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Phineas Thatch is wandering aimlessly through the halls of the Lazaretto.
He hates being aimless. He hasn’t been aimless in years, there’s always been some sort of aim. But he’s now offered to help the Mothers prepare their ships three times, insisted that they should accept his help twice, and basically begged to be allowed to help once, and been turned down every time. Told that he should go rest, or eat. He’s been resting and eating plenty! He’d collapsed for about five hours already! If he tries to sleep again, he’s going to crawl right out of his skin. He needs something to do.
He adjusts his armor, which keeps nearly slipping off his shoulder. It’s supposed to have the Mica pauldron there for balance. The whole thing really doesn’t work without it, aesthetically or practically. But it’s fine. He’s making do.
He stops next to a big window that looks out over the kelp maze, and past that, the dock. He can see the Mothers loading supplies onto ships, carrying boxes back and forth up the ramp. Phineas is great at carrying things. He could definitely be helping with this, if they would just let him. He glares out at the docks, fists clenched at his sides.
“Do you ever take that armor off?”
Phineas whirls toward the sound of the unexpected voice, his hand twitching halfway to his side, where his mace would usually be hanging.
Tzila Guthrie is sitting in a stone alcove carved in the wall. She’s got a pen in her hand and a notebook balanced on her knees, and she looks just as startled as he does by how quickly he turned around.
Phineas exhales. “Sorry. Didn’t realize you were there.”
Tzila blinks at him. “Guess you were too busy glaring at the window like you wanted to punch it.”
Phineas flinches. For that split second, his mind flashes with images of blood and teeth spattering across the bar of the Black Candle Cabaret. Of bones breaking beneath the force of his gauntlet. Tzila doesn’t know about any of that, but it’s like she can smell it on him.
He turns back to the window again, mostly as an excuse to not meet this kid’s eyes. “I was just…watching them load the ships,” he finishes, lamely. A small fold-jelly is floating through the kelp forest below. As he watches, it bumps against a green strand, rebounds, drifts off in the opposite direction.
Tzila’s quiet for maybe half a minute. He can hear her pen scratching against the paper before she speaks again. “So do you ever take the armor off? Or is that just what you wear all the time? Looks uncomfortable.”
He turns back to her, arms folded across his breastplate. “I take it off to sleep.”
Tzila raises both eyebrows. “So, what, back at the Capital you’re just clanking around all the time? Doesn’t it get hot?”
Phineas blinks. “No, what? I mean, yeah, the city does tend to be hot, there’s all this glass, so it’s kind of a pain in armor. But back there I’m not in uniform all the time, obviously, I’m like…a normal person. It’s different here.”
Tzila narrows her eyes. “You don’t think it’s safe here?”
“No, I do,” Phineas says, surprising himself a little as he says it. They’ve been fully submerged in Fold for over a day now, after all. He’d never even heard of the Mothers before Saskia Del Norma had sent him after them, and his initial impression hadn’t been a positive one. It’s like their entire aesthetic is cultivated to unsettle. But the Fold here seems…controlled. Quiet. It’s not like the wave of tearror he’d seen crashing down on Midst, and it’s certainly not like the flashing, freezing shadows at the corners of his oldest memories. It’s more like…a wet blanket. He’s not sure he likes it, but he’s also not afraid of it, not really. And the Mothers have been nothing but calm and kind and firm. So the armor isn’t on because he’s expecting a fight. It’s just… Do not show weakness. “I’m still…on duty, I guess.”
Tzila frowns at him. “You’re still on duty? For the Trust? Down here?”
“Someone had to get help for Midst, and I was the one who could,” he says, which is true. Does it matter that Saskia was the one who’d told him to do it?
“The Trust has their own help, right?” Tzila points out. “The Trust wouldn’t need the Mothers.”
Phineas doesn’t especially like the direction of this conversation. “The more the better. They’re probably sending aid ships to Midst already, but it won’t hurt to have the Mothers too.” This is…probably true. It should be true, Midst belongs to the Trust, there should be aid ships coming. The fact that he’d seen the numbers on the conversion ticker indicating an absolute nosedive in Valor values shouldn’t…well, it might delay things, maybe, and he has to admit that if--when!--aid ships show up they probably won’t be too happy to work alongside people like the Mothers, but still. Midst is Trust property. He’s helping Midst. He’s still acting in the interests of the Trust. He’s still doing what he’s supposed to do.
