Archive of Our Own

O has brought a pack of cigarettes, but he grimaces whenever he attempts to smoke one. She watches with some amusement while he tries not to cough, and persistently declines his offer to share. She is quickly developing the impression that he only pretends to like them in order to look older and more mysterious than he really is. 

They are actually the same age. But in some lights he looks like a grown man and in others, he still looks like a boy. It’s a curious phenomenon that she has also observed with her other peers. By comparison, Kit feels like she has been an adult for as long as she can remember. 

Neither J or L have a high opinion of her new partner. L says he is arrogant, deeply self-possessed, and barely literate. J says that he has always been a poor student and a troublemaker, who has difficulty taking things seriously. Apparently he made it impossibly difficult to concentrate in their coding classes.

Kit wouldn’t disagree with any of that. She has had the good fortune never to share a classroom with him, but from the times they have been in each other’s company she can see where such impressions might come from. Even now, while he tries not to choke on the cigarette he impolitely chooses to smoke in a full passenger carriage, he is telling stories which mostly centre on his own questionable brilliance. He has not stopped talking, even when she attempted to drown him out by pretending to read her book. It’s no surprise; she has already been warned by B that he is a heinous travel companion. 

But all of this must be counterbalanced by her other evidence. Despite B’s complaints, Kit is three years older than she is, and she knows from fragments of stories that he actually took good care of her during the year of their apprenticeship, even if she would fervently deny it. As they prepared to come back to the City, after they all linked up with each other on their way out of that horrible town, he created the diversion that helped her to escape with Ellington before the authorities could catch them. Some may not have approved of his humour, but it can’t be denied that he lit up their last collective excursion to Winnipeg. And earlier, while she clutched the satchel containing their important package tight to her chest, he had nudged her arm gently with his elbow and grinned at her, in a way that made her forget why she was worried in the first place. People are very rarely simply one thing or the other. 

When he goes quiet and stops laughing at his own jokes, her stomach flips. 

“What?” she whispers, so that the passengers in the seats in front of and behind them cannot overhear her. 

He is looking past her, at the window on her other side, and he speaks at full volume. “We’ve been stopped at this station for a very long time.”

“Shh!” J was right about him not paying attention in his lessons. They have to be careful about who can overhear them, especially in a quiet carriage like this.

“It’s just an observation.”

It’s too risky to ask him what he thinks this delay means, but she knows what she thinks it means. She finds herself twisting the strap of the satchel around her hand twice, just in case she has to make a break for it. 

She presses her face to the glass as close as she can, but she can’t see anything of note. There are people waiting for the next train after this one, and a few on the stairs making their way out to their workplaces or their homes, or wherever else they might be going at this time in the morning. 

“I haven’t got all day,” he announces, like he is a businessman trying to get to his important job in the next town over. “Anyone know what’s holding us up?”

Kit finds herself gritting her teeth in an effort not to reprimand him. There are a chorus of meaningless supportive grumbles, potentially from actual businessmen. But then, a voice speaks up from a few rows behind them. 

“I think I saw some police board a few minutes ago,” it says, quite calmly, because clearly the owner of the voice does not find that to be a particularly worrisome development. Unlike Kit, who immediately glances back at the carriage windows to see if they are likely to open wide enough for her to jump. 

Their shared training has taught them not to panic. Kit feels a strange, familiar numb settling over her, while she evaluates exit points and conjures up as much as she can remember about the layout of this station and the structure of the carriages. 

O huffs and leans all the way out of his seat to address the speaker behind them. “Unbelievable. Did they board in front or at the back?”

“At the front. They must be really taking their time.”

Kit has already started to shift things inside the satchel so that she can remove the cassette tapes from their cases, planning to distribute them among pockets instead — that may not make any difference, but it’s better than doing nothing. She wishes she was with B, or even M. She has worked with them so many times that she feels they can talk without talking, whereas she doesn’t have that ability with O yet and she has no idea why he has started involving random bystanders in their own personal emergency.

After a painfully long pause, where she tries and fails to catch his eye, he lets out an overly theatrical sigh, loud enough to be heard by the passengers around him. 

“I haven’t got time for this. Do you have that number for the very, very fast taxi company? I suppose they will be able to drive us to Ophelia quicker than the train.”

“I’m going to Ophelia,” another voice chimes in. “I didn’t know there was a company operating all the way out here.”

“Oh, yes,” O answers, while he starts to stand up. “It’s owned by a friend of ours. They have a lot of cars, and they can usually come by here within just a few minutes.”

“Wonderful news!” a new voice booms. “I’m late as it is. Will you order a few cars, son?”

“Of course. They’ll be delighted to have the business. I’ll call as soon as we get to the telephone outside.”

He hangs back just enough that there are a couple of people in front of them as they open the door to the carriage. He is so much taller than her that Kit has to crane her neck to look at his expression, but before long he looks down to give her a quick grin. His blue eyes are sparkling with his good idea. 

Once their party steps onto the platform, they are intercepted by a couple of train guards, who insist that they must wait on the train for a few more minutes. One of the supporting voices from the carriage engages in a negotiation on their behalf. Kit knows that he will not win it, but she thinks that doing so is no longer necessary. 

Wordlessly, she puts her hand around O’s wrist and gives it a gentle squeeze. When he looks down at her, her eyes tilt toward the staircase that will lead them outside. If they make a run for it now, with everyone distracted, she thinks she will have enough time to get her bearings and remember the map she studied of this town before anyone can catch them. He catches her meaning right away.

“Ready?” he asks, in a whisper so quiet that she can barely hear. When she nods, he slips his hand into hers and holds it tight. 

“Three,” she mumbles. “Two…One… Now.”

His legs are so much longer than hers, and he must be able to run much faster than she can. But he never loosens his grip on her hand – not even once.

When she was a little girl, there were headquarters all over, so many that she could never keep count. They’ve diminished in number in the intervening years, because people keep burning them down, so the secrecy around their latest is unprecedented. She wasn’t even told about it — she had to rely on Olaf and his hopeless navigation skills to lead them there, which took almost all day from the nearest train station, but she now realises should have only taken an hour if he’d had the faintest idea where he was going. 

She should have been irritated by that, by the time she arrived and had a chance to examine the map. But it was fine weather in the woodlands, and never a moment’s silence. She quietly suspects he may have circled them around those tracks on purpose, and has to stop herself from smiling at the idea. 

Sadly, by the time she is there, Lemony is apparently in the Mountains, and Jacques is abroad. In their organisation, nobody is ever anywhere all at once — but, here, she doesn’t need her brothers. They are all as good as family here, where they are among others of their kind and away from the rest of the world’s cruelty and incompetence. She has the luxury of spending most of her summer reading Bourdillon with B, discussing the relative advantages of different travel destinations with M, and helping H construct a first attempt at an aircraft that will never need to refuel (it needs more work). And most days, spending her afternoons sitting on the floor in front of the makeshift stage in the room down the hall from the library. 

Beatrice is already sublime, with her crystal clear songbird voice and her sparkling warm humour and that just-right amount of mischief that suggests a healthy amount of independent thought. On the stage, when she returns to the City, she is going to be magnetic. Kit is not the only one who thinks that Beatrice will pull audiences like they’ve never had at any of the organisation’s productions. Finally; a chance for their messages to compete with the mindless, self-indulgent drivel that independent showrunners insist on putting out.

Olaf doesn’t have the same sort of natural talent. But he’s so passionate about it, and Kit thinks that counts for a lot. When Beatrice invites critique, Kit politely tells them both they are equally wonderful, and only ever wonders afterward why she can’t bear to tell him the truth. 

The two of them had linked up almost instantly, all the while pretending to be indifferent to the other one being around. It’s a fascinating and ridiculous dynamic. They are all as good as family here, but none of them are as close as those two — they treat each other a bit like annoying siblings, but with even more familiarity than Kit has with her own brothers. When she eventually asks about it, B cheerfully tells her that Olaf was such a badly behaved child that his parents brought in Beatrice from a few blocks over to see if she could fix him. 

Almost every night that summer, they read and rehearse and build and even eat together. The longer they do this, just the three of them, the further she thinks Olaf’s mask slips. Kit increasingly thinks that her brothers never sat down with him long enough to break through the initial façade. 

“Did you go to see your father?” Beatrice asks one night late into August, while they eat their share of the roasted vegetables H prepared for them that day.

Kit knows right away that she is missing something, and expectantly turns her head to Olaf, sat on her left side — he is usually the one to fill her in when Beatrice jumps around from one topic to the next that she was never there for the start of. Now he pretends he doesn’t see her. 

“I went back for…the thing,” he says vaguely, with his eyes on his plate. “I’ll stop in when I’m next posted in the City.”

This time, Beatrice needs to be the one to explain. She looks at him a little longer than normal, and, seeming to sense no resistance, she looks across the table at Kit.

“His mother’s funeral,” she translates for him quietly.

“Oh,” Kit breathes, feeling suddenly embarrassed. She pauses with her knife partway through a parsnip, feeling that the moment ought to be marked without her mouth being full of root vegetable. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Olaf says, without even a moment’s hesitation. It strikes her as very strange and very cold, but then she wonders what on Earth would possess someone to say such a thing. “It means she’s finally out of that fucking house.”

