Chapter Text
The tannery smelled like death and money, which, in Ketterdam, usually meant the same thing.
Jesper pulled his scarf up over his nose and told himself it was because of the smell and not because he was starting to feel vaguely guilty about this job, which was ridiculous because he hadn’t even done anything yet. He was just walking. Walking was not a morally complicated activity.
He’d been in worse parts of the city. The tannery district sat at the edge of the Barrel’s reach – not quite respectable enough for the merchant class, not quite dangerous enough for anyone interesting. Just grey. Workers with grey faces doing grey work for grey wages, the whole street exhaling a kind of exhausted permanence, like it had forgotten there were other ways to live and stopped caring about the loss.
Jesper, who had never stopped caring about anything, found it profoundly depressing.
He had the name on a piece of paper in his coat pocket. Wylan. Son of Jan Van Eck. Kaz had given him almost nothing else, which was either because there was nothing else or because Kaz enjoyed being cryptic the way other people enjoyed breakfast. The job was simple. Find the merchant’s son, assess whether he was usable, make an offer. If he said no, apply pressure. If he said yes, bring him back.
Simple. Routine. Jesper did this kind of thing all the time.
He pushed through the heavy door of the tannery’s front office with his best easy smile already in place.
The man behind the desk was thick-necked and unimpressed, which was fine. Jesper had extensive experience with unimpressed.
“I’m looking for one of your workers,” Jesper said, leaning on the counter with the particular brand of casual confidence that suggested he belonged anywhere he happened to stand. “Goes by Wylan. Young, probably. Curly hair, I’m told.”
The man’s expression did something complicated. “You a relation?”
“Something like that.” Jesper kept his smile easy. “He around?”
A pause. The thick-necked man scratched the back of his neck. “Hasn’t shown up,” he said finally. “Three days now.”
Jesper’s smile didn’t move. “Three days.”
“Didn’t send a word, didn’t collect his last wages. Just stopped.” The man shrugged the shrug of someone who had filed this under not my problem and moved on. “Happens. Boys like that – young, no family to answer to – they drift. Probably found another job elsewhere.”
Boys like that. Jesper looked at the man for a moment and the easy smile went a little fixed. “Right,” he said. “Did he leave an address? Somewhere he was staying?”
Another shrug. “One of the other boys might know. Ask around.”
So he did.
It took longer than it should have because most of the workers were deep in the process of trying to avoid conversation with a well-dressed stranger, which Jesper understood as a survival instinct but found inconvenient. He worked his way through with the combination of charm and patience he usually reserved for card tables, and eventually – eventually – a young woman near the drying racks said she thought Wylan had mentioned a boarding house. She thought. Near the harbourfront.
She couldn’t remember the name. She could remember the street.
Jesper thanked her and left.
Outside, in the grey air, he stood for a moment and recalibrated. Three days absent. No word, no wages collected. Either the boy had moved on and Kaz’s information was simply out of date – annoying, Kaz hated out of date information – or something else was going on.
Probably moved on, Jesper told himself.
He went to find the boarding house anyway because going back to Kaz empty-handed was its own category of unpleasantness.
The harbourfront boarding houses were the kind of places that existed just barely. Narrow buildings leaning slightly into each other for support, salt-damaged and perpetually damp, full of people who were between things – between jobs, between cities, between whatever they’d left and whatever they hadn’t found yet. Jesper had stayed in a few of them, back in his first months in Ketterdam when Colm’s money was already mostly gone and he hadn’t yet found his footing with kaz.
He didn’t have warm memories of them.
The street the woman had named had four boarding houses on it. Jesper tried the first two and got nothing – no record of any young, curly-haired boy, nobody matching the description. The third was locked up entirely, some dispute with the city over permits, a notice nailed to the door. He stood in front of the fourth one for a moment. It was the worst looking of the four. The step was rotting at one end. The window on the upper floor had been repaired with a piece of canvas instead of class.
The woman at the front desk was older, iron-haired and watchful. She looked at Jesper the way people looked at things they weren’t sure were trouble yet but were keeping an eye on just in case.
“Wylan,” Jesper said. “Young, curly hair, probably came here a couple of weeks ago. Might have given a different name.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed very slightly. “Room six,” she said. “Top floor. Haven’t seen him today.” A pause. “Or yesterday.”
Jesper kept his face arranged correctly. “He paid up?”
“Through the week.” She said in a way that meant so he’s not my problem yet.
“Right.” Jesper tilted his head toward the stairs. “I’ll just-”
“He a friend of yours?”
The question was odd enough in its tone that Jesper stopped and looked at her properly. She was still watchful, but something had shifted underneath it. Something that looked, if he was reading it right, almost like concern. The reluctant kind. The kind people developed against their better judgement for people who were quiet and didn’t cause trouble and maybe reminded them of someone.
