Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

What kind of shoes does Reno wear?

Black kevlar-soled Turk specials (on duty)
Alligator boots with pointed toes (off duty)

The alligator boots are a little beat up, and have been resoled twice. They fit like his own skin. He got them shaking down Frankie Manuflect in Wall Market, the same gig that brought Rude a spectacular Zegna three-button in black and camel pinstripes that might have been made for him. That makes the boots nearly five years old. But like any truly good thing, the boots do not go out of style.

They are on Tseng’s desk at the moment. Tseng is out. Reno is waiting. Reno has been called in on his day off. Along with these alligator boots, which zip up the back, rising up his calves, boots the color of bad coffee, of canal water on a moonless night, Reno is wearing his favorite jeans, which have developed holes in the ass and the knee. Anyone who felt like looking could look and get a fairly detailed picture of how his legs intersect with his hips.

Reno has his goggles dropped over his eyes, tuned to shield them from the hard midday light coming through Tseng’s slotted blinds. He is not jumpy. He is waiting.

The door opens, closes. There’s a soft sound of broadcloth. Reno lets his eyes drift open, pushes up his goggles. Tseng has placed a flat package on his desk and is shucking his overcoat. As he settles it on the rack, Reno picks out the vague outline of his Osel under his suit jacket, holstered under his left arm, biggest goddamn gun in the business, more than enough to mess up the line of the suit.

Reno leaves the alligator boots on Tseng’s desk.

“Thank you,” Tseng says, “for coming in.”

Reno stretches. The Peloponnesian War tour t-shirt, older than the boots by a factor of two, is utterly pliant and almost colorless, with gaping holes in the armpits. He’s not an especially smelly guy, but today, on his day off, minus his shower, Reno smells like Reno.

Tseng faces Reno, puts his hands in his pockets, and waits.

Reno removes the alligator boots from his desk.

“Thank you,” Tseng says. “Please open the package. We have a situation.”

--

Reno scoots his chair closer to Tseng’s desk. Above their heads, fanblades slowly revolve.

“What do we got?” Reno asks. “Larceny? Blackmail? Anthrax?”

“Open it,” Tseng says.

Reno shrugs, pulls the paper free.

It’s a photograph. A woman lying in a pool of blood, next to a pair of scissors. There is a flash of something gold across her hip—a belt, maybe.

“Know her?” Tseng asks.

Reno’s face goes from day-off neutral to profoundly still.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “I know her.”

“Word on the street, Reno,” Tseng says, “is you did her. Is that plausible?”

Reno looks, for a second, exactly like the kid Tseng met seven years back, straight out of the Pipes in Sector Six.

“Yeah, it’s plausible,” he says quietly.

Tseng reaches out for the photograph, draws it halfway across his desk, pulls out his chair, takes off his suit coat and puts it over the chair, and sits down. His white shirt is cut by the black lines of his shoulder holster.

“Don’t you want to know?” Reno asks.

The breeze from the fan tosses errant strands of Reno’s hair, pulled loose from his ponytail. Tseng’s hair, slicked back behind his ears, is too smooth and heavy for the air to play games with.

“I didn’t do this,” Reno says.

“But you could have done it. You might have done it,” Tseng muses, “and you thought about it a few times.” Reno doesn’t speak. Tseng watches. “You thought about it plenty of times,” he corrects himself.

Reno closes his eyes.

“And your name will come up.”

“Top of the list.” He’s not cocky.

“Does,” Tseng asks, “Shinra know about this history?”

Shinra, in Tseng’s mouth, means more than just their employer. It means, Reno suddenly perceives, everyone who isn’t presently in the room.

“Unclear,” Reno says carefully, staring at him.

“I have people at the scene,” Tseng says. “At present there is no official involvement. We could take a shot at putting this on the local color.”

Reno soaks this in.

“It would raise a red flag,” he says finally. “It would come back on you.” He points. “Here, see? Someone stabbed her in the throat. Look at that angle of entry. That’s not local color. It’s assassination.”

Tseng and Reno regard one another steadily. Reno’s face is bleak. He doesn’t look like a Sector kid anymore.

“You’re going to have to tell me,” Tseng says, “how you got involved with Scarlet’s niece.”

Chapter Text

What personal information does Reno end up providing?

What attracts him (brain power)
What almost happened to his eyes (trophies for Little Anton)

“The relationship,” Reno says, swallowing whiskey, “was complicated.”

“It would appear.” Tseng’s holding a glass, but isn’t drinking. It’s the best whiskey he has, better than the stuff he gives to Rufus and Rufus’ father. The only other person who has ever touched it, as of now, is Reno.

Reno has pulled his knees up to his chin and is hunched in the office chair with two fingers of Tseng’s best whiskey in his glass. He can’t taste it at all.

“It was about information,” Reno says. “That’s…that’s what I thought I was going to be. A runner. A courier. For whatever, however many years. Those guys do not last, normally, more than five years.”

“Butterflies,” Tseng says.

“Fair enough,” Reno agrees.

There is no veneer. There is no spin left, no bravado. Whatever Reno is, it is here. The objective part of Tseng is watching the incipient collision of this essential Reno with his own personal plans and schemes. He does not like being prescient; it gives him a headache.

Reno without his veneer is one of the worst things that has ever happened to Tseng.

“She’s better than Scarlet,” Reno says, and halts. “Was. Was better. She was all intel, all the time.”

“Were you sleeping together?”

“It was about information,” Reno says again, looking tired. “She taught me how to use my head. I didn’t know jack shit. She basically gave me the manual for my mind, you know? I’m not—you know this. It’s not about the firepower. It’s about knowing where to set the charges.”

Tseng, watching Reno over the lip of his glass, reflects on a job history, years working truths from the unwilling, years of gifted interpretation, Reno’s uncanny talent for finding the right thing in the wrong place.

Tseng’s business is closure: he resolves problems, provides cohesion, puts the pieces together, when there are pieces to be had, and he brings silence where silence is required. Reno is different. Reno is messy. Reno sees openings; Reno wants the why.

“She was contract,” Reno says. “She was contract for years; I never got the reason. She had incredible intelligence assets. Never seemed interested in working for Shinra. Maybe the contract work was just building some kind of financial muscle, for later. Right about when I expected her to show up as special consultant to Godou in Wutai—something like that, something serious, political—she disappeared.

“When she turns up again, I’m working for you.” You, Tseng understands, does not mean the Shinra Power Company. “She’s got a new connection, Little Anton, who got run out of Shinra and had set up shop in the mountains outside Nibelheim.”

“Little Anton,” Tseng repeats. “He was ex-Soldier. Drummed out on a psych evaluation, if I recall.”

“Psych short for ‘psychotic,’” Reno agrees.

“At that point we know he was working on re-arming Wutai. It fits.”

“He had resources; she had networks. And she had information. That’s what gave her the networks. She had ways to open the conduits, stuff she’d gathered for years, no one was safe.

“I brought her a design.”

This, within the framework of the Shinra Power Company, is a treasonous act. Tseng looks at Reno, his eyes half-lidded. Reno takes a sip of his drink.

“Mobile tactical, a special tread shape. Got it out of Scarlet’s office.”

“A favor?”

“Not a favor. Protection.”

“Protection.”

“From her, yeah? Tried to protect myself from her. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work.” Reno doesn’t elaborate. Tseng reviews Reno’s file, inwardly, contemplates a short but brutal series of deaths in the family that took place early in Reno’s career, one after the other, culminating in the razing of a little jazz club on Musashi Street.

Reno had taken a leave of absence and come back with scars beneath his eyes.

“She was responsible,” Tseng says. “She was what happened to you, back then. And retaliation was impossible, because of the design. Because she could hang you for treason.”

“She kept Little Anton from taking my eyes,” Reno says.

They drink in silence.

“What are you going to do with me?” Reno asks, at last.

Tseng looks at his barely-touched glass, calculating lead times, administrative delays, the consequences of obstruction. Reno, he thinks.

“I’m going to take you home,” Tseng says.

“Okay,” Reno says, cautious.

“Pack light,” Tseng says.

“Oh,” Reno says, the light dawning.

Chapter Text

What does Reno learn?

How Tseng lives (monastically)
What mentaiko tastes like (erotic)

“Not what I expected,” Reno says. He’s standing in the spare and high-ceilinged living room in his socks. The alligator boots have been parked on a shoe rack in the front hallway, which is very short.

“What did you expect?” It is not a rhetorical question.

“Big windows,” Reno replies, his duffel bag dangling from his hand. His mag-rod, fully collapsed and about the size of a flashlight, protrudes from one of the back pockets of his jeans. He had asked if he’d be needing it; Tseng had only shrugged, but hadn’t left the Osel at the office, either. “Big windows and white furniture. Rugs.”

“You must be thinking of Palmer’s apartment,” Tseng says. “Not my pay grade.”

Reno is looking at the hardwood floor, old and pitted, glowing dull amber in the afternoon light.

“I wasn’t expecting you to live on a street like this. You hear the neighbors upstairs?”

“All the time,” Tseng says, steering him towards the back room.

“My place is falling apart,” Reno says, setting his duffel bag down in the corner of the nearly empty room. There’s a writing desk at a window that looks out over a disheveled bit of yard with high walls. Light slants across the floor.

They stand face to face in the back room.

“Scarlet is already on the warpath,” Tseng says.

“I figured.”

“If she likes you for this, she will make you disappear.”

“Yeah,” Reno says, “I figure that too.”

“She’s going to work out where you are, soon,” Tseng says. “You want to eat?”

“Sure,” Reno says.

Tseng’s kitchen is very small; Reno’s is smaller, but then Reno never uses his kitchen, and it’s obvious from the knives and the plates standing in a rack beside the sink that Tseng does his own cooking. This, like the apartment itself, takes Reno a little bit by surprise. There’s a colander hanging from a hook over the stove. Tseng takes this down and sets it in the sink. He stops to roll up the sleeves of his work shirt.

“Spaghetti with mentaiko. It’s salty. Might not be good for your blood pressure.”

“Don’t know what mentaiko is. Don’t know what my blood pressure is, either,” Reno says, “but spaghetti is good, so is salty.”

“Mentaiko,” Tseng says, pulling a package from his pint-sized refrigerator, “is spicy cod roe. And I do know what your blood pressure is.” He squares the package to the side of the sink, produces a skillet, and fills a large saucepan with water.

“You’re doing it again,” Reno says. “You know something about me I don’t even know about myself.”

“I have to maintain my reputation for omniscience somehow, Reno. Sit.”

Reno complies. The table, wedged into the corner of the kitchen, is scarcely big enough for two, wavy glass and cast-iron, like patio furniture. It must be fifty years old.

Tseng lifts a glass lid from a dish, slices a generous amount of butter into his skillet. From his seat Reno can see a skylight, just to the right of the sink, that gives light to the kitchen. Directly beneath it is a tiny patch of indoor garden. Little plants with round leaves glow dark green; gray moss grows around a couple of porous, volcanic-looking rocks. It’s about the size of a bathmat.

“You live here,” Reno says.

Tseng is scraping something pinkish free of a membrane with a paring knife. He pauses in his work long enough to look over his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head this morning?”

“No, I mean,” Reno says, “here. In that garden under the skylight.”

Tseng feels a chill ripple across his shoulders.

“You plant it yourself?”

“That’s right,” Tseng says, keeping his back turned, this time.

--

Reno’s loyalty definitely extends to eating whatever his operations supervisor offers him with no complaints. As it turns out, Tseng cooks like he fights. The noodles are al dente, and the spicy cod roe gives him Sector flashbacks for reasons he can’t identify.

He eats mentaiko spaghetti as fast as he can.

“There’s more,” Tseng says, “in the pan. Slow down. I don’t feel like Heimliching you this evening.”

“I can’t believe this,” Reno says with his mouth full. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“It’s just fast. You can add other things, shiso leaves, improves the flavor,” Tseng says. “I was in a hurry.”

Reno eats like the scavenger he was, and Tseng empties the rest of the skillet onto his plate, sets a bottle of dark beer beside it. They’re both quiet until the plates are empty. Halfway through the beer, Reno wipes his mouth and looks at Tseng.

“You don’t ever do this, cook for someone else. Do you?”

“No,” Tseng says, “I don’t.”

“Nobody comes here.”

“How do you figure?” Tseng asks, feeling the chill.

“Chair angles. The space. I don’t know. No one sits where I’m sitting.”

Tseng doesn’t reply to this. Reno’s eyes, he concludes, are more green than blue. And the thing that’s been bothering him, he realizes, for more than five years, since he started properly paying attention, is their lucidity.

“Are you ever not hungry?” he asks. “Some kind of childhood vow to eat as much as you possibly can? Where the hell do you keep it all, Reno?”

“I burn it up,” Reno says. “That was fantastic. The best spaghetti I ever had.” Reno’s eyes close, and he leans back against Tseng’s wall, spent. “Mentaiko. Holy shit.”

“Hopefully,” Tseng says, “it doesn’t turn out to be your last meal. We’re going to lose our margin. Can you turn your brain back on, please?”

“Brain’s on,” Reno says. “It’s been on.”

“There are a few things I don’t understand about her.”

Reno leaves his eyes closed, but his face has changed.

“Ask,” he says. “It’s okay. Ask.”

Chapter Text

What powers have Reno in their grip?

The power of enemies (hers)
The power of the unsaid (Tseng’s)

“Were they close, she and Scarlet?”

Reno, elongated on Tseng’s couch, ponders the question. Tseng himself is seated on a low antique stool facing the couch, feet flat on the floor, elbows resting on his knees. He has removed his holster and his tie. The Osel is sitting on the coffee table, blued metal shining indistinctly against the black-lacquered wood. There’s nothing else on the table. Reno, who has a tendency to slither off couches and chairs, looks half-asleep. He is wide awake.

“Did a number on her once,” Reno says finally. “Got Scarlet a house call from Setsudo thugs who didn’t realize. Big mess. Bodies in the rose garden.”

“Why?”

Tseng means, Reno knows, why bait her, Scarlet.

“She owed Scarlet,” Reno says. “Owed her an education, her free pass above the Plate. Bought her clothes, when she was young. Scarlet was the patron saint of her early years. Pissed her off when she figured out how much smarter she was than the patron.”

“And Scarlet?”

“Scarlet,” Reno says, “is not smart enough to get that she’s not as smart.”

“She did this number,” Tseng asks, “because Scarlet got on her nerves?”

“Your own aunt, go figure,” Reno says. He lets his eyes open. His ops supervisor of more than seven years is holding his tie in his hands, passing it back and forth, folding it and folding it again. The top two buttons of his shirt are undone. “She hated owing anything. Family, she hated most.”

Tseng’s eyes flicker to his tie, wrapped around his hands. As if, Reno reflects, somewhere inside, Tseng understands that.

“This,” Tseng says, “something to do with why she never signed on?”

“She was mercenary, and Shinra pays,” Reno says. “By all rights, she should have gone for it, for the money, for the opportunity to stick it to Scarlet on a regular basis. But I think she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t work for anyone. She barely had partners, man,” and Reno laughs. The laugh breaks off instantly.

“That lends credence to the possibility that she got killed by someone she was working with.”

Reno shifts on the couch, cracks his neck. Tseng feels it, the wheels turning.

“Don’t think so,” Reno says at last.

“She made no lasting alliances.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Reno says softly.

Tseng is silent.

“She made enemies for a living. She used them for protection. No one was safe.” Reno enunciates the last four words with an intonation Tseng has never heard him use before.

“Someone took her out.” Tseng is heavy-lidded again, his face unmoving. “Someone either had a death wish, or made some kind of calculation.”

“Where did she die?” Reno asks.

“Back room of the White Iris. Private. Locked down,” Tseng says.