Kit doesn’t have anything to say to that. She watches Beatrice’s face, the solemn, non-judgemental understanding, and decides perhaps she does not need the full details. She leaves her fork against the edge of her plate so that she can touch his sleeve, just gently and just for a second. He looks back at her then, and gives her a little smile. Nothing else; none of his jokes and none of his bravado. 

Lemony never has liked being wrong. She wonders how he’s going to take it. 

“Not again!” she complains, holding the book right up to her face, so close that she has no hope of being able to read any of the words. “Will you stop!”

Kit has no particular personal sensitivities about having her photograph taken. She assesses pictures of herself as quite ordinary — she has no egregious facial features and she considers her hair passable enough, even pinned up like this — but she was always told that she should avoid any pictures that might later be used for identification. Perhaps if he would give her some time to get somewhere which could act as a completely unidentifiable background for the shot  (the extremely recognisable bookshelves at the Akhmatova Bookstore definitely are not suitable) and find a large hat for her to wear, she might be amenable. 

But, of course, she knows that he doesn’t want a picture of her in a wide-brimmed hat in a bland location. He wants to catch her at her most her.

He is laughing far too loudly for their surroundings. She would like to tell him to be quiet, except that when they are caught in a tableau of her trying to disappear back into the bookcase while he attempts to rip the book from her fingers, all the while trying to block her from running away and also not drop his camera, she starts to laugh as well. 

“How – difficult – are you going – to make this!” 

“Why are you doing this – no, no no, careful of the spine!”

“Be careful of my spine, K, for God’s sake –”

Eventually, the health of the book takes precedence. She lets him pry it away from her, and within a second she is blinded by the flash of the photograph. 

“Brilliant,” she deadpans, a little breathlessly. “I’m sure that was a good one.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” he laughs. 

He already has a photograph of her. There was something wrong with the ancient film in his already half-broken old camera, so there is a white spot on the picture, and she resisted the idea of the photograph in its entirety, so she is giving the lens a very stern and long-suffering look. 

He has kept hold of it anyway. He can never keep anything in a good condition, so it’s creased in half from being stuffed into too-small spaces like wallets and pockets and his car’s glovebox, but there is something she finds reluctantly beautiful about the way he is wearing it down. It’s not a lot different from the way she feels about books with well-worn pages, and notes in the margins. It inevitably means it was cherished by someone. 

She wants to be too sensible to be affected by things like that. But, for all his faults, isn’t he sometimes just so sweet?

“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” she chuckles, as he places the camera rather roughly on the bookshelf behind her, and carelessly abandons the book on the floor next to their feet. “I will blame you if I get sent to prison again.”

He ignores the last part. “Extremely proud,” he corrects her, grinning ear to ear, before he leans down to kiss her. 

“Horse.”

“Hooves,” Olaf replies, while she drums her fingers on the steering wheel and he stares through his binoculars at the windows of the apartment block opposite. It’s been four hours with no lights on the fifth floor, and nothing suspicious whatsoever on the other floors. There was a very brief flurry of activity when someone opened a window and they briefly suspected that the man they are looking might have been making a run for it from the third, but as it turned out that was just because it’s a warm day for Autumn and that young mother apparently wanted some fresh air. 

“Saddle,” she replies. 

“Skirt.”

She is already leaning all the way back in her seat, and she allows her head to loll sideways to level the side of his face with an amused smile. “I’m sorry. Did you say skirt?”

“It’s part of a saddle,” he explains innocently. It’s amazing how much his vocabulary improves when it suits him.

“It is a part of a saddle,” she agrees knowingly. That doesn’t explain why he’s already managed to make skirt a relevant answer three different times, or why whenever he takes his binoculars away from his face for two seconds he seems to be looking at her legs. To be fair, she has to admit that it is a flattering skirt. And she can admit, just to herself, that she chose to wear it on purpose.

“Yeah, well… so there,” he grumbles. “It counts, doesn’t it? Don’t dodge your turn.”

She knows that he knows exactly what he’s doing, and he knows that she knows it. But if he insists on pretending to stare at an empty apartment a little longer, she can stand to drag it out. “Alright. Coat.”

“Disguise.”

“Escape.”

“Crawl.”

“Jump.”

She knows it’s coming. At least he has the decency to take a pause for comedic effect before he does it. “Skirt.”

This time she finally does laugh. “You can’t keep saying the same word over and over again.”

“Well, to be honest with you,” he says, perfectly professionally. “I am finding it difficult to concentrate.”

She grins. “Why’s that?”

“You know exactly why’s that,” he mimics playfully. He’s trying so hard not to smile; she can see his lips quivering and the hollow where he’s sucking the inside of his cheek. “You’ll get upset with me if we miss the guy.”

She folds her leg up underneath her and unbuckles her seatbelt, watching all the while to see if the movement will make him lower the binoculars. Eventually, she can get enough leverage to lean over to his side. Even with her right there, with her hands on the side of his face, he persistently ignores her under the guise of his duties. It takes a bit of inelegant manoeuvring, particularly because of the very skirt that has apparently been his undoing today, but she finally manages to make it over to his side entirely, with her hands slipping down to the tops of his arms, her legs either side of his, and her own shoulders blocking his view. Even though there’s no way he can see, he keeps on pretending to look, even while his familiar lopsided smile has started to break through his little stone-faced act.

She drops a kiss to his cheek, but that still isn’t enough to convince him.

“We’ve got work to do, haven’t we?” he asks, without looking at her. 

With her lips close to the shell of his ear, she murmurs. “I think we can have a break.”

“But everyone tells me I’m such a bad influence on you,” he murmurs. He’s doing a very clever job pretending that he can’t feel her and doesn’t want her, but his voice has darkened, and she isn’t imagining the shiver. She can feel the tension in his arms from keeping up his charade. His jaw is tensed when she flutters a kiss against his lips that he can’t see coming. 

“Little do they know,” she whispers back. 

Once he’s put up just the right amount of fight, and she’s laughing so much that her cheeks are starting to hurt, he gives in. The binoculars are discarded on the dashboard while he tangles his hands in her hair, and they happily see nothing else of that apartment block for the rest of the afternoon.

He finds her when the story is already all over. It wasn’t him that pulled her out of the water, but he’s there on the beach when she’s finally set back onto dry land, as the first rays of dawn light are trickling over the waves. 

She thinks of the ink-black deep beneath her, around her, as far as the eye could see, of the violent rushing of the water, of pained gasps for breath, and the aching all over as she tried so hard to just live . But it looks so peaceful out there now, in the budding light, from the relative safety of the shore. Perspective is everything. 

Her skin is sticky, her hair is brittle and her throat is burning from choking on mouthfuls of saltwater. She’s barefoot — the boots would have been a hindrance to staying afloat — and she’s still freezing cold, even though she’s been out of the water for over an hour. She thinks she might actually look almost as bad as she feels. 

“I saw the distress signal at two,” he says quietly, once the coastguard has left them. She makes a good show of standing, but not for long — it’s all she can do not to collapse face-first into the pebbles. They sit together in the morning chill while she stares at the ocean and he plays with a stone in one hand. “You’ve been swimming since when?”

“Hours,” she replies hoarsely. So long that it felt like it would never end. 

She knows that there is more she will need to say, not just to him but to everyone else with an interest. It had seemed so simple when they cooked this up at headquarters, and she is the most experienced at sea. Commandeer that boat, they agreed, at whatever cost. Get the crew and the captain to the lifeboats, and abandon the ship in the most isolated place on the map. It would be difficult, they accepted vaguely, but nothing worth having ever came easy. 

It’s only now that she sees the major flaws in the plan; namely, that commandeering the boat from a determined enemy would be utterly impossible, and that without doing so, there would be no way to redirect it from reaching shore, dangerous cargo and all. 

She closes her eyes. She had never begged so ardently in her life as she did on deck, restrained by the crew. Not for her own safety — for theirs. Abandon ship, she’d wept. As the fire spread through the lower decks as yet undetected, as she imagined it approaching the powder room, as she imagined the whole thing blowing sky high. Abandon ship. She screamed it until her voice was hoarse, even while they hoisted her over the edge. 

Everyone must know already about the fire. She knows they will have called for help, and that nobody will have been able to reach them out there in time. What could they do to stop it, anyway? She has no idea what she could have done, in the reverse, after the fire had taken hold. 

She can see in his face that he knows that it has gone wrong. For a start, they pictured her arriving triumphantly back on land, with a smiling crew and a restrained captain ready for interrogation. Not half-drowned and half-alive.

“What happened to the rest of them?” he eventually manages to ask. The question feels like a knife twisting in her back, but she doesn’t blame him for asking it. This is her rehearsal for what she’ll have to explain again and again to all of their associates.

“I don’t know,” she admits, in a guilty whisper. “I tried to warn them — I tried so hard to warn them, but they threw me overboard instead. I don’t know what happened after that.”

