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Chapter thirteen

Desperate Dream

Niko’s head swam as he woke, groggy and heavy, his thoughts slow. He glanced at the clock again.

Whoa. Shit. That was a hell of a nap.

A slurry of guilt, shame, and nerves coursed through him as he forced himself to sit up, rubbing his hand across his face. Beside him, the other half of the bed was empty, not a single wrinkle of sheets disturbed. Elliott had never come to bed. They’d been researching all night.

Or had killed each other in a double murder-suicide. Either was equally possible.

Niko made his way into his chair, then down the long and winding hallways toward the lounge Elliott had mentioned. The door slid open for him, revealing at least two dozen different holograms hovering across the room, and two very tired looking men awash in pale blue light.

“Uh, hey guys.”

“Aw, look who it is,” Zann teased. “You get enough beauty sleep, Princess, or do you need a few more hours?”

Even Elliott smirked at him—though he looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, his gaze unfocused.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I have no idea how the hell I slept that long.” Niko wheeled into the lounge. “You guys should have woken me.”

“Nah, I know how you get when you don’t have enough sleep. I don’t want my head bitten off,” Zann said. “Besides, there’s no way in hell I’m going into that bedroom. Probably some kind of freaky ass sex dungeon in there.”

Niko rolled his eyes, then turned to Elliott.

“Morning, babe,” he said, a tinge of sheepish guilt in his tone. “You good?”

Elliott yawned. Niko only now noticed two big, emptied mugs of coffee sitting by both men. “Niko. I’m… good. We’ve made some progress tonight. Do you want to get some more work done with us?”

“You look pretty tired, actually. Why don’t you get some rest? You’ve been at it all night. You too, Zann. Right? I can take over from here.”

“Nah, I’m good for at least another hour, maybe two,” Zann said. Niko believed it. His half-brother had a practiced history of all-nighters doing obsessive research or combing over new evidence for a hot case, when he’d worked at the station.

“I can stay too—” Elliott began, but Zann cut him off.

“No, you go on ahead. Niko and I can pick it up for a while.”

Elliott hesitated, glancing at Niko, but the unfocused look in his eyes told him everything he needed to know.

“Zann’s right. It’s okay. Go get some sleep.”

“Alright.” Elliott stood and gave him a kiss on the hair, then slipped out of the room. After a long moment, Zann turned to eye Niko.

“Maybe he’s not using you.”

“For fuck’s sake. He’s not. I’ve been telling you.”

“I said maybe .”

Niko sighed. It was the best he was going to get for the moment. But it was another step in the right direction.

“So how is it?” Niko asked. “Working with him.”

“Utterly fucking surreal,” Zann admitted, leaning back in his chair.

He picked a stylus up from off the small, white table beside him and began turning it over in his hand.

Then he started tapping it against the tabletop.

“Past several months of my life have been spent investigating Elliott Kestrel. Never imagined I’d be doing an investigation with him. ”

“Life’s weird, sometimes,” Niko muttered.

“Guy’s sharp as a tack, though,” Zann grumbled, maybe a little begrudgingly.

“We’ve been making more progress tonight than I had the entire time I was working on my own from that nasty-ass motel.

” After a pause, he added, “He’s not a bad person.

I know why he’s doing the shit he does. I just…

wish it had all been different somehow, you know? ”

“Yeah. Me too.” Niko wished Galapol had listened, had tried to help. Had, in fact, done anything but actively work to silence Elliott. Their lives all would have been very different if even that much had changed.

But it meant Niko would likely have never met him, either.

The thought made him ache, a tide of guilt flooding in with the sting of it.

He didn’t want Elliott to have to suffer.

He didn’t want him to have to go through everything that he’d had.

But Niko was grateful he’d gotten to cross paths with him because of it.

In the end, he pushed the thoughts away. There was no use feeling guilt over them—he couldn’t change reality, nor the past. Galapol had been callous monsters and none of that was on Niko.

“Well, let’s get to work,” he mumbled. “If you’re still good for another hour or two.”

“You bet I am,” Zann said. He rolled his head back and forth across his shoulders, his neck emitting an audible set of pops and cracks.

It felt good to work alongside his brother once more. It was something Niko thought he’d never have the chance to do again.

Maybe everything might actually work out for them, after all.

