The pipes in the building groaned at six in the morning.

  Nothing alarming — old infrastructure doing what it had done for forty years, a low resonant thrum that travelled up through the walls from whatever lived in the basement and distributed itself evenly through every level. Cael had been awake for three hours by the time it started. He lay on the boards and listened to it move through the walls and let it settle over him — the place announcing itself.

  He'd been thinking about Nadia's left thumb.

  Her face, her voice — none of that. The thumb, pressed between her teeth when she was thinking, and the way she went somewhere else while she stared at a canvas. Thought made visible from the outside, when someone didn't know you were watching. He hadn't drawn it. He was never going to draw it. But his brain kept returning to it regardless — water finding the same crack in the same wall, not by choice, by the path of least resistance.

  He got up at half past six and went to the bathroom down the hall — shared, three tenants, a written schedule in Mrs. Vanek's handwriting taped to the door — and washed his face with cold water because the hot didn't arrive until seven. He checked himself in the mirror for a moment. He didn't do this often. His reflection unsettled him — not because it was wrong, but because it was too still. He'd been drawing faces for years and he knew what that looked like — a face that had learned to carry nothing. His own did it constantly. He couldn't tell anymore if that was true or if he was reading himself by the same rules he applied to everyone else.

  Back to his room.

  The knock came at eight.

  Three raps, no-nonsense, three raps — her place, her schedule, no announcement needed. He opened the door and Mrs. Vanek was standing in the hallway holding a wrench and looking at him with the flat efficiency of an unplanned stop.

  "Hot water." She said it before he'd fully opened the door. "You're getting none until Thursday."

  "Alright."

  She looked at him. She was a small woman, not much over five feet, grey hair cut close, back straight, back straight, the kind of posture that had stopped being a choice years ago. She wore a cardigan with a pocket that the wrench was now going back into.

  "The valve," she said. "Third floor. Those idiots with their washing machine."

  He wasn't sure if she expected a response to this. "The cold water still works?"

  "Obviously the cold water still works. I said hot water." She glanced past him. He'd made no changes to it — the boards, the wall, the east-facing window, the sketchbook under the sill. Nothing that could be taken as personalization. She studied it — the alertness of someone who'd caught something off and couldn't place it.

  "You eat?" She was already half-turned toward the stairs.

  "Sorry?"

  "Eat. Food. Do you." She said it without looking at him, already turning back toward the stairs. "I have bread. It's from yesterday. I was going to throw it."

  He thought about saying no. He'd been saying no since March because saying no kept the distance intact, kept people far enough that nothing they did could reach him. It was also, he was increasingly aware, making him into something he didn't want to be.

  "Yes," he said. "Thank you."

  She made a noise in her throat that wasn't quite acknowledgment and went down the stairs. He followed.

  Her apartment was the ground floor, all of it — a living room serving also as dining room and study, a desk under papers, a small television on a stand older than most tenants. The kitchen was through an archway. It smelled like coffee and flour, whatever had been in the oven and the settled air of a place having been lived in the same way for a very long time. A cat was sitting on the back of the sofa with the boneless authority of an animal that owned the furniture and tolerated the humans.

  The television was on. It was always on, Cael was beginning to understand — background noise, the sound of someone else's voice in a quiet apartment. The news was running. He caught fragments of it while Mrs. Vanek moved around the kitchen: a press conference, something about the Fold, a budget dispute.

  Then the anchor's tone shifted — that shift — the half-step down in register that meant they were moving from inconvenient to alarming — and Cael heard Allet Street.

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  Cael didn't react. He sat down at the table where Mrs. Vanek had put a plate and fixed on the plate and did not look at the television.

  The footage was from someone's phone — shaky, badly lit, the interior of the convenience store at an angle that caught the shelves and the crack in the floor and part of the counter. A figure moving through the frame. Tall. Blond, or the bad lighting made it look so. The image was three seconds long and explained nothing.

  The anchor said: witnesses describe a man, early twenties, tall, light hair, who intervened before leaving the scene. Bureau officials have declined to comment on whether the incident is connected to the ongoing Ouranos investigation—

  Mrs. Vanek came in with two cups of coffee and set them on the table and sat down across from him.

  Cael picked it up.

  Dense, slightly sour, the kind that lasted because it was made to. He ate and she drank her coffee and it continued in the other room, and he was aware — with the low certainty that had settled into his shoulders since Allet Street — that Mrs. Vanek was watching him differently than she had when she handed him the key with the plastic fish.

  "You have family?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "Here?"

