Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The Necessary was quiet when she returned and one of the lanterns had sputtered out, adding to the dim. Cressida had Caldwell in a chair by the bar, his jaw held gingerly in one hand, his eyes suggesting he was present but still taking inventory of the situation.
The crow was on the bar. It watched Caldwell with the detached attention of something that has seen this kind of thing before and found it neither alarming nor particularly interesting.
“Room,” the stranger said to Cressida.
Cressida glanced up at her. “Top of the stairs. Last door has the best bed.” She paused. “There’ll be water in the pitcher for washing up, if you want. Don’t drink it.”
The stranger looked at her.
“Sorry,” Cressida said. “Habit, I guess. I’ve been telling people that for years. Nobody listens.”
The stranger took the stairs.
The door at the end of the hall was slightly ajar, a thin line of dim light at the edge. She pushed it open.
The room was small, the furniture reduced to what the years had not managed to remove. A bed with a time-worn quilt. A window that looked out over the street, the jail visible across the way, a light still burning inside it — Creed, probably, reviewing the prospectus by whatever light he’d managed to find.
On the edge of the bed sat the girl from the railing. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap. She had the specific stillness of someone who has been waiting long enough to have gotten comfortable with the stillness.
She looked at the stranger with the same direct assessment she’d used at the railing — no performance in it, no attempt to seem smaller or less present than she was. Just looking.
“You put him in the jail,” she said. Not quite approval. Not quite amusement. Something between them that the stranger had no name for.
“Yes,” she said.
“Cressida’s been threatening to do that for two years.” A pause. “She never does it.”
“She didn’t this time either,” the stranger pointed out.
The girl considered this. Something in her expression suggested she was filing the distinction away in the same place she filed everything else — carefully, without sentiment, for later use.
“I’m Neve,” she said.
The pale woman dressed in black, still wearing her dusty tasseled scarf from when she rode in looked at the girl for a moment. The crow had followed her upstairs, now landed on the window ledge, folding its wings, its ice-pale eyes moving between the girl and the street below.
“Is there a name for you?” Neve asked.
“A name has not found me yet,” the stranger appeared to admit.
Neve absorbed this without apparent disappointment. She had the look of someone recalibrating rather than retreating.
“You’re a Walker,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I knew before you came in.” She glanced at the crow on the window ledge. “Mostly ‘cos of the crow.”
The crow did not look at Neve when she mentioned it. It was watching something in the street below with the quality of attention that suggested it was not watching anything in particular, which meant it was watching everything.
“Your mother,” the stranger said. “She worked here?”
Something moved through Neve’s expression and was gone before it fully arrived. Not pain exactly. The place where pain had been often enough that the tissue had become scar tissue — held now in the set of her jaw, the high cheekbones, the particular stillness of a face that had learned to outlast what crossed it.
“She left,” Neve said. “About a year ago. Little more.”
“She tell you she was going?”
“She told Caldwell he was useless. Nothing but a thorn in her side.” A pause that had its own texture to it. “That when I knew she was leaving.”
The Walker looked at her. The girl held the look without difficulty, without the performance of bravery that children sometimes put on when they want to seem older than they are. Neve was simply present — the same quality of waiting the stranger had noticed from the railing, up close now, legible as something that had been developed through necessity rather than nature.
“Cressida looks after you?” she asked.
“Cressida looks after Cressida,” Neve said, without malice. “I’m just in the vicinity.”
“She makes sure I eat and that I get the rainwater first,” she added, with the precision of someone who distinguishes between what is true and what is sufficient. “That’s enough.”
From downstairs came the sound of Caldwell’s voice, low and indistinct, and Cressida’s response, shorter. Then quiet. The building had the particular stillness of a place that had exhausted itself for the evening.
“You’re leaving in the morning,” Neve said.
“Yes.”
“After you let him out.”
“Yes.”
Neve looked at the window. At the light still burning in the jail across the street. Something in her expression had the quality of a calculation being run and set aside — not abandoned, just deferred.
“I thought about asking,” she added, “if you’d take me with you.”
The stranger waited.
“I’m not going to,” Neve said. “Ask.”
“All right.”
“It’s not that I want to stay.” She said carefully, the way someone says a thing they have rehearsed not because they want to perform it but because they needed to know what it sounded like out loud. “It’s that I don’t know where she went. And I don’t care to know.”
The crow turned from the window. It regarded the girl with its ice-pale eyes for a moment — not the alert attention it brought to threats, not the gauged stillness it held around things it was assessing. Something quieter than either. It turned back to the window.
The stranger had no comfort to offer that would not be a lie., so she offered none.
“Nod isn’t—” Neve started.
“No,” the stranger said. “It isn’t.”
Neve looked at her. The directness of it again — the assessment that didn’t flinch from what it found.
“But you’re still leaving,” Neve said.
“Yes. I have something to do.”
Neve nodded. Once. The nod of someone filing a confirmed data point rather than accepting a verdict. “Of course. Your name needs to find you.”
She stood up from the bed, smoothed the quilt where she’d been sitting with a habitual tidiness that suggested she’d been doing it since she was small — keeping whatever small space she occupied in order, because order was the one thing in Nod she could maintain.
She moved toward the door. Stopped with her hand on the frame.
Neve glanced back at her then — just briefly, just enough. The expression that passed across her face was not quite a smile and not quite relief and not quite the recognition of finding, in an unexpected place, someone who already knew the thing you’d been trying to tell people for years.
Then the girl was gone, her footsteps quiet on the boards, already below the threshold of hearing before she reached the stairs.
The crow watched the empty doorway for a moment. Then it stepped over to the bedpost nearest the door, tucked its head under wing, and went still in the way that meant it was not sleeping but that it was done with the evening’s accounting.
The stranger sat on the edge of the bed where Neve had been sitting. The quilt was still warm.
Across the street the light in the jail still burned. She laid down and slipped into a restless sleep.
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