Ten Minutes

I went to see my brother, because there is only so much cosmology a person can carry before she needs to stand in a room where the worst thing happening is a dog.

The second hidden house was over a chandler's, and it smelled of tallow instead of bread, which Tatch informed me solemnly was a downgrade, and the one-eared dog had come with them, which Tatch informed me was the only thing that mattered, and the three other rescued children had taught my brother a card game that appeared to have no rules except that the youngest always won and everyone else had to make a noise like a goose when they lost. I watched Tatch make a noise like a goose. I had paid for the memory of his laugh, sold it to frame a guilty man, and I could not hear it, but I could watch him make a noise like a goose, and it turns out that is very nearly as good, and the Tally cannot take what you make new.

Kestrel was on the roof, because Kestrel was always on a roof, it was where he did his thinking and his worrying and his being unbearable, and I climbed up to him with the city spread out grey and glittering below and the seam thin and wrong above, and I did not tell him about the backward move, or the older Vesper, or the balance carried forward, or that I had become, in one night, the most hunted working in Caul. I had decided not to put him on my ledger. I told myself that was still the reason.

"You look," Kestrel said, handing me half of whatever he was eating without being asked, the way he did, the way he had done in a dark Sink eleven years and a forgotten lifetime ago, "like a woman who has had a very educational night and would like to talk about literally anything else."

"The dog has fleas," I said. "I can see them. They each owe the dog a small debt of blood and none of them intend to pay."

"See, this is why I keep you around." He grinned. "Most people, you ask them how they are, they say fine. You tell me the dog's parasites are in arrears." He nudged my shoulder with his, the careful almost-touch, except this time it was a touch, brief, warm, gone. "Tatch made a friend. The little one, Pip. They've decided they're brothers now. He told her you were coming back with custard and she's been guarding the window for three days in case you arrived and tried to give it to the wrong child."

"I forgot the custard," I said, and was horrified to hear my voice do something it had not done since the salt, which was wobble.

"I know you did." Kestrel was watching me with the unloaded smile, the dangerous one, the kind one. "You've forgotten the custard four times now. It's becoming the great running tragedy of your life. A cult, a Comptroller, and whatever else you're carrying that I'm not allowed to see, and the thing that's going to break you is a pudding you keep failing to acquire for a nine-year-old." He bumped my shoulder again. "So I bought one. It's in the chandler's cold-store. When you go down, you give it to Tatch, and he gives half to Pip, because that's the kind of boy you raised, and you watch them eat it, and for ten minutes the world isn't ending. That's the whole trick, Vesper. That's the only trick I know. You can't fix the ending. Nobody can fix the ending. You can buy ten minutes where it isn't happening, and you can spend those ten minutes with the people you'd burn the world for, and you can do it again tomorrow." He looked back out over the grey. "I learned it from a girl who gave me half her bread when I'd decided to die. She bought me ten minutes. I'm still spending them. Eleven years later, I'm still inside the ten minutes she bought."

I could not breathe for a moment. He did not know. He still did not know it was me, the girl, the bread, the balance. He was sitting on a roof telling the girl who gave him the bread about the girl who gave him the bread, and the entry between us glowed one life owed, and I had a whole truth in my mouth that would have undone him, and I swallowed it, because some debts you do not call in on a roof in the grey, with custard in the cold-store and the world ten minutes from not ending.

"Kestrel," I said.

"Mm."

"If I told you that nothing you could possibly do is more dangerous than being near me, that I am hunted by a cult and a Comptroller and a dead-eyed woman who shares my face, that everyone I let onto my ledger ends up a lever someone uses to break me, and that the kindest thing I could do for you is walk down these stairs and never come back." I made myself look at him. "What would you say."

Kestrel Roan considered this with great seriousness, the way he considered everything that mattered, behind the loaded smile.

"I'd say you've clearly never had the custard," he said. "Because if you had, you'd know it's worth it." And then, before I could decide whether to laugh or weep or both, he went still, the smuggler waking, his eyes going to the street below, and the warmth dropped off him like a coat, and he said, very quietly, in a different voice entirely, "Vesper. Don't move. Don't look. There's a woman at the corner of the chandler's, grey coat, watching the window Pip's been guarding. She's been there since before you came up. And she's not a Collector, because a Collector would have knocked." His hand found his knife. "She's got a line scored over her heart. Corner to corner. Like a crack in something."

The Mendicants had found the second hidden house.

And this time they had not come to lay a writ and force my Hand from a distance. This time, with me newly become the one thing that could close their door forever, they had come themselves, to the house where I kept the only lever that had ever worked on me, and they were watching a window a six-year-old had been guarding for three days, waiting to be given a pudding by the wrong person.