Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The morning after it happened, Inej woke to find her body, hanging. 

Empty.

She was still staring, in shock, into her own face when the door of her room (or, to speak more accurately, her personal prison cell within this gilded cage) opened behind her and to her left. The guard looked from Inej’s body, to Inej herself, and back in blank horror.

Oh, she thought. You can see me.

It felt like the first time anyone had done, in the month since she’d arrived at the Menagerie. It was in this moment that she realized.

I can leave.

Holding the man's gaze, a prayer on her lips, Inej felt out for the other places—the unseen frameworks of the world that coursed around her, roads that keened for her passage—and vanished.

Chapter Text

All demons were stronger underground.

The people of Ketterdam didn’t know why, and they didn’t need to. They just kept the entrances Onder locked up and well guarded, at least in the good part of town, and stayed wary of what might emerge from the canals. Every once in a while—after a plague or a bad fire; a bad fall for the stock market (it was Kerch, after all); a spate of strange killings—the Merchant Council would turn their attention yet again to the city’s “demon problem” and send their priests and their soldiers into the tunnels. But most of the time, Ketterdam left their monsters be. After all (so they thought), the demons stayed below—or if they didn’t, then in the worse parts of the Barrel, where the stadwatch didn’t patrol and the thrill-seekers didn’t wander, and this amounted to much the same thing. Most of the time, the rich folks just prayed to Ghezen and Sankta Margaretha for protection, locked their doors (for what good that did them), and went about their own business. Feeling a little less evil for their own human blood. Feeling certain their neighbors shared it.

They thought they were safe.

Kaz let them. For now.

He told himself, again and again, that this was the best way. But maybe it was the demon in him, the thing that wanted to curl up in the darkness and wait out the world. The animal part of his brain that liked these tunnels. And Kaz did not like these tunnels. The cramped feeling, the perpetual flooding, the stink? No, he hated it down here. Yet, even so, there was no better way than the Onder to get around Ketterdam if you liked avoiding the crowds and the attention of the stadwatch—given that you knew which routes could be relied upon to stay dry, the times for the shift change in the entrances upwards that were known to humans, and the other passages to the surface which were more obscure. Kaz, of course, did know. Nor did it hurt that he was now Dregs lieutenant—and that the other nonhuman gang members who used these tunnels were starting to get an idea of what, exactly, this meant. There were still all the usual territory wars, but when all was said and done Dirtyhands got the best pickings down here, according to his own notion of what that entailed. The Dime Lions could keep their damn Stave roads for all he cared, and if the Liddies demons actually enjoyed swimming, that was clearly their problem. The one, too little demonish. The other, arguably too much demonish.

‘The one too little demonish.’ 

Oh, they could pretend they were practically human. They could pretend all they liked. They were still monsters all the way down, and someday, Kaz swore on his own rotten soul, they would pay up. One move at a time—slowly, slowly—and Pekka Rollins would never see him coming. “Brick by brick,” he promised himself, speaking just loud enough to let the echo carry.

By brick by brick by brick by brick by brick by brick by brick by brick by…

Lesser demons used the acoustics of the tunnels to navigate them (unless they privileged their noses); everyone used them as advance warning. Kaz was well known (both in the Onder and above) for picking fights for little to no reason, so if any demons were close enough to hear the echo of his rasp, they would most likely know what was good for them and clear out.

That, or they could listen for the sound of his cane. He’d recently given a few of them good reason to remember he had it. They thought it was a human affectation (hypocrites, they all chose humanness as a value, and so what if he played along?) but, truth be told, Kaz felt so much stronger with it than without it. That leg would never permanently heal, and devoting the extra energy to it was not only a strain he could do without, but felt like a denial of a part of himself. Why should he cover up the fact that he was a cripple? What was he supposed to be ashamed of? Give them all a few bad breaks of their own to tend to, maybe they’d get the message.

“That a demon saying?” came a voice from just behind him, sounding genuinely curious. 

What the fuck? No one snuck up on him. It shouldn’t have been possible.

Kaz whipped around, staring down what looked to be an empty stretch of tunnel. What the FUCK?!!

More freaked out than he’d have liked to admit, Kaz bared his teeth and held his breath.

Before his eyes, the speaker materialized from thin air, as if emerging from a fog. She remained partway see-through, dressed in scraps of purple silk recognizable (even in the absence of the painted-on lynx spots, which she must have washed off before her death) as a costume from the Menagerie, one of the pricier pleasure houses on West Stave. It was meant as a gaudy, revealing, exoticized farce of Suli costume, nothing Kaz held a fraction of a millimeter of respect for, but on this ghost—against the otherworldly amber glow of her bare arms, the underwater antigravity of her hair, and the tinge of corpselight blue that lit her silhouette—it somehow didn’t look quite so bad as usual.

In all honesty, it came as no surprise whatsoever to him to see one of Tante Heleen’s girls dead. The Barrel was the Barrel, and that woman in particular was a real piece of work. (Fully human, too, by the smell of her, but you wouldn’t have thought.)

“How did you do that?!” Kaz snarled, once he’d processed. It’d taken a minute. Due to the shock.

Yes, that was it, that was why.

“I’m dead,” said the girl, apparently unperturbed by the fangs and the cane he held like a weapon (which it was). While she had been aiming for affronted, something of the pain of the fact was audible in her voice. “Haven’t you met ghosts before?”

“That trick…usually only works on humans.” Kaz relaxed slowly into a more conversational manner, softening as much as possible the sharp click! as the tip of his cane reunited with the floor. He also calmed down internally, and yet here he was still talking as if faced with something actually capable of doing him injury. Why was he doing that? She was a ghost, of all things.

Maybe she’s something more powerful than any of the other ones. Something uniquely powerful.

Something uniquely dangerous.

He couldn’t tell, yet, if this thought was ordinary or demonic instinct. It was always atrociously difficult to tell whether or not a nudge of this sort was one of the dependable, spot-on ones. Accordingly, he entertained them all, but cautiously. 

After eight years, he’d more or less perfected the method.

She seemed surprised. “I wanted not to be detected. That was all.”

“Alright. So, what business?”

“You’re Kaz Brekker, right?”

“Yes. And…?”

She nodded, then looked down and through him, glaring at the memory she relayed. “I woke up the other morning, and I saw my body. Hanging. But that wasn’t how I died. I think the man who killed me was one of…one of your sort.”

“‘Of my sort.’ And which sort would that be? A demon, a Barrel boss…?”

“—Or a teenager? A monster, obviously.”

Ahh, monster. That, he could do. 

Kaz allowed the black chasm of him to rise just a little closer to the surface. It was as easy as dropping an act. “So you want my help. What do I get?”

She froze.

Kaz was confused by the degree of her reaction—the tangible weight of her fear, and its disparate immensity (after all, she’d already known he wasn’t human)—until, all at once, he realized, and felt immediately sick to his stomach.

He sighed, dropping his head slightly with his eyes closed. “I wouldn’t have accepted that sort of payment, even if you’d offered it. Look.” When he met her eyes once again, he knew they appeared human once more. (Although human eyes would have required a bonelight to see this well in the tunnels.) “I have a few jobs that could use a ghost. Things a human spid—a human spy can’t pull off. And…your sort…doesn’t usually associate with mine.”

She inhaled, performatively.

Kaz grinned, fleetingly, and not wide enough to show teeth. Not sure, as he did so, if it undercut his rasp (which people tended to assume was a natural, in-born, demon trait) or in the contrast of it all, made him seem only more the monster. Not sure, as he observed himself wondering how he came across to her, what exactly it was he was doing. The precise list of his reasons for caring. “Or mine with yours. It’s a unique opportunity. But I need you to do something first, to get a fuller measure of your abilities.” An object appeared in his free hand without warning or traceable origin, ivory against black leather. “You might want this.”

The outline of her wavered slightly, like ripples in still water, as she became solid enough to handle the knife. She hesitated before accepting it from him.

“What…?”

“It’s human bone. Should be able to vanish and reappear with you.” He knew this wasn’t the ‘what’ she was asking; had decided not to care.

“And you just happened to have it on you?”

Kaz shrugged.

“Ah. Demon. Got it. But why?”

“Test goes like this. Try to attack me. I want to see how near you come to managing it.”

She scoffed, as though it would be the easiest thing in the world to ‘manage.’ “I’m not interested in hurting anyone. That’s not the kind of help I’m asking for, nor any I’m willing to give.”

“Is that right? Then what’s your plan for when you find this guy, to go to the stadwatch? You think they pay any attention to tips from the dead? Try from anyone from the Barrel. Monster, human, living, dead. You live—or, well, not—west of Fifth Harbor, they won’t do shit.”

Now the glare was directed at him personally. “I’ll figure it out when I get there, then. With or without your help.”

“Suit yourself,” Kaz replied. “I’m not investing my time in anyone who’s going to waste it.” He turned and started walking, adding as he did, “And here it sounded like it mattered enough to you to make a deal with a demon.”

Another scoff sounded behind him. “Don’t you want your creepy knife back?”

“Not really. Throw it in the canal if it bothers your sentiments.”

“For some other demon to find?”

“Who’s to know?”

“Then perhaps I shouldn’t.”

Kaz was glad she was behind him, and missed the brief flicker of a real smile. “No, perhaps you shouldn’t. After all, the Saints wouldn’t like it. You know, it gets me thinking. Seeking me out to begin with doesn’t align all that well with your faith.”

“And how—?”

“At your neck. It’s for Saint Lizabeta, right? Anyhow, you could petition Petyr or Margaretha or one of the other demon-killers. Spiritually neutralize it.”

“Would that actually work?”

Kaz didn’t have the faintest clue. He didn’t spend much time ruminating on Saints. Why believe in someone out there in the cosmos who’d prefer you dead, when there were enough who held the same opinion right here on Earth?

“Daitya. Would you slow down?”

“You’re a ghost. How could that matter?” Why are you still here? This, he didn’t have to voice to communicate, only kept walking.

“I’m certain I could do it, if I wanted to.”

Kaz stopped. “Oh, really?” He didn’t turn to face her, but closed his eyes, examining whether there was any other way to track her, anything she gave off without meaning to do so. Detecting nothing, he recognized that there was nothing to detect. Even so. She would have to be material to injure him, and there was nothing new in fighting material things. “How about you prove it.”

He turned then, and, seeing the look on the wraith’s face in that instant before she dissolved into the tunnel’s stale air, Kaz knew his mistake.

It happened within the space of three heartbeats (two of which, admittedly, he had to do without). An ice wind cut through his stomach, then turned in an instant to searing pain as both knife and girl jumped back into materiality. They stood there like that for an instant, frozen in place, equally stunned.

She’d stabbed him. She’d actually stabbed him.

The blade’s incorporeal path of entrance had also turned, retrospectively, into a physical wound.

Fascinating, was his first coherent thought.

Kaz gritted his teeth as the girl pulled out the knife. Standing with all the straight-backed elegance and unbreathing stillness of a statue, she stared at the blood, at the redness of it. Too like a human’s.

He inspected the wound briefly, a familiar dizziness setting in, and nodded her way. That’ll do it. And then some. He forgot, in that moment, that the fact of the non-emergency of the injury was something he needed to explain. The incongruity of his reaction was another admixed confusion.

The girl said something, some panicked exclamation, in Ravkan (which he didn’t know). “How bad is it?” She stepped forward, offering a hand, from which he flinched automatically. She noticed, and gave him space, which was an irritant as much as a relief. She noticed.

But she’ll just chalk it up to…to demon-ness. To something. It doesn’t matter.

“I’ll be fine.”

“But…you look like you could—I mean, like you need a med—”

“I don’t die.” A beat. “You were going to say.” He took the horror in her face as confirmation.

“I really didn’t mean for it…I didn’t think it w…I…” She blinked. (How could you need to blink?) “Wait. You say you don’t what?”

“Every demon has their…specialty. One of mine—” Kaz cut off, the strain starting to catch up with him. “Is that I don’t stay dead. So if you’ll excuse me, and meet me back here this time tomorrow.” Kaz tucked his cane in the crook of his arm to check his watch, keeping his right hand pressed over the wound. When he looked back up, he sighed (and covered the urge to cough). She was still there.

“It’s a quarter to one, if you needed to know.”

“Okay, then. This time tomorrow, Lazarus.” The wraith closed her eyes before vanishing, which struck him as a kind of letting go. A release of effort. He’d heard that only more powerful ghosts could materialize, so that seemed to fit.

Okay, so she was on some whole other level of powerful.

Cool. 

Neat. 

Informative.

Kaz cursed under his breath as he went to go find somewhere secure in which to die.

♥︎x♣︎

Kaz really hated dying. 

It wasn’t the pain or discomfort, or the vulnerability whilst unconscious, or even the time gap. He was pretty used to pain, the location he’d chosen was a dependable one, and humans (as well as many kinds of demons) lost a lot more time to sleep than he lost to death. None of that was important.

