Archive of Our Own ^beta

They get the tip the same way all the others come in.

One of Caitlyn’s Enforcer buddies, interrupting dinner to pass her a note, mutter a few words, exit out the side entrance.

“Anything?” Vi asks, already standing from her seat at the table.

“Possibly,” Caitlyn says, already holding the slip of paper to her.

A routine, it is. Practiced habit with a shape all its own. Vi reads what’s in her hand and Caitlyn pulls her jacket off the back of her chair and they leave the grand Kiramman mansion behind again.

It’s a motel. They often are.

Or a warehouse, or a pub, or an old picture theatre, once.

What a way to see the sights.

////

The guy behind the front desk is short, broad, chewing on a toothpick. Caitlyn takes the lead.

“Haven’t seen anythin’,” the man says.

Caitlyn drops something onto the counter in front of him.

“The lie would be more convincing if you looked at the picture first.”

He looks. At the picture, then at her.

“Haven’t seen anythin’.”

Vi stands in the corner of the foyer with her arms folded.

Can never stomach how much talking these things involve.

“How about these two, then?” Caitlyn says.

The man—the owner, Vi figures—looks at the other pictures she puts down, on top of the first.

“Nope,” he declares. “Can’t help you.”

“I’ve spoken to four other people on this street who would bet their lives on seeing both of these women, nearby, recently, and this man-” she taps the first picture, separates it from the others “–barely a few hours ago.”

“Anybody round here ain’t got a life worth much. Bet all you want.”

Vi shifts from foot to foot.

Quiet, contained.

Still enough to get Caitlyn’s attention.

She looks over her shoulder at Vi, her eyes pinched in the most subtle way, and Vi meets her gaze. Runs her tongue around the inside of her teeth. Breathes out through her nose. Lifts a shoulder, only enough for Caitlyn to notice.

Caitlyn turns back to the unhelpful clown at the desk.

“To be abundantly clear,” she says, leaning into his space, “these women and their associates are wanted in relation to the terrorist attack on the Piltover Council. Your recalcitrant behaviour is an obstruction of justice.”

“Sorry, honey. I don’t speak Topsider.”

“There are serious consequences for refusing to provide the information I think it’s very likely that you have.”

“How’s that? Gonna arrest me for havin’ a lousy memory?”

“One has a metal arm, and the other has blue hair and tattoos,” Caitlyn says, jaw set, by the sounds of it. “These are hardly forgettable people.”

The man at the desk leans back in his chair and gives her a long, slow look, over all the parts of her he can see.

Vi watches, unmoving.

Try it, asshole. Try whatever you want.

“We get all types,” he says, finally. “You stop payin’ attention.”

Caitlyn straightens herself. Takes the pictures back. Looks right, where an Enforcer loiters at the bottom of a wooden staircase, and back to the man.

“I don’t suppose you’ll mind us having a look around for ourselves, then,” she says. Not a request. “Checking the rooms. Talking to some of your guests.”

The man shrugs, picking at his teeth. “Hope you got a strong stomach.”

////

They don’t find anything.

They never do, unless you count the person who mistook a street vendor for Sevika the other week or the airship attendant who thought he’d spotted the unnamed man they’re only half-certain is with her, and Vi doesn’t.

She stands in the middle of the last room on the top floor while the owner spews curses in the hall and Caitlyn stares out the window, as if the grubby street below could hold more than the whole building has.

“Fuck.”

Caitlyn crosses to her, face creased. Eyes tired. They’re both so tired.

She rests a hand on Vi’s arm.

It does little to her desire to pick up everything in the room and hurl it out that window.

“Whatever,” Vi says, like she’s responding to something. “Let’s go.”

The building doesn’t have an elevator.Vi thumps down the stairs with her fists clenched and her eyes unfocused.

Another dead end. No idea why it makes her quite this furious, at this point. Should be comforting. The consistency. The fucking inevitability.

Pointless.

Pointless.

Pointless.

A man crosses her path on the third floor landing. Vi hears him coming, heavy steps on the way up, boots and brawn. Feels his scrutiny. Meets his gaze, only a fraction of a second, but it’s long enough to focus her eyes in his and his eyes in hers and for both of them to know exactly what’s going to happen next.

He shoulder-checks her. Hard. No reason other than he can.

She shoves him. Hard. No other reason than that’s what a person does.

He slams into the wall by the bottom of the stairs just as Caitlyn gets there—she jerks back, arm out to the officers behind her, head snapping to find Vi waiting at the top of the next flight, daring this random man twice her size to shift off the wall and step forward and make something of their little altercation.

Comprehension flits across Caitlyn’s face. Her arm lowers.

“Leave it,” she says—to the other officers, mostly. And also not.

The asshat against the wall studies Vi.

Vi braces.

This is how these things go, isn’t it?

He shoves her, she shoves him, and now they’re going to get into it until one of them’s unconscious. Stillwater taught her that. Rules of the jungle.

He doesn’t move.

Whatever. She can get things going herself. Step forward and put her fist into his gut and see where that gets them.

Then he shifts, only enough to not be leaning against the wall anymore. He tilts his head. Spits on the floor, without breaking eye contact. And turns to keep on up the stairs.

His glob of frothy mucus turns the floorboards darker where it landed.

Vi looks at it, anger giving way to confusion.

She looks at Caitlyn, who’s looking at her, and then she can’t look at anything anymore.

She hits the stairs, brushes past some other asshole—Hey!—makes it outside and stares at the sky. Her hands feel empty. Like she’s forgotten something. It’s cold and the air’s crisp and she never wants to be inside again.

She breathes in, and it doesn’t satsify.

She breathes out, and some of it stays trapped.

She coughs. Gulps. Clenches her fists tight enough to feel something, even if it’s the way her fingers ache, her joints flaring in pain. Closes her eyes and breathes in some more, like maybe it’ll work better if she practices.

God, what the fuck.

The look on that man’s face.

Must think he’s got it all figured out. A Zaunite teamed up with a bunch of Pilties, an ex-con palling around with Enforcers, helping turn her home city upside down to oust her own sister, her blood, her last remaining family.

Yeah.

She’d spit at her, too.

////

There’s a bag strung up under the walkway round the courtyard behind the mansion, hanging off one of the crossbeams. Somebody put it there, for her. Vi’s never asked who thought of it.

Most nights after dinner, after everyone’s asleep, or even, fuck it, before that, she’ll strip off a layer or two of clothes and go out in the chill night air and beat the shit out of it until the leather changes colour and her arms go numb.

It doesn’t help.

////

The next one is a butcher shop.

Like they’re gonna find Powder holed up in a display case between the steaks and the sausages.

They don’t, obviously, and the unblinking way Caitlyn orders a thorough search all the same, the unflinching way she rattles off her list of questions to the butcher who clearly has no idea what the hell is going on, is almost comical.

Vi takes up her new habit of standing outside and forgetting how to breathe.

Another hit. Another miss.

They nearly found her.

They didn’t.

She can’t figure out what’s more of a relief.

“Come on,” Caitlyn says, very quietly. Vi hadn’t realised she was even there, here, outside with her. Her face comes into focus too slow. Why isn’t she having as much trouble breathing as Vi is? “Next time. We’ll aim for next time.”

////

This is the overall problem, Vi decides.

Time.

She can never seem to get the ratio right.

Can’t wrangle it, no matter how tight she thinks she’s got it by the throat, how hard she squeezes, or how careful she thinks she’s being with it barely in her grasp.

Her parents. Dead. Suddenly.

Vander. There. Briefly.

Her siblings. Dead. Early.

Then Stillwater. An eternity she couldn’t shake.

And now, hours, days and weeks zip by at lightspeed, and Powder gets further and further away barely a fucking minute after Vi had finally, finally, got her back, and what’s she doing?

Watching it happen.

Helping it along.

A clock she keeps winding forward, or a countdown she’s cheering the fuck on. Like that isn’t a well-established way to make a bomb go off.

Except for the moments it feels more like father time’s got her by the throat himself, drop-kicking her into the past faster than she can blink. When a memory rises up to meet her like a tidal wave and she can’t do anything but let it crash down and take her with it.

Can not get it right.

////

Powder has a thing for juice. Orange juice.

Some days, she won’t eat or drink anything. Doesn’t feel like it, doesn’t want it, isn’t hungry. Vi can at least get her to drink a big glass of the stuff, with a bunch of ice, because she likes the cold and the crunch.

Used to be, Vi would tear her hair out trying to think of things Pow would eat. Now she tells herself something is better than nothing, and tomorrow she can switch back to tempting her with whatever food she can cobble together in the kitchen that belongs to the Drop but only gets used by them.

“It’s a pub,” Vander’d say. “Don’t need a stovetop to serve beer.”

Vi’s reading on her bed when the door slams.

Powder stomps in, throwing her bag down under the shelves Vi put up last year.

Vi rolls onto her side, focused on her book.

“Some of us are trying to concentrate.”

Powder responds by tearing her cardigan over her head.

Vi takes the bait with a sigh.

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.”

Her boots join the pile.

Vi lets her book fall shut. Tries to gauge where on the scale this particular kinda meltdown might sit.

“What’s wrong with your shoes?”

“They’re wet.”

“Why’re they wet?”

“Because Jake Gordon is a—a—it doesn’t matter, just—ugh-”

She’s bent over, struggling with a sock. They’re wet, too, it seems, soggy and sticking to her.

Powder’s hands are shaking, is part of the issue. She sniffs, wipes angrily at her nose with her forearm.

“Hang on, hang on—you’re gonna fall over.”

Vi drops down from the top bunk to crouch in front of her, and Powder lifts her foot up, holding onto Vi’s shoulders to balance.

“Take a breath,” Vi tells her, sticking her fingers between the damp fabric and the cold skin of her ankle. “With me. C’mon.”

Vi breathes in, deep and deliberate and loud, and Powder follows along.

In, and out.

Together.

Until Vi’s got Pow’s feet bare and dry, and her hands aren’t so shaky. She sorts through the top drawer of their shared dresser, holds up specimen after specimen until Powder’s picked a fresh pair of socks she’s happy with.

“Up,” Vi says, helping her get them on.

She’s too big to be fussed over like this, really. Vi does it anyway.

“So,” she says, once she’s got a clean jumper on, too, and they’re sitting on the bottom bunk. “What’s the deal with this Jake Gordon kid?”

“He called me Orange Breath.”

“What?”

“Because of the drink.”

Vi sighs at the underside of her bunk. Doesn’t even make sense, but the things that hurt us the most rarely do.

“And what’d you do?”

“I… yelled at him to shut up.”

“Good. Little punk.”

“But he wouldn’t. He just… kept saying it. A lot. So I yelled at him again. A lot.”

“Sounds like he needed to be yelled at again.”

“Yeah, but…” Powder sighs, deep and endless. The sigh of someone much, much older.

“What?”

“He wasn’t saying anything. Then. I think he only said it the once.”

Vi resists, barely, the urge to say, Oh.

“Stupid,” Powder mutters, picking at her fingers, at her skin. “He called me a freak and he pushed me into the gutter, and it was all blocked up from the rain and I had to walk home with my feet—with my shoes all watery and squelching, and-”

Vi reaches to still her hands. She’ll make herself bleed.

“That sucks. You hate getting your feet wet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m just stupid.”

“Okay, well, first of all, the only person who gets to call you stupid is me, okay?”

“Like you’d know, you’re the king of stupid.”

“If I’m the king of stupid then I’m an expert on stupid and I would know.”

“That’s not how kings work, stupid.”

“That’s King Stupid to you, peasant.”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, you did it right that time.”

Vi makes sure to grin when she says it, makes sure to squeeze her wrists.

Powder laughs, almost, shoving at her. Then she sobers, because there’s no joke in the world good enough to reshape what they’re staring at, and Vi has to watch her eyes fill and shine and her lips twist together.

She tries the other thing. The sitting-back-properly, tugging-at-her, opening-her-arms thing.

“C’mere, piglet.”

Her little sister crawls onto her lap with her head down, settles with her hands gripping Vi’s shirt.

Vi wraps her up. Rocks her, the way she sometimes rocks herself when she needs to feel the motion.

“I wish my brain were different,” Powder whispers.

Vi holds her tighter.

“You don’t ever have to wish that,” she tells her. “Your brain is incredible.”

“It’s broken. It’s broken and it’s loud and I don’t understand why I—why it’s so loud. I hate it.”

“Come on, it’s not broken.”

“Nobody else does it. You and Clag and Mylo and—None of the other kids talk to things that aren’t there or—or think things they don’t wanna think and I—I—I’m wrong, why am I all wrong?”

“You’re not wrong. You’re just different.”

“I don’t wanna be different.”

Like every time they have this conversation.

Vi sighs, and keeps holding on to her. The least she can do.

It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. Like everything she does in moments like now with problems like this.

What good is she against an enemy she can’t pummel with her fists?

What use is she now?

Some protector.

Some fucking sister.

Useless.

Useless.

Useless.

Vi closes her eyes against the thought. Rests her head back on the wall and holds Powder close.

It gives her an idea.

Vi swallows, and says quietly, “We’re the same, you know.”

Powder sniffles. Looks up at her with wide eyes. It’s as if the thought that Vi, that her big bold sister, the one with the fists and the eyes and the hair, could relate to any of Powder’s countless weaknesses had never, ever occurred to her.

Vi’s not so sure revealing the truth is the right move.

Powder’s looking so hopeful, though. So hopeful and so sad.

“You hear it, too?” she whispers.

Vi opens her mouth. Closes it.

She thinks about how tired she gets.

Tired of telling herself she’s not doing enough, not being enough, but has to keep going anyway. That people are relying on her, and it’d be easier if they wouldn’t, and that’s terrible, because she loves them, and don’t you help the people you love, what kind of person doesn’t want to help the people they love, and on goes the deafening feedback loop, forever.

What happens when it’s late, and she can’t sleep.

Can’t close her eyes, or she’ll see the bridge, like it was years ago, on fire, and her mother, dead and open-eyed, staring at nothing.

Can’t hear anything at all over the sound of it all burning.

Can’t stop herself, on some nights, from wishing she’d burned up, too.

“My own version,” she says, pushing it all aside. It’s not important—not the point of this conversation. “Everyone’s got a shitty voice in their head they don’t wanna listen to.”

Powder wipes at her face.

“What do you do about it?”

Do?

What is there to do?

Can’t admit that, though—the thought that there’s not anything to do except endure it. Ride the wave. Wait it out.

That’s her truth.

It’s not gonna be Powder’s.

“Hit the bag for a bit,” Vi says, wracking her brains. “Go scout Topside with the boys. Just... gotta do something, I guess.”

“Does it help?”

“Helps me ignore it.” She shrugs. “Then I can get on with stuff.”

Powder narrows her eyes. She’s gone from fidgeting with Vi’s collar to playing with her hair. “You’re not very good at this.”

Vi swipes at her hand. Doesn’t much like her hair being touched, either.

“It’s not the boss of me, I mean,” she says. “I just don’t think about it. I’m in charge. Just like you’re in charge of you.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

Powder’s right—Vi is not very good at this.

She wishes she had the words, the power to take all this pain away, to take it on for herself, if she had to, or—Jesus—to pull the rest of the world in line so Powder didn’t have such a hard time moving around in it.

Can’t even think about it, most days.

Makes her want to put her fist through a wall.

“You just have to keep trying. Every day, no matter what. Figure out what helps you feel better and then… do that.”

“Like hitting a big bag full of sand?”

