The Long Way

The Prague flat had been empty for eleven days before Nyx walked into it, which was, in the trade, about three days too long. An empty room breathed differently. It remembered the last person who had been in it, and it held that memory against the new arrival the way a dog holds the smell of its previous owner, and the smell of this particular flat was cigarettes that had not been smoked and coffee that had not been drunk, and it told her, before she had taken three steps across the parquet, that whoever had arranged this safehouse was not on their side anymore.

She did not say this to Declan. She had learned not to say things to Declan until she was sure of them, because he had a way of reacting to her certainties that she did not always want him to have.

She said, "I'll take the window."

"You always take the window."

"That's because I always know where the window is."

He did not argue with her. He had come in behind her, the second echelon the way they always moved now, and he set the two canvas bags against the wall in the hall and did the thing he did in a new room, which was to touch four surfaces in a short line and then stand still. She had never asked him what the four surfaces told him. She had asked him, once, what the stillness was for, and he had said, I am letting the room tell me if it is lying, and she had not asked him anything else about it.

The window looked out over a narrow street that angled down toward the river. Across from her was the blind wall of a Habsburg-era apartment block with one decorative cornice and, she counted, forty-one arrow-slit vents pretending to be ornamental stonework. Every fourth vent was wider than the others. Every fourth vent would fit a rifle. Whoever had built this block in eighteen ninety-something had already been thinking about her profession. It was a disconcerting thought, and she had it every time she worked this city.

There was a pigeon on the opposite sill. The pigeon was wrong. Pigeons on Prague sills sat in one of two positions, because Prague pigeons were efficient about shelter and wind. This one was in a third position, with its head cocked at an angle a pigeon's head did not cock at. She watched it for forty seconds. It did not move. A small device, then, and a good one, and she was supposed to see it, because if she was supposed to see it that meant whoever had put it there wanted her to know she had been seen.

She closed the curtain.

"Declan."

"Yes."

"It's not the flat that's bad. It's the building opposite."

He came to her. He did not ask for the window, which was a mercy she had never stopped counting, and he stood at her shoulder and looked at the curtain where she was looking.

"Show me."

She opened it a finger's width. He looked. He did not move his face at all. He closed it again.

"Four hours," he said.

"Three," she said. "They'll want the river light. The sun comes off the river at seven and they'll go before it turns."

"Three, then."

They stood for a moment. She could feel the heat of his arm through her jumper, not because she was cold but because he was a temperature she had been cataloguing, now, for almost two years. It was a catalogue she had not meant to start and could not, at present, close.

"I have to go," she said.

"I know."

"It's one of mine."

"I know that too."

"You can't come."

"I know that as well. Don't insult me with the list."

She almost smiled. Smiling was a thing her mouth had begun to do again, recently, in rooms that contained him, and it was something she noticed about herself the way she noticed a slow bruise coming up — after the fact, when she was alone. She did not, at this moment, smile. She turned toward him.

"Feed me first," she said.

"That's what I was going to do."

"I know. I'm telling you I want it."

He nodded once. He went to the narrow galley kitchen that had no business being called a kitchen, and he opened the two paper bags they had brought up with them and he began to unpack things onto the counter. She watched his hands. Declan's hands were the least assassin-like of any of the hands she had ever loved, and she had loved exactly three sets, and the other two were dead. His hands were large and careful. He had a scar across the web between the first and second fingers of his left hand where, aged nineteen, he had been knifed by a boy from his neighborhood he had grown up with, and he never talked about it, and she had been brave enough, twice, to kiss the scar, and both times he had gone very quiet, and both times she had thought, this is a man who does not know what to do with tenderness and is willing to learn anyway, and both times she had almost cried about it and hadn't, because Covenant-trained women did not cry about scars on men's hands.

He made eggs. He made the eggs the way he had been taught by a grandmother she had never met and would never meet, with butter and a little cream and almost no heat, so that they came out soft and slow, and he put them on a plate with a piece of dense rye that was not as good as the Czech rye on the corner but would do. There was a small bowl of something pickled. There was salt.

She ate. He did not eat yet. He stood at the counter with his weight on one hip and watched her eat the way he watched her do everything — as if he were learning her, still, after everything, because the part of him that had been trained to learn people had never quite been willing to treat her as finished.

"Who is it," he said.

"Mihail."

"Which Mihail."

"The one with the cheekbones."

"There are three with the cheekbones."

"The youngest. The one from the cohort in Zurich."

He went very still. She had seen this particular stillness in him three times before. It was not fear, and it was not anger. It was the thing he did when he had a second, inside himself, to decide whether to be the man who loved her or the man who had been trained to end things like this quickly.

"He was in your class," Declan said.