  "In the city."

  She nodded, absorbing it without comment. She wrapped both hands around her cup. Her knuckles were large, worn down by decades — maintenance hands, the kind that made decisions without consulting anyone.

  "I had a tenant." She turned the cup in her hands once. "Four years ago. Second floor. Paid cash, didn't ask questions, good enough. Turned out he owed people." She paused. "Not violent. Financial. A problem regardless."

  Cael met her eyes.

  "I'm not telling you this for a reason," she said. "I'm telling you because I was thinking about it this morning and I'm too old to pretend I'm not thinking when I'm thinking." She drank her coffee. "You're not going to bring that kind of problem here."

  It wasn't a question.

  "No," he said.

  "Good." She put the cup down. "The bread's yours, take the rest. I made too much and I'm not eating white flour anymore, doctor's orders, which is a depressing sentence to have to say to someone at my age."

  The cat had moved from the sofa to the kitchen entrance and was now sitting in it with its tail wrapped around its feet, staring at Cael with the evaluative blankness of a face mid-verdict.

  "What's its name," Cael said.

  "His name is Karel." She pronounced it differently than it looked — Kah-rel, two clean syllables. "He's fifteen. He's terrible. He bites if you try to pick him up and he doesn't like men." She glanced at the cat. "He hasn't bitten you yet."

  Cael regarded Karel. Karel stared back. There was a long, mutual assessment that ended with the cat blinking once and looking away, which registered without a name.

  The set said: the Bureau confirms the injured individual has been treated and released—

  Mrs. Vanek didn't look at the television. She was looking at her coffee.

  "My husband was blond." Her eyes were on the screen when she said it. Casual. Like it had nothing to do with anything. "Light. Like yours. You don't see it that often."

  Cael said nothing.

  She picked up her cup again. "He died nine years ago. Heart. Very fast." She said it the way people said things they'd said enough times that the edge had worn off — not without feeling — the feeling wasn't the point. "I kept it because it was easier than not keeping it. The tenants are work but they're also — " she gestured, a small movement that encompassed the apartment, the cat, the years of someone's life being lived in these rooms. "Company," she said, and said it as though she knew how it sounded and had decided not to care.

  He looked at his plate.

  His mother in Verne, watching her own set, hearing the anchor say Ouranos and storing it away as everyone did — the world kept producing what it wasn't built for, and the only reasonable response was to keep the news on and be glad it was somewhere else.

  She'd probably seen the Allet Street footage too. A blond man, early twenties. She wouldn't have looked twice.

  His mother didn't know the man on the news was him. She thought he'd been killed in a cape incident six weeks ago — no body, no explanation, a notification and a closed file.

  He could call her. Couldn't call her.

  "Thank you for the bread," he said.

  "It's bread." She waved a hand — a small, dismissive arc. "I'm not doing you a favor, I'm saving myself a bin."

  He stood up. Karel watched him from the doorway — tail low, eyes tracking, a cat leaning toward a verdict it hadn't reached.

  "The hot water Thursday," Cael said.

  "Thursday morning, if those idiots upstairs have done what I told them. If not, Friday." Frustration worn down, by now, to something almost fond.

  Cael went back upstairs.

  He sat with what was left of it and the east light coming in at the angle that was becoming familiar, and turned it over: the footage. Three seconds of it. The anchor's voice.

  Tall. Light hair. Early twenties.

  He'd known it was on the news before he sat down. He'd felt it in the set of her shoulders when she put the cups on the table — something between wariness and recalibration, a person who'd seen something and was deciding what to do with it. She hadn't done anything with it. She'd asked about his family. She'd told him about her husband. She'd let her cat decide what it thought of him. She hadn't mentioned the scar — and neither had the news.

  He didn't know what that meant. Whether it meant nothing, or whether Mrs. Vanek was a woman who collected information quietly and kept it in a place he couldn't see.

  His eyes went to the sketchbook under the sill.

  Her hands — the large knuckles, the grip on the cup. Hands that had been solving problems long enough to do it without thinking about it anymore. Karel in the doorway, the wrapped tail, the fifteen years of opinion in those eyes.

  The pause before company — before it, the gesture that stood in for a much longer sentence.

  None of it drawn.

  He sat with the light and ate and let himself think about someone here looking at him differently than they had three days ago. No hostility in it, no recognition — not yet. The habit of a landlady who'd spent sixty years noticing things in this building and had learned to wait before speaking.

  He was going to have to be more careful.

  He didn't know if careful was something he knew how to be anymore.