Athelas felt his world turn dark and bloody and sharp as fighting and feeling took over thought, the perilously familiar sensation of fragile life behind him, waiting to be snuffed out either by enemies as yet unseen or by his own knives. His mouth was full of the taste of lilies and jasmine. He would have slashed it away with the arterial release of blue blood if he could have, but the stench only grew as the scent of blood weighed on it. Back and forward, his feet slipping in viscous blue, it became heavier as he slashed and ducked, thrust and parried.

  And then Athelas became aware that the soft movements of life behind him had grown silent beneath the scrambling, heavy percussion of boots and armoured marching. He slashed coldly and desperately at the remaining two behindkind before him, dispatching them far more messily and uncertainly than he might have done had he all his faculties about him, and turned in a cold sweat, his knives at the ready.

  The hall danced in front of him: Camellia in the centre of it with her back to him and Harrow clutched behind her, around her in a gilded, weapon-bristling frame of menace, a group of four fae who were not enforcers. The first in that v-formation, far closer to Camellia and Harrow than Athelas himself, his blade already in his hand and glinting gold in the hallway, swept that sword up into a high guard, a smile curling across his face.

  Camellia turned her back to the enforcer, crouching over the sprawled Harrow with as much of his skinny body tucked in as possible—a target impossible to miss. Athelas gazed down at the neat, dark parting of hair for a split second while the world narrowed down to that single point, then his eyes travelled past it to the sword that slashed downward. He leapt, panther-like, his right blade turning the stroke meant to cleave Camellia’s head to the side, and his left piercing the fae’s eye with coldly furious precision. His knees punched into the fae’s chest as his knife sank home, and sent the body tumbling backward, freeing his knife as he landed lightly. The next two fae couldn’t move swiftly enough to avoid a swift, jabbing stab through the gap in their armour between chest-plate and neck-guard, and the one who had been knocked over by the foremost fae’s falling body had time only to make a single, desperate flail with his sword as he lay on his back. Athelas kicked that assault away and knelt on the fae’s chest to stab his blue-soaked blade down through the behindkind’s eye again and again, with savage precision, until there was nothing but blood and brain floating in the eye socket.

  The fae’s sword fell away, clattering to the floor, and Athelas rose, the hall relievingly, impossibly free from scent once again, though his sight still swam with faces familiar and bloody. He stepped away from the fae, turning unsteadily on the balls of his feet until Camellia marked the centre of his narrowed vision once again; she was beginning to struggle to her feet with Harrow.

  “You appear to have very little sense of self-preservation,” he said to her through the babble of the spectres, helping her to rise and supporting her as she supported Harrow.

  Camellia, her face ashy and closed, hefted the boy into her arms as she said, “I never learned that skill.”

  Athelas remembered the shocking slash of blue across her throat earlier at the point of his knife, and the way she hadn’t flinched or drawn back. “Nor that of self-defence, apparently,” he said, removing the hand that had assisted Camellia and leaving a bloody mark on the tangerine fabric. That messy blot tore at his soul with an unexpected savagery, and it seemed as though the world grew darker and louder around him.

  “We all have our skills,” Camellia said through the wailing of phantoms past, throwing a glance toward the end of the hall from which they had come.

  Athelas heard it, too—the sound of more behindkind staff. “In that case,” he said, his voice not quite steady, “I really do think we ought to run.”

  A run was not quite possible: Camellia struggled with Harrow and Athelas with the world around him, and in the tumble of real and imagined foes, Athelas fought as savagely and blindly as he had ever done. Aware of neither friend nor foe, but only the faces and cries of those he killed before him and the shuffling of the Harrow-burdened Camellia behind him, Athelas pushed on and on through the bloody hallway until he was on his knees.