"He was in my year. He was in my weapons class. He was in my language class. He was in my bed, for about six weeks, when I was nineteen and did not know better. Marcus liked us to couple inside the cohort. He said it was efficient. He said it built operational intimacy."

"Marcus said that."

"Marcus said that."

"And you," Declan said, "agreed with that."

"I was nineteen. I agreed with whoever told me what a word meant."

He did not answer that. He put his hands flat on the counter. She watched him choose. It was not a thing she had the right to watch, exactly, but she had been watching him choose for two years and she did not, anymore, know how to not.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't. Not about that."

"I'm sorry it's him."

"It's always going to be someone who was in my bed, Declan. Marcus built the cohort that way. If not Mihail it's Aria. If not Aria it's Petr. If not Petr it's a boy from Dresden whose name I could not tell you because I never asked."

"I know."

"I'm telling you so it's said."

"I know," he said again, and this time the word did the work it was supposed to do, and she let him do it.

She finished the eggs. The pickled thing turned out to be fennel. She had not expected to enjoy it and did. Somewhere outside, a tram went by with the specific weary rattle of a Prague tram at dusk, and somewhere inside, a radiator ticked, and she thought: in ten minutes I am going to walk out of this flat with a suppressed rifle and I am going to find the man who was once a boy I kissed badly in a laundry room in Zurich, and I am going to put a round through his occipital because he has been sent to do the same to us, and when I come back my husband will be here with a towel and he will not, for the fourth time in my life, ask me to account for my hands.

It was a long thought. She had time for it because Declan had not yet moved. He was still at the counter. He had turned around so that his back was to her, which he only did when he needed to not be looked at, and she did not look.

"Declan."

"Yes."

"I know what you want to say."

"Then you can save me saying it."

"Say it anyway."

He turned. He had gathered his face into the shape he gathered it into when he was going to be honest. It was a face she had learned to love more than any of the others.

"I want to go with you."

"I know."

"I want to take the shot."

"I know that too."

"I want to do this thing for you because it is a thing that should not keep happening to you."

"Declan."

"I know. Don't."

"You didn't let me finish."

"Finish."

"If you did it for me," she said, "it wouldn't help. I would still have to know that he came for us. I would still have to know that Marcus can reach inside my old rooms and pick a boy and point. And if you took the shot I would carry both things — the boy, and the debt. And I am not, right now, strong enough to carry debts."

He considered her. He considered her for a long time.

"That's fair," he said.

"It's not fair. Nothing about this is fair. But it is how it is."

"How it is," he said.

"How it is."

She stood up. She rinsed the plate, because she had been raised in a compound that punished you for leaving dishes, and because two years of Declan had taught her that rinsing your own plate was not punishment, it was a way of saying thank you to a room, and she was trying, tonight, to say thank you to this room in case it was the last room she was in.

She took the rifle out of the long bag. She checked it. She did not need to check it. She checked it because the checking was part of the ritual. She checked the suppressor. She checked the magazine. She checked the bolt. She slung it across her back under the coat. She put the gloves in her pocket and not on her hands, because in a Prague stairwell gloves were a tell, and she put her boots on, because she had been barefoot for an hour and wanted Declan to have seen that she had been.

She went to him. He was still at the counter. She put her hand under his jaw and tipped his face up, although he was taller than her and it was not, exactly, tipping, and she kissed him the way she had been teaching herself to kiss — not as a goodbye, not as a down payment, not as a thing she owed anyone.

"Don't be careful with me when I come back," she said.

"I wasn't going to be."

"Be careful now. Don't open the door for anyone. Don't answer the phone. Don't do the thing you do when you are bored, where you check the corridor."

"I don't do that."

"You do. You always do. Don't do it tonight."

"Tonight I won't."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

"Say what you're promising."

"I won't check the corridor. I won't open the door. I won't answer the phone. I will sit in this chair, with my rifle across my knees, and I will not move until you come back."

"Thank you."

"Come back, Nyx."

"I will."

"Say it."

"I will come back."

She went out into the stairwell. She did not take the lift.

The stairwell smelled like paint and cat. Somewhere above her a door closed. She counted the floors by the tread under her feet rather than by sight, because a person going up a Prague stairwell with a rifle under her coat did not look at the numbers on the landings, she looked straight ahead, because looking at numbers was for tourists and assassins, and there was no middle category.

Four flights. The service door at the top. She knew this building. She had walked it a year ago for a different reason with a different partner who was now dead. She had walked every roof line in three hundred square meters of old Prague at one point or another, which was the kind of knowledge you did not bring up at dinner and did not, in fact, know what else to do with.

The roof was terra-cotta tile and steep. She moved along the valley where two slopes met, below the line of sight of anyone on the Habsburg block opposite. The pigeon — the wrong pigeon — was two windows over and one up from the vent she had made him for. She had thought, from the flat, that he would use the fourth vent. She had revised, on the stairs, to the second. She revised now, on the roof, to the window.