The White Iris is a gambling establishment in Sector Five, a destination for slumming ambassadors. A lot of nice cover, Reno reflects, in a rubbled Sector.

“Locked room suggests an inside job,” Tseng says.

Reno rubs his face, suddenly tired. He’s been to the Iris a few times. He runs through the catalogue of managers, servers, regulars. Scissors. What the fuck?

“Did she know?”

“Huh?”

“Did Scarlet ever get the picture? Did she know what her niece really thought of her?”

“If she did, it didn’t show. I don’t think she is that kind of actor.”

“No,” Tseng says.

“I’m done,” Reno says suddenly. “She’ll have me by morning.”

“I’m not done,” Tseng says.

Tseng on the stool could be mistaken for a salaryman, but only for a second. Reno feels it, a power that feels like mass, feels like weight, accumulated, unmoving, the weight of water at the bottom of the darkest lake.

Tseng’s phone rings.

He extracts it from his pants pocket, holds it to his ear.

“Yes,” he says, “I heard.” He waits. “Email the forensics. The profile - let Banry have it. That’s right. No, I don’t think so. Sure. Go ahead, put her on.”

Tseng straightens up, crosses his legs. “Scarlet,” he says, “I heard.” He listens, his eyes half-closed. “Of course. Help yourself. Tenzin has already been briefed; he could—very good.” Tseng’s eyes flick to Reno, horizontal on the couch, watching him. “No, but it’s his day off. Any number of places,” he says. “I’d be glad to send you a list of likely—very good.”

Reno, parsing his face, sees patience, patience and contempt. Tseng’s eyes move back to him, and the expression becomes impossible to disentangle.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Tseng says.

Chapter Text

What does Tseng perceive?

The significance of silence (interference)
The significance of seals (observation)

Reno is looking at his wrists.

Tseng, typing, pauses for a microsecond, losing his thread. Night fell cloudy and humid; the room is warm. Reports are coming in, from Plato down at the White Iris, from Rude, who is casing Reno’s apartment. Reno is leaning against the table where Tseng is working, hip canted, half-sitting on the table, facing him, close enough that Tseng can smell the odor of his jeans, and through them, his skin.

Data is stacking up in drifts on Tseng’s monitor; Reno, twisting around to see, watches them open, window after window of interviews, blood spatter analyses, psych profiles, and after a while, Reno notices, a small, loopy-looking glyph appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, blinking steadily.

“We have absolutely nothing from the staff,” Tseng says.

“That,” Reno says, “does not compute. I personally put the fear on the whole fucking operation after that data swap went south. They know better than clamming up on us, man. She wasn’t Shinra, but she was Scarlet’s family, they must have known that.”

“I think they did know it,” Tseng says. “Back when we were doing site monitoring during the Pelasco grab, I reviewed the surveillance. We logged five separate meetings between her and Scarlet there, starting about a year ago.”

“I remember,” Reno says. “We had eyes on the Iris 24/7.”

“What's striking,” Tseng says, “is that all the structure we put in there for Pelasco, which we’d left up more or less out of curiosity, got taken down about sixteen hours ago.” He brings a window to the top of the stack. “No incident report. No equipment returned. No paper trail whatsoever.”

“The Iris staff knew about the stuff?”

“Yes.”

“They didn’t say anything to you when it came down?”

“No,” Tseng says, “they didn’t.”

“Does not compute,” Reno says again. “We had full access. The whole neighborhood is scared shitless of us.”

“There must be somebody,” Tseng says, “that scares them more.”

“More than Shinra?”

Tseng looks up at Reno, patiently, until Reno makes a soft noise in his throat.

--

“Rude’s showing guys at your place.”

“Scarlet’s?”

“Yes.”

“Very nice,” Reno says, thinking of his duffel, which he has kept set up with a toothbrush and some spare clothes, along with a wad of cash, in the back of his closet at HQ, for the last two years. He is beginning to think he should have taken his duffel bag straight to the Junon Harbor Transport.

“Rude says they’re SOLDIER, not exactly invisible. She’s not trying at all, now.”

“Oh,” Reno says suddenly. “Angels. Scarlet disabled…”

“It’s what I’m thinking,” Tseng says.

“I got it wrong,” Reno whispers. “She doesn’t think I did it.”

“No,” Tseng said, “she doesn’t.”

Reno, pitched against Tseng’s writing table, shudders once.

“Easy,” Tseng says.

“Scarlet can’t have…there must have been someone else there. It was too precise. She doesn’t have that kind of physical control.”

“There was definitely someone else,” Tseng says. “According to forensics, about five foot nine. A little taller than Scarlet. A lot more trained.”

--

Reno points at the screen. He still looks shaky.

“What’s the blinking thing?”

Tseng looks at the glyph, glances up at Reno. Pleased, Reno thinks.

“That,” Tseng says, “is a Wutainese character, in seal script."

"What's it mean?"

"'Red,'" Tseng says.

"Red," Reno murmurs, "red for Scarlet?"

Tseng smiles.

"It lets me know," he says, "that she's here, in my system, looking around."

“She’s hacked your home computer?”

“Oh, yes,” Tseng says, “about a year and a half ago. We had an argument about IT privileges, and she didn’t like the outcome.”

“So you let her spy?”

“I let her spy. The next part, Reno, requires a field trip. We’re going to need something a little more secure.”

“She must have someone out there by now.” He’s shivering again. Whip-thin, Tseng thinks; he has no insulation.

“So do I,” Tseng says. “They’ll run interference for us. Even so…bring your mag-rod, and the gun you took off Manuflect that’s in your duffel.”

“You know about that? No fair,” Reno says, recovering himself. “I need some mystique.”

“You have more than enough mystique,” Tseng says, removing his phone from his pocket and leaving it on the table. “Put your boots on.”

Chapter Text

What is required for survival?

Leverage (on the inside)
Misdirection (on the outside)

Tseng sits in the entrance hall to his apartment building. He’s wearing his overcoat, and there is an umbrella resting against his left leg; he’s a banker, bored, waiting for his ride. Reno is staged back, half in shadow, slouched against the wall next to the elevator. His gun is in his jacket pocket. His mag-rod is clipped to a leather wristband and rests in his left hand.

Ables, the doorman, in navy and gold looking almost like an officer of the law, gently pushes the crashbar on the front door, and exits the building. He stands, hands clasped behind his back, peering into the street. Cars pass. Headlights gleam on the wet pavement; Ables stops, cocks his head, unclasps his hands, which come to rest, meditatively, on his stomach.

Presently Ables re-enters the building.

“Well?” Tseng un-crosses his legs.

“Here, sir,” Ables says, passing Tseng his phone. “Across the street, back a ways, and one in the stairwell of the Maytree Building, here.”

From his place in the shadow, Reno sees him smile.

“It’s time,” Tseng says.

Ables retrieves his phone, makes a call.

Fifty seconds pass.

Down the street, a car pulls away from the curb. Ables’ phone beeps, and he opens it.

“I’ll let him know,” he says, and turns to Tseng.

“Rousseau sent the text.”

“Get me a visual confirm,” Tseng says, eyes dreamy.

Ables steps outside, for all the world a doorman searching for his tenant’s errant taxi.

“You popped their order codes?” Reno asks.

“Overrode them,” Tseng replies. Rousseau, Reno thinks: Tseng’s mole, buried in Weapons Development. “They’ve been ordered off the building.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Apparently we’ve been spotted getting out of a taxi on Kurumi Street.”

“Rousseau is one brave motherfucker,” Reno says.

“Rousseau is working off a debt,” Tseng says.

Ables returns. “Street is clear.”

“Let’s go,” Tseng says.

After they have disappeared around the corner, Ables lets the door click closed, and turns to resume his seat behind his desk. As he walks towards the back of the foyer, the door opens again.

Ables doesn’t hear it, but he feels the air change.

--

They walk west, into a warm wet breeze.

Tseng’s neighborhood, Reno thinks, is a complicated place. Anything above the Plate takes money to maintain, and the money involved here shows when you look at the ages and makes of the cars parked bumper to bumper on the little residential streets. But paint is peeling off the walls, and roofs are old-fashioned shapes, clad in anachronistic tile, green and blue and gleaming wet. They pass tiny vegetable gardens behind iron grates, empty bottles posted in doorways, waiting for refills, and laundry lines, mostly empty tonight, strung as if shared property across the street above their heads. A lot of the street lights don’t seem to be working right; they flicker and fizz, emitting tiny showers of green sparks.

“Your neighborhood in the President’s bad books?” Reno asks.

“We might be a little behind on protection payments.”

“Kind of risky.” Reno’s own neighborhood is squeezed dry on a monthly basis; there’s raw sewage in the gutters, sometimes, but the power flows steadily.

“We manage,” Tseng says.

As they turn the corner onto 9th, Reno perceives a taxi on the curb, lights off, motor running. Tseng touches his elbow, and they cross the street.

As they slide across the old-fashioned bench back seat of the taxi, Tseng says, “Panglossia.” The taxi driver flicks on her lights and accelerates into the street.

“Panglossia?” Reno asks, and cracks a smile. “Had no idea you were into that stuff.”

“You’d be surprised,” Tseng says, his eyes on the road.

Chapter Text

What hides behind pleasure?

Sedition (poetic)
Machination (political)

“It looks like a cat house,” Reno says, looking up the stairs.

Panglossia sits at the top of what may once have been a down-market apartment building. Like all the buildings in this part of Midgar, it’s tall and narrow, fragile-looking, its walls built from cinderblocks. In this neighborhood, businesses stack vertically; there’s a greasy-looking ramen place on the street level, a beauty parlor on the second floor. The third floor has no signage, but it has been painted bright pink, and there’s a red and gold carp-shaped flag hanging from the balcony, stirring fitfully in the rainy breeze.

“Haven’t been here?” Tseng is already climbing.

“Nope. Know it by reputation only,” Reno says. “I saw some video once. Guy was hanging by his nipples—“

“The pornography,” Tseng says, “is a useful cover. It also brings in a lot of money. That’s useful too.”

Reno regards Tseng’s back, the set of his shoulders. Something clicks. “You part owner?”

“Not exactly. Say a silent partner.”

“Here I was hoping you were letting me in on your secret life,” Reno says.

“Through here,” Tseng says.

Panglossia’s front door appears to be copper, with curlicue designs executed on its surface in rivets. There are long skinny stained-glass windows on either side of the door, throwing colored light into the entryway and down the stairs, pink and blue and greenish gold.

Tseng pushes open the door. The hallway, wood-paneled, is very narrow; blocking the way, standing in front of a curtain of amber-colored beads, is a burly-looking woman wearing indigo blue Wutainese work clothes. Reno wonders if she’s a masseuse, although her hands look like they are more accustomed to breaking bones than working knots out of muscles.

“He’s here. Showed up half an hour ago,” she tells Tseng.

“Thank you. You resolve the connectivity issues you were having?”

In reply, she smiles.

“I’m glad he could help you,” Tseng says.

She moves aside, and they pass a series of half-open doors framed in twinkling red and yellow lights. As they walk, Reno catches quick, truncated visuals of cheesy bedroom furniture draped with swaths of metallic fabric, floors snaked with taped-down cords, and a camera on a dolly that seems to have been made out of a dressmaker’s dummy bolted to a skateboard. They squeeze past two lithe young men dressed in pale, beribboned corsets and complicated garter belts, drinking coffee from paper cups, clearly bored out of their skulls.

From behind a closed door, Reno hears the crackle of what sounds to his ears awfully like a live mag-rod, followed by a yelp he can’t help but parse as enthusiastic.

He raises his eyebrows. Tseng shakes his head.

“Not in there,” he says. “This way.”

They stop in front of another closed door, decorated like all the others with tiny lights. It opens onto another hallway, followed by a flight of stairs so tight they have to climb up in single file. At the top of the stairs is a door marked “Maintenance.” Tseng opens it.

Reno sees a long, low-ceilinged space that may once been a two-room apartment. The interior walls have been knocked down. Small round tables are scattered across a subdued hardwood floor.

Bookshelves line the walls from floor to ceiling.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s what it looks like,” Tseng says.

“It looks like a research library.”

Tseng glances at him over his shoulder.

“I used to deal on campus before it closed,” Reno says. “Used to sort of make a game out of getting into places, especially the ones you needed a key card. Places with old books.”

“Old books.”

“Liked the way they smelled,” Reno says simply. He walks over to the wall, runs his hand over the spines. “Wutainese,” he says, surprised.

“These are interdicted works from Wutai,” Tseng says.

“What?”

“You can’t get these books in Wutai. They’re not supposed to be available in Midgar, either. Underground publishing, underground distribution. Political theory, mostly. Some poetry.”

Reno is leaning against the wall of books, his eyes on Tseng’s face. Tseng sees the rise and fall of his breath, sees his Adam’s apple move in his throat as he swallows, hard.

He turns away, then, gesturing towards the corner.

“Let’s meet Sesklo,” he says.

--

He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, Reno thinks. He takes in the tangle of black hair, the olive skin, the grey eyes, stoned and sarcastic. Sesklo is grimy under a luminous phthalo blue dress jacket that Reno thinks might be silk. Its sleeves are pushed up to the elbows. There’s a lit cigarette in his hand. Hacker, Reno thinks, remembering the woman in the front hallway.

Sesklo is kicked back from the round wooden table, chair tipped so he’s leaning against the forbidden books of Panglossia, watchful behind the smoke. There’s a battered leather messenger bag, buckled closed, in the middle of the table.

“Whoa ho, it’s Old Sharp Threads,” he says. Tseng, Reno notes, just got caught by this kid in the process of flicking lint off his lapel, but he seems to absorb the nickname, neither receiving nor inflicting damage.

Fast, Reno thinks. Kid’s fast.

Sesklo doesn’t move as Tseng and Reno pull up chairs; his eyes never leave Reno’s. Reno, not sure he likes this, decides to take up some room; the table rocks as he sets his elbows on it.

“So this is something special,” Sesklo says. “So this is what Sharp Threads means when he says it’s urgent.”

“Sesklo, this is Benz,” Tseng says.

“Right,” Sesklo says. His eyes are half-shut.

“I take it Fibonacci was successful?”

Sesklo doesn’t even answer this, just drags on his cigarette and lets the smoke escape.

There’s a pause, and Tseng’s hand goes into his breast pocket. His face is completely tranquil.

“You can spare that, Sharp Threads? With your dry cleaning bills?” Sesklo asks.

“You like to see if she’d give me a discount?” Tseng smiles. “I have a lot of dry-cleaning bills.” By way of answer, Sesklo takes and pockets Tseng’s gil. Reno’s eyes are on Sesklo’s face, but he’s caught a glimpse of the stack of bills in his peripheral, and it’s breathtaking.

“Fibonacci got something interesting,” Sesklo says.

--

“Did what you asked,” Sesklo says. “But you didn’t exactly give us time to do our job, so I had Mikey help scan the footage, looking for her. I didn’t think you’d mind, since you liked him so much on the last thing.”

Tseng makes a face that encourages Reno to imagine just how much he liked Mikey.

“It was good you upgraded us,” Sesklo says, unbuckling the straps on his bag and extracting a small, flat, gunmetal-colored machine, almost tablet-sized, with curved, beveled edges. “We needed the extra space. We’ve been going for what, now, a year? You have a nice library now. Lots of Shinra antics. Room for whole worlds of blackmail in there.”

“Get on with it, Sesklo,” Tseng says.

Sesklo grins, stretches, and opens his laptop.

“We only had to go back a month. Camera One, Camera Three, and Camera Nine came up empty. Camera Five is running steady, we can divert—“

“No,” Tseng says, “leave it in place.”

“Camera Seven,” Sesklo says. “Our lucky number. Here. Have a look.” Sesklo turns his laptop around to show them. “Just press ‘play,’” he says.

