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It’s like this, at first.
They don’t know how to talk about it, Faraday and Badd, like they’re aware that what they’re suggesting is against the laws they hold so close but unable to stop themselves from bringing it up anyway. She — she’s going by Calisto Yew, now, and she likes the name, “most beautiful” and a tree known for its symbolism — is the one who first states it outright, baldly, under the fluorescent flickering lights of some diner at one in the morning.
The two men had been stirring their coffee and looking absolutely miserable. Already they’d been through the machinations of reflected grief, for what felt like the thousandth time, so sorry for your loss, it’s not what she would have wanted, how could they have possibly let him go free, and Yew can’t take it anymore, the ever-so-righteous set of their jaws, the way Badd crunches through three of those goddamned lollipops and clenches his fist under the table. (God, can’t he just smoke? Both she and Faraday do, are doing it now next to this shithole’s open window.)
Maybe she should feign a little more grief herself; maybe she should act like the dead girl actually meant something to her instead of being a smoke screen behind which she could create a new identity; but then again, maybe Calisto Yew can be a little more like the actual woman who plays her in this weird drama, cold and hard and unwilling to wait any longer.
She flattens her hand on the table. “I’m done sitting around.”
Faraday’s head jerks up, his brows knitting together, the dark circles under his eyes more prominent in this setting; the restaurant is somehow sterile in a non-dramatic, mundane kind of way, even with the decades of wear caked onto the Formica. “Calisto…” It’s almost a warning, under his breath.
“You’re the ones who wanted to work with me,” she points out. “You came after me once the verdict came down. You convinced me to entertain this idea in the first place.” Just like she’d planned, just like anyone with their particular brand of righteousness would have. Bleeding hearts, can’t resist a victim.
She knows frustratingly little in this scenario — about the two of them, how much they know already. She hates recon missions, but it’s necessary here for her to do the work she actually likes. The deception. The infiltration. Slipping into people’s lives like poison into water.
What she has right now, though, isn’t enough to fill a glass, let alone make it deadly, so when neither Badd or Faraday respond, she plows forward. “Look. We all know why we’re here. I’m hunting the smuggling ring, okay?” The first lie of the night, and it flows smoothly off her tongue, as natural as anything else she’s said. “The companies that are affiliated with the ring are scumbags. They want their backs covered in case anything should go wrong. They come to me for that kind of thing, they walk right in my front door… I don’t even have to look for them.” Because she’s on their side, of course, but her alter ego backs this one up, too. “It would be way too easy to use that.”
Badd speaks up for the first time, mumbling around his lollipop stick. “.........What are you saying.”
God, does she really have to spell things out that simply? Are they really unable to act without direct insurance, mutually assured destruction? Is that what it’s like to be one of the good guys – you can’t take a risk unless you have your little team with you? Maybe this is going to be harder than she expected.
But – fine. Yew holds out her hand in Byrne Faraday’s direction; he’s staring out the window, fatigue written all over him, so he doesn’t notice that she’s waiting until she snaps her fingers in front of his face. “What?” he asks. Somehow there’s no trace of irritation there despite the objectively rude way she’d tried to get his attention. Good. It’ll be better for all of them if they don’t waste their time on things like personality clashes. She’s making so much of this up on the fly that she doesn’t have time to round off the rough edges to placate these people.
“That little phone you’re always messing with. I wanna see it.” She beckons her hand until Faraday starts rummaging in his pockets; he eventually pulls out his cell phone. Jesus Christ. Still? “Not that one.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Calisto.”
Now she has to laugh. It’s ridiculous at this point to pretend that they don’t all know what’s going on. (Well, to a certain degree; of course she knows more than Badd and Faraday, but that’s how this has to function. They need to think this is a circle when the truth is it’s a pyramid – her on top, naturally.) “Pwwh – come on, Faraday, I’m not stupid. Your little – thingy. The one you use for crime scenes, it could really come in handy for figuring out the smuggling ring’s tactics.” She’s not quite sure how to convey what she’s seen him fiddling with, the way it can project rooms in perfect imitation, recreated images for investigation – or for infiltration. She makes an awkward sort of starburst motion in the air, but Faraday doesn’t react; he’s a damn good actor, could give her a run for her money.