“Yes,” He said, because it was the simplest answer and suddenly he wanted the conversation to be over.
She nodded, just once. “Top of the stairs, end of the hall.”
The stairs creaked under him. The hallway was narrow and dark, a single lamp doing almost nothing against the gloom, and it smelled like mildew and old wood and the particular staleness of air that didn’t get changed very often.
Jesper knocked at the door when he reached the room.
Nothing.
He knocked again, louder, and said “Wylan?” at the door in what he hoped was a normal casual tone and not whatever tone was currently being generated by the feeling that had started somewhere in his chest and was working its way outward.
Nothing again.
He tried the handle.
The door was unlocked.
He would not, later, be able to fully reconstruct the next ten minutes in the right order. They would come back to him in pieces for a long time afterward – sensory fragments, edges of moments, the way time had done something strange and elastic and refused to behave.
What he would remember, in no particular order, was the smell of the room. Cold and close and deeply wrong.
The quality of the light through the canvas-patched window. Grey, flat and indifferent.
The figure on the narrow bed, very still, very pale, one hand hanging over the edge.
The small brown bottle on the floor beneath that hand, topped on its side and empty.
And the sound he made – some involuntary sound, short and sharp, that he would be embarrassed about later and wasn’t thinking about at all right now – as he crossed the room in three steps that he couldn’t remember taking.
The boy was breathing.
That was the first thing Jesper established and he established it with both hands, one on the boy’s chest and one pressed to the side of his neck, and the relief that went through him was so fierce and physical it was almost like pain. Breathing. A pulse under his fingers, thin and too fast but there. There.
He was young. That was the second thing – younger than Jesper had expected, younger than made sense somehow, curled on a narrow boarding house bed in clothes that were slightly too big for him and looking like something breakable that had been very carefully set down somewhere and left. Ruddy red curls, pale freckled face, blue shadows under his eyes that spoke of days of this, not just hours.
The empty bottle on the floor was some kind of sedative, Jesper thought, though he was not Nina and didn’t know medicines the way she knew medicines. He didn’t touch it. He didn’t touch anything except the boy – one hand still at his neck, confirming and reconfirming the pulse like if he stopped checking it might stop being true.
“Okay,” Jesper said, out loud, to no one. His voice came out strange. “Okay. You’re – okay.”
He didn’t know if he was talking to the boy or to himself.
He got himself moving.
This was not the first time Jesper had been in a bad situation. He had been shot at, cornered, robbed, betrayed in various colorful ways, and once – memorably – had spent six hours hiding in a canal lock while two separate groups of people who wanted him dead argued on the bridge above him. He was not, by any reasonable measure, someone who froze under pressure.
He almost did now.
What saved him was the simple mechanical calculus of what does this situation require – a thing Kaz had drilled into all of them, a way of cutting through the noise to the next necessary action. Not the whole picture. Just the next thing. Then the thing after.
The next thing was Nina.
He sent a runner – the iron-haired woman downstairs, who took in the situation at the door of room six with an expression that moved through several things very quickly and landed on grim efficiency, who knew a street boy who could carry a message, who said she’d done this before and the way she said it made Jesper’s chest hurt. He gave her the location and Nina’s description and told her it was urgent without specifying how urgent.
Then he went back to the room.
He sat down on the floor just inside the doorways. Not on the bed – some instinct said don’t crowd him, don’t loom, don’t be another presence that takes up space and requires something. Just the floor. Just near.
The boy – Wylan, this was Wylan, Jan Van Eck’s son, the one Kaz wanted for a job, the one who had stopped showing up to the tannery three days ago and collected no wages – was still breathing. Still and pale and entirely unaware of Jesper’s presence, which was probably for the best because his presence right now was a little ragged at the edges.
He started talking.
He couldn’t have said why, exactly. Something about silence feeling dangerous. Something about the way sound worked in small rooms – how it could fill space that might otherwise feel too empty, too final. Something about having spent years using his voice as a weapon or a shield or a deflection and not knowing what else to do with it.
He talked about the tannery. The smell of it. The woman who’d told him about the street, who’d had paint under her nails and looked like she’d rather have been somewhere entirely. He talked about the boarding house and the woman downstairs and her very effective no-nonsense energy. He talked about Ketterdam in the way he’d learned to talk about it, which was with a wary kind of affection, the way you talked about a city that had tried to eat you and mostly failed.
He didn’t talk about the bottle on the floor.
He didn’t talk about walking through the unlocked door.
He just talked. Kept his voice even and continuous and present, a thread of ordinary sound in a room that had held something terrible, and waited for Nina.
She arrived twenty minutes later, the minutes felt considerably longer.
