Chapter Text
The Agency never really slept, not entirely, but there was a stretch of hours past midnight when it came close—when the corridors thinned out and the hum of the Arxis dropped to something almost gentle, and Shiloh could move through the halls without being seen as anything other than a shadow with somewhere to be.
She didn’t have anywhere to be. That was sort of the problem.
The maintenance ladder outside the east wing led to a service platform that overlooked the crossing-point yards, three stories up, technically off-limits after hours for reasons that had never been explained to her satisfaction and that she’d stopped asking about around age fourteen.
The rungs were cold under her palms. She climbed fast, the way she always did—not reckless, just certain, her body already knowing where her hands would land before her mind caught up to send the order.
At the top, the platform opened onto a flat stretch of grated steel and a view of the yards lit low and orange, crossing points humming faint against the dark like something breathing in its sleep. She sat at the edge with her legs hanging over, boots swinging above the drop, and let the cold work its way into her the way it always did up here—clean, uncomplicated, nothing in it that needed managing.
She didn’t hear him at first. That was the strange part. Phineas wasn’t a loud person by nature, but he wasn’t usually quiet in a way that surprised her, either—she’d gotten used to the particular shape of his attention, the way it announced itself before he did.
Tonight he just arrived, settling onto the grating a careful distance from her, legs crossed instead of dangling, like he’d decided the platform was for sitting on rather than sitting over.
She glanced sideways. “You followed me.”
“I noticed you were gone.” He said it plainly, no apology built into it, no accusation either. “Wasn’t difficult to guess where.”
“You could’ve stayed in bed.”
“So could you.”
She huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh and looked back out at the yards. He didn’t fill the silence after that, didn’t ask if she was alright or tell her it was dangerous up here or point out, as her brothers would have within the first ten seconds, that there was no railing and she was the Director of an entire Agency and maybe that meant something about where she should and shouldn’t be dangling her legs at two in the morning.
He just looked where she was looking, like the view was the whole reason either of them had come.
“You climb like you’ve done it your whole life,” he said eventually, not as a compliment exactly. More an observation, filed away the same careful way he filed everything.
“I have, basically.” She turned the ladder rung under her palm—habit, a way of keeping her hands occupied when the rest of her wasn’t ready to be still. “David used to find me on the roof of the old house. Before all this.” She gestured, loosely, at the yards, the crossing points, the whole architecture of her life. “He never told Mom. Said it wasn’t his business what kept me up there.”
“Smart brother.”
“He’d disagree with you if Elijah were within hearing range.” A beat. “Elijah would build me a railing out of spite.”
“Elijah would build you a railing out of love and then be furious you needed one.”
That surprised a real laugh out of her, short and startled, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth like she could take it back before it echoed too far into the yard.
Phineas didn’t look smug about it. He rarely did, when he managed to catch her off guard—like getting a genuine reaction out of her wasn’t a game he was keeping score on, just something that happened to be good, the way clear weather was good.
They sat for a while without talking. The cold settled into her shoulders, and somewhere below a crossing point flared and dimmed, cycling through some automated sequence nobody was awake to watch but the two of them.
“You don’t have to ask,” she said finally, not looking at him. “Why I’m up here instead of asleep.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I know. That’s—” She stopped, recalibrated. “Most people ask. Or they don’t ask, but they’re thinking it so loud I can hear it anyway.”
“I can think it quietly if it helps.”
“It’s not that.” She pulled her knees up instead of letting her legs hang, wrapped her arms around them, chin dropping to rest there. “It’s just—some nights the ceiling feels like it’s counting something. Days, maybe. I don’t know what. I just have to be somewhere with more space than a room gives me.”
Phineas didn’t reach for her. That was the thing she’d learned to expect from him by now, the thing that had stopped surprising her and started, instead, feeling like a fact of the world—like gravity, like the yards lighting up orange at night. He didn’t reach unless she’d already made room for it.
“I used to count crossing-point cycles from my father’s east tower,” he said instead. “When I couldn’t sleep. There’s a rhythm to them if you watch long enough. Three short flares, then a long one, then it resets.”
She lifted her head. “Is that true or are you just saying that so I’ll watch the yards with you?”
“Both things can be true.”
She watched him for a second—the easy set of his shoulders, the way he wasn’t looking at her at all but out at the drop like it was the most natural place in the world to be sitting at two in the morning—and something in her chest loosened by a degree she wasn’t going to examine too closely tonight.
“Fine,” she said. “Count them with me, then.”
“Already was.”
They sat at the edge of the platform until the sky started thinking about turning gray, her shoulder finding his at some point without either of them deciding it should, and neither of them mentioned going back inside until the cold made the decision for them both.
The Raelo of Verrow ran its economy on trade routes that spiraled up through terraced streets, stacked so steep that half the marketplace existed on rope bridges strung between buildings, swaying with every gust off the canyon below.
Officially, Shiloh and Phineas had come through the Arxis to confirm the Agency’s supply contact hadn’t been compromised.