Badd leans forward, and the gravitas of the room tips naturally towards him. She’s tempted to laugh again at how fucking serious he is about all of this. Like the police would be competent enough to find out he and Faraday were doing anything even remotely illegal. They can’t even get close to taking down the smuggling ring, despite the fact that they have a fuckton of evidence (that’s part of the reason why she’s here).
The two men at the table share a look that makes her prickle like a cat that smells a rival, and even after just a month or two of working alongside them, she’s learned their body language well enough to read it. Oh my God.
It wasn’t hesitation over breaking the law holding them back; it was that they were thinking about icing her out of this.
Sure, she’d had to turn them down when they’d approached her immediately after the trial. By that point she hadn’t established her new identity well enough to be believably useful in something like what was taking shape. But part of that rejection had also been to stall them. Alba’s hope had been that if someone directly involved in the case, “Cece Yew’s sister,” didn’t want any vigilantes out there, it would at least set Faraday and Badd a few weeks back, make them less certain about their abilities.
It seems they have even bigger hero complexes than she thought, if they were willing to go ahead and try to avenge a woman against her living will. And maybe that’s too harsh; maybe it was about something bigger than that with a capital B, some dramatic bullshit about doing the right thing or acting on behalf of the people. Whatever. It doesn’t even matter now, because she can’t waste the time getting upset about this if she wants them to let her in.
She hates to say it, but she doesn’t just want that: she needs it.
By the time Yew’s finished with her tiny fit of indignation (that honestly, she got under control remarkably quickly), Badd and Faraday have completed the conversation they’d been having across the table using only eyebrows and stoic facial expressions. With a final nod from Badd, Faraday sighs and reaches into his pocket again, pulling at his scarf while he does it, like he needs air. You have no idea, buddy, she thinks derisively, a bit hysterically. Things could either spiral out of her control or firmly fall back into her grasp, all depending on how she takes these next few minutes.
This time, what comes out in the palm of his hand is the thing she’s seen him use before, the thing that Alba seemed the most worried about when she’d relayed its existence to him. “This is Little Thief,” Faraday says.
She frowns. “Little Thief? But I thought you used it for crime scenes. You know, to do recon work on the smuggling ring’s targets.”
Now it’s apparently Badd’s turn to speak. “.........That’s not enough anymore,” he says gruffly, lollipop clacking against his teeth.
Oh. She hadn't given them enough credit. Realistically, she knows a more aggressive approach is bad for the smuggling ring, but the part of her – the truth of her – that likes the cover of darkness and the pliability of the shadows is impressed. “You’re going on the offense.”
Faraday’s eyebrows haven’t parted the entire time they’ve been here, and the furrow between them only gets deeper. “Yeah… what did you think we were doing?”
“I just thought you were going to track them outside of your jobs,” she says, honestly dumbfounded. In no way had she expected to be surprised today. But that’s fine, in fact, it’s better; she’s always loved a challenge. Alba’s not going to be happy, but he’ll change his tune once she gets them, and she’s almost got them. She’s so close she can taste it.
“No,” Faraday says, his mouth a grim slash; he’s been taking lessons from Badd. The expression is wrong on his face, which practically wants to be friendly, and it’s only thrown into deeper relief when the device – Little Thief – comes to life in his hand and spits out a tiny green floor plan, rotating slowly in the air. He only lets it go for a few seconds, they’ve all clocked the waitress approaching from the counter to top up their coffees, but the effect is there anyway. “It can do full-size models, too. And we’re not just using it for recon. Those companies you were talking about… we want to make sure that everyone knows what they’ve been doing. We’re gonna expose them, Calisto.” He leans forward across this table, and now his face shifts into something earnest that makes him look ten years younger.
“Wow,” she says. It’s genuine. “So… then, what do you need me for? Why am I here, gentlemen?” The question is aimed towards them, like she’s saying convince me, but what she really needs is for them to justify it to themselves. It’s important for them to believe that she is an essential part of this. Make them think that they need her even though she knows they were considering not even telling her the whole truth until minutes ago.
If she were anyone else, the layers might get confusing, but this is what she does, and she can’t afford to do something so juvenile as to make an error. It’s easier than breathing, at this point, to live so many lies at once.