Kaz shifted slightly, grimacing, and made a fist with his left hand, feeling the creak of the leather. Feeling his last breath in the back of his throat, and the bile rise with it in association.

Dying meant remembering the first time.

But it’s worth it, he insisted to himself. It’s here, and then it’s gone again. It’s going to be fine.

For this, it was worth it.

He was only able to contemplate on the nature of his discovery for another brief moment before he was swallowed up by the suffocating dark.

♥︎x♣︎

Kaz checked the time once more. After inspecting a flaky black area on the floor with the tip of his cane, he was reasonably sure he was in the same portion of the tunnel. That is, unless anyone else who made use of this one (and since his rise through the ranks of the Dregs, that number had significantly decreased) had been fatally stabbed in the last day or so.

He realized, perturbed, that he hadn’t gotten her name.

Kaz normally didn’t mesh well with ghosts (then again, he didn’t mesh with practically anyone). There were multiple reasons for this, but only one he was happy to acknowledge. Ghosts—Kerch ghosts, at least—all were there because they had some kind of remaining business with humanity, some grudge or vengeance. They were the very definition of “I’m not done yet.” This, he could see himself in, and yet could not respect. The kind of vengeance they could exact was very limited, and, in his opinion, not a one had used what they could do to its full potential. They haunted places and individuals, created nightmares, and plagued their victims’ days with bad luck and supernatural “accidents.” Some could physically materialize; most couldn’t. Accounting for a few exceptions here and there, they amounted to a lot of whining souls still hung up on their previous lives, casting judgement on the present as if it were the past and never following through on the sentence.

He’d never heard of one who could personally, directly, manually injure a human—never mind something like him.

“Wraith?” he called. The word echoed up and down the tunnel, making it obsolete to repeat it, but he did anyway after another moment passed.

Would she turn up? Would she arrive later, somewhere else, at a time he wasn’t expecting?

Had it been for nothing?

Taking a deep breath, Kaz resolved to leave. But he stopped before he’d even started, because something…

He could feel something. Something off. Something ever so slightly…

“Wraith. You’re here.” He spoke not quite at a whisper and not quite aloud.

As the girl became visible, she examined him as if puzzled.

He felt the right side of his mouth twitch upward—as if his ability was something positive, something he should take credit for. What a despicable impulse. “All healed.”

“I’d expected as much. That’s not it. How did you know I was there?”

“You…didn’t intend for me to?”

“No. Not yet, at least.”

Would she have followed him for the rest of the day, with him unawares? If so—and more accurately, if she could—she’d undoubtably make…no, not only a natural spy.

An inimitable one.

“I’d like you not to do that. On me. As for others…that’s an essential part of what I’m hiring you for. So…it better not be shorting out, or something.”

The wraith narrowed her eyes. “It’s never happened before. Might be on you.”

“You’ve been dead how long?”

“Four days.”

“And does ghosthood come with some sort of magical guidebook?”

“No.”

“Have you talked with any other ghosts?”

“Not exactly.”

“So you don’t know it’s not you, do you?”

Judging from her expression, his current line of inquiry was as much of a request to be killed as the last time they’d spoke.

“Alright, how’s this. You’ll try and sneak up on a few people for me, and you’ll tell me what you can about your death and the man who killed you. If your wraith powers are having an off day today, or only work on demons the first time around, it’s better we know that now than midway through a job. Sound reasonable enough?”

She considered him before ‘exhaling.’ “Lead the way, daitya.”

Nodding, he turned, and felt her follow. Silent, scentless… They entered a wider tunnel that met at a 45º angle with the last. Kaz knew immediately that it was empty except for themselves. The echoes held only the sound of dripping water, and that of Kaz’s footsteps and cane. It didn’t take long for him to become overly alert to the noise of his own breathing.

The wraith’s presence was causing him to feel strikingly aware of how much breath doubled as a form of communication, and how much it was taken as a granted quality in a person. It was not as though he wasn’t already clear on how much living bodies could give away without intending to do so, but her potential to give away absolutely nothing put it in fresh perspective. In a way, he envied her. That she had the conscious choice and control, to such a great extent, over what and what not was disclosed.

They took another turn, into a much smaller corridor, and Kaz counted doors, working through the comfortably familiar problem of translating the city below to the city above. By a combination of memory and spacial calculations, he brought the two maps in his mind into their proper alignment. Locating the correct door, he picked the lock—only for his own benefit, he realized as he did, with another small jolt of discovery. “You can go ahead of me, Wraith. First stop’s right up those stairs. I’m guessing the trapdoor at the top won’t cause you any difficulties.”

“What is it?”

“Thought you might like a change of clothes to start with. Take all the time you need. They’re all theater costumes, no one ever misses them. Assuming…you can change out of what you die in?”

She tensed, as though he’d said something wrong. There was a death-still pause between his question and her answer.

Kaz cursed how little he knew with certainty about the basic logistics of all of this. It was him who could use the guidebook. (Thankfully, he did know of one human, a Grisha, who might be persuaded to fill him in.)

The low volume of her response, and the way it carried without creating an echo, was startling in and of itself. If he hadn’t seen her mouth move, he would have wondered if she’d thought it directly into his head.

“I…I wasn’t in this when I died.”

Oh.

He might have known.

Kaz knew and was inoculated to every inch of the Barrel—everything that happened in it and everything that it was—and yet…

“I see. In that case, I’m guessing you want out of it all the more.”

A cold fire resonated through her image—in her squared shoulders, the set of her mouth, and most of all her eyes—as the wraith passed him and through the threshold without a word.

Watching her ascend the steps, nearing the top, he at last remembered.

“Your name.”

She looked down at him over her shoulder, as if trying to make sense of the question.

“I don’t know it,” he supplemented, feeling a bit silly as he did.

“And here I thought you would just keep calling me ‘Wraith.’” There came a slight change in her in this moment, one he filed away out of interest, and, later on, was incredibly grateful he had. The fire of her grew stronger, casting a faint blue light on the stairs. She lifted her chin with a smile, and became more solid than he’d ever previously seen her. “I’m Inej Ghafa. It’s nice to meet you.”

And she turned back, climbed the last few steps, and pulled herself up through the ceiling in one fluid motion.

Chapter Text

When she’d tried to leave the city, to go home, she felt physically tugged back, as though there was an anchor hooked into the base of her spine. She was chained here, and only she could free herself, and yet she couldn’t free herself. I can’t get out of this place.

I still can’t get out of this place.

Next, Inej had felt out the length of this metaphorical chain, already certain where her expanded prison had its epicenter. No, she couldn’t go back there. Even invisible, even immaterial. She wandered the city in a daze, trying to work out her next move. That other place, the place-between-places, was too loud, overwhelming: a flood of information Inej didn’t know how to decode, like voices singing a hundred different songs at once. The “songs” formed a topography, a buildup of sound in some places and chasms of silence in others. Maybe it was more a matter of reading this than the individual notes, but thinking about it all hurt her head. She decided she would preference traveling on foot like a living person, particularly when she didn’t know just where she was headed. This was how Inej found herself walking in an unfamiliar district past closed-up shops, no reflection of herself in the dark glass. She felt like a stray, like a starving animal, except…she never got hungry now. It was strange, to be hollow yet full and full yet hollow. It felt both wrong and right that she didn’t see herself in those shop windows. This wasn’t the world she knew. This wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

Predawn turned to morning, and the streets filled with activity. Inej did not want to be seen, but being unperceived was, in a way, much worse.

Solid figures stepped right through her, and her stomach was ice. It was a new kind of erased. The next thing she knew, she was sitting in a ball in an alley, unnecessarily hidden behind a garbage bin, her legs tucked under her chin, rocking, rocking. The shop nearest must have sold flowers, because the air around her was filled with the smell of green things rotting. Green things rotting. People in the street. Their touch had gone right through her, but she had still felt it—the edges of each and every body. Hair, breath, skin. Every sensation a theft.

Just breathe in, breathe out, Inej could hear her father telling her. She could feel the distant echo of his hands on her shoulders, reminding her to pull them back, lift up her chin, and give it another go. Breathe in, breathe out. But she didn’t need to breathe anymore. She wasn’t supposed to need this. It was supposed to all be over now.

Mama, Papa. I want to go home. Why can’t I go home?

What if I never can?

She had once had a daydream that someone good would come for her and get her out, like Sankta Magda guiding girls accused of witchcraft through the forest to safety. Someone who would take her to her parents. She had once held hope for goodness, for kindness, but those things had never materialized. Now, though, she was grateful for the impossibility of that dream. There was nothing to find but a body, maybe not even that by now. There was no mark of her left but a signature on a contract in a language she couldn’t even read. She didn’t want that to be the news they received. But nor could she bear the thought of no news ever reaching them, of them always living in uncertainty, in that grief-in-limbo of a missing child. Their daughter had vanished from their camp on a cold morning much like this one, on the other side of the ocean, and better if she’d been swallowed by the sea instead of by the hold of a slaver ship. Better if she hadn’t only kept vanishing: from her body, from herself. From the ranks of humanity, from the ranks of the living. She had to get out of here, and see them again, before joining their ancestors in the next world. But what if she couldn’t?

Is this what it feels like to be forsaken?

Inej knew her people wouldn’t have turned their backs to her, yet she was stuck here, unable to get back to them. Perhaps it amounted to the same thing.

No. I will not take that answer.

She was not a starving animal. She was not an erased thing. She was Inej Ghafa, and she would not so easily give in to despair. She would find her way out.

♥︎x♣︎

Inej spent the next couple days learning how best to navigate the city, and stewing on how and to whom she would make herself visible. While it was comforting somehow to be invisible—undetected, unaccosted, seeing without being seen—it itched at her as well. More importantly, she knew she really would be stuck here indefinitely if she couldn’t find some form of assistance.

On the third morning, she made up her mind who she would seek out. Maybe this is a terrible idea. But if I do nothing, nothing will happen. So she had leaned into her fear and hunted down one of the most notorious demons in the Barrel: a thief, thug, con artist, and killer.

We meet fear, her father had always told her. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. She hadn’t needed this lesson for the high wire—that was her world, wherein fear would have seemed to her an unnatural response. She hadn’t learned anything but the obvious from her fear of her kidnappers, of Heleen and her enforcers, or of her own “clients”—that everything essential had been broken, taken, stripped away, with no way out and no way forward. But in that moment, in the Onder, just before she had made herself known, she had understood exactly what her father had meant. This sharp black outline of a boy, growling an echoing threat down the tunnels in a voice like two stones ground together. He’d stroked the silver head of his cane in the same way she’d seen other men absently brush the handle of a holstered gun. According to the stories she had heard, it was no less a weapon.

Something is about to happen, she thought. And then she’d spoke.

She knew not to expect anyone in this city to do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, so it seemed wisest to approach someone who was fully explicit about the fact that they wouldn’t. This box, he certainly ticked. Given everything Inej had been able to deduce from what she’d heard of him during her time at the Menagerie and her past three days, he was no friend of Tante Heleen’s and seemed apathetic, at best, about her line of business. Or, at least, Inej hoped that was really true. There was plenty of hearsay in the Barrel attesting to his lack of a conscience in other regards. Maybe, for him, it would be knocking out competition. Maybe he’d relish tearing the Menagerie down only to set up a brothel of his own in its place. She had no idea what the internal workings of a demon’s mind might look like. She had no idea what he would want out of the deal, but if he didn’t make that perfectly clear from the first, or if it wasn’t something she was willing to do, there was nothing to stop her from calling it off. Although she had no way of knowing what, entirely, she’d walked into, she could “walk out of it” without even taking a step. At any time, Inej reminded herself, you can just disappear and go back to silently watching. At any time. And if that was all Kaz wanted from her, too—the silent watching? She could live with that. (Or, not live. Well, whatever.) So far, this felt like forward motion.

She was still optimistic enough to think that honesty, unlike kindness, wasn’t entirely out of the question. Ludicrous as it sounded to associate that quality to someone like Kaz Brekker. I guess we’re just going to have to find out, she thought with a sigh as she located the office and the man he had described. Of course, he didn’t look up, didn’t perceive her arrival. No one had, before Kaz today, and no one had since. But, naturally, Kaz wasn’t going to simply take her word for it. So be it.

Alright. Fairness and honesty. Impossibilities? Perhaps I’m just the world’s most delusional ghost, Inej considered, while making a mental note of the exact changes this Barrel boss was making to his books. (Kerch’s number system, at least, she could make sense of. If Kaz wanted more, she would need a notepad and enough time to copy out those alien, compact, spiky letters.) Human or demon, or monster of another sort? Inej couldn’t tell. Slimy, that’s for sure, she thought. If only he would stand up and walk off somewhere so she could get a closer look; even from the other side of the desk, and completely undetected, she could begin to feel the danger signals going off in her body. I wonder how much of this information is actually new to him. Possibly this is all just a test of my honesty.