Unofficially, the contact had confirmed himself fine in under four minutes—a wiry old trader named Coss who’d barely glanced up from his ledger before waving them off with an assurance that nothing on this canyon had changed in a decade and wasn’t about to start now—and that had left them with an entire afternoon, a beacon sitting dormant at the old Velrite Doorway site on the canyon’s lower terrace, and no reason to hurry back to it.
“We could head back,” Phineas had offered, mostly out of formality, watching her survey the terraces stacked up above them like rungs on some impossible ladder.
“We could,” Shiloh agreed, already walking toward the nearest bridge.
He’d fallen into step without further comment. That was usually how it went.
The rope bridges swayed constantly, strung taut between buildings that leaned into the canyon at odd angles, wood groaning under distant footsteps somewhere above.
Shiloh went up the way she went up everything—fast, sure-footed, testing her weight against the give of the rope before she’d fully committed to the next step, like her body ran its own risk assessment faster than her brain could interfere with it. Phineas followed a half-step behind, not because he couldn’t keep pace but because he seemed to like watching her get there first.
“You’re not even holding the rail,” he said, mildly, as she crossed a particularly narrow stretch with her arms out for balance instead, the canyon dropping away beneath her in a long, dizzying pull of orange rock and distant water.
“The rail’s rusted through in two places. I checked.”
“When did you check?”
“While you were talking to the merchant about tariffs.” She glanced back at him, grinning, hair coming loose from its braid in the canyon wind, strands whipping across her face. “You should try not holding it.”
“I like my structural integrity.”
“Boring.”
“Cautious,” he corrected, and stepped off the rail anyway, arms loose at his sides, matching her stride until they reached the far platform together. The wood shuddered under their combined weight for one uneasy second before settling.
She was already laughing before he landed, delighted in that unguarded way she rarely let herself be in front of anyone but him—like being the Director of the Agency was a coat she could take off up here, three hundred feet above a trade canyon on a Raelo that had never heard her name attached to any responsibility at all.
“See,” she said, breathless, triumphant. “Still standing.”
“Barely.”
“Barely counts.”
They kept climbing. The terraces grew more crowded the higher they went, stalls packed tight along every platform, awnings in faded canyon colors snapping in the wind, vendors calling out in the clipped, musical dialect of Verrow that neither of them fully understood but had both picked up enough of to barter badly and cheerfully.
An old woman selling strung beads waved them over with the particular insistence of someone who’d already decided they were buying something; Shiloh let herself be pulled into the stall without protest, turning a string of blue-black stones over in her fingers while the woman named a price roughly triple what it was worth.
“That’s robbery,” Phineas said under his breath.
“It’s tourism tax.” Shiloh was already counting out coins. “I don’t even want it. I just want to see what she does when I actually pay full price.”
What the woman did was look faintly delighted and then suspicious, like she suspected a trick, and then delighted again when no trick came. Shiloh looped the beads around her wrist and kept walking, grinning at Phineas’s expression.
“You just got fleeced on purpose.”
“I got fleeced for entertainment. There’s a difference.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon buying things they didn’t need.
A carved bone whistle Phineas swore had some kind of local significance he couldn’t quite translate, turning it over in his hands with the focus he usually reserved for actual mission intel, until Shiloh finally took it from him, put it to her lips, and produced a sound so thin and mournful that three separate vendors turned to look at them.
A length of dyed cloth the exact color of the canyon light at dusk, which she draped over his shoulder like a sash before deciding it looked better on no one and folding it into her bag instead.
A paper cone of fried something neither of them could identify—crisp, faintly sweet, dusted with a spice that made her eyes water and him cough—that they ate anyway, trading bites back and forth without comment, her fingers brushing his every time the cone changed hands.
Nobody here needed anything from Shiloh. Nobody here even knew who she was, beyond a girl with a good eye for market stalls and a laugh that came easy, and someone beside her who kept catching her wrist, gently, whenever a bridge plank looked more rotted than the last, thumb resting briefly against her pulse before letting go again like he was just checking she was still exactly as alive and unbothered as she looked.
Near the top terrace, where the crowd thinned and the wind picked up sharper, they found a ledge overlooking the whole spiral of the market below—stalls and bridges and canyon light gone amber with the hour, the whole town lit from within like something remembered rather than real. Shiloh sat first, legs swinging over nothing in particular, and Phineas lowered himself beside her without needing to be asked.
“I like it here,” she said, licking spice-dust off her thumb. “Nobody here has ever seen me be the Director of anything.”
“You could come back. Just for this. Not for the contact.”
She looked at him sideways, something soft crossing her face before she caught it and turned it into a smirk instead. “Careful. That sounded almost romantic.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain exactly one romantic thought at a time and you ration it very carefully.”
“Occupational discipline.”
She laughed—really laughed, head tipped back, throat bared to the canyon wind—and he watched her do it the way he always did, like it was something worth cataloguing, worth keeping.
By the time they climbed back down to where they’d left the beacon standing sentinel at the crumbled ring of the Velrite Doorway, the sky had gone the same dusk-orange as the cloth folded in her bag, her hands were sticky with fruit syrup, her feet ached pleasantly, and neither of them had thought about the Agency in hours.
Phineas crouched to wake the beacon’s antenna, and Shiloh stood over him, beads knocking softly against her wrist, in no particular hurry for the light to come.