Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Name She Stopped Using
The kitchen table, which had not been designed for this.
Someone had to move first, and it was Callum, which was either a tribute to his character or evidence that Sera had entirely lost the use of her legs, and she chose not to examine which. He stepped back from the door in the way that a man steps back from a door when he has made a decision and is not going to revisit it, and he said, "Come in, then," and Emrys Vane stepped across the threshold of a house he had never been in and stood in the hall looking at neither of them for a moment, taking in the keys on the hooks and the notebook on the desk and the general settled fact of where Sera had ended up, and whatever he thought about it stayed where he kept those things.
Callum made tea. He made it without being asked, which was characteristic, moving to the kettle with the ease of a man who has decided that the kettle is something he can manage even if everything else is currently beyond scope. Sera sat down at the kitchen table. Emrys sat down across from her. The table was rectangular, which meant there was no position from which this did not look like what it was.
"I need to be brief," Emrys said, "because the full version will take longer than you want to sit still for, and some of it isn't mine to put on you today."
"Start with the Institute," Sera said.
He did. The escape — four months ago, near-Aberdeen, a window in their surveillance pattern he had been mapping for two years and had finally been able to use. Six weeks in a farmhouse outside Stonehaven, recovering in a way he said without elaboration and she did not ask him to elaborate on. Then word reaching him through channels she was not familiar with — the Compact's successor organization, apparently, not gone but rebuilt on different architecture — that the Institute's northeast corridor had reactivated. Drone passes. Ground personnel. The sort of movement the Institute made when something had drawn its attention back to a region it thought it had finished with.
"The escape," Callum said, from the counter. Not a question.
Emrys looked at him for the first time, with the directness of a man who has had eleven years to develop opinions about Callum Voss and has arrived carrying all of them. "Yes. My escape reactivated their interest in this corridor. They want to understand how it happened. They want to understand where I went." He paused. "If I leave, I draw them after me. If I stay, you have someone who knows their methodology at a level no one outside their own organization can match."
The silence had a specific texture. Sera was familiar with the silences of people who are thinking carefully, and this was one, Callum standing at the counter not looking at the kettle, Emrys sitting across the table with his hands flat in front of him.
Then Callum said: "There's a house two doors down that's been empty since March."
He said it the way he said most things — not quickly, not as a performance of generosity, but as a practical observation about the available housing stock in Hollow Creek, delivered to the middle distance rather than to either of them. Emrys heard what was actually being said. Sera watched him hear it, the slight adjustment in his posture that was not quite surprise and not quite relief and was, she thought, something more complicated than either.
"That would work," Emrys said.
Callum brought the tea over. He set a mug in front of Sera — the blue one, she always had the blue one, and he knew this without thinking about it — and set a mug in front of Emrys with the same undemonstrative precision, and sat down at the end of the table with his own, and there were three people at the kitchen table in Hollow Creek on a February morning, which was not a sentence Sera had ever expected to be the subject of.
Emrys looked at the mug. Then he picked it up.
Neither of them said anything about it. This was either because there was nothing to say or because everything that could have been said was so large and so various that no individual sentence was worth the attempt, and the tea was warm and the kitchen smelled of the rosemary she kept in the window, and outside the foxglove stood in its pot on the step in the February damp, alive because Sera had trusted it to be.
Callum drank his tea. Emrys drank his. Sera watched them both and understood that she was going to have to get very good at watching both of them at once, and that she had approximately six weeks before the baby arrived to make whatever kind of peace she was capable of making with the fact that the man she had buried eleven years ago was going to need a key to the house two doors down.
The morning sat around them. No one was in a hurry, or if they were, no one was willing to say so.