In a narrow window on the screen Reno sees a deep balcony that overlooks the Plate. It’s late afternoon, by the angle of the light; the sun has just slipped behind a reactor. There’s a little breeze, and Reno sees, but does not hear, the gentle movements of a windchime that is hanging from the balcony overhead.

President Shinra appears to be standing waist-deep in flowers.

“Fuck me,” Reno says, before he can stop himself.

There,” Sesklo says, “on his right. She’s coming into view.”

“Benz,” Tseng says slowly and deliberately, “can you ID?”

Reno looks down at his hands. He's gripping the edge of the table. His knuckles have turned white.

A woman, her hair gleaming, backlit, is moving among the gardenias. The contours of her body are visible where the breeze pushes against her dress. There are flowers in the crook of her arm.

“Audio’s crap,” Sesklo says, “nothing we could do about that short of souping up your own fucking security cams.”

“It’s fine,” Tseng says. “It’s enough.”

“She’s information-gathering,” Reno says. “She’s working him. Who…who was she working for?”

“Herself, maybe.”

Reno frowns.

“Maybe…maybe she’d work him for fun. Don’t think so. The conduits she had going…what she was doing in the mountains, with Little Anton...”

Wutai,” Tseng says.

President Shinra crosses in front of the camera, moves to stand behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders. The audio is crap, but the video is good enough to see the dimples when she smiles. She looks back at him, leans playfully away, into the flowers, gestures with one hand, gathers the cut stems.

“See that?” Tseng asks.

“Scissors,” Reno whispers.

Chapter Text

Who plays, and what game?

Reno (cornered)
Tseng (side unknown)

“What the fuck,” Reno is saying, his voice toneless, his breath misting the taxi window where he leans against it. He’s wedged tight against the door, his legs thrown towards Tseng, a funny combination of bonelessness and tight-strung nerves. “What the fuck was that we saw.”

Tseng, on his side, is still and silent, upright, his wool coat pulled around him. Neither of them are wearing safety belts, and their bodies sway a little with the movements of the taxi. How we manage, he thinks, on our respective sides. Shock knocks Reno askew; shock throws Tseng back into himself.

“He’s been trucking the gardenias in,” Tseng hears himself say. “For a long time now. They don’t stay. He has to keep replacing them.”

They are enroute to meet Rude, the plan patched double-blind, through Sesklo. Sesklo irritated him tonight, and Tseng was pleased to use the gravitational power of his money to make him into some manner of errand boy, at least for a few hours.

“You’ve been running those guys for a year,” Reno says. It’s not a question, but Tseng answers anyway.

“Yes, that’s right,” he says.

“You’ve put together a whole library of footage? Everyone? The whole farm?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Insurance,” Tseng replies.

“Insurance,” Reno repeats. Tseng shrugs, watching light strobe across the window, past Reno’s face.

“We all need insurance,” he says simply.

Reno laughs.

“Well, you did it right,” he says. His voice is light, boyish, missing something. “You get everyone, you’re covered. All the angles. I only got one. No choice. I had one angle.”

Tseng doesn’t reply to this.

“I had to do something about her,” Reno says finally. “It was risky, very risky. But it was my only chance. I could give her something, and she’d stand down. She might accept it. She might take it, and let me be. Or I could give her something that would start something I couldn’t stop. It could turn me into a conduit, it could fuck me forever. I was hoping, for old times’ sake…”

“You were hoping she wouldn’t disclose certain aspects of your resume,” Tseng says.

There’s a pause. The taxi turns right; Tseng hears the wheels sighing.

“Nice,” Reno says. “I didn’t know you knew that.”

“I was able to infer a lot of it during your leave of absence. It never went anywhere. As far as I was concerned, it was water under the bridge.”

“Water under the bridge,” Reno says suddenly, savagely.

“As far as I was concerned,” Tseng repeats, his voice level, “it was over.”

“It’s never over,” Reno says. “That’s the point. That was her power. I tried to buy her off. She tried to open a vein. Figured she had me, I’d be her guy inside, since she was keeping Scarlet on ice: Scarlet was well out of that loop. Scarlet always got her innocent side.”

“Innocence can be very expedient,” Tseng says.

They ride silently for awhile. Tseng reflects on the fall of yellow hair, the gardenias, the way she leaned on Shinra’s arm as she cut.

Then Reno asks: “How’d you know Fibonacci would have this?”

“I didn’t. I assumed,” Tseng says, “I suspected. I guessed.”

“Nice,” Reno says again. “Good guess.”

There it is again, Tseng thinks. Something’s gone from his voice.

Reno rubs his face, closes his eyes, presses his cheekbone against the glass.

--

Tseng stoops a little to clear the noren as they enter the shop; Reno lets it brush his face. The taxi is waiting some blocks away; Reno reflects on the enormous amounts of money he has seen moving around tonight, money to keep a cab handy, money to hold a cover down, money to place markers for a blackmail scheme whose subtle feelers might or might not ever brush up against you.

The shop doesn’t have windows because it is mostly open to the street, which means the paper lanterns hanging from the eaves are tossing in the wet wind. Reno sees tarps rolled up and held in place against a rough bamboo frame; these, he figures, are let down in really wet weather, probably turn the place into a steam room.

They’re in a skewer joint, Reno realizes; so tiny, it must specialize in take-out, and only a few people are eating at the narrow bar. Bundles of meat rest on a grill set flush on top of a bed of charcoal, sending steam and smoke towards the blackened ceiling.

The cook looks up with flat, unfriendly eyes.

“I’d like the back room, please,” Tseng says, pushing an envelope across the counter. The cook shrugs, pockets his money, and turns back to his work, cutting away the dorsal fins of about a dozen Knifewing eels.

“You want guts this time?”

“Sure,” Tseng says.

The cook pushes the fins aside, threads dark gobbets of meat onto skewers and sets them on the grill.

“Come on,” Tseng says to Reno, shouldering past a pair of old men who are careful to keep their attention on their food.

Reno drags his gaze away from the Knifewings on the cutting board, and follows his ops supervisor past a paper partition.

“The back room” is jammed behind the pantry, possibly a large retrofitted closet, clearly for special customers of a very particular kind. Tseng uses his foot to shove the door open. There’s a strange, three-sided table surrounded by four chairs. Overhead, a gigantic paper globe casts a dim red light. There are no windows. Reno pushes back into a corner of the room; Tseng sits facing the door.

“It’s a gaming table,” Reno says into the silence. “I was trying to figure it out, the shape.”

“It’s called Five Strategies,” Tseng says. “They used to play it in Eastern Wutai before the war. A big favorite with the military. Against the law now.” Reno gestures at the empty chair positioned near the triangle’s apex.

“What happens to the guy who doesn’t get a side?”

“Every player has a side,” Tseng says. “One is hidden.”

--

They are well into their skewers by the time Rude arrives, slipping through the door without a sound. Tseng gestures at a chair, a plate; Rude declines the food, sits down in his coat, and folds gloved hands on the table.

“You really think this is her?” he asks without preamble.

“Scarlet is the only person outside of the Turks who knew what kind of surveillance was loaded up at the Iris,” Tseng says. “Scarlet is the only person outside of the Turks who had the power to go in and take it down. Even the Iris staff didn’t know where everything had been sited.”

Rude shakes his head.

“Her own niece?”

“Her own niece would have shanked her in five seconds,” Reno says.

“If Scarlet discovered her niece was running a racket—say, spying for Wutai,” Tseng says, “what do you think she would do?”

“Nothing up-front,” Rude says, “if the old man was as obsessed as you say. It would have been dangerous for her. Check it: you find out, you tell the President…say he believes you, say he doesn’t believe you. It would go bad either way. There’s no safe road. He’d blame Scarlet for bringing her in…”

“Or he’d punish her for her treasonous accusations against his favorite,” Tseng says.

“Keep going. Say Scarlet did find out,” Rude says. “She couldn’t do nothing, either – in case someone else clued in. What if the old man figured it out on his own? Decided maybe Scarlet had put the whole thing in motion? Put a fork in her, man: Scarlet is done. It explains this Reno bullshit, at any rate.

“She had stories, she had footage, you and her niece, stuff from back in the day. She made a case in front of the whole board, and she wanted to make sure I was in the room while she laid it out. Make sure I knew, close off my options.”

Rude takes off his sunglasses, puts them on the table, and looks at Reno with tired brown eyes. Finally he says:

“Listen, you need to hear this. This isn’t just Scarlet whispering sweet nothings. Someone dismantled our stuff at the White Iris using your codes.”

The codes are part of a Turk’s clearance. They change once a week. They are never shared and they are never written down and they are never transmitted electronically.

Reno’s face is white now.

“I don’t see,” Tseng says, very even, very bland, “how Scarlet might have gotten hold of that information. Was she lying to President Shinra about that?”

“She didn’t say anything to the old man about that. She hasn’t said anything to anybody, yet. I found the sniffers she’d had taken out. Reno’s authority marker was in the cache.”

That’s it, Reno thinks. That’s it.

“Authority markers are not easy to forge,” Tseng says.

“Don’t have to tell me,” Rude says, who’d tried.

Reno looks down at skewered squid, knifewing guts, pushes his plate away.

“It’s all right,” Tseng says.

“Don’t think so,” Rude says. “Not this time. You,” Rude says, pointing to Reno, “shouldn’t be here. You should not be in Midgar.” His eyes flick to his ops supervisor. “And they’re onto you.” He laughs a little, shakes his head. “Kurumi Street. Fuck’s sake, Tseng. Your bridges are burning, man.”

“I know,” Tseng says.

“I hope you know more than that,” Rude says. “If I fail to bring Reno in by morning, I’m colluding. They send me to Hojo, I get to sample his enhanced interrogation techniques. I hear he’s doing something with potions these days.”

“I can’t do this,” Reno says quietly.

“Rude,” Tseng says, looking at Reno, “I’ll need a little time.”

Rude sighs, passes his hand across his face.

“Look,” he says. “I can spend the rest of the night running circles around this town pretending to look for my off-the-rails boss and my partner. After that…” Rising, Rude reaches across and squeezes Reno’s shoulder, once, hard. “Got to get back to Scarlet, she’ll wonder.” He collects his shades, looks over Reno’s head, meets Tseng’s eyes.

“Don’t fuck around. Get him out of here,” he says, and is gone.

Chapter Text

Which way?

The way of the body (Reno gets out)
The way of the mind (Reno gets in)

They turn left onto the Weiyang Road, and the foot traffic disappears. Little shops, shuttered for the night or for good, give way to long, low buildings without windows; old factories, Tseng thinks, refitted into one-room apartments, lightless.

“We need to get off the Plate,” Tseng says.

“Yeah,” Reno says, “we’re easy prey up here.” He rolls his shoulders. His movements, Tseng notes, are fluid, almost preternaturally relaxed.

“We’d better avoid the trains; we can’t afford to be scanned…”

“Sure,” says Reno. He is no longer in Tseng’s line of sight. He’s started walking a pace behind him; Tseng can scarcely hear his tread.

Tseng flips up his coat collar against the wind.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Sure,” Reno says again; at the sound of his voice, Tseng glances back at him. The streetlights are febrile in this part of town, and Reno’s skin has a greenish cast.

Tseng catches a glimpse of an old canal, long dry, bending to enter a desolate stone plaza. Lampposts flank the entrance, shedding narrow cones of light; beyond them, Tseng sees the canal snaking away between piles of gravel before it dives beneath the factory wall and into massed shadow.

As they come abreast of the entrance, their taxi pulls up alongside, its lights off. Tseng opens the door, turning to Reno in time to see him drop off the lip and vanish into the canal.

--

Tseng knows this: if Reno is permitted to run, he will disappear. Either he will go to ground or he’ll be killed, and either way, lost to him.

Reno’s got no resources: nothing but his mag-rod, some pocket change, and his gun. It’s a terrible decision. An animal in a cage would make a better decision, Tseng thinks.

He is not sure how well Reno knows the area. He’s gambling, Tseng suspects, that the canal will give him a way to slice through these derelict neighborhoods, a transverse cut past the streets; Tseng won’t be able to get a car behind him down the canal’s narrow housing, and while he’s a fast runner, Reno’s speed is of another order.

Behind Reno, Tseng hasn't got a chance. As he gets into the taxi, Tseng reckons he has about a minute and a half to find a way to get in front of him.

The streets spread out in his memory. He needs an intercept, he thinks, as he sends the taxi shooting East back down Weiyang Road. He knows, from years of cultivating the immigrants that occupy the Weiyang Apartments, that the canal passes through a sequence of inner courtyards that punctuate the old factory complex before it drops through a pair of locks, long defunct, and into the scruffy back-end of Joy Land, a rambling indoor arcade that will offer Reno a maze of light and noise and people in which to become invisible.

He sees it then, what he remembered, a narrow covered passage between buildings blocked at the end by an ornate cast-iron grille, half-gate, half-grate. “Wait here,” Tseng barks at the driver. There’s no time to try to open the gate; he catches the highest bars, gets a toe into the gap between the bars and the grate, and squeezes himself through the twelve or so inches of space at the top of the gate, scraping buttons off his coat, wincing as the Osel gets jammed into his ribs. He twists his hips, slips the rest of the way through, and lets himself fall.

He lands in a tiny courtyard surrounded by high limestone walls. The canal, six or seven feet deep, emerges from beneath the row houses and runs along the inner wall of the courtyard; if Tseng has miscalculated, and Reno has already been through, he will never see him again.

Tseng crouches at the lip of the canal, watching the darkness. He’s wrenched his right knee. If he has to run at all, it’s over.

At first, he thinks he’s too late. He can’t tell where the footsteps are coming from; sound is bouncing off the courtyard walls, bouncing around inside the canal. But Tseng’s night vision is superb: without it, there is no way he’d have reacted in time, dropping straight down onto Reno, forcing him into the cement wall of the canal, tangling his legs and wrapping his arms up and around Reno’s shoulders, with his fingers laced behind his neck.

--

Tseng uses his entire body to subdue Reno because his entire body is what it takes. He has a mass advantage and he deploys it without compunction, flattening him against the gravel at the bottom of the canal, pinning him shoulders and hips and legs and feet.

He concentrates on regulating his breath. Gradually Reno’s own ragged breathing starts to change.

“Fuck,” Reno says, “fuck.”

"Reno," Tseng says, and closes his eyes.

They lie still, breathing together.

“What do you want to do?” Tseng asks.

“What are my choices?” Reno answers, finally. “I have to buy Rude some time. I have to get the fuck out of here. And you—and you…”

“And me?” The words are plain, no inflection; square, almost, Reno thinks. Gaming pieces.

“Tell me,” he says, “tell me. Stop fucking with me. Just tell me. What’s the power behind this? She was dangerous, she was a problem for the whole company, everyone in it, that means you. That includes you. Say you knew about her, knew what she was doing. More: Say she knew about you, the library, the blackmail material, whatever pro-Wutai networks you’re supporting out there, everything.”

Tseng, listening, grows utterly still.

“I’ve seen you mask your height; you did it in Junon, when we got Mobreng out of the way for Rufus. Someone a lot more trained than Scarlet,” Reno whispers. “Maybe you had reasons, a lot of reasons, same as I had reasons. Maybe I was handy…expedient…”

“No one would see it coming,” Tseng says. “No one would ever touch me.”

“How it works,” Reno says in a muffled voice. “What could you do? If she had the goods on you, she could get you killed. Or worse, keep you alive…”

“A Wuteng dog,” Tseng says, “on a leash, very convenient.”

“You kept me feeling easy with you, kept me at your place, kept me where…where you could lay hands on me, you know? When the time came.”