Vi smiles at the dig. Jostles her. “I think your thing is gonna involve, like, those little robots you make, or something else ultra-clever.”

“They’re not robots, they’re inventions,” she defends, eyeing off the desk in the corner, covered in papers and scrap metal and whatever tools Vi’s been able to scrounge for her. “And they’re my friends.”

“See? Your brain—it’s the coolest. Like, nobody else on the planet would’ve figured out how to fix the beer taps on their own, and you did that when you were nine. You’re basically superpowered.”

“Tell that to Jake Gordon.”

“Jake Gordon can die in a ditch.”

“You can’t say that, that’s horrible!”

“I hope—I hope he gets real bad diarrhoea, and all his teeth fall out.”

“Ew!”

“Whatever, he deserves it.”

“How’s he gonna eat with no teeth?”

“That’s the point! Like…”

Vi curls her lips over her teeth and takes a bite at the air. Makes a nom sound, for the theatrics of it.

Powder joins in, giggling.

They do it together - om, nom, nom - until they’re both cackling, and Powder shoves her hand at Vi’s mouth and Vi pretends to bite it off.

“You really are stupid,” Powder says, some of the light back in her eyes already.

Resilient, this kid. Vi wishes she didn’t have to be, but thanks the stars it worked out that way.

“And you taste delicious.”

Powder yanks her hand away, shrieking, and Vi sets to chasing her around the room trying to eat her.

“I’m gonna get you if you don’t hurry!” she yells, stalking around their bedroom while Powder laughs and flees from corner to corner.

And Vi does get her, eventually. Same as ever, when they play this game. Almost like something they agreed upon, one day, wordlessly.

Powder wouldn’t know what to do if she won, and Vi wouldn’t know what to do if she lost.

So she doesn’t, and she doesn’t.

////

They go shooting.

Tobias’s idea. Could be he’s spotted the frayed edges of his daughter and the woman who keeps following her around. Could be he just wants them out of the house.

Before Vi can argue, Caitlyn does it for them.

“There’s too much going on,” she says, when he brings it up over breakfast. “We can hardly leave town for a—a field trip.”

“I think it will help,” her father counters, with the patience of a saint. “Get some target practice in. Keep your skills sharp. And your mind.”

“Dad…”

“It’ll be good for you,” he adds—can sense her wavering. “Get some fresh air. Take some time.”

Vi glowers at her empty plate. Couldn’t pick a food again today.

You seriously think we have that luxury?

She bites it back.

Not his fault they’re in uncharted waters. He’s a Kiramman. They’re Pilties. Not like most, but enough like many. Luxury is the name of the game.

Imagine, having so much power over a thing like time, you can take more whenever you want.

“Let’s do it,” Vi says.

Tobias is smart. Worth listening to, Vi’s learning.

No point pretending they aren’t both all but climbing the walls as it is.

“You want to?” Caitlyn asks, more surprised than anything.

“Yeah,” she says. “If you promise not to shoot me.”

////

They travel north, she thinks—headed towards the mountains. By the time they stop, it can’t still be Piltover. Too many trees. Trees and grass and flowers, streams and stone and sunlight. Sunlight for miles and miles and miles.

Caitlyn stands in a beam of it, like the wilderness has been waiting for her. Reserved her a place, all special.

Vi smiles.

Smiles.

She can’t help it.

The further they got from Piltover, the lighter the air around them started to feel.

The air between them, too.

It’ll all go back the way it was the moment they’re back in the city, Vi knows. For now, she’ll enjoy the relief of being able to breathe for once.

She watches from a distance as Caitlyn sets the butt of her rifle against the seam of her shoulder and aims it down the length of the field at something Vi can’t even see.

She holds her position.

And holds.

Crack.

The air splits.

If there’s any recoil, Vi doesn’t see the impact. Caitlyn stays perfectly, entirely still.

Until she relaxes, hand shifting to the bolt handle, pulling it up and out and leaving it there, muzzle pointed safely down, one smooth movement. The empty cartridge tinkles on the gravel at her feet.

Vi squints.

“Did you hit it?”

Caitlyn turns, smirking. “Like you even have to ask.”

She trots over, happy with herself. Starts talking about where the other targets are, and how many they can make it to before sundown, and whether Vi wants to have a try.

She’s excited. Energised.

Vi’s rarely seen it, outside the whole… mission thing. The cause.

Excitement related to the hunt for your mother’s killer can’t be worth much of anything.

Ten or so targets later, they eat together under the cover of an old gazebo at the edge of the field, on a rug Josephine must have packed them when she packed up all the food they told her not to bother with. Caitlyn’s rifle rests in its open case by her side. Vi knows enough to be able to tell she hasn’t reloaded it, the bolt handle shifted out of place, the chamber visibly empty.

She’s never understood guns. Always figured if you’re going up against another person, the least you can do is get right in their face. Confront the thing head-on, or not at all.

The possibility of doling out damage from a hundred yards away must make it easy to pretend you’re not doing anything, Vi thinks.

Can only imagine how addictive that’d be.

“What is that?”

Caitlyn follows Vi’s eyeline, to the pattern standing out in relief against the wooden butt of her weapon.

“The family crest,” she says, swallowing a piece of fruit. “Kind of a… brand, of sorts. Don’t laugh.”

“Is that silver?”

“Only sterling. I know it seems silly.”

“Can’t imagine stamping my name on something like that, that’s all. It’s extravagant. But it’s cute, too.”

“Says the person with their name stamped on the side of their face.”

Vi touches her cheek, where the tattoo is.

Fair.

Caitlyn’s never asked about her tattoos. Never asks about her scars, either, not the ones she’s seen, at least. Her curiosity must be eating her alive.

Vi thinks about telling her. All of it. Gonna happen one of these days, isn’t it?

A matter of time. Like everything.

“Joking,” Caitlyn says, to her silence. “It’s… This is my mother’s rifle, actually.”

“Oh yeah?”

“They’re similar. Hers is… Well, older, for one. An antique, basically. It’s probably a bit sacrilegious that I’m using it, but…”

Vi nudges her with her knee, needing this to not be so serious. Wanting the weightlessness to last as long as it can.

Hell of a thing to want, when it’s all dead mothers and missing sisters and hardly any space between.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Vi offers.

Caitlyn smiles. “Deal.”

Vi’s finishes her second sandwich, Caitlyn her first. She lies back on the rug and looks up at the weather-eaten wooden rafters in the roof of the gazebo. And she looks at Vi, resting on her bent knee next to her.

He hand finds its way to Vi’s ankle. A casual touch.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Vi wishes they could stay here forever.

She picks a different thought to give a voice to.

“I didn’t know your mom was into all this, too. Shooting. Even if she pointed a gun at me when we met.”

“She introduced me to it, in fact. Much to my father’s dismay.”

“She did?”

Caitlyn hums, eyes back on the rafters, unfocused. “Before Grayson, she’d take me out on weekends, sometimes. Just like this. To all sorts of places she liked when she’d been my age. We’d spend hours just, practicing. Walking. Talking. It only happened about once a month, if that, with the Council and… everything. But I loved it.”

Vi takes in the field before them. The mountains, huge. Thinks of the easy way Caitlyn’s pointed out every landmark, leading Vi from target to target with passion and pride.

“This was one of those places.”

A small smile reshapes her mouth. “The first we ever visited together. It became a favourite.”

Vi breathes in the air with new significance.

She’d spent the day meeting a little piece of Caitlyn Kiramman’s heart, and she hadn’t even realised.

“Anyway,” Caitlyn says, sitting up to wipe at her eyes, sniff. Take another piece of fruit. “Just your average mother-daughter bonding, full of gun safety lectures and target practice.”

Vi rubs her arm in a way she hopes is comforting.

“I bet it was the lectures that really drew you in.”

She tosses a blueberry at her. “Very funny.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Okay then,” Vi says, leaning on an elbow beside her, enjoying the warm breeze and this new direction of their conversation. “Enlighten me.”

“I… I liked the mechanics of it all, at first, I suppose. They’re incredible machines. And weapons, and very dangerous, of course, that’s all true, but that’s not what I saw. Not initially.”

How unlike you, Vi thinks. Looking at something most people have made up their minds about in a way nobody else would bother with.

“I was already following Jayce around, watching him pull things apart and put them back together, or building things from scratch, and Mother... she pounced on that, I think. I wasn’t allowed to shoot a rifle until I could successfully disassemble and reassemble one.”

“Yikes.”

“It’s discipline. That’s what she… It was about discipline. Patience. Focus. Respect, too. The responsibility of owning one is not insignificant.”

“So you’re like, her star pupil, then.”

“I don’t think I was, generally.” Caitlyn idly plays with the sleeve of Vi’s jacket. “I didn’t want a teacher. I wanted my mother.”

Vi thinks of Vander. Of the things he taught her, or tried to, and how it helped, even when it didn’t seem like it would.

She listens to leaves fall out of the trees around the gazebo and thinks of Powder, too.

“There was this arcade thing, not far from the Drop, when we were kids,” Vi says. “With a shooting gallery. Little creatures painted on bits of wood that popped up. Powder was… she was so good at it.”

“Really?”

“Never missed. No idea where she got it from. She was just… clever, like that. Really clever.”

Caitlyn’s eyebrows lift upwards.

“I wish you… you could’ve known her, back then,” Vi says. “Known Powder. You would’ve gotten on pretty well.”

Caitlyn takes that in. Vi’s reminded she has so few pieces of the sister Vi grew up with. Of the girl she prayed would still be alive and waiting for her if—when—she ever got free from that shithole they put her in.

“Then it’s probably for the best that I didn’t,” Caitlyn says. She’s still fidgeting with Vi’s sleeve.

“Why?”

“Because I have a job to do. And I already know it’s much harder to do it if you care too much about someone involved.”

Vi doesn’t say anything to that.

Wouldn’t know where to begin.

////

The carriage takes them back towards the city far faster than it managed to get them out of it.

Feels unfair.

Caitlyn watches the trees turn into buildings out the window, and Vi watches her watching. Can see her mind growing preoccupied already, reality getting its hooks in once more.

She rests her hand on Caitlyn’s, on the seat between them. Her touch breaks the spell—Caitlyn looks at her, a faint question in her eyes.

“Hey,” Vi says, like they haven’t spent the whole day together. Caitlyn’s eyes are warm. Something of their day together lingering.

Vi lifts her hand to kiss the back of it, and Caitlyn’s fingers unfurl to hold her cheek, her thumb stroking. Indulging her. Vi's eyes drift closed. They’re indulging each other.

Caitlyn shifts closer, and Vi opens her eyes only so she can tilt her head up and close them again when Caitlyn kisses her.

It’s warm, fleeting. A sentence in a conversation.

Enough to mean something, and not enough to imply anything that could add weight to their circumstances.

Things weigh enough as it is, for now, and Piltover is getting closer and closer by the second. Vi’s never sure how much further any particular scale can be tipped without the whole thing toppling. It’s the same with their sleeping arrangements, or the occasional times they’ve showered together. Sometimes it’s within reaching distance and sometimes it’s not. They pick their moments. The general agreement, their lives being what they are.

So it surprises them both that when Caitlyn pulls away now, Vi’s hands grip the front of her dress and she leans in to press her mouth more deliberately against Caitlyn’s.

Moment picked.

Their mouths slot together, and they exhale into it, and there’s a hand at the base of Vi’s throat, and Caitlyn’s head tilts and her lips part and her fingers press into the skin there, seeking. She finds the collar of Vi’s shirt. Pulls.

“Come here-”

Vi goes where Caitlyn wants her. Helps her lean back against the side of the carriage and slides her hand into her hair to hold the back of her head and keep kissing her, slow, careful, until Vi’s lips tingle and she has to stop to breathe. She breaks it, reluctant. Pants. Stays close.

Caitlyn’s fingers stroke at the nape of Vi’s neck. She sighs quietly, nosing at Vi’s jaw.

“Sorry,” Vi murmurs, not sure why. She presses a kiss to her temple, hopes it’s soothing, hopes it says more than words can. “I just…”

Things could so easily go another way.

Things could be different, and still might, tonight or tomorrow or next week.

One day, Caitlyn might change her mind.

One day, Vi might make her.

Time’s so goddamn unpredictable.

For now, Vi lets herself imagine an alternative so vivid it feels an awful lot like reality.

“I know,” Caitlyn says, soft, and the hand on Vi’s shoulder comes round to her cheek—its favourite place, it seems. She says it again, and Vi believes her. “I know.”

////

Some nights they sit in the living room with the fire going.

Caitlyn reads, journals, goes over her notes from the day, or the day before that, or the day before that that that.

“I think we’re getting closer,” she’ll say, not looking up.

Vi will hum, spread out on the rug, focused on unwinding a fresh roll of fabric for her arms. The wrappings she had on need a wash. Again. Filthy.

“We’re gonna run out of city soon,” Vi will respond, as if that’s even possible.

Lately it feels like the cities are their own planets. Bigger than she ever realised.

It’s just easier than saying anything else that comes to mind.

“We’ll find her,” says Caitlyn, to herself, to whatever’s in front of her. “We will.”

Vi will only hum, if she’ll make any noise at all.

Caitlyn, who thinks they might not actually be drowning in a sea of possibilities, and Vi, who can’t imagine finding a way to float.

No room for, And what happens if we do?

None at all for, And what happens if we don’t?

No point thinking about your next step when you can’t get past your first.

So the fire, and the living room, and silence, largely. Sitting around with their growing collection of things they don’t talk about.

Sometimes, Mr Kiramman is in his armchair with the newspaper or a book, or dozing with his glasses resting on the end of his nose. He goes to his office during the day, joins them either side of that, if they’re here, if they’re eating or sitting together outside of one of their bedrooms. He always looks tired. He doesn’t often speak.

Caitlyn will frown at her notes, chew on the end of her pen, get up. She’ll pause by her father, squeeze his shoulder. Shift his newspaper or remove his reading glasses, if he’s dozed off. And goes upstairs, relocates to her room to stare at the map and the papers and the pictures spread out on the floor and think, if Vi had to guess, Shit.

Vi stays where she is. Cuts a length off her roll of fabric, tucks it in the crease between her thumb and forefinger, starts winding. Round and round and round and round.

////

It starts to look like a checklist.

Tip, search, fail.

Information, investigate, nothing.

The attic of a restaurant in Piltover.

A workshop, eerily close to the one Vi and her siblings broke into all those years ago, the thing that started all this, in a way, the thing that brought them to this point.

An abandoned shopfront that used to be a clothing store.

Tick, tick, tick.

Tock, tock, tock.

////

“We need to ditch the reward thing.”

Caitlyn’s unpacking her bag—her battered journal, a sleeve of ammunition. They’ve just returned from inspecting an airship that docked overnight. Somebody thought they saw a large woman with brown skin and a prosthetic arm sneak into it. If they did, she’s not there anymore.

“What’s that?” Caitlyn asks, distracted by her task. Or maybe it’s Vi who’s the distraction.

“The reward,” Vi says. She sits on the end of Caitlyn’s bed, expecting her to turn around. “All those posters with Ji—with her face on them. It’s not helping.”

“We have more information than we’ve ever had.”

“False starts and dead ends. More excuses to chase our tails every other day.”

“That’s the process, Vi. Gather information. Investigate.”

“People will say anything if they think it’ll net them some coin.”

“I know it’s frustrating-”

Vi huffs a laugh. It multiplies, gains footing. Gets louder.