She got that sense even more when she returned and he gave her her next assignment.

“Alright. Perfect,” he said, once Inej had relayed the information he’d asked for, nodding with a distant, hungry look on his face, as though these mere pairs of numbers had been immensely helpful. Inej’s brows furrowed. He kept switching between commending and antagonizing her, and—while it was a completely different animal from Tante Heleen’s predatory changeability—it gave her the distinct awareness that everything was an act with this guy.

Good, she thought. That awareness is good. This is one of the monsters of this city, a monster like all the other ones. It’s good not to forget that. Because there was something inexplicably…different…about him as well, and she was nervous about that getting to her head, get her thinking about things that would do her no benefit. It was treacherous to want things that couldn’t be had—things like companionship, like friendship, like someone it was safe to trust—and Inej knew it was a definite possibility he had read her loneliness from the first and was playing off of it. Right, precisely, because he was a con artist. He read what people wanted and pretended to offer it as ploy to trick them out of what they already had. In Inej’s case, her capacity to spy on people.

“Are you satisfied now, daitya?”

“Not quite, but we’re getting there. We’ve done a human and a ‘high-level’ demon, so next up, a ‘low-level’ demon.” The lightless tunnels of his eyes aboveground glinted with something she wanted to call mischief. Wanted, but advised herself not to. “Namely, my boss.”

“Thought you said yesterday that you were the boss.”

Kaz shrugged, as if to say it was the same thing, more or less. “Second-in-command.”

“And vying to change that, sounds like.”

He neither verified nor denied this statement, though (if she wasn’t mistaken) a grimness crept into his inhumanly blank expression—a trace of emotion that felt more real and involuntary than any of the others. Inej filed this away for future reference. Kaz wanted her to spy for him, but so did she intend to spy for herself; she would gather as much information as she could about him, and anything and anyone else that struck her as a step in the right direction.

After receiving the rest of her instructions, Inej slid back into the place-between-places and set her intention for where to re-materialize. This was the last on the list, he’d said, and next it would be her turn. She breathed in, breathed out, weighing her misgivings.

It was easy enough to ask ‘What do you remember?’, but Inej did not know what she could say. The last month was a miasma she didn’t want to look at yet, a roaring darkness she could feel pulling at the edges of her and threatening to tear her apart. She’d become too familiar with this feeling of disintegration while she was alive, and it scared her now even more because she didn’t know what would happen the next time she vanished (in the other way) or where she would be when she came back to herself. All of it was too close, too vivid, yet riddled with gaps. She couldn’t account for everything, and the things she did remember, she wished she didn’t. 

Have I made the right choice? Should I have waited longer before acting? And am I sure this boy can actually help me, upon assuming his word can be trusted when he claims he will try to?

Her hand went to the pocket of her new quilted vest, to the solid weight of the knife he had given her.

I need to go home. To see my parents again, to join my ancestors.

If this turns out to be a dead end, at least I’ll have learned something more about what’s keeping me here.

Without fail, Inej went unperceived by not only Per Haskell, but by the collection of humans and nonhumans loitering around on the first floor of the Slat, who Kaz had not asked her to spy on. One thing that stood out strongly was that the Dregs demons were, for the most part, distinguishable (either subtly or unmistakably) from the humans. Kaz himself could pass for human—eccentric human, but human—since his single unquestionably demonic physical feature (besides whatever it was he was covering up with those gloves) were his teeth. Others, meanwhile, could have been clocked as nonhuman by nothing more than their silhouettes. They were inhumanly large or inhumanly small; were covered in a thick hide or greasy pelt; had rows of spikes jutting from their vertebrae or bones that seemed unsymmetrical or improperly jointed.

Haskell was one of the smaller, hairier ones. His grey coat was patchy in places, and severely bedraggled. He had fallen asleep in a comfortable chair by a dying fire, which illuminated his protruding brownish-yellow fangs with an orange glow. Inej, initially, had to fight an urge to laugh, because the scene before her was the greatest contrast she could possibly imagine to everything she knew so far about Kaz. Then, after this moment of surprise passed, she realized she couldn’t confirm whether or not the demon perceived her presence without him waking up somehow. Should she…? That seemed more than a little impolite, especially as this would undoubtably leave him wondering how such-and-such had moved of its own accord, or how such-and-such noise had been produced.

She didn’t have to deliberate long, because just then, as though some internal alarm had gone off, Haskell woke suddenly, briskly pulled on a hat and coat, and left his office. That has to be something demonish, she decided, making a further study of the room (and the unlocked desk drawers’ contents) before herself departing.

♥︎x♣︎

For the fourth time today, Kaz knew she was there before she announced herself. “Go on, then,” he said without so much as a glance her way. His office, at the Crow Club, was also in complete contrast to Haskell’s at the Slat. It was devoid of all additional comforts or flourishes, spare without feeling shabby, and immaculately clean.

“Can demons control exactly when they wake up?”

“Some. Haskell, for example, wakes at the same time on the same day each week. Goes to his favorite club.” At last, Kaz looked up at her. “He couldn’t tell you were there.” It was not a question.

“No one can.” Except you, for some reason. “So, can you control exactly when you wake up?”

Counter to all her expectations, Kaz seemed not to have seen the question coming, and spoke without a planned answer smelling of ulterior motives. (Unless, Inej reminded herself, that kind of behavior was a ploy in and of itself.)  “Actually…” The demon cocked his head, considering. Almost as if he was himself curious about the answer. “I have no idea.”

“How could someone not know?”

“If they don’t need to sleep. Now, would you rather continue asking me personal questions, or tell me more about what happened to you and how you think I could help?”

Huh. Since she’d woken up dead, she hadn’t exactly “slept,” either, but she did experience something along the same lines as dreaming. He didn’t sleep, couldn’t be killed—if you looked at it one way, their inhumanness was oddly well-matched. But surely that was an illusion, a projection her mind had drafted up. They were, after all, different species. She wondered whether his non-experience of sleep was similar to her own, or very, very different. Did demons have dreams?

Inej refocused. This may have been fascinating, but it was not essential.

‘“I don’t actually know what, precisely, is keeping me here. Maybe it’s that man, or maybe it’s all of them. Maybe it’s Heleen, or the other girls, or both, or all of the above.”

“It’s definitely not some sort of…teleportation glitch?”

Inej glared at him, to no visible effect. He does remember I still have that knife on me…right? “Yes. Definitely.”

“What else?”

‘And you’ll tell me what you can about your death.’

Inej froze.

What am I doing? I can’t do this. 

How could I think I could do this?

“I…I blacked out…or blocked it out…”

Without anticipating to, she felt treacherously like crying. She hated it. She hated herself for it. He would only prey on her weakness like all the rest, and she would falter and get herself trapped in something else, some string of unrevealed assurances to keep her hoping that her continued faith would someday be rewarded, that her efforts for his gain would someday be repaid.

However, Kaz seemed nothing but put out.

“If you’re going to vanish on me, at least warn me when you’ll be back. I have other things to do, you realize, besides wait for a ghost to show. And some of those things, you might not particularly enjoy being witness to.”

Inej scoffed, became solid once more, and sat down. Ridiculous. She’d been an undetected witness to the whole of the Barrel for the last few days. Hadn’t she seen everything? “Don’t you dare try and use this,” she said, aware that the necessity of swiping at her eyes did not back her intention to come across as someone not to mess with. “I know plenty about people like you.”

“I’m not going to console you,” he said, and irrefutably looked it. “I’m not going to tell you it’s alright, because it’s not, or that it’s going to get better, because that’s nothing I can guarantee. What I can and will promise is my help in investigating this. Whatever ‘helpful’ looks like for you. Maybe that’s identifying the man who directly killed you, maybe that’s targeting everyone that allowed it to happen, maybe that’s acclimating you more to the city.” Kaz leaned back in his chair with a sigh, radiating a disinterested interest. “So, what first?”

Inej let his words settle in, only to realize she’d started laughing. She knew it must have been jarring, but, in this moment, it felt like the natural response. Of course. He had been something different all along, and I’d known it. And I’m terrified I’m going to trust him, because he’s not trying to make me believe things are what they aren’t. I’m terrified I’m going to trust him, because so far, he’s been entirely trustworthy.

None of this is even about him. It’s about whether I trust myself and my own decisions.

It was such a relief, after the previous month and the last few days, to recognize that she did.

“What? What is it?” Had she been unpredictable enough to actually catch him off guard? Between Kaz’s confused almost-smile—really? from a daitya?—and the genuine surprise in his eyes… Even with the fangs, he was suddenly, strikingly, indistinguishable from a human boy.

“Just remembering something I hadn’t expected I’d forget. Let’s start with the third option; I want to figure out if I can still eat. Do you?” I want to feel human.

“Yes. And, yes, I think that’s true of all demons.”

“And you don’t eat solely people, or something like that?”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Oh, no worries.”

“Then…then we’ll start there. Also…I don’t know is this is presuming anything, but…do you need somewhere to stay? I could get you a room at the Slat, if you’re interested.”

Inej didn’t really need somewhere to stay, but she did welcome the thought of a room with a door, and the ability to lock it. As long as it didn’t tie her to this city in any way she couldn’t extricate herself from of her own free will. “That…Would that make me Dregs?”

“No. We’ll just say the room is haunted.”

“Is that a joke, or a serious plan?”

“It would be the truth, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“Then there you go. The Slat’s mine, whatever Haskell thinks, and it’s my say who can stay there and under what conditions. Since we’ve confirmed he can’t detect you…there’s nothing he can do about it. So no, you don’t have to join the Dregs if that doesn’t suit you.”

“Yes. Yes, that sounds just right. Thank you.”

Kaz tilted his head ever so slightly when she thanked him, his eyes unfocused. As if, she thought, he’d never used or been told those words in years. (Maybe not sincerely, she considered.) “Of course.”

“You don’t have an available attic or basement, do you? Something especially predisposed for haunting?”

“No basement,” he said, standing, and nodded once to the office’s door Onder, which he had left ajar. “It’s Ketterdam. And the attic’s mine.”

Was it? Intriguing.

“That’s a lot of stairs,” Inej commented breezily. She’d seen the building from the outside.

“And?”

“No, that was the entire observation.”

“Sure as hell better be,” he said, as he shut the door behind him and before her. When it was fully closed, it left no more evidence of itself than a seam. Through the wall, she could hear him begin his descent, but lingered for a moment in the empty room.

I am Inej Ghafa, and I will get home. She felt out for the chain that held her there, and it answered. Inej vowed to herself that this was a fight she would win.

Chapter Text

Seeing Kaz eat made it clear that, if he could, he would cancel it from his biological needs no different than sleep. Inej, meanwhile, had never eaten at a restaurant before and was unfamiliar with (but curious about) most of the food, and Kaz turned the menu into a not-unwelcome reading lesson. She didn’t order for a long time, surely long enough for two whole parties to take a normal amount of time to eat, and worried they were being a pest to their server. This after she’d initially spooked him by her sudden appearance at the booth. (She would have to work on that.) Kaz, meanwhile, was not the least concerned. He probably had expected things would happen this way, she reasoned. He began to give her a lesson in analyzing body language by way of the restaurant’s other patrons while she thought over what she wanted to be the very first thing she herself chose to eat since she’d been home.

Maybe he already knew that this experiment would be a failure, that this was something else that was now cut off from her. (That was what she herself suspected, but she didn’t want it to be true.) Or, he was making this productive in multiple areas at once simply because the daitya did not waste a second of his precious, infinite time.

Still, she felt more like a living human than she had in far too long for someone who’d only been dead a few days. This was the first time she’d gone completely solid in a public place, and the performance rubbed off on her. Situated in the formula of the restaurant, she felt much safer being visible than she had outside, on the streets, even in the nicer areas of the city. This was why Kaz had seemed to have entered the Kooperom alone, and her to have appeared from thin air. Outside, everyone had gotten well out of his way, like party guests before their host’s uninvited nemesis, while she had walked in his wake of aversion, invisible.

“If she’s not going to order anything, we’re going to need your table,” they were eventually told, upon which Inej chose something.

“No, you were still deciding,” Kaz snarled. “We’re paying customers. And she is still deciding.” The man fled from Kaz’s glare. Watching him, Inej started snickering. “What?” Kaz asked sharply, as he had the other time she’d laughed, but with an acerbic edge that hadn’t been there before. It brought to mind stories she’d been told as a child, whose demons were irritated, confused by, or even scared of, human laughter. She’d always thought (until now) that simply couldn’t apply to anything but fairy-tale demons. Bringing this up felt unwise.

“The poor man,” she explained. “I think I might actually want to order that.”