“You’re not safe, in the inner circle,” Tseng murmurs. “In the deepest intimacy. In the private room. All that knowledge between you.”

“That’s right,” Reno says.

“I’m not,” Tseng says, in a barely audible whisper, “that person, Reno.”

“No? You know, you’ve known all this time. Anytime, you could chop me out—“

“And what have I done with my knowledge?” Tseng asks.

Reno is silent.

“That’s right,” Tseng says. “Exactly. Have you considered why?”

The word hangs between them. Beneath him, Tseng feels one long shudder run through Reno’s body.

“Reno,” he says at last, “you have it backwards. You could chop me out, burn my networks, sell me anywhere… You know how it is with Scarlet. I could be your bargaining chip. She would trade. You know that: to get me, she’d ensure your safety, gladly. You two could pin this on me, actually,” Tseng continues, conversational, as he feels Reno’s sudden, shocked movement. “You could come out of this with my job, if you wanted. You didn’t see that? It wouldn’t be hard.”

Tseng drops his face against Reno’s neck, lets Reno have it, the whole thing.

“You must have noticed that Sesklo doesn’t like me very much. So far, he likes Shinra even less, and he’s been happy enough to take my money. But if you wanted to try, I think Sesklo could be turned. Fibonacci’s an artist, she doesn’t care either way, as long as the problem is interesting.”

Tseng waits for a long time while Reno thinks this over.

“Burning you,” Reno concedes, “would be an interesting problem.”

“Yes. Do you understand now?”

Reno feels Tseng’s mouth against the edge of his jaw, feels his breath.

“You weigh a fucking ton,” he tells him.

“Don’t do that again,” Tseng says, right in his ear, soft and clear. “I don’t run as fast as you do. I might not be able to catch you next time.”

“I can't beat Scarlet, Tseng. I have no idea how she got my codes.”

“Scarlet won’t take you. I won’t let that happen.”

“You can stop her?”

“I can,” Tseng says, skin to skin and bone to bone. “I will.”

Chapter Text

How do things stand with them?

one knee bent (relaxed)
one leg taking the weight (on edge)

“I’m thinking we should use the Elevator.”

Reno gives him a sharp look.

“What?” Tseng asks.

“Your knee,” Reno says.

They’re back in the taxi, idling around the corner from the Weiyang Apartments.

“What about my knee?”

“You jacked it up back there, didn’t you? Before you landed on me.”

“It’s very minor,” Tseng says. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing, right,” Reno says. “You’re coming off your foot wrong on that side, pretty fucking obvious to anyone paying attention.”

Tseng doesn’t answer. Reno makes a disgusted face.

“I’m carrying Cure,” he says, “let me.”

He shoves up the sleeve of his jacket; Tseng can see a bangle, high and tight on Reno’s forearm. It glitters with tiny pink and champagne-colored diamonds. The green Cure materia must be a miniature, set flat into the bangle’s inner surface. It doesn’t look like Shinra-issue equipment at all.

“That,” Tseng says, “is the blingiest…what is that?”

“It’s where I keep Cure,” Reno says, “when I’m off-duty. Just—“

“It looks like a geisha’s Seduce bangle…”

“It was,” Reno says. “It’s different now. Shut up.”

“Reno, why…”

“Shut up,” Reno says again. “I don’t have to explain anything.”

“That’s a funny way to talk to your ops supervisor,” Tseng says.

“Fuck’s sake,” Reno says.

“I had no idea,” Tseng murmurs, “that you liked high-end women’s jewelry. It explains why you kept bothering Frankie Manuflect. And here I thought it was because Rude liked his tailor.”

“Look. I know you hate Cure,” Reno says. “You’re waiting for head trauma or major fucking contusions. You ever take the Elevator?”

Tseng lifts one shoulder, lets it drop.

“I didn’t think so,” Reno says.

“I’m aware, Reno,” Tseng says, “that it’s not the most comfortable way off the Plate.”

“Is that what you’re aware of? Remember when Tenzin rode the Elevator? That was a spinal injury. He’s ten years younger than you. Don’t be stupid about this.”

“Reno.”

Reno meets his eyes.

“Right,” Tseng sighs. “Do it.”

Tseng feels Reno’s long hands close around his knee, feels his Cure knit the ligaments. It’s an unusual variant, extremely precise; there’s only a trace of the familiar nausea.

“This is ridiculous.”

“It’s Cure. Get over it,” Reno says. “This is the best application I ever found, just goes where you put it, it’s not going to give you bad dreams or change the chemistry of your pee, okay?”

“We should have let it heal,” Tseng says. “It was taking my weight.”

“Too late,” Reno says. “Flex.”

Reno is right; his ribs still ache, and the scrapes on his knuckles haven’t closed.

“Knee working? Think you can run?”

“I can run,” Tseng says. “But I’m not going to.”

Tseng leans forward and addresses his cabbie.

“Nine Lives, and when you drop us, you don’t have to wait anymore.”

—

The Elevator, Reno knows, is a product of favors for favors; the Nine Lives fails to notice the Turks slipping past the cordons and into the back rooms and in return, the Turks overlook a modest smuggling enterprise that lets the club serve a range of curious specialties to its clientele.

They pause on the shiny granite steps. Tseng turns to Reno, studies his face and torn jacket.

“There’s no mosh pit in there. You may be a little disquieting.”

“It’s not my fault,” Reno says. “You wanted to go somewhere fancy with me, you shouldn’t have pounded me into the pavement.”

Reno has scrubbed at the scrape on the side of his face with the bottom of his t-shirt. He looks at the bloodied hem, shrugs, stuffs it partway into his jeans.

Tseng sighs.

“All right,” he says. “We don’t look like friends. What are we?”

“Master of the universe in a midlife crisis,” Reno says promptly. “Sector Eight loft, buys fresh produce at Parmellis and has a chemist custom-cooking his drugs. Here.” Reno reaches out and wraps Tseng’s long hair around itself. “Hipster ponytail,” he explains. “I’m your, uh…”

“My outlet?”

Reno doesn’t reply. Tseng’s smile has a touch of the self-disparaging.

“I’m a little self-destructive,” he says. “I never get to break the rules, so I get hold of someone authentically crazy, to live through vicariously. You’ll be the freedom I never had.”

Reno stops still. Tseng watches his eyes widen fractionally.

“It only has to get us inside, Reno,” he says mildly.

Reno blinks, twice.

“Okay,” Reno says. “Boyfriend who likes to fight. Show me off. They’ll understand that.”

“Don’t hurt the bouncer,” Tseng says, and opens the door.

—

Nine Lives has a chandelier hanging in the bar that looks like a huge, luminous jellyfish. As it slowly rotates, spots of light drift across the walls, pick out glitter on the collarbones of the naked girls.

Tseng’s hand rests between Reno’s shoulder blades. Reno pushes his own hands into his back pockets and lets Tseng steer him through the crowd.

“Get me a phone,” Tseng says, low, in his ear.

“Any preference for brand?”

“It needs to get signal under the Plate.”

Tseng, his hand still on Reno’s back, leans into the crowd at the bar and orders cognac.

The bar’s teakwood, smoke-blackened, fashionably ugly; it looks, Reno thinks, like it could have been lifted out of the skewer joint, burn marks and all.

He is acutely aware of Tseng’s hand, the slow movement of his thumb against his back. He pushes closer, watches the crowd under his eyelashes.

Who we are, Reno thinks, it’s what we notice. What we see in the world has everything to do with who we are. It blots out everything we don’t see, all the other possibilities. We’re Turks, he thinks. We see what we see. These girls, what do they see?

He plants a kiss on Tseng’s neck, slips away from his hand, steps into the spinning lights.

Tseng watches him go. Reno’s got the end of somebody’s scarf. He’s taking a drink out of somebody’s hand. He’s standing contrapposto, drinking, fingering the scarf, silent, still, girls in tiny skirts or in nothing at all in erratic motion around him. Abruptly he looks over his shoulder, at Tseng.

Tseng tilts his head to one side, glances at his cognac, back at Reno.

Reno shakes himself, a single, shivering movement, relinquishes the scarf, keeps the drink. Shoulders past gaunt boys in shiny suits, a shockingly old man in fur.

“Not sure,” he says, suddenly at Tseng’s side again, “if we’re going to have to strip to get in the back rooms. They like that here.”

He pushes a hand into Tseng’s front pants pocket. Tseng feels his fingers uncurl, feels the phone.

“It’s covered in rubies or something,” he whispers in Tseng’s ear, and carefully, gently bites the lobe. “What I could get. Sorry about that.”

“I like rubies,” Tseng says. “I like reception better.”

Absently, he runs his hand over the nape of Reno’s neck, feels where the hair’s been cut short. He catches the bartender’s eye, pulls a thick, folded bundle of gil from his coat pocket, glances at Reno and lifts an eyebrow. The bartender grins, the gil disappears; he steps from behind the bar and unhooks the velvet rope that’s hanging across a heavily carved door. “Straight down on the left, bunch of rooms in a row, you can’t miss them. If a door’s locked, room’s occupied. Does he share?”

“He might,” Tseng says. “I don’t.”

“Enjoy,” the bartender says, looking at Reno.

As Tseng closes the door behind them, he sees, just at the periphery of his vision, a young man in a server’s long apron easing away around the other side of the bar, lifting a cellphone to his ear.

Chapter Text

What holds them together?

Awareness (of the gaps)
Faith (in the substance)

“You ever going to run out of money?”

“Me?”

“Well, yeah,” Reno says. “You had to pay the doorman so we could come in without emptying our pockets. You paid that guy back there. There’s only a finite amount of gil in this world, you gonna tap out soon?”

“Don’t worry,” Tseng says. They stroll past the doors to the little private rooms, slip past a couple making out against the wall, turn a corner and keep walking. The carpeting’s gone now, and the hallway has taken a slight but definite downward slant. The air’s warmer now, a little humid. No one’s around.

“A life of crime, Reno,” Tseng says. “This isn’t coming out of my paycheck.”

“Did you sell your soul to Don Corneo? Or are you the guy who’s secretly behind that power-siphoning ring we broke up last year?”

“Thank Scarlet,” Tseng says. “Well, no. Better not. It’s her money. A special project in Weapons Development, a lab out in Mythril Mine K that needs a lot of steady funding; Rousseau set it up for me. I think,” Tseng laughs shortly, “Scarlet thinks it’s an anti-tank artillery project of some kind.”

They walk in silence for awhile, past a series of ventilator fans installed high on the wall. There’s a deep, almost subliminal hum; Reno can feel faint vibrations through his boots.

“You sure trust me,” he says finally.

There is a long silence. Mako-green lights in their cages flicker on the walls as they go past.

“I sure do,” Tseng says.

Reno, looking a little shaky, shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Here’s the door,” he says.

—

“A rappelling line,” Tseng says.

“I was trying to tell you.” Reno is already getting into harness. Tseng runs his hand along the rope, barely visible in the light from the bare bulb screwed into the near wall, right next to a clipboard displaying the inspection dates on each piece of equipment Reno’s pulling out of the box on the floor.

“It’ll hold?”

“It’ll hold,” Reno says. “They anchored it right and it's rated for five Rudes.”

There’s a hole in the floor in front of them, roughly four foot square, its threshold marked only by a stripe of vaguely luminous paint on the cement. The line dangles from an uncertain point above their heads and vanishes below them into the dark.

“I see. It’s more a problem of regulating the rate of descent,” Tseng says, pulling on heavy gloves.

“Yeah, pretty much. There’s a force arrestor, see, Parimal did this, he calls it a parker—“ Reno gestures at a metal plate attached to his harness. “The line goes through it here. See how that works? If the acceleration gets too crazy, it's supposed to break your fall.”

“Did it break Tenzin’s fall?”

“It broke his tailbone.”

“That’s unfortunate.” Tseng tightens the straps around his chest and thighs.

“I could stay up top, monitor, maybe belay you…”

“No,” Tseng says. “I didn’t like the look of that server we saw as we were leaving. Management here knows about the Elevator. If anyone made us…”

“Right,” Reno says, double-checking the parker on Tseng’s harness. Tseng watches him as he studies meshed gears, tugs straps; he sees him tilt his head, narrow his eyes. Then Reno exhales sharply. Quickly, with steady hands, he wraps a sub-line around his own body, threading it through his harness and around the main line, and ties a long, complicated knot. When he pulls, the knot slides smoothly up and down the main line.

“What’s this?” Tseng asks.

“It's a Klemheist knot. Backup,” Reno says, “in case Parimal’s parker fails. We'll be hooked together; the sub-line should take our weight. It might help.”

The corner of Tseng's mouth crooks up.

“Might it?”

“We may also need to use the walls to slow us down.”

“Ouch,” Tseng says.

“Yeah. Keep your knees a little bent,” Reno says, “and keep your arms around me.”

—

The Elevator is a Pillar hack, plain and simple, an abandoned steam vent that runs inside the Pillar all the way down to the ground. They slip down the line in increments, dropping ten feet, then twenty-five.

There’s no light. The harnesses are equipped with lamps, but mindful of the dangers of unwanted attention, neither Tseng nor Reno has turned them on.

Tseng’s harness, with its parker, is attached to the line; Reno’s attached to Tseng via carabiners. The straps of the harnesses make little creaking sounds as they shift. They aren’t dawdling, but Reno, distrustful, is paying out line through the parker by hand. Tseng’s not sure he’s ever spent this much time coiled around his second-in-command, and he’s not sure what to do with the data his senses deliver faithfully, documenting the rise and fall of Reno's breath, the feel of Reno's back under his gloved hands.

About halfway down, a red dot lights up in the dark, moving across Reno’s cheekbone.

Tseng heaves, sending them into the side of the shaft. He hears a crack.

“Sniper?” Reno gasps. Tseng kicks the wall, hard, driving them into the other side of the chute. They continue to collide with the walls as they fall, first on one side, then the other, their downward trajectory increasingly erratic.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Reno chants, adjusting the parker by feel in the dark, trying to lock off the rope and halt their descent. He feels Tseng’s fists on either side of his spine. They’re not stopping; they’re picking up speed. Reno can smell the line burning.

Two more shots sound, sharp, in his ears. “Slow us down,” Tseng hisses.

Reno feels the parker start to lose its grip on the line. In another few seconds, they’ll be in freefall.

“Let go of me,” he shouts.

“What?”

“We need my body weight on the knot so it stops sliding. Tseng, let me go!”

Reno feels Tseng’s arms tighten spasmodically around him. Then Reno hears Tseng curse, a ragged sound, and he feels himself drop, and the Klemheist knot catches on the line.

Tseng’s weight hits the carabiners between their harnesses then, pulling them both out of the vertical. Reno wraps his legs around Tseng and hauls on the straps of his harness; they struggle in silence for awhile until Tseng gets hold of the rope. They rotate slowly for a moment in the dark, suspended.

“Well,” Reno says, sounding breathless, “that worked.”

There’s another shot. This one pings off the wall of the shaft and ricochets somewhere beneath them.

“We’ve got to get down,” Tseng says.

“I’m gonna hook up the parker on my harness how. Then kick us out again,” he tells Tseng. “We need to keep moving or that fucker upstairs—“

Tseng looks down. There’s a grayish rectangle not far below them, outlined in green fairy lights.

“Once your parker’s attached, cut the knot and drop us,” he says.

Chapter Text

What’s the cushion?

Speed (going down)
Stealth (going up)

The ground, Reno figures, probably won’t kill them.

He thinks they’re still at least forty feet up, maybe more. If they were dropping into the water of the river Browt, which ran through the old Sector Four and whose length had been enclosed in cement by the time Reno was fourteen, they wouldn’t even feel much of a rush.

As his pocket knife goes through the rope, Reno suddenly wonders what this moment, viewed ten, fifteen years from now, will show him about his boss, about himself.

