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He went very still.

This could not be what it looked like, because these things did not happen. There were rules. He knew them intimately.

People turned into ******** kittens. He would proceed as though nothing was unusual about this situation. It was, he was swiftly learning, the best way to cope with everything that Deus threw at any of its unfortunate thralls. He managed, to his distant, depersonalized surprise, to sound professional and unruffled. It was a lie.

"Are you Leona Tavish?"

Tuesday had said "********" once in his presence. Specifically she had said "how do you work this ******** thing" about a new toy. He'd had to excuse himself to go laugh silently into his arms in another room while his horrified mother took over and asked where she'd heard language like that, like she didn't know.

He relaxed a little. "What'd you touch? Or did you eat something? It's usually in the food, right?"

"Oh, come on," he protested loudly through the door. "Jesus Christ. Listen--I need some information about the ******** Sahara. Jane sent me."

The sarcasm drained away, replaced by contrite quiet as he stepped inside and relaxed incrementally in the welcome heat. "Sorry if it's a bad time," he said. "I'm not--real good with the phone." Too nervous to ever use it to make a call; too frustrated at this particular moment to wrestle with his shaking hands for a text. "Obadiah Thompson," he added. "I figured she'd warn you I'd be along, but I don't know if she did."

Taym resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and settled for exasperatedly scrubbing his face with his hands instead, raking his fingers through his hair. "Intelligence division," he said bitterly. "I'm getting shipped out there in two months. They're giving me the literature but I'm looking for firsthand advice since I'd prefer on the whole if I returned in one piece and breathing. I was told you'd have the expertise," he lied, willing to test out minor flattery.

Fine. Don't offer him a chair. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and tried not to look at either of them, odd and unsettling pair that they were. He didn't want to know how they'd gotten that way.

He fell quiet again, dropping his eyes to his fingernails for no good reason, transparently avoiding looking up.

"Run where, exactly? This is the kind of s**t I want to know," he said, without inflection. "I'm pretty sure my partner thinks he's going on vacation for two months. If he won't prepare himself I'll be prepared for both of us. I take my responsibility to him," he continued, "extremely seriously. And I'm sorry to intrude on your grief--I really am so ******** sorry," he added, with a note of genuine, pained sincerity for the apology, strained and grieving, "--but if this is my job I want to do it well, and I do consider keeping him alive part of it, and I want to be equipped."

"I didn't even know short trips were an option," he told her, tired. "Thank you. I'll look into that as soon as I can. And thank you for the rest of it. If there's anything else," he added, pulling out his phone to dispatch a message, "I'm sending you a text and I'd deeply appreciate it as it occurs to you."

He wanted to ask more. He wanted to interrogate, to examine, to cross-reference and pry. But he had exactly enough tact to realize that digging up a pile of fresh memories was a bad idea. "Thank you," he said again. "Really. And if there's..." but there wasn't anything he could do, so he didn't finish the thought. He hazarded a glance at them, at her tiny face and the man's frail shoulders under the blanket, and turned away to go. "Sorry for barging in."

It would have been disastrous to stop and think. He was sending a second text before he'd even left the basement. His hands were shaking, and it took him an agonizingly long time to get the message out. He was already out of the building and aimed at the old towns by the time he hit send.



He reached out hesitantly for Fiona, whose absence immediately collapsed into a surge of worried, protective comfort, wordless as she normally was: just the vague intangible sensation of a mother's hand pressed to his forehead. He accepted it only briefly before asking her to stop.