If Render was half as calculating as Mal had once believed him to be, he would have had the good sense to let her stew in the destroyed studio for at least day, if not longer. If it was her torturing some poor soul in his place, she wouldn't even bother replacing any of the surveillance devices, or fixing the damage: even impersonal observation could become comforting in the right circumstances, and making someone sit in isolated mess was a time-honoured strategy in breaking wills.
Instead, he had showed up two hours after Kaia had hugged her goodbye, armed with a clean-up crew and a tight-lipped invitation to dinner. She had been just quick enough to hide the one negative she had managed to pull from her hidden canister, the rest of the film now destroyed: the only evidence of Goose and Clover’s first meeting was now tucked under her heel, the plastic case digging into the arch of her foot and making itself impossible to ignore. Every time her attention wandered, it was to the sepia memory, the two of them wreathed in a fuzzy yellow glow and staring at each other incredulously — in the image preserved on the negative, Goose's face was safely obscured by water damage, but Clover’s was untouched, and there was no hiding that Mal was her mother.
“You should try the kale, Mal — leafy greens are good for the baby.”
She ignored him, preoccupied with how funny the meat smelled and how sorely she missed sausages, followed distantly by every other concern she had for the immediate future. His team was doubtlessly repairing all the damage she had done to the studio: she would be dead on her feet by the time she escaped this dinner, so wreaking havoc anew on the repaired fixtures would have to wait. She could probably muster the energy to destroy some of the amenities, though — Kaia had smuggled out a pillow-case of film canisters when they left, and she held no qualms about destroying the rest to send a message, nor would she hesitate to tear up the specialized paper and dump the developing solution down the drain.
Render sighed, lacing his hands together for his chin to rest upon. “Mal, I’d like you to at least try to be civil.”
“Why should I?” Her fork landed on her plate with a sharp screech as she leaned back and crossed her arms, no longer interested in even pretending to eat. “I’m trapped here, where the father of my child was murdered — my only solace is that it was quick. What civility are you owed?”
He shook his head and sighed. “What do you want me to say, Mal?”
She chewed her lip angrily, and picked a pointless question at random: “How could you let this happen, if you know his sister's reputation, the threat she poses to your community?”
He sighed. His glass held only water, despite the wall of wine behind him. “The report detailed it as self-defence — my guards felt threatened, and so they acted to protect themselves. I’m afraid that’s all I know, and I don't obligate my employees to justify choices they make in the moment to maintain their authority.”
“He was a good man." She picked up her butter knife, dragging the pad of her thumb over the serrated edge, dulled to the point of uselessness. "He didn’t deserve to die.”
He hid his scoff poorly. “Remind me — he was how much older than you?”
"How old was Constance?" She didn't really care about the answer, deciding that it couldn't be egregiously low: as much as Midtowners carefully selected for youth and naivety in their Untouchables, they were still operating on a skewed perception of maturity. An Untouchable older than sixteen was considered an adult by necessity, old enough to suffer the full consequences of their decisions, whereas a twenty-year-old Midtowner could stray nowhere without their parents in hot pursuit, and evidently couldn't even be trusted to sit alone for their own portrait.
As always, ruminations of age and maturity bounded uncomfortably through the spaces Kawehno:ke occupied in her mind, where the average Untouchable's metric was just another extreme on the bell-curve: Mal had quickly learned not to offer her opinion on matters of the local teen populace, when her reasonable suggestions of letting the kids breathe and make their own decisions was met with shock and disbelief, as though she had suggested letting a toddler play with a kitchen knife.
"Twenty-five, when she left. And I saw what he stole from Naloss Pharmaceuticals: not exactly the witch’s rampion."
“That haul was going to buy passage aboard the Page.”
“I've been meaning to speak with you about that.” He tilted his water glass in his hands, choosing his words carefully. “This hurts me more than it hurts you, Mal, but— I can't in good conscience allow you to board that ship, not in your condition.”
Her free hand tightened around the tablecloth. “My condition?”
