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So little has changed in this place.
Sure, a thick dust has settled across the flag with its hand-stitched emblem. The maps are tattered and frayed where they cling to fractured walls; the bed a home to mice. But Silco swears he can hear a pot of coffee whistling on the makeshift stove. Smell the sulfur of a match, the smoke of a freshly lit cigarette.
Their mining jackets are still right where they’d hung them—inside one another—and Silco finds his eyes avoiding them like beggars in the sump.
It’s still so much like when he last set foot here, back when his scar was still fresh and he’d needed to scavenge for basic needs like an exile in the fortress he’d built brick by brick, stitch by crooked stitch.
So little has changed, and yet everything has.
Silco shifts in the small wooden chair behind the desk, busying his anxious fingers with the handle of Vander’s knife, its grooves worn smooth from tracing the crudely carved V.
It’s foolish to meet here. To let the light touch things best left behind. But he won’t reveal his hand without seeing what else is on the table. Can’t let Vander know where he’s been hiding. Won’t risk meeting at The Drop.
The letter he’d found in this spot still resides in the top left drawer of his desk at the cannery—folded edges worn soft from pensive fingertips. From opening and folding and re-opening in the late hours of the night when sleep evaded him, as it so often did.
He’d wanted to burn it. To rip it to shreds and drown the flimsy apology in the Pilt, just as Vander had done to him. But the weaker man surfaced to stop him. Stilled his shaking hands. Folded it neatly. Tucked it close to his heart.
There’s a rustle outside the door, a clumsy shifting of heavy boots, a jiggle of the crude handle, and his traitorous heart hammers into a frenzy.
Silco grips the handle of the knife, bracing himself for the man he’d last seen through murky water as his vision went black around the edges.
But the man who enters has none of his bite. None of his rage. No trace of the fight in his towering body.
Vander looks broken. Those strong, broad shoulders slump beneath his linen shirt. His once-lustrous brown hair now dull and greying, his beard unkempt. There are bags under his tired grey eyes, and the light seems to have left them entirely. They widen with shock when they meet Silco’s, pinching into painful remorse as they scan the carnage of his face.
Silco lets him look. Lets him rove over the blackened skin around his eye, his missing upper lid that exposes the jet black sclera and molten iris. Both Silco’s eyes lower a fraction as a strange, self-conscious feeling overtakes him. It’s hideous, he knows. But the way Vander’s brows pinch, the way his lips tremble with a thousand apologies that struggle to escape reinvigorates him with a twisted satisfaction.
Good.
Finally, Vander heaves a sigh and one makes it out, but just barely. “I’m so sorry.”
Silco sits still as a statue. Watching. Waiting. Piercing right through him with his sick, lambent eye.
Vander shakes his head and rubs the nape of his neck. “I know it’s not enough. I know there’s nothing I can say that will undo what I did to you.” His hand drifts to the leather at his forearm almost reflexively. “Not a single day has gone by that I’m not haunted with regret. I don’t expect your forgiveness—I don’t deserve it—but I want you to know that.”
Better.
Silco gives a single nod. He isn’t ready to reward him with words. Not yet. It’s satisfying to watch him squirm.
Vander lets out a ragged breath. “So, what’ve you brought me here for?”
“Take a seat,” Silco orders with a nod of his head toward the small wooden chair in the corner. It’s covered in cobwebs and dust.
Vander clears some of it away with a half-hearted brush of his enormous palm, dragging it toward the opposite side of the desk to face Silco. The chair groans under his weight—he’s gone soft around the middle, his once-firm edges rounded with age. It suits him though, and Silco curses the weaker man inside of him for thinking so.
Vander waits for Silco to speak, fidgeting like a scolded child, eyeing the knife in his hand.
Finally, Silco begins: “I understand there’s been a recent loss.”
He may as well have struck a second gash across Vander’s arm, the way he reacts. “They won’t even give me her body,” he starts, nostrils flaring, lips pressing into a hard line. “How am I supposed to have a funeral without a fucking body?”
Silco can’t help but remember it—her body. So tiny and fragile the day she was born. Swaddled in a blanket with that pink tuft of hair peeking out. He’d been so afraid to hold her.
Vander’s arms were large and sturdy. Safe. But they hadn’t been able to protect her. Not from this.
Silco loosens his grip on the knife.
“Leverage,” Vander says with a bitter laugh. “They want the others too. Powder and two boys I’ve taken in. Children,” he spits. “Councilor Kiramman will stop at nothing to avenge her daughter, and that academy boy she was sponsoring.”
Silco sighs, thumbing over the well-worn V. “Grief can turn men into monsters.”
Vander frowns, and a war wages on behind his tired grey eyes before he speaks again. Softened with remorse, but just as bitter. “We had a deal, you know? The Sheriff and I? I keep Zaun from attacking and they leave us alone.”
Silco’s hand chokes up around the handle. “A deal?”
Vander’s eyes dart to the knife before leveling with Silco’s. “I know, it’s rock-bottom. Pathetic. But I swore I’d do anything to keep those kids from ending up like their parents.” He shakes his head, huffing a sharp breath through his nose. “Some good that did.”
Silco gives a bitter nod. The old lamp flickers above them, casting light over the tattered plans pinned to the walls, the fractured wooden beams that the broken man across from him had hammered in himself. The same man who’d dug these tunnels with his fists. Dreamed with Silco at this very desk through so many long nights, their soot-covered fingers ashing cigarettes and drawing plans for a brighter tomorrow.
“Sounds like the deal’s been broken,” Silco says flatly.
“They chose violence.”
“Will you?”
Vander pauses for a moment, thumbing through his beard. “They have their culprit, she paid with her life. They could pin the whole break-in on Vi and call it even, but no. Worst part is I can’t even say I’m surprised,” he adds bitterly. “What good is keeping peace when the cost is everything you’re fighting to protect?”
There’s a light in Vander’s eyes. It burns like the fire that once roared across the bridge, like the blast from the bottle Silco had thrown—the one Vander told him not to. Burns so hot that it catches the tinder of Silco’s traitorous heart.
“So you want to fight, then?”
Vander is quiet for a moment, glancing at the glass he’d left beside the letter, at the fractured ruins of all they’d built. But that fire in his eyes still blazes, stoked with each seething breath. “I wanna hit them for all they’ve got.”
Silco’s heart glows with it, flames licking up through his cheeks to form a rare, genuine smile. “I have a resource that will help us accomplish that.”
Us.
And suddenly it’s strange, like the walls are coming back to life, the dust clearing, the ink of their schemes freshly drying as Silco tells Vander about the work of Dr. Reveck, about the cannery, about Shimmer and how it saved his eye. About how it just might save them too.
And maybe it’s a trick of the light, but Silco swears he sees the weight of the last seven years lift from the corners of Vander’s eyes, just for a second.
“So, do we have a deal? You rally the people, I arrange the supplies?”
A smile twitches at the corners of Vander’s lips, like he’s just heard the voice of a long-lost friend. There’s a moment of contemplation, and finally Vander extends his arm—the one with the bracer.
“For Zaun?” he asks.
Silco imagines the scar must be awful. Deep and puckered. Such a painful reminder that Vander took lengths to conceal it.
A weight shifts in his heart. It’s too soon to tell what it is, where it’s headed, but Silco sets down the knife. Reaching across the desk in a fluid, decisive motion, he clasps the leather, shaking forearms before drifting to Vander’s hand.
It’s just as broad and warm as he remembers, like an old beloved jacket, and Silco’s fits so perfectly inside it.
“For Zaun.”