Tzila is looking at him very skeptically. She opens her mouth, like she’s about to say something else.
“What, uh, what are you drawing?” Phineas interrupts, changing the subject as quickly as he can.
The skeptical look stays for a moment, but then Tzila scoots over on her stone ledge to leave room for another person and holds the sketchbook out toward him. Phineas walks over and leans on the ledge next to her. The page has several drawings of the Mothers, one of the ferry creatures that had taken them to the Lazaretto, and, tucked in the corner, what Phineas recognizes as the beginning of a sketch of himself--just the lines of his shoulders and the back of his head, as he’d been standing at the window.
“You’re really good,” he says. Phineas has never had a particularly discerning eye for art, but the kid clearly has talent.
“Thanks,” says Tzila, pulling the notebook back and looking down at it. “I left my sketchbook behind on Midst. The Mothers gave me this one.”
“That was good of them,” Phineas says quietly. As he watches her bring the pen back to the paper again, the horror of it all hits him in a way he hasn’t let it yet. So many people on Midst just lost their lives, lost their homes, lost whatever else they might have lost to the tearror. He thinks of that crackling, desperate broadcast through the mostly-empty streets, calling for anyone who was still out there to come shelter in the caves. And he thinks of Saskia Del Norma’s furious face as she’d looked at him.
All Phineas did, for this kid especially, was make an already horrific situation so much worse.
He should apologize to her. It’s not fair, to be sitting here next to her when she doesn’t even know what he’s done. But what would he say? Tzila, I’m sorry I hurt your father. I’m sorry I’m the reason that you’re separated from him. I don’t even know why I did it. I didn’t think twice. I didn’t even realize what I’d done, not really, not until I was standing alone in the street. I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I don’t know if I can be sure I wouldn’t do it again.
No, he can’t say any of that. Maybe Lark was right. An apology is a Valorous deed, to be sure, but its value is negligible unless it can be paired with an atoning action. He can’t apologize yet, not until he has a plan for how he’s going to go forward.
Well, if he’s not apologizing to her, he should probably…ask her about Francis Peabody. That is still his assignment, after all, and if… when he makes it back to the Trust, it might still be relevant. Tzila hadn’t seemed to know anything when they’d questioned her aboard the ship, but they’d also asked her basic questions about where she was from and if she’d ever interacted with the Trust, and he now knows she lied about that, so it’s possible she lied about the investigation, too.
He doesn’t need to freak her out, he can just…ask. Casually. Like they’re having a normal conversation.
He’s suddenly very tired, exhaustion filling him right down to his bones. Phineas leans his head against the stone wall next to him and closes his eyes.
“Why do you have that?” Tzila asks.
Phineas opens his eyes. She’s pointing at his abacus with the back of her pen. He looks down at it and frowns. “It’s my abacus.”
“I know what an abacus is,” says Tzila, rolling her eyes. “Why do you have Caenum? Didn’t being a soldier and solving mysteries and whatever get you a ton of Valor?” The question puts Phineas immediately on edge, but Tzila mostly just sounds curious, although her lip does curl on the word ‘soldier.’
“It did,” says Phineas, defensively. Why is he defending himself to a twelve-year-old? “The pay itself was…well, adequate, and we had all these opportunities to gain more Valor. We were rescuing people, recovering stolen property, bringing criminals to justice. I just…” His hand comes up and touches the single bead, and he looks down at the floor. “I had a lot of debt to make up for.”
“Ohhh.” When he looks back up, Tzila is nodding, as if with understanding. “Did you get a lot from your parents? Or did you do something?”
She says this like it might be an exciting story if he had, but Phineas recoils from the suggestion. “No! No, I didn’t, I just…” He takes a deep breath. “I was an Unlift. I only came to the Trust when I was a little bit younger than you are now. And the place I came from was…” Cold. Dangerous. Lonely. Hungry. The scariest place in the universe. “It wasn’t a good place. So the debt I came in with was very large. It’s taking a long time to work off.” He touches the bead again, feels the cold glass between his fingertips.
Tzila’s eyes have narrowed to slits. “And you don’t see anything wrong with that?”
Phineas looks over at her, taken aback by the question. “It’s just how it is. It was a lot of trouble and work for a lot of people to take care of me, it’s only fair.”
