Sanctuary. ?ilina, Slovakia.

  Hannah waited up for them. Gareth had shaken his head at her, ground his jaw, and gone out for the night. Alyosha had given her a grateful look as Alex called him upstairs for something. Alex had to have known what she was doing but apparently it wasn’t worth acknowledging.

  What a damn mess.

  She was dozing when they came in a couple hours before dawn. Their steps sounded heavy in the hallway and she was more than a little bit dizzy from exhaustion when she got up to meet them. They looked like hell. Of course.

  “We’re fine,” they called in chorus, but Misha was pale and had his arm hooked around Reeve’s neck. He wasn’t limping so she dreaded to see what the hell that was about. Reeve had an egg by his temple that made his hair sit funny and he kept his left hand crooked and up by his chest, guarding it.

  When Gareth got upset, he’d go out and get in a bar fight or fuck women from his rotating roster of sex workers. Reeve had to go out and tangle with goddamn monsters. She bit her lip, wondering why they couldn’t just get drunk like she did.

  Hannah sighed, rubbing the sleep from one eye. “Sit down and let me see.” They did, slowly, while she grabbed her med bag from under the coffee table and put on gloves. On principle she wanted to check Reeve first, but with the amount of blood on Misha, she started with him. The wound—about an inch below the very corner of his left collarbone—wasn’t huge, but it was still bleeding. It looked ragged, and in a spot that was absolutely going to reopen anytime he moved that arm.

  “I have to stitch this,” she told him quietly.

  “Just get Gareth,” he replied sourly.

  “He’s out.”

  “So stitch,” he sighed.

  She looked at Reeve, who put up his good hand. “I can wait.”

  Frowning at the lump on his head, Hannah grabbed her flashlight and checked his pupils. They seemed fine. “Have you puked?”

  “No.”

  “I swear to god, if you’re lying—”

  “He hasn’t,” Misha interrupted with a slight grin. “If he had, I would tell everyone.”

  She sighed again and started setting out her tools. “What the hell happened?”

  “This idiot,” Misha nodded to Reeve, “burned the head first.”

  “You’re not going to want to talk,” Hannah said flatly just before pouring disinfectant on the bite and cleaning it out with saline.

  Misha clamped his mouth shut and grunted.

  Reeve cleared his throat. “The body felt like it weighed five-hundred pounds and we had to haul it across the house. Barely got it out the back door to burn it.” He prodded at his temples and asked, “Anything I can do?”

  “Grab that sterile saline and if he starts bleeding again I’ll need you to rinse it out so I can see. And just keep the grumpy Russian still.”

  Misha’s lip curled. “Ukrainian,” he snapped.

  Hannah prepped her suture needle. “Well, you speak Russian.”

  The sullen disgust rose up off of Misha like heat waves. “Alyosha speaks English. Is he British now? And besides, he also speaks Russian and I don’t need you understanding everything I say to him about your dumb ass.”

  “It’s probably," Reeve added, voice strained, "the language more people in this region share compared to Ukrainian.” She was not looking forward to dealing with his hand.

  She glared at Reeve. “Don’t you start with me too, numb-nuts. Don’t move.”

  Hannah set to work. To his credit, Misha held still. She glanced up at Reeve. “So what’s going on with you and Alex?”

  Reeve balked, sitting back in his chair and looking from her to Misha and back. “Can this wait until we’re alone?”

  “Yes, please,” Misha grumbled, and at the same time, Hannah said, “No. I really don’t give a shit. And I need to treat that hand, so you can’t walk away from me this time.”

  If he was strung tight when they walked in, she’d just wound him up close to snapping. She watched him from the corner of her eye as she worked and was glad to see he didn’t leave.

  But he didn’t talk either. She could feel Misha shifting awkwardly under her hands, and as satisfying as it was to see him speechless for once, she swatted at him to keep still. He muttered something unintelligible in Russian, but she had already moved on.

  “So,” Hannah pushed. She knew it was possible she was being a little reckless from lack of sleep. “You and Alex finally fucked and now you’re all awkward—”

  “Finally?” Reeve was genuinely incredulous, making her squint.

  She looked at him deadpan and was silent for a long moment in response before continuing. “Now you’re all awkward because both of you are pissed and resentful?” He didn’t respond. She finished her last stitch and looked up. “Does that sound about right?”

  Reeve stood up, making her nervous she’d gone too far, but he didn’t get any farther than the couch. He grabbed one of the thin blankets and brought it to the table and sat back down. “You’re really walking up to the line,” he told her, sounding calmer than she knew he felt. He set the blanket on the table. “You need a sling, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” Misha objected. His voice had lost a lot of its normal venom and sounded tired, softer even. It had taken a lot out of him.

