Brightwater

Day eight, 1:58 a.m., your phone buzzes on the nightstand.

leaving the building. rule one. you're welcome

You stare at it. Then you're up, pulling on jeans and a dark jacket in the dark, shoving your earpiece in your pocket and your feet into boots. He didn't say where. That was the deal. He's allowed not to say where.

He didn't say you couldn't follow.

The tracker in his watch shows him crossing the east garden on foot. Not the linen van this time, not a swapped car. You watch the dot pause at the old gardener's gate in the wall, which is supposed to be welded shut, and then slip through it onto the steep lane down to Old Town.

You go out the same way four minutes later. The gate isn't welded. It's been oiled.

Vessaline at two in the morning is a different city. The trams have stopped. Snow sifts down through the streetlights in slow gold flakes, and the cobbles are white and silent except for one set of footprints going down the hill ahead of you.

You stay a full block back. You've done this before, in other cities, for other reasons. Keep to the shadow side. Don't look at the target's back for too long; people feel it. Watch the street instead. Watch who else is watching.

Nobody is. For once, nobody is.

He walks fast with his hands deep in the pocket of a gray hoodie, the hood up, head down. Without the suit and the cameras he could be anyone. A student. A barista going home. You only know it's him because of the way he moves, that loose swimmer's ease, and because your whole body seems to have learned the shape of him in a week, which is not something you're going to think about.

He crosses the river on the little iron footbridge and turns into the Weavers' Quarter, where the old textile mills have been turned into flats and studios and bars that are all closed now. He stops in front of a brick building with tall arched windows, warm yellow light glowing behind steamed-up glass. A hand-painted sign hangs over the door, a swirl of blue water and a sunrise.

Brightwater House.

He knocks twice, a pattern. The door opens. Music and warmth spill out, and a woman's voice shouts "Cas!" like he's the best news she's had all week.

The door closes behind him.

You stand in the snow across the street for a full minute.

Then you look it up on your phone. Brightwater House. A registered charity. Emergency housing and support for LGBTQ+ adults who have lost their homes. Founded four years ago by an anonymous donor. Director: Margit Solheim.

You put the phone away.

You should go back. You know where he is now. He's safe. He's inside a building with locked doors full of people who are clearly happy to see him. You can sit in the café on the corner when it opens and watch the door until he comes out.

You cross the street instead, because you need to see the inside of a building your principal is in. That's the job.

That's the only reason.

The door is opened by a woman in her fifties with a gray buzz cut, reading glasses on a chain and a sweater covered in cartoon cats. She looks at you, all six-foot-something of you in a dark jacket at two in the morning, and her face goes hard as stone.

"We're full," she says. "And if you're press, I'll break your camera and then your nose."

"I'm not press." You show her your credentials, low, so the street can't see. "I'm with him."

She looks at the badge for a long time. Then at your face. Something changes in her eyes.

"You're the new one," she says. "The twelfth."

"Does everyone know that?"

"He talks." She steps back. "Wipe your feet. Don't make a fuss. And don't you dare call him anything but Cas in here."

Inside, Brightwater House smells like onions and bread and laundry soap. The ground floor is one big room with a kitchen at the back, mismatched sofas, a long table covered in board games and mugs, fairy lights strung along the iron beams. A radio plays old Aldorian pop. A dozen people are scattered around in pajamas and socks, the youngest maybe twenty-two, the oldest older than you. Some are playing cards. One is asleep on a beanbag with a cat on his chest.

At the stove, his back to you, stirring an enormous pot, is the Crown Prince of Aldoria.

The hood is down. His hair is a wreck. His sleeves are shoved up and there's flour on his forearm. He's arguing over his shoulder with a tall guy in a purple bathrobe about whether soup needs more paprika.

"It needs so much more paprika," says the bathrobe.

"Pascal, you'd put paprika in coffee."

"I have put paprika in coffee. It changed my life."

The woman at the long table, a young woman with a shaved head and a nose ring, maybe twenty-three, slaps down a hand of cards. "Cas. You owe me four hundred matchsticks. Pay up or stir faster."

"I'm a man of my word, Juno. Put it on my tab."

"Your tab is longer than the river."

He laughs. Not the laugh you've heard from him at galas or on the dance floor at Glasshouse. Not even the one in the car, surprised out of him. This one is easy. It comes all the way up from somewhere low and unguarded, and his whole body goes loose with it.

You've been watching him for a week, and you realize you've never actually seen him before.

Margit touches your elbow. "He comes twice a week," she says quietly. "Sometimes three. Cooks. Fixes the boiler badly. Sits up with the ones who can't sleep. Paid for the building, the beds, the counselor, the lawyer for Pascal's asylum case. Nobody here knows who he is, or if they do, they're too decent to say." She looks up at you over her glasses. "If that changes because of you, I will find you, Ethan. I don't care how big you are."

"How do you know my name?"

"I told you. He talks." She lets go of your arm. "He says you can't be shaken off."

"He's right."

"Good," she says. "Someone ought to keep up with him."

Across the room, Caspian tastes the soup, makes a face, and reaches for the paprika in defeat while Pascal cheers. He turns around with the jar in his hand, grinning, saying something to Juno.

He sees you.

The jar stops halfway. The grin falls off his face like something dropped. All the color goes out of him, and then all of it comes rushing back at once, red up his throat, his eyes huge and green and frightened in a way you've never seen. Not even at the hospital.

The room keeps going around you. Cards slap. The radio sings. Nobody else notices.

"Ethan," he says, very quietly, across the whole room. "You weren't supposed to see this."