  The knuckles of his left hand pressed into white linoleum, sticky with blood, curled immovably around his knife; his right arm pressed against his right knee as if he could force himself up while the world turned around him. He could not: shadows pressed and thronged him until he couldn’t breathe for the sound of dead things and the weight of their death.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” whispered a voice through the babble, directly into his ear. Flowers grew between his fingers and then up his arm, tearing through flesh. “Didn’t I tell you that there was nowhere to run? All you’ve done is make things messy for yourself again.”

  Athelas laughed a bloody laugh that was very nearly a sob, and in the darkness felt the hilt of a knife between his fingers that was not the knife that ought to have been there. He knew what it was there for—he knew who he had to kill with it—but there was also a pressure cupped around each of his cheeks, and while that pressure was there, he could keep the darkness at bay just a little longer, though he couldn’t push it back.

  In the darkness, a familiar voice, heavy with satisfaction, said, “There you are.”

  Zero, said Athelas’ brain; but that made no sense. The hands that had been cupped around his cheeks, staving off the darkness, removed themselves. A tangerine flicker wafted bergamot at him as it moved between him and the voice, and Athelas’ hands moved in protest at the loss of the warmth that Camellia’s hands had made around his face.

  “You’re in the way,” Camellia said. Her voice was pleasant, but Athelas was desperately aware of the strained undertone beneath it.

  “I intend to be in the way,” said Zero, and there was no mistaking the threat in his voice.

  Athelas blinked heavily, his foot shifting and slipping beneath him as he tried to find purchase enough to stand, and his sight cleared well enough to see just as Zero’s huge white hand reached for Camellia’s wrist. Without thought, he lunged to his feet, his knife sweeping out and the tip of his blade ringing against Zero’s wrist-guard, knocking his hand away from Camellia’s arm. His feet, now solid beneath him, didn’t slip.

  “Don’t touch,” he said, blade still outstretched, although he swayed. A drop of blue blood from the tip of his knife seemed to hum through the air before it hit the unmarked floor between Athelas and Zero, who stood frozen, staring at Athelas.

  He had never before raised a knife to his master—not in any physical way. Had never said him no, never stood openly against him. He should not be doing so now, though Zero was no longer his master; Camellia’s good word would never stand against another slight, not even if Pet stood for him because of it.

  But Athelas’ blade stayed where it was, swaying as much as he did, and he didn’t withdraw or drop it. In the silence that fell, Zero’s hand rose to grasp the hilt of his sword, a single speck of blue blood staining the cuff of his shirt.

  “Stop that right now!” Camellia said sharply, hefting Harrow once again from the floor where she had laid him.

  Zero’s eyes faltered away from Athelas and rested on Camellia instead, and Athelas smiled involuntarily, a rictus rather than a genuine smile.

  Only half conscious, he enquired of her, mockingly, “Defending me, my heart?”

  “You’re speaking for him?” Zero said disbelievingly, at the same time.

  “I’m asking you not to get in our way,” Camellia said. Her cheeks were faintly dusky, but she did not look at Athelas; her gaze, straight and unfaltering, was on Zero. “We’re not in your way, and you have no reason to stop us. You can attend to whatever business brought you here without regard to us.”

  “This is my business.” Zero’s icy blue eyes seemed to burn into Athelas with the deeper meaning of you are my business.

  “I’ve warned you before about your need to interfere,” Camellia said, drawing his attention again. “It never ends well for you.”

  “You,” said Zero, in what seemed to be disbelief, his arm dropping back to his side. “You are advising me not to interfere.”

  “I don’t interfere,” Camellia told him. “Perhaps you can take a leaf out of my book, just for the afternoon.”

  Zero’s eyes lightened, and Athelas knew through his weariness that the bitterness of death had passed. Despite the commensurately lightened atmosphere, the fae’s voice was challenging when he said, “There is a difference, isn’t there? Between don’t and can’t?”

  Camellia’s nostrils flared and whitened. “That was cruel.”

  To Athelas’ utter astonishment, a searing of blood slashed across each of Zero’s cheeks. “I apologise,” Zero said swiftly. “I should not have said that.”