  “Just until you can mimic Gareth,” she told him sternly, taping a bandage to his shoulder and tying the blanket around his neck to keep his arm stable.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “Maybe.”

  “Go lay down.”

  Misha made it to the couch and curled up, prying his boots off with his feet to clunk on the floor.

  Hannah turned to Reeve and replaced her gloves. “Let me see your hand.”

  He pulled his left hand out from under the table and held it out. Hannah tensed her brow. Most of his palm was shiny and a ruddy shade of pink with splotches of yellow on his calluses. The top of his hand by his thumb looked fine but got worse as you moved across, going red around the middle of his hand and above his last two fingers was a cluster of white blisters, already ballooning up with fluid.

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  “This isn’t gonna feel great,” she muttered.

  “Already doesn’t.”

  She dug in her bag for burn ointment.

  “I’d love to talk to him,” Reeve offered. “He wouldn't talk to me so I didn’t force it and now he’s—”

  “I don’t need to know your sides. Anytime it’s like this with two people, you’re both wrong.” She could see him grinding his teeth at that, but she wasn’t having it. “I already put in a thousand percent more than my share of emotional labor keeping you and Gareth from killing each other those first few years. I’m not going to be a proxy in this. You’re going to have to figure out how to communicate with each other. Slow breaths.”

  She began spreading the ointment lightly over his hand and he hissed, jerking his hand back involuntarily. She probably could have given him more warning.

  Reeve took hold of his wrist with his good hand, gripping it tightly, and held it out to her. Gently, she covered his hand in the ointment in silence while he held his breath, sweating. After she’d loosely wrapped it, she took her glove off and dropped her head in her hand. She could have fallen asleep right there.

  “If you didn’t want to hear me talk, why force this conversation?” he asked.

  “The million dollar question.” Misha’s voice rose, muffled, from where he’d buried it in the couch cushions. Hannah ignored him.

  “We need to keep each other informed on what the hell is happening. If I don’t know what bullshit is going on, I can’t keep either of you safe. So get used to telling me.”

  Reeve looked wrung out. “We both need sleep.”

  It wasn’t an agreement but it wasn’t a defense, either. She nodded, closing up her bag. “If you pop those blisters I’ll shave your head.”

  He smiled, but it didn’t match the rest of him.

  ---

  Boryspil International Airport. Kyiv, Ukraine.

  Grace clutched her small but thick English-to-Ukrainian dictionary in one hand and checked for notifications on her phone with the other as she walked out of customs. It didn’t take a monumental effort to fake nerves at the moment. The responsibility and weight of the assignment sat heavy in her stomach, along with the cold fear that she might fail Mackenzie.

  She’d have given anything for a little more direction, but the paradox of omniscience was that in a room full of all the knowledge of the universe, there was very little information to be had. The sound of chatter and rurr of luggage wheels competed to drown out the clack of her short heels as she crossed the floors of the Boryspil airport, buffed to a high polish, but it was still in there and it made her think back to Mackenzie leading her to her private office. Grace thought the sound might always be locked in that moment from then on. Knowing how classified what Mackenzie was going to tell her was had made Grace that much more cognizant of eyes on the two of them. Their heels had sounded like gunfire going off in the empty hall as they walked. She knew realistically that they walked together all the time. She’d visited Mackenzie and Rafe at their quarters more times than she could count, but that didn’t register inside her chest.

  She chatted with the taxi driver as best she could in her faked halting Ukrainian mixed with apologetic English, eyes glued to her phone. She told him all about her master’s program in medieval studies and how excited she was to see the architecture in Kyiv and the Pirogovo Village Museum. (She made sure to mispronounce Pirogovo.)

  “I want you in Ukraine,” Mackenzie had told her once they’d shut themselves inside her office, surrounded by a chaos of paper in a sorting system she never understood. “I think.”

  Grace waited for more but nothing came. The silence became more dreadful the longer she stood in it, looking into Mackenzie’s unflinching eyes that said, I am asking you the impossible. Please make it only improbable. She swallowed and reminded herself who she was.

  “Do you think you could narrow that down to five-hundred square miles or so, ma’am? My office is going to start to miss me if this takes more than a few days.”

  Mackenzie quirked her mouth at her and pulled a sketchbook the size of a notebook out of a locked drawer. “No.” She handed it to her.

