The argument about Raine's cooking had died the way all arguments died in this apartment, not with a resolution, but with exhaustion.
Raine was still muttering something under his breath about people with no appreciation for complexity. Sierra was leaning against the counter with a piece of dry bread she'd pulled from the cabinet a moment ago, chewing it with the pointed satisfaction of someone making a statement. Selene had finished her tea and was sitting with both hands wrapped around the empty cup, the way children hold things they don't want to put down yet.
Lucian was at the sink.
He rinsed his cup quietly, methodically, without any particular expression. The rain outside had softened to a low murmur against the glass. The magelight over the stove buzzed faintly. The apartment smelled of burnt herbs and old paper and whatever unidentifiable thing Raine had added to the pot. It was, for a moment, almost ordinary. But all of them knew, nothing about what had happened was not ordinary.
The coin slipped from his coat pocket while he wasn't looking.
It hit the floor with a sharp, clean clink and rolled. Raine, halfway to the bin with a handful of scraps from his earlier disaster, stopped it under his boot without thinking. He crouched, picked it up, turned it over in his fingers.
His expression did several quiet things before settling into something unreadable.
"...Lucian."
"Mm." Lucian had not noticed yet.
"Why does this coin look like it's trying to tell me something?"
Lucian turned. He saw it in Raine's hand. He crossed the room and held out his palm.
Raine didn't drop it immediately. He tilted it toward the magelight, squinting at the surface, where the markings shifted like ink disturbed in still water. It was slow and alive in a way metal had no business being.
"The markings are moving." Raine was still studying it.
"I know." Lucian just wanted him to return the coin already.
"That's not normal coin behavior."
"No, it's not."
Raine placed it in his palm. The moment Lucian's fingers closed around it, the markings went still.
Sierra had turned from the counter. She wasn't chewing anymore.
"That's the coin from the Greymish Queen." Not a question.
"Yes," Lucian said.
She took a slow bite of her bread. "And you've just had it in your coat pocket this whole time."
"Yes."
She nodded once. "Okay. Do you think you can figure out what it says?" This time it was a question.
Lucian set the coin on the table. "I am not sure."
"What is this part about the Greymish Queen? Raine questioned. "I don't like her calling "THE GREYMISH QUEEN" a self imposed identity." He did a sign with his fore and middle fingure. "You guys didn't tell me that part though."
Sierra looked at Lucian who was still staring at the coin on the table. Selene too was attentive.
"Well it happened." Sierra was still waiting for Lucian to say something.
Then he started explaining. He explained it the way he always explained things he found uncomfortable, short sentences, no preamble, nothing that wasn't necessary. Raine already knew about the ambush. Lucian told him about The Greymish Queen. The sigil she left in blood on the ground, and the way it matched the coin's face exactly. The same pattern. The same weight.
Raine listened without interrupting. That alone said enough about what he was thinking.
When Lucian finished, Raine stood still for a moment, one hand resting against the shelf beside him. Then he turned and started pulling books.
"I might have something on it." He declared.
He moved with the quiet urgency of a man who has seen something like this before and already suspects where it leads. He stacked three volumes on the table, opened the top one, flipped through to the middle, shook his head, moved to the next. All of them knew Raine should not be having these books. These were artifacts from the old broken world, or maybe when the world was still intact. But many people in the obsidian wasted carried things they should not be carrying.
Selene slid off her chair.
She crossed to the edge of the table without being asked, without anyone suggesting it. She didn't touch the coin. She just stood near it, silver eyes resting on its surface.
The markings, still since Lucian had set it down, began to move.
They drifted across the face of the coin and rearranged into something new, a pattern that hadn't been there a moment ago, spreading from the center outward. A pattern that felt less like decoration and more like a name being written in a language nobody in the room spoke.
Sierra saw it first. She straightened slightly but said nothing.
Raine glanced up from the pages. He looked at the coin. He looked at Selene standing two feet away with her hands at her sides. He looked at Lucian.
"She's doing that," he said.
"Might be," Lucian said.
"Is she aware she's doing that?"
They both looked at Selene.
Selene looked back at them with her calm, unhurried silver eyes. "It started when I got close," she said, the way she said most things, reporting what was true without any interest in making it sound more alarming than it already was.
"Right," Raine said. He closed the book in his hands and reached for another. "Good. Fine. That's fine."
Sierra looked at him. "You're doing the voice."
"What voice."
"The one you use when things are very much not fine."
"I don't have a voice."
"Raine."
"I said I'm fine."
He wasn't.
He'd found what he was looking for, a thin, battered text with water damage across the spine and pages that crinkled at the corners like they'd been dried too fast. He handled it carefully, turning pages with two fingers, scanning lines of cramped, fragmenting script, his lips pressed thin.
Old Greymish. Lucian recognized the shape of it from Dominion suppression records. A language they had spent considerable effort burying, which meant anything written in it was worth considerably more than it looked.