“You were Cece’s sister,” Faraday says, and puts his cigarette out in the ashtray so he can rest a hand, briefly, over hers. It’s such a flash of emotion that she finds it difficult to reconcile this with the same man who’s brought fire to her from across the courtroom. “If anyone should help, it’s you.”
As usual, Badd is far more pragmatic. He leans back, as if to contrast against Faraday in one more way, and pulls his lollipop out with a frankly ridiculous popping sound. “.........Also. Like you said… those companies come to you. Practically walk in your front door.”
Wow. It’s a plan worthy of the smuggling ring themselves; make someone believe you’ll help them only to stab them in the back and smear them. She’s impressed.
Faraday takes her stunned silence for hesitation, and says, coaxingly, “I know it seems wrong to do this to potential clients, who might want your services, but Calisto, you know what they’re doing is wrong.” He gestures around them, indicating the atmosphere, the time of night, the way they’re all wound so tightly they’re practically about to snap apart. “And no one else cares. We’re the only ones who are going to do anything about this. I mean, look around. It’s past midnight. The police don’t do things like this unless they’re forced to.”
Badd takes that completely on the nose, doesn’t argue a whit as he replaces the lollipop. “...Even in the depths of night,” he says in that gravelly voice. It makes everything he says sound like a noir film. To be fair, what they’re talking about could absolutely be a plot in a novel. She’d be the femme fatale, of course, destined to betray them in the end, but they don’t know that, can’t see it coming. No one ever wants to believe it, least of all the good guys, and at least that part is still true, even if they’ve got more spine than most of the other ones she’s worked with.
Another surprise comes when he pulls out a black card with a white three-legged raven on it. The sign of the ring. Yew’s familiar with it, of course, and she knew even before tonight that the police had one of them; it was evidence in the Coachen case. The part that catches her off-guard about its appearance here is the fact that Badd has it at all. It’s the final piece of the puzzle, evidence smuggled illegally out of police custody to prove that he’s serious about this, too.
“The smuggling ring’s calling card,” Faraday says, and the shocked tone makes her realize that maybe he and Badd hadn’t told each other everything, that maybe it’s coming together for all three of them in more or less the same way right now.
“Do you know what it is?” Badd asks.
Obviously, she does, but she keeps her mouth shut; Faraday shakes his head, a small motion.
“.......A three-legged raven. A yatagarasu.” Badd lays it out on the table. “In Japanese mythology… it’s thought to be a guide, and an incarnation of the sun.”
“Rich considering that the smuggling ring is always operating in the shadows,” Faraday mutters, drumming his fingers on the table. Where he’d been drawn and tired before, as though the pressure they all felt was pushing him down, he’s now practically bouncing with determination. They’re teetering on a precipice here.
An idea occurs to Yew, almost perfectly poetic in its symbolism. She’s never been able to resist the irony of the universe.
“Then let’s make that the first thing that we steal,” she says. It’s a commitment on her end, a risk, but this is what she came here for, and she knows deep in her gut that this is the moment to take it. Part of her life is knowing when to research and when to throw that out the window and rely on instinct, and this is one of those times. Almost nothing has gone the way she’d planned so far, so there’s no point in counting on anything except herself and what she can feel.
“The symbol?” Faraday asks.
“Yeah.” She nods again, can see it taking shape before her eyes, the smuggling ring and its inverse, with her at the center of both, propping them up while keeping them from ever meeting. “It’s the sun, right? A guide? Well, so are we. We’ll be guiding people to these companies that cooperate with the ring.” Half-truths are easier than full lies, after all, she knows that well.
Before any of them can back out, before she can let this perfect chance slip through her fingers, she reaches out and lays her hand on top of Badd’s, the same way Faraday had touched hers earlier. It’s not a gesture that comes naturally to her, but it’s what’s right, now, the kind of thing people have always done to signify deals. They’ve always needed contact. Proof that the other person is human, too. And she’s gotten good enough at pretending that no one has been able to tell the difference.
For one moment, Badd tenses up, but he doesn’t pull away. Catching the drift, Faraday adds his hand to the pile, and none of them need to say anything to see the symbolism: three hands, three people, three legs to the crow on the card before them. A perfect trifold opportunity for all of them.
It’s almost enough to make her believe.