Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sol doesn’t see the blow coming until it hits him.

A fist cracks into his chin and he grunts with the force of it, his head snapping to the side, his balance shifting off-center. There is a shock of pain which immediately dulls to a radiating pulse at his jaw. Sol staggers backwards, suppressing the reflex to touch the point of pain and keeping his hands up instead. He is rewarded with another quick flurry of blows, which he blocks this time, his shoulders and forearms taking the brunt of the attack.

The punches subside, and Sol’s opponent fades backward: a curly-headed, blue-eyed man who scrubs the back of one hand quickly over his sweaty forehead in the brief break.

Sol grins and straightens up. There is spit, or maybe blood, beginning to trickle from one corner of his mouth, and he wipes at it with his taped-up hand, then checks the mark on the white bandages. Not blood, then. He’s good to keep going—not that he would have stopped if it was blood.

“Okay there, Sol?” the man across the circle asks, and Sol smiles, feeling adrenaline pounding through his veins.

“Don’t ask me that, Tommy,” he says, and then he lunges.

This time, he’s the one on the offensive. His blows rain down hard and fast on the weak guard Tommy throws up, and it only takes a few whacks to the shoulders before Sol manages to pop Tommy one in the nose. His head snaps back, and Sol takes the opportunity to lower his shoulder and drive it into Tommy’s chest, sending him sprawling backward onto the hard cement floor, where he groans before shoving himself back up to his feet.

Tommy’s nose has started bleeding; Sol watches him become aware of the fact, touching the tip of his tongue to the blood trailing from his nose to his upper lip. There is a metallic taste in Sol’s own mouth now, too. He grins. He doesn’t ask if Tommy is alright.

They circle each other, wary as two wild cats, eyes on each other’s torsos with hands and feet flickering in their periphery. Sol knows that Tommy’s next blow will be telegraphed in his stomach, and he’s taught Tommy the same trick. So, when Sol does attack, he slides his right foot forward and goes for the jab instead of the cross. Tommy catches it on his arm and grabs, this time, instead of pushing back. He yanks on Sol’s arm, bringing him stumbling forward into an embrace.

So, now he wants to play dirty, Sol thinks with glee, and he hits Tommy full in the stomach, bringing them both tumbling to the floor.

The concrete is hard on Sol’s knees and the sound that Tommy’s back makes when he hits it is not pleasant. Neither is the sharp grunt of pain that leaves Tommy’s mouth, or the hiss of breath that Sol lets escape through his teeth. But there is no time to dwell on injury; Tommy is instantly struggling to escape Sol’s grasp, and Sol can’t let that happen. Clenching his thighs tightly around Tommy’s legs, Sol claws his way up Tommy’s body, avoiding the flailing fists that glance off of his shoulders and the top of his head. Once he’s sure his weight is enough to keep Tommy trapped, he plants one elbow on Tommy’s shoulder and rears back for the punch.

At the last second, Sol sees fear in Tommy’s eyes. It glints there, and then Sol hits him in the face, and the blood from Tommy’s fountaining nose splatters sideways and his head falls back against the cement and a cheer goes up from all around them, raucous and rough. Sol tilts his head back to feel the blood running down his own throat and grins.

It’s the best he ever feels, winning one of these fights. It’s the best he’s ever felt.

The cheering continues for a few seconds as Sol sits atop Tommy’s limp form, and then he rolls to the side and off of him, knees already protesting at the movement. Tommy groans and sits up, and Sol offers him a hand. There is no hesitation; Tommy takes the offered hand and lets Sol pull him to his feet. They slap each other’s shoulders.

A voice cuts through the noise, loud and joyous: “And the win goes to Solomon Tozer! Get out of the ring, gentlemen, and let’s see who’s next.”

Sol turns lazily to recognize the speaker: a short, angular man with reddish-blonde hair, a mustache, and a goatee.

“Give us a minute, Cornelius,” grins Sol. “I’m busy scraping Tommy up off the ground.”

“Everyone here is vying for their chance to be scraped off of that very ground,” Cornelius retorts with a smile. “Give them the chance to get crushed into it, first.”

Sol nods and waves him off, but still takes his time helping Tommy get to his feet. He can feel the attention from behind him, good-natured but pointed, focused on his back. He likes to push Cornelius as far as he can, especially when he’s still got the adrenaline of a good fight running through his veins. He thinks Cornelius likes it, too—or he wouldn’t let Sol go as far as he does. Anyway, Sol knows he’ll be repaid for this cheekiness later. Right now, with pain and excitement mingling beneath his hot skin, he isn’t sure he minds.

Tommy melts into the crowd as soon as Sol helps him out of the circle. Sol stays near the front—his privilege as the fight’s winner and Cornelius’s right hand man—and watches the next pair step into the ring. One of the fighters has an awful black eye, while the other sports an ankle brace. Injuries from last week, Sol thinks, and wonders which of them will exploit the other’s weakness first.

“Stay back,” warns Cornelius from his perch—he’s sitting atop an old stove, one leg crossed over the other. “No early hits.”

One of the fighters, Freddy Des Voeux, laughs. “Won’t need ‘em. Your boy here will be going down fast and hard.”

There is an appreciative murmur from the men in the circle. There are about fifteen or twenty of them, spanning a spectrum from energetic youths to stringy older guys. All are watching the fight with great interest, and most of them sport wounds of their own.

Cornelius leans back on his makeshift throne. “Get ready,” he says idly.

The fists of the two men in the circle go up.

“Remember, you’re not fighting for anything. You’re fighting to fight. To express the things that you can’t let out in your daily lives.”

There is some disjointed cheering. Someone in the crowd yells, “Get on with it!” Cornelius fixes his gaze on the man in question until the group trails into near-silence, until the shuffling of the two men circling in the ring of bodies is the only sound.

“Fight, then,” says Cornelius, and the crack of the first punch rings out almost immediately.

-

Sol’s back slams into the door.

He grunts, groping behind him for the doorknob, and finally gets his hand on it only to discover that it is locked.

“The fuck?” he mumbles, and gets another shove from Cornelius for his trouble, this one snapping his head back against the door. Sol grins and swipes his tongue over his lips.

“I keep it locked so no one finds anything they won’t like,” Cornelius explains. He’s still leaning his whole body against Sol’s as he fumbles in his back pocket for the key. Sol’s almost half a foot taller than him, but Cornelius has a kind of lithe strength that he uses to shove Sol around like this. Plus, Sol lets him.

“You never used to keep it locked,” Sol observes.

“Mm, I never used to do a lot of things, Solomon.” Cornelius gets the key out of the pocket of his skinny jeans at last and fits it into the doorknob with a click. He looks up at Sol, winks, and then throws the door open.

Sol, who had ninety percent of his weight on the door, goes staggering backwards—a motion that almost turns into a fall, except that he catches himself with a hand on Cornelius’s bed. He turns just quickly enough to hear the slam of the door, followed by the clicking of the lock, followed by Cornelius hurtling into Sol, full-force.

“Jesus,” Sol grunts as he hits the bed. Cornelius is on top of him, all grabbing hands and flailing limbs, and it’s all Sol can do not to start laughing. Cornelius doesn’t like to be laughed at, especially when he’s throwing his weight around, but sometimes Sol can’t help but think of a ferret when he looks at him, all mischievous energy and nowhere to put it.

He lets Cornelius go a minute longer, scraping his nails down Sol’s arms and yanking at his hair, until he decides to do something about it. It’s an easy thing to reach up and grab Cornelius’s shoulder, and Sol twists his body at the same time, shifting his weight and pushing up with one leg—and before Cornelius can react, their positions have swapped, leaving Sol on top and Cornelius with his hair mussed and loose against the stained duvet.

Cornelius grins, his mustache twitching with the motion. “Winning the fight wasn’t enough, hm?” he asks.

“You love it when I fight back,” Sol retorts, and then he drops from his hands to his elbows, kissing Cornelius hard enough that their teeth nearly knock together. He drags his tongue over Cornelius’s teeth and can feel him about to close his mouth—Sol has lost blood that way before—so he pulls back just in time, and starts kissing down Cornelius’s neck instead.

“No marks,” Cornelius warns, and Sol can feel the buzzing of his voice in his throat. He hums in response, then reaches up with one hand to pull Cornelius’s shirt out of the way before biting down on his collarbone, hard enough for him to feel it but not hard enough to bruise. Cornelius hisses and grabs a handful of Sol’s shirt, yanking at it.

“Off,” he says.

Sol sits back and peels his shirt off. As always, there is a flash of insecurity at the moment itself—as though Cornelius is going to turn him away after seeing his top surgery scars for the dozenth time—but Sol bullies it out of his own mind, distracting himself by leaning in and capturing Cornelius’s mouth with his own once more. This time, Cornelius groans and bites Sol’s lip. Sol feels a warmth pool in his stomach at the feeling, and he leans in further as he feels Cornelius’s hands begin to run up and down his back and sides.

“How d’you want it tonight?” he mumbles against Cornelius’s lips. He can feel his eyes going lidded and his blood pounding heavy through his body. It feels so good to fuck after a fight, especially a win. Fortunately for Sol, Cornelius is almost always up for it.

Cornelius hums in the back of his throat. He’s got one of his hands in Sol’s hair and the other trailing around from his side to his stomach, then lower, palming the front of his jeans. 

“How’d you like to take me up the arse? Or,” Cornelius asks, eyes glittering, “will that pain your winner’s pride too much?”

It won’t, Sol wants to say, it’s perfect. But things are never that sappy with Cornelius, so instead he gives him a hard shove, knocking the bed against the wall, and then growls, “Fuck the shit out of me.”

Cornelius laughs, his eyes shadowed with desire. Sol thinks he’s about to pull away, to go for the condoms and lube, but just as Sol starts to lean back, Cornelius darts forward and sinks his teeth into the muscle above Sol’s shoulder.

“Fuck,” Sol hisses, a sharp flash of pain running down his shoulder to his hand. He clenches his fingers in the duvet. “Jesus, Neil, that’s—”

Cornelius pulls back, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. There’s a hint of red at the corner of his lips that makes Sol frown and lean away, probing at his shoulder with his other hand. When he looks at his fingers afterward, they're spotted with blood.

“Christ,” he says, “what the fuck was that? Give a man some warning.”

Cornelius lies back, looking up at him. “Don’t call me Neil,” is all he says in reply.

“Fine, Jesus,” says Sol. He keeps looking down at the blood on his fingers. He should clean this, he thinks in a distant part of his mind, pour some disinfectant on it and bandage the wound. Human mouths can be as dirty as a dog’s—he heard something like that once. But the fresh, throbbing pain in his shoulder joins the dull ache of his jaw in a duet, and Cornelius has his arms folded, his eyes alight with desire and triumph, and suddenly Sol wants nothing more in the world than to have his brains fucked out.

“Fine,” Sol says again. “If I don’t call you that, will you put your cock in me? Or are you gonna keep playing vampire?”

Cornelius is in the midst of another one of his arch games, trying to look unaffected by Sol’s words, but Sol can feel how hard he is against his thigh. He leans in, just a little, and is rewarded by Cornelius’s breath hitching. Sol smiles.

“Only because you’re so desperate for it,” Cornelius says, and pushes at Sol’s chest. Sol sits back to let him by.

While Cornelius roots around in the top drawer of the nightstand, Sol busies himself by pulling his socks and trousers off, and then his boxers. By the time he’s stuffed his packer into his trouser pocket and tossed the whole mess across the room, Cornelius has his clothes off too, and is squeezing lube from a little bottle into the palm of his hand. He looks up, as if he can feel Sol’s gaze on him, and winks.

“It’ll be cold,” he warns, as near to a kindness as Cornelius ever gets.

“That’s because your flat is a freezer,” Sol retorts.

“Billy needs it like that,” Cornelius shrugs, then gasps quietly as he runs his lube-slick hand over his cock. With his free hand, he gestures for Sol to prop himself up on the bed.

Sol does so, arranging the two pillows to cushion his spine as well as they can, but he can’t brush off Cornelius’s words as easily. They lodge in his stomach like a heavy weight and pull him down, even as Cornelius settles between Sol’s spread legs. 

Billy needs it cold. And what am I doing here, then?

Then Cornelius slides a finger into Sol, and any thoughts of guilt are speared from his mind.

The lube sends a chill shock through him, as Cornelius warned, and Sol focuses on that first, rather than the feeling of Cornelius’s fingers inside of him. He knows that it will be a quick and dirty prep job—Cornelius’s always are—and so he focuses on relaxing, on ignoring the stretch and the urge to clench and instead letting Cornelius probe as deeply as he wants. This might be painful, if they were doing it differently, but Cornelius says “arse” when he means another word, one that makes Sol fizz uncomfortably in his own skin. He tries not to think about it, tries to just feel.

“You’re so wet for me,” Cornelius murmurs as he adds a second finger. Sol lifts his hips a fraction off of the bed, and Cornelius takes the opportunity to lean closer and stab his two fingers down from a new angle. Sol gasps at the feeling.

“You like that?” asks Cornelius, and Sol huffs a “Yes,” in response.

“Good,” says Cornelius, and presses closer to Sol, his fingers bending inside of him to elicit another gasp. Sol can feel Cornelius’s length pressed against his inner thigh and the faint wetness there, the chafing of skin on skin. He feels like his mind is miles away from his body, like all that matters is the feeling of Cornelius’s fingers moving inside of him and Cornelius’s wiry body pressing down on him.

