Page 26 of Graceless

"The light's going," I said.

It was three in the afternoon.

She didn't call it out. She turned back to the panel and set the swab down and picked it up again, and her hands were not steady, and I watched her hands not be steady and understood that I had done that, and that something in me — some ruined, starved, unforgivable thing — was glad.

I gathered the clipboard. I was at the foot of the stairs when her voice stopped me.

"What do people call you?"

Not steady either. Aimed at the panel, not at me — but thrown to reach me, and it did.

"You have the card."

"I have a card that says R. Barrett, and we both know what a card is worth." She turned around. Chin up, eyes bright, pulse still wrong — I could hear it across the room. "I'm not asking what the company calls you. I'm asking what people call you. People who know you. If those exist."

If those exist.

There is one. He calls me by the whole name, the buried one, and it lands like a verdict every time. Before him — before everything — there were others, and what they called me is under a very old floor and staying there.

The word came up anyway. Three letters. The only thing left in the till that was actually mine — and after what had almost happened at that easel, I owed her one true thing or I was worse than everything they call me.

"Raq," I said.

She went still. Not the fear-stillness — I know that one on her now; I have caused it, and sworn against it. This was the other kind. The kind that holds a thing up to the light.

"Raq," she said. Testing the weight. And the syllable in her voice did something to me that I will not be recording. "Is that short for something?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell me what?"

"No."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she nodded — once — and said, in exactly the voice she uses for the angel:

"Okay, Raq."

"Lock the door tonight," I said, and took the stairs, and did not look back, because looking back was no longer a thing I could price.

"It's always locked." And then, quieter, as the door was closing — I was not meant to hear it; I hear everything: "Good night, Raq."

I went up the wall in the dark.

The field was wrong.

Not the alley — the alley held its cold nothing, fourth night running. The edge. Something touched the far edge of my range once, held there a moment — heavier than the surveyor, older, a different instrument entirely — and withdrew. Once. Gone. The way a hand tests a door it intends to come back for.

The surveyor phase was over. Whatever came next had checked the address.

My phone had been silent for two days. Not buzzing — silent, and the silence was spending Cam's borrowed paperwork hour by hour, and somewhere across the river a query was climbing toward a desk with my name warming on it.

And under all of it — under the field and the phone and the borrowed days — my knuckles still held the side of her neck, and my body still leaned at the angle I had refused to finish, and the sound of her breath catching played in me on a loop I made no move to stop.

Tomorrow I would sit in her cellar and be furniture, eighteen inches from a woman whose mouth I had been three inches and one warning away from, and one of two things was going to break first — whatever was coming out of the dark, or me.

I kept the watch.

CHAPTER 8