“Frustrating,” Vi declares, marvelling at it. “You can say that again.”

“She’s out there somewhere,” Caitlyn says, taking more things out of her bag and dumping them on her desk with force. “She has to be.”

“You know we’re looking for someone other than Powder, right?”

“You mean Jinx.”

“You keep talking as if we’re only looking for one person. I thought Sevika was on the list, too.”

“You can’t tell me you’re as interested in finding Sevika as you are in finding-”

“No, but it’d be nice to know you’re not single-mindedly hunting my sister.”

Caitlyn’s finished with her bag. She buckles it, shoves it away from her like she can’t look at it anymore.

“We’re not going to get any closer to bloody anyone without providing an incentive to people who might be able to help.”

“What, you don’t think they’ll do it out of the goodness of their hearts?”

“Vi.”

“So much for believing in people. Helping unite and—and heal. Or did that only count until your mother got blown up?”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Vi can’t deny that’s why she said it.

She just needs to see something—anything—crack this goddamn veneer Caitlyn’s walking around behind all the time.

She just needs to see something real.

Caitlyn doesn’t move. Except for her hand, which Vi can see is gripping the edge of her desk so hard her knuckles change colour.

“The reward stays,” she says. “That’s the end of it.”

Considering it’s not an answer, it somehow manages to be one.

////

Waking up is a crapshoot involving one of too many possibilities.

She’ll wake tense, prepared. Always a reason to wake up, a noise, a footstep, a shout. The clanging of her cell door. Reality comes back with stealth; an ache in her shoulder that wasn’t always there, the gap at the back of her mouth where a tooth used to be. A need to pee that she doesn’t have to smother. Sheets, blankets, pillows, warmth... Silence. She can breathe. She’s not there anymore. She used to be. It’s done.

She’ll wake slow. Comfortable. In Caitlyn's room, Caitlyn’s bed, she’ll register the feeling of another person curled next to her, against her, around her. She'll hum at it, at this, a recognition, and her mind will stay quiet, for a while. It’ll be dark. It was always dark. Her eyes will snap open and she’ll remember so much about that darkness, as if she never left it. Except she did. And she can again. She does. Gets up, leaves the warmth of the bed and the woman in it behind, washes her face over the bathroom sink and tries not to vibrate at the contrast between the place she slept in then and the place she sleeps in now.

Vi comes to realise her life exists in two halves.

Before Stillwater, and after.

The worst is waking without any confusion at all. When consciousness finds her with a half in each hand and smacks them together so loud it’s what wakes her in the first place. Flung into existence, gasping. She sits up. Scrambles, like she can get away from it.

And she can’t.

////

Breakfast offers no reprieve.

Sitting at the table, to Tobias’s left, if he’s here, or that chair anyway, if he isn’t, opposite Caitlyn, who might also be here, but also might not, and consider the fine crockery and the silverware and the mountains and mountains of food.

Hell.

It didn’t start out like this, but time has a way of ruining everything, doesn’t it.

“Are you alright?”

Tobias’s voice barely reaches her. He’s more observant than Caitlyn, more able to spot these moments of weakness, even when his daughter is too caught up in her journal or her notes or whatever other fuel for her obsession has her attention already, even this early in the morning.

It’s the damn pastries.

One has apple in it. An old favourite of hers, on the few occasions she’s had to try one.

Another’s purple. Blueberry. She can’t remember what blueberries taste like. She’d like to.

Another, red. Probably strawberry. Too sweet, even for her. But. Still.

There’s toast. Fresh bread, with seeds in it. Toast means butter. Butter’s good. And toast—toast goes with everything. If she has toast she can have bacon—there’s bacon, too, and beans and cooked vegetables, and shit, they are three entire people, and Caitlyn’s hardly eating these days so she barely counts. Probably the kitchen staff are acting out of pure boredom.

The eggs smell incredible. Josephine, the head cook, puts some kind of herbs in them.

Vi fiddles with her spoon and can’t figure how a pile of food she didn’t have to cook herself could be so stressful.

Tobias clears his throat. Vi looks at him, and finds him looking at her.

“Sorry,” she says, caught out.

He looks confused.

The crunch of Caitlyn biting into a piece of toast fills a bit of the silence. She’s reading some papers, a pen in her free hand.

“Are you not hungry?”

Vi’s eyes go back to the food laid out so carefully in front of them.

Her hands are sweating. Her lips are dry.

She misses when some bastard would shove the same cold porridge in the same metal bowl with the same dirty spoon at her, same time every morning, for years and years and years and years.

Huh. Prison.

Fight To Survive, But You’ll Never Have To Decide What To Eat!

She can’t decide.

She can’t decide.

She can’t decide.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Can’t decide that, either.

“Yeah,” Vi says, standing. Caitlyn looks up, brow furrowed, mid-chew. “I’ll just—eat later.”

////

A warehouse. Abandoned.

Ain’t that always the way.

“Eyes open, gentlemen,” says Caitlyn, eyeing off the large, dark building ahead of them. “Remember what we talked about. In through the eastern side. Quietly. Torches up, weapons drawn. If anything moves, shoot it. Questions?”

A chorus of No, ma’am, or otherwise silent agreement.

Vi's not sure she heard right.

“Good, then,” says Caitlyn. “Let’s go.”

“Wait-”

She puts her hand in the crease of Caitlyn’s elbow. Caitlyn glances at her hand, then at her, a deep frown in place.

“What?”

“Shoot it? That’s—Are you serious?”

“I wouldn’t say it if I weren’t.”

Vi stares at her.

Behind Caitlyn, the small collection of officers they’ve brought with them for this latest chapter of the hunt are shifting towards the warehouse they’re all here to look at.

It’s the undercity, it’s night, and it’s a bad idea all round.

Not a single warehouse in this part of the town’s actually abandoned.

They’re gonna find all kinds of fun shit in there, people or property or perfectly legal stockpiles of valuables the good people of Zaun have to smuggle into their side of the bridge lest the topsiders tariff it all to hell. Not any of it’s going to resemble what—who—they’re really here to find.

In any case, Vi’s here because being not-here isn’t an option and not because she’s interested in watching some trigger-happy Enforcer half-accidentally shoot her sister in the face.

“It’s a—a figure of speech,” Caitlyn says then, impatience palpable. She shifts her arm out of Vi’s loose grip. “We’re not here to waste time.”

Vi snorts. “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

“You can’t say that about every lead we get.”

“I can about the stupid ones.”

“Stop it.” Caitlyn steps to her, her voice low. “Now is not the time for this.”

There’s that word again—time.

Vi wishes she’d stop speaking of it as if she has any real understanding of the concept.

She relents, if only because it’s dark and late and cold and a side street in the ass end of the undercity is not, no, the best spot for a heated argument. Whatever. The warehouse’ll prove her right in five minutes anyways.

“Alright, cupcake,” Vi says, hands up to appease her. “After you.”

It’s quiet, the closer they get. There’s a couple streetlights lit up by the fence line but nothing any closer.

They step onto the property and all Enforcers lift their rifles, most with torches clipped to the barrels. Wide beams of light carve up the path ahead.

There’s chains and padlocks on the door.

They get to work on it and for a brief second Vi’s mind betrays her.

Caitlyn’s watching the other officers bust in as quiet as they can with her fingertip at rest by the trigger of her rifle, and it feels as if someone useful might materialise inside whether they started out there or not just by sheer force of Caitlyn Kiramman willing it to happen.

It doesn’t.

The lock breaks, the chains pulled aside, the Enforcers file in, and their only reward is an airship’s worth of tinned food and textiles.

Spaghetti and silk. What a horror show.

“Wow,” Vi says, poking at a crate as if it might spring to life and shapeshift into a person of interest. “Thank goodness you brought all them bullets, huh?”

Caitlyn says nothing.

////

Caitlyn says nothing a long time, in the end.

Nothing the whole trip back towards Piltover, nothing the whole journey into the city proper, nothing the whole walk through the tall iron gates of the Kiramman manor and across the drive and up the front steps and through the main entrance and into the foyer.

Her silence would be lighter if the not-speaking weren’t paired with the not-looking or the not-touching. Which it is.

Vi makes for the sitting room. She’s thinking about pulling off her boots and her jacket and her hand wraps and piling them into the fireplace.

Caitlyn says something.

“Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

Vi stops by the arm rest of one of the sofas.

The chandelier high up overhead lights the room in an uneven glow she can’t get used to. Can’t get used to the idea of a room being lit without anyone in it, either.

“You’re gonna have to be more specific,” Vi mutters, not turning around.

“Do you know where she is?”

“Do I… what?”

“Do you know where your sister is?”

Vi’s face goes slack. She stares straight ahead.

The fire isn’t burning. Shame.

“Why would you ask me that?”

A light thud behind her. Caitlyn dropping her bag in the entryway. The flop of her gloves landing on the tiles next to it.

“You know why.”

Vi scoffs. It’s not fair of her, but neither’s this line of questioning.

Not like she hasn’t thought about it.

Catalogued, over and over, the handful of places she knows with certainty Powder might go to hide, lick her wounds, camp out. To survive. In Caitlyn’s mind it must look more like planning, plotting, any number of evildoings, or preparations for them.

Half the places she’s not even sure still exist. Another thing taken by time.

The Last Drop’s still in tact, and so obvious it isn’t even worth checking.

The old arcade. Or what’s left of it.

Babette’s. A last resort.

Powder never befriended Jericho like Vi did, so she’s not sure his place makes the cut.

It’s a short list. A pointless one.

“We’ve already had this conversation,” Vi says, to the pile of ashes under the mantle.

“Have we?”

“Would you stop… Yes, we did. We looked in all the obvious places, that’s where we started. You know that.”

“I’m starting to wonder.”

“Why, Cait? Few weeks of fruitless hunting and you’re sick of it?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Try doing it for seven years from a jail cell.”

“That’s not the same.”

Vi supposes that’s true.

She broke a man’s arm, once. Right in the middle of dinner.

Strode through the cramped dining hall to leverage his body against the corner of the metal table and tear it out of its socket, deliberate but careless. Instead of dislocating, the joint splintered. Cracked.

One of Silco’s men.

Vi doesn’t remember his name, or what information he had to give her about Powder or Silco, or if he even gave it, before or after the arm-breaking. She didn’t always bother to ask.

She just remembers him screaming, and how long it took her wrist to heal after they punished her for it.

“Right,” says Vi now, and she can’t hear herself over the sound his shoulder socket made when she destroyed it. “Not the same.”

She remembers other things.

Stillwater. Now that it’s front of her mind, she can’t make it retreat.

Vi turns away from it, towards Caitlyn.

Caitlyn, whose face is flat. Eyes cool.

Caitlyn, waiting.

Waiting for Vi to prove her right.

Waiting for Vi to prove her wrong.

Anger licks at her skin. Her face pinches.

Vi steps forward. Maybe some recognisable part of her will come into focus if she’s close enough.

“Are you—Are you kidding me with this? Do you think I’d be taking the world’s longest and most excruciating tour of your damn city if I had an actual idea where to find her?”

“Is it really so strange for me to wonder?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You know what it-”

“No, I think you better explain it to-”

“You seriously don’t understand why-”

“Would you stop answering a question with another-”

“It’s like you don’t want to find her,” Caitlyn says, shouts, with a step forward of her own. “It’s like you—like you don’t want… me… to find her.”

Vi blinks.

The shape of Stillwater hovers between them, retinal burn that won’t fuck off.

“Every time we—every new opportunity we get to actually find her, you get more and more distant. You disparage the idea or you lurk in the background while I do all the heavy lifting.”

Her face tingles. She swallows.

“And you think every lead is a waste of time.”

Her hand aches. Her wrist.

“And you undermined me tonight-”

“Oh, come on,” Vi spits—finds her voice. “You were talking about going in there guns blazing. Like I’m not gonna say something.”

“Sometimes a firmer hand is needed.”

Three men held her down while a fourth smashed her forearm with a club more times than she could count. The pain made her faint, so they stopped.

“We’ve never done that,” Vi says. “Not at any other place we’ve gone to, any other lead we’ve followed. We ask questions, we look around.”

“You realise you’re normally the one launching into a situation head-first. I don’t see why-”

“There’s a difference between ruffling a couple feathers and—and shooting the whole flock.”

Had enough, 516?

“This can’t go on forever. We have to know when it’s time to try a new approach.”

“Or time to interrogate me, at least.”

“Don’t be—we’re having a conversation.”

Shame. You usually have more fight in you.

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“You can’t tell me if our roles were reversed, you wouldn’t ask me-”

“I can, actually, that’s how trust-”

“It’s not about trust-”

“Of course it-”

“Stop interrupting me!”

Next time, then.

“Shut up!”

Vi doesn’t mean for it to be so loud.

But the bone-cracking won’t go away.

The screaming. That man’s, and her own.

Plus the voice. Taunting.

Where the fuck did he come from?

“Just—shut up! Please! Fuck!”

Caitlyn does.

Everything does.

Vi shuts up, too. She blinks at nothing, vision finally clear.

She’s breathing heavy.

She looks at Caitlyn, and around, and past her.

It’s so quiet, now. Vi doesn’t like that either.

Caitlyn breaks it.

“I thought we were in this together,” she says. “I thought we wanted the same thing.”

She looks like she might step closer, reach out, try to touch, to connect. Her face has gone from so foreign to so familiar in the space of a nanosecond.

Vi’s starting to think time behaves entirely different to how she’s used to whenenver this woman is involved.

“Yeah, Cait,” Vi says. “Me fucking too.”

////

It’s a rare day when the sun peeks through to the crowded streets and some magical breeze shifts the otherwise stagnant air, and Vi and her siblings walk the Lanes with their heads up and their gazes unafraid of meeting another’s.

It’s safe, for them, considering they’re a group of kids. Something to do with their association to Vander. The Hound’s kids, people say. The big man’s little whelps.

A time to buy the essentials for the week.

“He totally stiffed us on these,” Mylo says, around a mouthful of fruit.

Clag takes the bag off him to add it to the others he carries, threads his fingers through the handle. “No, he didn’t.”

“Bet he had at least two more crates of these damn things under that table. But no, hurry, mister, only got a few left! Load of shit.”

“You’re just butthurt he charged you more than last time,” Powder says, trotting along in front of them. She’s wearing an old helmet that she’s decorated with colourful graffiti and stickers, a chunk of metal beaten into shape, with a chin strap. She must have pinched it from Vander’s stuff. She’s hardly taken it off in weeks.

Vi knocks her on the helmet with a knuckle, grinning.

“Where the hell did you learn butthurt?”

“I dunno. Ekko probably.”

“Ekko. Right.”

“He said it means somebody’s pissed you off.”

“I guess so.”

“Why? What does it mean?”

“You’re using the word before you’re sure you know what it means?”

“I like saying it. Because butts.”

“You’re a butt.”

“Your face is a butt.”

Vi goes with it, groaning dramatically. “It feels like a butt today, yeah.”

“That’s because you got your ass kicked by that machine,” Mylo says. “Feint right, feint left, bam. Owned by a robot.”

“A fast robot,” Powder says, coming to the defence.

Vi shoves him gently. “Still better than you’d ever be.”

“What do I wanna pick a fight with mechanical boxing gloves for?”

“Yeah,” says Clag, smirking. “You’ve got enough actual people lining up to punch you in the face.”

“Huh, good point, Clag.”

“Like you don’t,” Mylo says to her.

Vi shrugs. “Not as many as you.”

“Let’s count.”

