Then I sit and think about my father. About the loneliness of knowing what he knew. About the weight of carrying it alone because sharing with someone he trusted meant putting them in danger. About the courage it takes to keep filing memos and writing letters and building a case, page by boring page, when the system you’re fighting is ready to destroy people exactly like you.
33
VI
I hearMara laugh before I see her.
It stops me mid-step. Not because Mara laughing is unusual. Hell, she used to laugh all the time, big and loud and with her whole body, making strangers in coffee shops turn around and smile. But that was before. That was the Mara from the apartment we shared and the Sunday mornings and the version of our lives that existed before Rothwell collapsed.
Before I walked into the Rot and she followed.
I haven’t heard her real laugh since before we reconnected at the safe house. The sounds she’s made since arriving at the Rot have been careful and controlled. She’s smart that way, limiting herself to the laugh of a woman who’s aware she’s a guest in a dangerous place and doesn’t want to draw attention.
This isn’t that.
This is her real laugh. Full and unguarded, the one that starts in her stomach and takes over her whole face.
She and Rogue are in the neutral zone on the edge of the dry fountain, with Rogue’s legs stretched out, ankles crossed, doingsomething with a piece of wire. Mara is watching him the way you sit with someone you’ve decided is safe. Rogue is talking, low and easy, with his half grin and lazy gestures, and whatever he’s saying is making Mara laugh the way she used to in the before times.
I watch them from the second-floor railing. Sting’s railing, I realize, and the thought comes with a flicker of amusement, maybe, or recognition. I’m standing where he stands, watching people from above, trying to read a situation from a distance.
There’s nothing romantic happening down there. I can see that clearly enough. Rogue’s posture is warm, but it’s the same warmth he’d give anyone he’s decided to include, like the new Runt on a work crew, or a trader he wants to put at ease. It’s how he operates. He reads the room, identifies who matters, and makes them feel welcome. It’s a skill and it’s genuine.
With Mara, it’s genuine, too. The grin is there, but it’s not aimed at anyone in particular. He’s not charming her. He’s just sitting, talking, and making her feel comfortable. He’s offering something nobody else has thought to give her, some normality.
Mara says something, and Rogue tips his own head back and laughs, real and unguarded. They’re just two people at ease with each other in a place where ease is hard to come by.
She’s fitting in here, in the Rot, making friends, laughing like she belongs. Only she was never supposed to belong here. She was supposed to be outside of this.
She’s last piece of my before life. The only person who knew me as just Vi. Not the mayor’s daughter, not the Runt, not the woman who belongs to three men in a dead mall. She was my last connection to anything outside the Rot.
Watching her here… I feel it slipping.
And if Mara fits here, then here is real. Not a detour, not a phase, and not the thing I’m just enduring until I find the truth about Dad. This is my life and these are my people. And Marasitting comfortably beside one of them means she’s starting to understand why I stayed. That in some ways, for some of us, inside the Rot is better than outside.
I should want that for her. And I should be relieved that my best friend is seeing the guys as people instead of as my complicated situation. But another part, a smaller, less generous part, is panicking, because as long as Mara didn’t understand, as long as she looked at the Rot with outside eyes, I could pretend I still had one foot in the world we came from. Mara settling in here, getting closer to making this her permanent home like I did, means that door is closing.
Like something is about to die.
I think about the club and the skeleton masks in the dim light. Sting beneath me, Armen’s and Rogue’s hands and mouths, and the mirror going clear and the faces on the other side, watching. I nodded at them and they nodded back. And I remember wondering, in the seconds before I looked away, whether any of those faces belonged to people from before. People from Rothwell who knew my dad, who’d voted in his elections, who’d maybe stood in line at the same grocery store or sat in the same bleachers at the same high school football games.
People who watched Mayor Renner’s daughter come apart in the arms of three masked men and thought:Ah. So she’s one of us now.
The thought should bother me. Maybe it does, a little, in a distant corner that still cares about things like reputation. But mostly it doesn’t, because the woman in that room wasn’t the mayor’s daughter. She was someone who chose. And if the before-times people saw her, then they saw a version of Vi that’s more honest than any version they knew before.
Down in the neutral zone, Mara stands, stretches, and says something to Rogue that makes him grin. She walks toward the residential corridor and I hustle to meet her halfway.
“Hey,” she says, slinging her arm around my shoulder. Easy. Normal.
“Hey.”
We walk together. I want to say something. I can feel the words forming, not about Rogue specifically, just… something about what I saw. Mara being comfortable, laughing, and looking like she belongs in a place I’m still not sure I belong in myself.
She glances at me and reads my hesitation the way she’s always read me, instantly and completely, because Mara has known me since before I knew myself.
“They’re not what I expected,” she says.
“Yeah? What did you expect?”