Kit hears herself say it and thinks about how inconceivably fucked everything is. You tried to warn them, she thinks, that you were going to blow them to smithereens?

She swallows hard. She can’t help but think of Lemony, and think that he might be the only one who could understand. “I feel sick.”

“The water?” Olaf guesses gently.

“No,” she groans. She can’t bear to look him in the eye, so she closes hers. “They wouldn’t listen. What if they never did?”

“You tried,” he says, simply, as if that’s enough. “You couldn’t have let the cargo reach the harbour.”

She throws her hands out in front of her with what little energy she has left. Really, she would like to weep, but she cannot allow herself to do it, in case he pities her. She doesn’t deserve to be pitied. 

“So what?” she whispers, voice cracking because of the shouting. “So what if they went down with it? The captain was an enemy, yes, but he still didn’t deserve that, and the crew were just… like anyone. They had no idea what they were transporting.”

She sees his throat when he swallows, and his eyes flickering back and forth as he considers. She waits with bated breath for the accusation she thinks might be coming, the same accusation she would level at herself in his position. There must have been another way. Couldn’t you have tried harder? 

He doesn’t say it. She deserves to hear it, but he loves her and so of course he won’t be the one to do it. “You couldn’t have done anything else,” he says, while he turns that stone over and over in his hand. “If the captain couldn’t be overpowered, and the crew wouldn’t listen to sense, what else was left?”

She doesn’t have the energy to walk him through the millions of mental calculations she went through aboard the ship on her way to his same conclusion. Short of taking that harpoon gun and butchering the captain in cold blood, she can’t think of another way she would have averted them — and she remembers seriously considering that, while the match was lit in her hand. Maybe that would have been better, if it saved the rest of them. The thought makes her feel sick all over again. 

“The mission wasn’t to save the crew,” he deliberates, so evenly and nonchalantly that it stuns her. “The mission was to stop the ship.”

This makes her want to cry more than ever. If she is honest with herself, she doesn’t think she would — that she could — defend him like this, if the roles were reversed. This is more than she deserves. “We’d never have done it, if we knew those two were mutually exclusive.”

He looks at her directly now, and she eventually manages to pull herself together enough to look right back at him. “Maybe we would,” he says eventually, honestly.

“No,” she says, as ardently as she can with her dry throat. “It would have been better to do nothing. I made a mistake.”

When she thinks about the word mistake, she thinks of spelling errors, of spilling drinks and misremembering codes. She doesn’t think of scuttling ships in the dead of night, with the clueless crew and their demented captain determined to stay aboard while the whole thing burned. 

Olaf tilts his head and clicks his tongue, in clear disagreement. “But we were never taught to do nothing.”

She has nothing else to say. She can’t bring herself to quite believe him, but she feels better for hearing it — and guilty for feeling better, too, and too tired to think coherently about how she feels or doesn’t anyway. While she rests, he lays his jacket over her shoulders, and scoots close so that he can put his arm tightly around her. 

It’s true that they have always had more things to worry about than other people their age. Kit has been worrying about villainy and treachery for an unfathomable length of time now, even way back at the age when other children would have been only worrying about making friends at school. But she thinks there is more than usual to worry about by the time they are turning twenty-three. Either that, or they are only just becoming old enough to appreciate the total sum of how much there really is to worry about. Schisms continue, every few years, and they continue to turn trusted associates into enemies in the blink of an eye. This one feels worse than the last.

There is an older group of volunteers who are so determined to stamp out all of the evil in the world that, in Kit’s opinion, they are coming dangerously close to being a part of it. There has been a recent discovery of an incredibly dangerous fungus, now in containment in the hands of the Anwhistles, who thankfully can still be relied upon. There are worrying developments by a once-trusted graduate student in the suburbs, who whispers say has managed to weaponize her interest in both optometry and human psychology. She is only one in a long line who have been interested in hypnotism as a method of stamping out wickedness wherever it pops up, but if the rumours are true, she will be the first to demonstrate that it really works. Then there are the volunteers from the schism before, who have long since stopped having understandable or logical goals, and seem instead to be seeking anarchy and destruction through whatever means possible.

Then there is a Count, in a City mansion, who apparently thinks the organisation he has been a part of since he was too little to walk has been spending too little energy on being proactive. Reports say that he has been talking reporters, political candidates and members of the judiciary around to his new ‘way of thinking’. He told a group of volunteers recently, quite proudly, that it was time to stop living in the shadows and start leading from the front. 

What he means by this, nobody seems to have any idea. But he has long been considered volatile, and the company he keeps is less than savoury. His concept of what a ‘stronger’ version of their organisation would look like seems unlikely to be anything good. 

Olaf doesn’t have much time for his father. Kit can understand that, having had the questionable pleasure of spending some time in the company of the Count. She would have come across him at some point, she’s sure, but the first time was actually on purpose. Olaf showed it to her, even though he hated it. His mother is gone now, though Kit can ascertain from stories that she was once-vibrant, before she became the dead-eyed woman at the end whose single interest in life, according to Olaf, was her pet parakeet. They didn’t reminisce about her over tea, on Kit’s one and only afternoon in that cold, cold house; instead, his forceful father told him that he was a waste of space. 

There were pictures all over the house — some staged portraits, and some smaller photographs. All framed, painstakingly displayed, of younger versions of Olaf. But the real-life version, sat at the other end of the table with his eyes cast down, seemed to be quite uninteresting to the Count by comparison. 

Part of her came away morbidly relieved that her own childhood home never lasted long enough for her to hate the bones of it. Her own parents are long gone now, but when she thinks of them, she thinks of warm hands and happy faces, her father’s favourite checked shirt and her mother’s string of pearls. She thinks of being safe and golden and smiling. She doesn’t think anyone has ever really smiled in that old mansion the way they did when she was a toddler on the farm. 

Olaf is reluctant to engage in a discussion about his father’s plans. According to him, it’s all hot air. Nothing more than the latest in a long line of over-ambitious, crackpot plots. 

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” he said quite frankly one night, without even bothering to look up from the notes he was making about his new play. “People think he’s some sort of genius these days and it always makes me laugh. He’s just a control freak with too much time on his hands.”

Clearly, those sorts of statements are meant to be reassuring, but they trouble Kit more than anything. 

Just for today, they can put it away, just for a little longer. It’s a warm night on the beach, and Jacques has even managed to get the evening away from the newspaper. While Lemony’s distaste for Olaf from their youth has never once waned, no matter what she does, she thinks Jacques has started to waver. 

Though the two of them share a bottle of whiskey, she doesn’t join in — she has never much liked the taste, and she will need a clear head to drive home. Somehow, despite being the only sober one of the three by the end of the night, she trips in a sand dune and takes a dramatic tumble halfway back down the hill on their way back to her car.

She knows even as it is happening that it must be funny; she thinks at one point she even flips totally head over feet. When she’s sat up, disoriented, and spat the sand out of her mouth, she looks up to see her brother and Olaf both doubled over side-by-side, laughing uproariously at her. It might have been nice if one of them had found it within themselves to help her up, but she can’t stay angry. 

When they get to the car, they manage to find a song they all know, and Olaf has them practically rehearse it all the way home. Halfway there, as they speed along an empty road with the sun setting outside, windows wound down, Olaf completely butchering the lyrics, she thinks this is it. This is the moment I’ll think of long after it’s all gone. 

She feels the moment burrow into her consciousness, a snapshot she’ll never be able to delete.

A more optimistic person might think that it would last forever. But Kit was raised up to know that optimism is futile; volunteers are only associates for a few years at a time, before the next disappearance, or the next schism. Parents are a fleeting presence at best. Friends can last, but they might not. The strongest bond she has ever had in her life is with her brothers — but she knows, because of the Calibans, that sometimes even blood is not strong enough. In the grand scheme of things, romance is temporary and very, very weak.

B spends more time in Kit’s apartment these days than she does at her own. Kit has set up in the top floor of a building only a couple of minutes’ walk from the theatre, and B seems determined to be the new roommate that she never actually asked for. 

It’s funny, really. She is beautiful and bright and wealthy and just twenty-one, and she has everything in the world, including a very plush apartment of her own in a much nicer district. But, of course, it’s Beatrice. She would forfeit luxury for the company of friends any day. 

The arrangement is working nicely for Kit in any case, firstly because Beatrice is one of her closest associates and she very much enjoys her company. Secondly, because Beatrice is her little brother’s girlfriend, and so if she stays late Lemony will often drop by to pick her up and walk her back home, which gives her an opportunity to check on him. And lastly, because Beatrice is good at everything up to and including cooking, so Kit has been eating better than she has done in years from whatever B chooses to make out of the tins in her cupboards. 

Tonight, though, Kit is expecting her. She has the stew heated and ready on the stove before she even walks back through the door. 

“You made something!” Beatrice cries, in disbelief, while trying to unwrap her scarf and take off her coat in the hall. 

With a roll of her eyes, Kit plates up the food and waits for B to sit down. Cheeks still ruddy from the cold outside, she begins one of her usual stories about her day at the theatre, without noticing Kit’s sly expression while she eats.

