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Aleksy's home was a Queen Anne cottage at the end of a dead-end street near the bay, on a spit of land that wasn't Waite State Forest but might as well have been. There were trees everywhere, and a pretty decent view of the beach five minutes' walk away. It was the house that hush money purchased, but Aleksy had long-ago made his peace with that: anything was better than a rented room full of collegiate assholes. And this place, it was all his. The door had locks on it, three of them, on his side of the door.

It was a pretty house, was the crux of the matter. It didn't look like a house Aleksy would own, but the name on the mailbox was Spektor, and the bike chained to the front porch railing was definitely Aleksy's.

Aleksy pitched himself off the couch, texting as he walked:



He unlocked the door: a deadbolt, a chain lock, another deadbolt. Good, solid locks, and a door that opened inward. Aleksy wondered if he looked tired, because he felt tired. "Hi," he said, quieter than usual, avoiding looking at Thorne. "You said shower?"

The other side of the door has a shoe rack, a row of coat-hooks. Then the living room, bare hardwood, a couch, the detritus of four years of an artist-in-residence. The coffee table has a collection of coffee cups, not all of which contain coffee, and an open sketchbook.

"Take your time," said Aleksy.

Today? Nothing happened today. It was only that... Aleksy flinches away from Thorne's hand at his neck, muscles in his jaw tightening. "Laika's in the backyard, if you like to see her," he said.

He thinks about it, but Thorne came all this way and probably not just to see Aleksy's dog. Honestly, he'd been half expecting to find a pair of beat cops checking to make sure he was alive and not a danger to himself. "I don't want you to think I'm insane. And you will, if I explain, so... no. I haven't seen Lucas. But I've seen him."

Aleksy shakes his head, curling into the couch again. "He doesn't seem... harmed... by whatever it is," he says. "There are towels under the sink."

Aleksy shifts uncomfortably, making room on the couch. Not that room had been lacking in the first place, since Aleksy isn't a very large man. He's pretty small, actually.

"I see things sometimes," he says. "You've heard the story about other ashdown? How there is mirror town, close to this one but not quite, with rain always." His accent is thicker, less the mild and studied touch on the sharper consonants; he has to tell this right, or it doesn't make sense. "I do not--see--the way you do any more. And I am afraid. That maybe I am. Losing control of it."

"I think I am going crazy," said Aleksy.

But Thorne had seen it, hadn't he? Of course he did. Aleksy can see the birds trapped in Thorne's tattoo struggling to be free. "It is to trap the Enemy," he says. "So they say. I do not... explore it... overmuch. I have had my fill of asylums."

"That's the mystery," says Aleksy, "and your... boyfriend... person. He is irate that I can't explain better." Whatever Lucas is to Thorne, it's obviously something kind of important. You don't just snap candids of people you intend to ******** and run from. Well, Aleksy might, but that wasn't Thorne's style. The fact that he was here was proof enough of that.

He curls into himself. "Then I go back." Then he goes back and they hurt him again. "Do you believe me? That I see these things and they're real?" Even Eve didn't seem to really believe--or to understand why it was so horrifying--or--Aleksy scrubs his hands over his eyes.

Aleksy doesn't laugh. "He wants answers. I don't have any to give. And then he says--he says my sister is--"

He cuts himself off, that same knife-handed gesture his sister had used, though he couldn't have known that. Finished. The matter is done because it ended there: there will be no discussion of sisters in this house.

Aleksy says, "I wasn't born like this," and gestures to himself. "I was born a woman."