A Brotherhood of Crows.
Chapter 20

In the ballroom of the Rookery, angry voices roses to the rafters.

“Peace! Peace, Brothers!” Wraith boomed over the clamouring of this hall. “We will have peace in this hall!”

“There can be no peace,” Gorcrow retorted to cheers, “Until the Council of Ravens answers this Brotherhood!”

A Crowmoot. The first he had ever experienced - the one time the Council of Ravens could be summoned before the whole Brotherhood, and held to account. Word of his intention to call one after the news had arrived at the Rookery has spread quickly, carried in hushed whispers by his allies - his “sons” as Vraath had called them - and had whipped up the ranks to the Brotherhood into a fervor. Any Brother could, in theory, call a Crowmoot, but few did - the repercussions for calling one of a matter of insufficient importance were too horrifying to speak of.

“We have all heard the news of Brother Luther’s fate,” the newest member of the Council, Brother Abraham said, holding out his hands in a universal gesture calling for calm, “He has served this Brotherhood well, and will soar in Heaven upon Black Wings. All shall die.”

“All shall rot,” intoned the rest of the Brotherhood, almost out of obedience.

“ - Beneath the beating of Black Wings,” snapped Gorcrow dismissively. “Is that all this Council can say? One of our Brothers lies dead, slain in an act of cowardly blasphemy! And yet, here, we hear our Council speak a memorial! Has the Council abandoned its watch? Are we not meant to look to them for leadership? Do we not want more, Brothers?”

As cheers rose around him, Gorcrow tired to keep himself calm. His heart was pounding away in his chest. The thrill came not just from the occasion of the Crowmoot itself, but from knowing that everything was falling into place so, so well.

“Brother Luther’s death is regrettable,” Vraath was speaking now, his voice raised over the howls and heckles of the crowd, “But he brought that fate upon himself. Luther took a squad of Clockwork Hearts from the armory - without permission - and led them into the Rim. His rashness was his undoing. There is nothing more to be said on the matter.”

“What of his body?” a voice called out from the Brotherhood, “If it is found, we could be exposed?”

“Arrangements have been made,” replied Vraath, “The body has been recovered and disposed of. Our Brothers in the media have quashed the story before it took wing. Our Brotherhood is safe.”

“Safe?” Gorcrow spat, “One of our Brothers is slain, and this Council speaks of safety? Is it not in the interest of our Brotherhood to know why Brother Luther took his Clockwork Hearts to the Rim? Should our Brotherhood not know of the threat to our order?”

“What threat do you speak of, Brother Gorcrow?” Boomed Wraith, but there was a wariness in his voice.

Beneath his mask, Gorcrow licked his lips. What he was about to do was where the success of everything hinged. It was also, for the Brotherhood, a grave taboo. “Brother Luther was slain by a man called Elijah Avaron, AKA the Sleepwalker. He is a detective or sorts, specialising in the ‘paranormal’...and he through means unknown, can walk in the world of the Pale Citizens.”

There were gasps from the Brotherhood. Gorcrow surveyed them from behind his mask; they say at their dining tables, or leaned against walls, a sea of masks. For the first time he felt a sense of revulsion. Many of them were here for the theatre of the Crowmoot. He could see Brothers sipping champagne, stroking the legs of their paramours, whispering quietly to one another. This Brotherhood, supposedly the elite, and yet many of them saw their mission as bloodsport. It disgusted him.

“This Sleepwalker,” continued Gorcrow, “Is known to the Council. They have watched him for sometime, yet never acted. It was this Sleepwalker who slew Brother Luther; it was this Sleepwalker who slew one of my own creation on the streets of Edinburgh but a few days ago. It is this Sleepwalker, who walks with the Pale Citizens, who has powers that we cannot imagine, who could destroy this Brotherhood. And he is looking for us, Brothers. He seeks us, doggedly. With this in mind, can we not see why Brother Luther chose to act, rashly perhaps, but act nonetheless? When the Council sits here and pontificates,Brother Luther acted, and he tried to put this Sleepwalker to the sword! Are these the deed of a fool, Brothers, or the deeds of a hero?”

As the cheers and jeers rose again, Gorcrow knew he had them. Feet pounded against the floor, fists banged tables, and angered masks turned upon the Council of Ravens, who sat in the centre of the room, suddenly looking very small.

“Brother Gorcrow,” Wrath spoke with unusual softness, “”Tread carefully, Brother, you speak of secrets known only to the council. To do so openly is blasphemy against the Brotherhood.”