She came through the door with the particular controlled urgency of someone who had seen bad things before and knew how to be useful inside them. She looked at the boy on the bed. She looked at the bottle. She looked at Jesper on the floor.
“How long?” she asked, already moving.
“I don’t know. He was like this when I got here.” Jesper stood up, automatically, because staying on the floor while Nina worked felt wrong. “Is he-”
“He’s alive.” Nina’s hands were already moving, checking the same things Jesper had checked but with the efficiency of knowledge rather than desperation. “This is- it’s a sedative. He didn’t-” She stopped. Checked something. Her exhale was careful and controlled. “He’s going to be okay. We need to keep him awake.” She looked up at Jesper. “Talk to him. Keep talking.”
“I’ve been talking,” Jesper said, and his voice did something at the end of that sentence that he covered badly.
Nina looked at him for just a moment – really looked, in the way she sometimes did that went straight past every defense he’d ever constructed – and then she turned back to the boy on the bed.
“I know,” she said, quietly. “Keep going.”
It took another hour before they could move him.
Jesper talked for most of it. He was aware of how he must look – this tall, loud, generally ridiculous person cross-legged on the floor of a terrible boarding house room narrating his own life to an unconscious stranger while Nina worked. He was aware that this was not a version of himself he showed people. He found he didn’t particularly care.
Wylan stirred, at some point. Not to consciousness – just to the surface of it, enough to make small sounds, to turn his head slightly. Nina spoke to him in a low steady voice. Jesper, without quite deciding to, shifted from talking about nothing to talking to him directly – still inconsequential, still surface-level, but aimed now. You’re okay. You’re not alone. We’ve got you.
He didn’t know if any of it landed. He kept saying it anyway.
They moved him when Nina said it was safe to, which required negotiating with the woman downstairs – whose name was Maren, Jesper learned, and who had apparently developed the reluctant concern he’d clocked earlier specifically because Wylan had helped her carry groceries up the stairs one day without being asked – and then navigating a very narrow staircase with more care than Jesper usually applied to anything.
Kaz had places. That was one of Kaz’s uses – he always had places, safe houses and rooms and arrangements that existed for exactly this kind of contingency. Nina sent word. A location came back, so they went.
Jesper had the boy’s weight against him for most of the walk, one arm around his own shoulders, and he was struck by how light he was. How young. He’d thought it before but it hit differently now, in the cold air of the street, the boy’s red curls against his shoulder and his breathing shallow but steady.
He didn’t know his name.
He knew the name Kaz had given him – Wylan, son of Van Eck – but that wasn’t the same thing. He knew nothing about him. What he liked, what he was afraid of, what had brought him to a boarding house near the harbourfront with an empty bottle on the floor.
He knew he was breathing.
For right not, that had to be enough.
Outside the safehouse door, once Nina had gotten Wylan settled inside and pronounced him stable in a voice that left no room for argument, Jesper stood in the narrow hallway and looked at his hands.
They’d stopped shaking about twenty minutes ago. He hadn’t noticed when.
He stood there for a while in the quiet. He could hear Nina moving inside the room, the soft sounds of competent care. He could hear his own heartbeat doing something it didn’t usually do, a kind of sustained elevated thing that had nothing to do with danger or excitement and everything to do with the image of an unlocked door, a figure on a bed and a bottle tipped on its side.
He thought about the tannery. Three days. Nobody came looking. Nobody had noticed, or noticed and not cared, which was somehow worse. A boy had disappeared from the world and the world had shrugged and moved on and Jesper had almost- had nearly-
He put that thought down carefully and didn’t look at it.
He didn’t know this boy. This was a job. Kaz wanted a recruit and Jesper had been sent to find one and that was the entirety of what this was supposed to be, clean and simple and professional, and there was absolutely no reason for the way his chest had gone strange and tight and refused to go back to normal.
He put his hands in his pockets. He stayed in the hallway.
He didn’t leave.
Eventually Nina came out, pulling the door quietly behind her. She looked at Jesper with an expression he recognized – it was the expression she wore when she was being gentle about something difficult, which Nina did better than almost anyone he knew despite what she’d have you believe.
“He’s stable,” she said. “He’s going to be asleep for a while. When he wakes up-” She paused. “When he waked up, he’s going to need-”
“I know.”
Nina looked at him. “Jesper.”
“I know,” he said again, quieter. “I’ll be there.”
She studied him for a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, and went to send word to Kaz.
Jesper slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor of the hallway, back against the plaster, knees up. He stared at the opposite wall. He thought about Kaz’s piece of paper in his coat pocket – Wylan, son of Van Eck – and thought about how little that told you about a person. A name and a father. The least interesting things about anyone.
He didn’t know what the most interesting things were yet. He thought maybe he wanted to find out.
He stayed on the floor and waited for morning.