Cornelius pulls his fingers free and Sol exhales again, the sound more ragged than he’d like it to be.

“Are you—?” he asks.

Cornelius nods, one hank of hair falling into his sweaty face, and lines himself up. He plants his hands on either side of Sol, clenching his fingers in the messy duvet, and Sol reaches up to rest his own hands just above Cornelius’s hips. He’s bony there, like he is everywhere else, and Sol snatches a moment to run one thumb over the line of Cornelius’s hip. For a moment, he almost imagines that Cornelius is something fragile, something to be protected rather than the whipcord-thin ball of rage and manipulation that Sol knows he is.

Then Cornelius thrusts into Sol, and all else is forgotten again.

He doesn’t go slowly. Cornelius never does anything by halves, not once he’s really gotten into the thick of it—he saves his energy for times just like these. He ruts into Sol with a pace that leaves Sol burning, clenching his fingers on Cornelius’s waist so hard he’s sure it will bruise.

“Fuck, yes,” hisses Cornelius through clenched teeth. His head is tilted back so that all Sol can see is the line of his beard, his nostrils, and the hint of his brow. But he knows, from repeated experience, that Cornelius’s eyes are squeezed shut and his eyebrows are drawn together, a line or two appearing just above his nose, lines that Sol always wants to smooth out with his thumb. He aches, now, to lean up and kiss Cornelius there—but his body is rebelling against him, and it wants nothing more than for him to lie back and take this.

So, he does.

He lets Cornelius fuck into him until the burning feeling fades and is replaced with a feeling of taut fullness, of rightness, and then at last Sol squirms up onto his elbows and grins at Cornelius. He is rewarded by the smaller man ducking down and clashing their mouths together, somehow avoiding a strike of teeth but instead leaving them panting into each other’s mouths, shoving their tongues where they can, swapping spit like they have no time, like this is desperate, like it will end at any moment.

Sol is assessing the speed of Cornelius’s movements and he thinks he can afford it, so he reaches up and plants a hand at the small of Cornelius’s back, feeling the skin slick with sweat.

Cornelius grunts, a couple of inches from his mouth.

“Good?” asks Sol, not wanting to get headbutted in the nose if he’s wrong.

“Good,” groans Cornelius, “good, you’re always so good for me—”

And Sol flips him.

One moment he’s on his back, knees spread, Cornelius blocking out the faint light above him like some sort of fallen saint, and then the two of them are engaged in an undignified scramble, their knees rucking up the duvet. Cornelius is inside Sol all the while and Sol feels the length of him pressing in all directions at once. Sol moans—he can’t help it—and is rewarded with a sharp grin on Cornelius’s reddened face, even as Sol presses him back into the pillow that was just supporting his own spine.

“Gonna ride me, huh?” Cornelius pants. “Gonna fuck yourself on me?”

“Not doing all the work,” Sol huffs, but begins to rock his hips anyway, and is rewarded by another groan from Cornelius.

“Hold on,” Cornelius breathes, and shifts the two of them to a new angle. Sol balances himself, his arms shaking faintly, and then Cornelius thrusts— and his skin meets Sol’s, and he’s so deep inside of Sol that Sol can no longer tell where he ends and Cornelius begins, and he tosses his head back, closing his eyes with it, riding the wave of sensation to the point where it begins to fade. And that point is where Cornelius thrusts again.

He's always known just how to fuck Sol, and tonight is no exception. Sol feels his hips buck in a rhythm he hasn’t chosen, matching Cornelius’s movements, and he hears their sweaty skin slap together over and over, and he feels himself breezing right out of his own mind and out of this room, distanced from himself in a way he doesn’t feel even when he’s fighting. There’s something peculiar about fucking Cornelius that goes beyond all of the rest of it. It’s like sex and a fight all at once, and Sol is grateful for the space it provides him, keeping him separate from his own brain and thoughts. Sensation is all there is, and he’s good at sensation.

Cornelius comes with a shudder, making a faint, soft noise in the back of his throat—a noise Sol knows never to mention, if he knows what’s good for him—and it’s as he’s bucking his hips in the after-throes of it that Sol comes too, feeling the wave crest over his entire body, curling his toes where the soles of his feet lie exposed to the chill bedroom air. He keeps his arms braced, holding himself upright even as he pants and shakes through it, his hair flopping into his face.

“Well,” says Cornelius at last, and Sol cracks open an eye to see the familiar smiling face beneath him. He’s regained his composure, then, and that means it’s time for Sol to reclaim his own.

“Well,” he retorts, gratified to hear that his voice is steady, and he slides off of Cornelius, only letting out one uneven breath at the friction against his sensitive skin. Cornelius is up as soon as Sol is gone, moving to clean himself, but Sol is covered in sweat and wants something more than a rag.

“Your shower free?” he asks, and regrets it. The words are an acknowledgement of another presence in the flat.

“Check at the door,” Cornelius says.

“Right,” says Sol. Even the recognition that they aren’t alone here isn’t enough to bring him down from his high. Skin humming with energy and contentment, he steps out into the hallway.

 -

The blinds are drawn, but the faint moonlight that filters through them is still enough to illuminate the smoke trailing from the end of the cigarette Cornelius holds. He’s lying back in bed, one arm tucked behind his head and the other resting comfortably over his stomach. Sol watches him from the doorway for a moment, his hands and the hair on his chest still damp from the shower. Cornelius looks peaceful like this, idly bringing the cigarette to his mouth and then dropping his hand again, letting the glowing end of the butt dangle dangerously close to the bare skin of his stomach—but Sol knows that behind the calm façade, there is a mind ticking and scheming, always calculating several moves ahead. Cornelius doesn’t relax. He merely conserves energy.

“C’mere,” Cornelius says, gesturing lazily with his cigarette. “Close the door.”

Sol can’t help but look behind himself as he does. The bedroom door clicks quietly into place and Sol pads across the floor in bare feet to settle on the edge of the bed. Cornelius pats the covers next to him, and Sol swings his legs up and shuffles into place, shoving a pillow between his head and the wall that serves as a headboard. It doesn’t escape his notice, how quickly he responds to Cornelius’s commands— like a dog called to heel, Sol thinks, though there’s no malice in it. Both he and Cornelius know that this is the role he accepted when they first started running together: the right-hand man, the loyal knight, the consort.

Cornelius takes another drag off his cigarette; when he speaks, his voice has the muffled quality of the smoke in his lungs.

“Good fight today,” he says, and then exhales.

“Yeah,” Sol agrees. He probes the purpling bruise on his jaw with one finger and is rewarded with a dull ache. “Tommy’s got a real arm on him. Surprises ya, skinny as he is.”

“Surprised you,” Cornelius notes.

Sol is looking away—he’s making his discomfort too visible, and he knows it, but he can’t stop himself.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it did.”

Cornelius tilts his head, the motion accompanied by a rustle of fabric. “Something bothering you?”

Sol shakes his head. “Just tired,” he offers, knowing they both see through the lie.

He can feel Cornelius’s eyes on him. Sol fights the urge to hunch his shoulders and cross his arms over his chest, instead focusing on the play of the moonlight on the thin trail of smoke from Cornelius’s cigarette.

They pass a few minutes like this, Cornelius smoking and Sol watching. Gradually, Sol’s uneasiness fades, until he finds himself back in the lazy, casual headspace hanging out with Cornelius usually puts him in. The moonlight limns the side of Cornelius’s face, and without much thinking Sol reaches out and puts his hand there, rubbing his thumb over the cheekbone. There is a faint pressure against his palm, as though Cornelius is leaning into the touch, but his eyes are still open and clear.

“I’ve a new project in mind for the club,” says Cornelius softly, his words pushing at the velvet silence that has wrapped itself around them.

Sol raises his eyebrows. “Tired of watching the lads beat the shit out of each other?”

“Mm, no,” says Cornelius, and Sol laughs, because it’s all there on his smug little face: Cornelius has never liked to fight for fun, but he’s always loved watching others bleed.

“What, then?” Sol asks once he’s stopped chuckling. His thumb is still making lazy circles on Cornelius’s cheekbone.

“Have you ever heard of the John Franklin Memorial Maritime Museum?”

Sol shrugs. “No.”

Cornelius hums in the back of his throat. “They’ve something important there. Something they guard more carefully than the rest of their collection.”

“What’s it about, then? Random Navy junk, or…?”

“Not random at all,” says Cornelius, and he turns his head to meet Sol’s gaze, his eyes gleaming in the near darkness. “Artifacts from a vanished expedition, in fact.”

“So, Franklin’s the one who disappeared?”

“No.” Cornelius pauses, takes a drag. The smoke curls from his nostrils, like he’s a dragon and Sol has stumbled into his lair.

“Franklin’s the man who gathered the stuff. Made his life’s work of it, apparently.”

“But it’s a memorial.”

“Something… happened to him.” Cornelius smiles. “Something no one can explain. And the source of it lies in that museum, under lock and key. Anyone who could get their hands on it, well, I reckon they’d be in for quite a payday.”

In the lull after Cornelius speaks, Sol offers the only solid insight he’s gleaned from his words: “You’re talking about stealing, then.”

Cornelius laughs, tipping his head back and forth. His eyes have gone squinty as they do when he really smiles, and Sol wants to kiss him, but he doesn’t.

“You’re so… practical, Solomon. Yes, I’m talking about stealing.”

Sol nods. “Wouldn’t take much to put most of the men up to that. They’re itching to do more than scrap in a parking garage.”

“And you?” Cornelius asks. His eyes twinkle above his cigarette.

Sol considers what he’s got going on. A long, grey stretch of crap shifts at his shit job and visits to the OVA, begging for the benefits they’ll never give him. A life of monotony broken up only by the bright points of their meetings, of another man’s blood on his knuckles and Cornelius’s teeth on his neck.

“Sure, I’m in,” he shrugs.

“Great,” smiles Cornelius. “Billy’s coming.”

Sol stiffens and draws his hand back from Cornelius’s face. The bastard is still smiling, as if he expected this reaction. He knows how Sol feels about Billy Gibson, and yet here he is, dropping his name for what feels like the umpteenth time tonight.

Sol prefers to pretend that the rest of the flat is empty, that only darkness sits in the closed room at the end of the hall. It’s easier that way.

“Why is Billy coming?” Sol grits out at last.

Cornelius’s response is smooth and flippant: “Because he wants to.” A pause, during which he rolls over to tap out his cigarette on the nightstand.

“Why?” he asks, with his back to Sol. “Are you jealous?”

Fuck, no, thinks Sol. He’s the farthest thing from jealous—he’s the intruder here, creeping in the footprints of another. Sol has only met Gibson a handful of times, but each meeting was frigid, a barely concealed hostility coursing beneath Gibson's words. Having the man around the whole time Sol and Cornelius plan this job—well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Sol would rather bow out entirely, but of course, that's why Cornelius has waited until the last minute to spring this on him. He knows that Sol hates going back on his word.

Sol sighs. “I’m not the one you need to worry about. I mean, is Billy okay with… this?” He makes a stupid little circle with his finger, encompassing the dirty room and their half-naked bodies, lying in bed together like it means something, like the two of them are more than fuckbuddies and co-conspirators.

Cornelius shrugs. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s dying, so he doesn’t like it rough anymore. He understands when I get that from someone else.”

The words hit Sol just below the sternum and he sits up without thinking, grabbing Cornelius by the shoulder and rolling him over to face Sol again.

“He’s what?” Sol says.

Cornelius shrugs again. His shoulder is bony, and Sol is gripping it too tightly for it to be comfortable, but he shows no sign on his face. 

“Some hereditary thing,” he says. “His mother died of it too. He doesn’t have the money for treatment, and he’s too far back on the NHS waitlist now… after missing a couple of appointments.”

Sol stares at him. There’s a tiny smile playing at the corner of Cornelius’s mouth, as if he’s discussing the weather or some mild amusement, rather than his boyfriend’s impending death.

“Okay,” Sol says eventually, because there’s nothing else he can say. He doesn’t say Sorry, because Cornelius hates pity almost as much as he hates being laughed at.

Anyway, maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe Gibson will be kinder this time. Even if he’s not, Sol can bite back the anger and be the bigger man until all of this is done with. He owes Cornelius that much.

He lets go of Cornelius’s shoulder, but Cornelius catches his hand as he’s about to pull it back and tangles their fingers together.

“I need you to go to the museum,” Cornelius murmurs, and presses a kiss to Sol’s knuckles.

Sol watches doubtfully; Cornelius isn’t usually this touchy, so he must really want this. Still, the feeling of his lips on Sol’s hand and the faint scratch of his mustache against Sol’s skin are nice. He doesn’t move away.

“Where will you be?” Sol asks.

Cornelius grins, his face splitting into a smile bright enough to nearly blind Sol.

“I have a meeting with the head of security,” he tells him.

-

The John Franklin Memorial Maritime Museum is, despite being a mouthful, actually pretty nice. Sol expects to be awed and bored in equal measure when he arrives, feeling underdressed in his tank top and old football shorts, but when he steps inside, the place isn’t what he imagined. There are no high, marble ceilings, no miserably tiny placards to squint at—in fact, the museum feels almost like someone’s house. The wood floor creaks under Sol’s weight and the front room is cluttered, with pictures on the walls and a rack of aging brochures in one corner. Facing him, next to a blue-painted door that stands open, is a small desk with a blonde, bright-faced man sitting behind it. He looks up as Sol enters.