“Not, Brother Wrath, when it is in the interest of the Brotherhood to know the truth,” countered Gorcrow, “So I put it to the Council - have I spoken a word of a lie?”

Brother Zacken, who had until now remained silent, toying with her stiletto knife, spoke now: “What Brother Gorcrow says is true. The Council has long been aware of this man, this Sleepwalker. We have watched him and we have seen his trail as he walks, unknowingly, with the Pale Citizens, and we have seen ignorance. Elijah Avaron poses no threat to us.”

She was drowned out by howls from the Brothers, and Gorcrow smiled in satisfaction. “Lies!”, “The Council has betrayed us!”, “Gut him!”, “Damn your lies Brother!”

“Again, Brothers,” he said, “Again, our Council is blind. Again they talk of safety when out of our Brothers lies dead in the Thames. They talk of ignorance, but it is they who are ignorant, - the Sleepwalker is looking for us. He has already claimed one crow. How many more will die to his hand?”

“No more!”, “Kill the Crow Killer!”, “Kill the Sleepwalker!”

Vraath snapped: “And what would you have us do, Brother Gorcrow? Kill the Sleepwalker, and risk exposing ourselves? There are forces at work here you cannot possibly understand -”

Now time for a more dangerous play. “No, Brothers, no - do not kill the Sleepwalker. Let me have him instead. You all know of my experiments, you all know my work with Chaos. I can use the Sleepwalker, make our gravest threat into our most valuable asset. Perhaps he is the key to the realm of the Pale Citizens.”

“Is this your demand for the Crowmoot, Brother?” asked Wraith, “Is this what you wish to put to the Brotherhood.”

Gorcrow nodded, the feathers on his mask shimmering as he did so, “It is, Brother,”

A vote then. The only time the Brotherhood of Crows ever came close to being a democracy, the only time the Council of Ravens could be bound by the Brotherhood at general - and it was just at his fingertips. Everything he had done until now, the creatures, lying to the Council, sending Brother Luther to his death, had built to this moment.

Wraith spread out his arms, calling for silence, “Brothers, you have heard the demand for this Crowmoot. Will we, as one Brotherhood, agree to Brother Gorcrow’s demand?”

The cheering rose as a swell, and filled every inch of the ballroom, and beneath his mask, Gorcrow smiled.

*

The rest of that day passed swiftly. After her refusal to go home, Zularna hung around the factory, talking to Tobias and I. Tobias had asked to see her crossbow, and then, with it is his hand, had said “Half a mo,” and then scuttled off to the workshop, he had returned, half an hour later, with the bow in hand,

“I made a few adjustments,” he said, “I’ve installed a semi auto bolt on the string here. Instead of drawing it back manually, it’ll come back after each shot is fired. Also, I took the liberty of adding the magazine here. It’s got three bolts in it, couldn’t fit more in and keep it collapsable. But it’ll be a damn sight faster than reloading by hand. Give it a try.”

Zularna had taken the bow down to the firing range, and in quick succession, pumped three bolts into the target mannequins. I noted her speed, and accuracy - headshots, the lot of them. She holstered the bow and pronounced Tobias a genius.

To me, Tobias presented a handful of speedloaders. “I’ve been making some modifications to your SmartRounds. These are coded to your vocal patterns - usual non-lethal and lethal stuff, but I’ve added a few new options. Try em - “shredders” for fragmentation rounds, and “hot shot” for explosive tipped rounds. Should cover you in case you go up against anything heavy in the field.”

I clipped them to my belt and nodded my thanks.

After that, we buried Michael. With Tobias and I having no religion of ourselves, Zularna recited a short prayer over the fresh grave, the arabic slipping smoothly from her Edinburgh twain:

“Allahumma ighfir Iahu warhamhu wa a’fu ‘afihi, wa akrim nuzulahu wa wassi’ mudkalahu waghsilhu bi-ma’ wath-thalin wa-barad, wa naqqihi minal-khataya kama yanaqqa ath-thawb al-abyad min ad-danas....”

As she spoke, I had looked into Elsewhere and seen Red, standing in grey place, by that grey grave, watching me. I had shivered and gone back to reality.

“...Wa abidhu daran khairan min darihi wa ahlan khayran min ahlihi, wa zawjan khayran min zawjihi, wa qihi ’adhab al-qabri wa ’adhab an-nar.”