“You know how to count?”

Powder giggles. Mylo shoves Vi into Clag, who shoves her back into Mylo, who shoves her again, into Powder this time, who isn’t paying attention to the stupid roughousing and makes an oof and stumbles. Vi snags her by the back of her shirt. She straightens herself, her helmet nearly coming off.

“Shit, Mylo—careful with her.”

“I’m not breakable.”

“Nah, man,” Mylo agrees. “S’what the stupid helmet’s for.”

“You’re just jealous!”

“You got me. I’d really like something moronic to wear on my head.”

“Don’t you have that already with your hair?”

“Hey.”

Powder stops the most often. Always finds something that interests her. Vi hangs back with her, or drags her along when she can’t be bothered.

Down the street there’s a man selling suspicious meat on a stick, a huge grill sizzling and steaming to one side, and another stall with a red sail overhead, the older couple under it spruiking what looks to be herbs, and also books. Vi knows the books are mostly hollowed, an easy trick, each with a bottle of pills or syrup in it. Medicine they’re not supposed to sell, that nobody’s supposed to buy.

“We just need soap now,” says Clag, consulting a list he’s been keeping in his pocket. Vander’s handwriting’s on it. And Powder’s, at the bottom: Butts.

The stall with the soap is next to the guy with the meat. There’s a girl there now, about Vi’s age. She has freckles and soft-looking dark hair. Vi’s spoken to her a couple times. Likes her smile.

“You do it,” Mylo says to his brother, still chewing. “Everything over that side stinks. Or maybe you can go,” he adds, and Vi’s head snaps towards him in time for him to nudge her, and nudge and nudge, eyebrows wagging. “Have a nice conversation with the daughterrrr.”

“Shut up.”

“She’s cute,” says Claggor. “She always smiles when she sees you.”

“You think so?”

Mylo laughs very loudly. Claggor thumps him on the arm.

Vi scratches at the side of her face not all bruised up, thinking. She looks back to Powder, deep in conversation with an old guy she recognises, who sells odds and ends, trinkets, metal scraps.

“Fine,” Vi says, turning away from her brothers. “Watch Powder.”

The girl at the soap stall is rearranging a corner of the display. Vi’s pretty sure it’s all a front for something. Zaunites need soap as much as anybody, but the Lanes isn’t the place for a whole table of it.

The girl’s got an apron on over her dress. There’s a ginger cat on the front. It’s cute.

“That time of the week again?” she says.

And Claggor’s right. She does smile.

That’s… cool.

“Yeah,” says Vi, smiling back. And then, because her brain’s chosen now to turn her all tongue-tied: “Soap.”

“We do sell that here, yeah.”

“Uh—yeah. I. meant. We need soap. Please.”

She’s still smiling. Vi’s still enjoying it.

“Any preference? I like this one. It’s nice, but it’s like, subtle. Kind of… woodsy.”

Vi sniffs it. She’s not really sure what it smells like, but it is nice.

“You’re Vi, aren’t you?”

“You know my name?”

“Yeah, I heard your siblings use it. They’re you’re siblings, right? I’m Kara.”

Kara.

“What happened here?” Kara asks, tapping the side of her own face.

“Oh.” Vi touches the spot on her cheek where her stupid bruise sits. “Nothing. Playing a game.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very fun game, if that can happen. What kind is it?”

Kara asks a lot of questions. Vi usually hates that.

“You know the old arcade? Nobody realises, but everything still works, so. Yeah. There’s like this, uh, machine… thing… in it. It’s fun to fight.”

“Sounds kind of scary.”

“Only if you’re too slow.”

“So you’re too slow, then.”

“I think everything else just moves too fast.”

It’s a strange thing to say, and Vi’s not sure why she said it.

Kara considers her a second. Turns around to reach under one of her tables for something, and when she straightens she pushes a small metal cylinder into Vi’s hands.

“What’s-”

“Put it in your pocket,” Kara says, with urgency. “Please.”

The little container has no label, a screw top lid. Vi does as she’s told. Kara relaxes.

“It’ll help the bruising,” she says. “Don’t tell my mother I gave it to you.”

Vi gets it now. She bets Kara and her mother have careful piles of all kinds of tinctures and home remedies hiding back there. The soaps are another front, like the old couple with their books. Vi doesn’t get why they can’t just buy what they need out in the open. The topsiders wouldn’t like it, all these unregulated medicines. Or Silco, the asshole.

Now Kara puts a small bundle of soap bars between them on the table.

“These are the ones Vander usually gets. He says your sister doesn’t like strong smells.”

Kara’s smiling again. It’s nice to know her name.

Vi takes her soap and puts down her money and stays where she is, purchase in hand.

“I don’t know if, uh… It’s probably lame, but, if you wanted to come to the arcade with me—with us—sometime, you can. If you don’t like boxing Powder can show you the shooting gallery. She’s really good.”

Kara’s smile falters. Something behind Vi has caught her eye.

“Oh. Isn’t that her?”

“What?”

Vi turns to look. Most of the people around them have gone still, too, watching—

Back near where she left them two minutes ago, Mylo and Claggor, watching—

“Powder!”

Vi takes off at a sprint. The half-crowd of onlookers around the fuss get in her way, she shoves past a man and a woman and her fucking brothers—

“She wandered off—She wasn’t even doing anything-”

Mylo’s voice. Vi ignores him.

Powder’s standing in the middle of the street with an Enforcer in front of her. He’s holding her helmet, turning it over in his hands.

There’s a second Enforcer, too. A woman. She’s got Powder by the elbow—Powder, who’s a quarter of the woman Enforcer’s size, Powder, who’s pulling angrily at the grip on her arm… Powder, who looks dangerously close to doing something these Enforcers will not let slide.

“Give it back! That’s mine!”

“Looks more like stolen property to me.”

“Screw you—I didn’t steal anything.”

The woman Enforcer yanks on Powder’s arm. “Watch your mouth, brat.”

“Hey.”

The Enforcer with Powder’s helmet turns to Vi.

“Can we help you?”

Vi moves in front of him. She hates that she has to look up to meet his eye. She can smell his rank cologne.

“Leave her alone.”

The man stares down at her.

Her instinct is to run, which they can’t do, or they could, if they smash one or both of these Enforcers in the gut to get a head start, and…

Damn it.

She promised Vander she’d never pick a fight with one of these dicks.

No point making a bigger scene. Powder could get hurt, or her brothers. All she has to do is find a way out of this.

The officer with the helmet spins it round in his palm. The woman, Vi can see out the corner of her eye, is now not even looking at either of them.

Vi’s stomach twists.

They’re just bored. They don’t even care.

She can feel her fists balling up so hard her knuckles pop.

The man leers down his nose at her.

“And who the hell are you, then?”

“She’s my sister,” says Powder, and she pulls at the woman’s grip again. “And she’ll beat the crap out of you if you don’t watch out!”

Vi suppresses a groan.

Tempting, Pow, but not helping.

The Enforcers laugh.

“That right?” says the man, appraising Vi again. “Bit scrawny, aren’t you? Think you’re gonna take me on with little noodle arms like that?”

Vi swallows.

“Come on, Powder,” she says, evenly. “Let’s just go.”

“I didn’t say we were done.”

Worth a shot.

Vi glances at Powder and glares at the man.

“What do you want?”

“An answer,” he says, and he drums his fingers on the side of the helmet. “Who does this belong to?”

Vi looks at the helmet. Glances at Powder.

“It was our Dad’s.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“She just likes wearing it. She’s a kid.”

“Let’s try again.” He’s shifted to stand closer to Vi, close enough that her reflex would be to step back, but she won’t. She won’t. His eyes are as cold as his voice. “Who. Does this. Belong to?”

The back of Vi’s neck prickles, and she hates herself for it.

She looks at the helmet. He’s holding it upside-down, but she can see the remnants of the bright markers Powder’d used to draw and colour all over it at one edge. Some of it’s rubbed off on his glove.

Vi meets the eyes of the Enforcer again.

Tells him, “You.”

His face breaks in to a slow, broad grin. He chuckles. Nods, looking to his fellow officer. Pleased. Then his eyes go back to Vi. His chuckle fades. His sharp grin doesn’t.

It’s clear what he’s about to do. She steels herself.

It’ll be over in a second. It’s fine.

Powder’s safely behind her, Clag and Mylo in her periphery.

Soon they’ll all go home together.

The Enforcer examines the helmet again. Holds it with a hand on either side, as if testing the weight. Folds the fingers of one hand over the rim. A firm grip round the edge of it.

“Good,” he says, and draws his hand back to prove her right.

It’s an awkward hit, but he’s a grown man. The hard curve of the metal helmet slams into where Vi’s face is already sore from letting the boxing machine get one in.

She goes sprawling, white spots in her vision.

“Vi!”

Her palms skid against the gravel. Pain flares in her face, bright and dizzying. She grunts.

The helmet clatters to the ground by her hand.

“Trencher trash,” says the Enforcer who struck her. “Too much paperwork.”

Their boots crunch on the dirt when both of them step away, turn, walk off.

Vi groans. Spits out something pink and catches sight of Claggor and Mylo’s boots approaching fast.

“Damn, Vi-”

“You okay?”

“What an asshole.”

“Are you-”

A hand lands on her shoulder. It’s Powder. Eyes tearful, face crumpling. Like she’s the one who got her ass beat. Like she’s the one in the dirt in front of all these people. So stupid and avoidable and pointless. Vi grabs her by the wrist.

“What the fuck, Powder?”

“I’m sorry-"

“You know, you know not to mess with them, and you did it anyway!”

“It was an accident—he stole my—my helmet-”

“The fucking helmet doesn’t matter! They can take you away, Powder, don’t you get that?”

“I didn’t mean—I didn’t—mean to-”

She hiccups, trying to pull her arm out of Vi’s grip. The tears in her eyes have spilled onto her cheeks and her mouth’s open, stuck on a sob, saliva and snot. Her baby sister, distraught and scared, and Vi’s making it worse. Wasn’t the point of letting that bastard knock her down to avoid all this?

A twinge of sympathy sneaks up on her, a moment of sad and bad and fix this. Her grip falters, and her face throbs.

Why’s she always the one fixing things?

What’s the point if they’re gonna break anyway?

“Fuck,” Vi spits, and lets her go. “Why can’t you just be fucking normal for once?”

Powder sobs, wrenching her arm away. She stares at Vi and she sobs and she stares.

Vi turns away, holds her aching face, eyes closing. The shock of the hit’s fading. Pain’s all that’s left. Pain and embarrassment.

Claggor steps forward. “Come on,” he says. “We better go.”

Mylo takes the handful of bags off Claggor so he can heft the shaken Powder off the ground, resting her against his front with an arm under her and around her. She buries her face in his chest.

Mylo hangs back with Vi. Collects the helmet. He doesn’t try to help. She gets herself up, dusts herself off. Feels like her face is already swelling.

“You shouldn’t have had to…” Mylo starts, and stops. “Here.”

He gives her the helmet. They walk home in silence.

After the inevitable yelling and arguing and door-slamming, Vander sits her down and tsks and makes a bundle of ice with an old tea towel and holds it against her swollen cheek.

Vi glowers at a spot on the floor. She wants to go to bed and never get out of it.

“I heard what happened,” Vander says. “Sounds like you made the best out of a shit situation.”

“I got lucky,” is her response, bitter and bruised. “We all did.”

“Sometimes protecting people means taking hits, instead of throwing ‘em. It’s not pretty work, but it’s important.”

Vi thinks she’d rather a job that didn’t involve a pounding headache every once in a while. It feels selfish. She keeps it to herself.

“What were they doing in the fucking Lanes anyway?”

Vander stills a moment. He’d had the same thought. “I dunno, kid,” he says, quiet. “But I’ll sort it out. I promise.”

Later, Vi finds the tin of ointment Kara gave her in her pants pocket. She uncaps it. Sniffs. Can’t name the smell, but it’s nice, floral. She looks at her face in the mirror, purple and black and bloodshot, and she screws the cap back on and tosses it in the trash.

A day passes.

The boys don’t interfere. They know the sisters argue, and they know the arguments have a way of playing themselves out. As much as they can and do try to diffuse some of the tension in their own way—Claggor will bring Powder a cold drink or a pillow for her to hug; Mylo will drag Vi to the arcade—they know, too, that this is something that existed well before them, on its own, without them, and sometimes it needs space to do that again.

“She’s yours,” Clag said to her once, in that easy, simple way of his. “And you’re hers.”

Like that fixes everything, in the end, immutably.

The fact that first came one and then came the other, and ever since there’d only been togetherness, despite so many opportunities for it to change—so many others who didn’t survive an attempt at separation—to the point where a world without the two of them in it, together, is inconceivable.

Inconceivable, Vi thinks, in the rare moments she lets herself dwell on it all, but not impossible. Not nearly impossible enough.

She draws a picture. Goes into their room before dinner and finds Powder on the bottom bunk with her notebook and her handful of coloured textas—fancy ones, the ones Benzo gifted Vander to give to her.

Vi sits next to her on the bed. Leans against the wall. Looks over at what Pow’s doodling. Animal faces and people faces, like always. Sometimes it strikes Vi that Powder’s not… improving, with her drawings. She’s sketching the same stuff now she did a year or two ago, in the same way. Like she’s not doing it to get better at it. She’s just getting it out of her head.

“That one’s cool,” Vi says, with a nod.

Powder’s hand goes still on her work-in-progress. For a moment Vi thinks she’ll slam the book shut and chuck it at the wall. She doesn’t.

“What’s that?” she asks, sounding only half-interested.

Vi unfolds the sheet of paper she’s brought with her, lays it on top of the notebook.

“Just a thing. I’m not as good as you.”

Powder studies it. A deliberately cartoonish depiction of yesterday’s bullshit. Powder, proud and defiant in her helmet, giving a giant middle finger to an ugly, cowering Enforcer. Little figures of Vi, Clag and Mylo in the background, cheering.

“I’m not that tall.”

“Eh. One day you will be.”

“Why’s he got two noses?”

“That one’s a wart. You can’t tell but it’s full of pus.”

“Gross,” she whispers, eyes alight. She turns and sticks it on the wall next to her bed with some other pictures she’s put up. Vander tried drawing a horse, once. “He was such a butt.”

“Such a butt.”

Powder goes back to her drawing. The air in the room is thinner, lighter. Vi drums her fingers on her leg, watching her sister swap to a different colour texta.

“I was a butt, too,” she mutters. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

“You were a butt. Are a butt.” She swaps textas again. “You got scared.”

“I wasn’t scared.”

“Sure you were.” She stops what she’s doing, thickening a line on the side of a dog’s head. “I was mad. He took my helmet and he said something horrible and I wanted to kick him in his big ugly balls. I was gonna do it. I know it’s stupid but I hated him and he was laughing at me and I wanted to just—to just-”

“I know,” Vi says, quiet, before she can work herself up too much.

“And then you were there. I didn’t feel scared ‘til I saw how scared you were.”

Vi swallows down her next words, and her guilt, and most of all, her shame.

Her fingers twitch with the afterthought of it all. Responsibility. Of course Powder would look to her big sister as a source of stability, of steadiness. Of course Vi would fail her in this way. Of course—of fucking course—it would frighten her, to see Vi so affected.

Vi watches her draw, and thinks what a shocking thing it is to be someone so meaningful to someone so meaningful to you.

“I dunno why you think they’re gonna like, snatch me, or whatever,” Powder mumbles, careless, offhand. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Vi wants to argue.