“But it’s not--” Tzila starts, and then deliberately shuts her mouth. Her chin is jutting out like there’s something she wants to say, but she’s stopping herself. And it’s at this point that Phineas remembers that he knows that Tzila and her father left the Trust, but Tzila doesn’t know that he knows that. Yet another secret that he should probably tell her, but again, what’s he going to say? It seems like the least of their problems right now.
Tzila kicks her feet, heels hitting the stone wall behind her legs. “My dad…my dad always used to say,” she says cautiously, her voice cracking a little, “that there are some people in the Trust who only have Caenum because their parents had it, and their parents before them, back so far that it’s not anything anyone did, it’s just the way it’s always been. And it all stacks on each other, and the hole gets so deep you can never climb out of it. Is that only fair?”
“Well--”
Apparently Tzila’s just ramping up. “And even if someone did earn their own Caenum, what then? They screwed up once so now they’re just totally stuck forever?”
“It’s not forever,” Phineas breaks in when Tzila pauses for breath. “That’s the whole point, you can always pull yourself out.” The words echo strangely in his ears. What was it he’d said to that fugitive, Ginsberg, only a few weeks ago? None of us are irredeemable in the eyes of the Trust.
You did something bad enough that they left you to die, whispers a little voice in the back of his head. How’s that for irredeemable?
Tzila’s whole face is pinched. “Like you did?”
“Like I will,” Phineas says automatically. Like I almost have, he nearly adds, only that isn’t true anymore, is it? He’s gone from being so close to breaking even to…he doesn’t even want to think about it. How much Caenum do you get for nearly beating a witness to death? Does it get modified if the victim is technically a fugitive? (Actually, it certainly does.) Will it be modified by intent? Phineas has been wrong about what’s right so many times in his life, has had to have notaries and teachers explain it to him again and again. Intent never matters as much as results, but it does sometimes lessen the amount deducted if you thought you were doing the right thing. Except he can’t really remember what he was thinking--he’d been fixated only on the goal, he’d been thinking only that he couldn’t afford to fail again, he’d been paying attention only to Jonas in the doorway. And that’s hardly noble intent, you’re not supposed to be thinking about yourself, you’re not supposed to do things just to earn Valor, so that’s probably not going to help his--
Phineas is abruptly, ferociously disgusted with himself.
He runs a hand over his face. Then he stands up. He shouldn’t be just sitting here.
“Whoa, wait, you don’t have to leave,” says Tzila, alarmed.
Phineas shakes his head. “No, I should--I have to--” He pulls himself together enough to find a real excuse, and gestures toward her sketchbook. “I don’t want to keep distracting you.”
“You’re not, honestly, Lark went off with one of the Mothers to talk about something and I was--bored.” The words sort of tumble out at her, and when Phineas focuses enough to look at her, she’s chewing on the edge of her fingernail. There’s a fragile look on her face.
Of course, Phineas realizes belatedly, shaking off the maelstrom inside his head. The kid just lost everything. Of course she doesn’t want to be alone.
He sinks back down onto the ledge next to her. His armor makes a soft clank.
Tzila’s still chewing on her fingernail, staring vaguely out the window. Phineas thinks she’s maybe blinking back tears.
Well, distracting kids is easy. Back with the Family, he’d done it a lot. He clears his throat. “You know, being with the Company wasn’t all daring rescue missions and murder investigations. It was a lot of just standing around looking strong. And even when we had a mission, the media was always following us around. You know Jedediah Pom, right?” He glances over at her. She’s still not really looking at him, but she does nod. “He’s a lot bossier in person. If we weren’t live and he didn’t like the way something went down, he’d try to get us all to reset and do it again. He made me say a line into the microphone, like, a dozen times once.”
Tzila’s looking at him now, and raising an eyebrow, which he takes as a good sign. “Of course, we usually were live, and that’s not as easy to re-do. One time--” (oh, yeah, she’ll like this story) “--we were raiding this fancy house as part of a mission. Our ship was hovering above it, and we were going to rappel down through an open window to break right into the second story. Spahr--the Consector, you met him--was going first, and Pom was already narrating him heroically gliding through the window with his hair waving in the wind when, pow!” Phineas smacks the back of his hand against his other palm. “Turns out the window was closed. And we make strong glass on the Light! Spahr smacked right into it!”
From next to him, a giggle. Tzila is laughing, hiding her mouth behind her hand. “Like a bird?”
Phineas grins. “Like a bird! Once he stopped seeing stars he had to reach down and unlatch it.”
“What did Jedediah Pom say?”