So we laid Michael to rest, to the soft sound of Arabic, spoken by in the grey by a woman with a red ghost in her shadow.

*

“Yeah, well that’s the problem isn’t it? It’s not one thing or the other. It’s just the middle. Like the middle child, always the problem child.”

“Ok, I sort of see where you’re coming from -”

“Good, so I say we move it,”

Zularna set down her fork, decisively, “You can’t just move...the whole Middle East?”

We sat at the table in the living room. After the funeral - if you could call it that - we had retreated inside from the soft Edinburgh rain, and Tobias had put together a simple meal of pasta with some vegetables from the greenhouse.

“Well,” Tobias set his fork down with what I assume was meant to be equal decisiveness, somewhat undermined by the fact that the impact made it flip up and land back on his plate, “Can you think of a better way of sorting out all the problems of the Middle East?”

“Yes. I mean, no, but .”

I let them argue. I had very little to contribute to the discussion, or the meal as such. I concentrated on pushing food around my plate, periodically sipping my coffee, and wondering when I could next be alone.

“No, hear me out on this,” Tobias said, “It’s the same thing, innit? It’s a perfect analogy. The Far East, right, that’s got all sorts of mystique – it’s exotic and shit. And the Near East, well that’s pretty exciting cos it’s right there. But the Middle East? Pffff. Neither one thing nor the other. No wonder no one gives a shit. They should rename it. Call it, like, the not-quite-so-far-but-still-a-change-of-scenery East. Or the Top South.”

“Yeah, but, Top South, that’s an oxymoron,” replied Zularna.

“You’re a poxy moron!” Tobias, having recovered his fork, clearly wanted to gain control of the argument with a solid rebuttal, an act somewhat let down by the fact that he made that rebuttal with his mouth full and had to repeat it several times before Zularna understood it.

A meal together. Christ. Tobias and I barely ate meals together, and we lived together. I mean, we did eat in one another’s presence, by which I mean Tobias munched takeaways hastily collected after jobs, and I smoked away my hunger pangs. But now, here we were; watching my teenage flatmate argue with a homicidal woman I’d met two days ago, and he’d met about two hours ago, as if they’d known one another for years.

“I still don’t think you can just move it, Tobias -”

“That’s the other thing with the middle east – y’know how everyone says it’s full of extremists?”

“Err...”

“Well, that’s cos they’re in the bloody middle. If you’re the region in the fucking middle of something, then by definition anyone from outside is from an extreme. Ergo, they’re a fucking extremist,”

“I...ok…”

It bothered me. It also bothered me that it bothered me. What bothered me most was that I was simply sitting, silently, waiting for the whole thing to end, simply so that I might go and have time to be bothered by other things. To be bothered by Red, and by dead men walking, by the Brotherhood of Crows and by words written in neon lights in unseen alleyways.

Sometimes, things get under your skin in a way that no amount of smokes can scalpel out. This was one of those times.

“Ok, I’ll play: But surely, right, that means that the extremists are gonna be on the sides, not in the middle?” said Zularna.

“Ah,” said Tobias, trying to wave away the comment with his knife, and accidentally sending the piece of cutlery flying off to become embedded in a wall. “Look, they’re not extremists in their own country, are they? That wouldn’t make any sense. It’s when they go to the middle, that they are extremists in comparison. Thus if we move it -”

Why couldn’t I speak? I had no idea. Maybe it was not really following the conversation - a daily hazard with Tobias, whose mind moved on a plain as yet unknown to explorers - or maybe it was something else, some sense in which this normal dinner scene, with its conversations and its communality and its...norm...just didn’t sit with me, me who never slept more than two hours a night, me who woke up with a gun against my head every night, me who didn’t even know what was real -

At that point my body took over, and I got up, and I stormed out, and sought solitude.

*

Around twenty seconds after Elijah’s chair hit the floor with a shattering clang, and the man himself vanished:

“Should,” Zularna paused, “Should I go after him?”

“A good rule of thumb in life, I think, is give it a shot,” Tobias pushed his plate away. “Well, most of the time. I’d maybe not give that advice to Harvey Lee Oswald, or...I dunno, whoever shot Jr.”

“Who?”

“Dallas?”

“What?”

“You don’t watch Dallas?”

Zularna put down her fork. “I’m going to give it a shot,” she said, and got up.

*

The problem, thought Tobias, as he watched Zularna leave, was that he hated thinking.

