Chapter 3: A Reasonable Distance

The woman on the landing wore cream silk into a flooded building and did not glance down once.

That, Sau-lin thought, was either breeding or excellent insurance.

"Vivian," the event manager said.

So this was Vivian Ashby.

She was perhaps forty, though wealth had made the question impolite. Her dark hair was pinned at the nape. A narrow gold watch circled one wrist, discreet enough to cost more than every instrument the quartet had carried out. She paused in the doorway and took inventory.

The split pipe. The blackened wards. Callum on his feet with the hairpin clenched in one hand. Sau-lin beside the broken mirror, solid enough to cast a shadow.

Vivian looked at her for half a second.

Most people needed longer to understand that a dead woman had appeared at their real estate preview. Vivian needed less. Nothing opened in her face, no fear and no recognition. She merely adjusted the value of the room.

The contractor edged past her toward the stairs.

"Ms. Ashby, the basement wall is staying closed."

"Of course," Vivian said. "Thank you for exercising judgment."

The man looked startled by praise and fled before she could revise it.

The event manager began explaining the sequence of failures. Vivian listened while watching water creep toward one of the white chairs. Her attention had the ease of a shopkeeper reading whether a customer could pay before he reached the counter. Guests, contractors, staff, Callum. She priced each of them and moved on.

When the manager reached the woman in the old dress who had come through the mirror, Vivian spared Sau-lin another civil glance.

"Our actress," the manager said weakly.

Sau-lin admired desperation when it dressed itself for work.

"No," Vivian said. "I don't believe she is."

Callum shifted between them.

A small movement. Protective, if one misunderstood him. More likely he wanted his murder suspect where he could see her.

Vivian noticed the movement. She noticed the warm jade in his fist and the root-shaped bruises reaching past his cuff. The pleasant curve of her mouth did not alter.

"Mr. Rourke," she said, "this appears to have exceeded the agreed scope."

"Your basement exceeded the agreed scope."

"It often does."

Callum's fingers gripped the hairpin. "You knew there was something under this building."

"I know there is a nineteenth-century cellar beneath a building constructed in 1907. That is why I hired a specialist."

"To open it?"

"To make it safe."

Vivian stepped aside as two catering workers came up the stairs carrying sodden table linen. One apologized. She assured him there was no need, then checked the label inside his jacket as he passed.

This woman could read money in a room, including money that believed itself invisible. She had seen Callum's failure. She had seen Sau-lin. Whatever conclusion she drew, she folded it away without a crease.

"Thank you for coming so promptly, Mr. Rourke," Vivian said. "I'll be in touch."

"About the damage?"

"Among other things."

She turned to the event manager. "Get everyone home. Keep the contractors out of the cellar. We will call tonight unfortunate and tomorrow exclusive."

The manager followed her downstairs.

Callum waited until their footsteps faded. "Who is she to you?"

"The owner of a damp building."

"Try again."

"No."

The word was true and therefore easy.

A vibration moved under Sau-lin's feet. The thing under the city had struck through the rite and found resistance. Now it was tasting what remained. The new knot inside her tightened each time Callum's heart beat.

She needed to leave this fool, return to the buried path before the thing below finished noticing her, and discover what he had done from a safer distance.

Sau-lin walked out.

"Stop."

She continued down the stairs.

The preview had dissolved into wet coats and irritated departures. Staff hauled flower arrangements to the curb. The quartet argued over whose car held the parking ticket. A woman in cream silk stood under the front awning, speaking into her phone as if the evening had gone exactly as planned.

Sau-lin passed within three feet of Vivian.

Vivian looked directly at her.

"Good night," she said.

Sau-lin gave her nothing.

Outside, fog softened the upper floors and silvered the red paint on the balconies. Winnie's grille was locked across the paper shop. Behind it, ranks of candles and folded houses waited in the dark. A bakery near the corner still had its lights on. Warm air breathed from its open door, carrying sugar, yeast, and the scorched edge of egg custard. Somewhere inside, a radio promised relief in two plops and two fizzes.

Sau-lin had not been hungry in decades. Her body remembered anyway.

She turned downhill along Waverly Place.

At the window above Winnie's shop, a tenant leaned out to smoke. He followed Sau-lin with his eyes, cigarette stalled near his mouth. She looked down at herself.

Her hands had color.

The lines across her palms were clear. Water darkened the hem of her dress. Mist touched her skin and melted there.

Behind her, Callum emerged from the building and headed the other direction, toward Washington Street, his toolbag swinging from one hand. He did not call after her again.

Excellent.

The warmth in her palms increased. Sau-lin curled her fingers against it.

Once, warmth had been too common to notice. A crowded shop in July. Tea cooling beside the ledger. Kwok-wing complaining that she stole the blanket while surrendering most of it without a fight. Her body had made heat and wasted it freely.

Now each degree felt stolen. She lifted her palms to her face and breathed into them, as she had on January mornings, and could not make herself stop.

Callum reached the top of the lane.

A high note pierced her left ear.

Sau-lin stopped. The ringing sharpened until it seemed to pass through her teeth. Under the skin of her wrist, a dark branch appeared.

Across the intersection, Callum caught the side of his van.

He looked back.

"Stay there," he called.

She took another step downhill.

Pain closed around her ankle. Black bruising spread upward in thin roots, visible through skin that should not have been skin. Her borrowed pulse slowed.

One beat.

A pause long enough to count.

Another beat, softer.