“Hey there!” the man smiles. “Interested in checking out the museum today?”

“Uh. Yes.” Sol has picked a Monday morning for his visit; he figures it’s the least popular time of the week, and he doesn’t work until late tonight, so he’s got time.

“Great!” the man replies, and begins shuffling through papers on his desk.

Sol moves closer and reads the man’s (seemingly homemade) nametag: T. Hartnell. How do you have this much energy on a Monday morning, Mr. Hartnell? Sol wonders. He can feel the weight of his own night of poor sleep dragging at him, and he scrubs at one eye with the heel of his palm as Hartnell finally surfaces from his rummaging with a slip of white paper clutched in one hand.

“Here you go, one ticket,” he says, extending the paper.

Clumsy with confusion, Sol steps forward to grab it.

“Don’t I need to, uh, pay?” he asks. The ticket in his hand has a barcode on one end and the name of the museum, along with a small picture of the front of the building, on the other.

“There’s a donation box just there.” Hartnell smiles and points. “But admission is free to the public.”

“Uh, great,” says Sol, and walks right past the box and into the museum. (They always make him feel guilty, these things—as if it isn’t hard enough to hang onto the money in his own pocket, now he’s responsible for giving some of it away?)

Inside, the clutter of the front room gives way to a neatly arranged parlor, with artifacts in glass boxes on pedestals and several other doors that lead off in new directions. Sol finds himself intrigued by the stuff; it’s not all ancient arrowheads and bits of dirt, like in the museums Bill used to drag him to, but battered instruments he can almost picture himself using. Lengths of rope hang from the walls, and there is even an old desk in the center of the room, cracked down the side but still intact.

ARTIFACTS FROM 2013 RECOVERY MISSION, reads a sign on one wall, and Sol tries to imagine being there, pulling the remnants of missing men’s lives from sea and rock.

He isn’t sure what Cornelius wants him to do here. Case the joint, he supposes, so Sol goes through every room, trying to put a map of the place together in his head. The museum really does feel like someone’s house, and he discovers why when he finds an exhibit in the last room titled “John Franklin: Researcher and Discoverer”. On one wall are several pictures of the building Sol stands in now: one under construction; one freshly built; and one with a broad, beaming man standing before it, his arm around a woman with curled hair and an equally wide smile.

So, they put the research that killed him in his own house, Sol thinks, and mentally scoffs. Some memorial.

Notably, the Franklin exhibit contains no detail about his death—only a somber mention of his “passing” and the fact that his will dedicated this house and all of its artifacts to the museum. Sol gets more annoyed the more he reads, but also more intrigued. Whatever killed Franklin must have been weird if they’re going to such lengths to hide it. Cornelius’s instincts have proven right once again. Where there’s a cover-up, there’s usually money to be made.

“A new Franklinite?” asks someone from behind Sol, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. The museum has been empty up to this point, so he wasn’t expecting—

A professor? The man standing behind Sol has neat brown hair with bangs that slant across his forehead; a tidy beard; and a smiling, slightly wide-eyed look plastered on his face. He’s also wearing a heinously yellow cardigan over a white collared shirt. Sol rakes his eyes over this newcomer, from unfortunately-taller-than-Sol head to brogue-wearing toe, and revises his initial assumption: not a professor. A grad student, possibly. The man has the trying-too-hard sheen of someone in the lower ranks of academia.

And Sol has the greasy sheen of someone who hasn’t showered in a couple of days. He sighs.

“Sorry if I startled you,” the stranger offers, obviously uncomfortable with Sol’s long silence. “I don’t see a lot of other visitors here. Are you… a student?”

The pause gives him away. He doesn’t think Sol’s a student any more than Sol expects to see him at the corner store buying beer. Hopefully, there are no other uncertainties lurking behind that pause—but Sol has enough hair on his chin not to worry much about that anymore.

“Not a student, mate,” says Sol with casual disdain.

“Oh. Just looking, then?”

“Can a regular chap go to a museum now and then? Or is there a sign I missed? A dress code, maybe?” Sol makes a show of looking about himself. He doesn’t suppress the smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth; it’s always fun to goad idiots like this.

Said idiot’s eyes have widened in anger, now, and he takes a breath like he’s about to give Sol an earful—and then he doesn’t. He exhales heavily through his nose and closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, the mounting fury is gone.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” he says, instead of cursing Sol out. “My name is John. What’s yours?”

“Solomon,” says Sol, against his better judgement.

“It’s nice to meet you, Solomon,” says John, and even though his smile is more relieved than joyous, Sol has to respect the effort put into turning the conversation around.

To be polite, he nods in response. John, seemingly excited not to be met with another barb, takes this as a signal to keep talking.

“I’m a postgrad up at the college,” he explains. Sol smirks. “My research is in retrieval and restoration of marine artifacts, which is why it’s so great that this museum is here. Er, for me, I mean. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons that it’s great for other people.”

Sol says, “Hm. Well, I’m just here to look.”

“Right,” says John, looking flustered again. “I noticed you were looking at the Franklin board for a while—uh, it’s interesting stuff, obviously—and I guess I got it into my head that you might want to know more about him.”

Sol opens his mouth to say I don’t need your teaching, thanks— but, well, they’re going to be robbing John Franklin’s house, aren’t they? Surely some extra info about the man can’t hurt.

“Sure,” says Sol, folding his arms and relishing in the way John’s eyes go wide with surprise.

“Oh!” he says. “Right, okay. Well, he was a great man, obviously. His research was groundbreaking for the field, and his ideas on where these artifacts could be found… no one had ever looked there before. He and his wife funded the recovery, too.”

“But…?” Sol prompts. There is a defensive quality to John’s tone that makes Sol think he isn’t saying everything he wants to.

John sighs and then, to Sol’s surprise, smiles. “Well, the truth is… no one had searched his chosen sites before because they were considered impossibilities by all prevailing theories. Once he started turning up artifacts, the scientific community realized he had to be either a genius or a lucky fool.”

“And you’re on the fool side.”

John glances wistfully about the room, cluttered with monuments to John Franklin’s success. “I won’t say that. But the methods described in his papers are… somewhat hard to follow.”

Another rich prick who lucked into achievement, thinks Sol. He wanders a little away from John, who follows until Sol stops and taps the glass on one of the framed pictures of the house.

“So, the museum keeps everything he found here?” he asks.

John nods. He seems eager to please, now that he knows he’s found a willing audience in Sol.

“Franklin and his wife agreed to deed the house to the museum on the occasion of either of them passing,” John explains. “Jane Franklin lives an hour or so away, now. She comes down to visit sometimes, but not too often.”

Sol looks at the picture, at the overbright smile the wife wears. “And are all of the rooms open for viewing?” he asks.

“Ah—no, the rooms open to the public stop here, I’m afraid. The second floor is administrative, and more fragile artifacts are kept in the basement, which has climate control installed. It’s difficult to get permission to go down there, even for research.”

Bingo, thinks Sol.

“Then again, those are the less intact artifacts, so probably not as interesting to a layman,” John continues. “Though I do wish they’d realize how relevant partially decomposed material is to those studying preservation and—”

“How did he die?” Sol asks, and John crashes into startled silence.

Sol turns to look at him. John is standing beside the picture of the house in progress, the skeleton of a building clawing its way toward the sky. Behind him, on the opposite wall, a dozen photos of John Franklin’s glory.

He’s a dead man now. Sol doubts his glory protected him.

“I… I don’t know,” John finally admits.

“Isn’t he the subject of your research? How can you not know?”

“Well, he isn’t—more the location and preservation of the artifacts he found—”

Sol takes a step closer to John. “Who would know?”

John bites his lip, looking uncomfortable. “I, er—his wife, I suppose, although…”

“Although?” Sol is very nearly intruding on John’s space, now; he can see the nervous glint in John’s eyes more clearly than the photos of Franklin behind him.

“I always imagined it was something… embarrassing to his reputation,” John says in a quiet voice. “After all, he was a pious man, a holy man, and—”

“I heard it was something to do with the artifacts he kept in the basement,” Sol cuts in. He might be showing too much of his hand, but he doubts John is going to get him thrown out for asking weird questions. After all, he was practically desperate to talk to Sol.

“What?” John leans back a little, brows pulling together in a perplexed fashion. “How would his research have killed him?”

Sol shrugs, intentionally casual. “Just something I heard.”

An angry flush is beginning to bloom in John’s cheeks. “Sounds like a ridiculous ghost story to me. Like I said, Franklin was a man of God, and if you’re just looking for ways to sully his good name—”

Sol feels an answering anger flash within him. “You’re the one who said his research was stupid—”

“I did not, ” John snaps, his eyes wide. “I was merely offering a nuanced perspective on his work. Don’t you dare twist my words to suit your nefarious needs.”

“Nefarious?” Sol demands. “Jesus—”

“And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!” John exclaims in a voice gone shrill. He looks like he regrets the words as soon as they pass his lips, all but clapping a hand over his mouth.

Into the sudden silence, Sol smiles, slow and nasty. There you are, he thinks. Cornelius may have been the one to coach Sol on uncovering the “true self” he claims everyone is hiding, but Sol’s been prodding people into anger for years to see where they fall. He’s glad, now, that John hasn’t clocked him—knows the kind of response he’d get if John did. Beneath the layers of scholarly interest and friendliness and anger, John’s just another God-fearing priss. And now that Sol knows that, he can throw John away with no remorse.

“I’m sorry,” John begins, lifting a hand to tug at his jumper.

“Don’t bother, mate,” says Sol. “I wasn’t interested anyway.”

He turns on his heel and walks away, enjoying the faint spluttering from behind him. He can already feel an itch in his fingers, and he has to resist pulling out his phone to check when their next club meeting is—he already knows it’s on Thursday. He curls his hands into fists as he stomps out of the John Franklin Memorial Maritime Museum, imagining them wrapped around the neck of a bottle of beer, around Cornelius’s neck.

-

There is already blood on the concrete when Cornelius brings up robbing the museum.

Sol hasn’t fought yet, and might not get the chance tonight. That’s alright. Being part of the eager, pulsing crowd is almost as good as being in the center of it; the only difference is that the crowd craves what the two men in the middle have, and it goes a little wild with it, men shoving and slapping every time a hit lands, so that the shape of the fighting ring is itself always changing.

Three matches have already begun and ended tonight. First was Freddy and Bill Pilkington with a short bout, which ended when Pilkington slammed an elbow into Freddy’s stomach so hard he nearly vomited. Second, Tommy Armitage—who almost has more anger in his wiry body than Sol would think possible—beat the shit out of Magnus, who now sits smiling and icing his nose in the corner. Last, and bloodiest, was Golding and a new recruit, some wafer-thin bloke with thinning blond hair. It’s the blond man’s blood that’s all over the floor now, and Diggle who chased him out into the alley, to sit with him while he got his nerves back.

As soon as the door closes behind Diggle, Cornelius steps down from his throne and into the center of the circle. The crowd is restless, humming, knowing they might get one more fight tonight before things wrap up—but they quiet down as soon as Cornelius looks at them. He’s standing in a splatter of someone’s blood, Magnus’s or the blond man’s most likely, and Sol can’t stop staring at the way the dark red liquid reflects the dirty white of his shoes.

Cornelius says, “I have a proposal for you all tonight.”

The mood quiets further. They’re confused, thinks Sol: this group hasn’t broken its routine since they first started beating each other up for fun months ago.

“Anyone who isn’t interested is free to turn it down,” Cornelius continues. “But I’d… appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone. If you told anyone, I think the rest of us would no longer be comfortable with your presence here.”

The threat rumbles through the crowd. There is some shifting, men shuffling their feet in discontent. They all recognize Cornelius as their leader, but that’s because he brings them fighting and adrenaline and because he beat Billy Gibson into the ground six months ago. A threat so boldly unmasked is new, and Sol knows the memory of the brutality of that fight is already fading for them.

But at the same time, none of them wants to be kicked out of the club. Sol knows most of these men well, recruited half of them himself, and he knows that this is the only good thing some of them have. So, although there are some mutterings of discontent, no one speaks up.

Cornelius rakes his eyes over the crowd, the same as Sol has done, but for much longer. Finally, when the murmuring has all but stopped, he smiles.

“Glad we’re all agreed,” he says. “What I have in mind is a complicated operation.”

There’s a laugh from within the crowd. Bill Pilkington, with Freddy’s blood still smeared on one cheek, says, “You realize this isn’t actually Fight Club, right, Cornelius?”

In the center of the circle, Cornelius looks small, but he smiles like he’s twice the height of the men around him.

“I’m quite aware,” says Cornelius. “I’m not asking you to commit acts of terrorism. People do that for ideals. Have ideals ever put food in our mouths? Kept probation officers off our backs?”

Cornelius pauses for a low murmur of agreement to go around the group, then continues: “No, I’m not asking you to do anything like that. I’m asking you to take action for yourselves. To steal something that will put a lot of money in all our pockets.”

Sol feels the eyes of some of the men on him. He’s a little uneasy, not sure if he wants to put his weight behind Cornelius on this just yet.

“I want you to help me steal an artifact from the maritime museum,” Cornelius says.

Tommy scoffs. “And how are we supposed to fence something like that?”