  “I’ll forgive you once,” said Camellia, her smile rather crooked. She threw a glance over her shoulder, and her hand came up to grasp Athelas’ arm again—as though he was someone to be trusted; as though he was not swaying on his feet and had not recently been overcome by mere shadows in the halls. As though he could have fought against the threat she stood in front of and lived. “But it looks as though we’ll have to discuss this another time. Those are harpies I hear, I think.”

  Athelas, feeling the seep of life and brightness through his entire body from the single patch of warmth on his arm—as if he was recharging by any sunny, summer stream, or as though a gentle fire had curled its way through his blood—straightened and found that his legs no longer had to account for the movement of the hallway around him.

  It struck him as humorous that he would once more be fighting with his previous lord, and perhaps he smiled a little, because Zero’s eyes grew colder once again.

  “I’ll take care of these ones,” Zero said, and although his eyes didn’t meet Athelas’, the words were for him alone. “Get everyone out safely.”

  And Athelas, somehow lighter and clearer-eyed than before, with the pinch of Camellia’s fingers on his forearm, once more moved onward to traverse the white corridors. This time, there were no spectres to avoid; they had been banished.

  They encountered the wave of enforcers engulfing the hallways to meet the rush behind them some time later, and slipped through that line to make it out of the hallways and into the café area of the DDP, but Athelas knew the day was far from over. By the time the enforcers had processed them, questioned them, and finally allowed them to leave, dusk was falling outside the DDP, and the lights of the building had begun to sweep over the silvery curves in pastel fluctuations. They found YeoWoo outside, sitting on the wide, shallow stairs that led to the street, a single, unmoving spot in the milling sea of enforcers that still crowded around the building.

  There was a bleak kind of look to her face, and the fingers that wrapped around her elbows, which rested on her knees, were white at the tips. Athelas understood the bleakness, but even in the sudden brightness of his world, it didn’t occur to him to do something about it—that he could do something about it. He didn’t even have such a thought until Camellia turned to him, wordlessly presenting him with Harrow. He accepted the boy from her as wordlessly as she proffered him, aware in that moment that although Camellia might not understand the bleak look as Athelas did, she was prepared to do something about it.

  She sat beside YeoWoo and said, “Did they not find the information you needed?”

  “Don’t know yet,” YeoWoo said rather mechanically, after a brief pause that seemed as though she was processing the words. “They’ll be processing things for a little while, he said. They need someone from another office who can use computers. Nothing was damaged before we got to it.”

  Athelas gazed at her. “And our merman friend?”

  “Gone,” she said shortly.

  So he had been right.

  “Dead?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “We…we had to stop the staff from destroying the computers in the server room. By the time I had a moment free to find him, he was gone.”

  Camellia’s gaze travelled over Athelas’ face, and then back to YeoWoo’s; for once, she didn’t seem to have anything to say that could either soothe or console. Athelas wondered if it was from a lack of knowing what to say, or if she expected him to say something.

  YeoWoo, as if she couldn’t help it, said, “I did try. I was just too late. If I’d gone to him any earlier, we wouldn’t have got to the computers soon enough, and we would only have had the operators from this location. We got everything.”

  Except, said the blankness of her face, so clear to Athelas, for the merman. A choice had been made, and that choice had not been completely satisfactory to YeoWoo.

  “I see,” said Athelas gently, hefting the unconscious Harrow a little higher on his shoulder. “Then perhaps we should go home.”

  STEAM IN THE SUNROOM

  When YeoWoo woke three days after the raid on the contract café, she felt as heavy and drugged as she had the first morning after. She dragged herself out of bed despite that, well aware that Athelas had been out and about those last few days—up to no good, probably, she thought wearily—and simmering with resentment because she had seen neither hide nor hair of Peregrine in the interim. Besides feeling significantly disgusted with herself, YeoWoo felt decidedly bitter about the lack of communication from someone who had made a promise to her, and she was determined on going and fetching that information if it had not been brought to her.

  Why she should feel so when she had reneged on a promise, herself, however—

  I didn’t promise! she thought angrily. No promise had been made.