It’s only as she is midway through relaying the latest update about her useless co-star that she catches onto the growing smirk. 

“What?” she groans. “What’s that look?”

Kit grins before she can help herself. “What do you think of the stew?”

Beatrice’s brow is furrowed despite the innocent question. “It’s very nice,” she answers cagily. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it. Do you really like it?”

This time, Beatrice puts down her fork. With the sparkling warmth and genuine empathy that always draws people to her, she gives her a true smile. “I’m sorry, K. I should have said a proper thank-you. It’s genuinely delicious. You should cook more often; you’re good at it!”

Kit gives her a big smile in return and lets her go back to eating. In the silence before she remembers where she had gotten to in her story, she decides to drop the bombshell.

“Olaf made it.”

Fork midway to her mouth, Beatrice pulls a face and lowers it back to the plate, as if she is suddenly concerned that instead of being delicious it might be somehow made entirely out of peppermint leaves. Kit laughs so hard she almost falls off her chair.

“He did not make this.”

“He absolutely did,” Kit replies, through a final chuckle. “I watched. He was actually a bit dissatisfied with the end result. Said it needed more garlic.”

“Lies.” Beatrice declares confidently. “He doesn’t know what garlic is.”

“He does!” Kit laughs. “This also has tomatoes, thyme, onions…”

“Your recipe?”

“His own. Inspired by one in a magazine, granted. But he read the magazine on purpose and of his own volition, and he’s the one who added the mushrooms.”

Beatrice is so perturbed that it seems like she is finally — perhaps for the first time ever — lost for words. 

“He can do quite a lot of things, actually,” Kit adds innocently after a moment. “When properly motivated.”

Beatrice has never been slow on the uptake and it’s only a second before she catches her meaning. She makes a very unladylike gagging sound and looks very much like she is being tortured. “You disgust me.”

“Now you know how I feel when I hear you gossiping about my baby brother,” Kit chuckles. “That’s all your surprises for today. You can eat your stew now.”

“Finally,” Beatrice huffs, but she is smiling so much that Kit can tell there is no genuine impatience. After a few moments though, staring contemplatively at her food, she speaks again. “You do know I’m only joking?”

“Hmm?”

“About you two.” She’s speaking a little softer now, and smiling much more genuinely. This is the reason everyone they know is in love with Beatrice. She’s looking at Kit with her big amber eyes like she has never cared about anything in the entire world more than she does in this very moment about her wellbeing. “You know I think it’s lovely, don’t you?”

It’s Kit’s turn to pull a face. 

“Oh, grow up ,” Beatrice laughs, as if Kit is not several years her senior. “I’m just saying. You’re very good for him.”

Kit doesn’t tend to think of her relationship in those sorts of terms. But Beatrice isn’t the first to say it; some of their set act like she has essentially muzzled and coerced Olaf into the shape of a normal human being. 

“Isn’t he good for me too?” she asks, as nonchalantly as she can. 

“Sure,” Beatrice answers, with a little shake of her head, like she’s playing something off. “I meant, you’re good together.”

Before she gets the chance to think about whether she wants to press the issue further, Beatrice sighs. “Did you talk to him in the end?”

Kit groans. She knew they would reach this topic eventually, but had dared to hope she might be allowed to finish her meal first. She supposes it was her own fault for bringing him up in conversation. “He doesn’t want to do it.”

His father continues to cause concern among the volunteers with his attempts to leverage people with the right ideas into positions of power around the City. He has been only modestly successful, but the problem is that succeeding even once will enable a domino effect. If he manages to replace the newspaper editor, there’ll be a new Mayor before they know it. It was a little less worrying in the summer, when nobody was sure quite how volatile he was, but the latest intel suggests that his plans are quite different from anything that they would collectively recognise as ethical or desirable.

The latest strategy in the playbook is that Olaf might be able to talk some sense into his father. Having seen them together, Kit thinks it unlikely. 

Beatrice looks back at her with some sympathy. “You asked him, then?”

“No,” Kit admits, in more of a defensive tone than she’d intended. “You know he’s not going to want to do it. You know he doesn’t want to get involved.”

Beatrice moves some of her stew idly with her fork. “Well, he’s definitely not going to do it if you don’t ask him to. You’re not asking him to want to.”

“I know what’s at stake here, you know.” Kit sighs. “I know.”

Beatrice can be surprisingly steely, underneath her warm exterior. She is the only one who appreciates even half of the complexity of asking Olaf to manage his father, but Kit can read it plain as day on her face that she doesn’t think such emotional considerations are a worthy reason to delay. 

Kit is spared the rest of the conversation by Olaf letting himself in. He promptly helps himself to the remainder of both portions of stew, and all the while, Beatrice stares at her with her wide eyes, reminding her wordlessly of what she already knows.

Despite how much she loves her, despite the fact that her intentions were good, despite how happy she makes L, she wants to call Beatrice up and say I knew it. I knew it and I never should have listened to you. 

She no longer comes around very often, probably because she knows as much. Enlisting neglected son to manage neglectful father was a stupid plan right from the outset, and Kit wants to direct the blame for it somewhere other than directly at herself, so Beatrice will have to do. There is perhaps a reason that the best recruits tend to be without parents — to avoid this desperation for approval that can so easily be weaponised, in the wrong hands. Beatrice, who never knew hers, probably didn’t understand the pull.

It had taken some cajoling and no small number of arguments. Having embarked on this slippery slope essentially blindfolded, Kit had only discovered halfway down that he had been spending years extricating himself from his father’s influence — by then, it felt too late to stop. At first, the Count hadn’t been happy to have him back around — he was watched like a hawk, by all accounts, as if he was only there to pick off old family heirlooms for cash. He came home a grey shadow, and went out again the next day to try to win his father’s approval all over again. 

But, so suddenly she hadn’t even been able to notice it, they’d started to build an understanding between themselves. He began to spend more time with the Count than he ever had as a child. Suddenly, he wasn’t such a waste of space after all. 

Who’s managing who? she’d asked, one night when he recalled the dinner he’d attended with his father’s mysterious ‘friends’, and all the plans they had for the future, which he suddenly thought actually didn’t sound so bad after all.

After five separate shouting matches and slammed doors, she learns to pick her moments, and to choose her tone carefully. When he comes home one evening just before they are due for dinner with B, she listens to the story he tells her — leaving out most of the details he apparently can’t remember — and asks him, very gently, if he thinks he will ever be like his father.

He pauses too long. “Isn’t there that poem?” he muses, staring out of the window. “What’s the one? About how your parents fuck you up, but then you do the same again.”

“That poem is maudlin and defeatist,” she tuts. “Larkin would have you believe we should all just lay down and die.”

He rolls his eyes. “I liked it in school. It’s about —”

“I know what it’s about. It’s not to be taken as a permission slip to...” she remembers midway through her sentence to moderate her tone. “It doesn’t mean you have to make the choices your parents did. Or do.”

“I know. It says we can’t help but do it, though.”

“Well, we can.” She’s tired of talking in hypotheticals. “You can. In a world where nobody has any control over their own destiny, everything we do becomes pointless and irrelevant, and the world carries on being just as wicked regardless. I don’t believe in that. Neither do you.”

“Such an optimist,” he teases. The conversation has either invigorated him or bored him — he’s standing up and shucking on an overshirt. With it halfway on, he bends down to give her a kiss on the forehead. “We said we’d be over at B’s by seven.”

She drops it, uneasily. It’s not the day for a fight.

Olaf’s apartment is shoddy, mostly undecorated and never cleaned. To be fair to him, there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to keep it tidy. This is a very old building in an unpopular side of town, and the landlord doesn’t seem inclined to fix any of the myriad issues with the place, from the slightly leaking bathroom ceiling to the noisy plumbing. Maybe if he had something nice, he’d put some effort into keeping it that way.

It seems like he feels the same. Everytime she stays over, and they are inevitably woken early by the whistling noise of the water pipes running to the other apartments in the building, and the God-forsaken pigeons that have chosen to live directly on his windowsill, he shows her the property pages of the recent papers. 

It’s so odd that he’s doing this now. Every day, she tries not to fight with him, and everyday he refuses to tell her anything beyond the most vague details of what he does, when he’s back in his horrible old cold house with his horrible father. There has never been a less appropriate time for them to live together. 

“Isn’t it a bit…?” she asks, bleary-eyed still, as she tries to see the details of the apartment in Monday’s paper without her glasses. 

“A bit what?” he asks, climbing back under the sheets to curl himself around her back and look over her shoulder. “It’ll have a view. It’s right next to the Royal Gardens.”

Kit scoffs. “Not that we ever go there.” Then, she sees the price, and scoffs again. “Besides, I can’t afford it, and God knows neither can you. And if I had the money, I wouldn’t spend it on a shoebox on the eighth floor of a concrete tower.”

She feels him grin against her neck. “I thought you might say that.”

She can tell instantly that she has fallen for a trick. Her eyes are already rolling, even before he pulls another sheet of newspaper from somewhere behind him with a theatrical little flourish and presents it to her. 