Thinking was a very different beast to learning. Learning was a thing Tobias simply did. It didn’t really matter what was being learned provided that something worthwhile was being scanned, scrutinised, bound, and delicately placed upon a shelf in the library of Tobias’ mind, its spine offered up invitingly for when the occasion for its use might arise. This was perhaps the reason why, with four months to go until his eighteenth birthday, Tobias was more well-read in Literature than more Emeritus Professors; more mathematically learned than Alan Turing, Euclid and Newton combined; and possessed a deeper and more fundamental comprehension of the intricacies of both the natural and unnatural sciences than most disciples of both disciplines would even consider possible.

Of course, there were still gaps. But Tobias worried that if he didn’t paper over those gaps, then his mind, always zipping and flipping and dipping and dropping like a drunken sparrow, might turn to actual Thinking. He paused, scanned his mental bookshelves, and realised that his knowledge of anti-psychiatry was little more than a post it note, so he set down his knife and fork, got up, and proceeded to his real bookshelves to see if he had an tangible material to address the gap.

Part of it was a love of Learning. But it was also the fear that if he ever started Thinking, really Thinking about things, he’d end up no better than Elijah and Zularna.

*

I stood now, on my balcony, and smoked reflectively, looking out at Edinburgh’s towers and winding streets, scattered across the earth like a giant’s discarded jewellery. The sun was beginning to set, and long beams of light caught upon the spires of St Giles, clung to the houses of Old Town, and skipped over the shadows that amassed in Princess Street Gardens.

I was disturbed from my thoughts by a polite cough behind me. Zularna emerged from my room and walked out to join me.

“How did you get up here?”

She looked surprised by the question. “I took the stairs.”

“There are stairs?”

“Yeah, your wardrobe is in front of the door to the stairwell. Why’d you put it there?”

I hadn’t, nor had I known that there were stairs leading up the the watchtower. My solitude up here felt suddenly rather fragile. “I like to be alone up here,” I said, and flicked my spent cigarette over the edge of the balcony.

“Do you want me to go?”

“No - no, you can stay. What can I do you for?”

She didn’t answer at first, but leaned against the balcony rail and looked out over the city. “Quite the view you have up here.”

“It is,” I watched the sun begin to fade for a moment. “Something you wanted from me?”

“Not every conversation needs to have a purpose...I just wanted to talk to you, really.”

“What about?”

She threw me a look. “You really don’t talk to many people, do you? Outside of the job, you mean?”

Well, recently, I started talking to Red ghost that lives in your shadow. “Not really. Why?”

“Must be lonely.”

I shrugged, and patted my pockets for my tobacco pouch. “Doesn’t bother me.”

Zularna watched me roll another smoke. “Those things will kill you one day.”

Yeah, your doppelganger might have mentioned. “So what do you want to talk about?” I sealed the paper shut with a lick, and popped the smoke in my mouth.

“I just...I’m working with you now. But I know nothing about you. Wanted to try and get to know you better.”

“Okay,” I cupped my lighter and lit the smoke. “What do you want to know?”

“Where were you born?”

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” she raised an eyebrow at me.

I met her gaze over the thin tendrils of smoke rising from my rolie. “No, I don’t. Where were you born?”

Zularna looked out over the city again and then pointed: “There.”

“The Royal Infirmary? So you’ve been in Edinburgh all your life.”

“My parents are from North Berwick, but yeah. I went to school here, Uni. You really don’t know where you were born?”

“Nope.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty four.” I reconsidered, “Maybe twenty five, hard to say. Ask me something else.”

“Okay, well...what music do you like?”

“Don’t really have time for music.”

“What was the last book you read?” S~ᴇaʀᴄh the Find ɴøᴠel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“Don’t really have time to read.”

“But you have all those books downstairs?”

“Tobias’s,” I flicked some ash from the end of my smoke. “Say what you will about him, but he reads like a beast. You know he read The Lord of the Rings in a morning? All three volumes, all the way through. Blasted through them and then started reading Richard Feynman. Kid’s got skill.”

Zularna pondered this in silence for a moment. “Do you have any family?”

“An older brother. We don’t really see eye to eye. You?”

She smiled. “Only child. Mum and Dad are still in North Berwick. Where are your parents?”

“Not in the picture, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sorry,”

“Not your fault.”

We lapsed into silence. The wind whipped gently through our hair, and blew the smoke from my cigarette out over the Edinburgh sky. “Have you ever been in love?” she asked, after a moment.

