Present day. Wednesday. 2:07 AM.
Kael was awake because he was always awake at 2 AM. This was not insomnia in the clinical sense. It was more that his body had developed a specific opinion about the architecture of the night and had decided, without consulting him, that these particular hours were its hours, and that sleep was something that happened on either side of them like parentheses around an argument.
He was reading. A monograph on 13th century Byzantine administrative practice, which was either deeply boring or fascinating depending entirely on who you were, and Kael was the kind of person who found it fascinating, which told you something about him if you were paying attention.
The knock came at 2:07.
Three knocks. Not frantic. Not tentative. Deliberate, evenly spaced, like someone who had made a decision and was committing to it.
He marked his page. He stood. He did not ask who it was through the door because the building's intercom was broken and had been for six weeks and whoever this was had already gotten through the front entrance, which meant they either had a key or the door's lock had failed again, which was also plausible. He looked through the peephole.
A woman. Late twenties. Dark coat that was dark in a way that might have been the peephole's distortion or might have been blood. One hand pressed flat against the doorframe. The other he couldn't see.
He opened the door.
Later, he would identify this as the precise moment his life changed. Not because of anything dramatic. Because of what he noticed first. Not the knife wound along her left side, which was real and deep and bleeding with the steady patient urgency of something that had been bleeding for a while. Not the way she was holding herself with the specific economy of a person in significant pain who has decided that pain is not currently relevant. What he noticed first was her eyes.
They were watching him with an expression he had never seen directed at a stranger. It was the expression of someone who had been expecting him. Not hoping. Not guessing. Expecting. Like his face was a confirmation of something she had already known.
"You're him," she said.
"I'm someone," Kael said. "Are you bleeding on my threshold?"
"Yes." A pause, and something in her jaw that might have been her recalibrating. "I apologize. I didn't have many other options and I needed somewhere that would hold." She glanced back down the corridor. The corridor was empty. She looked at it the way you look at a place where something was recently present and might return.
"Hold against what?"
"Can I come in first."
It was not a question. Or rather it was shaped like a question and functioned as a statement and Kael, who had spent three years in a small apartment talking to almost no one, felt something unlock in his chest that he would not have been able to name precisely, something adjacent to recognition, and stepped back from the door.
She came in. She assessed the apartment in four seconds with a sweep of her gaze that was too thorough and too fast to be ordinary, the kind of assessment that catalogued exits and potential cover and lines of sight. She registered the books. She registered the desk. She did not register any of it as interesting. She registered it as safe geometry. There was a difference.
"Sit down," Kael said. "Let me look at that."
"It's not as bad as it looks."
"It looks like it needs pressure and possibly stitches. Sit down."
She sat on his one good chair with the careful deliberateness of someone lowering themselves onto something that might not hold. He got his first aid kit, which was unusually comprehensive for a man with no stated reason to own one, and crouched beside her and pressed clean gauze against the wound, and she did not make a sound.
"My name is Sable," she said.
"Kael."
"I know." And then, at his expression, "Your mother's name was Yara Dravhen. She died three years ago. Before she died, she left a contingency. If she ran out of time. If something found her before she could explain it to you herself." A breath, controlled. "I'm the contingency."
The gauze was soaking through. He applied more pressure and thought about his mother's hands holding his in those last four hours and thought about what she had told him and thought about the specific weight of having waited three years for something and having it arrive bloody and unannounced at two in the morning.
"What found her," he said.
Sable's expression did not change. It was already careful, already controlled, and it stayed that way. But something in her eyes shifted, a recognition of the question's sharpness, its direction.
"That," she said, "is the right question. Most people ask what I am first, or what the world is, or whether they're dreaming."
"I'm not dreaming," Kael said. "I haven't been able to dream properly in six months." He paused. "The world got thinner."
She looked at him then with something that might have been relief. "Yes," she said quietly. "It did. For you specifically."
Outside, somewhere below them, something in the street made a sound that was not a car and not an animal and not anything Kael had a category for. He became aware, with a cold and specific precision, that the sound had been there for a minute at least and that some part of him had been refusing to hear it.
He heard it now.
"Is that what was following you," he said.
Sable was already on her feet, wound apparently irrelevant, something in her right hand that he hadn't seen her draw. It was not a weapon he had a name for. It looked like a length of thread pulled from the air itself, coiled around her fingers, faintly luminous, the color of something between silver and bone.
"Two of them," she said. "They followed my trace. I was trying to lose them before I came here." A pause that was almost apologetic. "I was mostly successful."
"Mostly."
"One got close enough to mark the building."
Kael stood. The sound below rose slightly, a frequency adjustment rather than a volume one, something pressing against a boundary. He became aware of his own heartbeat and beneath it, much deeper, something else, like a second pulse that had been there for months and that he had been telling himself was nothing.
It was not nothing.
It was answering.
"What do I do," he said. Not afraid. Something that would take a few more hours to become fear and right now was just very fast, very clear attention.
Sable looked at him. At his hands. At whatever she could see that he could not yet see about himself.
"Stay behind me," she said. "Watch what I do. Not the thing I'm fighting. Me. What I do." A pause. "And try not to touch the shadows in this room. Some of them are fine. Some of them, for the next few minutes, will not be."
The front door shuddered. Not from knocking. From something leaning against it from the other side, slow and exploratory, learning the resistance of the wood.
Kael looked at the door. He looked at the woman standing between him and it with thread-light wrapped around her fingers. He thought about his mother saying you weren't ready with the particular sorrow of someone who had run the numbers and found them insufficient. He thought about three years of thin days in a small apartment, waiting.
"Alright," he said.
The door opened.