Page 24 of Graceless

"So," Cam said. "Now the part I came to say. Are you listening? Look at me and be listening." I looked at him. My brother's eyes are the color of a verdict. "Leave. Tonight. The interest is in her, not in you — but you are a beacon, brother. You are the most legible thing on this block. Every hour you keep this vigil you confirm to anyone with eyes that she is worth guarding, and things with accounts read guards the way you read traces. You are not her wall. You are her advertisement."

"The surveyor came the first night. Before the vigil."

"Yes. And it has come back every night since. Interest arrives on its own, brother. Priority is earned." He let it land. "Leave, and she is a woman who shouted once and went quiet. A curiosity. Files close on curiosities. Stay, and you will hold her up to the dark with both hands."

The city ran its noise below us. Her light burned.

He was not wrong. That is the part I will not pretend: the tactics were sound, the read was clean, my brother has been right about fields of battle since before this planet had fields. Leaving might close the file. Staying might feed it. He offered me the whole of it with both hands, the way he has always offered me reasoning — precise, patient, and costing him nothing.

And underneath his voice I heard the other sentence, the one he was not saying, the one that has lived under every conversation we have ever had, and I had never once let myself hear it until a woman with paint on her hands taught me what it sounds like when someone chooses their words to be checkable:

I have watched you lose everything once. I filed the report myself.

"No," I said.

Cam went still.

"You have nothing left they can take, Baraqiel," he said, and his voice went down into the register he saves for the things that frighten him. "Do you understand me? Nothing. No wings, no grace, no standing, no name worth protecting. Which means when they come to price your interference, there is only one asset on your books." He looked down at the window. "They will take her. And they will do it in front of you, because that is how the lesson is taught. I have seen the lesson taught."

"Then hear my message," I said, "since you're carrying messages tonight."

I stood. The parapet is narrow. My brother did not step back, and I did not need him to; the distance between us was already the kind you measure in wars.

"Anything that reaches for her — I don't care what pays it, what sent it, what office holds its file. I don't care if it comes out of the dark or down out of the light. I will not check its name against a ledger first. Wings or no wings." I let him see all of it, everything I keep banked, the whole furnace. "You've watched me watch for ten thousand years, brother. You have never once watched me hunt. Pray to whoever still takes your calls that this is not the decade you learn the difference."

Silence on a rooftop.

And my brother — the coordinator of the field where I learned what the inside of my screaming sounds like — looked at me for a long moment with something moving behind his eyes that I could not read and he would not name, and what he finally said was:

"Hm."

Then the air moved, and the parapet was empty, and I stood alone above her street with my hands open at my sides and the city not caring, the way the city has never once cared.

I sat back down on the ledge.

Her light was out. The dark held. The horizon, east, past the water — quiet tonight, or pretending.

I kept the watch.

Two long pushes at eight. She opened the door and looked at me, and then looked at what I was carrying, and her whole face did something I had no name for and wanted to cause again immediately.

"What," she said, "is that."

"Your stool."

It was a contractor-grade platform stepladder. Reinforced steel frame, ribbed aluminum treads, locking cross-braces, a rated working load of three hundred pounds, and a guardrail. I had selected it at six that morning from a supply house in Gowanus on the merits. It was the correct equipment.

"That is not a stool. That is scaffolding. That is what they stand on to fix the BQE."

"It's rated for the work."

"It's rated for a CREW." She stood aside because I was already coming in with it, and it went down the thirteen stairs ahead of me — the turn required geometry, and I did the geometry, and she followed me down narrating the entire descent. "Oh my God. Look at it. It doesn't even fit past the — mind the frame, MIND THE FRAME — Barrett, I restore paintings, I'm not re-roofing the house⁠—"

I set it by the sink, where the bad stool had stood. I folded the bad stool and put it by the stairs to take out.

"Hey — no. That's still my stool."

"It's evidence," I said. "Of an equipment failure. It goes."