“Here is the real one,” he says, tapping insistently at the circled entry. “Almost half the price for double the space. Even we could manage that.”

Now that he has started spending such a lot of time with his father, he has finally managed to inherit a couple of dusty old heirlooms which have sold for a reasonable figure recently. Perhaps that is his plan for the deposit. The thought makes her uneasy all over again.

It’s nice, from what she can see. It’s clearly in the suburbs, and from the pictures it looks like exactly the sort of place that Kit can’t help picturing when she thinks about being normal and contented. It has a pale blue front door, and a front yard with flowers lining the path. 

“Seriously,” he says, quietly. The blinds are still drawn, and when he pulls her close so that she can relax back against his chest, she’s almost tempted to fall back asleep again. “Why not?”

How long would it be before they killed one another, stuck out there in the quiet with nothing to do but fight? Even if they didn’t, how long before someone burned that little house, blue door and all, right down to the ground?

“It’s — too ordinary,” she says softly. “It’s a nice place, for more normal people. But we couldn’t live there.”

“Aren’t we normal?” he jokes, with one of his tight, forced laughs. She knows that sound, and she knows what she’s doing. Every time she stays here he gives her a few options, and she turns them all down. He persistently drags her back to him, as if he thinks he can keep them close together through sheer force of will, no matter how he changes or how much he becomes his father’s son. 

“No, we are not.” She doesn’t want to look at the paper anymore, so she abandons it at the side of the bed and flips over to face him. “Normal people go and get a dog and marry one another and go on little holidays and – go to the cinema, or something, at the weekends.”

“Is that the whole recipe?” he asks, forehead against hers. “I don’t want the dog, but I’d take the rest. Can we substitute the cinema for the theatre?”

“You’re —” she wants to say missing the point, but then she finds another, more appealing avenue, less likely to end in a conflict so early in the day. “Since when have you enjoyed watching people perform? You only like the theatre when you’re the one on the stage.”

“No, no, no,” he chuckles. “I’m just tired of watching B pull that same face over and over and over and over again…”

They used to guiltily laugh about that. Beatrice does have a certain thing she often does, at least in rehearsals. If she was ever at the theatre and B widened her eyes and started wobbling her lip like that, she would start to think of him, with his own eyes laser-focused on hers and daring her not to grin, and she’d have to cover her mouth with her hand to stop herself.

They don’t joke like that lately. Not since this business with his father. Maybe a year ago, she’d have jumped at the chance for that blue front door.

“You’re no better,” she says, primarily because it is true (all the characters he plays somehow end up being exactly the same), but also because she knows it’ll get a reaction. She knows they won’t have to go back to their newspaper debate if she can draw him on this one instead. 

“Slander!” he cries, and she settles in comfortably to listen to his explanation of why. 

He drove to Monty’s while she sat in silence and stared out of the passenger seat window. Considering last night’s fight, silence is the most they might have hoped for. She’s surprised they even made it into the car. 

Monty hosts a group of them once or twice a year. Kit, who assisted in the building of some of the enclosures inside his house, is always near the top of his list. He’s a born entertainer and there is never a shortage of wild stories from his latest global excursion, unsolicited presentations about animals he finds particularly interesting, and whatever alcoholic drinks anyone could ever ask for. If they’re lucky, sometimes he even bakes a cake. 

Olaf has not been invited personally, but theoretically they come as a pair. She doesn’t think Monty will mind. Besides, she’s warier than ever of leaving Olaf to his own devices for too long, and so it’s the most sensible thing to do to bring him. 

As soon as they arrive, they part ways. He’s trapped here for now, with only trusted associates for company, and so she can relax, and enjoy the opportunity to get some distance from him (even if within the same building). Once she has said hello to Monty, and held the new bright purple lizard he has apparently been making everyone hold as soon as they come in, she weaves her way into the kitchen to check if there’s any cake. 

She finds something even better. 

Bertrand is her closest associate. Actually — for him, she will say friend. He is on an ever-shrinking list of people she would genuinely trust with her life. 

She comes to stand right next to him while he finishes making himself a cup of tea. “I should’ve known you’d be out here,” she prods. Bertrand is secretly a little uneasy around snakes, though he chooses to keep that fact private. He has trained almost every other animal, from fish to birds to enormous predators, and yet he has never really shaken his disgust for reptiles. 

“Too right,” he says, with a big smile. He’s changed his glasses since the last time they saw each other, a couple of months ago. His new pair are tortoiseshell and rounded, and suit him much better than the rectangular black frames he used to favour. “This is as close as I’ll be going, at least until he locks them up for the night. Did you see the size of that new python? What the hell is he feeding it?”

She rolls her eyes. “I don’t think he’s feeding it volunteers, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Either way, I’m going to stick with the eagles. Did you want tea?”

“No,” she answers, holding up the glass of white wine she had been presented with by their host the second she’d stepped foot over the threshold. “Why are you…?”

Bertrand pulls a face. “I’ve got to get back over to the Lake tonight.”

Because she has been so focused on her own problems, she has scarcely thought lately about B’s latest mission, but now she can explain his new glasses. He has been acting as an assistant to Georgina in her new office by Lake Lachrymose. It’s important that they find out as much as possible about her ability to hypnotise and her plans for the use of it in future. It’s not well-known information, even in their group – Georgina has been described before as frighteningly clever, and she is quite well-connected with other volunteers given her background, so if there are weak links she is likely to find them. But, he chose to tell her about it the last time they met, on the understanding that she would not pass it on.

It’s not a million miles away from what they hoped Olaf might have done for them with his father, in theory. Except, in practice, B reports back and shares important developments as he goes along, and genuinely and vocally thinks Georgina’s interest in hypnotism is morally reprehensible. If only they had even half of that certainty about Olaf.

“Surely she hasn’t got you working overnight?”

“No,” he admits. “But I wouldn’t want her to get wind that this was happening and potentially connect the dots… Better safe than sorry. I’m only staying an hour.”

Seems a little over-cautious, but she knows better than to question B’s instincts. Before she can respond, Beatrice has arrived behind her in a flurry of excited movement.

“You didn’t say hello!” she cries, throwing her arms around Kit before she really has a chance to take her in. 

Kit is of what Olaf once jokingly called overly restricted height (actually, she is a very ordinary height, and he is unusually tall; a fact that didn’t seem to change his opinion one bit), but Beatrice is even more petite, so Kit is able to give Bertrand a long-suffering look over the top of her brown hair. She’s trying not to be too openly sour, but she still hasn’t quite managed to forgive her for the mess they’ve made together. Bertrand likes Beatrice, of course, just as much as everyone does – but he could take or leave her overly-touchy tendencies and will be able to sympathise. 

“Hello,” she grumbles, while extracting herself. 

“How are you?” There it is; this is why it’s easier to be cross with Beatrice when you don’t have to actually see her. It’s a question anyone would ask, but Beatrice manages to say it in a way that nobody else could replicate – Kit takes one look at her round, genuine eyes and her warm sunshine smile and can’t bring herself to be the one to upset her. 

“Good,” she says, with a smile of her own. Bertrand, who already knows that she has recently actually been quite angry with her, rolls his eyes and sips his tea. “Is L with you?”

“Currently trapped with the bearded dragons,” she confirms, without a shred of concern. “Monty wanted the knife, for the cake – can I…?”

As she reaches over to fetch it from the counter behind B, she turns her head to continue the conversation. “You might want to come back in, anyway. O is taking an unhealthy interest in the venoms.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Kit finds herself snapping, before she thinks better of it. Bertrand looks at her right away, shocked by her tone, and Beatrice almost cuts her own fingers off on the knife in her surprise. Clearly, it was meant as a joke. 

“Sorry,” she says, as soon as she realises that she was wrong. “I just meant, I get enough of that from everyone else. Sorry, B. I know it was just a joke.”

It’s water off a duck’s back to Beatrice, who accepts the apology with a winning smile and a little unbothered shrug of her shoulders. But it’s more concerning to Bertrand – right away, when she sees his furrowed brow, she wishes he hadn’t witnessed it. “A little on edge about him lately, then?”

“Not especially,” she lies. “No different than normal. I’m just tired of being asked to manage him all the time.” With a pause, she looks back at Beatrice. “I know that wasn’t what you meant.” 

Beatrice isn’t looking at her. She’s looking right at Bertrand, unblinking, with her eyes like dinner plates. It only takes Kit a half a second to register that she is on the outside of something. “What?”

Bertrand is looking at Beatrice with a sort of calculating expression on his face. That doesn’t help to clarify much, except that they both know something that she doesn’t. “Nobody’s mentioned, then,” he says, pointedly, at Beatrice rather than at Kit. 

In what has evidently been a non-verbal debate, Beatrice has given up the ghost. She throws up the one hand that isn’t holding Monty’s knife in a gesture of surrender, though it’s clear from her face that she isn’t completely happy about it. Kit suddenly feels like she’s a parent about to hear an unflattering school report. It’s hardly the feeling she would have expected a couple of years ago, back when she and Olaf used to be a team. 