Cornelius’s smile doesn’t falter. “I have my ways.”

Tommy’s eyes flicker to Sol’s. Sol knows they’re a piercing blue in sunlight—he spent enough time meeting that bright gaze over lunch at the construction gig they worked together—but in the dim lighting of the warehouse, they look grey. As Sol looks back at him, Tommy’s brows pull together.

Sol knows that at one nod from him, Tommy will agree to this. Maybe not everyone will. But Tommy will. Sol has that power.

His stomach churns. Does he believe in Cornelius that much? In whatever strange, unexplained artifact he wants to steal?

The moment slides by him, and before Sol can do anything, Cornelius is speaking again.

“Don’t be shy,” he says, pacing to one side. He steps in the blood again.

“After all, why should the fat cats at the museum get to keep everything for themselves? They think that just because we’re underfoot, we don’t matter. Well, we can show them otherwise.”

Sol thinks about the cluttered house with its creaky wooden floors.

“Does that make us rats, then?” he says aloud, unthinking.

Cornelius’s eyes fix on him, and he becomes aware that he’s made a mistake.

“Rats?” Cornelius asks, in a lilting tone. “Is that how you see us, Solomon? As vermin to be stamped out?”

“Er,” he tries, searching for words that will get him out of this, but Sol has never been a good speaker. He can sense the men staring at him, too, and the thought makes him tense.

“If you’re not on board, Solomon, allow me a chance at convincing you,” says Cornelius, stepping closer. His voice is soft and dangerous.

“Convincing me how?” Sol asks.

“What do you think, men?” asks Cornelius, half-turning to face them. “We’ve time for one more fight today, don’t we?”

His meaning hits Sol like a bucket of cold water.

Cornelius hasn’t fought in the circle since that first meeting, when Gibson said something sly and smirking and the others backed him up with scorn. Then, Cornelius hadn’t been cemented as their leader yet. He hopped down from the crate he sat on and walked over to the towering Gibson and put a hand on his chest, fingers splayed across the grey fabric of his shirt, and said, “Let’s repair this, Billy.”

Sol knew they were fucking even then, figured they’d go easy on each other—that this would just be a show of violence for the benefit of the other men in the circle.

When Cornelius beat Gibson’s face into a bloody pulp, there was no question of going easy.

Now, when Sol steps forward, the men around him part with nervous stares to let him into the circle. Across the small space, Cornelius smiles at him and brushes one hand under his chin, flicking his fingers against his goatee. Despite himself, Sol feels a chill: Cornelius is a small man, but vicious. And Sol has practice in nothing but letting him win.

“If someone else would like to call start,” Cornelius says in a voice thick with humor. “I don’t think it would be particularly fair for me to do it.”

In the end, it’s Diggle who calls the time, but Sol is barely listening. He’s too focused on the angle of Cornelius’s lithe body, the point of light in his eyes, and the pounding of his own heart in his chest. He tries to imagine angles of attack, wonders if he should hit right off the starting line—it’ll be the best way to throw Cornelius off-balance, to keep him on the defensive in a way that makes up for Sol’s unfamiliarity with Cornelius’s fighting style.

They begin, and Cornelius is faster.

He darts forward and to Sol’s right, making Sol twist to follow him. Sol has an arm up to block the punch he sees coming, but then Cornelius changes his strike halfway and a pointy elbow slams into Sol’s side. Sol grunts and slides back a step, catching his breath. Cornelius follows, eyes shining like a predator’s.

He doesn’t hit straight on, like Sol’s expecting. Every move Cornelius pulls is devious, spring-loaded, and dirty. He kicks Sol in the shin. He yanks on the hem of his shirt to distract him. He lets one of Sol’s punches clip off the top of his shoulder and then drives his palm into Sol’s chin. None of these maneuvers leave Sol particularly hurt, but he’s confused, and he knows he’s getting slow on the uptake. It’s strange to see Cornelius so full of action outside of the bedroom; it’s like the moment he’s been saving his energy for has finally arrived.

No matter how fast Cornelius is, though, Sol is bigger—and he’s been fighting regularly. He begins to get the measure of Cornelius’s wild attacks and manages to block most of them. He lands a couple of hits: one to Cornelius’s side, and one just to the right of his solar plexus that leaves him gasping for a couple of moments. Sol can feel the adrenaline humming in his limbs in that particular way that means if he doesn’t lose the thread, if he doesn’t fuck this up, he is going to win.

Then Cornelius sweeps his legs.

One moment Sol is up, swinging a haymaker over Cornelius’s dodging head, and the next there is an intense pain in his knee and he hits the ground, the concrete floor knocking the wind out of him. He grunts in pain and hears a gasp from the assembled men. Cornelius is on top of him in an instant, giving no quarter, raining down a series of quick, sharp blows to Sol’s shoulders and chest that become blossoming points of pain.

He gets his arms up at last and manages to catch one of Cornelius’s hands. This earns him a second of respite to flex his injured knee, only to be rewarded with a hot spike of pain.

“Th’fuck did you do to me?” he groans, barely loud enough for Cornelius to hear it. 

He expects a jeering smile in response, a condemnation of Sol’s own slowness and lack of technique. Instead, Cornelius’s eyes flash and he says nothing.

Sol holds on tight to Cornelius’s wrist as he tries to wrench it away and scans him, a realization dawning. In Cornelius’s front trouser pocket there is a small lump, and the very top of a wooden handle pokes out.

It’s a knife. Cornelius has knifed him.

Not hard. Not enough for permanent injury, Sol thinks. Just enough to surprise him, to buckle his knee so that Cornelius could take him down. But weapons aren’t allowed in their little club. And the only reason Cornelius would have brought one out… is because he realized he was going to lose.

Cornelius finally snatches his hand free and pulls it back for another blow, but Sol bucks his hips at the last instant, throwing Cornelius off-balance so that he has to use both hands to steady himself on Sol’s prone form instead. They stare at each other. The clamor of the men around them fades into the background.

I could expose you, Sol thinks. I could tell them what you are : not a leader of men, but a cheater. A liar. You might keep control, but they’d never look at you the same.

But the move would be a brutal one. Toppling Cornelius from his throne would leave Sol in limbo, too—not to mention the chaos it would bring to the club. And Cornelius would never smile at him again, not in that real, soft way. Would never press a kiss to the corner of Sol’s mouth and bite his lip and laugh when he flinched. Sol would never figure out everything that was going on between Cornelius and Gibson—would never have the chance to establish anything of his own in the space afforded him in Cornelius’s bed, and maybe even his heart.

Fuck, thinks Sol, and the moment passes him, and Cornelius punches him so hard in the temple that he nearly blacks out.

Afterward, while the men are slapping Sol on the back, he meets Cornelius’s gaze and Cornelius pauses in his speech about the museum. Dizzy, Sol thinks he sees something there: recognition of what Sol just gave up for Cornelius? Even affection?

“You won’t regret this,” Cornelius says to the men, but he’s looking at Sol.

-

This time it’s Cornelius on his back, shoulders bumping against the wooden floor, and Sol is above him, a hand in his hair, pinning him down.

“Want to fuck me, then earn it,” he spits. His trousers are off but his shirt is still on. Sol can see that Cornelius’s pupils are dark with lust, and he runs his tongue along his lower lip, wetting it.

“Earn it,” Sol repeats, and pulls Cornelius’s hair, knocking the back of his head into the floorboards.

“Think I already have,” says Cornelius, and reaches up a hand to prod at Sol’s temple. The contact stings, of course, and before Sol can move Cornelius’s hand away he pokes again, harder this time.

Sol hisses. “Stop it,” he says. “Fight’s over.”

“Fight’s hardly begun,” Cornelius retorts, and bucks his hips. He’s fully dressed, unlike Sol, and the friction of the fabric is obviously doing something to him. Cornelius exhales heavily before continuing to move, so that he’s almost rutting up against Sol from the floor.

Sol hums in the back of his throat. If Cornelius wants another fight tonight, that’s what he’ll get. It’ll be a fair one, this time. Sol is already on fire from their earlier tussle, his skin aching for Cornelius’s fists, wanting to mark him up, wanting to be marked. So, he tangles his fingers deeper in Cornelius’s hair and yanks his head back, then ducks down beneath his chin and kisses the thin skin there.

“Hah,” Cornelius breathes, and then says, “no bruises.”

Sol is feeling ornery tonight, though, and he begins to suck at the base of Cornelius’s throat. The skin is salty with sweat and he can feel Cornelius’s Adam's apple bob as the smaller man swallows.

“No bruises,” Cornelius hisses, and his hand is on Sol’s face again, pushing him away from his throat.

Sol’s own bruise throbs as Cornelius shoves at it, but he doesn’t let go, latching on meanly with a hint of teeth as Cornelius continues. Cornelius, in return, releases the pressure for a moment only to come back and smack into the side of Sol’s face with the side of his hand. Sol reels sideways, releasing Cornelius’s neck with a wet sound and catching himself hard on one elbow. The fabric of his shirt slips and he almost collapses onto his shoulder before catching himself again.

“What did I say?” Cornelius asks, and there’s something hard in his eyes that Sol might be afraid of if he wasn’t still high on the adrenaline of their earlier fight.

But he feels he’s owed something for what happened earlier, so he says, “I heard you.”

“And you ignored me?” Cornelius asks.

“You don’t want me docile.”

“No, I don’t, do I?”

Cornelius rakes his eyes down Sol’s body. Sol stiffens, feeling himself the subject of scrutiny. His packer is still in his boxers, making a soft bulge there. The hairless tops of his thighs are exposed, as well as his hairier lower legs, wrapped around Cornelius’s own. His shirt gapes loose at the waist, half-hiding his stomach and the injection marks beside his hip.

“You don’t,” Sol reiterates. He doesn’t like the way they’ve frozen. He wants the pace to pick back up: he’s aching for it, his blood pumping in his veins like he’s just come from a run. He goes to pull on Cornelius’s hair again, and Cornelius resists the tug, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords as he maintains that plasticky, fake smile.

“You’ve always been a good wife to me, Solomon,” he says. “Don’t ruin that now.”

Cornelius leans up to kiss him, and his lips are soft and pliant against Sol’s, but Sol’s entire body has stiffened. A good wife to me echoes through his head, curdling in his stomach, making him sick and small. A good wife.

Cornelius licks along the seam of Sol’s mouth and bites at his lower lip, playful, murmuring something now that the moment of tension between them has passed. All at once, Sol can’t do it anymore. He wrenches away from Cornelius, leaving him lying on the floor as Sol shoves himself backward and stands up, shirt flapping half-open.

“What are you so bothered about?” Cornelius asks. He pulls himself up on one elbow, and for once he isn’t the picture of composure. His shirt is wrinkled, the top button of his trousers is undone, and his cheeks are flushed and his brows drawn together in confusion. He looks unsteady.

“I’m not your wife,” Sol spits.

Cornelius blinks. “No? Then why is it I’ve had my prick in you longer than we’ve exchanged words this month?”

“Aw, go to hell,” Sol says. He stomps over to where his trousers lie in a puddle on the floor and begins to pull them on.

Cornelius is on his feet now, too. He steps closer to Sol, although not close enough to touch him, and says to his back, “What, running away from me? Are you still afraid of the museum plan?”

“What? Fuck, no,” says Sol. How is he thinking about his precious plan right now?

“I talked to the head of security,” Cornelius fires off. There is a note of triumph in his voice. “He was drunk. He’s a smart man, but an unsteady one—he should be very easy to fool.”

Sol tugs his trousers up around his hips. Despite himself, he turns to face Cornelius while wrestling with the zip. Cornelius is smiling, but there is a manic energy in his wide eyes. Sol thinks again of their fight and imagines how different this encounter would be if he’d said something. His knee throbs.

“It’ll be a success,” Cornelius says. “You don’t know how much we stand to gain from this.”

“I don’t care about the heist,” Sol says, enunciating his words clearly despite the anger that burns within him. “I’m not your fucking wife. I don’t want to hear about your day.”

Cornelius tips his head to one side. “You seem stuck on this.”

“I’m,” says Sol, and the anger burns so brightly in his eyes that he almost can’t see. He makes a vague gesture to his body, to the open neck of his shirt where Cornelius can surely see the scars. “I’m not that. Never that.”

He does up the button on his trousers and jams his feet into his shoes. For just an instant, it seems as though Cornelius is going to catch and stop him at the door. Something in Sol aches for that, for an apology, for a return to how things were just a moment ago—so he opens his mouth and cuts Cornelius off.

“Besides,” Sol says, one hand on the doorknob. “You already have a wife, don’t you? He’s dying in the next room.”

The barb lands just as he intended it to, more effective than most. If Sol wasn’t so angry, he’d be proud that he’s finally pierced Cornelius’s armor—because he has, he can see it all over his face. Cornelius doesn’t take a step back, but he might as well: his eyebrows fly up, his lips purse, and his eyes look almost comically sad. The line between his brows is what tells Sol it’s real, that he’s not faking, putting on his puppy dog frown for some sympathy.

“Maybe you should go back to fucking Billy,” says Sol, a cheap shot to follow up the blow he’s already landed, and then he turns the knob and leaves. He doesn’t look at the door at the end of the hallway, the one with no light pouring from beneath it, but the thought of it follows him all the way out.

