“Well,” Nox said. “They stop talking, which is almost as good.” He sobered then, just a fraction. “There are still pockets of his followers,” he sighed. “Old loyalties. Old fear. It’s not gone.”
“I know,” I replied.
Ashcroft was dead, but what he’d built wasn’t. Not entirely. Systems didn’t crumble because one man bled out on a polished floor. There were still people who thought like he did, or who had found safety in his lies and didn’t want to let them go.
We’d cut off the head of the snake, but there were always more heads.
But there were more on our side now, too.
“Griff and Elias are downstairs,” Nox said. “They’re arguing about where to put the new weapons lockup so it doesn’t spook visitors.”
“Griff thinks everything spooks visitors,” Bishop said. “He’s not wrong.”
“And Eamon keeps threatening to move it into the clinic if they don’t decide,” Nox added. “So maybe go… referee.”
“That sounds like my cue,” I said.
“Queen duty,” Nox murmured.
I flicked the coin out of his hand as I passed. “Careful,” I said. “If you call me that too often, I might start making royal decrees.”
He smiled brightly. “Tempting.”
The Accord’s ground floor had turned into something halfway between a guard post and a community hall. There was a desk near the door where someone always sat with a ledger and a pot of tea. A bulletin board on the wall held notices: job postings, missing relatives, requests for mediation.
Near the back, Griff and Elias were standing in front of a storage room with the door open, arguing in low voices.
“We can’t put it here,” Griff was saying. “It’s right next to themain hall. Someone trips over a crate and we’re going to have a diplomatic incident.”
“And if we put it in the basement,” Elias replied, “we’ll be hauling rifles up and down stairs every time someone looks at us funny. That’s not efficient.”
I cleared my throat.
They both turned.
“Before you ask,” I said, “no, we cannot store the weapons in Eamon’s clinic.”
“See?” Elias said to Griff. “She agrees with me.”
“I didn’t say I agreed with you,” I countered. “I just preemptively vetoed the worst option.”
Griff huffed. “Fine. We’ll put them where Bishop suggested. Inside, but behind another door. Locked. Out of sight unless we need them.”
“See?” I said “Compromise. Look at us, being reasonable.”
“It’s terrifying,” Elias scoffed.
Griff’s gaze softened as he took me in. “You look tired,” he said.
“You always say that,” I replied.
“You always are,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong.
It was a different kind of tired now, though. We weren’t running anymore but building something new. I spent far fewer nights lying awake listening for someone trying to sneak in and kill me. Now I spent more nights lying awake because there were too many meetings to think through.
“Come on,” Elias said. “Let’s head up to the rooftop.”