It’s what they do.

They’re Enforcers, topsiders. They don’t give a shit about us.

You can’t give them any excuse to fuck with our family.

But those are Vi’s fears, not Powder’s. Wouldn’t be fair, to pile on like that, to unload. Powder deserves better. If Vi had her way, Powder would live a life entirely free from every train of thought that keeps Vi up half the night. But it’s too late for that, isn’t it?

“I’m not going anywhere either,” Vi says, and she wants to hug her, hold her tight, but she doesn’t. “I’d never let anyone separate us like that.”

There. Bravery. She can be brave enough for the two of them. Or pretend to be, if she has to.

When Powder speaks next, her voice is small.

“I’m… I’m sorry you got hit.”

“No, hey.” Vi scoots closer to her, rests a hand on her back. “That wasn’t your fault. It happened because that Enforcer’s a shithead, not because of you.”

“You were protecting me.”

“Duh. That’s my job.”

Powder sighs, as if she accepts this, but does not like it.

“Whatever,” she says. Over it all already. Resilient. She hands Vi a texta. “Wanna do Mylo’s hair?”

////

“Go on,” says Caitlyn, arms folded. “Say it.”

Vi sighs through her nose. Can’t stop glaring across the street.

Her head hurts, her eyes. Sleep never found her. She doesn’t want to do this today.

“What?”

“Powder would never be here. Etcetera.”

“Well. She wouldn’t.”

Caitlyn nods at the building, at the statement.

“Maybe,” she says. “But we’re not looking for Powder.”

Powder fell down a well.

She’s across the street before Vi can consider a response. Not that she’d say it, if she found one. Responding turns a comment into a conversation. Neither of them have time for that anymore, if they ever did.

They’re in the foyer, under warm lights. Some pot plants. Vi didn’t know apartment buildings came with front desks.

“Ready?” Caitlyn asks her.

Vi gives a small nod. Hands in pockets.

“Do your thing.”

They ride an elevator to the fifth floor, which Vi knows is the middle of the building, having counted the windows from the street.

The elevator’s got plush cream carpeting and bronze accents everywhere and so does the hall it opens into.

Way too fancy.

“It’s just at the end here,” says the desk clerk, who’s escorted them up personally, mortified at the implication a place like this could have any association with people like that. “But as I said, we have a very particular clientele, and I’m here every day. I know everyone.”

Caitlyn smiles, thin and fake, at his hospitality.

Not a if it moves, shoot it to be seen.

“Thank you for your assistance,” she says. “I’m sure we won’t take up much of your time.”

“Anything to stop that… girl… from causing anymore chaos.”

Vi thinks about a retort. Coming to her sister’s defense.

He doesn’t know anything about Powder. Nobody knows anything about Powder.

They near the end of the hall and Vi chooses silence. Better to get in, find nothing, and get out. Let the situation speak for itself, like always.

“Here we are,” says the clerk. “516.”

His key chain jangles when he slides a key into the lock.

A ringing noise starts up in Vi’s ears.

The key turns, the lock clicks, the keys jangle again.

The ringing intensifies, shrill. Is she the only one who can hear that?

“Oh,” says Caitlyn—dim surprise. “Um—thank you.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” the man tells her. “If you can please lock it behind you when you’re done.”

Vi glances at Caitlyn, half hoping she’ll give some indication she can also hear that—that noise—and when she looks back to the front desk clerk helping them out he’s the warden warden warden.

Tall.

Wide.

Here.

His keys jangle when he pockets them. He looks Vi square in the eyes.

Fuck.

She rears back, staring. Fear turns her blood to ice.

What the—what the fuck, what is he—how can he be-

What the fuck.

Her back hits the wall. The air thumps out of her, a smack to the lungs.

She gasps. Trembles.

Oh but fuck his smile never means anything fucking good.

Five one six.

Not five-sixteen.

Not five-hundred-and-sixteen.

Five.

One.

Six.

His voice.

His voice and the ringing, shrill and never-ending and mean. Her vision’s all shit. Black. Speckled. It’s dark. It’s dark and she’s cold and it’s loud and it’s happening again.

Up for another day, 516?

Vi falls back against the bricks. Cold. Wet, cold bricks.

Sleep well, 516?

She’s vibrating, her hands—her hands won’t—cooperate-

How much you think you can take tonight, 516?

Fuck.

Fuck.

Does it help if I let you decide how it goes this time, 516?

Reckon you’re healed up enough to eat, 516?

Shouldn’t start fights, don’t you think, 516?

First the number.

Don’t you think don’t you think don’t you think.

Then the pain.

“Vi?”

She drops to her knees—hands and knees, grip the floor. Carpet. Carpet? No carpet here—brick.

Unforgiving, these walls. All of them—no give at all. Only take.

Take and take and take and take.

She can run her fingers over the gaps and cracks and focus on the creases and the smooth bits and the dry bits and block out all the rest of it with her eyes closed.

Protect your chest. Protect your face.

Curl into a ball.

Coward.

Stupid child.

Path of least resistance.

Smaller target.

It’ll be over soon it’ll be over-

“Vi.”

A hand on her back—more violent than the hits, the batons, the boots, a flat hand, deliberate-

“Don’t touch me.”

She shoots to her feet. Careens backwards into the wall of her cell again. Shoves at the guard who put his hand on her even if it’ll only earn her a harder beating this time or next-

“No, hey—it’s me—it’s me-”

She pushes, shoves—another guard, another-

“Hey—it’s me-”

She’s…

Another voice.

Vi can’t breathe. Hands twisted in his uniform.

She looks down the hall after the… the warden-

Hall?

With—wallpaper. Carpet. Elevator.

She shakes her head.

Squeezes her eyes shut.

Falls back against the wall. Legs not working. Hands not working, legs not working, lungs not working.

Carpet.

Bricks.

Carpet.

She squeezes her eyes shut hard and buries her face in her fists and yells.

Carpet. Carpet. Carpet.

Hall. Hall. Hall.

“Fuck.”

“Vi, it’s okay.”

The voice again. It’s gotten closer. Louder. It’s nice.

Finally, a voice she likes listening to.

“It’s just us. It’s just us, we’re in the hall, outside the apartment we came to check.”

Powder.

She’s looking for Powder.

Nobody knows anything about Powder and every day a guard with a baton comes into her cell and tells her to stop talking about it.

Every time you think about your bloody Powder, think about this, too.

Her skin burns. Splits. Bleeds. There’s something in her mouth that’s not supposed to be there. A tooth. Teeth. Her nose, her jaw, it’s—wrong. It’s all wrong.

She scratches at her face, pulls and shifts, has to fix it, can’t come apart, can’t give him that, won’t—

“No—Stop that-”

More hands, touching again, her face, her face this time, gentle, gentle, which—oh—that’s—okay. That’s okay. Helping. She’s helping.

You have to tell her about the number.

You have to tell her about the pain.

“It’s gonna hurt—It’s—gonna-”

“No, no, nobody’s getting hurt today.”

Heard that before.

“Vi. Just—Look at me. Can you do that?”

Vi.

There it goes again, calling her that.

Nobody in Stillwater calls her Vi.

Nobody in—in-

…Oh.

“That’s it. Focus on me. Just—focus on me.”

Vi breathes, ragged. Manages to do it again.

She’s leaning forward, gathered against the person in front of her, head pressing against a shoulder, arms tight around her back, hands rubbing, holding, tight, safe, tight, safe.

“It’s okay,” says the voice.

She can smell mild perfume, deodorant. Can hear the rustle of fabric, clothing, where she’s gripping and being gripped. There’s a hand on the back of her head. Fingers in her hair, holding.

“It’s okay. You’re okay.”

It won’t stop, like all the others. For once, Vi doesn’t mind it.

Her weight leans further. Tips forward. She’s caught. A quick redistribution, rearrangment, more holding. She grips at a waist, a torso. Presses her forehead into a collarbone and pants, and breathes, and breathes.

“Shit.”

“Just keep breathing, sweetheart. I've got you, just keep…”

“I don’t…”

It’s just us.

It’s just us, we’re in the hall.

Outside the apartment we came to check.

“The—The room.”

“I know-”

“Don’t—Don’t open the-”

“We won’t. We aren’t going in there, I promise. I promise. Hey.”

A hand at her chin, a gentle redirection. Their eyes meet.

Vi blinks. The buzz in her head, under her skin, falters.

“Cait… What…”

“I didn’t know what the room number would be. I'm sorry, I never would’ve…”

Vi tries to clear her vision, her head. She’s sweated bullets under her clothes, her armpits wet, her back. Her heart hammers. She wipes her hair out of her eyes and sits back on her haunches. Caitlyn keeps her hands on her, holds her hands with great care, eyes searching.

“I’m—I’m fine,” Vi says. Has to clear her throat and say it again. “I’m fine, I don’t… I don’t know what…”

She’s shaking. Why’s she shaking? Why’s it feel like she just went fifty rounds with the world’s heaviest punching bag?

And why are Caitlyn’s eyes shining like that?

Vi looks down at their joined hands. Pulls hers away.

“I’m fine,” she says, relieved to hear her voice sounding firmer already. She goes to stand. Has to put her hand on the wall to help—wallpaper, pattern, fancy bronze, no brick brick brick.

Caitlyn stands with her, half-helping. When she pushes at a loose strand of her own hair, Vi can see her fingers are trembling.

“It’s alright, Vi.”

Why does she keep saying that?

Vi already knows.

Apartment. Hall. Number.

The end.

“I’m fine,” she says, straightening. “Just—Need some air.”

And when the hallway threatens to tilt—when she starts to feel her boots slip on the carpet—she digs her heels in and grits her teeth and doesn’t accept the hand Caitlyn holds out to her.

Then they’re outside. The footpath. What, twenty minutes after they last stood out here?

Vi’s head still aches. Her eyes.

Everything else is gone.

Like it’s all slunk back into the tiny corner it fits itself into.

Time has that quality, too, though, doesn’t it. Elasticity.

“Can I do anything?”

Caitlyn’s standing close, not touching her. Vi chances one quick glance to her eyes, already knowing, and—yep. Saucers. Shiny saucers. Goddamn dinner plates.

Vi shakes her head. Knows this one by heart.

“No.”

////

Tobias finds her in the courtyard, squaring off with the punching bag.

Vi can’t smother her annoyance. Of course Caitlyn told him. Of course he’s out here, now, like this.

“We missed you at dinner.”

Vi lands a couple more blows against the bag. The chain holding it up clinks, and clinks again.

It’s late, dark. She’s didn’t think anyone else would be awake.

“Not hungry. Sir.”

“It might help you feel better if you have something to eat.”

Vi loosens her stance. Sweat slips from her hairline into her eye.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“It’s getting quite late.”

“That not allowed?”

“You’re bleeding through your hand wraps.”

Vi looks at her hands. Every joint’s inflamed, so, she thought all the pain was only that. But he’s right. Blood.

“Happens.”

“Vi-”

Vi looks at him, in the dim evening light. There’s a lantern nearby, but he’s facing the wrong way to be caught in it. He’s holding a full glass of water.

He cares. About you.

Vi takes a second. She’s hot now, her body regulating in the wake of the exercise. The modest cloth bra she wears to work out in is sticking to her.

“Today was… I didn’t mean to scare her. Sorry, if I did.”

Tobias moves to the garden bed on one side of the walkway, to sit against the low brick wall around it. He puts the water glass down next to him.

“You don’t need to apologise for having a panic attack.”

Vi huffs. Hits the bag. “Looked worse than it was.”

“She tells me you hallucinated.”

Another hit. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh. Alright, then.”

Vi glances at him. She expected him to argue.

“It just—I dunno,” she says—pointlessly. He’s let it go. She can let it go, too. “Surprised me. The apartment number. Doesn’t even mean anything.”

“We’ve never talked about your time in Stillwater.”

“Ancient history.”

“You’ve been out nearly two months.”

Vi can’t tell if he says it to illustrate her point, or challenge it.

“You were in there a while. About seven years, is that right?”

“Something like that.”

She lands a few more half-hearted hits against the bag.

“It’s alright if you don’t want to talk about it. But we can.”

Good.

That’s what it is.

She doesn’t want to talk about it, end of.

More than that, she couldn’t, even if she did.

Seven years of her life that may as well have not happened. Everyone else sure walks around as if it didn’t, no gaping hole in their adulthood, paying no attention to hers. No long series of unrecognisable people and places, no strange ache of having been left totally, completely behind. She’s just a freak. That's all it is.

Nobody’s gonna understand it, be able to bridge the gap between the before and the after. Sew up the two halves of herself walking around in her head.

It shits her that she even kept track. Time exists only to measure meaningful things and her time in Stillwater wasn’t—wasn’t that. It wasn’t fucking anything.

Once, they beat her so long she thought she’d died. That time had stopped for her altogether. Until it started up again.

Vi doubts even a smart man like Tobias could make sense of it.

“It doesn’t matter,” is what she says, striking the bag again.

Tobias nods. Slides his hands into his trouser pockets.

Vi expects him to leave, after that. He doesn’t.

He stays seated on the brick wall, watching her throw punches at a big leather bag full of sand. Maybe it’s the time of night, the poor lighting… He looks worn, wrinkled. He doesn’t seem to be concentrating, entirely, on what Vi’s doing. He could go inside where it’s warm, go to bed, make himself some tea. He could be doing anything else.

That’s right, Vi thinks, his presence here suddenly less bothersome, his motivation for coming outside in the middle of the night to say hello and stay put that much clearer. His wife’s dead.

Vi wonders what she looks like to him. When his eyes are on her, he watches with muted interest. She wonders if he knows anything about boxing.

She tapers out of her latest series of blows, rests her forehead on the bag, panting. Her arms burn.

Tobias stretches where he sits, yawns. Looks at his watch.

“Must be time for a little lie-down,” he says, standing, stretching again.

Vi doesn’t push.

It sounds like too good an idea.

////

Caitlyn wakes her at sunrise. She has a mug in her hand and a softness in her voice.

“Hey,” she says. “You fell asleep on the floor again.”

In the living room, on the rug. She winces, her shoulder stiff.

Absurd, how long it took her to adjust to her cell, a concrete floor, a wafer-thin mattress, and how quickly she unlearned it all. So much for muscle memory.

Caitlyn sits on the edge of the coffee table. Rests her chin on her palm and watches Vi sit up slowly. When she’s half upright, Caitlyn hands her the mug of tea she’s holding.

“For you.”

“Thanks.”

Vi’s developed a taste for it. Life’s full of surprises.

Caitlyn hunches where she sits. Can’t be comfortable. A patch of dried skin on the side of her wrist is visible where her nightgown sleeve’s slipped down her forearm, reddened. She keeps scratching at it, which makes it itch more. Her lips are pale. So is the rest of her.

She’s beautiful, Vi thinks. She’s exhausted.

Vi’s wrappings are in a pile on the coffee table next to her, discarded, bloody. She should clean them. Bin them. Disgusting.

“Are you alright?”

“Huh?”

“You look tired. And you just woke up.”

“Says you.” Vi sips her tea, watches her over the top of her mug. “You gonna fall asleep over there if I sit here long enough?”

Caitlyn hums. Rubs at her face.

“Probably. Which is why you have to get up, soon as you’ve drunk that.”

Vi takes one more sip and puts it aside, on the table, on a coaster, and forces herself to her feet.

“You can have the rest.”

“Really. Black. No sugar.”