The next four days went more or less the same, with the three of them working diligently on piecing together research, sifting through files, trying to follow paths of logic.

Sometimes all three worked together, and sometimes only one or two as the others slept or took a break.

No one gave each other shit for needing a few hours to recoup and just be a person or rest. There was a mutual and unspoken understanding of the necessity of breaks between them.

Niko provided the cooking—chilaquiles in the mornings, slow-cooked tender barbacoa ready for dinner, and much more. He found he’d really missed cooking, and to be able to provide for the two people he loved had become far more than any kind of chore. It was a delight.

Sometimes they stayed silent over meals, too lost in thought or burned out by endless research. Other times, they talked a lot, Zann probing Elliott with questions and Elliott throwing them back at him. The two of them seemed to be tentatively co-existing, even if it came at a grudging effort.

Over meals, Elliott spoke of his years in university and how he’d graduated early thanks to a uniquely tailored, advanced program.

Zann said he’d never had the chance to attend, but had graduated high school as class valedictorian.

He’d had to work his way up the hard way through Galapol, without a degree to fall back on.

He then embarrassed Niko with old stories about him growing up, and Elliott, in turn, shared memories of Cleo from happier times, including a surprise sweet sixteenth party she’d planned for him that had ended in pure chaos and had somehow involved an ostrich.

Elliott spoke, too, about his previous romantic life—which truly only amounted to Liam, and an escapade of briefly-acquainted lovers before him—and, after a generous handful of goading, Niko finally got Zann to admit out loud that he’d been both married and divorced twice, by age twenty-five.

That information prompted Elliott to describe Zann as ‘speed-running the milestones of an apocalyptic midlife crisis,’ and Zann retaliated by calling Elliott a ‘dandy little murder-twink who thinks he knows everything.’ A fight nearly erupted between them that Niko was forced to referee back into uneasy peace.

And thus, their mealtime chats were over, Zann sulking and taking his food to his room instead, after that.

On the evening of their fourth day, Niko checked up on Elliott, needing a brief break of his own from the endless research. He’d been at it for the last few hours with Zann, while Elliott had left to take a few personal hours.

Niko found him in the Murder Room, where he stood now at the island with T1-N4 pieced apart and an assortment of tools and circuitry lying scattered on the countertop. Niko couldn’t help but laugh.

“You’re actually going to fix her up, huh?”

Elliott shrugged, not glancing up from unscrewing a tiny component from her side panel. “Why not? This is a project. This is fun. And I think… I needed a break. I couldn’t think or see straight anymore, from doing so much reading. I wasn’t contributing much at that point.”

Niko winced. “Yeah, staring for hours at holograms will do that to you.” He made his way over to Elliott’s side. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m—I’m alright.”

“Yeah? How’s working with Zann been?”

“Not… horrible. It’s strange having people here, though,” Elliott admitted. He pried the small part from T1-N4 and turned it over in his hands, examining it before setting it on the countertop.

“Yeah? I can imagine.”

“It still messes me up a little sometimes, though.”

Niko frowned. “What do you mean? Messes you up?”

Elliott stared at T1-N4 another moment, not answering, before looking over at Niko. “I was alone here for a year and two months. Complete isolation does not do kind things to a human mind.”

Niko was at a loss for words this time, a quiet dread snaking into his gut.

He remembered the cafeteria and how it'd transformed once he had been left alone in it, too vast and full of strange angles that were somehow both too spread out, yet suffocating. “Yeah? It must have been really hard for you. I honestly don’t know how you did it.”

“Mostly, it was just that I didn’t care anymore.

I was so… lost that I just didn’t care .

I buried myself wholly in my mission and in preparing for it any way I could.

Training, obsessive target practice, learning as much as I could.

But it still hurt. It hurt a lot. And after so many weeks, and then months, my mind started playing tricks on me.

I’d be working on something in here, just like this, or lying in bed, and suddenly the silence was broken.

I’d hear footsteps clear as day. Someone walking down these halls. ”

“Holy shit,” Niko murmured, goosebumps pricking along the back of his neck at the chill of imagining it.

“Right. So naturally, I imagined every scenario there was. Honeybliss had found me. Galapol had. I thought maybe one of the original Quwa-quay workers was still here all along, hiding away. After a while, once you’d started showing up in my life, I had a paranoid thought that you’d found me. I even heard your voice once.”