“Oh. I see.” Kaz grinned: maliciously, transiently. Looking for just a moment like he would laugh to, but a laugh devoid of empathy, or apology. “He’ll live. …More likely than not. Cook’s a demon. Specifically, a hondendemon—very good noses.” He began delineating to her the varieties of Ketterdam’s demons, and their partial division according to the gangs. It was a bewildering system that—according to Kaz—had an order to it, albeit one which she couldn’t yet see. All the gangs accepted both humans and demons, but some in unequal amounts, and different kinds of demons were more prevalent in different territories due to a mixture of which gang held it and the Onder’s variability (mostly in temperature, access aboveground, and water level). Such-and-such gangs used demons only for such-and-such things, others used only humans for that but used demons for such-and-such other things. A smaller percentage of the gangs didn’t discriminate, using humans and demons for the same jobs. The Dregs didn’t discriminate. Kaz seemed proud of this, as if he’d been why or had picked it as his own for this reason.

He was also proud of his harbor.

“And this,” Inej had stated, pointing to a place on the map he’d brought out to better illustrate the way the city was split up, “all the way up here, is also your territory. Why?” It was part of the border she was unable to cross. She knew she had stood there, right there, with the lights of the Lid to her back, and tried and failed to fly back across that ocean.

“Fifth Harbor’s mine. The city left it disused for years, until one of the demons they’re perennially trying to do away with fixed it up, with his own money—dredged it, built out the quay and the docks.” (Actually, she learned later, he’d had to mortgage the Crow Club to pay for it all.) “Now it’s making them money—all those tourists—but the Dregs get our cut, and we get it before everybody else.”

“Oh, ‘your own’ money, is it. Which you earned…how, again? Stealing?”

“Doing business.”

“Well of course. You know, I can’t understand how you could be so proud of something you didn’t even do honestly.”

“So you’d rather I never feel a sense of accomplishment for anything, ever again, for the rest of my life? How about all of them?” He subtly indicated the other tables. People eating, talking. Normal, living people. “Inej, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone honest in this city. For my part, I avoid the ones I do find. Harder to find something to use against them.”

Inej narrowed her eyes. “And me?”

“And you, what? Right, because I’m currently looking for leverage over the woman who literally stabbed and killed me the other day. Seems more in my interests to help you work out how to leave my city than to try taking advantage of your current circumstances somehow, wouldn’t you say?”

‘His city,’ he says. He certainly does act like he owns the place.

“Hmm. I see your point,” Inej said with a smile, as her food arrived.

Eating, as it happened, was only nearly possible. It was absolutely delicious, and, while she was fully solid, everything was normal at first. Swallowing, however, felt wrong: it was stepping just past the limit and finding yourself tugged sharply back. 

The simulacrum of life ended here. 

Inej gagged and spat the mouthful into her napkin, which promptly dropped, with the added weight, right through her now increasingly translucent hand. Kaz sighed as if in sympathy, but said only “Informative.” He might as well have said he’d predicted the entire thing. She couldn’t have—shouldn’t have—expected anything different from him, and yet…

“‘Informative?’ Here’s something informative. I’ll slit your throat right in this restaurant, drag your body somewhere, and see just how long I have to wait before I can kill you again.”

“Nine hours.” Kaz sighed a second time, leaned his head back, and absently examined the ceiling. “Four minutes. And thirty seconds. If you stop the bleeding, it’d shave off a hour or two.” 

She had no way of knowing whether he was serious, or making this up on the spot. Then again, she wasn’t currently solid enough to have made good on the threat. Inej held her hands in front of her face; they wavered slightly before she could regain a shadow of her previous materiality. 

Suddenly, Kaz thought of something, and checked his watch.

“What now?”

“I’m introducing you to someone. He’ll show you to your new room. Should be here any minute now.”

“I shouldn’t bother asking you how you arranged that, should I? You’ll either say nothing, or something that sounds very smart but regardless explains nothing.”

“You should repeat that one to him when he gets here. Might find it relatable.”

“Does that mean you actually have a friend? Full of surprises, aren’t you. I wonder if I shouldn’t have researched you more thoroughly.”

Kaz kept his eye on the door, and his expression didn’t change in the slightest. (He didn’t refute her statement about friendship, which she chose to consider significant.) “‘Research.’ Given what you must’ve heard, it’s surprising enough that you picked me to approach.”

“You’re honest about the fact that you aren’t. That’s all I thought I needed to know.”

And I just felt I needed to do something, she thought. Anything at all. Anything that looked like it would lead somewhere. Though maybe this isn’t it.

Kaz didn’t answer, but met eyes with someone across the room and flicked his head in a get over here motion. Inej twisted around to see who she was about to meet; one of the humans she’d seen earlier at the Slat—a tall, thin, dark-skinned young man dressed in high Barrel flash—separated from the group that had just entered, making some kind of apology or excuse for doing so which they seemed to understand perfectly well. “Kaz, you know,” it could have been, as, with a shrug, he walked backward part of the way to keep facing the others, replying to a further comment or finishing up an earlier point. Some of them noticed her from across the room, looking slightly puzzled, and Inej shivered internally: how many people (and demons) did Kaz intend for her to be ‘introduced to’? Involuntarily, she felt herself slipping away.

“Kaz. Who’re you ea—wait. Where’d she go?”

Stomach sinking further, Inej became once more visible, with a little effort.

“This is Inej Ghafa, our new spider. I’d like you to get her settled into that vacancy on the third floor.”

Jesper nodded and said ‘would do,’ before turning his attention to Inej. “‘Inej Ghafa, our new spider.’ And you’re a ghost,” he added with a winning smile and a unmistakeable sparkle in his grey eyes, as if he thought her being a ghost was a wonderful thing. Inej’s returning smile was smaller, but she was finding it less difficult now to stay solid; this was not at all what she’d thought to expect of someone Kaz chose to allow her to consider his friend.

“A wraith,” Kaz corrected automatically, having apparently decided there was a difference. (It’s the branding, Inej, he’d state later, when she asked why exactly it mattered to him so much. Calling you a ‘ghost’ makes you sound flimsy, incorporeal. Calling you a ‘wraith’ gives your enemies better warning of what you actually are: dangerous. Inej wouldn’t argue with this assessment of her; she liked the strength of the word, liked the feel of it on her skin as she liked the weight of the knives she carried.)

“I just said that,” retorted Jesper, sounding a bit stung.

“Did you? Then the others should rebrand as ‘ambulatory bedsheets.’ She’s the only real one. One of a kind.”

“I see,” Jesper said thoughtfully, and considered her further. “Well. You really are in his good graces, aren’t you?” he complimented—seeming, if possible, only more intrigued than before. He extended a hand (bedecked with rings). Inej hesitated for an (she hoped) imperceptible instant before accepting it. “Jesper Fahey, expert marksman—and just human—difficult to believe, I know. Everyone asks. Anyways. Welcome to the Dregs.”

“She’s not joining the Dregs. More of an independent contractor.”

“If the old man finds out…?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Oh. Sure.” Then, as an aside to Inej: “Just promise you’ll stick around long enough to get properly acquainted, yeah?”

“I’ll think about it,” she answered with a wider smile than before, standing. Kaz got up as well, taking Inej’s mostly uneaten plate with him and leaving in the opposite direction. 

The kitchen? A back entrance? 

Who knew.

“Couldn’t he ask for…something to put it in? Or is that what he’s doing? Or is he going to return it to them and say it made me sick, or something?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.” Jesper turned to leave through the front entrance. “I’m sure you’ve already noticed this yourself, but he’s Kaz Brekker.”

Inej and Jesper left the restaurant, and somehow, it didn’t feel too overwhelming this time to stay visible and solid. “And he didn’t pay,” she realized. “He said…”

“He didn’t mention he has something or other on the cook? The man eats free. And the poor skiv’s just glad that’s enough to keep it from coming out.”

“Is that right.”

“Like I said: he’s Kaz. And see, I know plenty of demons, but I think he’s the one that takes the name most to heart.”

“Yeah, I was getting that feeling…”

“So, how’d he find you, exactly? —Ah, excuse me, sorry,” Jesper said, with the same brilliant smile he’d brought out for her earlier, to a frazzled-looking boy with a mop of red hair who he’d bumped into from behind. (The exchange was very brief, but from what Inej could tell, the apology did him much more damage than the collision had.)

“Oh. Other way around, actually. I found him, I mean. I’m…stuck in this city, for the time being.” She explained her situation (without bringing up the Menagerie) and the arrangement she and Kaz had arrived at. Jesper listened more or less attentively, but entirely in earnest, only interjecting here and there with “Turn coming up now” or “Sorry, you said—?”.

“You know…” he said carefully when she’d finished. “Since you’re trying to work out why you’re stuck here. There’s actually a Corporalki, right here in the Barrel, who specializes in the dead. Nina Zenik. Joined the Dregs about a month ago. I might’ve thought Kaz would drop you off at the White Rose for her to sort you out…but I guess he’s getting more out of it this way.”

Inej processed this new information for a while without answering. She felt furious—wanted to call this all off, turn around, and go there instead—but of course, there was no one to be furious at. She was only making the best decisions she could with the information she had. As for Kaz, he’d made no promises not to deny her pertinent information until he saw fit to. 

Additionally, going to meet Nina Zenik at the White Rose was something Inej couldn’t do. “The White Rose. That’s…that’s on West Stave. I can’t…I died there. Just days ago. I can’t go back there. Not…not yet.”

“Oh. Saints. I didn’t know.”

“I know. I didn’t say.”

“That recent.” And it can’t have been pretty, she knew he was thinking. “Can…Could I interest you in a hug?”

“No,” she said, then winced at her tone. Too sharp. “No offense. I just…”

I still feel their hands on me.

“None taken. Offer’s always open, though; giving good hugs is a specialty of mine. (One of many, that is.)”

Jesper seemed relieved to have gotten another smile out of her. He was so kind, it was hard to believe he was real. “Thank you,” she said. “Maybe someday.”

He nodded, then paused to think everything over. “Would…you still like me to take you to Slat? Or somewhere else, maybe? And I could go see when next she’s free, and if she can meet you somewhere, if you want.”

Inej took a deep breath. “Alright. Then show me the room he’s decided to give me. And get me an introduction with Nina Zenik.”

♥︎x♣︎

Kaz needed to speak with Nina Zenik. 

He had someone else in mind, as well.

During the walk, he mulled over the information he’d asked for immediately after waking up from his last death, and which he’d received that afternoon, while he and Inej had been testing out her detectability. The stadwatch had been at least thorough enough to conclude for themselves that the suicide was most certainly staged (the light fixture she’d been hung from was on the ceiling, she was 5’3”, and there was nothing in the room she could have realistically climbed to reach it; the marks on her neck were all wrong). However, predictably, this was the extent of what they were good for regarding a death like Inej’s. The only relevant part of Heleen’s statement had been that ‘she did see a client that evening, but guards saw her alive when they left;’ Kaz needed more than a written report to accurately judge if the second part of this was an outright lie, or something she actually believed. And he was dead set on hearing exactly what she had to say for herself, with his own ears.

Kaz felt off-course, as he had since he’d first met Inej. From that first instant, when she’d snuck up on him, something in his brain had come to attention, holding fast, and it had yet to relax. He was set on edge by his own generosity to her, but, after all, he was getting his end of the deal. Well, that was what it came down to. He was the one inconvenienced, and he was just letting it happen. He was the one doing the courting (in the business sense, of course); if she was unsatisfied, she could cut the whole thing off. For once—in complete contrast with his entire mode of operating—Kaz had nothing on her. And he’d told her so himself, but hadn’t brought up this part of what it meant. 

If she wanted out, then that would be that. He couldn’t stop her. There were no strings attached. No manipulations. No leverage.

What was more worrying, he recognized, was the fact that he didn’t want any.

Alright, this is bad, Kaz thought, while turning onto East Stave, yet made no alterations to his itinerary.

He liked her.

She was startling, and contradictory, and made him need to know more, to understand. He had to force himself not to ask questions about her that weren’t need-to-know or to let himself care too much about her feelings; to not be changed, treacherously, by mere chemicals going off in his brain. She brought back out of dormancy the wish that he could go back to being the boy he’d once been, and wanting that was something he refused to permit himself.

Of course, the questions she had about him were to gain context, orient herself, and know who (or what?) she was working with—not anything personal. It was Kaz who was basically asking to get knifed in an Onder tunnel, again, to get his head on straight. He couldn’t afford to get distracted, thinking about impossibilities. 

He couldn’t afford to like her.

As the Emerald Palace came into view, the thought was driven home. Working with her was an opportunity, and Kaz would meet his end of the deal—no more, no less. It was fairer than most Barrel bosses, even than some Councilmen, and the closest Kaz was willing to come to human.

Any closer, and everything he was working for would all fall down around him.

He passed vendors, mere feet apart: one hawking Sint Margaretha’s demon-repelling protective charms, and the other, little rose-colored phials of diluted demon’s blood. The hypocrisy of Ketterdam, in a representative sample. Not all demon’s blood was the real thing, but on East Stave, you could be sure of it. It made the pigeons likelier to take big risks, without any actual boost to their wits or instincts, despite the advertising. The blood shops were not particularly safe (no actual mediks), but it was a quick way to make some scrub, and practically every demon in the Barrel did or had done it, some very regularly. Kaz hadn’t had to resort to this since he’d joined the Dregs; if he had to admit it to himself, the entire industry gave him the creeps.