The question surprised me. “No, not really my thing.”

“So you don’t have a girlfriend?

“I’m not especially interested in women,”

“A boy friend?”

“No, I’m not interested in men, either.”

“No romantic or aromantic partner?”

“None, nada, zilch. Why do you ask?”

She scowled at me. “You really aren’t very good at conversations, are you?”

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “Have....you ever been in love?”

Zularna turned back to the city and didn’t say anything for a moment. “I was, once, when I was seventeen. She was this girl at my sixth form. Annie - she wanted to be a therapist. Good kid - a natural carer for others…”

“I hope you don’t mind me asking...but you said girl, I -?”

“I’m queer.”

“Ah, I see…” I fumbled for the right words, finding myself in very uncertain territory. Emotions and the like weren’t my area of expertise. They happened certainly, but I’d never pretended to understand them beyond trying to keep tabs on when my feelings told me I was in danger. “What happened to Annie?”

There was a distant look on her face, illuminated as it was by the dying rays of the sun, . “She got sick...Huntington’s disease. You know I had this plan for us. I wanted to take her to Cuba; we’d get a house together out there, it’d be warm, away from the war...she’d be able to read and be comfortable, and I’d cook and clean and try and get a job out there…” she trailed off. “She died, when I was nineteen, in answer to your question.”

“I didn’t ask anything,”

“You don’t need to. It’s what anyone would ask. It’s the reason I’m here now, rather than in Havana.”

At the back of my mind, I felt a tug, so I closed my eyes. “What?” I snapped at Red.

“How’s this all making you feel, Chicka?

“I dunno, sympathy - Christ, why does that matter?”

“Are you not,” Red did the head-cocking motion, halfway between a shake of the head and a nervous tick. “Interested to know why she’s telling you all this stuff? Or why she’s even sticking around with you two?”

I glared at Red. “I think you want me to be interested,”

“So you’re not?”

“I didn’t say that - I just prefer to let people explain things in their own time,”

Red sighed. “Ok, try this - what do you see in her?”

I scowled “She doesn’t trust people?”

“She really doesn’t. Which makes it important that she’s hanging around you.. Something’s not making her run away,”

I snorted. “So, what, there’s a magic reason for her to trust me, explicitly? She was getting on fine with Tobias as well. Ain’t about me,”

“You ever see someone not get along with Tobias?” she challenged.

“By ‘get along with’ do you mean ‘not murder out of sheer annoyance’?”

“You know what I mean, Chika.”

“I’m not entirely sure I do. Ok. Fine. She trusts me. Why?

Red smirked at me. “Why don’t you ask her?”

I grimaced at her “I don’t think we know each other well enough for that,”

“Fair enough,” Red inspected her nails, “One more thing: she lies.”

“What?”

“Go on, chika, you’re being rude,”

Disorientated, I found myself back in reality, and lost for words. “I’m...I’m sorry you lost someone who mattered that much to you…”

“You know what the funny thing is,” said Zularna, rounding on me, “Normally, when I meet someone, I know if they’ve lost someone. I know if they’ve been in love, where they were born, I can telI everything about them without them ever needing to even say their name. I don’t really even need to talk to them about anything, because I fucking know it all, already. People can’t keep secrets from me. It’s impossible. And then I meet you, and I’m blind. And you know what? It pisses me off. It pisses me off because I know next to nothing about you and I don’t know why.”

That, I guess, explains the trust issues. What’s worse than not knowing anything about the people in your life? Knowing everything about them...until the day you don;t.

The other half of that conversation called to me,, and I blinked into Elsewhere.

“Are you going to tell her?” asked Red. The brilliant vermillion of her hair and dress shone like a lighthouse beacon in the great grey place.

“I’ll think about it,” I took a drag. Thank Christ cigarettes still existed in Elsewhere.

“You’ve been avoiding me, haven’t you?” Red toyed with her hair as she spoke.

“Can’t say I really enjoyed the conversation that much.”

“Shame. I was thinking about you. You’re a funny little man, aren’t you?”

“How so?”

“It’s funny,” sad Red, “that you call this place Elsewhere.”

“How do you mean?”

“Think about it - you find yourself here, you don’t know what here is, so you name it. Naming’s a powerful thing. It helps us feel like we can control things, like we have some ownership of them...naming makes us feel less afraid.” she looked out over the skyline of other Edinburgh, “In the beginning there was the word…”

“So what do you call...here?” I flicked ash from the ghostly tip of my ghost of a smoke.