Mihail had always been lazy about elevation. Mihail had always told her, in the sparring cages, that elevation was for people who did not trust their shot. She had told him, at nineteen, that elevation was for people who did not want to die. She had been right. She was still right.

She moved. The roof was cold under her palms. A gutter complained. She found the angle she wanted, which put the window across the street thirty-two degrees off her spine, and she laid down with the rifle across a folded pad of coat that she had brought for exactly this, and she waited.

He came up to the window six minutes after she settled.

She knew him by his shoulders. Mihail had Covenant shoulders. You got them from the hanging bar. You got them from swimming laps in freezing pools. He had always looked, from behind, like a much older man than he was, because Marcus had loaded him early and heavy, and she remembered, with a flash of feeling she had not expected, the first time she had put her hand between those shoulder blades in a steam room in Zurich, and how hot the skin had been, and how he had not said anything but had smiled with his mouth closed, and how she had thought, stupidly, that it was love.

He had not been Marcus's favorite. That had been her.

He had known it. He had not held it against her, exactly, but he had let her see, once, that he held it against Marcus, and Marcus had removed him from her cohort three months later and sent him to Belgrade. She had not seen him in six years. He had aged. She could see, through the scope, that his hair was shorter than he had worn it at twenty-two, and that he had a fresh scar along his jaw, and that there was a tiredness in the way he sighted his own rifle down toward the flat opposite that she recognized, because it was the tiredness of a man who had been told, one too many times, that he was a tool.

She thought: I am going to kill him.

She thought: he does not know that is Declan in that flat.

She thought: he does know that is Declan in that flat, because Marcus sent him, and Marcus sent him because it was me. He knew. He came anyway.

She thought: small mercy, Mihail. You came anyway.

She breathed out. She held. She pulled.

The round took him in the hollow behind the right ear. He did not turn. He did not slump, precisely. He went out of frame the way a curtain goes down, and she did not see where he fell, which was fine, because she did not want to.

She waited. She counted to forty. She counted every second. No one came to the window. No one leaned out of the block. A dog barked, two streets over, and kept barking, and did not stop barking, because a dog did not know anything about her and did not, now, care.

She broke down the rifle. She wrapped it in the coat pad. She did not wipe her hands, because there was nothing on her hands. She slid back across the valley of the roof. She went down the service stairs. She walked across the street because not walking across the street would have been more conspicuous than walking across it, and she walked into her own building, and she walked up her own four flights, and she got to the door of the flat and she stopped.

She stood at her own door for a long time. Long enough that the lights in the corridor clicked off on their timer, and then clicked on again, because her weight on the floor set off the sensor.

She was crying. She had not known she was going to. She was crying in the quiet way where you did not make any noise and your face did not move, and she stood there and let it happen, and then she wiped her face with the inside of her sleeve, because she was not going to bring it in with her.

She knocked. Three short, one long. Their knock.

Declan opened the door without looking through the spy hole, because she had told him not to look through the spy hole, because a bullet through a spy hole was a thing that happened in Prague often enough to matter. He opened the door and he stepped back and he let her in, and he closed the door, and he relocked it, and then he looked at her.

"Come here," he said.

She came. He wrapped her in his arms, very carefully, the way a man wraps a parcel he does not know the contents of. He was warm. He was larger than her, which was not the thing she thought about when she thought about him, but was the thing her body thought about when her body was tired, and her body was tired.

"He's done," she said.

"I know."

"It was clean."

"I know that too."

"He came anyway."

"Yes."

"He knew it was you I was with. And he came."

"Yes."

"Declan."

"I know."

"I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything with it tonight."

She put her forehead against his collarbone. He held her. After a while he put her in the kitchen chair, because her knees had started to go, and he put the kettle on, because the thing his grandmother had taught him to do for a shaken person was put the kettle on, and while the kettle whistled he crouched down in front of her and he took her hands, and he looked at them the way a jeweler looks at stones.

"Your hands are fine," he said.

"I know."

"I wanted to check."

"I know."

"You can check mine, if you want."

"Let me see them."

He held them up. Large. Careful. The scar on the left. A small fresh mark on the knuckle of the right that she had not noticed. She kissed that too.

"How did you get that," she said.

"The door frame. Earlier. I was putting the bags down."

"Don't lie."

"I am not lying."

"Declan."

"It was the door frame, Nyx. I swear to you. You took all the violence with you. I did not have any. I had the door frame."

She laughed. It was thin and rough but it came out, and it surprised her, and he looked at her with the particular softness he reserved for when she laughed, because he had told her, once, that her laugh was the rarest and most surprising sound he knew, and he had not meant it as a compliment. He had meant it as a fact.

