Page 132 of Graceless

Then his leg went, and he sat down hard against the broken wall, and I got to him before my knees got a vote. He was breathing hard — ragged, winded, a man after a fight — blood dark from his hairline, the blue banking out of his eyes in stages, and when I took his face in both hands he leaned. Into my hands. All of that impossible weight, held up by two palms, and it turns out I can.

"You're bleeding."

"It will close." His voice was gravel at the bottom of a river. "Caterina. You threw. The pin. At the host of heaven."

"You were both in Mrs. Esposito's arbor. I improvised."

"You threw a kitchen implement at a census of the Almighty."

"And you punched one in the face. Twice." My hands were shaking on his jaw and I did not take them back. "We'll split the lightning bolt."

Something came out of him that was almost a laugh — wrecked, one syllable, blood in it — and then his forehead came down onto my shoulder and stayed there, and his whole frame shook once, twice, and went quiet, and we sat in the wreckage of my yard — the cracked pavers, the murdered clothesline, Mrs. Esposito's grape arbor scattered to matchsticks — under a sky with nothing left in it but stars.

"Well," said the fisherman's voice behind me, cheerful, conversational. "That is the single most alarming thing I have ever witnessed. And I have witnessed alarming things."

I turned. He was standing by the dead geraniums where he'd set me down — big as Raq, built like the sea, salt-gray stubble and laugh-lines, a canvas jacket that had died at some point and continued working. He looked at me. At the nightgown. At the wreckage. At the rolling pin, lying in the middle of the yard like a dropped sword. And a smile spread across his face like sunrise coming up over water, and he said, over my head, to the man leaning in my hands:

"Raq. I like her."

"Sar," I said.

The smile came down to me, delighted. "How⁠—"

"You smell like fish."

CHAPTER 37

RAQ

Iput Caterina to bed and went out to clean up the mess we had made of her yard, as instructed. She had issued the order from the pillow, half asleep, with one finger raised: the pin comes back inside, the arbor gets stacked respectfully, and if Mrs. Esposito asks, it was a gas main. She was unconscious before the terms were fully dictated. I complied with all of them.

Camael came at one in the morning, when the block was done pretending to sleep. I was stacking the last of the arbor into a cord Mrs. Esposito could burn when he stepped out of the dark by the fence with his coat unbuttoned — unbuttoned, Camael, whom I have never seen with so much as a collar out of order — and stood there looking at the wreckage. The pavers. The folded clothesline pole. The dark stain by the wall that the rain had not finished with.

"Sar is on the roof," he said.

"I know."

"He should not be here. Neither should I." He came the rest of the way into the yard and stopped at the stain, and looked at it a long time. "You struck one of the host."

"Yes."

"You struck a census-taker of the host, in the open, under the count, in front of witnesses beyond number." His voice stayed level the whole way, which is how I knew. "There are brothers who were unmade for less before your woman's species learned to close a door. And I have spent the hours since standing in places I am permitted to stand, listening to channels I am permitted to hear, waiting for the summons. For the Decision. For anything."

He turned around, and his face was wrong — not moved, worse: uncertain — and I had known that face since before light had a name for itself, and I had never seen it uncertain.

"There is nothing, Raq. Nothing was opened. Nothing was filed. The count records everything — that is the entire nature of a count — and the record of tonight does not contain you." He said it the way you report an instrument reading that cannot be true. "A struck census-taker who did not file the strike. A second who descended without instruction and departed without report. I cannot construct the reason. Do you understand what I am telling you? I have existed since the first morning, and I have never once been unable to construct the reason."

"Maybe there isn't one."

"There is always a reason. When it is missing, it is not absent. It is withheld." He buttoned his coat, finally, one button, like a man remembering his uniform. "And do not ask me which brothers flew tonight. I will not say. Not to you, not to anyone. That refusal I can survive."

He went to the fence. Stopped. His back to me, the water tank black over the rooftops behind him.

"One day they are going to ask me what I saw." Quiet. Level. "And when it comes, Raq — do not ask me to choose."

Then the yard was empty.

Cate