—

“Did you miss the mattress?” Rude asks. Tseng’s holding up the stolen phone between them, so Reno can hear. He’s shielding the light from the screen with his hand.

There had been three mattresses, not one, neatly stacked and horribly wet. Reno and Tseng had hit them on their feet and finished up flat, face to face, before rolling off and out of the sniper’s line of sight.

Reno decides not to think about the sound the parker had made as it disengaged, about thirty feet away from the ground.

“The mattresses were delightful,” Tseng says.

“Courtesy of Tenzin.”

“I see,” Tseng says. “That was thoughtful of him.”

They’re in almost total darkness, in a little maintenance bay just around the corner from the bottom of the shaft. There’s rubble underfoot and sodden drywall and what feels like an inch of water on the floor. Reno curses under his breath as it sops over his boots.

“Nobody to blame but yourself,” Rude says. “If you hadn’t done that fan dance and sent Scarlet’s mooks out to Kurumi Street, she wouldn’t have set guards on all the civilized ways off the Plate.”

“She made us anyway,” Tseng says. "Rude, we’ve got a sniper topside and I need to know who’s waiting for us once we clear the Pillar.”

“No one official,” Rude says. “There’s no kill order yet.”

“Hired guns? Did she out-source?” Reno asks, working in the dark, stowing their harnesses and requisitioning a tactical flashlight from the lock box he found bolted to the wall. He edges towards the doorway, drops to his haunches and listens. There’s no sound coming from the room at the bottom of the shaft. “Think he’s planning to come down?” he asks Tseng.

“I wouldn’t.”

“No, me neither. I’d stay put and call a friend,” Reno mutters, “under the Plate.” He withdraws Frankie Manuflect’s automatic from his jacket pocket.

“Hired guns are likely,” Rude says. “Accountability issues are simple. No reports to file. No employees worried about murdering their co-workers. No due process problems.”

“Scarlet’s learning to think pretty clearly,” Tseng says. “Does she still have the Iris under scrutiny?”

“She’s camping there, man.”

“That’s too bad,” Tseng says. “I had a few questions for Hillyard Bai.”

“No one’s seen him,” Rude says.

“No?”

“He wasn’t there, when they rounded up the staff of the Iris. Manager made excuses, said he was out sick.”

“Sure he was,” Reno says.

“See what you can find out about any bounty hunters Scarlet’s running now,” Tseng says, “and try to get a message through to Plato. I’d like him to ask some very discreet questions among the staff at the Iris. Give him this number. We need to locate Bai.”

“Stay alive,” Rude says, and Tseng pockets the phone.

“This was a nice find, Reno,” he says. “The reception is remarkable.”

“What’s remarkable is our need to get the fuck out of here,” Reno says. “If Rude’s right, Scarlet knows where we are now.”

“Scarlet knows where we touched down,” Tseng corrects him. “If we can get clear of the Pillar before her shooters cordon us off, we’ll be a little tricky to find.”

“I guarantee they’re on their way,” Reno says, “if they aren’t already here. You hit? Anything broken?”

“No and no, Reno. You?”

“I’m grazed,” Reno says. “Not serious. Ankle’s a little weird. Otherwise, wet and dirty and smellin’ like Sector Four.”

“We are a banquet for the senses,” Tseng agrees.

“If our guy upstairs is a smart guy,” Reno says, “he called his buddies before he ever engaged us. You have any sense of who he is, what his connections are?”

“No,” Tseng answers. “Too many possibilities.”

Too many guys, Reno reflects. Too many guys, collected over too many years, who’d be happy enough to kill them.

“What’s our egress?” he asks.

“Give me your flashlight.” Reno shrugs, passes it across. Tseng flicks on the light and strokes the beam up the wall. Reno sees guardrails, a narrow ladder. The light shuts off and Reno feels the flashlight pushed back into his hand.

“We’re about to come up through a maintenance hatch about seventy feet off Harkat Substation’s back door. We keep to cover,” Tseng says. “We move west. I have a place in mind.”

Chapter Text

Who hunts?

She does (inscrutable)
He does (implacable)

Reno watches Tseng move out of cover a few yards in front of him, his black wool coat damp and spattered with mud. It’s not exactly camouflage, but it deflects attention away, at least for a second, from the costliness of the cloth. It’s grey and misty under the Plate; Reno feels the wind blow a burst of rain sideways across his neck and shoulders.

He waits for two beats and then follows Tseng, swift and silent, closing the distance between them and landing next to him in a crouch.

“Good job. We popped our Elevator cherries,” Reno whispers, “and we didn’t die.”

“Our sniper,” Tseng says, his voice very low, “might take care of that for us.”

“How’d you know where to come up, anyway?”

“Substation schematics,” Tseng says, “are my favorite light reading.”

“Bathtub reading,” Reno says, scanning the crest of the tangle of rebar and concrete in front of them. Visibility is poor, but there are plenty of very nice vantage points, despite the mist, for a sniper.

Reno wishes he’d worn a hoodie; he’d like to hide his red hair.

“Something like that. It was my first time taking the Elevator. But I’ve given the problem some thought, when I was sitting in the bathtub.”

“The problem?”

“How to get off the Plate in a hurry.”

—

Tseng takes them west.

The Plate above their heads twinkles with lights marking service pathways across the underside; high up Reno sees faint green flashes in the shadows, where mako pipelines are starting to fail. When he was little, Reno remembers, he and his friends, full of stories from immigrant uncles and aunts, had given the biggest lights old star names: Han, En, Guin. Their night sky, he thinks, mocked up in honor of something they’d never seen. But their constellations had been Sector constellations, reflecting Sector realities: the Juice, the Alley, the Knife.

“Another problem I’ve been thinking about,” Tseng says, “is Bai.”

“You think about him in the bathtub, too?”

“Constantly,” Tseng says, sizing up a rusted-out fire escape ladder crawling up the side of a derelict building. He points his chin at it, and Reno nods.

They climb fast, exposed on the building’s face like spiders. The sound of concrete crumbling below them and to Reno’s left makes him suck in a breath and quicken his pace.

“Bai’s the night concierge at the Iris,” Tseng says, when they reach the roof. “Plato just sent me his schedule. He was on scene when she died.”

“You think he saw the killer,” Reno says.

“I think it’s possible. Bai’s a pretty sharp guy. He pays attention. Actually,” Tseng says, pausing to shake a stone out of his shoe, “he’s been paying attention on behalf of interested parties for a while now.”

“You?” Reno asks.

“Sometimes. Sometimes other parties.”

“Wutai,” Reno murmurs. Tseng doesn’t answer.

“If he has any sense, he’ll be on his way to Junon,” Reno says.

“He has sense,” Tseng says. “But he also has a problem. A problem that won’t let him leave.”

“Oh, yeah?” Reno asks, struck, once again, by how much Tseng knows about the Wutainese immigrants of Midgar. “Drug habit?”

“Sick parent.”

“I don’t know if I want to know how you got that intel,” Reno says.

They’ve reached the edge of the building. A little below them Reno catches the dull gleam of corrugated tin: a descending cascade of uneven sheet-metal roofs, sheltering an ad-hoc collection of little apartments.

Tseng glances back at him with hooded eyes before he jumps.

—

They travel roof to roof, always moving west. When Tseng finally calls a halt, they’re on one of the highest roofs in the Sector, with their backs to a tar-covered, homemade housing for a ventilation fan. Below them is a warren of tiny shacks, eaves glowing here and there with faint mako-green, their lights produced by hand-cranked generators. Even this late at night, Reno sees people stirring in doorways, sees a man crawl into a cardboard shipping box, dragging a blanket behind him.

“That must have been strange for you, when she came back to Midgar, started meeting with Scarlet,” Tseng says suddenly. “Did she reach out? Try to make contact?”

“Never,” Reno says. “Not even once.”

“What was that like?”

“It was like this,” Reno says. “Like this night. Never being sure what was out there, waiting. I knew she was fucking with my head. Sitting me out - she was trying to force me to act. Make me do something. Take her deal, maybe, get on her good side again. I felt like she was waiting for me to come to her.” Reno watches a little girl pace in front of a ragged door curtain, far below. “I was pretty sure that if I did that, she’d kill me anyway. There wasn’t anywhere for me to go.”

Tseng thinks about that, closes his eyes.

“You lived with that for a year,” he says, his voice rough. “You never said a thing.”

Reno’s quiet a long time.

“I answered your questions,” he says finally. “Now I have a question for you.” He pushes his hands through his hair, abruptly agitated, and drops into a crouch at the edge of the roof.

Tseng waits.

“What are we doing?” Reno asks. “Scarlet has every card. She’s controlling the investigation, man. Why are we still here? What can we do, besides run?”

“We can find out what happened. I want to know how she did this.”

The wind’s picked up, pulling Tseng’s hair loose from its makeshift ponytail. It hides his face for a second.

“Once I know that,” he says, “I’m going to cut her off at the knees.”

Chapter Text

What destroys us?

The knowns (trails we leave)
The unknowns (trailing us)

Reno hasn’t seen much of Hillyard Bai. When he was a regular visitor to the Iris, keeping his eye on Pelasco, he’d had a tough time working out where Bai stood in the staff hierarchy. Bai had moved like a flunky, kept his head down and his smile on, just the night-shift concierge who brought the ice and apologized when the flies got bad.

At the same time there was something about Bai’s smile that made it look like it could fall off at the slightest provocation, and Reno is still not sure what was underneath.

“He’s in there?” he asks Tseng, looking doubtfully at the shanty, its walls put together from old plywood doors and metal siding. There’s mako-light here, a chain of little bulbs hanging from the edge of the roof, and a faint, flickering light visible through a single window—office salvage, Reno thinks, held in place with scraps of reclaimed lumber. Crumpled paper scuds across the ground in front of the door. An old woman dragging a pot full of brackish water to her own shack, a few yards off, pauses to watch them, her face expressionless.

“He’s in there,” Tseng says. “It’s where he has to be. He can’t leave her.”

His mother, Reno thinks.

“Never thought he’d have dependents,” he says aloud. “Nothing in his file about that.”

One of the few things Reno had thought he knew about Bai was that he had no family in Midgar, certainly no sick parent. He was one of those guys, Reno had figured, who left few traces; the kind of guy who does his job, goes home to his capsule apartment in Sector 7, and watches TV in bed because there’s no room inside for a chair. Tseng, Reno knows, must have seen something in Hillyard Bai that inspired further investigation.

“He hid his family ties,” Tseng says.

“Why?”

“His parents were both dissidents. His father died with the insurgents of Jao Modo.”

“Angels,” Reno whispers.

“The survivors of Jao Modo have long memories,” Tseng says. “Their children don’t forget, either.”

“This is bad,” Reno says. “This place.”

“He has to pay rent on his other place,” Tseng says. “He has to look like he’s straight. His mother can’t be discovered; Shinra would have her executed.”

“Even now?” Reno asks.

“Even now. It’s an expensive fiction. This is the best he can do.”

The door is locked, but flimsy. Tseng runs his hands over it, gauging its integrity, then just yanks it off its hinges, setting it against the outside wall. He glances over his shoulder at Reno.

“I’m not sure we’re the first visitors tonight. Cover me,” he says, and Reno thumbs the safety off Frankie’s automatic.

—

As they step into the tiny entryway, Reno clocks stacked flats of an energy drink that is widely sold under the Plate, said to help with mako poisoning. Fake flowers sit in a cup on an upturned crate. A light with a paper shade hangs from a cord that disappears through a hole cut in the ceiling.

There’s a noise coming from the doorway up ahead, from behind a scrap of curtain that’s been tacked onto the frame. Tseng pauses, listening, his hand on the wall. It’s a love song from Wutai, a sentimental recording that dates from his parents’ time, and the vinyl record that’s playing it is scratched.

Then Tseng pushes the curtain back, and they are standing in the front room, and Reno’s drawn a bead on Bai, who’s slowly rising to his feet, his hands in the air.

He’s dressed in old sweats. There’s a women’s sock with a needle in it at his feet, work he dropped when he caught sight of Reno’s gun. He’s a little stooped, with narrow shoulders, dark eyes. His hands shake. He’s not an old guy, but his hair’s gone white.

“It’s all right,” Tseng says, his voice gentle. “You can put it away now, Reno. Mister Bai,” he continues, still using the same soft voice, “please don’t try to run. Your mother needs you.”

“It’s you,” Bai says. “I thought it would be you.”

—

Tseng and Bai are sitting at a low table in the corner of the room. Bai’s made barley tea. There’s no running water; he’s ladled it from a catch-basin into a water boiler decorated with little stars. His mother is propped up in an old armchair next to the water boiler, wrapped in blankets. Reno, leaning against the wall where his sight lines on the hallway are clear, can see her face in the shroud of blankets, watching.

She doesn’t say a word.

“That lady knew what was going on,” Bai says finally. “She picked us for a reason; she liked being under surveillance. Both sides watching, you see? We watched the Iris on behalf of Wutai. The cameras watched on behalf of Shinra. She was…somewhere in between. Everyone watching everyone. There was no chance of a mistake.”

“That’s how she liked to operate,” Reno says.

“When she died, when I came in and saw the blood, I thought about running. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone from Shinra came, and there would be questions. There—there can’t be questions.”

“No,” Tseng says.

Bai, his hands wrapped around his teacup, won’t look at him, or at his mother. He looks, instead, at the steam rising from his cup.

“We’ve been here too long,” he says finally. His face is grey. “I knew it, but I didn’t do anything. Now it’s too late. After I saw, I ran. I came here. I thought I’d try to move us tonight. But she won’t leave; she won’t leave. She can’t even talk. I’m not sure I can carry her.”

“Professor,” Tseng says, his eyes fierce.

“Not for a long time,” Bai says. “Just a spy now. Just a seller of unknowns. I took a chance doing that, I know, I risked her life; I had to.”

“For Wutai,” Tseng says in a low voice.

“For Wutai,” Bai agrees. “Listen. He saw me, I’m afraid.”

“Who saw you?” Tseng asks.

“The boyfriend. The one from Scarlet, the one who repairs the cameras.”

“Rousseau,” Tseng says under his breath.

“Your guy?” Reno stares at Tseng in disbelief.

Tseng slowly and deliberately sets his cup down on the table, and stands.

“They…he’d bring her flowers. Gardenias,” Bai says. “She liked to arrange them herself. Sometimes he’d bring other things, little presents. Poems. He came most nights.”

“How…how tall is Rousseau?” Reno asks Tseng, feeling cold.

“About five foot nine,” Tseng answers.

“He saw me,” Bai says. “He saw that I saw the blood. He knows.”

Reno hears a crack. The window shatters. Tseng’s head jerks around, but Reno is already on the move, headed for the door.

Bai’s dead, crumpled across the little table, his hand open beside his empty cup.

Chapter Text

What color are Reno’s eyes?

Green (just a flash as the light wanes)
Blue (clear as air)

Right off the bat, Reno knows this is not the sniper who tried to kill them in the Elevator. The shot, just one, fired through glass, took Bai in the temple; this suggests a combination of accuracy and proximity that speak to Reno of someone both audacious and accomplished—definitely not the shooter who failed to do more than graze them on their descent. This one, Reno thinks, is the dangerous one.

He’s through the front door and skidding around the side of the building. The dim green light shows him an abandoned sniper rifle in a tumble of crates.

Instinctively, Reno looks up, tracking for movement up the side of the ruined building overlooking the shantytown. The shooter’s there, a shadow directly above, climbing from a rotten window frame up onto the roof.

There’s plastic sheeting stapled all down the side of the wall in an attempt to keep out rain. Reno pulls savagely on the plastic, testing its ability to hold his weight; his alligator boots slither and skid until he gets a purchase and hauls himself up the wall, climbing the plastic, moving almost as fast as he runs.