Vi huffs, reaching to the ceiling to stretch out her back. Her toes tingle, and her fingertips.

“I don’t see how three sugar cubes could make it taste better.”

“Oh, Vi. Still so naïve in the ways of tea.”

She stretches down, to reach her toes. She can’t. Ow.

“Hey. Seriously.”

Vi straightens. Caitlyn’s eyeing her carefully.

Guess watching her fall apart in that hallway for no reason raised some red flags.

“I’m fine,” Vi says, for what feels like the ten millionth time that week. Why don’t people listen? "Too old to sleep on the floor, I guess. Going soft.”

“It’s not soft to need a bed to sleep in.”

“Guess I don’t need one, since we’re here right now, having this conversation, and not in a bedroom.”

“To want one, then.”

Vi ignores that.

Want.

If they’re going to start talking about what Vi wants, they’re going to be here a very long time with nothing to show for it.

Caitlyn shifts forward, rearranging her nightgown when it tangles under her, stopping with her hands on her knees. She’s so rarely like this, so void of good posture, composure. She seems to be bracing herself.

“Listen,” she starts. “About yesterday.”

“Do we have to?”

“I think it’s clear we were sent there on purpose.”

Vi turns to the coffee table to clear it of her things. “On purpose.”

“By Jinx. We’re irritating her. She’s paying attention, lashing out.”

The bandages, soggy with sweat and water when Vi removed them, are bone-dry now. Explains the feeling of cotton in her mouth. Falling asleep in front of the fire was a stupid idea.

“You think Powder used her own wanted posters to call in a bad tip on herself.”

“I think she’s done it more than once, the more I think about it.”

“A lot of thinking you’re doing.”

“You know how dangerous she is.”

“If it really was her, then, she’s just—being a brat. We’re annoyed, not hospitalised.”

“Right. A violent, diabolical brat, willing to taunt her only sister with her deep-seated trauma.”

“That’s not what-”

“We had men clear out the building, overnight. The whole building. They searched every apartment, floor-by-floor. They went into 516.”

“And?”

“Nothing. It’s unoccupied, we knew that, but there wasn’t even any furniture.”

“Do you people usually keep furniture in apartments nobody lives in?”

“Vi. I think… I think she brought us there specifically to get to you. To hurt you.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Don’t,” she says, sharp. Like her posture isn’t the only kind of composure she’s tired of holding onto. She stands, pacing away. “Don’t do that. You can’t pretend you weren’t affected when we realised what number the apartment was.”

“Powder would never do that.”

A well.

Powder fell down a well.

“You said it yourself—she’s clever.”

“Yeah, clever. Not cruel.”

“You can’t keep making excuses for her.”

“She wouldn’t deliberately-”

“She killed my mother, and you think a little prank involving your old inmate number is too much of a stretch?”

“You’re twisting my words around, I’m not a fucking—suspect or an informant. I know Powder, I know my sister, and she wouldn’t just-”

“Jinx, Vi, for God’s sake, her name is—she made that choice at the bloody cannery, you were right there, you were awake through all of it, unlike I was, knocked unconscious right before she decided to—to fire a rocket at-”

“What, you think there’s some crucial detail you missed out on? Hey, Cait, by the way, I totally suggested she bomb the tower while you were laid out on the floor right between us, yeah, my bad.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“I won’t talk about things I don’t know anything about and you keep your own opinions to yourself, how about that?”

Caitlyn looks away. Chews on her tongue, her teeth. Head shaking at the nothingness her eyes are focused on, to herself, even.

“She’s a murderer,” she says, quietly. “My mother, and half the other councillors, and—God, even Silco. He was like her father, basically, wasn’t he? And she did that, to him.”

Vander, Vi thinks. Vander was our father, after our father died. Not Silco.

Which doesn’t help, because her next thought is:

Powder killed Vander too.

Vander and our brothers.

She shakes the thought off.

No.

That was an accident.

That was the shimmer—that was Silco.

She didn’t mean to. She didn’t.

“I don’t understand why it’s so hard for you to get it.”

Vi slams the mug down on the coffee table, spilling.

“You don’t understand?”

“She is not the-”

“It’s not basic math, Caitlyn, she was—she’s my—she was this little kid, this little girl I used to-”

“I know that, I know-”

“Read stories to and doing drawings with and—no, you don’t know, okay? You don’t, you have no idea, no idea what you’re talking about when you talk about-”

“She is not the girl she was when you were put in prison. I’m sorry. She just isn’t.”

Powder fell down a well.

“Shut up,” Vi mutters—so sick of all the noise.

“That’s twice in recent memory you’ve told me to shut up. I don’t appreciate it, especially not from someone I—someone like you.”

Vi groans, rattled, bone-weary. Weren’t they both asleep ten minutes ago? Can’t they go back to that and try this again later?

“Like me?” she murmurs, stuck on the detail. “Like what?”

“Someone important to me.”

Important.

“Just not important enough to listen to.”

“That’s hardly fair.”

“You really can’t figure a universe where I’m right, can you? Where Jinx is just some—some stupid nickname she’s not even supposed to have and if it weren’t for—for fucking Stillwater and—and everything, then we would’ve—we would’ve been together. Not Silco, not Sevika. Things would’ve been different.”

“I tried to. You know I did. At the cannery, at that… that dinner party she threw for us. I had her gun. I was…” She sighs. More head-shaking. Vi gets the impression she’s thought about this more times than either of them could count. “I was one second from pulling that trigger. From putting a stop to it all. And you said please. Didn’t you?”

“I…”

“You said please, she’s my sister. You begged. And I hesitated. And she broke my nose and blew up a building full of people.”

Here’s to the new us.

Vi swallows bile.

Scrunches the dirty bandages still in her fist.

Her bare arms feel naked. So does the rest of her.

“She needs to answer for what she did,” Caitlyn says. “For what she's doing. And if she's your sister and you love her and I love you then…”

Here’s to the new us.

“Then this doesn’t work.”

Here’s to the new us.

Vi swallows again. Could be vomit, this time.

Here’s to-

“Fine,” says Vi. She needs to hit something, desperately. “Then you try to find Jinx. And I’ll try to find Powder.”

////

The first winter they’re with Vander, a flu rips through the Undercity.

Fever, cough, vomiting—it doesn’t seem to follow any one pattern. It just makes you sick. Real sick.

A couple weeks after it makes itself known Vi hears from someone in the Lanes that their brother’s kid got it and died.

That tracks. Happened a lot down in the fissures, too. Get sick and you got dead, probably.

At night she watches Powder sleep and wonders which one of them it’s gonna get first. Seems way more like a when than an if. Way more possible than impossible. Their luck is not that good.

When Vander comes home looking pale and dull-eyed, it seems like the universe has chosen in a way designed to really pull the rug out from under them.

Vi helps him make dinner, a thing she’s started doing because he seems to like her company and her help, and she doesn’t enjoy this big generous man doing everything for them, but tonight it feels as if they’ll all go hungry if she doesn’t lend a hand.

He falls asleep in his chair before they’ve finished eating and wakes coughing, mouth covered with a hand, stumbles to his room. Vi and Powder get into bed together, because they still can’t handle sleeping apart, and Vi listens to Vander coughing hard in the next room and thinks, Of course. We don’t get to keep him.

Vi keeps Powder busy with drawing, reading, the card game Vander’s been trying to teach them. She makes them breakfast and then lunch, too, and she cleans up the kitchen after, and Vander hasn’t got up by the time she’s done.

She wants to make him food but she’s pretty sure soup’s the best thing for a sick person and that’s beyond her skillset. She wishes she’d paid more attention when her father cooked. But she didn’t, and now here they are, and Vander’s gonna die without soup to warm him up first because she never learned how to make it.

She butters bread and adds jam and pours a big glass of water and hopes it’s enough.

Vander’s door is closed. A big wooden thing with a cast iron handle. Vi falters. It’s not like he’d leave it open at a time like this, but a closed door is a closed door and she’s still learning the rules of this place.

She puts the glass down on the floorboards so she can knock.

She waits.

She knocks again.

Behind the door, the sound of more coughing, suddenly.

Well, he’s awake… A good sign, right?

Vi turns the handle slowly, cautious. Listens for any sign of her presence being unwanted, of him bracing to tell her to fuck off. The door creaks once she’s got it open a few inches.

“Vi?”

Vander’s voice is hoarse, cracked. Vi clears her throat, realising her mouth’s gone dry.

“Yeah. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

The room is small, his bed pushed into a corner, a small set of shelves next to it doubling as a nightstand, with a lamp and books and newspapers, and a window at the far end of the bed with a thin curtain pulled to cover it. It smells like the pipe he’s often smoking and the aftershave he wears.

Vander’s lying on his back, a blanket scrunched up next to him like he’s thrown the covers off. He gestures her over, sitting up.

“I’m okay,” he groans. “Didn’t mean to scare ya.”

“I’m not scared,” says Vi, who still hasn’t stepped into the room, who’s clutching her plate of bread hard enough to shatter it.

Vander chuckles, and it makes him cough again.

Vi grips her plate some more.

“Nah,” he says, smiling despite probably feeling ten kinds of awful. “Not scared of anythin’, are ya?”

Vi wants to say she’s not sure what the point is of being scared when all the things you were most scared of have already happened to you.

She wants to, but here’s this kind strong man who’s taken them in grappling with a sudden illness, and Vi has to confront the thought that there’s always one more terrifying thing left to endure.

“That for me?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Vi steps forward to hold the plate out to him. His hair’s all messy, his forehead sweaty. He takes the plate and surprises her by grabbing a piece of bread and taking a big bite then and there.

“Hm,” he says, savouring it. “You used the good jam.”

Hasn’t lost his appetite yet, then. That’ll probably happen soon enough.

She thinks she can see some crumbs collected by his beard. It looks thick, soft. She wonders how often he shaves.

“This is real helpful,” he says, gesturing with his half-bitten bread. “Thank you.”

She remembers the water glass, out in the hall, and fetches it. Vander drinks, coughs, drinks some more. He puts the plate aside with one piece of bread left.

“For later,” he says.

“Yeah. Sure.”

He stays seated on the edge of the bed. Vi figures if he could get up, he would’ve by now.

“You two okay out there?” he asks.

Vi nods. Like she’s gonna say if they aren’t.

Vander hums. His eyes drift closed.

“Honest?” he says.

“You’re sick,” is her response.

“I’ll be fine. In a few days. These—These things don’t keep me down for long.”

“Mrs Carpenter’s brother’s kid got it,” Vi says, before she can stop herself. “And now he’s dead.”

Her cheeks go hot. A stupid thing to say.

Vander opens his eyes to squint at her.

“Heard about that,” he mutters. “Damn shame. But Lucas was sick a lot, long before this. Was just his time. Okay?”

Vi nods. She looks at his plate and wonders if she should find some fruit to cut up for him.

“You like being helpful, don’t you?”

Vi shrugs.

“I can look after myself,” she says. “And other people.”

Another hum.

“Yeah,” Vander murmurs. “You sure can.” He clears his throat. “But you don’t have to, y’know? Not always. S’what I’m here for. I don’t mind it.”

Vi can’t help but look at him with more than a bit of skepticism. “Okay,” she says. “Get up and come for a run with me. I want to go exploring.”

She’s not sure if it’s too cheeky, until Vander chuckles, nudges her shoulder.

“Next week,” he says.

She can’t believe how sure he is that this thing isn’t going to be the end of him. His confidence makes her confident, too. Just a little. Maybe they’re gonna be fine. Maybe blips like this are normal, and not a sudden end to a new beginning. Maybe she doesn’t have to stay vigilant for the next tragedy to finally find them.

Vander stands then, and it only adds weight to the feeling. A warmth in her chest.

“Gonna use the wash,” he says, ruffling her hair on his way past. “I’d like another glass of water, if you can?”

His glass is still half full. She doesn’t mind being given a job to do.

Vander moves slow and Vi waits for him in his room with a fresh glass of water and also an apple she found in a basket behind the bar upstairs. She didn’t cut it up in case he doesn’t want it.

When he comes back, he sits on the bed, leans back on the pillows and headboard with a groan. He probably needs to go back to sleep.

He takes the water glass and puts it aside. Squints at her.

“Ya look tired. Didn’t stay up all night worryin’, did ya?”

“No.”

“Good. That’d be silly.”

He says it gentle enough she doesn’t feel silly even though they both know he’s seen right through her.

He must’ve washed up a bit in the bathroom, his face and hair fresher, more Vander-like. His chest still rattles when he breathes. She can’t leave him yet. She’s supposed to wait til he goes back to sleep, right? That’s what she’d do for Powder. That’s what her mother did for her, that one time she got sick from a bad batch of meat they bought at the market. So that’s what she’ll do.

“’S’Powder okay?”

“Yeah. She’s reading. Don’t even think she heard me say I’m going upstairs.”

“Hm. Good.”

“Thank you. For the books.”

“Not sure how, uh… appropriate… some of ‘em are.”

“She’ll read anything. Doesn’t matter.”

“She get nightmares?”

“Yeah. But not about books.”

Vander doesn’t respond to that. He just says, after some more silence—comfortable silence, Vi realises; he’s not making her feel like she’s in his way—he says, “Ya don’t have to wait ‘til I’m asleep.”

“Oh.”

“S’what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

“Sorry.”

“Here. Can I?”

Vi looks at Vander’s outstretched hand. He’s asking permission to touch her. She knows if she says no, he won’t. Somehow it makes her more inclined to say yes, knowing she has a real choice.

She’s kinda wanted to reach out to him since she walked in here anyways, and wasn’t sure she was allowed.

She takes his hand—his are so big—and he rests her palm on his chest, to one side.

Vi can feel his heartbeat. She’s mortified when her eyes sting and fill with water.

“Okay,” she says, even though he hasn’t said anything. She pressesher hand into his shirt fabric. Feels the give of his skin.

“Still tickin’,” he says, quietly.

Vi thinks of clocks, and seconds, and how time does, always, have a way of running out, eventually.

For now, though. A beating heart.

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Vi uses their new proximity to touch his beard, like she’s wanted to a long while, now. Their father had a beard.

Vander’s is as soft as it looks. He keeps it neat. Their father didn’t have the tools to do that, other than scissors, but he preferred it longer, anyway. Said it kept his face warm.

Vi lets her fingertips stroke at the hairs on Vander’s cheek, shorter and softer there, and Vander lets her. She thumbs at the coarser patch around his jaw, his chin. It’s a nice feeling. Vander’s got his eyes closed.

“Do you know how to make soup?”

“Uh. Think so.” He must be close to sleep, and here’s Vi keeping him awake. Not the point of what she’s supposed to be doing, is it? “Been a while. You wanna learn?”

“I guess. If it helps.”

“Alright.” He pats her arm. “You go have a nap with your sister, and when I’m better I’ll teach ya how to make soup.”

Vi makes it far enough to close the door behind her, get down the hall, find Powder in their room, to lie on the bed next to her—still reading, still happy—and falls asleep to the sound of turning pages and ticking clocks.

////

The apartment building’s darker than she remembers it being. Could be the weather.

The clerk behind the reception desk in the foyer recognises her, she can tell.

“Hello,” he says, smiling and uneasy about it. His name tag reads Henry. “What can I do for you?”

Vi reaches over the desk to grab him and haul him over it. He shouts. So does a woman seated in a far corner, shocked from her reading.

Henry twists in her grip, scrabbles at her hands.

“You—What are-”

“We’re going upstairs.”

