A Red-Haired Girl

You hold her for eleven minutes. You know because the clock on the stove is the only thing in the kitchen you can look at without looking at her.

She doesn't say anything else. She breathes against your shirt, slow and shallow, and gradually the violet light in her eyes dims to an ember and then to nothing, and her fingers loosen. When she finally sits up, she does it carefully, the way people move after a fall on ice.

"Thank you," she says to the floor. "You can let go now."

You let go. She stands, steadies herself on the counter, and walks to her room without looking back. The door closes with a click so polite it's almost an apology.

You don't sleep.

In the morning she's at the kitchen table in a cream sweater with her hair in a braid, holding a mug of hot water she isn't drinking. Her eyes are brown. Flat, ordinary brown.

"Good morning, Ethan," she says brightly. "About last night. I'm so embarrassed. It's a blood sugar thing. I'm hypoglycemic, and I'd skipped dinner, and I got up too fast."

"Your eyes were glowing."

"Were they?" She tilts her head. "The stove light does strange things."

"Nyx."

"I really am fine now, Ethan. Truly. You were very kind." She stands, rinses the full mug, sets it upside down on the rack. "I'm going to sleep. I have a seminar at six."

"A seminar. At six p.m."

"Art historians are nocturnal," she says gravely, and disappears.

You stand in the tilted kitchen and look at the empty mug. Then you open the fridge. Sparkling water. One lemon. Your own shelf: eggs, rice, a jar of peanut butter you've been rationing like wartime sugar.

Hypoglycemic people, you are fairly sure, keep food in the house.

The Thermal Systems Lab occupies the basement of Halloran Hall, which means it has no windows and a permanent smell of solder and old coffee. Rafi Benhamou is at his bench when you come in, feet up, holding a cup he forgot about two hours ago, explaining to an undergrad why her code is a crime against nature.

"There he is," Rafi announces. "The landlord. How's the mystery woman?"

"She's not a mystery woman."

"She pays you triple rent in cash. She is the definition of a mystery woman. Either she's a spy or she's laundering money for a cartel, and either way I want an introduction." He swings his feet down. Rafi is, objectively, a very handsome man, with the kind of curls and jaw that make undergrads take his office hours twice, and he has never once let a quiet moment survive in his presence. "You look like hell, by the way."

"Didn't sleep."

He narrows his eyes. "Because of her?"

You think about cold fingers fisted in your shirt. About violet light on your own hand. "She was sick," you say. "I helped."

"Sick how?"

"Just sick."

Rafi studies you for a long moment, then shrugs and turns back to the undergrad. But you see him glance at you twice more that afternoon while you calibrate your sensor array, and you don't blame him, because you keep stopping halfway through measurements to stare at the wall.

Your research is about heat. Ultra-low-power thermal sensors small enough to stitch into a shirt, sensitive enough to read a fever before the person feels it. You have spent four years learning exactly how much warmth a human body throws off, and in what pattern, and how fast.

Last night, Nyx's hands were colder than a living body should be able to get.

And when she touched you, they warmed.

The knock comes at seven, just after dark.

You've been home half an hour. Nyx's door is shut, and the flat has that hush it gets when she's in it, a stillness you never noticed before she moved in. You open the front door expecting Mrs. Wieczorek with a plate of something.

A man stands on the landing.

He's somewhere in his fifties, tall, broad through the shoulders under a navy peacoat, silver at the temples and nowhere else. He has the kind of face that belongs on an old coin: weathered, handsome, completely still. Gray eyes. Very clean hands, one of which is holding a business card.

"Evening," he says. "Sorry to bother you. I'm looking for someone. Maybe you can help."

"Okay?"

"A young woman. Red hair, long. Very striking." He says striking like a man who has had time to choose the word. "She'd have moved into the neighborhood recently. Keeps late hours. Pays in cash." His eyes move past your shoulder, slowly, taking in the hallway, the coats on the hooks, the gray sweater sleeve hanging off one of them. "I was told she might be renting a room on this street."

There is a moment, a very short one, where you could say yes, she's here, I'll get her. It would be the normal thing. The easy thing. You don't know this man. You don't, if you're honest, know Nyx either.

But you remember her voice saying no ambulance, please, and the way she said I like Pittsburgh, like a person who has had to leave a great many places.

"No," you say. "Just me here. Sorry."

He looks at you for a long time. It isn't a hostile look. It's patient. The look of someone who has knocked on a great many doors and expects to knock on many more.

"Sure," he says. He holds out the card. "If you see her. Or if anything strange happens. Anything at all."

You take it. Cream card stock, heavy. On it, a small engraved oil lamp, the old-fashioned kind with a glass chimney. A name: IGNATIUS ANCRUM. Below that, ANCRUM LOCK & KEY, POLISH HILL, and a phone number.

"You're a locksmith," you say.

"Family business." He smiles slightly. "Locks, keys. Other things that keep people safe at night." He turns to go, then pauses at the top of the stairs and looks back, and his eyes go past you again, to the dark end of the hallway.

"Funny," he says mildly. "Your hall light's purple."

He goes down the stairs. You hear the street door open and close. You stand there with the card in your hand and your heart going hard for no reason you can name, and then you turn around.

Your hall light is a plain white bulb. It's off.

Nyx is standing at the far end of the hallway, by her door, one hand pressed flat to the wall. She's wearing the gray sweater with the long sleeves pulled over her fingers. Her contacts are out.

Her eyes are glowing, a low violet flame in the dark, bright enough to tint the wallpaper.

"You didn't tell him," she says. Her voice shakes. "Why didn't you tell him?"