It was part of why Ketterdam would never rid itself of its demons, no matter the stadhall’s and the Merchant Council’s threats. Not only their labor, but their very blood, was too lucrative to give up. 

Kaz even knew of a gambling hall that went so far as to lace their air with it, and employ solely (human-passing) demons, who were immune to the effects. Diabolical. And fucking genius. But it was one of those infuriating cheats only accessible to those few who could’ve burned kruge instead of firewood and not even miss it (so, why not burn it in a way that made even more?). The Crow Club couldn’t have afforded it in a million years. That was, unless Kaz bled himself dry perhaps five or so deaths in a row, annually. 

—No, forget how he’d get the blood. The firing and hiring he would have had to do, to avoid human employees inhaling it on the job, would have been: for starters, a pain in the ass. Furthermore, it would completely reject the Dregs’ uniquely egalitarian code regarding humans and demons, which would lose him far too many loyalties (as well as going against his own principles—whoever can do a job well, should do it). And finally, it would spread too much talk for his liking. He didn’t mind people wondering how on Earth he’d gotten the blood. That wasn’t the problem. The whole Barrel knew who’d done it first, and he’d have been doing it second.

Kaz refused to become the copycat of the demon that had killed his humanity. And he would do everything in his power to make sure Pekka Rollins never saw him coming.

Brick by brick, I’ll tear down everything you have, everything you are.

Crossing over to West Stave, Kaz debated which stop to make first. Visiting the Menagerie customarily left him irritable, which Nina would notice without fail. On the other hand, it was sure to take less time, and he was already irritable. Maybe it would have the opposite effect, give him something concrete to take it all out on. 

It wasn’t as if speaking with Heleen Van Hoeden was the best outlet for that…but it also wasn’t as if Kaz cared.

Entering her golden cage with a grimace, Kaz was shown straight through to Heleen’s office. Everyone knew perfectly well what he wasn’t here for. The business he and the Peacock did do was harder to parse out, which was also as he liked it.

“Ah, it’s Mr. Brekker.” Heleen adopted a false performance of a friendly reception, clearing something off the desktop and requesting he sit, get comfortable. Perhaps, he thought, because she found it easier to hide apprehension under animosity when she was veiling that, flagrantly, with the facade of a ‘mutually beneficial affiliation.’ “What business?”

Kaz stayed standing (both hands planted on the head of his cane) and got right to the point. “I heard there was a death here recently.”

“Not here to take responsibility for the crime, are you, Vuilehanden?” Her eyes communicated the rest: Then you’d best get out of the way.

Kaz smiled as she named him. Since he’d first entered this place, he’d only been filling further with a black, ice-cold rage, and now he was up to the ears with it. Though he may have looked like a boy, though he may have looked human, they both knew just what he really was. Not a chance, Dirtyhands returned, showing pointed teeth.

“I heard tell you reported to the stadwatch that Inej Ghafa’s killer was seen leaving before her death. What a compelling mistake, for a staged suicide…”

“My mistake, you mean? It’s what the guards stationed on that floor told me. Though I can’t fathom, now, how they could’ve been so well convinced to lie to me. I can’t allow further…tragedies…to occur at my establishment.”

Lost money and bad press, more like.

“I was curious what new safety measures you’re now implementing, to protect…your indentures.”

Heleen scoffed. “If you’re looking to steal from me, Mr. Brekker, you could at least come up with something better than that. Anyway, my girls are tough.”

“To survive here, for any length of time? That goes without saying.” Especially under the thumb of a woman like you.

Her expression grew more serious than before. Kaz wondered whether she’d dare to call for her guards, or leave their false veneer of civilized conversation intact. “If that’s all you have to say,” Van Hoeden said slowly, every word laden with warning, “I’d suggest you leave.”

“And I’d suggest you at least consider putting up demon repellent in the girls’ rooms. Unless you think a human could murder someone after they were seen leaving?” Demon repellent smelled faint to humans, but abhorrent (approaching painful) to demons. However, it wouldn’t have kept Kaz away, even though it smelled as bad to him as to any other demon.

“And ward off half their clients? I couldn’t possibly.”

But she would, he predicted, after this visit. She knew not what of hers he sought to threaten, but it wouldn’t matter. Kaz Brekker (so said every rumor in Ketterdam) was not only capable of anything, but followed through on it, with dead precision. She would take all the measures she could against the abstracted—and therefore, all-encompassing—threat his presence exuded. It wouldn’t do much to slow him down, but the additional precautions would keep out a lesser demon: one too reliant on the abilities they came with. Since humans (as he’d once pontificated, to a Black Tips demon, between blows) were built of a weaker alloy, most demons were complacent, blunt, resting a little too easy. If it had been a demon of this kind that had killed Inej, they wouldn’t be coming back for any of the others, not before he himself did. As for the rest of it, they would have to keep chipping away.

“It’s their blood on your hands, either way. I almost admire the killer. After all, they did get that girl out of this place. And on that note, I think I’ll take my leave of you. This room always smells so…” Kaz inhaled thoughtfully. “Depressing.” 

He couldn’t really smell the collective fear and trauma of the Menagerie’s tortured and manipulated girls, but demons were known for their acute sense of smell, and how was Van Houden to know its limits?

“—Oh yes, another thing. Might want to keep an eye on those diamonds, especially in this city.”

As he left, he saw her hand leap immediately to her neck, relieved to feel cold gems under her fingers. Demons reportedly loved shiny things. (Placing them in a category alongside thieves, corvids, theatergoers, the Ravkan aristocracy, and tourists on the Staves.) Kaz knew she wouldn’t notice until after his departure everything he had lifted—bracelets, rings, the gold pen on her desk. Her attention was, after all, exactly where he wanted it. She was thinking about all that he could take in future, not the things already vaporizing, slipping undetected from the bounds of her reach.

♥︎x♣︎

Nina was forewarned of Kaz Brekker’s imminent arrival in the same way she always was: the spirits she worked with always got exceptionally agitated whenever the demon was around. 

That’s him, they all clamored to inform her. He’s the one. He took everything from me. He killed me. He killed my family. —Me too! That happened to me too! —He’s going to suffer. Make him suffer. He took everything. Make him remember. Make him remember what he’s done. 

What a headache, given that all of them—including those she knew for a fact had died from accidental or natural causes, or in a different country, or who (on all other occasions) were perfectly clear on the fact that it had been some other monster of Ketterdam who had taken them out—joined in. At first, it had taken her a considerable effort to give him the benefit of the doubt, given the clamor he inspired, but by now she was more used to it. It’s not as if the ghosts were in any way wide of the mark as to his character, but it simply wasn’t humanly (or demonly) possible for him to have been responsible for more than a tiny fraction of her dead. For some reason Nina could not quite work out (other demons she’d brushed paths with caused only minor upset among her ghosts), he just had that effect on them all.

Well, so be it. It was still supremely headache-inducing. Nina wished she could shout Yes! I know! He’s a demon! The needle of his moral compass points naturally to the bowels of the Earth. And he’s insufferable enough without all of you pitching in, but ghosts were skittish creatures, and she didn’t want to lose contact with any of them by mischance. Instead, she laid a dampener over the room, and they all cleared out. Less strain on everyone involved.

“Did all the ghosts leave? It suddenly got much warmer in here.” Jesper got up to open a window and bank the fire; her room at the White Rose was usually supernaturally glacial, insistently one-upping gloomy, chilly Ketterdam for most of the year (until they reached the summer months, and the ghosts’ chill became—almost—a blessing).

“He’s almost here.”

“Is that why? Do they all turn and run when he’s nearby?”

“Ugh. Worse than that. They’re all temporarily certain he’s their killer. They only say so when he’s around, mind—otherwise I’d be really worried.”

“Um. A single demon couldn’t possibly be that prolific. Even one as well known for it a—”

Nina sent Jes a glare that said He’s practically at the door; what on Earth will he think we were talking about?! 

There wasn’t time for anything more than that. Kaz, as per usual, didn’t bother to knock.

“You told her,” he said to Jes immediately, deducing this from his presence. 

‘Her’ meaning his new ghost friend.

“You expected me not to? You didn’t yourself?”

“Why else would I be here? Of course I meant to introduce them.”

“Well, and what was keeping you? They could have met at the Kooperom as easily as her and I.”

“As fun as all this is…” Nina interjected, voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m certain a ghost this powerful would have discovered me and found a way to contact me, sooner or later, with or without your involvement. Additionally: ‘Why else would I be here?’ Great way to convince me to help you. Award-winning.”

“I wasn’t coming to ask for your help,” Kaz refuted, simply to be contrary.

“Sure, you weren’t. You brought me food.” The demon just stood there. “Well, hand it over.”

As he did so, it clicked together for Jesper. “So that’s what you did with it.”

“And that’s relevant because…?”

“Those are a wraith’s leftovers,” Jes said to Nina, and answering Kaz’s rhetorical question in the process.

“Oh, poor thing. She wanted to eat, didn’t she? The ones that strong often try…” Opening the bag, Nina looked up at Kaz accusingly. “She did order for herself? You didn’t pick this for her?”

“Of course she ordered for herself,” Kaz snapped, as if he was (for once!) actually offended that she thought so low of him. And, for once, Nina felt quite sure he was telling the truth.

“Alright. Then she can order for me any day.”

“It’s gone cold,” Jes noted, with a twinge of affectionate concern.

Affronted, Nina almost choked on her food. “Chocolate-drizzled waffles?! They could be three-hundred-ghosts-in-a-six-by-ten-room cold for all I care.” (Yes, three hundred. And those were just the regulars.) “But, Kaz, if you truly want my help…”

He knew what she was getting at. “I’ve already told you, I can’t arrange you a release from Hellgate. And as for breaking him out, I’d need—”

“—And I already told you, I don’t want you to break him out. They’d still think he’s a criminal. We’d be on the run—from Kerch as well as Fjerda, that is. And one country is plenty to get on with, wouldn’t you say?”

“You think he’d stop there?” Jesper took the opportunity to comment.

Kaz sighed. “Leaving aside whatever ambitions I may or may not have to get placed on an international watchlist…”

“Called it!”

“…This is Kerch. What motivation do they have, as of yet, to see him as anything other than a criminal?”

Nina got his point, loud and clear. “Fine. Have it your way. Whenever you figure out a way for us to get that kind of money, I’m sure I’ll hear from you.” The seances she was currently living off of would never cut it.

The demon grinned. “That you will. So, I’m assuming you’re already up to speed about my newest associate. What can you tell me about g—”

“Jes and Inej have already arranged for me to meet her myself.”

“Lovely. Still, I need to know everything I can, so as to fulfill my end of our arrangement, so she can leave this city of her own free will and move on from what she experienced here. And so I can avoid any unwelcome surprises in the process. Is that a fair ask?”

This, Nina found acceptable.

Chapter Text

Inej was enjoying her new room at the Slat, and even more so enjoying being a source of apprehension and mystery for the majority of the Dregs. It took a few days for someone to notice that the door to the “unoccupied” room on the third floor was permanently locked from the inside, for Per Haskell to be bothered by this small note of disorder and possible sabotage, and for Kaz to make a performance for him of not being able to pick the lock due to some supernatural obstruction. (Inej’s part in the performance was to stick her hand partway through the door, take the picks from him, and throw them down the hallway. It felt like a kind of game, but if she was ever particularly mad at him and wanted to lock him out of his own room, she would remember the technique.) After that, Nina came by to officially declare the room haunted. Even better, she was able to stick around for the rest of the afternoon, though a portion of the time was used up on her explaining to Kaz a few of the things her and Inej had worked out from previous conversations.

Nina was wonderful. She and Inej had been finding places and times to meet for the past week, around Nina’s schedule at the White Rose and Inej’s mixed spy work/lessons/updates with Kaz, as well as her new lessons with Jes. Jesper had taken over teaching her to read and write Kerch, as well as catching her up to speed on some of the gangs’ codes and policies, and spending time with him was frequently Inej’s favorite part of her day. Meanwhile, a friendship between her and Nina was also growing, and the information Nina was able to provide Inej about her current state of existence gave her a much deeper sense of relief than being able to read the signs and social interactions of her new environment.

“You two are correct that identifying who killed you and how would be an important step towards you being able to move on from here,” Nina had told her, “but that most likely won’t be all you’ll need. It should give you some closure, but often I see ghosts unable to move forward even when they know all the facts of what happened to them. The real key is in emotionally processing and coming to terms with what you experienced here, which may take a lot more time.”