She drags him to the elevators, smashes a fingertip into the up arrow, shoves him into the lift before the doors have finished opening. He hits the edge of one, stumbles against the hand rail inside.

“516,” says Vi.

Henry doesn’t argue. Swipes his key card with a shaking hand and presses a button.

When the elevator stops Vi fists the lapels of his suit jacket and brings him with her along the hall. Pushes him at the closed apartment door.

He’s shaky, forehead prickling with sweat. He fumbles with the keys. The rattling pisses her off.

“You know,” he says, breathing stuttering, “I would have done this if you had just asked nicely.”

The door unlocks.

Vi raises an eyebrow at him.

Henry sighs. Turns the handle, pushes, steps inside.

Vi follows. The entryway’s narrow, tiled. It fans out into a living area, a small kitchen to one side, balcony doors at the other end. Everything’s grey. Grey and white.

It’s empty. As promised.

516.

Meaningless.

“Wait here.”

Henry nods. He looks scared. Good.

Vi searches every room. It doesn’t take much, only a few cupboards, a wardrobe, a bathroom attached to the one bedroom. Empty fridge. Empty everything.

Caitlyn thinks Powder’s taunting her with—with this?

How?

Why?

She’s her sister. She’s her sister and she loves her. Vi’s sister. Powder’s sister.

“Your… colleagues,” says Henry, choosing a bad time to pipe up, “were already here recently. What are you-”

Vi shoves him against the living room wall, hard. He shouts.

“What do you-”

“Who was here before us?”

“What?”

She pulls him to her, slams him back again. More shouting.

“When we came here. Who was here before that?”

“N—Nobody, no-one-”

Vi hits him. Open-palmed, simple. He’s lying.

“Nobody,” he says again. “It’s—you can see—it’s been vacant six months, the owner-”

“Who’s the owner?”

“An Ionian, just a—a businessman, he’s very wealthy, he doesn’t care if it-”

Vi hits him again. A fist this time. He’s rambling. It’s annoying.

She just needs to know what it means.

What the room, the number, the emptyness, means.

“Please, I don’t—I swear, I have no interest in lying to you, please.”

“Who called in the tip that brought us here?”

“What? I’m not—I don’t know, it wasn’t me.”

“But you know who it was, don’t you, Henry?”

“No, how would I? Of course not.”

“I’m here all the time. Nothing gets past me. That’s what you said, Henry.”

“I only meant-”

She hits him once more. A real hit. Satisyfing. Kind of like the punching bag, if the punching bag could moan, or grunt. If the punching bag could bleed.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Please, I swear to you, I swear, I don’t—I don’t know anything about any of it, I just work the—the front desk.”

“No young woman, coming in to pay you a visit? Blue hair, long braids?”

“No, no—I’d tell you, I would.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, I’m sure—I know who you’re—talking about, and I haven’t seen-”

“You know her? How?”

“Everyone does! Everyone—I’ve seen the posters, I know the news-”

Another hit. He’s not listening. He’s not helping.

It has to mean something.

One hand keeps him upright and the other hand connects with his face again, and again, and again.

She has to make him listen. She has to make him help.

“What do you know?”

“Nothing, nothing, nothing-”

Henry yelps, trying to cover his face with trembling hands. He’s leaning away from her and she keeps him upright, her grip unbreakable. He leans, and she pulls him back into her fist. Blow after blow after blow.

A sharp crack splits through the dull meaty sound of fist-on-flesh. He screams.

She falters.

The moment her grip on his front loosens he falls against the wall, slides to the floor in a heap. Face swelling already, cheeks purple and red, lip split. Blood speckled on his white shirt collar. And the wall behind him. Vi looks at her hands. Them, too.

Nothing new there.

Not the first time she’s beaten anybody to a pulp. Not nearly.

She hurts people, and they hurt her. Just another day.

Time is so repetitive.

“You’re insane,” Henry moans. “You’re—You can’t just…”

He’s shaking. Clutching at the floor like he’ll somehow fall off it otherwise. Blood and spittle drips in a glob from his open mouth. Tears leak from his eyes.

Vi stands over him, panting with the effort of hurting him as much as she has.

Blood on his collar. Blood on the wall. Blood on the white tiles.

She braces for more. There’s always more. He’s going to grab at her ankles, kick her legs, try to get her down. He’s going to try to stop her. He’s going to retaliate. Just like she would. Just like she has, a hundred thousand times, in his position.

He doesn’t. He clutches his face. He moans. Doesn’t come naturally, to him. Fighting. Fighting back.

He’s just a desk clerk. A topsider. A random man.

Vi might’ve broken his cheekbone.

Henry holds his face, tries to push himself up with his other arm. He looks at her with his uncovered eye, which leaks.

“But I suppose it’s—it’s true, then,” he says, grunting with the effort of getting upright. He slumps against the wall, head lolling. “Takes a monster to catch a monster.”

////

Nothing changes, afterwards.

Which might be the worst part.

////

It lasts two days.

Vi knows the moment Caitlyn appears at the other edge of the courtyard, watching her at the punching bag, that she’s heard.

She puts herself between Vi and the punching bag, arms folded. Her eyes are razor blades.

Vi keeps her fists in place, her stance. She’s not done. She’s not nearly done.

“Move.”

“Make me.”

“Move.”

“Make me.”

Vi shifts, walks round the bag to stand at a different spot. Caitlyn follows. Stands in an equally impossible place.

Vi’s skin prickles all over. Her eyes burn. Guilt shame fury.

“Caitlyn.”

“Don’t let me stop you. I know how much you like to hit things. Thought I might mix it up for you. Or—should I stand somewhere else? Would you like me to dart in and out for some practice with a moving target?”

“Caitlyn.”

“Go on. Hit me. It’s what you’re best at and I’m feeling left out.”

Vi lowers her hands. Barely recognises her. Barely recognises either of them.

Here’s to-

“I know what I did.”

“He has a fractured eye socket. And a concussion.”

“It was a mistake.”

“So this is your approach now. Going around terrorising innocent people at random. Runs in the family, does it?”

“Fuck you.”

Caitlyn doesn’t flinch.

Broken bone, bruised brain… Vi did that.

Still.

Doesn’t sound so bad, when you have so much to compare it to. Even the worst injuries eventually heal.

“I talked to the manager,” Caitlyn says. “The owner. I talked to eight hundred people, it feels like. If you were anyone else, there’d be serious consequences for what you did.”

“Gee, thanks, Cait. Wouldn’t want to get thrown into Stillwater. Heard that place is a shithole.”

Caitlyn looks like Vi’s done it—struck her.

Not a line she’d ever cross.

Or who knows what either of them are capable of, really, at this point.

She recovers quickly, and then it’s Vi’s turn to feel like she’s been hit in the face. She leans in, like she refuses to let Vi avoid any syllable of what she says next.

“Fuck you, too.”

And she’s gone.

////

For a while, Vi doesn’t do anything.

Sleep. Eat. Talk.

She takes one of the crystal bottles full of brown liquid off the little cart in the sitting room and drinks it over the space of a morning and wakes up in a heap in the hall with a pile of dried vomit next to her.

Then she does it again.

////

They start going out alone. A lot. Both of them.

Caitlyn does her reading and her list-making and her note-taking, disappears for most daylight hours, comes back at some point during the day or night, silent and hard-faced and never dragging Jinx behind her so Vi figures she’s not having much luck.

If Vi’s totally honest, most of all she does is walk.

Walk and walk and walk.

Or sit.

Sit in a pub and eat.

Sit at a bar and drink.

Sit on a rooftop and stare at the sky.

She goes through the motions, off and on. Goes to Babette’s some, and talks to her. She doesn’t know anything. Goes to Jericho’s, and talks to him. He doesn’t know anything.

The days bleed together, like they used to when she was locked up.

Least it’s familiar.

////

There’s a day when Caitlyn isn’t back by dinner.

Vi barely notices. She’s decided it’s time to replace her hand wraps again. She’s taken up her spot in the living room in front of the fire, unwinding a fresh roll.

When she’s done, she goes to bed.

Doesn’t sleep, but doesn’t expect to. Lies on her side and stares at the wall and listens to her pulse pump dimly in her ears like it does sometimes.

Tick, tick, tick.

Tock.

Tock.

Tock.

When the sunrise starts to crawl through the gap in the curtain she gets up and showers with cold water and heads downstairs for breakfast because that’s what she does now.

Sits at the table by herself in front of all the food and picks out two pastries and some bacon and eggs and eats it all because decisions are easier when nothing matters.

Tobias joins her when she’s almost done. Pours himself a tea from the ceramic pot one of the housekeepers always leaves at his end of the table.

“Caitlyn’s gotten a head start, has she?”

Vi folds her cutlery on her plate with a clatter.

“Haven’t seen her,” Vi says, like she’d be more informed if she had.

They don’t talk to each other anymore.

Vi’s started wondering if she’s allowed to stay here much longer, if the daughter of the house can barely look at her.

“Oh,” says Tobias. “That’s odd.”

“Is it?”

He looks in the direction of the stairs, the bedrooms.

“I checked in on her before I came down and… I don’t know. Her bed’s made.”

Vi pauses in the process of shoving her chair back and abandoning the meal.

“She wasn’t there?”

“No, I thought… just, maybe she was with you.”

“I haven’t seen her since yesterday. Morning.”

Vi watches the realisation hit him at the same speed it does her.

She never came home.

It’s not an immediate call to action. Caitlyn might have gone to Jayce’s, to the precinct, to—any one of several other places if she decided here, home, with them—with her—is not where she wanted to be.

Tobias disappears into his office to reach out to Jayce and the precinct and several other places, his concern clearly rising with every thought crossed off his mental list. Nobody’s heard from her. Nobody knows where his daughter is.

Vi paces the hall with her fists clenched and wonders how many people she’s supposed to dedicate her life to finding.

“I’m going out,” she says, to the half-closed office door with Tobias on the other side of it. “I’ll see if I can-”

“Yes, alright.” Tobias appears, pulling on his coat. “I’ll join you.”

“I—No, someone should wait here, in case she comes back. Sir.”

“We have staff who can do that. I’m going with you.”

Vi makes it to the bottom of the stairs with him hot on her heels. Her frustration mounts, and she tries to tamp it down. He’s her father. He’s worried. But she’s about to burn this whole fucking city to the ground if it means finding Caitlyn and she can’t do that if he’s tagging along worrying about where the matches’ll come from.

Which is when the front door clanks open, creaking on its huge hinges in the otherwise quiet house.

Relief hits Vi like that cold shower she took not long ago.

Caitlyn’s upright, alone. She’s moving slow. As she steps through the doorway she shifts to roll her shoulders, start shedding her backpack, and pauses when she realises they’re both standing ten steps away from her.

“Shit.”

Her voice is hoarse. Her hair undone and unkempt. Her eyes are bloodshot, bad enough that Vi can see from here. Her cheeks, nose, are pink, too, like wicked frostbite or-

Why does she smell like smoke?

“Darling.”

“Hi, Dad.” She croaks it out, a sputter. “I’m—alright-”

He pulls her into a tight hug. A cough surfaces, and it catches and she can’t shake it.

Vi steps forward, hands hovering uselessly. Tobias holds Caitlyn’s forearms while she tries not to double over.

“I’m okay.” Her eyes are watering, her nose. She wipes at her face with a sleeve. She’s not wearing her gloves. “Really, I…”

“What happened?” Vi asks.

Caitlyn lets her father hang onto her. Steadies herself on his arm and clears her throat.

“A tripwire,” she says. She squeezes her eyes closed a second, like a flash of pain’s caught her. “A basement in the undercity. I didn’t see it.”

“A bomb?” Tobias asks, looking to Vi in horror.

Like it’d be the first time either of them had been blown up.

“Some sort of—smoke, chem-” and she’s coughing again, harder this time. She groans. Vi imagines her body’s had enough of the jerking motion it’s putting her through. “Chemical,” she finishes, eventually. “It burned. I breathed it in.”

“You what?”

“My dear, you need to go to a hospital.”

“We did, I—they just—discharged me, so I came-”

“Alright, that’s alright, just focus on breathing, for now, okay? Through your nose if you can. Steady.”

Vi watches Caitlyn struggle to breathe and finds herself doing the same.

The air’s gotten thinner in here. Not such a leap for her airways to catch fire.

Caitlyn got hurt. Again.

Once she’s calmer, Tobias rubbing her back and holding her hand, he says, “Let’s get you upstairs. You need rest, and water.”

“I can—I’ll get you some water.”

“No,” Caitlyn says, her voice suddenly firm. “I don’t need—anything from you.”

The words hit like bullets. Vi knows that’s the point.

Tobias looks at her, an apology all over his features. But his priority is his daughter. He helps her to the stairs. She misses the second step, stumbles.

“Steady-”

“Sorry,” she mutters, her father the only thing keeping her upright at this point. “My eyes are all…”

Vi’s fingers twitch. She itches to reach, to catch, to hold. Tobias has her.

They make their way up the stairs, across to the hall. Vi watches them until she can’t see them anymore. Then she stares a long time at the walls, as if she still can.

////

The punching bag waits for her. In broad daylight.

She’s drenched in sweat, her hands and wrists throbbing, by the time Tobias joins her.

“Is she-”

“She’s fine, she’s asleep. She couldn’t settle, so I gave her a little something to help.”

Vi catches her breath.

“She didn’t seem fine.”

“She will be, in a few days. Her lungs gave her some trouble when she was younger, so things like this… She’s mostly just grumpy.”

He takes his usual spot on the low garden bed wall. Watches her, in her own usual spot.

“I’m surprised you weren’t with her,” he says. “Yesterday, last night.”

Vi hasn’t got anything to say to that. She keeps her focus on the bag, on the punching.

It’s what you’re best at.

“Is there… Is something the matter, between the two of you?”

I don’t need anything from you.

Vi has plenty to say to that. How, though?

Sometimes she’s reminded Tobias is, specifically, the father of the girl who Vi is… who Vi… Caitlyn. It’s Caitlyn.

“I’d never do anything to hurt her,” is what comes out. And it’s not even true.

“That’s not something I worry about. You just seem… at odds. I don’t enjoy seeing you both at odds.”

What a way to phrase it.

Odds.

Odds are, she’ll be out of his hair by nightfall and he'll never have to see her again.

Never share breakfast with her or sit and read his paper while she fusses with her hand wraps or falls asleep on the sofa.

Not ever again.

Those are always the odds, where Vi’s involved. Endings. Always.

“She doesn’t understand why I keep…”

There’s no point talking about it. There’s no point to any of it.

It won’t change anything.

It can’t.

Why the hell is he still trying to talk to her?

Why the hell is she still trying to talk to him?

“She doesn’t get why I talk about… about Jinx… as if she’s still Powder. As if she’s still my sister.”

“Isn’t she?”

“Powder was… My sister’s Powder, and…”

Vi gives up on it. If she could explain, neither of them would be here.

“I don’t know,” she admits. The words taste of acid. “I don’t know.” And she hits the bag, for something to do. “She thinks I’m being stupid. That the evidence is everywhere and I’m ignoring it.”

“She said that, did she?”

More hits. More silence.

Gotta ration out this talking thing.

“Well,” says Tobias. “She does have a way with words when she’s struggling.”

Vi looks over at him. She didn’t expect that kind of concession.