“I— Mal, we can’t guarantee that your baby will survive, the cryogenics are just too unpredictable with fetal cells. Is getting to Proxima really worth the risk of arriving alone?”
“Save it. I know you don’t care about my baby, you just want to keep me here like a pet.” Why anyone thought she was good at planning was a mystery — Tai-Song never would have been caught out like this, would never let a short-term lie bite him in the long-term.
“You know that’s not fair—“
She pushed away from the table and stood up, leaving him to call plaintively after her. She kept away from the elevator and chose a hallway at random to march down, hoping it would lead to his office, perhaps even to a clue of Gwenh’s whereabouts. Halfway there, she and her brain both stopped short, recognizing the large print on the wall to her left, but only by the distinctive crack running through the length of the photo. The contents were otherwise completely unfamiliar: cradled between the shafts of refracted light, a rosy-cheeked toddler with a cap of yellow hair stared mournfully back at her, the bright shade of his blue eyes almost unnatural.
“That's my son, Ben.” Render had caught up to her, and she cursed herself for her distraction. “He was two, when his mother left us to board the Ellison.” There was an edge to his voice as he nodded to the next photo on the wall. A woman roughly Mal's age was sitting primly in an ornate love-seat with an elegantly-carved wooden trim, holding her son in her lap and facing the camera straight on. Her dirty-blonde hair was carefully styled to draw attention away from the purplish veins spiderwebbing over her left cheekbone, and her eyes were the same cobalt-teal as her son’s.
Mal drifted closer, intrigued to finally put a face to the name. Something about her was familiar, just like the energy and style of the work she had left behind, an unknown quality that had something in her chest relaxing. Maybe it was the face: most Untouchables had that kind of face, those haunted, sunken eyes. Maybe she was feeling the echoes of a brief intersection, decades-past: Mal could picture this woman seeking River out when he was pregnant with her, perhaps knowing that his earned passage to Proxima was no longer in the cards, offering to trade a camera that would draw far too much unwanted attention if sold in Midtown. If Mal believed in such things, she would say that maybe she and Constance were known to each other in another life: maybe, in different-but-not-better circumstances, she would have been another node in the network of Mal's childhood, another adult to model herself after, another voice in her ear.
“Sometimes I wonder why she agreed to marry me,” Render was saying, oblivious to her distraction. Mal gave herself a shake and told herself to pay attention. “The minute she got here, she couldn’t stand it — and I know she never wanted me like I wanted her, but was the money really worth all of the pain we put each other through?”
Mal thought the answer was obvious: Constance had been angling for a way to secure her ticket for Proxima, and marrying out of poverty was the fastest way to do it. Like everyone who willingly married into Midtown, she had weighed and accepted the cost of security and wealth: a certain amount of energy and affection, the possibility of having to produce an heir, and the agreement of causing as little fuss as possible. It was an arrangement that had endured since before feudal times, and yet the upper classes were always feeling shortchanged, caught unawares by the performance of love and unity in exchange for material wealth.
She had gotten distracted again, and only tuned back in when Render heaved another despairing sigh. “I’ve learned that that blood doesn’t mean much to Untouchables, not when there’s privilege to be gained. How else would a mother abandon her own child?”
She lifted her shoulders and shook her head, if only to seem engaged. Constance's right hand was tightly wrapped around the armrest of her love-seat, fingers arched and knuckles white. Her other hand was a little gentler on her son, holding him just-so to obscure the slight swell of a second pregnancy. More pieces were fitting together: she had already delivered an heir, had already performed her expected duties to everyone's satisfaction. Mal wondered what conclusions Constance had come to, when it was discovered that the cryogenic freezers could only maintain one in three pregnancies, whether she hesitated and struggled with the possibility of losing the baby, or if she hoped that she would miscarry.
“I’m upsetting you,” Render observed. He laid his hand on her shoulder and guided her further down the hall, where the photos took on a much darker quality. “Let’s talk about your work, not mine.”