"This outer ring," Raine said, tracing the air above the coin's edge without touching it. "It's a resonance anchor. Designed to bind a connection between two specific points." He paused, rereading something. "Or two specific people."
The rain filled the silence.
"And this inner marking," He stopped. Turned the page. Found the translation, or what remained of it, because half the text was eaten through where the water damage was worst, leaving nothing but pale blank paper where the words should have been.
"What?" Sierra asked.
Raine looked up. "I am not sure."
"Well, there must be something." Sierra insisted.
" A key?" He said with unsurety.
Nobody said anything for a while as they looked baffled at Raine.
"Key to what?" Sierra finally asked.
"That's the half I don't have." He turned the ruined page anyway. Nothing. He set the book down carefully. "I know some of this. Not enough. The language is too degraded and what I can actually read contradicts itself in two places." He exhaled through his nose and looked at Lucian. "You know who'd be able to tell us exactly what this is."
"Viktor," Sierra said.
"Viktor," Raine confirmed.
Lucian looked at the coin. At the markings sitting perfectly still inside his closed fingers. At Selene, who was still watching it with those quiet eyes, patient in the way children are patient when they already understand something that the adults in the room are still catching up to.
He pocketed the coin. "Get your coats."
The apartment shifted into the quiet motion of preparation.
Raine disappeared into the back room. The clink of small glass vials traveled through the doorway, followed by the soft thud of something being packed away. Sierra was already checking her guns, both of them, the way she always did before walking out into Siltwater at night, fast and certain, fingers moving through the motions without needing her eyes.
Lucian pulled on his coat.
Selene, without being told, crossed to her chair and began putting on hers. She worked the buttons from the bottom up, deliberate and careful. She had the focus of someone who had spent time learning to do small things for herself and took none of it for granted.
Lucian watched her for a moment. The coat was much longer than her waist. Something in his chest did a thing he didn't examine.
"She's coming with us," he said.
"Obviously," Sierra said, holstering the second gun.
Raine reappeared in the doorway, bag slung over one shoulder, still adjusting the strap. "Viktor is going to say something."
"Viktor always says something," Lucian said.
"I mean something specifically about her." He nodded towards Selene.
"He said something specific about my boots last time. Said a dead cobbler was personally offended." Sierra commented.
"He wasn't wrong," Raine said flatly. "Those boots deserved it."
Sierra glanced between them. "I'm going to regret coming, aren't I."
"Almost certainly," Lucian said.
"Wonderful." She pushed off the counter. "Let's go meet the man who talks to dead people."
Selene, coat now fully buttoned, looked up at Sierra. Then, very quietly: "Is he friendly?"
Sierra opened her mouth. Closed it. Considered the question with genuine thought.
"He's... Viktor," she said finally.
Selene seemed to accept this.
Raine crossed to the door and reached for the handle. His hand stopped an inch from it.
Two knocks. From the other side. They were unhurried, patient. The kind of knock from someone who already knows there is a person standing on the other side of it.
The room went still.
Sierra's hand was on her gun before the second knock finished. Lucian was a step behind Raine, Mourne half-drawn, his body already angled between the door and Selene without making a decision about it. Selene herself went quiet in the center of the room, fully still, her silver eyes on the door.
Raine raised one hand. Wait.
He leaned toward the door without touching it and listened. No retreating footsteps on the other side. No shifting weight. Just the rain against the roof and the low distant hum of the city and something breathing, barely audible, on the other side of the wood.
He looked back at Lucian.
Lucian gave a single nod.
Raine opened the door.
Slowly, one hand on the frame, body half behind it. Prepared, if nothing else, to use it as a shield.
The figure in the doorway was drenched through. Hood up, coat torn at one shoulder, the fabric darkened with rain and what might have been something worse along the left side. Boots thick with mud from somewhere that wasn't Siltwater, the soil color was too unfamiliar, too pale, the kind that came from further out in the Wastes where the ground turned chalky and dry.
A runner? Someone who had been moving hard through bad weather for a long time, and had only just stopped moving.
They lifted their head.
Raine didn't know the face. He looked back at Lucian, who had already found what he was looking for, the inside of the stranger's wrist, turned just slightly outward, where a sigil sat burned into the skin beneath the wet sleeve. Small. Careful. The kind of mark that was meant to be hidden and had been, until now.
It somehow matched the coin.
The stranger's eyes moved past Raine and found Lucian. Then they dropped, just for a moment, to Selene standing in the middle of the room in her large, fully-buttoned coat with her hands at her sides and her silver eyes watching back.
Something in their face changed. The tight, held quality of someone carrying a thing across a very long distance finally loosening, as though they had not been certain until this exact moment that they had found the right door.
They had.
Four words. Barely above a breath.
"She already found you."