chapter three

The ticking didn't stop.

Wren noticed it first as a texture under the ordinary sounds of the boat—the ballast hum, the

distant clank of someone dogging down a hatch two compartments over—a faint, metronomic

tap against the outer hull that shouldn't have been audible through steel this thick, and yet was,

patient as a held breath, patient as something that had all the time in the world because it lived

somewhere time didn't reach.

"You hear that," she said.

Julian's face had gone the particular still that she remembered from exactly one other night

in her life, the night in Valletta when he'd stood at the window of a hotel room with his back to

her and said *someone is going to come through that door in the next ten minutes and I need

you to trust me completely for exactly that long*, and she had, God help her, she had trusted

him completely for exactly that long, and it had cost her eleven days of not knowing if he was

alive.

"It's the pressure differential," he said. "Thermal expansion in the outer plating. It's normal."

"You're lying to me again."

"I'm managing you again. There's a difference, and I'd like you to notice it, because I am

trying, badly, to draw a line I did not used to know how to draw."

The honesty of it landed like a slap dressed up as a kindness—which was, she thought, more

or less the story of the two of them in miniature. She stood, because sitting across from him in

this amber-lit coffin of a room with her pulse doing something complicated and traitorous every

time his voice dropped register was not a posture she trusted herself to hold much longer, and

crossed to the small round viewport set into the bulkhead, more decorative than functional at

this depth, a porthole to nothing but black water and the ghost-glow of the boat's own running

lights refracted back at her like something in the deep was holding up a mirror.

"Tell me about the crew," she said, to the water, not to him. "Petrenko. The others. Who's

actually captaining this thing, Julian, because it isn't you, and it isn't me, and I'd like to know

whose hands are on the wheel before I decide how frightened to be."

"His name is Achterberg. He worked for me for nine years before he worked for whoever's

paying for this boat now."

"You don't trust him."

"I trust him precisely as far as the money goes, which used to be a great distance, and

currently is not, because the money currently belongs to Lazarus, and I have not yet determined

whether that means Achterberg is loyal to a fiction wearing my face or loyal to the highest

bidder regardless of whose face is on it." He said this the way he might have once discussed a

difficult witness, dispassionate, almost bored, a tone she'd learned very early meant the opposite

of what it performed. "Either way. Watch him."

Wren turned from the porthole. "You keep saying his name like you know things about him

you haven't told me."

"I know everything about him that can be known from documents."

"That's not what I asked."

Julian's silence, this time, went on a beat too long, and in the amber light his face did

something she hadn't seen it do in six years and had, if she was honest with the parts of herself

she usually kept behind locked doors, missed with an intensity that frightened her—it went

unguarded. Not performed-vulnerable, not the practiced crack he let people see when he needed

their sympathy. Actually unguarded, the way he'd looked exactly twice in the entire span of

their history: once the morning after the first time they'd slept together, when he hadn't yet

remembered to build the wall back up before she woke, and once in a hospital corridor in

Marseille when he thought she was still under anesthesia and hadn't yet learned she could hear

him.

"There are days," Julian said quietly, "when I wake up and I am not entirely certain which

of us I am."

The words sat in the compartment like a dropped weight, and the tick against the hull kept

its rhythm, indifferent, patient, a clock that had started counting down to something before

either of them had climbed aboard.

"Explain that," Wren said, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she felt, old

training, the deposition voice, the one she used when a witness said something so large it

threatened to swallow the room whole and someone needed to keep standing upright in the

wreckage of it.

"I don't have gaps," Julian said. "That's the—that's the specific horror of it, Wren, if I had

gaps I could at least locate the wound. I have a complete, continuous, entirely ordinary memory

of eleven days in Rotterdam that I have since proven, through three independent sources, did

not happen. Hotel receipts for a room I have security footage of standing empty. A dinner with a

supplier who has since sworn, under oath, that the meeting took place in April, not in the eleven

days I remember it taking place, and who has the calendar entries and the corroborating

witnesses to prove it. I don't merely suspect that something was done to me in Malta. I am

telling you that I have a memory, whole and unbroken and entirely convincing from the inside,

of a version of events that the physical world insists did not happen. And I don't know, some

mornings, whether that means someone edited eleven days out of my head and replaced them

with a lie so complete it fooled my own nervous system—" his hand, she noticed, had begun

that slow closing again, knuckles whitening over the old injury, "—or whether it means I am the

thing that got made. The copy. Standing here, entirely convinced I am Julian Voss, built out of

his memories and his tells and the particular way his hand tightens when he's telling you

something true, and simply *wrong* about it."

The tick against the hull, for one suspended second, seemed to synchronize itself with the

pulse Wren could feel in her own throat.

"You don't believe that," she said. "You can't believe that."

"I don't know what I believe. That's rather the point I'm making." He looked up at her then,

and the wall he'd been holding fully collapsed, and what was underneath it was not calculation,

was not the courtroom animal she'd spent a decade learning to read—it was simply a frightened

man, asking, without asking, for the one thing he had absolutely no right left to ask her for.

"You knew him before either version existed, Wren. You knew Julian Voss when he was

twenty-six and terrified of his own father and hadn't yet learned to be any of the things I've

since had to become. If anyone in this world has a version of me uncontaminated by whatever's

been done since—it's you. So I need you to look at me. Properly. The way you used to, before I

gave you every reason to stop. And tell me if I'm still him."

The compartment had gone very small. The amber light caught the scar through his

eyebrow, the new lines at his mouth, the old ordinary miracle of a face she had once known

better than her own reflection, and every professional instinct she'd built in six years of learning

to survive without him screamed at her to step back, to catalogue this as manipulation dressed in

the most dangerous costume he owned—*need*, honest and unguarded and aimed directly at

the one wound in her she'd never fully closed.

She stepped closer instead.

Close enough to see the exact place where the pulse jumped at the base of his throat. Close

enough that when the boat listed, gently, in its long slow descent, her hand came to rest against

his chest without her fully deciding to put it there, and she felt his heart going hard and fast and

utterly unguarded beneath her palm, no performance left in it at all.

"Your heart's doing the thing it used to do," she said, very quietly, "the night before you left

for Rotterdam. When you thought I was asleep."

Something in his face broke open entirely. "You were awake."

"I'm always awake, Julian. That was always the problem." Her hand hadn't moved. Neither

had his eyes, locked on hers now with an intensity that had nothing left of the practiced

courtroom animal in it, that was simply want, old and starved and entirely unashamed of itself

down here in the amber dark where no jury was watching. "I don't know if you're him. I don't

know if that question even means what you think it means anymore. But your heart remembers

me, whatever's wearing your face, and God help me, so does mine."

The tick against the hull stopped.

Both of them heard it stop, the sudden absence louder than the sound had ever been, and

somewhere forward, down the long iron throat of the boat, a door that should have been sealed

swung open with a groan that was not, this time, the ordinary complaint of metal under

pressure—but a footstep, unhurried, coming closer, keeping perfect time with a heartbeat that

was no longer only Julian's.

to be continued

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