“Dammit,” Caleb said from his seat far up in the stands. With vicious pulls he tore the bookie’s receipt to shreds. Swearing felt good, so he tried again. “Godsdammit.”
“I warned you not to bet against the city,” said Teo as she tallied her winnings. The crowd thinned, making for the exits. Sam, in the aisle, cupped her hands around her mouth and hooted in triumph. “Especially when Zolin’s playing.”
“If she’s sober.”
On the court, each team saluted the other’s serpent-goal. Zolin’s teammates lifted her onto their shoulders and ran a slow circuit around the court. A band struck up a bassy triumphant tune, and Sam thrashed to the music. She waved to Teo, who waved back but did not leave her seat.
“She has a face full of powder off the court, but it’s never hurt her play. This is religion to her.”
Caleb winced, and Teo noticed.
“What is it with you?”
“I just lost a decent chunk of soul. Give me some space.”
“Whenever I mention religion, you get this look like you’re about to stalk off and beat your head against a wall somewhere.”
“I told you what happened with me and Mal.”
“You told me what happened. You haven’t told me what you’re going to do next.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Again Sam waved, and this time Teo smiled, and stood. “Fine.” She slid her receipt into a pocket of her white linen jacket, and joined Sam in the aisle. They danced as the band played, hands on each other’s hips.
Fans filtered out into the dark, hot night. Caleb sat alone in the empty row, save for a small Quechal man, silver-haired and slump-shouldered, who rocked in his seat, muttering a half-remembered prayer.
Sam whispered in Teo’s ear. They drew apart, glanced around at the empty stands, laughed. “You want to grab a drink with us?” Sam asked.
“Sure,” he said.
They extricated themselves from the labyrinth of halls and shops and parking structures that adjoined the stadium, and found a bar with a crudely painted, misspelled sign and a muscular young woman guarding the door. Teo gave the bouncer a wink as they ducked inside, and the woman shifted, unsure whether to smile back. Teo and Sam joked about her confusion as they found a booth. Inside the bar, Caleb drank gin and listened to them argue about art, faith, sports, and alcohol. Sam picked up the tab; her
After an hour, the bar’s air grew stagnant and they staggered out onto cool streets. Teo hailed a driverless carriage and the horse pulled them across town through traffic toward Andrej’s. As they rolled through the night together, Caleb remembered their last carriage ride, the rush and terror of the evening when the water ran black.
Sam didn’t like Andrej’s. She sat uncomfortable in their corner booth, eying the brokers in the dark elegant suits, who drank expensive cocktails and laughed moneyed laughs. “How can you relax in this place? You think anyone here’s ever seen anything real?”
“What’s real?” Teo asked, swirling her drink.
“Don’t you know?” she replied with a smirk, and touched the side of Teo’s face. A small scar ran next to Sam’s eye, new since the riots. Caleb had not asked how she was wounded. He did not want to hear the answer.
After an hour he excused himself and climbed the spiral staircase to the roof. He looked out over the city to the sea, and to Bay Station barely visible on the horizon. The city gleamed below and above, skyspire lights reflected on the belly of the clouds and on the harbor’s black surface. Salt spray mixed with the bitter quinine taste of his gin and tonic.
“You should go to her,” Teo said when she found him.
“Are you sure you should leave Sam in there alone? She might burn the whole place down.”
“She’ll be fine. And you should apologize to Mal.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You haven’t talked about anything else all night.”
“I haven’t talked about anything all night.”
“Exactly.”
He leaned against the balcony railing, and hung his head over the drop: four stories to the next step of the pyramid, then another four stories, and so on down. Windows glowed from the sandstone blocks: other bars, or people late at work, lost in paper mazes.
“She should apologize to me,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” That, also, sounded like a lie. The air up here, fresh and cool and open, would not admit falsehood. He drank. “What would I say to her, anyway?”
“Say you’re sorry for being an idiot, to start. Maybe you add: I was under a lot of stress. We’d just saved the city from a mad necromancer, and I have issues with religion, but those don’t give me the right to pass judgment on you. You could plea the fact that your father’s a lunatic, which makes you sensitive about the subject.”
His next sip of gin lingered too long in his mouth, and when he swallowed he shivered as it slithered into him. “Yeah.” Turning from the world he leaned back against the railing and followed Teo’s gaze to the altar in the center of the roof. “Apologize,” he said, testing the idea. “Even if I’m right.”
“Do you want to be right, or do you want to be with her?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Later, maybe. From her point of view, you’ve insulted her, insulted her dead parents, and left her in the Drakspine Mountains with no one to keep her company but a bunch of the same Wardens who killed her family. This is throw-yourself-at-her-feet-and-beg-forgiveness time.”
“I do sound like a jerk when you put it that way.”
“Yes.”
They watched the stone.
“Hey,” he said at last.
“Yes?”
“You’ve been a real friend to me about this, for the last few months.”
She shrugged, and sipped her single malt.
“I’m glad it’s working out, with you and Sam.”
“Is it? I mean.” She examined the constellations reflected in her whiskey, in the ice. “She’s wonderful. Wild. Too wild for me, I think. She went out in the riots, when you were gone. I couldn’t get her to stay. She said she had to be where the people were fighting.”
“Artists.”
She didn’t reply.
“Do you love her?”
“I think. I don’t know. Shit. Maybe I’m just giving you all this advice because I’m desperate, and I can help you, even if I can’t help myself.”
“To desperation,” he said, and raised his glass. She raised hers as well, toward the altar.
“And to bleeding hearts,” she added, and they drank.
31
An apology was easier to conceive than to compose. He tried writing the words he would say. He tried all the sales tactics—delivering his speech to a mirror, to an empty room, to a picture of her drawn with charcoal and tacked to his wall. Nothing worked.
At the office, instead of processing claims or helping prepare for the eclipse, he began and abandoned countless variations on an apologetic theme. Drafts formed a crumpled mountain in his wastebasket. In the end he
