I watched from the second-floor railing. Didn’t approach. Didn’t signal. Just stood there with my hands on the rail and let the picture assemble itself.
It didn’t take long to figure out that Armen is helping Vi.
Not with the deep retrieval, the paperwork she’s obsessed with getting from No Man’s Land, the contested territory. Armen’s smarter than that, and more careful. What he’s doing is more discreet. He’s connecting Vi to people who knew her father. He’s pulling records from the Rot’s own archives like land contracts, correspondence, and whatever fragments of Rothwell’s pre-collapse bureaucracy survived the transition and somehow ended up being stored here. He’s building a context around the evidence she already has, filling in the blanks.
Small moves. Deniable moves. The sort of thing you could explain away as routine research or general curiosity if anyone asked. Except no one’s asking, because no one noticed, no one except me.
The three of us guys have always operated on transparency. That’s the deal. Not hierarchy. We’re equals, we always have been. We don’t pull rank because there is no rank. But weoperate in the open. We argue, we disagree, we push each other to the wall when we think the other is wrong, and we do all of it face-to-face. That’s what makes the three of us work when every other crew in the Rot runs on intimidation and control.
Armen didn’t go against me. He wentwithoutme.
That’s a different thing. Going against me means he thinks I’m wrong and wants to fight about it. I can work with that. But going without me means he’s already decided the argument isn’t worth having. He considered my opinion, assessed the odds of getting me to change my mind, and concluded it would be faster and easier to just work around me.
He decided I wasn’t going to change my mind, so he didn’t bother trying.
Armen knows me well enough, as well as anyone alive, to recognize that my stance on this isn’t strategic. It’s personal. And the personal is the one territory where Armen has never been able to reach me.
I should confront him. Not to give an order. I can’t order Armen any more than he can order me. But I should say:This is something we should have talked about. You owed me the conversation, even if you thought I’d say no.
I’m standing at the second-floor railing, looking down at the atrium where the dry fountain basin sits filled with sand, watching Rotters cross on their way to work assignments, and I’m trying to build that confrontation in my head. Trying to construct the sentences. Trying to find the version of this conversation that’s honest without being an ultimatum.
I can’t get my thoughts straight, at least not at the moment.
Underneath my frustration is something I recognize with the particular discomfort of a man, meaning me, having to deal with his… feelings.
Fuck all, I hate that word.
I’m relieved. Yup, that’s me. I’m fucking relieved he’s doing something I couldn’t. Do I feel good about it? Hell no. But I am grateful to him.
Armen is doing the thing I wouldn’t. He’s helping Vi chase the truth about her father through channels that are safe, controlled, and unlikely to get her or any of us hurt. He’s managing the situation I refused to. Or, maybe I just couldn’t. Guess I wanted someone else to make the decision for me.
That’s the truth, ugly and precise, sitting right next to my memory of Vi’s body against mine at the club. The way she told me to sit, the way she pulled my mask down and kissed me with a certainty I couldn’t match, and the way she saidharderwhen I fucked her, and the way I can’t stop thinking about that night.
I’ve spent days trying to compartmentalize it and reduce it to its components—a physical encounter, a release of tension, a reset of the dynamic between us.
Not working.
Vi took something in me apart that night that I haven’t been able to put back together, the boundary that kept the personal at a distance I could manage. And I let her. Well, more than let her. I followed.
And I’d do it again.
Now, Armen is helping her chase her father’s ghost, and I’m standing at a railing watching it happen and not stopping it. Stopping it would require me to be the version of myself that existed before that night in the club. The one who said no and meant it. The one whose certainty was stubborn and unmovable.
That version is still here, more or less. But there’s a crack in the foundation and Vi put it there, and Armen is building something in the space where that crack runs.
Below, I watch him cross the atrium. He’s carrying a folder, thin, unremarkable, the kind that holds maybe ten pages. He walks at his usual steady pace, posture relaxed, looking for allthe world like a man carrying routine paperwork to a routine destination. He doesn’t look up.
He doesn’t need to. He knows I’m here. Armen always knows where I am, the same way I always know where he is. We’ve been aware of each other’s position in any given space for years. It’s a partnership built on mutual surveillance disguised as trust. Or maybe trust disguised as mutual surveillance. I’ve never been sure which.
He crosses the atrium and disappears into the residential corridor, toward Vi’s room.
I stay at the railing. I don’t do any of the things the enforcer in me is insisting I should do. Instead, I stand here and feel the relief settle in next to any frustration and the residual heat from a night I can’t put away.
Something’s going to give—and it won’t be me.
29
STING