Mal swallowed the instinct to balk at the five-by-five-foot print, unsure of how to reconcile it with the photo she remembered taking, more than ten years ago: taken from behind, Yuen-Fa was standing on top of the counter in one of her old locales, reaching up to change the bulb of a weakly flickering light, her hair shorter and her posture hunching inward even as she stretched to reach the ceiling. The bright, flaring lines in the original photo had been carefully erased, leaving the negative space uniformly smooth and black, and Mal bit down on the urge to irritably ask what possessed someone to have done that. The lines of light had lent something of a hopeful metaphor to the image — without their soft glow, Yuen-Fa seemed to be reaching into a void, battling a current that would only consume her.
“Have you thought about names yet?”
“I don’t name my prints.” She peered down the hall: it seemed that nearly all of her early work was here, every photo blown up to extravagant proportions and placed in gilded frames. The formidable collection was like a graveyard of her old life, each photo rife with an energy she hadn’t been able to muster in years — some could have been the work of someone else, if she didn't vividly remember taking each one. It was strange to look at a photo of a lone chair in a dark room, barely visible in the combination of lighting and monochrome development, and have absolutely no memory of what she had been trying to get at with the choices she had made.
He laughed. “I mean your soon-to-be miracle.”
“Oh.” She shifted her feet, suddenly hyper-aware of the slide hidden in her shoe. “Hemlock.”
“For a girl, or a boy?”
“Both.” She found herself gravitating to the portraits, the human subjects. There was Des, before he had gone missing, standing on top of Bayonne’s highest junkyard mountain and reaching for the pale, smoggy sky; the black and white development made it look like a woodcut, just the barest hint of detail to give it texture and depth. Next was Baba, hunched over and stitching an embroidered quilt square for a newborn she no longer remembered the name of, Dad passed out on the couch in the background; the thready light was soft rather than stark, and the room preserved on film was fuzzy and safe. There was the couple she’d known for a few months when she was fourteen, leaning against each other as they stared at a wedding boutique in Park Slope; that building had come down with the force of a Midtown bombardment, and the family living on the top floor had been killed in the collapse.
“Hemlock Yeung,” Render mused. “Or will you be giving him your name?”
"I don't have one." Her dad’s great grandparents through the paternal line had once been Tarbells, but it had been even longer since Baba and Jay's family had carried surnames, and the idea had never been a part of Mal's life. She reached out and touched the print, tracing her fingers over the shop-that-was-no-more, taking care to inject a quiver into her voice. “I want to see Gwenh.”
“Why?” He turned his cool stare on her. “You find trouble wherever you go, collecting felons and miscreants — you need to leave that life behind if you’re going to raise this child well. There's no room for people like Gwenh, going forward.”
"Untouchables, you mean. Have you forgotten that I'm one, too?"
He laughed derisively. "Almost. I'll make a Midtowner out of you, yet."
“You couldn’t pry the Untouchable from me or this baby if you tried, Vulture.” The epithet had no bite when it came from her mouth — how could it, when she knew the value of vultures?
He rolled his eyes. “I’ve never known an Untouchable to be so principled.”
“I don’t know the meaning of the word.” She was getting too involved, too heated, but his even-toned words were too idiotic to go unchecked. “Principles require that you die for them; we have more important things to hang our lives on.”
“How you speak to me now betrays your ideals — I could punish you for your attitude.”
“And if you mean to kill me, I’ll grovel for your forgiveness. My pride is nothing, when it comes down to one or the other.” She turned to him and held his gaze. “You’re right, Mister Render: Untouchables hold nothing sacred but our own lives. We consider that a virtue.”
“And what of the people dying to protect your lands? Is that not noble?”
“Of course a Vulture wants us all to die for our cause — that will neatly tie up all of your loose ends, won’t it?”
He shook his head gravely. “I have nothing to do with that war.”
“Of course you do — how else would you protect the Page from us vagrants, if not by pushing us back from the coasts? How else would you ensure we keep flocking to your doors, willing to work for scraps and empty promises? How else will you steal away our young ones for your own purposes, if you don't ensure that every alternative is unthinkable?”