-

He doesn’t go to the next fight. Can’t. Something in him is afraid that if he does, Cornelius will have turned them all against him. Sol sits on his broken-down couch with the TV off and imagines walking into the warehouse to see the faces of his friends burning with hatred for him. Imagines Tommy coming after him with that wiry, choked-down anger finally aimed in his direction. Imagines Pilkington turning his face away in disgust, or worse, saying something about his disposition, about how he cried like a bitch, like a girl when Bill died—

The urge to fight isn’t so easily banished. Sol wishes he still had a membership to the gym with the punching bag, the one he would hit until his knuckles bled in the weeks after Bill’s death, but of course, he can’t afford it anymore. The membership is long lapsed, and Sol doesn’t dare put a fist through the drywall in his flat because that’ll be the safety deposit gone, and he doesn’t know where he’d find another shithole to take him if the landlord decides he’s too much trouble.

So, he sits on the sofa and he drinks too much beer and when he wakes up the next morning, headache throbbing between his eyes, he doesn’t even have a text from one of the lads asking him where he was. It’s all radio silence. As if he never existed.

It aches in him for the next week. His friends haven’t abandoned him entirely—he and Tommy go for drinks on Wednesday night, and Freddy texts him stupid memes—but all at once, it feels as though there is a glass window between Sol and them. He is on the outside, and they share something that he is no longer a part of. The feeling terrifies him.

On Friday, after a shit day at work where he tweaked his shoulder and got yelled at by the foreman, Sol looks at himself in the cracked mirror above his bathroom sink. His beard is scratchy and needs a trim, there are dark hollows beneath his eyes, and he looks tired —not from lack of sleep, but from everything, a whole shitty pileup of things that haven’t let him alone for the past six years.

He puts on his trainers and he goes to the warehouse.

-

When Sol walks in, he can already hear the others down at the far end. He’s not surprised that the fights have already started; he arrived late on purpose, terrified of turning up early and adding awkwardness to the cocktail of emotions that is already brewing inside of him. The kind of noise is strange, though. It’s not the howling and hooting of a crowd watching a fight, nor is Cornelius giving a speech. The sounds Sol hears, growing clearer as he approaches, include the scuff of heels on concrete and the sounds of blows—but with no shouting, no cheering. By the time he’s near enough to begin to make out quiet voices, he almost feels like he’s at the wrong warehouse, that these aren’t his men after all.

When he steps out into the light shed by the one functioning overhead bulb, he sees the reason for the strange noises.

The men aren’t fighting. They’ve broken into two groups and are scattered across the space. One group paces back and forth between boxes and crates, bored looks on their faces, glancing about themselves with a little too much tension. The rest of them, looking for all the world like a handful of kids trying to sneak up on their parents, crouch and scuttle between the same boxes. As Sol watches, one of the men gets close enough to his quarry to pounce, and there is a brief scuffle before his target is on the ground. Sitting atop a barrel, watching the strange game of cat-and-mouse go on around him, is Cornelius.

It takes a few moments for Cornelius’s gaze to land on Sol, but something in his expression makes Sol certain that Cornelius knew he was here the whole time. Freddy—the man just tackled to the floor—sees Sol next. He stands, dusts himself off, and then looks uncertainly between Sol and Cornelius.

It’s almost worse than outright anger. The men don’t know what to do with him. They don’t know where their loyalties lie.

“Good to have you back, Solomon,” says Cornelius.

His words are loud in the quiet of the space. Several of the men startle at hearing them, and then startle again when they see Sol. The game begins to break up, everyone slowly clustering around the confrontation that they’re sure is about to take place.

“I was sick last week,” says Sol. A bald lie.

Cornelius tilts his head. He doesn’t smile. There is something hollow behind his eyes as he says, “That’s a shame.”

“Right,” says Sol, fighting not to clench his fists. No matter what, he’s not going to apologize—not even if Cornelius threatens to kick him out or ban him from the club forever. He’s not going to apologize for freaking out at being called wife, at the smugness that Cornelius showed as he doubled down on the term. Woman, girl, babe, he might as well have said. Righteous anger burns in Sol’s chest and tightens his throat, but he tries not to let it show.

“Seems like I’ve missed something,” Sol adds when Cornelius doesn’t speak again. “Lot of pansy creeping about here, no fighting. We a sneaking club now?”

“I thought you weren’t interested in the heist.”

“I am,” Sol says stubbornly. “If it’s what the men want.”

“Oh, they want it,” says Cornelius, and glances out at the ring of curious faces, some closed off, some concerned. “We’re just winnowing down the group now. We’ve already agreed on a date.”

It hangs in the air. Sol takes a deep breath, lets it rush out through his nose, and then asks, like he knows Cornelius wants him to.

“When is it?”

Cornelius regards him for one more drawn-out moment before, all at once, he smiles. His eyes crinkle and he spreads his hands before him, his fingers shining pale in the dim light.

“We’re thinking Sunday,” he says, and Sol feels the shock of it, the soon-ness. “Might as well get it over with before anything goes wrong, right?”

“Yeah,” says Sol, unthinking.

“Great. You can join in, if you’d like.”

Sol eyes him. The words are friendly, but Sol has known Cornelius long enough to be able to tell when he’s faking. He doesn’t like being the object of his charm. Doesn’t want to be just another mark. But he also doesn’t see how else he can be let back in.

“What are you doing?” Sol asks.

“Learning how to overpower the museum guards,” Cornelius answers glibly.

“Sneak up and tackle, like,” adds Pilkington.

Sol scans the faces of the other men. There is relief on some. Magnus smiles openly at him.

“Alright,” he says. “Who’m I tackling, then?”

“You can partner with Tommy,” says Cornelius, still smiling. “Freddy could use the break.”

Sol spends half an hour tackling and being tackled, feeling half as though he’s running drills in the Marines again and half as though this is a child’s game that will earn them nothing. At the end, there are no fights and no fucking. Cornelius doesn’t even cast Sol a second glance as he leaves.

-

Sol Tozer is tired.

He has been for some time. First, he was tired of the Marines, of being the first thrown into danger and getting shit pay for it. Then, he was tired of crying. Tired of waking up in the middle of the night shaking, with his shoulder aching, or reaching for a body in the bed that wasn’t there. Tired of telling people he would be getting back on his feet soon—so he got back on his feet. Then it was into a grind that he hadn’t signed up for any more than he’d understood what it meant to be a Marine.

He worked job after job: menial labor, simple shit that was hard on the body. At first, he slipped up a lot. Bill was still on his mind and Sol would find himself thinking of him at the worst times. He’d be standing on the foreman’s tower, waiting to throw a lever to clamp a piece of metal, and then he’d be in a bar with Bill, watching the way his cheeks crinkled when he smiled. Sol would come back to himself with shouting in his earpiece and, more often than not, a pink slip at the end of the day.

New job, pay rent, get fired, repeat. Over time, the getting fired started to come less often, and Sol discovered a new joy: being laid off. It was no longer his fault, but the paychecks would end all the same, and the only difference was that he was one of a crowd of discontented men rather than an idiot the rest of them sneered at.

It was how he met Tommy Armitage, the wiry man with the deaf ear. They worked on the same construction site for a few months, one of Sol’s longest stints at a job since the Marines, and when they were both laid off Tommy screamed the foreman’s head off, spittle flying, his face pale with rage. The rest of the men left, but Sol waited, and when Tommy finally staggered away from the cowering foreman, Sol walked with him to the tube.

“Thought you were gonna hit him,” he said as they matched their strides.

“I thought so too,” said Tommy, “but I can’t afford another assault on my record. I’d be back in the clink, and my mum and my brothers’d be left to fend for themselves.”

“What was your first?” asked Sol.

Tommy’s eyes were piercing in the gloom of early evening. “Beat the shit out of a classmate at uni,” he said. “He was saying all sorts of trash about me. About my hearing and how the Marines’d refused me.”

“I was a Marine,” Sol told him, imagining a leaner, younger Tommy with his fists covered in another man’s blood. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

They were friends, then, and when Sol met Cornelius, Tommy was the first one he told about his idea.

“He wants to start a club, of sorts,” he said over a half-drunk beer. Tommy had both hands wrapped around his own drink and was staring into the glass like he would find answers there.

“You ever see Fight Club ?” Sol asked.

Tommy’s head came up slowly as he surfaced from his own thoughts. “The Brad Pitt flick? Yeah, I saw it.”

“Something like that.”

Tommy laughed, but there was a bright point of interest in his eyes. “Like, a bunch of blokes beating each other up for no reason?”

“Letting off steam,” Sol shrugged. “Can’t say there aren’t times I wish I could go at someone. And it wouldn’t land you with an assault charge.”

Tommy nodded, his dark curls bobbing, and took a long drink of beer. “Alright,” he said at last. “Can’t hurt. Who’s this bloke you said’s organizing it?”

“Cornelius,” said Sol, and Tommy scoffed.

“What a name.”

“I wouldn’t let him hear you say it.”

“Why not? What’s he gonna do to me, this Cornelius?”

Sol thought of the knife Cornelius had been holding when they met. The way he held himself, like a firecracker begging for a match. The hunger in his eyes when he suggested fighting, and the flatness of his tone: like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.

“I dunno. He seems like a dangerous guy,” Sol shrugged.

Three weeks later, Cornelius had his club, and Sol had his outlet. There was a little friction at first, stuff like Tommy had mentioned—guys doubting Cornelius, wanting to shove their own authority around, puff out their chests. After Cornelius beat up Gibson, there was no more of that. There was compliance. There were uneasy laughs, and then genuine ones, as everyone fell into line.

Then Sol and Cornelius started fucking, and he isn’t sure when that got twisted into what it is now, but if they were just fucking he wouldn’t be walking down by the river drunk and upset at the way things are with them.

It’s not the fighting, he reflects, taking a swig from the narrow neck of the bottle. They’ve fought before, and worse than this. It’s the—Solomon struggles to wrap his mind around the words, has to choke back bile to do so—the wife thing. Seeing him as a woman. He’s worked hard and long enough at subsuming that part of himself that having Cornelius refer to it really fucked his headspace, and he has to admit now that part of him is still wrenched up over it.

It's pathetic, of course. Who is he, if one little word can get to him like this?

It’s only that what he used to be has never been an issue with Cornelius. When Sol first peeled his shirt off, sweaty and nigh-shaking with arousal and the fear that Cornelius would reject him, Cornelius’s eyes glanced right over the scars as if they were nothing to notice. He fucked Sol mercilessly and didn’t care that Sol didn’t have a cock of his own. No, when problems arose between Sol and Cornelius, they were problems between two men. He always appreciated that.

Has this been brewing the whole time? Has Cornelius always seen Sol as a woman?

Can’t be, he thinks, wobbling on a turn in the pavement, and he looks down at his splayed palms. He must have dropped the empty beer bottle at some point.

Fuck. He hasn’t been this wasted since Bill died.

Does Cornelius matter that much to him?

There is a bench down by the water, with a view of nothing but the foggy impression of a moon printed on the front of the clouds. The water itself is sludgey and slow. Sol drops into a seat on the rain-damp bench and stares out at the view before him.

Cornelius is a good fuck. Cornelius is also the point of light Sol has organized his life around for the past six months, without even realizing it.

When he looks at the oil slick on the water, he thinks of Cornelius’s mouth on his neck, of his fist on Sol’s jaw. He thinks of spitting his own blood onto the cement floor and coming up and seeing Cornelius smiling, an unknowable light in his eyes. He thinks of tackling Cornelius onto his bed and hearing a startled, high-pitched laugh knocked out of him.

He thinks of Bill’s blood on the sand and Sol holding his hand in the chopper and of everything that came after.

He can’t lose Cornelius and the club now. Even if they’re doing something dangerous. Because without that one bright point, what will he do every day? Keep trekking on, alone?

He thinks of Cornelius’s mouth hot on his skin. Chokes down the revulsion that crawls at the thought of being his wife. He can let it go. Cornelius didn’t mean anything by it.

-

It is dark outside the museum.

They are parked across the street in Diggle’s battered old SUV. Even though they’re close to the front doors, there are no street lights here. Sol spares a moment to wonder if they were broken as part of Cornelius’s plan or just burnt out on their own before turning his attention to the men rooting about in the back of the car.

Seven of them have been selected for this task. They arrived in two vehicles. Diggle, Tommy, Hodgson (the club’s newest member; Sol isn’t sure he could hurt a fly under pressure, and is equally unsure as to why Cornelius chose him), Magnus, Gibson, Sol, and Cornelius. Gibson and Cornelius drove separately; Sol was relegated to the SUV with the rest of the men. Not that he wanted to spend time in Gibson’s medicinal-smelling compact with the two of them alone, but still… The thought of that private conversation, of words tracking through air laden with meaning, churned in Sol’s stomach for the entire ride.

He’s been delaying getting out of the car because he doesn’t want to see Gibson, but now that he can hear quiet voices from outside, he knows it’s time to take charge. Sighing, trying to calm his pounding heart, he opens the door and steps out.

Sol hasn’t brought his gun. He isn’t even sure he has it anymore, and doesn’t want to check the space at the back of the closet (can’t lay eyes on the grip of the thing without thinking of working it out of Bill’s twitching grasp). Anyway, a gun sounds like a terrible idea for a robbery. It’s the perfect way for things to get more difficult than they should.