  Grace stared at the cover. It had been a light cream once, but was smudged in a hundred places with ink and graphite until it had taken on a dim grey tone. She’d been in Mackenzie’s office more times than she could count, but she’d never been given any of Mackenzie’s notes. Whenever Mackenzie was in her Knowing, Grace was straight out—managing the office, picking up the slack Louis needed her to while he tried to do Mackenzie’s job. They would receive the intel and act on insights that were gleaned from her information. She knew Louis would go check on her and get glimpses of what she was working on, but he avoided it unless she would pointedly share it with him. No one had clearance but Mackenzie.

  When Mackenzie didn’t continue, she opened the sketchbook. A sprawling pattern took up the entire page. It was a grid of large uniform diamonds, the lines warped and curved in places like theoretical illustrations of wormholes. The diamonds in the grid were shaded in to give each a similar gradient, enough that despite being careful to only touch the edges, she should feel the graphite on the paper. The next page was the same but closer, showing more texture and shading. The lines weren’t lines anymore but crevices. Seams. The next page was more of the same with the grid at a slightly different angle, this one showing a crack on one square.

  “What is this?” she asked, breathless.

  “I don’t know.”

  She turned more pages. More curved squares at different angles. More cracks, more blemishes. Two distinctive cracks were duplicated from page to page, which was baffling. A page of smaller diamonds with more extreme curves. It continued. She began turning the pages faster, an ache in her stomach growing keener the longer it went on. More textures, more cracks. One page was a study of a fly sitting on one of the tiles showing angle after angle of its legs, eyes, and wings that devolved into crowded chemical diagrams. Grace lingered there. The lines here were deep and dark, indenting the page, as though she were carving the symbols into stone and not paper.

  “Holding the thread,” Mackenzie told her, “is like holding lightning. It takes up your entire body. It fills your lungs. And this is what comes out. There’s an infinite number of branches that offer a sort of reprieve from the engulfing feeling and the allure of that relief is so great sometimes I can’t help but slide over and sink into offshoots. Like this fly. It isn't actually any better than before, but when you’re on fire, you’re willing to drown.”

  Grace swallowed hard against the lump in her throat that she couldn’t have explained. The next page was all more chemical diagrams, though the force of the drawing was easing up again. The next was nearly blank and she stared at it until she realized the lines at the edges and bulbous cluster at one corner was an atomic structure and she was looking at a drawing of the space between electrons. With trepidation, she kept going.

  The diamonds were back. The same gradients, irregular dents.

  “And sometimes I’m able to slide back.”

  Page after page, Grace began to notice the addition of an asymmetrical irregular W at the sides or tops of some pages, and a slanted cursive G in the bottom corner. Page after page the G got darker and deeper.

  “What are the letters?” she asked.

  Mackenzie turned her head slightly. “I don’t know what that is,” She pointed to the W, then over to the repeated cracks and the G, “but those are shorthand.”

  Grace hadn’t learned shorthand—it wasn’t a verbal language and it was always jarring that her knack couldn’t comprehend it. There had been no need to learn it, as Mackenzie only used it for her Knowing. “What does it say?”

  She gestured toward the two curved lines she’d thought had been cracks. “That says 'ground' and "water'.”

  Grace frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Whenever Mackenzie took on that sincere, open tone, it gave Grace a shiver and she went back to turning pages. “What about this one?” She could see the G through the back of the pages. It was a gouging gesture now ripping through the paper.

  “‘Terrified.’”

  Grace’s hand went still. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Anything you can to find out what this means.”

  “Why Ukraine?”

  She smiled mildly and spread her hands. “A feeling.”

  Grace raised one eyebrow. “Beyond terror?” She flipped to the next page and the warped diamonds were gone. There was a portrait of what appeared to be Fredericka, with the imprint of the shorthand for ‘terrified’ at the corner, a ghostly embossed shape. Mackenzie’s hand closed the sketchbook nearly on Grace’s fingers.

  “Was that—” Grace thought better of the question. She opened her hands and let Mackenzie take the sketchbook. “I’ll input an assignment that I’m following up on intel from the pharma conference. Since I’m the one that got the intel, that’s easy enough. There’s nothing else you can give me? What you’re looking for?”

  Mackenzie sighed. “There is nothing else in this room that relates to this. Believe me, I’ve looked. And whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s not small.”

  Grace looked back at the book. Where could she even start?

  Mackenzie walked away to replace the sketchbook in the locked drawer and came back with a stack of paper. “I made you copies.” She let it sink in. “I’ve never let these papers leave this room before, other than to personally show Mercury. I trust you with this.”

  She took the photocopies and folded them as if already hiding them from the world. “Thank you. I’ll do everything I can.”

  “I know.”

  ***