the recliner he liked, the one she’d planned to sell since he moved out. A cup of coffee, a quarter full, occupied a coaster on the table. Aside from these, the table was bare, as was the rest of the living room. She knew how she’d left the place, and expected used water glasses and books facedown and splayed to hold her place, crumb-strewn plates covered in mold that would by now be halfway through the Bronze Age. Though there wasn’t much bronze around Kai’s living room; any prospective mold-civilizations would be out of luck. “You cleaned.”
“Most of it was done already. I put bookmarks in the books. They’re upstairs, by the bed.”
Violation. Presumption. “Thank you.” She turned a slow circle. “You get off shift early for this?”
“Something like that. My schedule’s changed a little.” A pendant hung around his neck; he dug it out from beneath his shirt. Ghostlight flashed off gold.
“Promotion. Nice. See how well you do when I’m not around to distract you.”
“That’s unfair.”
“You don’t live here anymore. I don’t have to be fair.” No malice there, or not much. She was too tired for malice. Or for manners. She sank into his armchair—no. Not his armchair, just the armchair he liked. “I saw one of your boys grab a pickpocket on the street as I was walking up here. Broke the cobblestones.”
“Public works will send a zombie crew in the morning.”
“Probably cause as much damage with Penitents as you stop.”
“Penitents are a deterrent. They don’t tire, they can’t be bribed, and they’re intimidating as all hells. Plus, they rehabilitate criminals. Not pretty, but it works as well as anything they use mainland.”
“Did it work for you?”
A cheap blow, but it didn’t seem to hurt, or else he hid it well. “You remember me when I was a kid. I was a punk. Penitence hurt, but I’m a better person now. We both are.”
She ignored that. “I saw a four-ton super-powered statue chase down a hungry girl who stole a purse from some mainlander who thinks pink is a color leather should be. Isn’t that overkill?”
“Best kind of kill.”
“So now you’re cribbing comic book one-liners.”
He started for the armchair, realized she was sitting in it already, and stopped. “You don’t see what’s out there. Kavekana’ai’s far above the docks. There’s war on the street. Always some local god from the Southern Gleb who thinks he’ll catch like wildfire here. Sailors bring in strong stuff from the New World. Even the drugs are getting worse: not just plants anymore, new compounds refined with Craft. I saved a kid from flying the other night. He’d taken some Rush, you know, lets you soar for a while, knocks you out for three days after. Problem is, the comedown’s fast. We found two guys last week in cane fields on the north slope, broken as if they’d fallen from a height only there wasn’t anywhere around to fall from. Some water rat sold it, sailed off on his ship, and left us to pick up the mess.”
“What’d you do with the kid?”
“Tied him to a bed. He hovered a few inches off the surface, but a fall from that height onto a mattress wouldn’t hurt.” He closed his eyes. “I didn’t come here to talk about work.”
“Why did you come?”
“To see you.”
“Here I am.” She held out her arms. “All my bits fit together, at least according to the doctors.”
“And to ask how you’re doing.”
“Fine.”
“And if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“No.” She liked that silence. Claude was the man with answers. Ask him any question, and he had a reasonable reply. That wasn’t why their fights began, but it didn’t help once they did.
“Four weeks,” he said, wondering.
“They wanted me kept for observation.”
“All on the mountain, though. They didn’t move you down to Sisters?”
“They had reasons for keeping me out of the hospital. Nothing serious.”
He sat on the couch. His feet rested next to hers on the carpet. Creases in the shiny black patent leather of his shoes distorted their reflection. “Kai, how can I help?”
She tried to remember how their last fight started. Her hours, maybe, or his, or else something they’d tried to do in bed, and that stupid seed grew into further foolishness until voices rose and words sharpened and a glass broke and the small house gaped empty and hungry around them. “You can leave,” she said.
“You’re hurt. You’re tired. Jace said you pushed yourself so far there was little the doctors could do for you. I know I haven’t been good to you, but I want to help and the least you can do is trust me.”
“That’s not how it works. And Jace shouldn’t have told you whatever. I’m tired. I’ve had a hell of a month. And us, we’re done. If you wanted to help, you shouldn’t have broken into my house. What did you expect, surprising me with roses in my living room my first day home from hospital, as if everything’s okay between us?”
The clock ticked on the wall. Normally it was too quiet to hear.
“I didn’t expect anything,” he said. “I hope you won’t push me away just because of what you think I want from you. Give me a chance to be your friend, at least.”
“Leave.”
The clock chimed. She didn’t count the hour.
“Okay,” he said, and stood. He donned his jacket, and brushed off the front of his shirt, though Kai saw no dirt there. “I’m going. You can keep the flowers.”
“I will.”
He opened the door. Outside, the night spread.
She sat in his chair, no, her chair, and watched the door close behind him. The fence gate swung shut, too, the latch settled, and she heard the cat’s whine of the wards. The house stank of dust and stale life.
The island is our prison. Bullshit. Kavekana didn’t trap anyone. People took care of that themselves.
She carried his coffee cup to the kitchen and dumped the milky dregs into the sink. She filled the mug, washed it inside and out, and left it upside down on the drying rack. The soap smell did not cut the dust, or the age, or the space. Was this what they called depression? Probably not. Drunkenness. Adulthood. She’d imagined standing here as a kid: her own house, free of family and the stink of the working harbor. Standing in skin that fit her soul. The skin felt good, and the body, but the rest of her life, she wasn’t sure.
She watched her reflection in the window glass for longer than people should, and saw inside the lines and shadows everyone she had been.
She left the kitchen, turned out the lights there and in the parlor, and walked into her bedroom, where she knelt and prayed to absent gods until sleep came for her, charged with painful dreams.