He grabs for the lip of the flat roof, pushing away from the wall, and flings his body up and over the edge, rolling to his feet. The shooter, wearing a neoprene jacket and toed slippers with sticky soles, is already halfway across the roof, making for the next building, which is a short jump away.

Reno’s got his gun out and he aims low, for the shooter’s legs.

Visibility is not in Reno’s favor. The wind kicks up, swirling debris into his face. He crouches, stabilizing his gun, and fires twice. The shooter staggers.

He moves into a run, pocketing his gun and pulling free his mag-rod. The shooter has dropped to one knee. As Reno comes within range, mag-rod extended, ready to strike, the shooter rises, in a sudden, twisting movement, swinging a two-by-four, full-body power behind the blow. It hits Reno in the face.

As Reno stumbles, the shooter swings again. Reno, still in shock, blinking away blood, has time to register that his attacker is Wutainese.

The board catches him in the solar plexus, paralyzing his diaphragm and dropping him to the tar paper that covers the roof.

—

His face is wet with rain and blood. Breathing with difficulty, Reno opens his eyes.

Tseng, he thinks.

He hauls himself to his feet, wheezing, whole torso aching. His nose is probably broken, his vision a little funny in his left eye. He scrabbles around him on the roof for his mag-rod. Tseng, he thinks, has been isolated. Reno’s been drawn up here very neatly and may not have enough time to reach his ops supervisor, who is being targeted, who was, Reno is now sure, the target all along.

—

Tseng, his back to the wall of Bai’s shack, edges around the corner, the Osel in his hands. He sees the sniper rifle in its nest of crates. He thinks of Reno, where he’d be, and looks for moving shapes on the rooftop up above, but sees nothing from his point of vantage.

Around him he hears movement, shifts and whispers from the shanty houses. An elderly man pokes his face out of a doorway, sees Tseng, and freezes in place. A tiny old woman, Wutainese, wrapped up in a shawl and baggy trousers and none too steady on her feet, has come staggering out of the shanty next to Bai’s place. The old man gestures at her, face white, mouth open, but she doesn’t notice Tseng until it’s too late. When she sees Tseng’s gun, she cries out and falls to her knees.

“Easy, Auntie, easy now,” Tseng says in Wutainese, lowering his gun. “It's all right. Don’t be afraid.”

But she is not afraid; she is in motion, following his own slight, inadvertent movement backward, and then the shawl’s in his face.

As he claws it away, Tseng feels a narrow cord wrap around his neck.

He feels a jerk from the line, twisted at the back of his neck. The woman behind him kicks the back of his knee; as he loses balance, he feels himself being dragged, with surprising force, towards one of the shanties. The woman is well out of his reach, the line far too tight for him to get his fingers under. His own body weight, he realizes, is helping her strangle him.

Tseng is rapidly losing consciousness. His peripheral vision falls away and the world turns green, then blue. Then, right at the edge of his awareness, he feels Reno coming in from his left, moving through the air like a thrown knife.

—

On the roof, Reno had planned to subdue the shooter. No doubt Tseng would want to ask questions; Reno, remembering Tseng’s face and the dead man on the table, had thought he might have a few questions of his own.

There’s no time for that now.

He grasps her by the chin and the back of her head, and breaks her neck.

—

When Tseng can see again, he and Reno are on the floor in Bai’s front room. Reno’s crouched over him, his arm cradling his head. His face, Tseng sees, is beat all to hell.

“This again,” Tseng says, his voice weak.

“This again,” Reno agrees. “Shut up and breathe.”

Reno’s free hand caresses his throat, offering no pressure. Reno’s fingers seem to know where the pain is, and Cure goes there, with economy and precision.

Tseng finally feels his panic subside, feels rage and regret roll in, turn his whole body cold.

“What a waste,” he whispers. His voice is wrecked, almost inaudible.

“Tseng,” Reno says.

“This was idiotic. We kept clear of the window, you had good sight lines. Never occurred to me there’d be another target.”

“Stay quiet,” Reno says. “Let me work. We’ll run in a second. Stay still. Hush.”

—

When at last he’s able to stand, Tseng retrieves his Osel from the floor, and turns to Reno.

“We can’t stay here,” he says. It still hurts to talk. “We don’t know what intel she was able to send before she attacked.”

“What about her?” Reno asks.

Tseng looks over his shoulder at Bai’s mother, who’s pulled herself out of her chair and is standing, weaving slightly, in the middle of the room.

He touches his throat, closes his eyes.

“There’s no time,” he says.

They leave Bai’s mother clutching the door curtain to hold herself upright, her son dead on the table behind her. She’s watching them, her breath going in and out.

Her eyes, Reno thinks, like a little girl’s.

Chapter Text

What do we do with the past?

Put it in a box (underground)
Give it another shape (in the mirror)

“Down here?”

“That’s right. Let’s have a little light,” Tseng says, and Reno clicks on his torch.

They’re in Sector Five, about an hour away from Bai’s place. Tseng’s unsteady on his feet and Reno’s guts ache; they’ve had to move slowly. Reno hears the clack-clack of an air filter in the distance, but otherwise it’s silent and still, and they’ve stopped in front of a burned-out building and a dark stairwell, slick with condensation, that leads underground.

Reno picks his way over a fallen beam and slips past a pile of rubble at the top of the stairs. Tseng takes the arm he offers. They descend steeply and turn a sharp corner at the bottom, where Reno’s light plays over a steel-slab door with an old-school bolt lock. The door shows marks of previous assaults, apparently unsuccessful. Tseng produces a key from his pocket, opens the door, and looks at Reno over his shoulder as they pass the threshold.

“We should take care of your face,” he says. His voice is still rough.

“Soon,” Reno agrees. “Need to rest first. I’m tapped out.”

Tseng locks the door behind them.

There’s a generator, small and squat, in the little tiled entranceway in front of the door. Once it kicks in, soft lights illuminate the windowless space. It’s none too big, but the air is moving, and Reno figures there must be a ventilation shaft somewhere.

“You had this long?” he asks.

“A year or two,” Tseng answers. “I have things that keep me in Sector Five, sometimes.”

Reno sighs, rotates his shoulders. There’s a long metal counter on the left wall, with cabinets below, and several cooler-sized bottles of water. Tseng, moving with obvious fatigue, drops his coat on a crate full of canned food. He steps to the counter, where there’s a motley assortment of tins, bottles, and cups. His hand hovers over a container of freeze-dried coffee, moves instead to a bottle of vodka.

Reno watches Tseng hook a pair of Shinra-issue coffee mugs with his other hand and step toward a narrow sofa bed in the far corner. The floor is carpeted; the carpet smells new. Everything feels like a mix between a bunker and a business hotel. Like a blank face, Reno thinks: no identifying marks.

He wonders what it’s like to live down here.

Reno unzips his boots and eases himself down onto the sofa, cursing softly. Tseng, hesitating a little, sits beside him, still holding the vodka and the mugs. Reno’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa in his socks. Tseng stands the bottle up in the couch cushions between them. Reno can’t see his profile; his hair is in his face.

“‘She kept him from taking my eyes,’” Tseng says suddenly.

“What?”

“What you said, before. In my office.”

“Right,” Reno says, and his face suddenly shows all his exhaustion. “All right.”

—

Silently, Tseng pours vodka. Reno unfolds himself from the corner of the sofa, takes the mug, drinks, and chokes. “Strong,” he gasps.

“Rude gave it to me,” Tseng says. “Take it slow.”

Reno drinks again, at a slower pace this time, shaking his head.

“Sounds like you already know,” he says, “but it’s not like I said. I didn’t just come to you fresh from that gig with her.”

Tseng drinks, his eyes on Reno. He’s not angry. He’s patient, waiting.

“She told me to play along, get myself embedded. I kept working for her for six months after you recruited me.”

Tseng drops his eyes to his mug. His face is still.

“Corporate espionage,” Reno says, watching Tseng’s face, “on a fairly grand scale. I gave her everything I could get my hands on, until she disappeared.”

“How did that work?” Tseng asks.

“Dead drop,” Reno says. “At a little corner store down on Severin Street. Plans, designs, memos, transcripts from meetings.”

“Sounds risky,” Tseng says. “What did she pay you?”

Reno looks down at his hands. Ah, Tseng thinks.

“You were very loyal,” he says.

“Was I? It didn’t matter. Six months in, she was gone,” Reno says. “Fell off the map. Contacts all dried up—it was like no one’d ever heard of her. I—“ He looks down. Tseng watches his eyelashes flutter against his cheeks.

“She didn’t warn me. She didn’t tell me anything,” Reno says. “Just left me there.”

“Did you think she was dead?”

“I didn’t even know that,” Reno says. “A big nothing.” He closes his eyes.

“I was floating,” he says. “Drank a lot. Lay in bed and asked myself what the fuck I was doing. Put on the suit and kept coming to work. Got to know Rude, you…”

Reno lifts his eyes and looks at Tseng. It’s quick, less than a second, but something in Reno’s glance, that flash of blue-green coming out of nowhere, feels like the shot of vodka Tseng just poured himself.

“I stayed,” Reno says quietly. “I stayed with you.”

Tseng smiles. His lips are tingling.

“You were a Turk,” he says.

“That’s right. Remember Handsome Bogosian?” Tseng, caught by surprise, laughs, coughs, touches his battered throat. Of course he remembers—Bogosian in pleather pants, the truck, and Frankie Manuflect, running for his life down Sad Staircase.

“Remember when we wound up Bogosian’s network, all those guys? And after,” Reno says, “when we went drinking. Me and you.” Reno looks down at his drink, smiles. Tseng remembers that, too, the dull gleam of the brass fittings of the bar, Reno with his chin in his hands, slouching over a drink, his red hair backlit, luminous.

“Then she came back?”

“She came back,” Reno says. “She’d hooked up with Little Anton in the mountains. Anton had plans, and she wanted my intel. You know how that panned out. She wanted more; everything she had before.” Reno lifts his shoulders, high and tight, and lets them drop.

“I told her to go fuck herself.”

Tseng thinks back to a Reno he recruited, a Reno seven years younger, his eyes smudged with punk eyeliner, his head shaved high up the sides.

“She didn’t like that,” Tseng says.

“She went nuts. Never heard her like that before. She threatened my family, threatened to expose me. And—angels! You knew,” Reno whispers, “you actually knew, the whole time.”

“Not the whole time,” Tseng says. “I only figured it out after Musashi Street.”

The place on Musashi Street had belonged to Reno’s legal guardian. Handel, Tseng remembers, hadn’t just owned the club. He’d been a jazzman—a pianist. A good one; Tseng had gone himself, early on, to hear him play.

“After they shot my sister,” Reno says in an emotionless voice, “they went to Musashi Street on a Saturday night. Killed every fucking person in that club. Burned it to the ground. I’d lived there my whole life. She knew my life was there. That was the message, that was her answer: I wasn’t getting out. I was gonna comply, or she would fry everyone I ever loved.”

“And you couldn’t come to me,” Tseng mutters.

“And tell you what?” Reno cries. “What should I have said? ‘Tseng, I fucked our company in the ass, now I’m in trouble, would you help me out?’”

Tseng is looking at him with an expression Reno can't interpret. He is overcome by a rush of memory: his boss, flawless and austere, finally cracking a smile. Tseng, triumphant, clinking glasses with him in a bar almost precisely the opposite of the place they’re sitting in now.

“Would you have helped me out?” Reno whispers.

Tseng tilts his head to one side, and waits.

“Angels,” Reno says, miserable.

“Whatever I looked like,” Tseng says, “I was…You and I—“ he halts, coughs. Drinks. “At any rate,” he resumes, “secrets are nothing new to me.”

“You got nothing to worry about on that score,” Reno says in a low voice.

They drink in silence for awhile, digesting this.

“When you took your leave of absence,” Tseng says slowly, “you were planning to kill her, weren’t you?”

“Planning to, yeah,” Reno says. “Tried. Tracked her to Nibelheim, got outmaneuvered in a high pass on the mountain. Little Anton, well…” Reno touches the scar under his left eye. “He had a thing about eyes. He’d cut on your face first, work up to it, then dig them out of the sockets.”

Tseng looks at Reno’s face, looks at it clinically. Reno had evened out the scars several years back, had a body-modification artist go to work on them. They looked deliberate now, of a color with his red hair.

“She interrupted him. Got me down off the wall. Told me to go home, told me never to say her name again.” Reno rubs his face, winces. “So I did what she said.”

“She saved your life,” Tseng says.

“I don’t know why,” Reno says. “I still don’t know why.”

Tseng puts his mug down on the carpet. He slides down the sofa towards Reno, and lightly touches his face, his cheekbone, his broken nose, his split lip.

“We should see to this,” he says.

“You hate Cure,” Reno told him, but he’s lifting his hand to his forehead. “Shit, it hurts,” he murmurs.

Tseng leaves his hand on Reno’s face while Reno casts Cure.

Chapter Text

On whose authority?

Rousseau’s (root privileges)
Tseng’s (brute force)

It’s warm, and there’s no pain.

Tseng is sinking into dreamlike, dissociated time, time shaped by Reno’s breathing, the beat of his pulse; his fingers brush the short fine hair at the nape of Reno’s neck.

He feels Reno’s body gradually release its tension as Cure rolls in, narcotic, stronger and less discriminating than before. It hits Tseng, too, in overflow, tangles with the vodka, wraps a layer of solace around his throat, opens him up to his own exhaustion, which is perfect and complete.

There is nothing to say, and no compelling reason to move or to open his eyes. Just the springy support of the couch cushions against his right side, the warmth of Reno’s limbs; as if Tseng has found space for himself at last, and a moment that might continue to telescope eternally, as far as he’s concerned.

—

“Hey,” Reno says, his voice a little rusty.

Tseng opens his eyes. He and Reno are sprawled across the couch. One of his hands is still on Reno’s face; the other’s abandoned on Reno’s right thigh. Reno is watching him steadily.

“I fell asleep,” Tseng says.

“Yes, you did,” Reno agrees. “Seemed like you needed it. Didn’t sleep long, though. You ready to get up?”

“Sure,” Tseng says, feeling his bones ache.

—

Reno makes the coffee.

His face still hurts around the edges and his nose, still healing up, is canted a little off-center. He’ll probably leave it be; he’s wary of the long-term effects of Cure on his cartilage.

“So your mole’s gone rogue,” he says, handing Tseng his coffee. “Doing wetwork for Scarlet, and didn’t fill you in. Seem like his thing?”

“Apparently,” Tseng says, “Rousseau’s branching out a bit.”

“A bit,” Reno agrees. “Hitting Scarlet’s mark with a pair of scissors, pretty novel behavior for a technical boy.”

“Yes,” Tseng says. “Bai put him at the scene. If he actually committed the murder himself, I underestimated him.”

“Rousseau the kind of guy,” Reno asks, “who can get at authority marker generation for the Turks?”

“Rousseau has root privileges in Weapons Development,” Tseng says. “I suspect he’s acquired root on my system, too.”

“Guess that’s a yes,” Reno says.

“I don’t think he did it by himself.”

“No?”

“No,” Tseng says softly. “I think he had help from a very good coder.”

—

“It’s you,” Sesklo says, incredulous. “How the fuck did you get this number?”

“It’s an interesting story,” Tseng says. He’s sitting on the couch with his legs crossed, balancing his coffee on his knee and his phone on his shoulder. He sounds relaxed, Reno thinks, more relaxed than he’s been all night.

“Oh, fuck you, guy,” Sesklo says. “Really? Just—fuck you.”

“I’d like to speak to Fibonacci, if you don’t mind.”

