Page 38

There weren’t any other options.

By the time he reached his former lodgings, afternoon had started to slip towards evening. It would probably be a little while yet before the parents returned home from their jobs, but that was all right. Samuel was willing to wait. He had nothing but time.

Rounding the corner, he had to forcibly keep himself from running. For the first time since Shan had found him, he felt like he was achieving something, and his whole being felt lighter. Bubbly. Free.

But the excitement vanished like a punch to the gut as he glanced up at the building he had called home for years. It was boarded up. Closed and shuttered. There was a large piece of parchment nailed to the door, and Samuel didn’t need to read it to know what it said. He had seen such things before.

The building had been condemned.

He stood straighter as the tension pulled his muscles taut, confusion spreading through him like the slow, thick drip of wax down a candle. It hadn’t been any worse or better than any other building with rooms for rent in Dameral. And it wasn’t like such regulations were actually followed. Rules and laws in Dameral were a joke, only enforced when there was some sort of political—

“Hells.”

Samuel darted up the steps, pulling the notice from the nail where it had been slammed into the wooden door. The language was formal, rote, nothing out of place to confirm the suspicions that he had. But Samuel was no fool—he knew what this meant, who had been behind it.

His own damned family. The Eternal King. The promise of mercy was a lie after all, and as he crumpled the notice in his hand, that old, familiar, helpless laugh caught in his throat.

It was too late now for him to do anything. The tenants would have been evicted swiftly, kicked to the streets with only what they could carry. Not just the family he had come here to help, but every last soul in this building. And it was all his fault, all to spite the landlord who had evicted him. A slip of the tongue before the Eternal King, a detail he didn’t need or mean to share, and the consequences that were not his to bear.

He could try to track them down, but he had never bothered to learn their names. Given his own situation, the danger in his blood, he had thought mutual anonymity would keep them safer. Ironic, in the end. He had doomed them and then left himself with no resources to help. Like so many others, they were simply gone, swallowed whole by the city that gobbled them up and spat them back out—broken, shattered, or dead.

The crumpled parchment fell from his fingers, caught in the slight breeze that always blew through the street, coming off the sea and smelling of brine. It rolled away in the wind, vanishing into the creeping shadows as the sun sank behind him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as he tried to impress their faces into his memory. But they were already fading, slipping away.

Gone.

Turning on his heel, he left his home behind. If the Eternal King had taken out his anger on his landlord, then it was likely that his old employer was also a target. He didn’t know what he could do, if anything, but he had to get there. At least at work he hadn’t been able to isolate himself completely. He had names, contacts, years’ worth of memories.

He ran.

It was the time of day when work was starting to let out, the streets filling with the tired and the hungry, but Samuel did not care, ducking and dodging and dancing through the crowds. He ignored every curse that was thrown his way, the looks of confusion and surprise, the attention he was undoubtedly bringing to himself.

In all his years of working there, he had never made it there as quickly as he did then.

The warehouse had just changed shifts, and he scanned the people leaving it—people he had worked with for so long, and yet not a single one glanced his way. He clenched his jaw. Surely he wasn’t that unrecognizable? He had shed the Aberforth mask, he was just himself, it shouldn’t be so easy to forget—

“Hutchinson?”

He spun around, so startled that someone actually remembered him, let alone came up to speak to him, that all he could do was gape for a long moment. It was a familiar set of dark eyes, and the same soft smile, though there were shadows under his eyes that Samuel didn’t recall being there. Of course it was him.

“Markus,” he managed, eventually, earning a smile from the man in front of him.

“I didn’t expect to see you back here,” Markus said, shyly, tucking his hands in his pockets. “After… what happened, we all thought you were gone.”

Gone. Always gone, gone like so many others. It was simply the way of things, and Samuel wondered when it had become normal. Or perhaps it always had been, and he was the one who was changing.

“I… am,” Samuel said, wincing. “In a way. I just need to know something—Cobb?”

Markus didn’t hide his disappointment, and Samuel felt a little bad for using him like this. “A few days after you. Dunno what happened, really, but the bastard they replaced him with is working us like dogs.”

“Dammit.” Samuel closed his eyes, filled with a sick sense of relief. At least it was only Cobb. The shipping company itself continued on, and Markus and the others still had their jobs. It was wrong of him to feel happy, he knew that.

But it was better than the alternative.

“What happened to him?” He didn’t need to clarify.

“He’s been drinking himself to death at one of the pubs,” Markus said. He dragged the toe of his boot across the cobblestoned street; Samuel noticed because he couldn’t dare meet his eyes. “I can show you.”

“Please.”