So, their primary weapons are to be their bodies. Hickey has a small knife, too—Sol sees the flash of it in the moonlight as he tucks it into his pocket. Then Sol’s gaze tracks over to Gibson, who is standing just beside Cornelius.

He’s obviously ill. There are hollows in his cheeks and the shape of his body seems wrong somehow: bent, painfully, in places it shouldn’t be. Even in the dim moonlight, Sol can make out the bags under his eyes. Gibson’s lips are dry and cracked and he moves slowly, as if every move hurts him. As Sol watches, his hand comes up to touch Cornelius’s shoulder, and Cornelius shifts his feet, leaning into the contact.

“Goddamnit,” says Sol under his breath, and he forces himself to walk over.

Both Cornelius and Gibson turn to look at him as he approaches, and he makes himself nod at each of them, as if this is some professional meeting of the minds and Sol isn’t fucking Gibson’s boyfriend on the side. Gibson’s eyes look luminous in the faint light and Cornelius wears the ghost of a smile, which broadens into a real one as Sol comes to a stop in front of them.

“Are you ready?” Cornelius asks, and Sol nods again.

“Not sure we should’ve brought Hodgson,” he admits in a low voice, “but everyone’s as ready as they can be.”

We shouldn’t have brought Gibson either, he doesn’t say.

“He’ll manage,” says Gibson, his words quick and clipped as they always are. Sol doesn’t know if it’s his annoyance with Sol leaking through, or if he just talks like that. “What’s happening tonight is more important than Hodgson’s qualms.”

“Everything is going to change,” Cornelius adds.

They’re unnerving, the two of them, like a duet act in some play Sol doesn’t know is happening. He swallows despite himself.

“Right,” he says. “Let’s get going.”

-

“Shit,” hisses Hodgson, and the word seems impossibly quiet following the crash of metal that just rent the air.

All six of them turn to look at him. The contents of the toolbox he was carrying lie scattered in the middle of the museum’s driveway. Hodgson stands sweating above the mess, his hands fluttering as though he doesn’t know where to begin cleaning up. Tommy hurries over to help him, even though he already cut his hand on the fence on their way in, and Sol watches with his heart pounding as they carefully pick up every tool. It’s not Sol’s toolbox, but he’s sure his prints are on the tools anyway, and he doesn’t want anything left behind.

Finally, Tommy tucks a crowbar into his belt loop, and the ground is clear of tools. Sol allows himself to heave a sigh of relief.

“Come along,” says Cornelius, his voice quiet but sure. He is wearing all black and seems to fade into the shadows, save for the pale, pointed triangle of his face and the bright glint of his teeth when he smiles.

They move across the driveway to the back door of the house. Sol half expects a lamp to go on and catch them all in its beam, but the yard stays dark.

Tommy fumbles with the tools at the door.

Sol remembers Tommy telling him, shielding his eyes against the sun, I learned to lockpick my way into my brothers’ rooms to steal my stuff back. Remembers the way his own fingers felt too stubby to manipulate the prongs when he tried. The time seems to drag out forever and yet he has barely taken a handful of breaths before there is a faint click and Tommy says, “That’s it,” and Cornelius gestures for Sol to push open the door.

There are a couple of lights on inside, surprising Sol. They’re dim, but still faintly illuminate the rooms and the exhibits within. Sol glances around, letting his eyes adjust and his breathing slow. The others file in quietly behind him.

“Looks clear,” Sol murmurs.

Cornelius nods. Behind him, the tall, looming specter of Billy Gibson mirrors the movement, but he’s not looking at Sol. He’s looking down, at the back of Cornelius’s head.

Sol gestures toward where he remembers the door to the basement being, and then he steps through into the main exhibit room, and John the grad student is standing before a display case holding a spyglass.

Sol freezes and opens a hand at his back so that no one steps through into the room after him, but it’s too late for his own stealthy exit. John turns at the sound of the first footfall.

“Who—?!” he half-yelps, and then his eyes fall on Sol, illuminated by the soft glow of a light bulb, and he does what would be a hilarious double take if Sol’s heart wasn’t pounding in his ears. He didn’t think that someone would be here. Didn’t even imagine it could be someone who didn’t work here. Didn’t Cornelius say something about the drunkard head of security, about how he wouldn’t have anyone on watch tonight but himself?

“What the hell are you doing here?” John demands, his voice shrill. He has one hand out in front of him as if to block an attack.

Sol takes a step forward into the shadows. He can feel the attention of the other men fixed on him from the darkness behind. John shuffles backward on the wooden floor.

“I could ask you the same question, mate,” Sol says. He layers his voice with heavy intent.

“I’m… I just needed more time, is all, before tomorrow—a little more time. I’m here for research. It’s not a crime—I didn’t break anything. But you… you can’t—”

“What, I can’t be doing research too?”

John’s eyes flash across Sol’s face. “You were saying something the other day,” he says quietly, pale beneath his beard. “About the artifact that killed John Franklin—”

And then Tommy is on him with the crowbar, and there is a sickening crack before John suddenly folds up on himself and crumples to the floor in front of Sol.

Sol looks up. Tommy stands before him, grim-faced but resolute in the dim light. He moves to step forward, to heave John to the side, but Sol holds up a hand and stops him.

“Wait,” he murmurs, and bends down over the other man’s prone form.

There is blood in John’s hair: a lot of blood. It wells up between Sol’s fingers as he cradles the skull in his hands. It reminds him of how he held Bill, at the end, when everything was dripping out the back of his head—

But he can’t think about that. He swallows revulsion, even as his hands shake, and probes at John’s wound.

It doesn’t seem fatal. Sol has felt his fingers sink into the ragged edges of a catastrophic head wound before, and this isn’t that. But any head wound can kill, and from the steady red stain spreading across the wooden floor and the side of Sol’s trousers, this looks to be a bad one.

Cornelius and the others move quietly into the room. Cornelius steps up behind Tommy and looks down, past the half-raised crowbar, to where Sol cradles the man’s head on one knee.

“Good work,” says Cornelius, and Tommy smiles, although Cornelius is looking at Sol when he says it. He doesn’t look away even as he steps forward, crouches down, and feels for John’s pulse at his throat with two fingers.

“Alive,” he says when he pulls back. “Put him aside. Someone will find him.”

Sol can feel John’s shallow breathing and his fingers are wet with John’s blood. He bends forward and lays John’s head on the floor. In all likelihood, John will be fine. He will be safe.

In all likelihood. Sol thinks of the shrapnel that tore off the back of Bill’s skull.

He shakes his head. Looking up at Cornelius, he says, “He could be hurt badly. We should bail now, before we get too far in. Drop him at the hospital. It’s quiet, and we all get away safe.”

“He’s not hurt too bad, is he?” Tommy interjects from over Cornelius’s shoulder. When Sol shoots him a look, defiance flashes in his eyes and he adds, “I didn’t hit him that hard.”

“For God’s sake,” Sol snaps, “hitting him at all was too hard, Tommy.”

He holds up his hand, letting the blood on his fingers glisten in the light. “He could die from this.”

“Easy, Solomon,” murmurs Cornelius, touching his shoulder. “Our man here will be just fine. Head wounds bleed more than they need to, remember?”

“Because they’re serious,” Sol argues, his hackles still up.

Cornelius’s grip tightens on his shoulder. Behind him, Gibson leans against the wall.

“He’ll be fine,” Cornelius repeats. “Besides, cameras would pick us up if we tried to drop anyone at the hospital. Then we’d be guaranteed trouble.”

Sol lets his breath hiss out through his teeth, forces himself to breathe evenly. He tries to banish the tension and anger from his limbs.

Cornelius is right, he thinks. This isn’t Bill. People have taken much worse head wounds and been just fine. Let it go.

“Alright,” he says, and stands up. “Let’s keep going. Cornelius is right—someone will find him.”

John looks very small and crooked on the floor, with his face pointed sightlessly up and his elbows above his shoulders. For a moment, Sol wants to reach down and arrange him so that he looks like he’s only sleeping. He wonders if John will ever sneak into a place after hours again.

From up ahead there is the faint sound of a door opening, and Cornelius calls back, “Solomon! I’ve got the basement door open.”

Sol glances down at John once more, and then he hurries away.

-

There is light coming from under the door at the end of the hall.

Worse, there are voices coming from under the door at the end of the hall.

Sol stands frozen to one side, his back pressed against the wall, listening as intently as he can.

There are two raised voices: one high, the other low. They press insistently against one another, annoyance building in each. Sol creeps closer, trying to make out individual words.

“…Not supposed to be…” he hears the higher voice say before trailing off.

“Don’t see what you— me to do about it—”

Sol winces as the words wash over him. Although there only seem to be two people present, two angry witnesses are a lot more to deal with than the one unconscious drunk they were promised. Sol thinks again of John upstairs, bleeding onto Franklin’s wooden floors, and doesn’t want Tommy to take a crowbar to these two people. Doesn’t know if Tommy could, anyway—one of them is supposed to be the head of security, after all.

Sol hears the higher voice say a long string of words that he can’t make out, followed by, “Restless.”

Sol glances at Cornelius. In the darkness of the corridor, he thinks he sees Cornelius roll his eyes.

The other men have clustered behind them, concern and determination warring on their faces. Sol looks hard at Tommy, trying to read his expression, but his jaw is set and his face is pale. He wonders if Tommy is thinking about John.

In order to continue down the hall to where the artifacts are stored—according to Cornelius, anyway—they will have to move directly past the office door that the voices are coming from. Maybe one man could do it. Sol doesn’t have faith in all of them making it. Not when Gibson is a tall, limping scarecrow, and Magnus has the bulk of a professional strongman.

Sol steps carefully across the hall, moving to stand beside Cornelius. He leans back against the wall, which is cool against his shoulder blades, even through the fabric of his shirt. It must be the climate control, he thinks.

“Cornelius,” he murmurs, “we didn’t plan for this.”

Cornelius just looks at him, his eyes shining in the dark. Sol recognizes a request for him to lay out his whole argument when he sees one, and he sighs. He’s never been good at expressing himself in words.

“If they see us, things will escalate,” he explains. “That’s the security chief’s office, right?”

“Mr. Crozier.” Cornelius rolls the words around in his mouth. “That’s right.”

“He’s the one you expected to be drunk and unconscious, yeah? Well, he doesn’t sound unconscious to me.”

There is a thump from the direction of the office, as of a fist on wood, before the security chief’s voice sounds out again: “God damn it, I know! But Lady Jane’s orders—”

Sol manages not to flinch at the sound, but he can imagine all too easily the door of the office swinging open, him or Tommy or Gibson being pinned to the wall by a slice of bright light. And that voice, belonging to a man holding a weapon, telling the other person in the office to call the police.

“Not unconscious, no,” agrees Cornelius. “But he’s probably still drunk.” A smile tugs at one corner of his mouth.

“So what?” Sol demands. “A drunk, angry man is a worse threat to us than a sober one. We should come back another night, with a better plan or when we know no one’s here but us.”

“If it comes to it, I can handle Crozier,” Cornelius says, glancing at the office door.

Sol isn’t sure if he means physically, or what, but his blood is up now. It feels like Cornelius is building a house of cards that’s going to come crashing down around them. Or, to put it another way, like he’s setting them up to get fucked.

“Come on,” Sol says, barely keeping the pleading tone out of his voice. “This is a bad idea, Neil. You know it.”

Cornelius puts a hand on Sol’s shoulder. Then, ever so gently, his hand hidden in the dark from the other men, he slides his grip up to Sol’s neck. The pressure is faint, but it’s there. Sol swallows.

“Have you forgotten about your friend upstairs so soon?” Cornelius whispers. Sol can feel his breath on his face. “This is our only chance now.”

He lets go of Sol and turns to the others, gesturing with one sharp jerk of his head that they’re to go ahead. Sol lets out a heavy breath and runs his hands up and down his arms for a moment, trying to chase the chills from his body.

If they’re going ahead, he can’t let them go without him. He has to believe that they can do this. That Cornelius will lead them true.

The voices from the office have dropped in volume, so that Sol can no longer make out their words, but they’re definitely still talking. He holds his breath as Tommy scurries first across the patch of light, then Magnus. Even as a beam of golden light falls on the side of Magnus’s face, lighting up his thin brown hair and the wide-eyed expression of concern he wears, the voices inside the office don’t change. Sol begins to believe that they may actually make it; he sighs in relief, trying to reach inside himself and let adrenaline take over again. He shouldn’t be afraid. He should be angry—should be triumphant.

Diggle and Hodgson move shiftily across the exposed portion of the hall, and then it’s Gibson’s turn. Sol watches him with an eye that can’t help being disdainful. Gibson is tall and gaunt, his joints seeming too big for his body, his arms and legs sticking out strangely. He winces as he sidles in front of the door, and then there is a bang from inside the office and the hallway drops into pure silence.

Sol barely dares to breathe. He locks eyes with Tommy, across the hall, wide-eyed and terrified. In the middle, marooned in empty space that feels as exposed as a treeless clearing, is Gibson.

It feels like the moment goes on forever, but, of course, it doesn’t.

“Fuck,” snaps a voice from inside the room—the lower, raspy one. Crozier, then. Sol can detect a slurring in the consonants.

“Shit,” Crozier adds. “Fine. Let me get my things together.”

That’s their cue for alarm, then—but it’s also their cover. Billy slouches painfully out of danger and Sol watches Cornelius follow. Then he hurries across himself. Sol casts a quick glance back just before the darkness swallows him up. The office door is still closed. Safe, he thinks with relief, and then he turns the corner and the quiet is absolute.