“She’s busy,” Sesklo says. “Can’t come to the phone.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Tseng says. “I wanted to warn her.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Tseng says. “She seems to be earning a dangerous enemy. Hacking official Shinra authority markers…” Tseng whistles. “It would be hard for her if President Shinra found out. Very hard. Where could she run, in this world, if he heard that? I don’t think there’s a thing she could say that he would listen to. I don’t think he’d believe her at all if she tried to tell him about me.”

“Fuck you, man,” Sesklo snarls. “You try this shit…”

“Give her this number,” Tseng says.

—

“You sure this isn’t actually Sesklo?” Reno asks. He’s hungry and prowling the bunker for potato chips or crackers but all he’s found so far is chili, pickled plums, and sardines. Experimentally he opens a tin of butter cookies on the counter, finds sewing supplies, and grimaces.

“I’m sure,” Tseng says. “This is outside his purview. It’s Fibonacci.”

“What are you thinking?”

“As soon as Rude told us about the authority markers, I began looking at our endgame,” Tseng says. “I knew there’d be no way to work with Scarlet. We’d never be able to destroy her case; it would come down to her word against ours. I needed another approach.”

“You’re gonna frame her,” Reno says.

“Yes.”

—

In the end, it takes less than twenty minutes for Fibonacci to call in. Tseng puts her on speaker. The voice Reno hears is disguised, pitched high, as if Fibonacci had been inhaling helium.

“You rang?” Fibonacci asks.

“It appears I got you out of the bath,” Tseng says. “My apologies. I would have preferred to be more considerate of your privacy, but circumstances…” he trails off.

“Oh, I see, you’re full of shit this evening,” Fibonacci says.

“I am under the impression you have been working with a colleague of mine on a side project,” Tseng says. “You spoofed an authority marker from Administrative Research. As a result, one of my people is under suspicion for something he didn’t do. That’s not cool, Fibonacci.”

“I don’t know, Tseng, I think it was kind of cool. I think it’s the first time anyone’s breached that particular system. You don’t think that’s cool?”

Reno lifts an eyebrow at Tseng.

“Considered abstractly,” Tseng says, “it’s a thing of beauty. Considered concretely and in terms of its implications, you’ve created a problem for me.”

“You’re making me feel sorry for you, Tseng,” says the voice, crackling now around the edges.

“Really?”

“No, not really. But it’s cute,” Fibonacci says. “This thing you have for Reno.”

“You’ll need to do some math,” Tseng says. “You’ll need to calculate how quickly you can trace this call and hire a goon—a good goon, I’m warning you—to try and hunt me down, silence me before I can bring your actions before President Shinra.” Tseng pauses, and sips his coffee. “Then you should calculate how quickly my goons can get to you. I should also warn you that my goons will always be better, and faster, than your goons.”

“What makes you so sure of that, sweetheart?”

“Because sending goons is what I do,” Tseng says simply. “It’s not what you do.”

“You shouldn’t make too many assumptions about what people do and don’t do, Mister Tseng,” Fibonacci says. “People can turn around on you in amazing ways.”

“All true,” Tseng says, “and thank you for the reminder. But see, I think I know you pretty well. I know what flavor of protein shake you had for dinner this evening, actually.”

There’s a hiss of static.

“Threats,” Fibonacci says, finally, “are not very classy.”

“Ask yourself which member of your team told me that, Fibonacci. And remember the goons.”

“Right,” Fibonacci says. “Lord, how boring. What do you need done?”

—

“How long will it take?” Tseng asks.

“It’s just a Maisie algorithm,” she says. “Trivial. Go have a nice coffee. Go scratch your butt for awhile. Go scratch Reno’s butt,” she snorts, “or whatever you’re into. When you’re ready, give her a call. It’ll be done.”

“Isn’t this better?” Tseng asks. “Trust me, it’s better. You wouldn’t like my goons.”

He types a long string of numbers into his stolen phone.

“I’ve sent you a bonus. Do you see it?” he asks Fibonacci.

“Holy shit,” Fibonacci says. “Remind me to check with you first, next time I get a call from someone in Weapons Devel, asking me for favors.”

“You could,” Tseng says, “stop taking their calls.”

“I could,” she concedes, “but that would be boring.”

“Being on my regular payroll wouldn’t be boring at all.”

“No thanks,” Fibonacci says. “As far as I can tell, life at Shinra is like life underwater. It’s cold. You can’t see too well. And there are sharks.”

“Your loss,” Tseng says.

“Sesklo hates you,” Fibonacci says. “He’s all for frying your severs. But I might actually like you, Tseng. Try not to die.”

—

Tseng finishes his coffee, and sits in silence for awhile, looking at the empty cup in his hand. Reno flexes his stocking feet against the carpet, and stretches cautiously, testing the stress to his ribcage and diaphragm.

“Alive?” Tseng asks.

“Alive,” Reno says, “and hungry as fuck.”

“We’ll eat soon. Plateside, I think. You want pancakes? There’s a nice little cafe in Sector Seven.”

“I’d eat ship’s biscuit at this point,” Reno confesses.

Tseng smiles a little, and turns back to his phone. There’s a long pause while he dials, and waits. The voice Reno hears on the other end is familiar.

“Hi, Scar, it’s me,” Tseng says. “I realize it’s early. Got a moment?”

Chapter Text

What are the terms?

Obedience (for Shinra dogs)
The muzzle (for dog owners)

Reno and Tseng take the train up.

It’s a commuter train, stopping at every station, taking in service workers coming up for their jobs on the Plate—dishwashers, hotel maids, couriers. It’s quiet onboard, passengers keeping to themselves, murmuring into their phones; underneath it all the rattle of the wooden trestles, the muted sound of the wheels.

It’s still dark when they board the train. As they travel past the stations—the conductor calls them by their old names, Memoriat, Hedgey Landing, Fallow Moon, Borboy—the shadows ease away. Aging, low-slung buildings and modern shanties made of spray-foam and salvage gradually take shape around them as light filters down through chinks in the sky. Slowly they climb towards the Plate, and sunrise.

“Don’t blame Rousseau,” Reno says out of nowhere. “He had to follow orders. He’s just another disposable soldier. He’s Shinra property, like me.”

“Like you and me,” Tseng agrees. “But I should have realized what Scarlet was doing, that she might use him that way. I guess it surprised me that she put him in the field.”

“And you can’t afford to be surprised.”

“No,” Tseng says, his voice a little hoarse. “I can’t.”

“I feel kind of sorry for him.”

“Do you?” Tseng asks.

“You said he was working off a debt. And now he can’t escape, not from anyone. Not from Scarlet, not from you…”

“I know what that’s like,” Tseng says.

—

At seven in the morning, they’re at a flimsy little table on the outer terrace of Café Tournade. Even this early, traffic’s beginning to clog up around Karhghad Circle, in the affluent center of Sector 7, Plateside; Midgar already weary.

Reno’s just inhaled a pair of cinnamon buns and a cup of espresso. Tseng is nursing a pot of coffee. His cup and saucer are porcelain, and the pot is decorated with a relief of stylized morning glories. The brioche in the little covered basket are handmade.

Reno, standing behind Tseng’s chair with his hand on the automatic in his pocket, looks down at his boss. Tseng in his ravaged suit is perfectly composed, even serene; the tender morning light shows the bruising on his face and throat. The contrast between his appearance and his demeanor is acute, made sharper by the delicate whorls of the idiotic table where he sits, the lacy paper doily under his coffee cup.

Scarlet’s in front of them, visibly trembling. She’s not wearing any makeup. Her hair is tied in a rough knot and the cut of her coat is military. It’s clear she hasn’t slept.

Rude is standing at parade rest a few feet behind her, his presence flat and affectless. If he hasn’t slept, it doesn’t show.

“Coffee?” Tseng asks, gesturing at the pot.

“Go to hell, daisy,” Scarlet says. She’s twisting the edge of her coat with her fingers. Reno has never seen her like this. She’s been crying, of that he’s sure.

“I’ve never understood your attachment to antiquated gangster slang,” Tseng says. “Suit yourself. Have a seat.”

“No thanks,” Scarlet says. “I don’t plan on sharing a table with you and your pet killer. You have something to say to me? After all this? After what he did to me and my family? This little psycho?”

“As far as I can tell, Reno and I are the ones with the grievance,” Tseng says, gesturing at his neck. “Your pet killers gave us some problems last night.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Scarlet says.

“Well, it hardly matters now,” Tseng says.

“Go ahead,” Scarlet says, “enjoy your triumph, just laugh, I know you want to; that’s what you do. Your thug murdered her, and you made sure he’s getting away with it. I’ll never recover from this. Never.”

“Yes, how tragic for you,” Tseng says. “Don’t dissemble. You had a problem, and you tried to solve it. Your niece was actively working to destroy Shinra—“

“You liar—“

“—And she hated you. She hated you, Scarlet.”

“You liar,” Scarlet says again. Her eyes are full of tears. “You’re a vicious little prick, Tseng, and you always were. She was the best of us, you asshole. She was better than Shinra. Better than you. And so much better than this piece of trash you keep on a leash. Your little fetish-object. Your murderer.”

Tseng regards her with unblinking eyes.

“I have a busy morning,” he says. “I take it you are here to accept terms?”

“Fuck you,” Scarlet says.

“You will call off the dogs,” Tseng says, enunciating carefully. “You will put aside your vendetta against Reno. You will not obstruct Administrative Research’s investigation of your niece’s death, or object to its conclusions. And you will never, ever again try to entangle my people in your schemes. If any attempt to do so comes to my attention, you will be called before President Shinra and accused of treason. I will show him the weapons schematics you shared—“

“I never,” Scarlet says, her face white.

During this exchange, Rude has closed the distance between himself and his boss. When he reaches Tseng’s side, he turns to face Scarlet, his affiliation clear.

“I will show him,” Tseng repeats, “the weapons schematics you shared over the course of several years with your niece, who was working for Wutai; schematics which you released to them using your authority marker. Then I’ll show the President clear, documented traces of the money you received for these transactions. If you read through the email I sent you, you’ve already seen a sample of what I’m talking about. If you would prefer that the rest of this evidence remain in my personal files, you’ll agree, right now, to my terms.”

Scarlet stands still, her hands working into fists.

“You’ll find, eventually,” she says finally, grinding out the words, “that your actions will have ramifications. Ramifications you can’t imagine.”

“Yes, you specialize in ramifications,” Tseng says. “So do I. Bet you mine are worse.”

“This,” Scarlet says, “is a lie.”

“I learned how to lie from the best, Scar,” Tseng says.

—

“Well,” Tseng says, finishing his coffee and returning his cup to its saucer with a click. “I think it’s time to get some rest.”

“Fucking high time,” Rude says. “I was starting to think you’d lost your edge, man.”

Tseng, looking a little aggrieved, cocks an eyebrow.

“Well, you got it done, eventually,” Rude says. “That’s one less ulcer for me.” He grasps Reno by the shoulder, shakes him once, hard. Then he cracks his neck, sighs. “I’ve been up all night; gonna turn in. See you soon. Don’t get framed.”

As Rude departs, Tseng touches Reno’s sleeve.

“I’ll need to give some thought to Rousseau,” Tseng says. “But I think he’ll keep for now. Let’s go get your things.”

“Yeah,” Reno murmurs.

He is looking at the point where Scarlet had been standing, mentally tracing her path out of the café, his eyes narrowed slightly. It had been just a flicker, the faintest uncontrolled shake of her head, when Tseng mentioned the attempt on his life, like he’d said something she wasn’t expecting.

He is also sure now, unshakably sure, that Scarlet’s grief is genuine.

Chapter Text

What’s gone wrong?

The idea (the killer)
The execution (coming home)

It’s a short walk from Café Tournade to Tseng’s apartment, and they skip the cab despite their fatigue. Tseng’s heavy on his feet, and Reno’s starting to stumble; it’s less the hours spent on the move and more, Tseng thinks, the sudden loss of adrenaline that has upended them. The wave’s receded. They’re walking on the exposed sand of the shore now, the ghost foam.

Reno rubs his face.

“What happens next?” he asks Tseng.

“It’s Monday morning,” Tseng says. “By all rights we should be making for the Shinra Building.”

“Standing in line at the cafeteria,” Reno says with a half-smile, “in our wrecked-out threads, getting orange juice.”

“And then heading upstairs to submit our Form 6As,” Tseng adds, “to account for the Sunday overtime. I’d retire to my office…”

“I’d set up that Norris camera we talked about with Rude, grab a slice of pizza for lunch…”

“And we’d clock out at about five-thirty.”

“You never clock out at five-thirty,” Reno retorts.

“I would this time. I’d close the files. I’d hang up the Osel.”

“We’d go for a beer,” Reno says. “We’d go to Mary Blodwen’s.”

“The music’s too loud there,” Tseng says. “Let’s go to Ockerby’s instead.”

“They pull a good pint at Ockerby’s,” Reno says, considering.

“We’d drink a couple of pints,” Tseng says, “and when we came outside…” He stops. He’s not sure how to articulate what should, by all rights, happen next.

“What’s actually going to happen?” Reno asks quietly.

They’ve reached Tseng’s street. Tseng looks at the thread of water running in the gutter, a handful of lost leaves moving in the current. He wonders what distant plain, far beyond the city, has let them loose.

“We’ll see,” he tells Reno.

—

Paro, the morning man, unlocks the glass doors, ushers them into the lobby, greets Tseng by name, nods at Reno.

“Rain’s let up,” he observes.

“So it has,” Tseng agrees.

“Paper’s a little late.”

“Ah,” Tseng says.

“And Ables,” Paro says, “saw the gentleman up and made sure he was comfortable.”

“Did he?” Tseng asks. He’s stopped in the middle of removing his coat. Slowly, he slides his arms back into the sleeves.

Reno takes the safety off the gun in his pocket.

“Told me to make sure to let you know,” Paro says.

—

They stick to the stairs, Reno covering their backs as they climb.

When they reach Tseng’s floor, he puts a hand on Reno’s arm, stilling his movement. He lifts a finger to his lips. Reno nods, pushing slowly and smoothly on the crash bar of the door on the landing. After Tseng goes through, Reno brings the door to noiselessly, resting it on the latch, and slips to Tseng’s side, scanning the elevator corridor where it intersects with Tseng’s hallway, looking for windows opening, doors closing, flashes of movement around corners.

No one’s there. The hallway’s empty. The door to Tseng’s apartment is ajar.

Reno and Tseng look at each other for a long moment, then Tseng, holding his Osel in a two-handed grip, gently pushes the door open with his toe. His apartment’s dark. Reno, his shoulder almost touching Tseng’s, follows behind, covering the hallway and the door.

“I’m in here.”

The voice, coming from Tseng’s living room, is hesitant, a light baritone. Reno doesn’t recognize it, but he already knows whose it is, who must be waiting for them.

“It’s just me,” the voice says. “No one else is here. Don’t be afraid.”

“It’s just me, too,” Tseng replies. Reno drops back against the wall of Tseng’s entryway, aiming his gun at the doorway to the living room. “Don’t be afraid.”

“You’re lying, but it’s okay. It’s good that Reno’s here.”

Tseng eases around the corner, sighting down his Osel and aiming at the pool of light from the lamp beside his armchair. The light plays on the Bender the man in the chair is holding. The Bender’s vibrating a little. It’s been hacked, Tseng realizes, and is holding far too much charge, more than enough to crater the apartment building.

Tseng slowly puts his Osel on the floor, and raises his arms in the air. He tilts his head at Reno, who hesitates only for a second before putting his automatic down.

“Scarlet didn’t actually do this, did she?” Tseng asks, standing unarmed in the doorway to his living room.

“No,” Rousseau says. “She didn’t.”