Callum bent over beside the van. His toolbag struck the pavement. He pressed a hand to his chest.

The knot between them pulled taut.

Through it came his heartbeat, no longer separate from hers. Each weak contraction dragged at the inside of Sau-lin's ribs. He was frightened. She knew it from the frantic effort of a body whose heart had forgotten urgency.

So had hers.

The ringing swallowed the street.

The tenant at the window shouted something. A car turned into Waverly Place, tires hissing over wet pavement. Its horn sounded from a great distance.

Sau-lin tried to move toward Callum. Her knee folded instead.

His heart stopped.

Hers stopped with it.

The city held its breath around a dead woman who had somehow acquired one.

Then the tether recoiled.

The force caught Sau-lin behind the sternum and ripped her uphill. Fog, bakery light, and red balconies smeared together. She struck the middle of the street on both knees and slid across wet asphalt.

Callum came off the curb backward. He hit the hood of a parked car hard enough to set off its alarm, rolled once, and sprawled against the windshield.

Their hearts slammed back into motion.

Callum dragged in air. Sau-lin braced both palms on the street while his pulse battered through her ribs, wild and painful and alive.

The turning car stopped several feet from her. Its driver leaned on the horn.

Sau-lin raised her head. "You have made your point."

The driver stared at her dress, lowered the window, and reconsidered. He backed out of Waverly Place.

The car alarm continued.

Callum slid off the parked hood. "Did you do that?"

Sau-lin got to her feet. Her knees had not torn, though they ached. "I was walking."

"You nearly stopped my heart."

"You took yours in the opposite direction."

"That is generally permitted."

"So is walking."

He slapped the hood until the alarm cut off. A dent remained where his elbow had been.

The tenant above Winnie's shop drew thoughtfully on his cigarette.

Callum retrieved his toolbag and came toward her. With each step, the bruising under Sau-lin's skin faded. His color improved. By the time he reached the bakery door, the ringing had thinned to a whine.

He stopped ten feet away.

Sau-lin's pulse steadied. Warmth returned to her fingers.

Callum shivered.

His eyes dropped to her hands. "What are you doing?"

"Standing in a street."

"You're warm."

"You say that as if it were misconduct."

"Everything about tonight is misconduct."

He stripped back his cuff. The root-shaped bruises remained on his forearm, dark at the center and paling toward his elbow. Sau-lin uncovered her own wrist. The same branches marked her skin.

Callum looked from one pattern to the other.

"How far?"

"Far enough to improve your company. Not far enough to escape it."

"About a block."

"A small block."

He glanced uphill toward his van, measuring. Of course he measured. Some men faced the impossible with prayer. Callum Rourke apparently preferred estimates.

"What happened in that room?" he asked.

"You opened a paper you did not understand."

"What came through the floor?"

Sau-lin could have said roots. Cold. Hunger. All true, all useless.

"A claim," she said.

"Whose?"

The answer rose toward her tongue.

Pain drove through bones buried under another century's earth, and her jaw locked on a mouthful of bitter cypress needles.

Sau-lin gripped her marked wrist until the urge to speak passed.

Callum saw. Suspicion hardened his face before concern could settle there.

"You know."

"I know many regrettable things. You have joined the list."

"Did you kill Declan?"

The bakery clerk had come to the doorway with a broom. Callum lowered his voice, but the name still landed between them without mercy.

Sau-lin saw the alley again. Declan on the ground. The jade trapped in his gray hand. His last refusal offered too late.

She could evade with a question. She could tell Callum where his brother had stood, what he had carried, what he had tried to break. Every truth would lead toward the thing listening under their feet.

"I did not want him dead," she said.

"That wasn't my question," Callum said.

"It is the answer you may have."

"Did you put that hairpin in his hand?"

"It was mine."

"Did you give it to him?"

"He had it."

"You answer everything sideways."

"You ask questions with knives hidden in them."

"My brother died holding your property."

"And now you have taken it into a basement and nailed it through a paper you could not read."

"He was drained of blood."

Sau-lin's hands remained warm. She wished they did not. Callum waited, grief having pared him down to the demand in his face. He had built a circle for one and caught something larger.

The bakery clerk swept the same patch of pavement while watching them. Sau-lin stepped closer to Callum, out of the doorway's light. Heat slipped into her with appalling ease. His shoulders drew tight against another shiver.

"Stop that," he said.

"I have not chosen it."

"For someone who won't answer a direct question, you're particular about grammar."

"Grammar has never driven iron through my hand."

His eyes flicked to the palm the root had pierced. No wound remained, only a black point under the skin.

He looked away first.

The bakery shut its door. The tenant crushed out his cigarette and closed the window. Around them, Waverly Place fell back into its ordinary night sounds: dishes behind apartment windows, a bus braking on Stockton, someone laughing up the lane.

Callum stood under the paper shop awning, eyeing his van at the edge of their new world.

"Three hundred feet, give or take," he said.

"You may give it all back."

"I need equipment from the van."

"Then fetch it without dying. The evening has produced enough paperwork."

He took in the locked grille, the wet street, and Sau-lin's visible hands. She could watch him convert disaster into tasks: retrieve the bag, measure the boundary, find somewhere inside it to wait for daylight.

He still believed this was a problem with an end.

"We stay within a block tonight," he said.

Sau-lin looked toward the sealed cellar. The pressure beneath it had not gone away. It had learned the rhythm of his heart.

Callum picked up his toolbag.

"I'll fix this in the morning."