“I have trouble imagining ‘coming to terms,’” Inej admitted. “I’d rather just be able to go home. But I know better. From this city I’ve learned…things won’t become fair, or how you wish they’d be, just from wanting it. Instead you become locked in cycles. Even though…Even while I…” She couldn’t find the words.

Nina smiled in sympathy. “You don’t have to tell me now. You need to give yourself time, and not rush yourself to be okay.”

At no point had Nina offered to touch Inej in any way. She assumed Jesper had told her.

After a minute or so in silence, the words Inej had wanted earlier arrived. “Although I did get out of that place…I ended up only with a larger cage.”

“Except this time,” Nina said, “you’ll free yourself by your own means.”

The words were encouraging, and said with so much love—something that threw Inej given that they’d really only just met—but the task still seemed impossible. How could it stop hurting when my mind refuses to let it end? She guessed the idea was that it would feel less impossible with time. And Inej had all the time anyone could ask for now, but how much would she need? Would her parents be alive still by the time she had the power to return to them and tell them what she had become? Or was that not something she should be concerned by? Maybe they’d come and find her, in ghost form, sooner than she’d be able to leave to find them.

“What do I do if that never happens?” was all she could say.

Nina thought for a moment. “I know this may not help any. But I think the same thing all the time, about my own problems. I made a promise to someone: to fix something, to regain their trust. And I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen. But I still have to keep going, keep acting as if I’m certain it will happen, or for sure it won’t.”

“So…” Inej shifted in her seat, folding her legs under her. “We don’t have full power over it happening, but we do over if it doesn’t. It’s frustrating…”

Nina sighed, expressing agreement.

“…but it makes sense.” They would just have to keep on fighting. “Can I tell you something a bit gushy?”

Nina sat up. “Oh? Go ahead.”

“Spending time with you, and Jesper, and believe it or not even Kaz, is bringing me so much closer to feeling free than I ever could have felt in the days when I was completely alone.”

“Inej,” Nina said, raising a hand to her cheek as if she’d made her blush. “That’s too sweet. I’m glad to help in every way I can.”

Inej felt almost that she could have held her hand. Maybe not impossible, then.

♥︎x♣︎

Kaz had known, of course, that at some point in all this Inej would, in looking for him to tell or ask him something, materialize in his rooms. He also knew it would be convenient for them to use the attic as a meeting place in addition to the Crow Club office. He didn’t want to think about why he didn’t invite her there at any time during the first week of their arrangement. He wanted to squash out the feeling that this would put him, in some form, on display (ridiculous, when the Dregs went up there to give him reports all the time—why should it be any different with her, besides that she wasn’t Dregs?), and he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. As a demon, Kaz by nature sought and required a “nest;” as a smart demon, he made sure to form and maintain a number of safe places spread throughout the city and rely on them as evenly as possible to avoid risk. Yet, at the end of the day, the Slat was home and the attic was his truest safe zone, arranged according to his liking. He guessed his hesitation was that he suspected Inej of all people would be able to see this. She would see something of who he really was, leaving him vulnerable. Her presence in his room would make him vulnerable.

Well, here she was, it was going to happen at some point. “What is it?” he snapped, looking up from his desk (thankfully it was somewhere midway through ‘visiting hours,’ and Kaz was at his desk), but just as he’d feared, Inej didn’t answer the question, too busy looking around. She was partly transparent, but it didn’t seem to be from fear or discomfort. Maybe from distraction? Kaz tried not to look too closely at how she glowed, like a sunrise at the harbor, or the look of curiosity in her eyes. If she’s wasting my time, I’ll return to what I was doing. But he couldn’t focus on that.

“Your insomnia shows,” she said at last, probably referring to how neat he kept things. “Is that word still applicable when it’s a choice?”

She wasn’t asking, Is it a choice? She must have assumed it was. And if Kaz had really tried to fall asleep, he might have been able to, but he had a good idea of the kind of dreams that would await him if he did. So no. It wasn’t a choice. Still, all he said was, “It fits well enough.”

Why are you here? Could you please get it over with and leave?

Don’t get it over with. Don’t leave. Please figure out who I actually am.

“Do demons dream?” Inej asked, while visibly noticing the fact that he still had a bed. What, did it really have to be that surprising that he lied down sometimes? Was she expecting a tarp to die on without getting blood everywhere, instead of bedsheets? Because that was rolled up under the bed.

“To my knowledge,” Kaz got out. “No personal experience.” At least, none since he’d ceased to be human. “Inej. Why are you here?”

Inej shrugged. “I’ve been so busy, it took me this long to realize I’ve never been up here.”

“So, no reason?”

“Hmm. Sorry to bother you, daitya,” Inej said, drifting ghostlike towards the door with a smile that underpinned the lack of sincerity in her ‘sorry.’ “I’ll have a real reason next time.” 

“No, it’s fine,” Kaz found himself saying, and pulling a list of notes from a drawer. “I’ve finished questioning the Menagerie guards. All the same description for the last client, which is to say, nothing besides the height and which Komedie Brute mask he had on.”

“The Madman.” I can recognize them. I’ve seen them all—and those horrid sham jackal masks, too, she’d said. They were the norm of the Staves, but Kaz could understand her bad association with them. (Besides the cultural appropriation with the jackal masks, which was worse.)

Kaz nodded. “Could be most anyone. Anyway, he was tall enough to reach the light fixture, but our eyewitnesses were also all in agreement that you weren’t hanging from the ceiling when he left.” Inej frowned at hanging from the ceiling. Kaz knew he wasn’t being particularly sensitive today, but he didn’t feel all that up to it when she’d just barged in here for no reason other than to goggle at his room. Additionally, over the course of the week, Kaz had become more interested in her death in and of itself. He’d slipped back into puzzling over a mystery for its own sake: the longer the trick behind her killer’s alibi refused to reveal itself to him, the more deeply he was intrigued. Simply can’t have been human, he was thinking, but beyond that, it still made no sense.

Due to this, Kaz didn’t hear the knock or the creak of his door’s hinges. “Brekker, I’ve—” Anika cut off, startled. “Who was that?!” Kaz glanced up: Inej had gone invisible (but was still in the room, he could detect without knowing how) and Anika’s hands had turned into horrific, razor-sharp talons. “The third-floor ghost?”

“Why, yes, it was,” Kaz rasped. “We were just having a nice talk about how she means to persist in dwelling here at the Slat without having a longstanding allegiance to the Dregs.”

“But—isn’t that a bad thing?”

Kaz shrugged. “I’m afraid I can’t do much about it. She’s a powerful wraith.”

“And if she ends up showing allegiance to someone else?!” Anika folded her arms, the oversized crow talons resting like enormous black spiders on each elbow.

Dirtyhands showed teeth. “Then the someone else will suffer, Anika darling.”

Inej rematerialized, waving tentatively in Anika’s direction. “Hi. I…have no intention of doing that. I’m just trying to get out of this city.”

“Inej, you’ve seen Anika, perhaps with different hands. Anika, meet Inej.”

“And if…whatever you’re doing here…doesn’t get you what you need,” the demon continued, undeterred, “wouldn’t it be only reasonable to turn to someone else?”

“If I did,” Inej said, “I wouldn’t tell them anything that would bring harm to any of the Dregs. I promise you this.”

Anika relaxed, and her hands changed back. “For some reason, I believe you. Continue on. But I’m telling Haskell,” she said to Kaz as she turned to leave.

Kaz rolled his eyes. “Your report.” She stopped at the door and gave it before leaving. Having to calm Per Haskell down about the fuller truth of the Slat’s “haunting” was going to be annoying, but it was inevitable this would happen eventually. Kaz had given Inej some forewarning of this when they planned out how they would demonstrate the haunting of her new room. Haskell likes to leave the work to others—namely, to me—as long as he feels he’s getting the credit and the rewards. He’ll make a show every now and again, if he thinks his authority’s being threatened, so everyone knows he’s still in charge.

“So, the old man’s going to come up here to make his show. You don’t have to stay.”

“Don’t you need me here to relieve his concerns, like I did Anika’s?” She sat down on the edge of his desk—it was so familiar and casual that he couldn’t help bristling. Inej slid off immediately upon seeing this. “She’s a shapeshifter?” Changing the subject. Kaz appreciated it, despite it being a prompt to re-explain.

“Some demons can alter their appearance to look more or less human, or for other purposes. For most, it takes effort to maintain, unless they don’t have a specific ‘true form.’ Anika is a rather powerful shapeshifter, and can do more than just parts at a time, like the hands just now, but she doesn’t generally sh…” Kaz trailed off. “Shapeshifting demons.”

Inej furrowed her brows. “Yes, that’s…what we were talking about.”

“Exactly. And if she took on the form of something particularly small, she might get past a hallway of Menagerie guards. Underneath a door without opening it, even.” 

“I thought you said you’d gotten all the information you could from that room and there’s no need of any of us going back again.”

“That’s correct, there’s not. What I’m saying is we need to make a list of demonic powers that fit your killer. Some forms of shapeshifting, or very powerful suggestive abilities. We can narrow it down from there if or when you remember more.” Kaz shook his head. “We’ll discuss this more later. For now…leave. I don’t need your help for Haskell.”

“If you say so,” Inej said, vanishing from the room. Kaz’s head was spinning.

♥︎x♣︎

That evening, there was a familiar knock at Inej’s door. She met him back at his attic. “Good news,” Kaz said. “He’s not going to take issue with it. Bad news, I may need you to do a few things for the Dregs overall, and not just me directly. It won’t be very often. It’s just what turned out to convince him.”

“That’s livable.” Inej tilted her head, watching him prop his cane against the closest wall before sitting down. “Though I wished you’d asked me first.”

Kaz sighed. “My apologies, Wraith.”

“Will it happen again?”

He met her eyes. “If I can, I will ask you first.”

“Alright.”

This had no effects on her life for a few days, until Kaz told her that (as long as she accepted) he was going to involve her in a Dregs job. “You’re just going to be watching Jesper. If everything goes well on his end, as it should, that’s the extent of your participation. It’s just a failsafe, and something I can go back and tell Per Haskell you’ve done, and I thought this would be the most comfortable since you already know Jesper.”

Inej nodded. That sounded simple enough. “What am I going to be watching for?”

“His safety.” Kaz seemed to consider for a moment before adding: “But if you notice anything, bring it straight to me.”

“Anything like what?”

“Anything that sticks out to you. He’s going to be following someone to see who they meet with. And if you have any additional insights from also observing this happen, it can’t hurt. Nothing more than that.”

“Alright,” Inej repeated. “And Jes can tell me the rest of it?”

Kaz nodded, and indicated that she could leave.

There was a map of the Menagerie on his desk. Inej was pleased to notice that she was now capable of making out Kaz’s atrocious handwriting (or at least, some of the time). In one corner he’d written: Through the wall? followed by Only ghosts.

♥︎x♣︎

The walk with Jesper, and the wait for the man he was going to shadow, was nice and seemed to calm both their nerves. “I’ve never followed someone following someone before,” Inej said, and asked how he (of all people) was expected to stay inconspicuous.

“Thankfully, the Barrel took care of that for me,” Jesper replied, pulling out a mask from the bag he was carrying. “Mother, Father, pay the…nothing? Don’t tell me you don’t know it.” The disappointment in his voice tugged at her heart.

Inej shrugged sadly, offering in apology: “I don’t know much about the plays themselves,” when the entire truth was more complex. She did, actually, know the Mister Crimson refrain. If it had been a different topic, she might have felt up to playing along.

“Ah,” said Jesper, clearly thinking that, once he’d finished teaching her practical lessons on Kerch and Barrel culture, he sorely needed to get around to the fun stuff. And maybe eventually, Inej thought, she would be up to that. Or perhaps she would just never quite be suited to Kerch, more due to her nature than the bad first impression. “Well, I don’t happen to have any silver to throw at you,” Jes reasoned after the pause, “so that’s good.”

“There are worse things to have thrown at you,” Inej replied, noncommittally.

“Like knives?” Jes offered. “That’s some collection you’ve been growing.”

Inej didn’t know what to do with the instinct to preen. They were weapons, after all, and ones she had no intention of using unless she really needed to. Still, there was some magic in them, as she’d found they made her feel safe to be fully material in public.  She liked the feeling of having more options of self-defense besides vanishing away. She liked feeling strong, even if it was by this city’s rule that to be strong was to be dangerous. To be capable of hurting another.

“I think…” Jesper said, eyes on the building across from the alley they were standing in. “Yep, it’s starting.” He put on the cape and mask, before nodding her way. “No mourners, Inej.”

“No…?”

“It’s how we say ‘good luck,’” he explained, his eye on the human he was meant to be trailing. “You say ‘no funerals.’”

“No funerals, Jesper. See you on the other side of tonight.” He set off, and she fell invisible, just a few steps behind him.

No one’s given me a funeral, was all Inej could think about the saying. On second thoughts, maybe the other girls…? But as she hadn’t been able to go back there and see, she had no way of knowing.