Chapter Text

Who calls, and who answers?

“There’s a design flaw in the Benders,” Rousseau says.

Reno’s trying to steady himself, holding and slowly releasing his breath. He can hear the sound of the Bender, an uneven hum, under Rousseau’s voice. “It’s a fairly simple exploit and then they become very good bombs. They do require some skill to keep from just exploding, though, as soon as they hit critical charge.”

“Do you…do you wanna die?” Reno asks.

“Of course I don’t want to die,” Rousseau answers, his eyes frank and serious. “But I need to control the situation. It may be necessary for me to die. I hope not. I have a few things I want to explain, if you’ll let me.”

Rousseau, Reno perceives, is able to hide his tells. There’s nothing in his demeanor, nothing about the way he holds his shoulders or uses his hands, that says “assassin.” He’s younger than Reno, slightly built, with owlish glasses and a rueful, apologetic face, and you’d have to be watching pretty closely to see that there’s no tension in his neck and that the hands on the Bender are perfectly steady.

Reno, against his will, is moved to professional respect.

Rousseau catches his assessing gaze.

“You’re fast,” he tells Reno. “You might actually be fast enough to get to me before I can release charge on the Bender. But don’t try, okay? You won’t be able to disarm this,” Rousseau says. “And even if you were successful—even if you got Sesklo or Fibonacci to help you—in the end you’d probably be forced to kill me. And if you succeed in killing me, bad things will happen to his people.”

He means Tseng’s people, Reno thinks: Tseng’s networks, embedded throughout Midgar. Private citizens, ordinary people, innocents, like Bai.

“I have back doors in all your systems,” Rousseau says. “Right now, I use them to help Lord Godou and the Tower. I could use them to hurt you. I don’t want to do that.”

“There’s a dead man switch,” Tseng says, comprehending.

“Yes,” Rousseau says. “I have to check in. If I don’t check in, every one of your contacts will be blown. Shinra will pull them out of their beds; they’ll disappear.”

Rousseau takes off his glasses, cleans them on the sleeve of his button-down shirt, and puts them on again.

“Your networks will burn, Mister Tseng.”

“Godou’s benefited from those networks, Rousseau,” Tseng says.

“Godou,” says Rousseau, hesitating and choosing his words with care, “regards you as somewhat of a liability.”

“Which is why you didn’t come to me,” Tseng says, “in the first place.”

Rousseau looks obliquely at Tseng over the rims of his glasses, but doesn’t reply.

“How long have you been working for Godou?” Tseng asks.

“Longer than I’ve been working for you,” Rousseau says. He looks at Tseng for a moment, pursing his lips. Then he un-cocks the Bender’s charge lever and types a pattern into the touch display, his fingers moving almost too fast to track. Reno, watching, suddenly realizes he hasn’t been letting himself breathe. He sucks in air, trying not to shake.

“All right,” Rousseau says. “I hope it’s clear that you can’t kill me. I don’t think we need an overclocked Bender to make the point anymore. Let’s talk now.”

—

“So when Ables called you, from the lobby,” Tseng says.

“I was around the corner from here,” Rousseau confirms. “I waited until you and Reno were clear. I brought in the Bender in short configuration, in a backpack; prepped it up here. Oh, and he’s alive, Ables,” he adds, eyebrows lifting as if in sudden recollection. “I had him call in when his shift was set to end. He’s in the boiler room. You can go get him later.”

“Thank you for not murdering my doorman,” Tseng says. “It would have been better, though, if you’d extended the same courtesy to Professor Bai. To say nothing of Reno and myself.”

Rousseau shakes his head. “I had to. Bai was a witness; nothing to be done about that. And you…well, I’d framed one of your people. I knew what that would mean. When you and Reno dropped off the Plate and headed straight for the Professor’s bolthole, I saw an opportunity and I took it. Please understand that it was a tactical decision.”

“Not the best decision,” Tseng says, “that you ever made.”

“It didn’t work out as planned,” Rousseau concedes. “But I was only about 50% sure the Tower’s people would succeed in killing you. Which is why I’m here. Acting as the failsafe, and hoping you’ll be reasonable.”

“Reasonable,” Reno says. “You killed her, put it on me. You just about blew up this building. Now you want us to be reasonable.”

“I’d like us all to walk out of here this morning,” Rousseau says. “I hope that’s possible.”

“Why,” Tseng asks, “did Wutai have you kill its own contract agent?”

“It wasn’t that simple,” Rousseau says. “It’s why I had to use the scissors.”

“Can you explain,” Tseng asks patiently, “about that?”

“The scissors must have seemed strange,” Rousseau says. “They were a message.”

“To whom?”

“Shinra,” Rousseau says. “We needed to make sure he understood.”

“Shinra?” Reno whispers.

“I don’t follow,” Tseng says.

“President Shinra,” Rousseau says, “decided to run her against us.”

—

“It was a double game,” Reno says.

“That’s what I think,” Rousseau says. “Shinra knew all along that she was a hood. She played him so he thought he had turned her—and maybe he had, who knows. At any rate, she sold him on that idea. She played to his fantasy life—she let him be a spy, not just a President. They joked about tricking Wutai, together.”

“She made enemies for a living,” Reno murmurs. “She used them as protection.”

“We understand a little haziness with contractors. But this was straight-up double-dealing, and the Tower decided to pull the plug. I was asked to get close, report back; once it became clear what she was up to, I was directed to end her life, but also to send a communication.” Rousseau shrugs. “She loved flowers. He’d truck them in, she’d arrange them: it was their little ritual. We needed Shinra to understand that we were aware of what he was trying to do, turning her.”

“She was a risky hire for you right from the start, I’d think,” Tseng says.

Rousseau shrugs again.

“You’re a risky ally,” he says. “That doesn’t stop the Tower from taking advantage of your intel, from time to time. Seeing as you’ve survived, I expect that arrangement to continue.”

“What happens now?” Tseng asks. He looks and sounds ten years older than he is.

“What happens now,” Rousseau says, “depends on how you want to leave things with the Tower.”

Tseng pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes.

“We have to leave him embedded,” Reno says softly, urgently. “We have to. We can’t kill him without fucking up your networks. If you bring him to Shinra, alive, he’ll roll over on you. Godou will put a hit out on you just to keep you from talking, if the President doesn’t get to you first.”

“Wutai will own my networks,” Tseng says.

“Is that so bad?” Rousseau asks. “You’ve been working from your end to restore Wutai for years. Is it such a change? We won’t interfere. Most of the time, we won’t interfere.” The light catches Rousseau’s glasses, hiding his expression. “It’s better this way, and much easier. Everyone goes back to work. Everything’s the same. More or less.”

“What about Scarlet?” Reno asks. “She still thinks I did this.”

Rousseau gives Reno a sad, diffident smile.

“Sometimes the truth’s a casualty of war,” he says.

Reno shakes his head in disbelief.

“You’re overthinking this,” Rousseau says. “It’s very simple. Close the investigation. Put it on Bai. Say he was obsessed with her, stalked her, and finally killed her.”

“Put it on Bai,” Tseng echoes. “An innocent man?”

“Innocent? Professor Bai?” Rousseau shakes his head a little, and smiles. “He’s dead now. It won’t hurt him. I take it his mother…”

Tseng’s face, Reno sees, is closed, neutral.

“Dead,” Tseng says, “along with her son.”

“I’ll inform the Tower,” Rousseau says, matching Tseng’s tone and expression.

—

They stand at the entrance to Tseng’s apartment. Rousseau has stowed the Bender in his backpack, and with it slung across his shoulder, he looks like a gentle, slightly mystified scholar—a math professor, maybe.

“Did she trust you?” Reno asks, as Rousseau puts his hand on the door. Rousseau pauses for a second, his eyes hard to read behind his glasses.

“Yeah,” Rousseau says. “I think so.”

“She must have, to let you in.”

“I had specific instructions from her, about you,” Rousseau says.

Reno stares at Rousseau, blinking rapidly.

“She told me,” Rousseau says steadily, “to leave you alone. Leave you out of it. So I looked into you. And I found out who you were to her. And it seemed like the best fit, for it to be you who killed her.”

“Amber,” Reno says, and stops, unable to speak.

“She tried,” Rousseau says. “She liked you.”

Rousseau looks back at Reno, then down at his hand, still on the door.

“Sorry about that,” he says quietly.

Chapter Text

What remains?

An obsession (the line of his back)
An obligation (waiting for information in rainy Midgar)

“Reno,” Tseng says.

They’re sitting across from each other at Tseng’s kitchen table, an empty coffee pot between them. Reno hasn’t said anything since Rousseau left and they liberated Ables, almost an hour previous. There’s no sound but the faint patter of water from a drainpipe falling on Tseng’s skylight. Reno, who hasn’t stopped shivering since Rousseau deactivated the Bender, has zipped his jacket up to his chin. He’s huddled in the corner seat, facing Tseng, looking lost.

“Reno,” Tseng says again, his voice soft. Reno glances up at him. His eyes are red.

“You okay?”

Reno’s hands are closed tight around his coffee cup. He shakes his head; then he sighs.

“I—yeah, I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

“Amber,” Tseng says, and halts.

“Yeah,” Reno says. “I don’t know what to do with it either.”

“I’m glad,” Tseng says very quietly. “I know what she did. But I’m glad she trained you, cared about you. I’m glad she saved your life.”

Reno scrubs at his eyes with his wrist.

“I’m glad I’m here,” he says. “I’m glad I’m here, where I belong. With you.”

—

In the end, nobody goes to work. Rousseau, Tseng discovers when he checks in with his team, has put in for a brief, paid, leave of absence. Rude has taken a personal day. And Scarlet is out of the office, no explanation given.

“Thanks for calling us in sick,” Reno says. “I need to sleep.”

“We both do,” Tseng says.

They’re in Tseng’s back room. Reno has pulled open his duffel and is scowling at his jeans. “Angels, I stink,” he mumbles. “My socks could stand up and walk away by themselves. I need to change clothes.”

“You can do better than that,” Tseng says. “Down the hall, to your left.”

“Serious?” Reno, exhausted, can’t disguise his pleasure.

“Don’t expect anything lavish,” Tseng says.

—

Tseng, sitting silently, listening to the distant sounds of Reno using his bath, is forced to laugh at himself.

He wonders if there are any lengths to which he will not go, if there’s any action he will not take, in the course of following his lonely and exigent desire.

Focused on his breathing, swaying a little with fatigue, he struggles to regain control. Attention turned within, he drops away from words and rules, down into a private ocean of feeling, searching for the bottom.

There isn’t any.

—

When Reno comes in, barefoot and wrapped in a towel, he sees that Tseng hasn’t moved from the back room. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Reno’s duffel, hands resting on his knees, his eyes almost closed. Reno takes it in, Tseng in his dirty white shirt with its ruined collar, long hair carelessly coiled and spilling over his shoulder, the purple welt from the narrow cord that nearly killed him starkly visible against the skin of his neck.

“Tired, huh?” he says.

Tseng’s eyes open slowly. The corner of his mouth turns up.

“You’re steaming,” he says.

“And shedding water all over your floor. Sorry about that,” Reno says, embarrassed, turning away slightly, pulling his towel free to dry himself off.

Tseng drops his eyes from his subordinate and gets to his feet, moving to stand beside the window. It’s clouded with condensation. He rubs it away and looks out on his neighborhood. The mid-morning light is hazy and cold, the eaves of the houses around him still dripping from last night’s rain.

He hears Reno rummaging in his duffel, hears him zip up his pants.

Then Tseng hears a soft exclamation, and turns back to see Reno pulling a long string of pearls out of his duffel. “I forgot about this. My insurance policy…Nice, eh?”

After a long moment, Tseng hears himself say, “Put it on.”

“Put it—“ Reno, kneeling before his duffel, shows the shock in his body.

Then he shrugs, stands, flips the necklace over his head. It hangs to his navel. His jeans, deep indigo and a little too large for him at the waist, ride low on his hips.

“Unwieldy,” Reno says. “Can’t see how the society dames put up with this.” He grins suddenly, swings it around so it’s hanging the wrong way down his back, and turns away to pick up a clean shirt. He’s twisted the long tail of his wet hair into a knot at the nape of his neck. The necklace’s spherical clasp, set with tiny grey pavé diamonds, is resting in the concavity at the base of his spine.

Tseng crosses his room, reaches out, and lifts the pearls away from Reno’s back. They’re uncultured antiques, he sees in surprise, each pearl slightly different, but an astonishingly close match in size and color—a little creamy, with a sheen of gold. “They’re natural,” he says. “This is worth more than my apartment.”

Reno, still holding the shirt, doesn’t turn around. “I know,” he says. “Even Frankie gets the good stuff, sometimes.”

Tseng lets the pearls run through his hand and fall back against Reno’s skin.

“You want them?” Reno asks suddenly.

“You’d give them to me?”

“You almost died to save my life,” Reno says. “What have I got you want? Anything. Name it.”

“Anything.”

Reno’s breathing, Tseng notices, has changed.

“Keep these,” he says. “Put them on sometimes.”

“Sure thing,” Reno says, eyes wide, still facing the wall.

—

There are a few minor details of paperwork. Scarlet, true to her word, has shuttered her investigation; Bai, dead, has been implicated. What remains now is only to account for the decommissioned surveillance equipment at the White Iris. This is done in fine print on Form Eleven Beta, something Tseng is confident the Board of Directors will never read, never even see.

Then there’s a funeral, which Rude attends on behalf of the Turks. Scarlet’s there, wearing black.

The President doesn’t come.

—

Tseng, waiting at the robata bar down on Haste, is drinking cold sake. He is in his wool overcoat, seated by himself at the long counter that faces the open air and the street. He’s on the phone.

“What floor is she on?…all right…No. She needs round-the-clock care. I’ll speak to Elmyra; she might be able to recommend…No. She is very fragile. Malnourished, and probably dehydrated, it’s not just mako poisoning. No,” Tseng says, exasperated, “no. Do not cut corners on this.”

The server, discerning the tone of Tseng’s voice, gives him a wide berth as he passes.

“I know the prognosis,” Tseng says, “and I know the protocol. We’re ignoring the protocol, Sal. Don’t worry about the cost. Use the account number I gave you. It’s fine. It’s all right.”

Tseng finishes his call, studies his half-finished sake, turns back to his phone.

“Anything new?” he asks.

“Nothing stirring,” Reno answers.

Reno’s on the other side of town, staking out one of the City fathers, a man who owes President Shinra a great deal of money.

“Edzo is wily,” Tseng says. “He’s shaken every tail we’ve tried to put on him so far, so don’t keep too wide a distance. He has a bad temper, though, so don’t get too close, either.”

“Don’t worry. I’m room temperature,” Reno says. “He won’t notice me.”

“Check in with Plato on the hour, and alert me if anything changes.”

“Always,” Reno says.

“Where are you, now?” Tseng asks softly.

“Kaneda’s Diner,” Reno says, “window seat, watching fancy opera people get rained on.”

Tseng lifts his cup of sake, holds it against his lips, listening to Reno’s voice.

“Kaneda’s. Is it any good?”

“About average,” Reno says. “Fine for me. I wouldn’t bring you here.”

“Four stars forever, for me?” Tseng asks, dryly.

“No—it’s not that,” Reno says. “It’s just—you cook better than this. I’d be ashamed.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tseng says. “Recommend something for me, I’ll try it sometime.”

“Sure thing.” There’s a little burr in Reno’s voice, like a question he doesn’t ask.

“Stay safe,” Tseng tells Reno, and puts his phone away.

He waves the server over, who refills his cup.

He drinks, watching the cars pass, their tires kicking up water off the shiny street. He watches their lights, like tracers in the rainy darkness.

Tseng and his cold sake and the air, and the night.