“I think it was something like ‘The Prime Consector has engaged in an altercation with a pane of glass.’”
Tzila lets out a snort of laughter, loud in the quiet halls of the Lazaretto.
There’s a lot Phineas is leaving out of this story. For one thing, they’d been breaking into the house because they’d gotten reports of Breach collaborator meetings happening within--reports which had turned out to be entirely, embarrassingly false. And for another, although the other soldiers had laughed about the window incident and still laugh about it now if someone brings it up, Jonas had been maybe the most upset that Phineas has ever seen him. Not in the purposeful, sharp way that he got upset when someone else had fucked up, but in a brittle way. Like this error might be the last straw, like at any moment either he might snap or everything else might break around him. The fact that they’d come out of the raid with basically nothing to show for it certainly didn’t help. All in all, it had been a pretty bad day.
But it’s a good story. And Tzila’s laughing, and Phineas realizes it’s the first time he’s even seen her smile. Good job, Phineas.
Tzila wraps her fingers around the edge of her sketchbook, her giggles trailing off. “What else did you do in the Light? What’s it…what’s it like?” Her voice is tinged with curiosity and wistfulness.
Phineas is maybe the worst person to ask about what’s going on in the Highest Light, since he’d mostly spent his time working and working out and had never wanted to spend Valor on drinks and nice food and doing things like his coworkers did. But he still manages to come up with some interesting things to say. He tells her about the new zoo that opened, which he’s only familiar with because he’d stood at the ribbon cutting ceremony. He tells her about the Loxlee Gala, and they both laugh as he describes some of the more ridiculous fashion choices of the people in attendance. And then she talks a little about her friends back on Midst, about some group project they’d done for an assignment at school that had involved making clothes out of weird materials. Even that simple story is tinged with worry and sadness, but Phineas does his best to be encouraging. He hopes it’s helping.
They’ve been sitting there for maybe ten minutes when there’s the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Lark rounds the corner. Her eyes immediately narrow and her steps quicken when she sees Phineas, and she practically bears down on the two of them. “What are you doing here?” she accuses.
“Talking?” Phineas offers, resisting the urge to stand at attention.
“About what?” Lark’s standing right in front of them now, arms crossed, eyes darting back and forth from Phineas to Tzila.
“Phineas was telling me about the Capital,” Tzila says. “Just ‘cause, you know, I’ve never been there. So I was curious.” She’s clearly trying so hard to sound casual.
“That’s it?” says Lark, staring hard at Phineas.
“That’s it,” Phineas confirms.
A lot of nonverbal communication goes on between all three of them, as Phineas suspects he and Tzila are both quietly trying to say some variation of “don’t worry, I didn’t spill any secrets.” Finally, Lark sighs and pinches her brow. “Come on, Tzila, it’s time for dinner.”
“Okay.” Tzila hops down off the ledge and tucks her sketchbook under her arm. Lark is already walking back the way she came. Tzila starts to follow, then stops and looks over her shoulder. “Coming, Phineas?”
Phineas and Lark both look at her, startled. “Oh, I--” Phineas starts.
“No,” Lark says flatly.
“He needs to eat, too,” Tzila points out. “It’s dinnertime. There’s only one cafeteria. He’s not doing anything else.”
This is…all true. Phineas looks at Lark. Lark looks at Tzila. Her brow is furrowed, and that seemingly permanent frown is still creasing her face.
“That’s alright,” says Phineas, as the silence starts to stretch. “I’m going to go eat in a bit. I told one of the Mothers I’d check in with them before I did, see if they need my help with anything. Maybe I’ll see you there?” He will eat later, but he’ll make sure he doesn’t see them there. And he did technically tell the Mothers this, although he’s pretty sure they don’t want him to check on anything.
Lark looks at him with that steady gaze. She doesn’t have her hat on, but even without it her eyes are shadowed and unreadable. Still, when she gives him the tiniest of nods, it almost feels like approval. Phineas gives the tiniest of nods back.
Tzila looks disappointed. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll see you later. Thanks for talking to me.”
“No problem,” Phineas says, smiling at her. Tzila gives a very small smile back, and then she and Lark walk away down the hallway.
Phineas leans his head against the stone again. That was one good thing he could do, he figures. Better than nothing. It’s always better than nothing. That’s the whole point.
It has to be the point.
He watches the fold-jellies drift through the kelp forest below, with the endless expanse of the Fold shifting and swirling beyond them.