It was fairly uneventful (besides having to occasionally dodge people who didn’t know Inej was there), until the man Jes was following crossed over to West Stave, which left her panicked. Jesper looked back. He must have been remembering what she’d told him the day they’d met. He cares, she thought, realizing freshly how this was another thing that made her feel strong. Inej, standing in the shadows, blinked visible for a moment and nodded him on. I thought you had a job to do?, her look said. If he was the only one who knew she was there, perhaps he was the only one to whom she was there. Maybe this was what she needed to get through it.

Jesper took a breath and walked on.

To their shared relief, the man turned in what Inej believed to be the opposite direction from the Menagerie and entered a theater. A normal theater, which was not to say that there wouldn’t be some rude humor, but certainly nothing Inej imagined she couldn’t handle.

“Not the worst place for a meeting,” Jesper whispered, clearly unsure how close she was to him or if she was listening. “You’d just look like you’d sat next to the person by chance. Ready to learn about the plays themselves?”

“There are worse things,” Inej repeated, and Jesper jumped. “Well, you asked a question.”

“It’s weird, hearing you talk when I can’t see you,” Jesper complained.

Invisibly, Inej smiled, and kept silent from there on.

Personally, Inej wasn’t sure that the man Jes was following was meeting someone in the theater. Maybe he was just filling time? The seat on one side of him stayed empty, and there was no interaction between him and the figure to his left, who was dressed as the Scarab Queen. Regardless, Jesper took a seat in the row behind, and Inej, uncomfortable with choosing a seat when someone else might think it was empty, floated up to perch in the auditorium’s rafters. Huh, she thought, looking at the size the audience had shrunk to. It’s almost like the wire, except they’re not here to see me.

Inej split her attention between Jesper, the man he was watching, and the play. She did glean some interesting things from the play, but that was obviously nothing Kaz would consider relevant. The Komedie Brute had two demon characters: the Grey Imp, who was “more demonish” in appearance, and the Dark Lady, who was human-passing because she hid her spider-pincered face behind a rather creepy lattice mask. The versions you could buy on the Staves bled black glitter like a portent. 

The Grey Imp was explicitly modeled on a gargoyle or waterspurt demon—small-horned and skilled at blending into the background—though in the service of the genre his hiding places were meant more to amuse than to impress. Audiences laughed at his expense or his pursuer’s, depending on whether the latter caught on to his absurd disguises: as a stray dog, a coat hanger, a lamplighter. In this performance, the Madman was having trouble locating him, so the audience was throwing insults his way. “What? Who said that?” said the performer, pulled away from his frantic search to break the fourth wall. “Was it you?” he asked a man in the front row, cupping a hand around the ear of his mask as if he found it hard to hear the shouting. “He’s over where? No, I think he’s probably behind this door.” The audience got (yes, it was possible) louder. “The statue? But he can’t be the statue. Maybe the bench, but not the statue, I’ve seen that statue about a hundred times before.” Behind the Madman, the Grey Imp statue visibly struggled to maintain his unnecessary elaborate pose. “Alright, if you say so—Wait, there isn’t a statue!” The Grey Imp had abandoned his previous disguise in favor of creating a second bench. “But I thought you said he wasn’t the bench. Oh, the other bench? But which one is the bench, and which one is the other bench? The one on the left, is that your left or my left?” Still facing his crowd of scathing critics, the Madman didn’t see the Imp sneak off stage to take what he’d stolen to his Lady.

The Dark Lady, veiled by her elaborate crown-like lattice, was the most terrifying and powerful character of Kerch theatre. A venomous, telepathic demon with mostly humanoid features, audience members fell silent and covered their faces to the eyes when she came on stage in a kind of defensive mass shunning. Evidently, she represented the Kerch people’s fear that the demons would become their overlords, and that worst of all they wouldn’t even know it until it was too late. As a result, she was a well-hated villain; in other words, a well-loved villain. She was meant to be a black widow (in multiple senses of the word), but Inej thought she looked either like a very glittery refugee from the Fold or like concealed speculation that Kaz was in fact the lost prince of some distant, monochromatic, demonic queendom.

Inej wasn’t going to run this last “insight” by Kaz, but she very well was going to tell Jesper.

In the last act of the play, the man Jesper was following and the Scarab Queen beside him both got up and left. Inej sank to the ground to follow suit.

By the time Jesper had also left the theater, the two had split ways. He followed the Scarab Queen down an alley. It was at this point Inej knew—as a feeling, not from facts—that something had gone badly wrong.

♥︎x♣︎

Jesper was watching the flicking lizard tail of the demon the informant he’d been following had met, keeping what he felt sure was a reasonable distance, when they turned right around halfway down the alley, pulling out a pistol from underneath the costume. Jesper dove for cover, intending to return fire. One of his revolvers jammed, which lost him precious seconds—more than he should have lost, in fact, only it was so surreal. You never jam, he thought at it, as if it was a sentient being that had snubbed him. The demon had close to reached his doorway when he aimed the second revolver. It was a fifty-fifty chance, high stakes. You or me? 

Before either he or the demon fired, a red line was cut across his neck from ear to ear.

Inej materialized, crumpling to the ground at the same time as the demon’s body. The tail still twitching.

“Inej?” Jesper asked. She was frozen, barely visible, a blue outline in the alley’s deep shadows. She didn’t respond.

Jesper knelt down next to her. She was staring at the cut she’d made, unblinking, the knife clutched tightly in her hands. “You saved me just now,” he whispered. “Or, well, fifty-fifty chance. I might have had it covered.”

“You might not have,” she said. Her voice was so low, it was as if she’d whispered right into his skull. “Didn’t you say…didn’t you say it was ‘no mourners, no funerals?’ Except there’s still a…”

Jesper wished he could hold her. Instead, he holstered his guns and leaned forward to get her to look at him, and not the body. “It was an accident. It was all just an accident. I…Kaz is going to kill me.”

“Not if I kill him every nine hours,” Inej said bleakly. “Jes, it wasn’t your fault.” Even so, Jesper felt like someone was ripping his heart in half, seeing all the life drained out of her like this.

“Please let it be my fault,” he said, at the verge of tears. “It’s easiest. It’s nothing new.”

“No, that can’t be,” Inej said. “Except being a really good friend. That can be your fault. Not bad things, Jes. Not this. Like you said, an accident, it just happened somehow.”

Jesper waited, watching the entrance to the alley, before at last bringing up the fact that they’d better get far away from here.

Chapter Text

Inej had been dead two weeks when she killed her second demon. But this one didn’t come back to life in nine hours four minutes (or whatever number it was again he’d conjured up that day). This one didn’t come back to life at all, and it would stay with her for the rest of her l…for the rest of her afterl…for as long as she was stuck in this awful city, and beyond that. There would have to be a beyond that, otherwise it was all for nothing.

No, hold up. Not the friendships she’d formed, that wasn’t “for nothing”—and by that line of reasoning, nor had the life she had taken been taken for nothing. And neither was this outcome, more broadly, if she chose to take it as a test of her faith and her spirit. But how could this path, and the violence she knew it could only continue to necessitate—even though Kaz had sworn (with an anger she hadn’t anticipated) that he’d make sure yesterday wouldn’t happen again—how could this be the path home?

Kaz could make any promise he liked, and stick to it to the letter if he had a mind to, no matter what strain it placed on him. But she would continue to protect him and Jesper, and Nina if that ever became necessary. She felt willing to face the price that would entail. Even if yesterday happened again. Even if more blood collected on her hands, on the blades Inej had gathered in the hope of feeling more safe, more real, more brave. There had been no good option back there, and while she knew it was selfish, the guilt of taking the demon’s life did not measure up to how she imagined she’d feel if she’d been able to step in to help her friend and hadn’t.

Additionally, while she was touched by Kaz’s promise and his anger (though whether it was anger for her sake or his own, she could not say), he should have known as she did that it was already out of his hands. So he’d messed up. If he hadn’t asked her to do it Jes might have died. If he hadn’t gone either? Inej did not know the full context of the job that had resulted in the death of the Liddies demon, and what other future circumstance his life would have been exchanged for. In any case, they couldn’t go back and change it, unless time travel was yet another surprise ability of his Kaz was keeping under wraps.

The night it had happened, Inej didn’t remember anything about the journey back to the Slat, only that it was with Jesper. She spent most of the night in his room. They both talked and cried, curled up at opposite ends of his bed (his feet sticking adorably off the edge). It was so strange, how this felt not only comfortable but the only thing that could have made it all feel better—she’d met him only a week and a half ago, but from that first moment, and in the intervening time… In the midst of sharing pieces of their lives and insisting that the other not blame themself for what had happened, Inej realized. I feel like he’s my brother. And nothing so far had felt worth all this pain except, maybe, finding people she felt practically designed to love. Not for nothing, she thought, and her heart eased just a little. Knowing Jes, growing close to him…it felt divinely planned. Maybe, from a distance (from the future, from the next world), she’d be able to see every reason for everything and would have peace. But this part, at least, she felt she could understand.

Regardless, in Jesper’s room that night, there was no chance of sleep for the living, or of dreams for the dead. And somewhere above them, Inej recognized when the tears exhausted themselves, Kaz was fuming or plotting or whatever he did. It must have been so lonely. Without originally meaning to, Inej wrapped him into her prayers along with Jes, the demon she’d killed, the girls still in Heleen’s cage, and herself. If he wants to blame himself for what happened tonight, she thought, he doesn’t have anyone there to talk him out of it. Inej wasn’t volunteering, just noticing.

“Even ghosts and daityas need friends, I think,” she told Jesper—the closest she could get to expressing the complex feeling.

“In my experience,” he answered, “ghosts and…”

“—It’s the Suli for ‘demon.’” Jes nodded in a way that said he’d worked that out from context clues, just hadn’t felt comfortable trying to say it himself.

“In my experience, ghosts and demons make excellent friends.”

Inej smiled. “You should tell that to Kaz, too.”

“I wasn’t referring to Kaz. Kaz is…” Jesper thought it over. “I consider myself his friend. I don’t always know if he thinks the same of me.”

“I think he does.”

Jesper shifted on the bed. “No, I…no offense, Inej, but… —He’s being weirdly nice to you. No, not weirdly, maybe. And maybe it’s different for you. But me, I’ve known him for a year now.” And whatever the demon had done in that year, she could tell from his tone, some of it must have really stung.

“Is that why you said earlier that things being your fault is nothing new?”

Jes shook his head tiredly. “You may have this opinion of me now, even getting to know me better, but…I’m not this wholly good person. I don’t even mean the life I live here, although…if I was someone better, someone like you, I bet it would weigh on me more. I mean that I’ve made some huge mistakes, and I don’t see my way out of them. I’ve broken trusts that I shouldn’t’ve broken, terrified of my lie getting found out, and…thinking I could fix it my own way before that happens, but instead I just get more and more…”

It reminded Inej of what Nina had said the other day, about wanting to fix something with someone, and not knowing if she’d ever get the chance. “More and more?” she prompted.

“Stuck here,” he finished. It seemed to take a lot to say. “But that’s what the Barrel does best, right?” he added, as if to wave off the depth of the hurt.

Inej sighed, and nudged the top of his fingers with hers. This solid, she could feel the variation in temperature between the metal of his rings and his skin. “Not if I have anything to say about it,” she said, not sure where the words were coming from.

Jes smiled softly and, carefully, laced his fingers with hers. Inej had a sudden shadow memory of Heleen’s grip on her hand, half-dragging her to her office on the night Inej had cried. She pulled her hand back, and, that simply, her fingers lost contact with Jesper’s. The memory shattered. Her heart was hammering, her body telling her she was about to be thrown away again, but Jesper’s expression was not one of disappointment or contempt, only concern and care. It was that easy. He would let go, and he wouldn’t hold it against her. He didn’t say anything about it, only looking at her kindly. The tears were coming back, a mix of relief and of mourning for the girl she’d been before, and as a result his image in her vision was wavering, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

♥︎ x ♣︎

The sun was rising, a white blot under Ketterdam’s coal smog, when Inej decided it was about time she go back up to Kaz to ask, ‘what now?’ He’d had yet to tell Per Haskell and she planned to be there, invisibly, when he did. She wanted to make sure he kept his earlier promise of asking her first before making any changes to the degree and nature of her association with the Dregs. His anger the previous night had—she now chose to conclude—to have been for his own sake in some way or another. (Was feeling for her something of which he was capable? She expected she would never find out). She thought he would very likely hold to the promise. Even so, Inej needed to see it for herself to believe it.

Jesper offered to come with her, to provide emotional support for as long as nobody told him to leave, but Inej declined. “Get some sleep,” she said, resting her hand on his arm briefly. He nodded, folding his arms with a smile as he watched her float up through the ceiling. Her braid hit it first, like a rope cutting through the surface of a still pool. The ceiling was, in a sense, like water, allowing her passage with the same lenience. This building accepted her: quietly, kindly. It told her its secrets with private friendliness. It rewarded her for curiosity, revealing its vents and eaves, and the ways one floor lined up to those below it and above.