-

The artifact room is smaller than Sol thought it would be. He imagined something huge and hollow, something that fit with the significance Cornelius layered onto his words when he spoke of it. An artifact that killed a man. How could that be?

Instead, the room Sol finds himself in is small and cold. The floor is tile, with metal skirting that flashes their torch beams back at them. Most of the space is occupied by massive, floor to ceiling cabinets. They are metal, too, and when Sol first steps into the room he has the overwhelming feeling that it looks like a morgue.

Tommy tries the handle on one of the first cabinet drawers. Sol tenses, waiting for the wail of a siren, but hears nothing other than the men’s footsteps and breathing. The cabinet makes a low scraping sound as it opens.

“Nothing,” Tommy says in disappointment. “Just fibers in plastic bags.”

“It’s not all treasure,” says Cornelius. “We’re here for one thing only.”

“And do you happen to know which of these drawers it’s in?” Sol asks. “Or will we be here all night?”

Cornelius folds his arms and smiles. “We’ll find it,” is all he says, and the other men fan out without an order, opening and peeking into drawer after drawer. Sol notes with some amusement that Cornelius doesn’t open any drawers himself; instead, he alternates between watching the men and fiddling with the knife in his pocket. From time to time, Gibson or another one of the men brings him an artifact for inspection, and Cornelius wordlessly shakes his head.

After a couple of awkward moments, Sol joins the search. It’s a strange situation: the rasping sound of drawers fills the room, while the men move in almost absolute silence. Sometimes the rustling of some paper or a plastic bag breaks the susurrus of metal on metal, but not often.

Sol is thinking again of the artifacts upstairs, the more intact ones. When he visited the museum, he imagined it was all like that: chunks of furniture and rope pulled from the ice, or else lost to the ocean forever. He wasn’t picturing this rotted detritus, an endless pulp of fabric fibers and wood splinters and bits of bone. The thought nauseates him. It’s worse than disappearing into nothing: it’s breaking down into a kind of foul slurry, a pollution of nature that indicates you were here once and never will be again.

He has his hand in a drawer full of unidentified bones, reading but trying not to read the labels on the bags with crew member names and question marks and empty spots for blood types, when he hears a gasp.

Shit, he thinks first, another injury. And then he remembers John upstairs, and Crozier in the office saying Let me get my things together . Maybe Crozier and his guest have found the body— not the body, Sol reminds himself, John isn’t dead —and have come back here to arrest the culprits.

But when he scans the room, there are no intruders, no lights shining under the door from the hallway. Instead, Gibson stands swaying over one of the open drawers, his jaw slack and the hollows in his cheeks more pronounced than ever.

“This has to be it,” he mumbles. It’s the first thing Sol’s heard him say since they entered the museum. His voice croaks, as though it is coated in rust. The words seem to snag on their way out of his throat.

“Give it here, Billy,” says Cornelius, and the way he says Billy is so soft Sol could vomit.

Gibson turns. The other men, Sol included, crane their necks for a glimpse of what’s in his hand. He’s taken it out of whatever plastic bag it was in, or else it was never bagged at all. It’s small and white and shines at Sol faintly in the light of his torch.

Cornelius takes the object from Gibson and turns it over in his hands. Only the side of his face is illuminated, so Sol can’t quite make out his expression, but his silence is uncharacteristic. He’s caught in the grip of what they’ve found.

“Well?” asks Hodgson with a nervous chuckle. “Do we get to see it?”

“It’s holy,” murmurs Cornelius.

Sol feels his stomach turn over. “What?”

Cornelius turns to face him. His eyes narrow only slightly in the beam of the torch. He looks exultant, his face washed out by the light. As Sol watches, Cornelius licks his lips.

He holds the artifact up. It is a small, white token of some sort—carved, Sol realizes as he peers at it, stepping forward to get a better look. The surface is shiny with wear, but it doesn’t scatter the light, so it’s not a gem.

“Some kind of figurine?” he asks, frowning.

“More than that,” says Cornelius.

The other men move closer. Diggle has put his torch away and now folds his hands together in front of himself. Hodgson nervously worries at his lower lip, while Tommy looks grim and prepared with his crowbar sticking out of his belt. Magnus lurks near the back of the room; he would look threatening back there, but Sol can see the whites of his eyes and knows the poor man’s probably terrified.

In the center of the room: Cornelius and Gibson. And just to one side, Sol.

Cornelius reaches up and puts a hand on Gibson’s shoulder. He’s still looking at the artifact in his other hand as he says, “Down.”

Gibson kneels without a word. He winces as he goes down, and Sol can only imagine how hard the floor must be on his aching knees, but he does it without protest. Now he’s the one looking up at Cornelius in the spotlights that fall upon him from the men’s torches.

“Here, now,” says Cornelius, and he slides his hand up to Gibson’s jaw, cradling his head. “Don’t be upset. We’re making the most of the bad situation we’ve been dealt.”

Gibson nods. “Things will be better?” he asks.

Cornelius nods back.

“Thank you,” murmurs Gibson.

Sol feels as though he’s witnessing something too intimate for him. He and the men shouldn’t be here. He has no idea what the museum and the artifact have to do with this, but this is a moment for Cornelius and Gibson alone.

The door slams open.

The moment shatters into a thousand pieces as all seven of them turn to the door. In the opening, the hall still dark behind them, stand two figures. One has a torch, while the other holds a gun—a hunting rifle, Sol thinks—and is pointing it straight at Cornelius.

“Mr. Crozier,” Cornelius smiles.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Crozier demands. Magnus shines his torch on him, and Crozier flinches away, squinting. His grip on the gun wavers.

Drunk , Sol thinks.

The woman standing beside him, also wearing a security guard uniform, isn’t paying attention to her companion. Her eyes are locked on the tiny figurine in Cornelius’s hand.

“Put that down. Now,” Crozier demands.

Cornelius, smiling, does not. Even as the woman mutters a string of incomprehensible syllables under her breath and then, louder, says, “This is dangerous for you. You all need to leave. Or you are going to—”

“Disappear?” asks Cornelius.

He slides the knife in his other hand across Gibson’s throat.

“Cornelius!” Sol shouts, in unison with the cries of several others, and he drops his torch.

The room descends into flashing madness.

The gun doesn’t go off—that’s the one thing Sol can focus on, that the gun doesn’t go off, because his ears strain for it during every agonizing second that passes—but there is a great shuffle of feet and lights flying everywhere and Sol finds himself rushing forward. He gets his arms around Gibson as he falls, but there is so much blood, an impossible amount.

Crozier runs in too, shouting something to the woman. Sol catches the name Silna before Tommy catches Crozier halfway, crowbar out and swinging. The two of them struggle, their shadows falling in tandem across Gibson’s limp form.

Cornelius meets Sol there, in the eye of the storm.

“He’s breathing,” Sol says, desperate. “See if you can keep pressure—hold it in.”

Cornelius puts his hand over the wound at Gibson’s throat, but he isn’t pressing hard enough to be any help. Blood bubbles over his fingers, wetting the back of his hand. Sol glances at him and sees that his face is calm and distant. He looks like he’s thinking.

Shock, Sol thinks, although there is something here he can’t fit together. Cornelius did this. He killed—

Gibson makes a choking sound and blood mats his beard. He seems to be moving his lips like he wants to say something, but no noise comes out. Sol puts his hand on the back of his head to keep his brains in. He keeps thinking that if they stay like this long enough, the chopper will come, and there will be doctors who know what to do. They’ll put him together again. It isn’t the end of things yet. He has to take the gun out of his hands. It might misfire. He hasn’t heard the gun fire yet.

He reaches for the hands folded over Gibson’s chest and finds Cornelius’s other hand there, still holding the knife. Sol’s fingers touch the blade and Crozier shouts behind him, followed by the sound of something—his gun?—hitting the floor.

“Cornelius, why?” Sol hisses, clutching at his hand, barely avoiding cutting himself on the knife. “Why would you do this?”

“He was dying, Solomon,” Cornelius says.

They’re in the dark, the three of them, with no light shining their way. Sol can’t read Cornelius’s expression. He can only hear the lilt of his voice, close and velvet-soft.

“He was dying. We agreed. You heard him thank me.”

“You’re not making any sense.” Gibson burbles something and Sol lets go of his head to seize Cornelius by the shoulders and shake him. “The fuck have you done? Are you crazy?”

“No,” Cornelius spits, “the world’s crazy. Our jobs demand our lives, chew us up and spit us into the gutter. No one cares who you are or where you come from. And there’s no recognition, no bloody thanks, just a last paycheck and a sneer as you walk out the door. I was made for better than this, Solomon. I was made for holy things. And now I’ve found them.”

With a sudden burst of strength, he shoves Sol away. Sol falls hard on one shoulder, feeling a shock of pain from his injured knee at the same time. He sees Crozier lying unconscious, Tommy standing over him with his crowbar in one hand and Crozier’s gun in the other.

The next thing Sol notices is that it’s cold. His hand, planted on the tile to push himself up from where he fell, has gone numb. When he pulls it away from the floor, the skin sticks, and it hurts. He looks up and for an instant thinks that all the light in the room has concentrated itself beneath Cornelius’s skin.

But it hasn’t. Cornelius shines with light because everyone with a torch is pointing it at him.

He’s hauled Gibson, bloody and gasping, up in front of him. Their chests heave in unison, but Cornelius isn’t looking down. He’s staring straight ahead, as if he can see something that the rest of them can’t.

Sol struggles to his feet. Someone must have knocked Silna down in the fight, because out of the corner of his eye, Sol sees her begin to rise too. Her movements are unsteady. Her eyes are fixed on the artifact Cornelius holds in one bloody hand.

Behind him, something is beginning to coalesce.

Sol can’t quite make it out. His breath puffs before him in the light of someone else’s torch, and he can almost see a shape rising behind Cornelius: a bearlike shape, with a long, long neck and two dark pits where the eyes should be. Each time he tries to get a clear look at it, it vanishes. Sol’s heart pounds in his chest, and a sick nausea pulls at his stomach.

“Cornelius,” he chokes.

The other men stand frozen against the cabinets, staring at Cornelius—or at the thing behind him. Magnus mutters under his breath, a long, whimpering litany, and Hodgson’s hand shakes as he aims his torch. When Cornelius’s eyes finally focus, he’s looking back at Sol.

“He wanted this,” he says, as if that explains everything. As if what he’s doing isn’t totally fucking insane.

“There’s… something—” Sol chokes.

“I know.” Cornelius’s voice is eerily calm, but a wild light dances in his eyes. “It’s what we’re here for, Solomon.”

“The artifact?”

Silna stumbles against one of the metal cabinets as she manages to stand the rest of the way up, and Cornelius flicks a hand.

“Hold her,” he says to Diggle, who moves over automatically and grips Silna by the arms. She curses at him, and he shakes his head as if apologetic.

“There are sacred things in this world,” Cornelius continues, as if he wasn’t interrupted at all. As the words fall out of his mouth, the creature-shape behind him seems to solidify and fade by turns. “Things we do not understand. Things most people… do not believe in.”

“How did John Franklin die?” Sol asks, a leaden weight in his stomach.

“He tried to own something he didn’t understand,” Silna spits, struggling in Diggle’s grasp. “It destroyed him. Just like it will destroy you.”

“And things will be different if I give it to you? That’s what you want me to believe, right?” Cornelius swings his head toward Silna, and the creature behind him moves too, its elongated neck mirroring his movements in disquieting harmony. “Crozier told me about you. You want to possess the creature as much as I do.”

“It can’t be possessed,” Silna snaps, and then fires off a string of syllables in a language Sol doesn’t know.

“Hold still,” Diggle says. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“This is insane,” Sol says loudly. “I don’t know what the fuck is happening here, but it’s insane. This thing, this creature—Gibson—”

Gibson exhales raggedly, reminding Sol that he is still alive, although his shirt front is covered in blood.

Cornelius ignores him. As if he is finished explaining, he bends down and lays Gibson on the floor again, pulling out his little knife in the same movement. The creature behind him bends down as well, its incorporeal snout only inches from the back of Cornelius’s head. Hodgson begins to sidle toward the door.

“Stay,” says Cornelius, his face hidden. “I want you all to see.”

Hodgson stops. Sol takes a deep breath and feels something inside of him break.

“No,” he says.

“No?” Cornelius doesn’t lift his head. His hands are on Gibson’s chest, now, and his face is still concealed behind his hair.

Sol is suddenly, sickly certain that he does not want to know what Cornelius is doing with his knife. 

“No,” he repeats. “Hodgson, Magnus, take Crozier and get out. Diggle, let go of the woman.”

“Shut up, Solomon,” Cornelius says. His voice sounds blurry.

Sol continues, his heart racing: “Hodgson, check on John upstairs as you go. Take him with you and get him to a hospital. Tommy, give me your gun.”

Diggle moves first. He lets go of Silna as if he’s been waiting to do it; she staggers forward, freed from his grasp, and glares back at him. He nods to her, then to Sol, before moving cautiously out of the room. Hodgson and Magnus follow him, half-carrying, half-dragging Crozier between them, and Tommy brings up the rear. As he passes Sol, Tommy places the rifle carefully in his hands. His eyes vanish into the shadows of his eye sockets, but his mouth is set in a frightened line. Sol gives him a nod that he wishes was reassuring.