“I had to hide in the office most of the afternoon, last Wednesday,” Bertrand says. “O showed up to meet Georgina and I thought he’d blow my cover.”

“Why?” Kit asks, before she can think of something better to say. 

“He didn’t say anything to you, then?” Beatrice asks, and it’s right then that Kit realises that she hadn’t wanted to ask about it, because she thought she might already know and be hiding it from them. On top of the fact that Olaf clearly refuses to tell her anything, even something important like this, it also stings to think that Beatrice genuinely couldn’t decide whether to trust her or not, after all these years. 

“Obviously not,” Bertrand replies, on her behalf. At least there’s Bertrand. This is really what she means, when she says he’s a friend more than an associate. “It might not be anything. I’m just surprised it wouldn’t have come up.”

“Well, there’s no point sugar-coating it,” Beatrice perseveres. “Realistically; his father has him meeting with Georgina. If he won’t tell us that, what else won’t he say?”

Kit starts to feel a bit of defensive anger rise up inside her. Beatrice, who is meant to trust her, and who is meant to be as close to Olaf as though she were his sister, is standing here spouting off half-baked theories about him?

“I’m surprised at you,” she says honestly. “He’s watching his father, as you of all people know. If that extends to a visit to Georgina’s, I wouldn’t be too surprised.”

Beatrice looks like she doesn’t quite know what to say. Not because she agrees, but because she is struggling to think of how to say whatever she thinks gently enough. Before she can manage it, Bertrand beats her to the punch.

“If he’s undercover,” he says, as softly as ever. “Why don’t we ever hear a report back?”

Having escaped the dragons and noticed that Beatrice has been out of his direct line of sight for more than a few moments, Lemony joins them just at the critical moment. When she turns her head to look at him, mainly to avoid looking at Bertrand, she can see that he knows exactly what he has walked into. 

“Why not say something earlier?” she asks, directed at all of them. But she knows exactly why, and nobody answers. 

“What are you four gossiping about?” Olaf asks, from the doorway — in her preoccupation, Kit hadn’t noticed him trailing in behind. It’s not such an odd thing for him to say, really. But in the context of their conversation, it lands like a lead balloon. It must be obvious, so he only waits half a beat before he sardonically answers his own question. “Me, then, I assume. Excellent.”

“Just leave it,” she manages to say, through the buzzing haze of her humiliation. 

“I saw you recently,” Bertrand says, eventually. His tone and expression are utterly neutral. “Down near Damocles Dock. I was just telling K.”

“Is that so?” Olaf asks. The undercurrent of his own tone is not so neutral. “What were you doing all the way out there?”

“I had some business at one of the restaurants on the lakefront,” B answers, without skipping a beat. It’s a bald-faced lie, but Kit knows he has no choice. “What were you doing all the way out there?”

“I just took the boat over,” he shrugs. “Not for any reason. I had a day off.”

Lemony scoffs. This is the moment where she knows for sure that it’s going to be bad. 

“What?”

“I think you were actually there visiting the resident optometrist,” her brother says, rather than answering the question he was asked. “Assuming on your father’s instructions?”

“Why ask if you already know?” Olaf wonders aloud, with no shortage of exasperation. He turns back to Bertrand. “God, what is this? Are you trying to make a point?”

“I’m not trying to make any point.” Bertrand says carefully, with a glance into his cup. “What’s your father’s business with Georgina?”

Oh, to hear the answer to any question pertaining to his father! Kit allows herself the smallest sliver of hope that, because someone else has asked it, she might finally hear something worth hearing, rather than a blustered list of things he can’t remember, doesn’t know and didn’t think were important. It lives for less than a second, until she hears him say a disappointing and all-too-familiar; “I still don’t really know yet.”

B smiles in a kind of way that makes him look puzzled. It is designed to diffuse, but she’s tried all these tricks herself and she knows that they do not work. “You have nothing to worry about in front of the four of us. You don’t need to dodge the issue —you must know. Why in the world would he send you there completely uninformed?”

Kit is very confident that she knows the routine from here. First, he will be defensive, second he will be angry, and thirdly he will disappear. There’s no other way it ever happens, and she hasn’t figured out how to break the pattern yet. 

“Do none of you find this a bit weird?” Olaf asks, to the room at large. “You all act like I’m under the orders of the Devil himself. Do you know my father was part of this organisation before you, me or even G were ever born?”

These are his father’s talking points. So often, when he gets defensive, he spits these strange lines out of nowhere as if he is being fed them from behind the curtains of his imaginary stage by an invisible, interfering director. 

“Stop,” Kit hisses at him, before he can say something else he will regret. 

The second the word is out of her mouth, she recognises his expression. They’re into stage two, already. This one might not take long.

“Oh, here we go,” he laughs hollowly. “I’ve got to keep my voice down, see, and I’ve got to stop drinking, and I have to watch every word, because God forbid I say anything I actually think.”

Perhaps it will hurt her feelings later, but for now she is more embarrassed than she is upset. More than anything, she just wants him to stop talking. How can he not realise how much more difficult he makes things for himself, when he acts like this? And for her, too?

Beatrice makes a little sound like a sigh, and when Kit looks at her she thinks she can see some sympathy for her oldest friend. She might not entirely trust him anymore, but she clearly doesn’t think cornering him is the right way to go about it. “Alright,” she says, to break the tension, and then she sets down the knife on the countertop and reaches her hand out toward him. “Come outside with me.”

“You can fuck off as well.” This takes them all by surprise. Beatrice is usually the one who can calm him down; everything Kit says seems to go in one ear and out of the other, he and Lemony have never gotten along for one full day in their entire lives, and he’s got no patience for Bertrand either, who Kit knows he sees as an insufferable bore. Without Beatrice, they’re definitely lost. “I know full well you followed me the other day. Did you really think I wouldn’t know you just because of a wig? I’ve known you since you were three.”

What? Kit mouths at her, in her shock. But Beatrice doesn’t respond. 

“It’s not really your father or Georgina that I worry about,” Lemony says, all of a sudden. As soon as he opens his mouth, Kit’s stomach twists. The attitude to Beatrice will definitely have riled him up. “It’s your new mentors.”

Kit feels every new bit of information like a blow. Each one leaves her a little bit more breathless. There is a silence after that latest bombshell which tells her that this piece of information is an important one. The fact that Olaf has not attempted to laugh it off is also discouraging. When she looks at him, she witnesses the unusual phenomenon of seeing him totally flustered and wrong-footed. “So you’ve been spying on me, too.”

“No,” Lemony replies smoothly. “But you know nothing happens in the City without someone knowing about it.”

“L,” Beatrice chimes in, quietly. “I’m not sure—”

“Who are they?” Kit interrupts, once she’s caught her breath. When nobody immediately seems to want to answer her, she turns to Olaf. She can see his temper is unravelling, but as usual, she doesn’t think she can avert the inevitable. And why should she try? “Why not say any of this, any of the hundreds of times I’ve asked?”

“Thousands, you mean!” he barks. “It never fucking stops!”

Lemony starts to speak, no doubt to defend her, but Olaf hasn’t finished making his point. 

“It was your idea that I get close to my father,” he reminds her, as if she could possibly forget. “Wasn’t that always going to involve speaking to his associates? Why am I suddenly on trial, Kit?”

The question was for her, but it’s just as well that Lemony wants to answer, because she doesn’t know where to begin. “You’re not supposed to be doing his bidding for him. You’re supposed to be telling the rest of us what he’s thinking. We haven’t heard one single thing from you.”

Trapped, Olaf seems to select the initial source of this entire mess as the primary target for his parting shot. Bertrand has mostly stayed quiet since his initial questioning, standing still as a sentinel at the counter, but Olaf addresses him with a jabbing finger. “You are such a fucking prick. You’ve ambushed me out of nowhere for absolutely no reason, and you,” he whirls back, and meets her eyes. “Have thrown the thing you literally forced me to do back in my face.”

“Enough,” Beatrice snaps, so harshly that Kit is almost inclined to double-check that it really came from her. Perhaps it’s the fact that Olaf is also not used to such a short, sharp reprimand from her that stops him mid-tirade. “Go home.”

He doesn’t need telling twice. That’s the next step in the usual process anyway, Beatrice is just shortening the closing monologue. He slams his empty glass down onto the countertop so hard she fears it might shatter, and stamps away into the hall. 

Kit doesn’t know what possesses her to follow. Beatrice seems to be wondering the same. She can hear her clarifying “not you!” behind her as she follows him out. 

He’s already halfway down the front steps when she arrives at the door. “What the fuck was that?” 

“Just leave it,” he mumbles, without turning around. “For once.”

She thinks that’s going to be the end of it, but just as he gets halfway down the driveway, weaving through the space between Monty’s truck and Beatrice’s roadster, he does in fact give her a quick final look. 

“While you’re here,” he calls back up to her. “Thank you so much for having my back.”

“How could I?” she cries, hands thrown out at her sides in truly hopeless exasperation. “Why would I, when you lie to me all the time?”

It doesn’t seem like he has an answer to that. He leaves her in the doorway of Monty’s house, and storms off into the dark.