The kettle whistled. He made tea. She drank it. They did not talk for a while.

At some point — she did not know exactly when, because the clocks in Prague flats were all wrong — she said, "I'm going to tell you something."

"All right."

"When I was fourteen they made us do the first one. Marcus. He lined us up in the yard at the compound and he told us that a person was coming who had hurt the Covenant and that we were going to each pull the trigger once. A round each. Seven of us. He said that way no one of us would know who had killed her."

"Her."

"Her. She was about forty. She was in a cotton shift. She did not look at us."

"Nyx."

"Let me. We lined up. We fired. He walked down the line afterwards and he stood in front of each of us and he looked at our faces. He stopped in front of me for longer than anyone else. He said — I remember the exact sentence — you are the only one who was looking at her when you pulled. The rest were looking at the ground."

"Jesus."

"I thought he was congratulating me, Declan. I thought he was telling me I was better than them. I did not understand, for maybe three years, that what he was telling me was: you are the one I can turn. Because I would look at them. Because I wouldn't look away. Because I could be taught to carry it."

"Why are you telling me this now."

"Because tonight I looked at Mihail."

"I know."

"I looked at him for six seconds before I pulled. I saw his hair. I saw his jaw. I saw the way he was sighting his rifle. I saw him. I pulled anyway."

"Yes."

"I am not sure whether that is better or worse."

He thought about it. He always thought about her questions, which was a thing no one in her life before him had done for her. He held the mug with both hands. He was not drinking. His tea had gone cold half an hour ago, and he did not mind.

"It's not better," he said. "It's not worse. It's harder."

"Why."

"Because looking was the thing Marcus trained into you. And tonight you used it to see a man as a man before you took his life. That is not the same transaction he was making. But it costs. It will always cost. And you will always have to pay."

"I am paying."

"I know you are."

"Declan."

"Yes."

"Tell me I am not him."

"You are not him."

"Tell me I am not becoming him."

"You are not becoming him. You are becoming someone who is going to hate the shot even when it was the right shot, and that is as unlike Marcus as it is possible to be."

"Say it again."

"You are not becoming him. You are nothing like him. You took the shot because not taking it would have killed me, and you took it clean, and you came home, and you cried on our landing, which Marcus would have beaten you for, and you came in anyway, and you told me about the yard at the compound when you were fourteen, which he made you swear you would never tell anyone, and now I know it, and now you do not carry it alone."

She could not speak. She put her face in her hands, because her hands were still fine, and because her hands had always been the part of her she had the most trouble forgiving, and tonight she thought they could be forgiven a little, and she wanted to ask them, quietly, if they were all right.

After a while he came around behind her and he put his hands on her shoulders and he pressed, very lightly, which was a thing he had learned she liked, and she let him, and the two of them stayed like that until the kettle had gone quiet and the radiator had ticked itself out and the tram on the corner had stopped running for the night.

"Bed," he said.

"Yes."

"I will watch the door."

"No. You will sleep."

"I will watch the door for an hour and then sleep."

"Declan."

"An hour. That is the arrangement."

"Whose arrangement."

"Mine."

"Fine."

She slept the way a fought-for sleep happens, in one deep drop, like a stone into water. She woke up once, around four, and he was on the chair by the door with a book he was not reading and a pistol flat on the table beside him, because neither of them was the kind of person who ever fully put a pistol down. She did not tell him to come to bed, because she knew he would not, and because she understood that watching the door was a thing he needed to do for her tonight, and she was not going to take it from him.

She said, softly, "Declan."

"Mm."

"Thank you for the eggs."

"They weren't much."

"They were a meal."

"They were a meal."

She went back to sleep. Outside, the river light came up gray and cold, and somewhere across the city a man who had been in her cohort had been found by a building super and was, by now, being zipped into a bag, and she thought of him briefly and then let him go, because she had been permitted to put him down for eight hours, and because she was not, at this hour, going to take him back up.

She had taken, she understood, the long way again. She always took the long way. Marcus had trained her out of shortcuts because shortcuts left signatures, and she had come to believe, over a very hard couple of years, that he had not been entirely wrong about that, even though he had been entirely wrong about almost everything else.

The long way, she would have said, if anyone had asked, was what got her here. The long way was what put her in this bed with this man in this Prague flat with a pistol on a table and a pair of eggs in her stomach and a dead boy from her cohort two rooftops away and, somehow, against every rule Marcus had ever given her, a chance.

She intended, she decided, to take that chance.

But not yet.

For the moment — for another hour, until the sun broke the river and the day made her pick it all up again — she was just going to lie in this bed, and breathe, and listen to the man in the chair in the doorway breathing too, and let the long way have her for a little while longer.

It was, she would later think, the smallest mercy.

It was, she would later think, the one that had saved her.