  But she had told Marazul that she would take care of him; and instead, she’d looked after her own interests first. She had told herself that she wouldn’t ever again abandon someone to the consequences of her actions in order to get what she wanted, and when the time came, she had done exactly the same thing. YeoWoo had killed YongChul by her own hand, and even if she hadn’t directly killed Marazul, she had left him to die. She wondered exactly how Athelas would look at her if he knew how far she had promised and failed to deliver, and that thought burned hot and bright in her as if it had been simmering for several days, just waiting for the chance to boil up and lodge in her throat.

  It shouldn’t matter how Athelas looked at her, but she found she couldn’t bear for him to look at her with that sense of fellow-feeling—that absolute understanding. He knew they were exactly alike—had known it from the start, even while she was still denying it with every sneer and jab she made at him.

  If it came to that, she couldn’t even claim that the single digit count of her victims made things any better beside the multitudes of Athelas’ victims: she was quite well aware that Athelas, in some important, almost indefinable way, didn’t really know the difference between right and wrong. YeoWoo did know, and she had chosen to do something that she knew very well was wrong, because she would get what she wanted out of it. Perhaps Peregrine hadn’t been wrong to look at her in the way he had, after all. He certainly had more of a right to do so than YeoWoo had had when it came to Athelas.

  YeoWoo was more awake but no less bitter in her thoughts when she left her room, and the smell of Harrow slinking along the hall from the room that had once belonged to the human boy Jake cut at her more deeply than she’d expected.

  There was another boy she should have looked after better: she and Athelas had both been so deep in their own business that they hadn’t taken enough trouble to make sure that the frailest member of the household was safe, and Jake had died because of it. In his place was a boy that Athelas, and not YeoWoo, had considered more important than getting what he immediately wanted.

  YeoWoo turned on her heel and swept down the stairs to the kitchen. The scent of human nauseated her.

  No one was in the kitchen or in the sunroom when YeoWoo wearily looked into each; no breakfast had been left, though she smelt the warm, savoury scent of bacon and eggs on the air. Camellia had evidently made breakfast especially for Athelas this morning: while YeoWoo enjoyed bacon and eggs, she was far more used to a Korean breakfast, and preferred that if she could get it.

  It shouldn’t surprise her if Camellia was favouring Athelas, she thought gloomily, aware that the thought was ridiculous but unable to stop it. YeoWoo didn’t deserve a breakfast full of small, mixed savory, spicy, and pungent dishes, lovingly prepared and arranged around the comforting warmth of a bowl of plump, sticky rice. What she deserved was exactly what she found at the front of the nearest kitchen cupboard: plain, dry, puffed rice with a little nutrition and no taste, poured out in a bowl with the last of the milk in the fridge.

  So she ate it without looking for anything else, aware that the house was beginning to stir around her, and that even Harrow was shifting up in his room. YeoWoo sank deeper into her human form, refusing scents and the influence of Between alike, and wearily ate another spoonful of the tasteless stuff, crunching through it all.

  It wasn’t until she turned her head toward the door at a faint sound that she saw Camellia leaning against the door jamb, observing her.

  “I slept late,” YeoWoo said, in excuse. “I got my own breakfast.”

  “So I see,” Camellia said. “You don’t seem to be much better this morning.”

  YeoWoo shifted a little, and one shoulder rose slightly as she turned back to her breakfast. “I’ll go out later, anyway. Where’s the old man?”

  There was a silence that made YeoWoo again glance over at Camellia, who said, “You haven’t seen him?”

  “How should I?” YeoWoo said, a little grumpily. “He’s been out already every time I get downstairs, lately.”

  “Yes,” Camellia said thoughtfully. “He has, hasn’t he?”

  She strolled into the kitchen and filled the jug, then switched it on. Over her shoulder, she asked, “Does he still have that pin?”

  “Oh.” YeoWoo stared blankly down into her rice puffs. “Yes, probably.”