Olaf makes his apologies to her, in private, but he offers no guarantees that anything will be any different. 

After he left Monty’s, he stayed away a couple of days. The next time, it was four. After that, they had the kind of fight she worried her downstairs neighbour might call the authorities over. Oh, they always could fight, even years prior — but it was so much more venomous now. Right before he left, he’d leaned down and shouted at her so loudly, right in her face, that it left her ears ringing. After that, he was gone a full week. 

He would have her believe he is with his father. But Beatrice checked that alibi, because she knows her way around that house from years ago, and of course, she couldn’t find him there. 

Most of the time in the last month, Kit has felt like she no longer cares. Whatever he’s doing; let him. She doesn’t love him anymore — the concept is so foreign to her that she begins to wonder if she ever really did. He’s an exhausting chore. He sucks all the life out of her every time she sees him.

But persistently, everyone still wants to know about him. They have their own ways of knowing where he goes and who he sees, but they all still want to know, what is he thinking? It’s worse now than before — except for Beatrice, none of them will engage with him at all, so she is their only source of information. Even Beatrice only speaks to him because she has no choice; they must see one another at the theatre, like it or not. Though Lemony did mention that she has suddenly found herself with an alternate, covering half of her usual shows. It’s such petty payback. It’s very him. 

The thing that keeps her holding on is: what happens after? If she turns around and tells him to go forever, once and for all, then who will he go to? It might have been Beatrice, a couple of years prior. It might have been his father, in the spring. Now, knowing the whispers about his mentors and his new connections, she fears it is someone much worse.

And once he’s there, what will he become?

And will it be my fault?

Tonight, a storm is brewing in the car on the way back to her apartment. Jacques has agreed to drive them, and he seems to catch onto the anxious tension and keep his mouth shut too — though he catches her eye in the rearview mirror once and gives her a little smile. They drive in torturous silence except for the sound of the rain on the windows. 

Olaf holds his tongue all the way up the stairs and into her apartment, and long enough to allow her to take off her jacket and sit down on the edge of her bed. But she can feel the fury in everything from the way he moves to the way he breathes. 

“I know you’re ashamed to be seen with me,” he eventually says, and by this point the speaking is a relief even if it is in anger. “But could you stand to make it just a little less obvious?”

“I just didn’t want a repeat of Monty’s.” That’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth. She’s sick of answering for him and being tarred with his same brush. 

“If you’d rather have gone to that boring gallery with someone else, why didn’t you just save me the trouble?” he continues, clattering around in her living room loudly at the same time, as he no doubt roots around for his things. “You left every room as soon as I walked into it. It was like you didn’t even know me.”

I don’t know you, she wants to shout. I haven’t known you for a long time now. 

Eventually, she just sighs. “I understand.”

“I understand,” he mimics nastily. “You drive me insane, do you know that? Why don’t you just say what you want to say?”

She ignores him. This is all he ever does now. Whether she speaks or doesn’t, it seems to make no difference at all. 

“Are you going?” she asks. It would make sense to stand up and see for herself, but she doesn’t have the energy. 

He doesn’t answer. Half the time, it’s like they’re having two separate conversations. “Where?” she persists, like a million times before. She’s said it so many times now that the word has seemed to lose all meaning.  

When no answer is forthcoming, she just shakes her head. “Must be important, at this hour,” she observes caustically. “Wherever it is.”

“If you want to know so badly, why don’t you have me followed again?” he suggests sardonically, through the wall. “Is that why J drove us?”

She manages to drag herself to her feet long enough to make it to the next room, so that she can pointedly open the curtains and show him the empty street. If he ever paid any attention to anything except himself, he’d have heard the taxi driving away. 

“Is that it, then?” he asks, brimming with his undeserved fury. “No apology?”

“I’m not sorry.” This slips out of her mouth in one hot breath; too hard to bite back. 

She is incredibly relieved once the door finally closes behind him. 

For the first time in his life, he sits still and just listens without interruption. At one point, while she searches for the words she needs to tell him that he’s nothing like the boy who held her hand on the way out of the train station, he even closes his eyes. Something ridiculous inside her wonders if he has fallen asleep. That would be the final indignity. 

“Finished?” he asks eventually, when the silence has become deafening. “Don’t act like you haven’t been practicing it. I found three-quarters of that in your notebook.”

Petty outrage springs up inside her at the idea of him going through her handwritten notes, on the hunt for her secrets. And then, as always, something much darker. There are more important things written in her commonplace book than her half-baked emotional ramblings about him. “How long ago?” she sighs. 

He shrugs. If he knows what she is thinking, he doesn’t let on. She will have to revisit the book and make sure she can report everything he knows to her associates. God, she is sick of being a liability. “Maybe a couple of months? You had a list of my failings over three whole pages.”

“If you knew what I was going to say,” she says quietly. “Why didn’t you change things before I said it?”

He has nothing to say to that. He sits there, defeated, in her chair — eyes open now and fixed on the window, as if he has somewhere else to be. At the start of their descent, when she thought about this, she pictured that he’d fight at the end when it came down to it. She doesn’t know whether she’s relieved or saddened to learn that he laid down his weapons months ago. “Why didn’t you just leave?”

“I did leave. It’s mentioned several times in your notes.”

“You know what I’m asking you,” she huffs. “Why not put me out of my misery? These pointless months of worrying about you and thinking about you and despairing about you…”

She doesn’t know why she’s bothering to ask. She’ll never get a sensible answer out of him right now, when he will already be defensive. She has learned as much a hundred times or more over the years. Thousands! he shouts at her, in her mind, back in Monty’s kitchen. “Felt like a lot of effort to put it all into words.”

Kit shakes her head sadly. “Liar.”

“Yes,” he agrees hollowly. “That’s really the key theme on page one of your little grievance report.”

She waits, after that. Sometimes, he needs the space to think about what he really wants to say, not just what is easiest. He might not be the boy she loved, but he deserves a last hearing. 

Minutes pass. She waits for so unbelievably long that it feels like time has stopped altogether. When she looks at him, he has the audacity to pointedly check his watch. 

“I wish I’d never fought so hard to try to save it,” she eventually says, when all hope of a sensible conversation is finally lost. “I'd love to go back in time and save myself the energy. I wish I’d known you’d never pull your weight.”

“I tried at the beginning,” he grumbles. “But all you ever did was pick and pick… ”

“Bullshit,” she interrupts. “You never changed even one bit.”

“I did,” he sighs. “Just much earlier than you’re thinking. You only ever loved me when I was pretending to be something different.”

Sure, Beatrice had said, looking like she was playing something off. You’re good for each other.  

“I never asked for that,” she says, while the pieces shuffle together. She never could square the boy in Lemony’s classes to the one she knew at headquarters. Perhaps he was always a better actor than she was willing to give him credit for. “All I ever actually wanted was for you not to destroy everything we’re supposed to agree on for the sake of your father’s belated approval.”

He just laughs, in that exhausted way he sometimes does when they reach one of their impasses. “Destroy what, exactly?”

They could argue it forever, but anything either of them had to say in their own defence has long been exhausted. When Kit thought of schisms, when she was young enough not to have seen them up close, she always thought of dramatic betrayals, of sudden cracks and fights so furious they could change entire moral constitutions. Now that one has unfolded in slow-motion in the last two years in the domesticity of her own living room, she realises just how insidious they can be. 

“Just go,” she says, eventually, and she doesn’t even care if that will mean he thinks he won their last round. In the end, they have both lost.

It’s difficult to deal with Beatrice, newly engaged and so happy. Rationally, Kit knows that it is not her fault that she is so miserable she cannot even imagine what being happy must feel like. It only makes her feel worse that she cannot bring herself to be delighted for her, or for her brother. 

Beatrice hasn’t left her alone for longer than twenty-four hours in the weeks since Olaf finally pulled his last disappearing act. That might be a sign of their friendship, or it might be because they want to be sure if she is also volatile. You can never be sure, especially with Beatrice. More than likely, it’s both. 

She talks at length about inconsequential things, flitting from one topic to another whenever the mood takes her. They talk distantly about the wedding, and yes, of course she will make it a point to be there, and they talk about Anna Karenina again, because they always agreed so wholeheartedly on it years prior, and Beatrice complains about being replaced in her latest production, as if any of those things are even remotely important in the grand scheme of things. There are new burned-out holes in the City every day. 

It can’t all be him. But she knows now — from Lemony, largely, now that she has become increasingly willing to listen — that at least some of it is. Despite it all, she still wants to believe that this is all his father’s fault. But can he really blame his father, at twenty-six? Can they all walk around blaming their parents for the rest of their lives? God, it really is that fucking poem. 

Beatrice sighs when she realises that she has lost her attention. She stirs her tea, the spoon delicately clinking against the china, and Kit watches her wrestle with herself about whether she will allow them to have a serious conversation about something important. 

She gives in. “Any luck finding him yet?”

They agreed that she would keep an ear to the ground, a fortnight ago, but Kit has long since reconsidered. “It shouldn’t be me to try,” she shrugs. “Maybe you.”