“I don’t call it anything,” she replied. “Do you speak any German?”

“Ein bisschen. Warum?”

“You know the word schadenfreude?”

“I do...feeling pleasure in watching someone else fail, right?”

“A literal translation is ‘pitiless joy’, but you’re right. It means something else. There isn’t an equivalent word in English. Yet it’s something we all feel, no matter how noble we are. Do you know how important it was, the day I learned the word schadenfreude? For years I’d felt this...something, this feeling, but it didn’t have a name, and then along comes this word and suddenly - boom. Order out of chaos. Did you feel the same way when you closed your eyes, looked around you and first called it Elsewhere? A sense of peace? Of freedom?”

“Perhaps,” I ground the cigarette down, and began to roll another, “But I’m more interested to know where you learned German.”

She glanced at me, slyly, out of the corner of her eye. “That would be telling, now, wouldn’t it.” She nodded over the balcony. “Look out there and tell me what you see.”

I followed her gaze, out at the skyline of other Edinburgh. “I see the city.”

“Is it the same as the other place?”

I looked again, concentrating on the details. Edinburgh has always been an unbroken city; it spread itself out over uneven ground, rising from the very bottom of Cowgate all the way to the highest turret of the Castle. Where the land fell, Edinburgh plunged with it, down into the swells of Waverly Gardens, then rose again in Newtown, before sliding down the hill, like a river, to reach the very northern most point of Newhaven Harbour. Every day and night of my life, I had let me gaze loosen and follow its meandering streets, its narrow alleys, its scattered parks and patches of green. Yet here, in that great grey place, something was different: the gothic architecture of Old Town, which sat in the centre of the city like the oldest rings of a tree, has spread - I saw unevenly cobbled streets, illuminated sickly by gaslamp; towers and spires and gargoyles seemed to rise and spring from every roof. But the images flickered like an old film.

“It looks like...the past.” I said, eventually, “Is that what this place is? Some kind of past?”

“Time does work differently here. Think of it more as you’re seeing more than one Edinburgh. You’re seeing different Edinburgh, other Edinburgh, every Edinburgh, all at once. It’s a sight not many people get to see.”

“Apart from you,” I said. “You gonna tell me why that is?”

She half smiled. “Eventually. No shoo. You’re being rude again, chika.”

I opened my eyes was back in reality. Here, Zularna was silent, leaning over the balcony. Here head was turned away from me, and the last tendrils of daylight caught in the rich blue of her hair.

I sighed, threw my cigarette butt over the balcony and said “I was wiped.”

She turned to look at me. “What?”

“The reason you can’t read me...at least I think it’s the reason. I was wiped.”

“Your...memory was erased?”

“Yes. Whoever did it was good. Completely clean slate, but not a sloppy one. You hear of people getting wiped and they wake up unable to remember sure, but they also can’t right, speak, fuck, some of them can’t even feed themselves. Not me. My first memory is my sixteenth birthday. Before that, nothing.”

Her face was curious. “Do you...do you know why?”

I shook my head. “No. I woke up in a hotel room. I knew my name, I knew the name of my brother - I knew how to count and read and write, and what happens in Hamlet and all that crap you learn in school, but apart from that...nothing.” I shrugged. “Maybe that’s why you can’t read me - some residual leftover from the wipe...I’m on a limb here, but...that’s my theory.”

She studied my face for a moment. “Does anyone else know?”

“You’re the first person I’ve told. Tobias doesn’t know - I met him long after that. My brother he...he’s complex, and we don’t talk about the past much. So the only person who knows is you.”

“I...I appreciate you telling me.”

“Seemed like something you needed to know.” I smiled, faintly.

The sun had fully set now, and darkness now finished its creep across the city, grew bolder, and seemed to rise from the very earth itself.

She’ll save your life. Twice.

“...there was one other thing,” I said, slowly. “One other thing you should probably know.”

“Go on,”

“There was a note in my pocket, when I woke up in that hotel room. It didn’t make a lot of sense at the time...still doesn’t, I guess but...it said ‘if you are ever in danger, tell someone you trust this: to close their eyes and follow a cat’.”

Zularna frowned at me in the dark. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. You think you are in danger?”

I didn’t reply immediate, but instead turned my gaze out to the city as it was lost in the swells of night. “These days, I’m not sure there’s a time when I’m not…”

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