“Stop,” snaps Cornelius, and his head comes up at last. Tommy and the others hurry out the door as Sol sees, horrifyingly, that there is blood on Cornelius’s mouth. It drenches the lower half of his face, in fact, and drips thickly onto Gibson’s torso.

Gibson is not breathing anymore.

The gun in Sol’s hand feels heavy and cold. Slowly, terrified, he aims it at Cornelius.

“What are you going to do with that, Solomon?” Cornelius asks. His teeth gleam in the light— the light from where? Sol wonders, and then realizes that the thing behind Cornelius is glowing now, faintly throbbing with a kind of blue-white illumination.

“We could do so much together, you know,” Cornelius adds. “We’ll be overlooked no longer. We’ll be the most powerful people in the world.”

“I don’t want that,” Sol says. His hands shake on the gun. He can see the flash of gunpowder in his mind, feel the report against his shoulder. Sees Cornelius bleeding out on the ground, the back of his head gone, his brains all over Sol’s lap as he cradles him.

“What do you want, Solomon? I can give it to you. Put down the gun.”

In the back of his mind, Sol is aware that Silna has begun some kind of sing-song chant, interwoven with huffing breaths. Her hands are up and her fingers tremble.

Sol thinks. What does he want?

He can shoot Cornelius right now and it will stop whatever he is doing. It will get rid of the looming beast behind him, the thing that looks like nightmares and breathes like breaking glass. It will end Cornelius’s story in tragedy, and Sol will be his betrayer. He will sit over Cornelius as he dies and then he will start over again. Like he did with Bill.

Or… Sol trembles. Or he gives himself over to whatever Cornelius is harnessing and his life changes. His life becomes something he does not understand. It would be easy. 

Either choice would keep him in the role he knows—second to another man in the story of his own life.

Silna is talking louder, now. Singing, really, her voice groaning and heavy with effort. Sol doesn’t know what she’s doing, but whatever it is, it must have something to do with the creature that glimmers almost-real behind Cornelius. She takes a step toward Cornelius, and then another.

Cornelius spares her one glance, a quick sideways slash of his eyes. “Shoot her, Solomon,” he hisses. “Not me. Not after everything we’ve been through. I built you from nothing . You were barely a man after what happened to you. Now I’m giving you the chance to join something greater than you’ve ever been a part of, and you want to throw it all away?”

“You killed Gibson,” Sol says, uncertain.

“That was a mercy,” Cornelius replies, and his voice is like ice.

The creature stares down at Sol. It is becoming more corporeal by the second, its form no longer flickering or half-seen, but only slightly translucent. It looks like a massive bear, and then Sol blinks and it looks more like a lump of snow, then blinks again and its face is all too human. Its eyes, black and bottomless no matter how clear the rest of it becomes, seem to pull him in like twin whirlpools. There is no blood on its face; it is clean even as Hickey stands before it covered in blood, even as he lifts the little knife that cut so easily through Gibson’s flesh and brings it to his gore-dripping mouth.

“This is happening with or without you, Solomon,” he breathes.

He opens his mouth for the knife. Silna cries out, interrupting her own song with a sharp, guttural syllable. It takes Sol half a second to realize that it is not in her language, but English. The word is simply No!

All at once, Sol understands what is going to happen to Cornelius Hickey.

He drops the gun, flings himself forward, and tackles Cornelius to the ground.

They roll together. The knife is knocked from Cornelius’s grip and goes skittering across the floor, but not before cutting a deep gash into the side of his mouth, which begins welling blood immediately to mix with Gibson’s blood on his chin. Sol tastes iron in his own mouth as his head knocks against the floor.

He must close his eyes for an instant, because when he opens them again, he is half-crouching over Cornelius, holding him to the ground with the weight of his body, and the great white thing is leaning closer, closer, its head steady on the impossibly long neck. It opens its mouth, and instead of hot, huffing breath Sol feels a cloud of ice crystals scatter over his face, and his skin feels colder than he ever remembers it being. The teeth inside the gaping maw are needle-sharp.

I’m going to die , Sol thinks, and Cornelius makes a choking noise beneath him, the wind knocked out of his lungs.

But the creature does not strike.

Slowly, through the rushing in his ears, Sol becomes aware of another sound in the room. Silna has picked up her singing again, and as he watches, she approaches the bear on soft feet. It swings its massive head toward her and Sol sees for the first time the giant paw planted on the floor in front of him and Cornelius. He also sees the razor-sharp claws on that paw.

Silna sings, and as she sings she locks eyes with Sol. She opens and closes one hand, as if grabbing desperately.

He is too afraid to make any noise, so he just frowns at her, confused. She points to the creature, then back at him and makes the motion again. The beast sways closer to her, and Sol thinks he can read fear in her dark eyes.

The artifact, he thinks.

Cornelius is just getting his breath back, and when Sol looks down he is greeted by the most malice-filled stare he has ever seen. Cornelius’s face is distorted by rage; he almost looks like a different person. The nasty cut at the side of his mouth runs up into his mustache, which is rust-colored with his and Gibson’s blood.

“You, fucking,” he wheezes.

Sol’s spine prickles, but he seizes Cornelius’s shoulders and leans in close. “Where’s the artifact?” he hisses, his voice as quiet as he can make it. “Where is it? I know you had it.”

Cornelius grins, a flash of furious red and white, and then headbutts Sol in the nose. Sol grunts and almost falls backward, but at the last second he catches himself and throws his body back over Cornelius’s before the smaller man can get up. There are a few seconds of struggling, during which Sol is grateful that the knife was knocked away; he doesn’t doubt that Cornelius would actually stab him right now, as possessed as he seems to be by anger.

Silna’s song rises behind the two of them, and Sol actually hears the beast take another step; its weight audibly cracks the ice on the floor. It’s becoming more and more real, he realizes, and continues his search with renewed desperation.

The only light in the room still comes from the beast and Sol’s discarded torch in the corner, which spills light across the tile at an angle only helpful to illuminating the top of Cornelius’s head. He doesn’t need to search the floor for long, however; he realizes after a few heart-pounding seconds that one of Cornelius’s fists is squeezed firmly closed. As if he is hiding something within it.

Sol straddles Cornelius in one motion and grabs for his arm.

He sees Cornelius’s eyes widen and hears the hissed sound of rage. It’s less word than feeling, and Sol feels a little bit of the old fight adrenaline kick up in his chest. But it’s worse, this time: it’s tinged by fear and anger and betrayal. Blood pumping, squeezing his knees tight around Cornelius’s trapped arm and hips, Sol uses both hands to wrench Cornelius’s closed fist open, not caring that his nails dig into the skin.

Sparkling in Cornelius’s palm is the artifact. Seeing it up close, Sol realizes that it looks just like the beast before them: long neck, folded back paws, and triangular head. He twists it between his fingers. Must be ivory, or some kind of stone he’s never seen before.

There is another crunch of ice, a huff of breath, and a faint cry from Silna that interrupts her singing for just a moment before she picks up the thread again. Sol twists around, still holding Cornelius down, to see that the beast has nearly closed its jaws around Silna’s head; she is singing directly down its throat. Her eyes are wide enough that Sol can see the whites even from where he sits.

He doesn’t need to get her attention. She is staring right at him, the desperation evident in her gaze as she sings, pouring all the air from her lungs into the long, aching notes. Praying to whatever god or beast will listen, Sol winds back his arm and throws.

The artifact finds its home in Silna’s palm with a thwack . Sol goggles; somehow, with her head inside the creature’s jaws, singing an endless stream of notes, she has caught his wild throw. And as he watches, she brings the artifact up in front of her and touches it, just barely, to the side of the beast’s jaw. Her song reaches an aching, desperate climax, the notes sounding as though they come to Sol on a freezing wind, from very, very far away.

He realizes, from someplace distant, that the beast is not there anymore.

Silna slumps to her knees, her head bowed over the artifact she holds between her palms. Sol looks down at Cornelius, who is wide-eyed with impotent fury, his lips bubbling with spit and blood. As Sol watches, tears well up in his eyes and then pour over, spilling down his cheeks. They leave tracks, clean and pale, through the blood that spatters the side of his face.

From somewhere in the room, there comes the sound of water dripping: the ice is beginning to melt.

-

When Sol steps out of the room, he finds three pale, worried faces staring back at him. Tommy is holding his crowbar like a baseball bat, while Hodgson stands in Magnus’s shadow, each of them hunched over like a frightened imitation of the other. As Sol stands before them, he watches the fear in their eyes fade, cut with something like… relief?

“What should we do now, Sol?” asks Magnus finally, and Sol looks between the three of them.

In the room behind him, Silna is cuffing Cornelius, who sobs into the floor in a pool of melting ice. Sol has Cornelius’s blood all over his shirt, and Gibson’s blood too, and in his hand he holds Crozier’s unused gun. He realizes that the three men in front of him must think that there’s been a second murder. But they’re not asking where Cornelius is. They’re not asking for his next command.

They’re looking to Sol.

There’s still something here for the rest of us , he thinks, and then he sighs, shaky with relief.

“We leave,” he says by way of explanation. “Where are John and Crozier?”

“Mr. Diggle is taking the man we surprised upstairs to the hospital,” Hodgson explains, his words tripping over each other. “Mr. Crozier is in his office recovering.”

“Great,” says Sol. Relief courses through him: John will be seen by real medical professionals, he’ll be okay, this isn’t Bill again. They haven’t hurt anyone who wasn’t already part of all this.

Sol realizes that he’s been standing still for a long moment and forces a rough smile onto his face. 

“Then,” he says, “why don’t you three go wait by Gibson’s car? I’ll get his keys. And I need to talk to Crozier for a minute.”

They nod and traipse off together. Sol waits for the three of them to disappear around the corner before he steps back into the artifact room.

-

“A job, sir?” says Sol, baffled.

“A job, yes. And don’t call me sir.”

Crozier gestures to the seat in front of his desk. He looks a mess: there is dried blood running down his forehead and down the side of his nose, and he presses a cold bottle of whiskey to his skull in lieu of an ice pack. But his voice still holds a commanding tone, and the rifle rests firmly on his side of the desk, now, so Sol steps forward and falls into the seat across from him, not caring about the blood that flakes from his shirt onto the upholstery.

“I need a replacement for Silna,” Crozier explains. “Someone who understands what happened here tonight and that it cannot happen again.”

“Is she alright?” Sol asks in confusion.

Crozier sighs. “She’s fine, considering. But I’m finally letting her have her way—she’s taking the artifact back to Nunavut, her home. It’s where the thing belongs. Jane can tan my hide all she wants, but she won’t have my head, not after I explain to her what happened. And what that likely means happened to John.”

All these names and places are swirling around in Sol’s head like a tornado, and he leans to one side, planting an elbow on the chair’s arm and resting his head in his palm.

“So,” he says, “you want me to take over for her.”

“I want to add you to the roster,” Crozier corrects, raising an eyebrow. “Silna’s my best guard. You’ll have to prove yourself if you want to take that role from her.”

“And do you expect there to be many more problems of this sort?” Sol asks wryly.

Crozier pulls the whiskey bottle away from his head and places it, dripping with condensation, on the desk between the two of them.

“There had better not be,” he growls, then seems to come back to himself and adds, “but I’ve no idea what other surprises John has lurking in his vaults. The man stole everything he found that wasn’t tied down, it seems. We certainly aren’t limited to actual expedition artifacts here, and while I’d like to return everything I can, unearthing and moving the things out of the stores might cause some trouble.”

Sol nods, slow and thoughtful. It sounds like a difficult job—more difficult than one would expect the role of museum security guard to be. He certainly doesn’t want to face down any more creatures like the one he saw tonight. But it’s a steady job, and he imagines the pay is better than that of a temporary laborer on yet another of London’s skyscraper build sites.

“Deal,” he says at last, extending his hand.

Crozier looks down at Sol’s palm and the flaking blood that still covers it. “Forgive me if I don’t shake that,” he says drily.

“Ah.” Sol retracts his hand and stands up. “I look forward to working with you, then,” he adds. “And, er…” He points at the whiskey and raises a questioning eyebrow.

“Don’t push it,” says Crozier, but there is an embarrassed look in his eyes and after a pause he adds, “I’ll try not to let it be a problem again.”

Sol nods crisply and walks out.

When he emerges from the museum, there is a faint lightening in the east—not enough to be the first rays of morning, but enough to tinge the sky a slightly paler blue. The distance from the museum to the street, and to the beat-up silver car beyond, seems impossibly large. A cool night breeze brushes Sol’s cheeks and his straggly beard, and he wants to laugh, or cry, or scream. He does none of those things. He walks across the street to his men.

“Cornelius?” asks Tommy. One word, with his eyes downcast, like he isn’t sure he wants the answer.

Sol lets a breath huff out of him that he thinks he’s been holding for six years. Since Bill died, or maybe since before that. He puts his hand on Tommy’s shoulder and squeezes.

“Arrested,” he says. “For hurting John and Crozier.”

“And the rest of us?” Hodgson pipes up in a tremulous voice.

“Safe,” says Sol.

He gives no more explanation than that. He wraps his arm around Hodgson, touching Magnus’s shoulder, and pulls Tommy into the crook of his other elbow. They huddle into him, shaking with relief.

“Safe,” he repeats.