“I’ve spoken to him already, after the fiasco with the casting,” Beatrice frowns. “I was never going to get a good reception. You said you would —”

“The last time,” Kit interrupts, trying not to be angry. “That you and I agreed on a little plot amongst ourselves, is what caused all this in the first place.”

Beatrice shakes her head sadly. “I know it’s difficult,” she says, after a long pause where she stares into her tea. “I hate it too. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think anything we did either way was ever going to stop it.”

Kit wishes — right then, and every night by herself too — that she believed that. 

The next morning, she can see the coiling smoke just outside her window. 

By the time Jacques reaches her, Lemony is already out of the country. He’ll be back, she knows, but how, with the manhunt in place and his life in tatters, she isn’t sure. She reads the newspapers with her mouth gaped open, and looks at the police reports they can get hold of with the same reaction of mixed shock and disgust. It’s working . This is his father’s plan, finally off the ground like they always dared to dream it wouldn’t be. Perhaps he’s a genius after all. 

In her fury, all of her reservations about making Olaf worse are out of the window. She stalks his usual haunts with purpose, utilising every little tidbit of useless knowledge she can’t do anything with now, until she finally comes across him. 

He’s leaning over the bridge with a skinny cigarette loosely between his fingers. 

“I knew I’d see you,” is the first thing out of his mouth. 

He keeps his elbows on the railing, bent slightly at the waist, and she wildly wonders whether she would have the strength to sweep his legs out from underneath him and throw him in. He doesn’t even stand up straight as she strides towards him. She is the angriest she has ever been in all her life and all he does is look at her out of the corner of his eyes, like an ultimately inconsequential minor inconvenience. “I could fucking kill you.”

Olaf sighs. “I am not the only person in the City who wanted your brother out of it.”

“You’re one of them, though,” she accuses. None of this needs to be a question; she knows it and she doesn’t require his pointless denial, or his pointless confirmation. She’s so angry she thinks it might be radiating in waves off of her skin. “You did this.”

The smoke he exhales seems to linger in the bitter air under the orange of the streetlamps. “Alright ,” he acquiesces, as if the couple of seconds of conversation have already been an enormous imposition. “I suppose it might be true that when I found out about all of your plotting to put me behind bars, that perhaps the solution of having L behind them sounded like an appealing alternative.”

She has no idea how he could have possibly known. She thinks she has done enough in the past months to be above suspicion, but that’s no real comfort to anyone. It means that there are more like him in their close ranks, but they haven’t figured out who they are yet. 

She thinks of how conflicted she felt, at first, when her brother had told her of their intentions. Of course, it was right, but the thought of him behind bars still wounded her. Looking back, she hates herself for caring.

“He’s gone,” she tells him, because she knows that they’ll never catch up. If there is one thing she knows Lemony can do, it’s run. “You’ll never find him.”

Olaf shrugs one skinny shoulder — had he always looked so angular? — as if to say, same difference. He has the nerve to look bored of her already, and to look smug, like a child getting one over on a playground enemy.  

“How can you do this?” she asks, over the top of the sound of a passing car — the first one since she found him here. It’s quiet here at night. Nobody would see him fall in. 

“I learned it from how we were raised, Kit,” he says, while he exhales. “We learned it all together.” 

“Shut up,” she hisses. “You don’t get to use that. We’ve never been this cruel.”

His eyes glitter under the street lamp as he smirks at her, pleased to see her falling into his bear traps. “You’ve never been cruel?” he asks, slowly, knowingly. “There are people all over the City who would disagree. About you, and about L too.”

He stubs the cigarette out on the railing half-heartedly, and lets it fall to simmer at his feet. “Besides; you all knew that review would be the last straw.”

It’s so ridiculous that in different circumstances, perhaps as a casual observer, she thinks she could almost laugh. Perhaps she would, if it wasn’t so sad.

“He’s my brother.” 

“And what difference does that make to me, anymore?”

“Because you did this to hurt me.” He looks for a moment like he’s going to laugh, like he’s going to say something stupid like not everything is about you, but she can’t allow him minimise and trivialise it, can’t allow him to deny it. “You could have run; you didn’t have to retaliate. And I hate you for it.”

This time, for the first time, she really means it. When she looks at him, she sees a callous, all-wrong version of the him she once knew, as if this one is a badly rendered version by a shoddy artist, void of any of the intellect, any of the charm, capturing only his worst side.

He tuts, as though she has said something stupid. “You hated me before this.”

“I didn’t,” she admits, cursing herself because it is actually true. “I always thought there was hope for you. I understood why —”

“Hope for me,” he echoes, with a theatrical huff and a roll of his eyes. “For the wayward soul? God, you’re insufferable. You can save your prayers and your pity for someone who wants them.”

“We’ll never forgive you for this,” she presses. “Not unless you put it right.”

“I can’t,” he shrugs. “And I wouldn’t, even if I could. I don’t want your forgiveness. I don’t want anything from any of you.”

“We all loved you.” 

“Lemony never did.”

Kit smiles grimly. “Well, you certainly got him back for that, didn’t you? I suppose you’re proud of yourself.”

He pauses just for a second, and then his face splits into a grin. Years ago, she used to think it was so contagious. Now, it leaves her curling her lip in disgust. “Extremely.”

Even in a life full of wishes and what-ifs, in that very moment, she doesn’t think she has ever wanted something as much as she wants to wipe that smile off his face. 

He can see the impulse in her, and it only deepens his smile. “Go on,” he goads, staring down at her with the sort of mischievous glee that she might once have been charmed by. “You know you want to. You’re allowed to; none of your friends are here. Do something, if you think you can.”

He finally seems energised enough by his little games to move from the railing, and he only does so in order to come closer toward her, dipping his head to taunt her face-to-face.

“You’re no better than I am,” he prods. “You know you’re not.”

Before she can find the words to tell him that she is, and always has been, and always will be, no matter what, his hands clasp around her shoulders, and suddenly the realisation is upon her that, for whatever reason, he means to kiss her. She’s so outraged by the thought that she veers backwards, almost onto the road. 

“You’re mad,” she barks, struggling for the words to explain the absolute, paralysing disgust she has for him. He doesn’t come near to her again, thankfully — he simply laughs at her harder, shaking his head as if she is just a stubborn child. 

“You’ll come around,” he declares, with all the bravado in the world. “You let me know when.”

“Fuck you,” she snarls at him. “I’d kill you first.”

He just laughs and laughs and laughs.

There is pandemonium in the opera house. Beatrice holds her hand tight, tighter than ever, and in ways only she could notice, shows her own inner turmoil — in the unusual clumsiness of her steps, the wet look to her eyes as the sirens blare. Bertrand is as composed as ever, and thankfully he is the one to take hold of B and steer them both toward a waiting taxi. 

It’s only a few minutes for Kit to walk. Besides, she can’t look at their guilty faces any longer. 

She is shivering. It is cold enough that she doesn’t appear strange to those outside on the street, but her legs feel like they might buckle at any moment, and no matter how many lungfuls of the refreshing winter air she takes, she still feels that her chest is somehow too tight. 

It’s like that horrible night of the shipwreck all over again. They won’t have to worry about the Count anymore; that’s clearly what Lemony had intended and, of course, he’s right. Sometimes you have to cut the rot out right at the root. But Kit feels the ugly slithering feeling in her chest as she wonders what horrors this will give way to in his place.

She wishes she felt less guilty. Of course, it is obvious to her that the others must have wanted to spare her the details. Her part in this was always meant to be a fragment of a larger plot that she wouldn’t know the reasoning behind, but that doesn’t help now. Why else would you sneak poison darts into a performance and into your associates’ hands? Why else was she being followed? Of course she knew, even if she hadn’t allowed herself to name it until all hell broke loose in the final Act.

Olaf will find out. If his mentors know, whoever they are, they will no doubt crow over this. Perhaps he will think she acted alone, if the others have escaped notice, and perhaps that’s for the best, if it keeps their names well out of the frame. 

It’s as she thinks of him — cursing her, crafting his plans for revenge, choking back tears — that she feels so faint that she has to stop. She veers left on the sidewalk until she can place her hands against a dark shop window and press her forehead hopelessly against the glass, willing herself to remember how to breathe.

She is in shock, she would say, if anyone was to stop and ask. Maybe it’s not even a lie. She has never been so shocked at herself before in her life.

Her stomach drops when they lock eyes through the window. 

It’s only for a second. If she wants to prevent his superiors from shipping this dangerous cargo to their counterparts in Peru, she only has less than an hour to prevent it. And if he wants to stop her, he has even less time to prepare their defences. 

She needs no time to think. He is just an obstacle to overcome, and not the hardest one she has faced by a long way. She doesn’t need any time to look at him, the new lines around his mouth or the mess he has made of his hair or his raggedy jacket, and she doesn’t need any time to reminisce on old memories. At the end of the day, they are meaningless, and all they come to is this — two enemies giving each other a wary glance through a sheet of glass. 

His mouth twitches in a grimace, and then his lips make the shape of the word Snicket, and he breaks off in a sprint in the opposite direction without a single look back over his shoulder.