“Constance could have left any time she wanted — I never stole her.”
“Ah, guilt. I was, of course, talking about Gwenh.” She turned away with a scoff. “If you want to talk about civility, then admit that you owe me this, Mister Render. Don’t forget that you killed my baby’s father, no matter how much you want to replace him.”
He flinched back, and then drew himself up to his full height. She had little fear left for him, despite the lengths he had already proven himself capable of; she had to stop herself from turning her face to gesture at the slow-healing bruise on her cheek, daring him to hit her again. Instead, she faced him head-on with her back straight and her shoulders squared, thinking of every second she had wasted trying to keep him pacified, how she would claw back those wasted moments from him if it killed them both. “Don’t put those intentions in my mouth, young lady. My only concern is for your safety — I will even go as far as to make concessions for your comfort and happiness, but do not accuse me of such— such degeneracy, and expect me to take the abuse without defending myself.”
“All talk,” she countered. He flinched back again, as though her lack of fear was comparable to a raised fist, a weapon in her hand. “Spare me the theatrics and take me to Gwenh, if you’re so willing to consider my happiness — but we both know that you won’t.”
***
The walls had been patched with a slightly different shade of white than the original paint, the flooring and underlay replaced where she’d slashed the originals to ribbons, all the evidence of her rampage tidied up and swept away without fuss. Her chairs had been taken away, as had her knives; the camera had been replaced as well, and she had no doubt that she would find thousands of little listening devices when she next combed through the room. There were probably microphones sewn into the lining of her bedcovers.
As she predicted, her entire body ached from the day's effort, and her grand plans of larger-scale destruction would have to wait: once she was rested, taking the fire extinguisher to the wall in search of a sealed-off access corridor would be a good use of her time. Still, she had energy to burn, and consumable materials to destroy: from her seat atop the kitchen island, it was almost therapeutic to watch the torn-up pieces of photo paper flutter down like facsimiles of snowflakes, landing in a sea of brown ribbon. When finished, she hopped over the impromptu art-piece and beelined for the bathroom, wondering if she should to pretend to vomit to keep up the pretense — she decided not to bother as she fished the pager from its precarious hiding place within the toilet tank, since it soon wouldn't matter.
She turned on the taps to fill the bathtub, and sat down on the narrow edge to read through her backlog. Willow had promised to send a message once the extraction was complete and not a moment later, but as a matter of safety she was not allowed to know when it would happen — that way, it couldn't be tortured out of her. There was nothing yet, and so the waiting game would continue, though hopefully not for much longer. She stared at the dozens of messages waiting in Willow's stead, all those delicate threads tethering her from the weightlessness of isolation: Kaia complaining that Zed was a brat, Dominik begging for forgiveness, Goose asking apropos of nothing if Kaia had a sweetheart back home. Her thumbs hovered over the keys, stuck in an endless cycle of wanting to reach out in response to any number of waiting messages and then convincing herself not to — if Render found the pager, it would be short work to find out where the messages were going. She was already in the gallows: it would be stupid to draw anyone down with her.
Still, she kept almost succumbing to temptation, always coming back to Goose's thread in particular — she desperately wished she could have at least part of them in the room with her. Her hands shook as she re-read their message, looking past the not-so-idle question of Kaia's relationship status and into her own guilt. It was selfish to conceal that Gwenh had survived mostly intact, that she was never dead, that it had never been anyone’s fault, but it was so much kinder than the truth, that instead of being dead and somewhat at peace, Gwenh had been suffering alone for years, had been abandoned by everyone who loved her — and really, what was the point of telling them, right this second? Wouldn't it be better to have Gwenh within reach for the big reveal?
She sat there for close to an hour as the water in the tub slowly turned lukewarm, clutching the pager with aching fingers, caught between two awful choices with no third option. Finally, she chose her selfish cowardice and left the message unanswered, tucking the pager back into its hiding place before stripping out of her clothes.