“She gets it from me, I think.” He takes his glasses off to clean them with the shirt fabric at his waist. “There was a time when I had such… strong opinions about what she should be doing, and who with. As far as our Jayce goes, for instance. He had so many ideas, so much determination to provoke change. It felt dangerous. That’s all I saw. I didn’t want him anywhere near her.”

“Would’ve thought you’d put me on the list by now, too.”

“I thought it was protective. Perhaps it was. But I’ve been ashamed to realise it was also a kind of control.”

“I’m not trying to control any-”

“No, of course not,” he says, with a lift of his hand. So casual. Slips his glasses back on. “It’s just normal, to fight change. It’s very normal.”

Here’s…

Even though I’m different.

“It’s not that I don’t see it,” she says, to the brick path beneath her boots. “What she’s done. What she’s doing. I’m not fucking… blind, I just can’t… It doesn’t make sense, when I try to put it together. It doesn’t make any…”

Tobias is nodding to himself. There’s a wooden post next to him, embedded in the bricks to keep part of the roof over the walkway upright. He leans against it.

“I still wait for Cassandra,” he says. “At the end of the day. I’ll get home, same time I normally would, and I’ll go to my study, like I normally would, and I’ll get to a certain time of the evening and realise I’m waiting for her. For her to come in after her own day, with tea for us both, like she used to, and these biscuits she liked that were too sweet for me.”

He clears his throat. Scuffs at the bricks with his slipper.

“And I’m lucky now, in a way, I think. It’s… final, when I remember that she’s… I have to sit with it. I don’t have to like it. But I have my answer. She isn’t coming home. I can just miss her. And then I can find her myself, when I need to.”

Vi wipes at her face. A few tears have started slipping out of her eyes, down her cheeks, and what for? Not her wife. Not her life.

“How?” she manages.

He tips his head, thinking. Like he hasn’t had to put it into words before. Like maybe he can’t, really.

“I close my eyes,” he tells her. And she watches him look off, away, and up. The side of the house. A bedroom window. Caitlyn’s bedroom window. “Or I open them.”

Vi wants to argue. To fight.

The standard reflex.

She can’t bring herself to do it.

He’s talking about memories. And reminders.

Those, she has. Those she has… so many of.

It never felt like a good thing.

It never felt like something she got to keep, when so much else got taken away.

“I should think it would rather break me if there were some small chance that she… that she might come back,” Tobias says. “That she was out in the world somewhere and the door really could open, one day, and there she’d be, with her awful biscuits, everything like it used to be. Even if it seemed so unlikely. I think I’d wait a very, very long time anyway, just to be certain.”

Vi sniffs. Swipes furiously at her cheeks.

Waiting.

Is that what she’s been doing?

Waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting, for something that’ll never happen, like the biggest fucking idiot in the world.

“Sounds like a waste of time,” she mumbles.

“Love is never a waste of time.”

Vi looks at him. Sees only, on his face, experience, and truth. Something familiar. She can feel him seeing it in her, too.

She kind of wants to touch his beard.

Her chest splits. Her face. Everywhere.

She falls to her knees, hands sliding off the punching bag she didn’t realise she’d been holding on to, and her palms slap onto the bricks and her fingers tremble and a sudden sob wretches out of her, so heavy it startles her. She gasps and curls in on herself with her head tucked into her arms. Another builds up and slips out.

“Alright. Okay. It’s alright.”

Tobias kneels at her side and wraps his arms around her. His grip is firm. There’s a strength to him she can’t name. A certainty.

“It’s alright,” he says again. “You’re okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Vi leans into it. Into him.

She clutches at his arms and presses her face into his shoulder and hears every word he says every time he says it and she cries and she cries and she cries and she grips him so hard it must hurt.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he tells her, like he knows.

I’m not going anywhere.

////

She doesn’t catch much of what happens for a while. A bit of time she’s fine to let go of.

Tobias gets her on her feet, into the house. Takes her to the bathroom the staff tend to use, by the back door, because it’s closest. Finds a tissue box and a towel. Helps her wash her face with gentle hands.

“There you go,” he says, so gentle. "That's better."

A stray sob hiccups out of her, residual. She groans, a hand on the sink while Tobias cleans her up. She closes her eyes so he can carefully wipe over her face one more time with a cool, wet cloth.

The mirror above the sink shows her Powder. And Vander. And her parents.

When she looks again, she just looks young. When did she get so young.

They leave a mess in the basin and Tobias guides her out into the hall with a hand on her back. Takes her upstairs. When they get to her room, Tobias doesn’t stop.

“She’s probably still asleep,” he says. “We’ll be quiet.”

The room is dark, all the curtains drawn. The big bed at the far end darker still, a vague shape visible in the middle of it. It’s a strange quiet, a hushed stillness. Caitlyn is definitely not awake.

Tobias moves her to sit on the edge of the bed, lightly. He crouches to undo the laces of her boots. Pulls one off, then the other. Puts them aside. Then turns, and carefully slides one of the drawers of Caitlyn’s dresser open, taking something from it. A sweater.

He puts it on the bed by Vi’s thigh and reaches for her waist, his eyes waiting for permission. Vi gives it.

“Arms up,” he murmurs.

Vi’s eyes fill with tears.

Tobias gets her out of her sweaty, snot-stained shirt and into the soft sweater he’s found. Tobias puts the dirty shirt into the laundry basket and comes back to the bed to help her lie down. Tobias, Tobias, Tobias. Vi’s crying again, quiet sniffling while her eyes drip. Maybe she never stopped.

He gets her lying down above the covers, the unconscious lump next to her unmoving. Vi can hear her breathing.

“You just lie there,” Tobias says, crouching by her head. He’s got a hand on her arm. His other, inexplicably, comes up to brush the hair off her forehead. His fingertips graze her skin. A calmness rolls through her. Her eyes close. “Okay? Just lie there with her and close your eyes for a bit.”

Vi sniffs. Nods. Curls into a ball with her back against Caitlyn’s sleeping form. She thinks she’s lying on her side, facing her. She’s not sure. She’s not sure of anything except how it feels when Tobias brushes at her hairline again. Stroking. Soothing.

The calmness rolls through her some more until she’s weightless. Boneless.

“There,” he whispers, still with her. “That's good. That’s all you have to do.”

////

The bed’s empty when she wakes up. Caitlyn’s bed. Caitlyn’s room.

Everything comes back to her in pieces, like always.

Different pieces, this time. Different halves. A before and an after grounded in… some other thing. Some other moment in time.

She’s not sure the full shape of it, or how to fit them together, yet. But it’s a relief to have the change.

The bathroom door opens and Caitlyn comes out in her sleep shorts and tank top, flicking the light off behind her. Her pace is slow, her eyes not entirely open.

Vi’s relief has layers. Waking alone was so unsurprising it barely registered.

I thought you’d gone.

I thought you didn’t want to be near me.

I can leave, if you-

“Okay?” Vi checks, when Caitlyn’s back by the bed. Her voice barely works.

Caitlyn nods, pulling at the covers and clambering back into the bed. Vi wriggles out the way to let her. Shifts onto her back with her hands on her stomach.

The room is quiet. Vi thinks Caitlyn’s going back to sleep. Vi thinks they both might.

Doesn’t feel like the proper use of a day.

Unless it is.

“You?”

Caitlyn’s pulled the blankets up high, got her back to her. She’s very still. Vi could’ve imagined hearing her ask.

“Okay?”

No. A real question.

Vi gives it more thought than she tends to.

A headache presses at her temples. Her eyes are scratchy, an off taste in her mouth. A strange tension in her sternum.

Standard sobbing hangover.

“Yeah,” Vi says. “I’m… I’m okay.”

A quiet sigh. The covers rustle, a readjustment. Vi can only see the top of her head, her hair.

There’s a quiet so long Vi’s certain she’s fallen asleep again.

“Can you…”

Vi turns her head Caitlyn's way.

“What is it?”

“Can we just…”

Vi studies her, what little she has to go on. Unmoving and heavy. Her voice sounds like shit still. A few days, Tobias said it would take. She’ll be fine in a few days.

"You feel very far away," Caitlyn says then.

Her voice is small.

Vi says, "Yeah. I feel that way, too."

They move together, Vi onto her side to tuck herself behind Caitlyn, drape an arm around her, and Caitlyn shuffles back against her, welcoming it. They share a pillow, Vi's chin by the top of her head. Her hand comes out from under the covers, to Vi’s arm.

Vi realises she’s not got her hand wraps on. Tobias must have helped her out of them.

Caitlyn runs her hand down the bare skin of Vi’s forearm and tangles their fingers together. Rests their joined hands on top of the covers by her stomach and sighs.

With their fingers intertwined, loose, Caitlyn's thumb takes up a small stroking motion. Vi's palm. Her index finger. Middle finger. Sometimes it goes away. Then comes back. She must be moving from finger to finger, in a loop. She probably doesn’t realise she’s doing it.

“Can’t feel that,” Vi murmurs.

“Hm?”

“That. What you’re doing. I can’t feel it.”

Caitlyn tilts her head back to try and look at her. Her cheeks are rosy and dry from whatever chemical cloud she stood in recently.

“What?” she croaks.

Vi lifts their joined hands enough to see what she’s doing.

“This one,” she says, wriggling her little finger. She brings her other arm around Caitlyn’s head and Caitlyn shifts to rest against her chest and give her room to do so. Vi touches the little finger of the hand Caitlyn’s still holding. It’s weird, but she’s used to it. “And this one, until about… here.” She touches the finger next to it, her ring finger, from tip to knuckle, and stops only above the knuckle where it joins up with her hand. “No feeling in them. Just numb.”

“What happened?”

The same old instinct raises its head.

Doesn’t matter.

Not important.

“Broke them. Badly. Never healed right.”

Caitlyn’s holding her hand with both of hers now, palm facing her. She runs her thumbs across her palm. Touches her index finger, her thumb, a caress. And the smallest two fingers, testing.

Vi’s skin is tacky, pale, more scarred than she realises every time she sees herself bare.

“Stillwater?” asks Caitlyn.

Her voice is very quiet. Very careful.

Vi smiles. Huffs.

“No. Powder.”

Caitlyn strokes at her fingers some more.

Vi watches the motion, the touching. Tracks the path of ghost sensations carefully. Sees it, knows it, but can’t feel it, no matter how hard she'd ever try. Signals and synapses and broken nerve endings. It’ll never make sense, not completely. Never reach her brain the way it’s supposed to.

Nothing will change that. Not even time.

Doesn't mean it's not really there, though. If she only keeps her eyes open.

“We were playing this game,” Vi says. “Me and Pow, and our brothers. You’d pick a room in the house and close your eyes and someone would go hide in it, and you’d try to find the other person in the dark as fast as possible, and the other person’s teammate would put stuff in your way to block you, make you slow. And the person hiding was allowed to move, but they had to be quiet or the person with their eyes closed would just find them faster. It was stupid. Something we made up together.” Vi looks at the fingers she can’t feel, as if one more inspection will bring it back. “Powder shoved this footstool thing in front of me so I wouldn’t catch Mylo, just part of the game. When I fell I snagged my hand on a doorhandle.”

“Ouch.”

“Powder was a mess. Vander took me to a doctor friend of his and she wouldn’t let us go without her. Like someone was gonna put me down if they couldn’t fix my little finger.”

“She cared about you.”

Vi shifts her other hand into Caitlyn’s view. Turns it, so she can see the back of it. Her knuckles are bruised from the bag and from… from Henry. Her middle finger’s crooked.

“That’s Stillwater,” she says, moving their joined hands to gesture at the bent digit. “I asked a guard for an extra blanket, said I was cold. Hadn’t been there long. Didn’t know how it all… He grabbed my hand, my finger, and he yanked on it, really hard. Dislocated, I think. He said it’d distract me from feeling cold.”

Caitlyn pulls Vi’s hand to her mouth and kisses the place where it’s healed wrong. Like so many parts of her.

“You’re covered,” she murmurs. She holds Vi’s hand to her cheek, hugging it almost. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“I mean I’m just… I’m sorry that I haven’t understood. I thought I did, I thought I… I’d seen the prison, I’d seen Jinx, I’d heard you talk about your sister. I thought I had all the information I needed and I wanted you to see it all like I did. Move on from everything holding you back and—and get on my level. It’s been… pissing me off, so much, that you haven’t.”

“Think I’d feel the same, if I were you.”

“I don’t think you would. Your heart’s too big.”

“You’re not exactly heartless yourself, Cait.”

“I think I might be. Just as bad as everyone I’m fighting against. Or worse.”

Caitlyn muffles another weak bout of coughs with her hand. Vi loosens her arms around her while she shakes with it, and returns her grip once it’s passed.

“You lost your mom,” Vi says. “Grief like that… It changes you. It changes everything.”

Caitlyn rolls over in her arms. Slips her hand behind Vi’s head and plays with her hair, looking into her eyes. Searching. Warm.

“Not everything,” she says. “Not quite.”

A new kind of relief washes over Vi when Caitlyn shifts up to kiss her. A gentle, slow thing. Vi hums into it. They both need gentle, right now.

Then she pulls away to sputter into the space between them.

“Sorry,” she says, trying to reign it in, turning away. “Ah—shit.”

“It’s alright.”

“So—attractive, I know.”

“I’m into it.”

The next cough comes out through a smile. Cait shoves at her before she gets caught up with not being able to breathe.

Vi rubs her back while she sits up, the covers slipping to her waist, coughing into the crook of her arm. Waits it out.

“Any thoughts about that tripwire you stumbled across?” Vi asks, after she’s laid back down against her.

Caitlyn hums. “The smoke was blue.”

“I wanted to think it couldn’t be her. Jinx. Just for a second.”

“You mean Powder,” Caitlyn says, with no heat.

“No,” Vi sighs. “I think I mean Jinx.”

Caitlyn rubs her arm.

“I don’t know what the answer is,” she murmurs. “I don’t know what’ll happen when we finally catch up to her. Or when she catches up to us.”

“I know.” Vi holds her tighter. “I don’t, either.”

“I don’t even know what I… what I want to happen. I really don’t. I hope you know that.”

“Yeah. I do.”

Caitlyn kisses Vi’s palm. Her thumb. Her fingers. All with a kind of reverence.

Vi can’t feel all of it, like she’s said.

But it’s still nice.

////

They must go back to sleep at some point, because at some point they wake up.

Seems like daylight’s filtering through the edges of the heavy curtains. Seems like they slept through the entire rest of the previous day.

Vi looks down at Caitlyn, still resting in her arms. She stirs as if part of her’s sensed Vi waking, too.

“Shit,” she mutters, that crackle in her voice still. “I really need to pee.”

Vi chuckles. Not what she expected to hear.

They take turns in the bathroom and Caitlyn bypasses the bed and makes for her door. She’s less unsteady on her feet, Vi thinks, if still pink-faced, still bloodshot, still exhausted.

Vi follows her down to the kitchen, which is empty. Must be bang in between meal times for nobody to be working in here. She watches Caitlyn walk around the space, lay out a cutting board and a knife on the shiny marble countertop.

“What’re you doing?”

“No offense, but if I have to lie in that bed one second longer, I’ll shoot a hole in the ceiling.”

Vi sits on a stool on the other side of the counter. Can’t help but be amused by her petulance.

“I’m hungry,” Cait tells her, rummaging in the fridge now. “And I feel like shit. So I’m cooking the only thing I know how to cook.” She turns around with vegetables in her arms, puts them on the bench. “Soup.” And she looks at Vi, tucking hair behind her ear, out of her way. She smiles. An invitation. “Do you want to help?”