Already, Inej had come to feel safe here. She hoped that was not about to change.

Kaz’s room, in any case, looked just as it had days before: a space not subject to change. Inej found herself thinking of the sets in that play, of the artificiality of the Staves as a whole, of performance in the many forms she had come to understand it; although Kaz lived here, most of what the room said about him had to have been intentional. The contrast with Jesper’s room was sharp.

“Inej,” Kaz said instantly. He was by the door, putting on his coat and hat. He didn’t ask how she was doing. She hadn’t thought he would.

Nor did he say anything about the lack of warning before her entrance. Her and Jes were still working this one out, and she planned to apply whatever method they landed on to others as well, but Kaz…did he just not care? Maybe only circumstantially, since he was clearly leaving anyway.

“You’re going to let him know on your way out?”

In answer, Kaz just nodded. Inej fell invisible, and followed him downstairs, watching the way other humans and demons on the stairwells came to attention at his passage.

Kaz knocked with the head of his cane before entering Haskell’s office on the first floor. Inej slid through the wall ahead of his passage, finding a good vantage point. This was her second time here and the most notably different thing was that Haskell was awake: working on one of his little model ships, assisted by both an open pot of glue and an open bottle. Inej wondered how the glue didn’t end up in his fur; on closer inspection, she saw that it did, in liberal quantities. “Enter!” he said very officially, when Kaz had already opened the door.

“You wanted the full report for last night’s job.”

“Your ghost got back?”

“My wraith. Yes, not an hour ago.” Inej realized that Kaz had made of her the suitable-sounding reason he’d needed to not have to immediately tell Haskell what had happened. “She said she was responsible for the Liddies kill. This confirms the rumor that you have likely already heard, sir, about the stiff having a slit throat rather than a gunshot wound.”

“That’s right, I’d already heard,” Haskell said in the manner of someone who hadn’t. “Who was it that cleaned up again?”

"Gorka and Seeger."

“Yes, that’s right. So, this ‘wraith,’ then. I wasn’t aware dead people could make more dead people.” Haskell seemed to think he’d made something of a little joke there, but Kaz naturally didn’t laugh or even smile. You can’t know how deeply I wish I hadn’t had to, Inej thought, fingering her knives. If only she could get free of this place, she would know for sure she would never end up making a habit of using them. Twice had been plenty enough. “Would we want to make an assassin out of her?” Haskell continued on, in complete ignorance of her mind.

Inej breathed in sharply.

Kaz was acutely aware of her mind on this matter, but he was horrendously hard to read as per usual. “I for one think we’d come to regret having someone that deadly haunting us, when she can’t be killed herself, or exorcised…”

At this, Haskell laughed again, more deeply. “You just about described yourself, boy.”

Kaz narrowed his eyes. Not the response he’d been going for. “What was that?” he asked, a note of threat in his voice. Inej was curious to see where this would go.

“Don’t talk as if you answer to no one,” the old demon growled, coming to stand. His fur bristled like an angry cat’s, the reaction almost out of place in its intensity, and it was, for some reason, in this that Inej could for an instant recognize a scrap of similarity between the two men. It was there and then gone. Their angers were actually polar opposites: Kaz’s was all bite and minimal bark.

Kaz brushed it off. “Ah. So you see the difference between her and myself, sir. She’s not Dregs. She doesn’t answer to you. And besides, she’s not interested in that kind of work.”

Haskell relented. “As long as it doesn’t get to your head, her answering directly to you.”

Inej hmph’d to herself at this last.

Kaz, she was glad to see (though of course, he was aware that she was; there were multiple layers to his theatre), only gave a fanged smile and said as he left, “Oh, on the contrary. If anything, I have to answer to her.”

The old demon, thinking himself alone, hmph’d as well and muttered something to himself that included “got himself a little girlfriend, now who in this hellhole would’ve guessed,” at which Inej bristled, and saw herself out.

♥︎ x ♣︎

A little ways down the street, Inej resumed visibility, which Kaz took as sign that she was ready to talk, if he was. “How’d I do?” he asked.

She smiled, but looked a little skeptical. “You didn’t kill him. Oh, and you called him ‘sir’ three times.”

“Only two. How’s Jesper?”

“Getting some rest.”

“Good.”

“So, where are we headed?”

“For me, the Crow Club. For you—”

“—Anywhere I like?” Further skepticism.

“Have you seen the university district yet?”

Inej nodded. “It’s peaceful.”

“Did you know Jes used to be a university student, until he joined to Dregs?”

“He didn’t mention it.” In the corner of his eye, Kaz saw her set a hand on the sheathed knife at her hip. It was the one he’d given her and that she’d named Sankt Petyr. Kaz didn’t know anything about Saints, but he knew full well which ones were known for killing off demons. He could certainly appreciate the humor in the name. But he could also imagine the way that humor had faded for her, now that a demon beside himself had come under her blade.

“You know what, come to think of it, there is something specific I’ve been thinking about lately. It might take your mind off all this.” A newspaper clipping materialized in his hand, which he passed to her. “Take a look at this article here. It’s an excellent sample of mercher pride and sense of assurance in their security systems.”

Inej examined the newspaper article closely. “So you’re going to steal it.”

“Absolutely.”

“Just for the fun of it?”

Kaz shrugged one shoulder.

“What have they done to you personally, Kaz? The merchants?”

“What haven’t they.” Anyone in the Barrel or Onder could say the same. “In any case, the painting’s not the most urgent thing, though I would like your help with it. There so happens to be an odd little mystery connected to this particular Councilman. You’ll find a name and description on the back of that paper.”

“Wylan Hendriks?”

Kaz nodded. “A couple months ago, Jan Van Eck’s only son left home quite suddenly, and to his wife and all his mercher friends the kid’s in Belendt. Guess where he actually is?”

“I’m going to guess in Ketterdam?”

“Correct: on Rosenstraat, right here in the Barrel. I want to find out why. For future blackmailing.”

“And in case he needs help?”

“Everyone needs help, Inej.”

Inej thought it over.

“If it turns out he does need help,” Kaz cautioned, “and you want to do something about that, it’s your prerogative and not mine.”

“We’ll see, then,” Inej replied stiffly. “By the way,” she added, “I did appreciate what you told Haskell.” She was gone before he could reply.

Well, Kaz thought, it was nothing. She’d make an accomplished assassin, he knew, but he didn’t want to see her forced to do things in opposition to her principles or adjust to the things he was adjusted to. He would use her abilities, but he wouldn’t use her. He would do what he could to get her out of this place, before it spiraled out of his control.

Oh sure, so, who had killed her? There were two many possibilities. He had a new lead, but it was too general, nowhere near a particular suspect or even a list of suspects. Kaz didn’t have a list of all the shapeshifters in Ketterdam, after all, no more than he did any other type of demon or nonhuman generally. He had a fairly good knowledge of all the particularly powerful demons in the gangs, but that still left way too many potential players, and likely excluded a few who were powerful enough to remain virtually anonymous, possibly to the point of remaining unaffiliated with any of the gangs, not needing the protection. If they were out there, going up against one of them wouldn’t be much more to Kaz than a change in routine. He could’ve managed it himself, non-affiliation and anonymity, if he’d wanted to, but since learning the true identity of the ‘Jakob Hertzoon’ who’d taken everything from him, he’d had more specific goals in mind, a clearer picture of the steps towards his revenge. To beat Pekka Rollins, he’d known immediately, he’d need a gang of his own. The Dregs would do for now, but eventually…if things continued down their current trend…he’d need to either start a new operation, taking the younger crowd with him, or kick the old man out and take his place. It wasn’t really anything to do with Haskell. Only that Haskell—wisely enough, if to a fault—wanted to reap the benefits of Kaz’s kind of leadership while not having to do much himself, and still getting the boss’s cut. That would only continue to work out for Haskell indefinitely if…well, for one thing, if Kaz hadn’t cared to notice.

Of course Kaz had cared to notice. But then, it was a problem to be solved another day, ideally a day when Kaz had a literal mountain of kruge and the criminal resume to show for it. Like that was going to happen anytime soon. Still, unless the situation became pressing, Kaz preferred to imagine an ideal split, something peaceable.

That’s a concern for another day, Kaz told himself. He hoped that day wasn’t too far off. But for now, there was work to be done.

♥︎ x ♣︎

The description Kaz had given her was brief, including only a short physical description and the address of a tannery, but Inej didn’t find it difficult to locate and identify Wylan Hendriks/Van Eck from that. At first, Inej wasn’t sure why he was slightly familiar; she hadn’t been in this area much. Then she recognized him as the flustered boy Jes had walked into on the day she’d first met him.

Watching the boy stirring vats of dye, Inej couldn’t confirm much about either Kaz’s question, or her own. It was clearly strenuous, demoralizing work, but did he need help; was he there to escape something worse; what was the reason for a mercher’s kid to vanish into the depths of the Barrel, anyhow? Did his father know he was there, or genuinely think he was out of the city? Kaz can’t expect me to make anything of this, she thought, then wondered if there wasn’t an office somewhere with any productive information in it.

There was indeed an office, and it did keep (some) information on the factory’s employees, including where they lived (for the purpose, Inej supposed, of tracking people down if they didn’t show up for work, or surely something along that line). She made a note of that address, on her newspaper scrap, and let herself spend another moment with the office’s books, to appreciate (though that might be the wrong word) how long the hours were, how low the wages were, and especially the gap in pay between men, women, and children. And they’d half it again for Suli, she thought, then wondered what her runaway was being paid. Probably the lowest; he looks like he could be years younger than me. Though I doubt he actually is. Next up, then, was to snoop around in the boy’s room—well, no, she couldn’t just presume he had a room to himself. But in any case, he had to have something there which would give her some indication of the answers to What is he doing here? and Does he need help?—well, that was, unless there just wasn’t anything useful. Either way, she’d find out soon.

Just as Inej was meaning to leave, she heard someone about to enter the office, and fell invisible. A manager sort of person swung open the door, speaking to the man following him who stayed in the doorway as he looked through a drawer: “Who was it you said had the saltwater idea?”

“That red-haired kid, Wylan. The one who’s always humming to himself. I think—you know, I think he actually stirs in time to the music.”

The manager person laughed, found what he was after (a set of keys), and left just as quickly and loudly as he’d entered. “Someone’s gunning for a promotion, looks like. Kid’s probably the only person here—besides myself—with any initiative.” The footsteps and voices faded off.

Perhaps the Barrel isn’t treating him all that terribly, Inej reflected; in context of how much worse she knew it could get, Wylan could have been said to be having a modicum of success as a runaway. She left for the second address, entering the spirits’ highway of singing, with less concern that he was someone she might feel the need to help. The boarding house was about as run-down as she had expected, but she discovered that Wylan did indeed have a room to himself. It was as small as her own at the Slat was, which was to say, it would have made a decent closet. Inej was well accustomed to tight spaces; she couldn’t imagine the same of a rich merchant’s son. However, he looked to be making the most of it. To supplement the room’s pitiful excuse for curtains, he’d fixed pencil drawings to most of the window glass—for the most part, impressively detailed botanical illustrations, complete with a variety of insects, but in the top-left corner a portrait of a woman with long curls, who might have been looking either out the window at goings-on below, or at the drawings beneath her—and on the floor next to the mattress (there was no bed frame) was a flute and sheet music, the papers warped, their ink showing through on the other sides, as though they’d gotten wet. There was nothing else in the room. She had the epiphany, after inspecting the sheet music, to lift up the mattress, which resulted in the discovery of a small stack of letters. Seeing who the letters were from, Inej was momentarily certain she had the answers in her hands, until she read their contents, and her excitement fizzled away. They were all incredibly short. T hey all said more or less the same thing. If you’re reading this, I love you. If you’re reading this, I miss you. If you reading this, I wish you would come home. Just that and more of that, over and over and over.

 Was the father heartbroken? Passive-aggressive? At the very least, she could now say he knew his son was in the city.

Replacing everything to be just as she’d found it, Inej said to the person whose life she’d nosed around in for most of that morning: “So, I’m not exactly sure what it is I’ve found out about you, Wylan. And I haven’t even an idea of whether you’d care about the theft from your father’s house that I’ll likely be participating in. He sure is taking much more vigorous and noisy efforts to protect and display his art than he is in getting you back home. As far as my own taste in art goes, I think your drawings are much more beautiful than the painting your father put a copy of in the paper. Maybe my opinion will change, seeing it in person, but I doubt it.”

Leaving for the Crow Club, Inej realized with some satisfaction that her mind had been off of the death yesterday for a while. Is this how Kaz does it, then? Tries to work out other’s stories, so he’s not always stuck in his own? Inej could certainly get used to the method.

So then, what on Earth is his story, exactly? Very reasonably, she’d never know.