The inn was called something in the composite script that Elijah had not yet fully parsed, but the woman who ran it had told him the name in spoken language and it translated, approximately, to The Still Hearth, which he had thought was a good name for an inn.
Names that knew what they were tended to deliver on the promise. The room she'd given them was small and clean, with two narrow beds and a single electric lamp on a low table between them that cast warm amber light across the stone walls, and a window that looked out onto one of the mid-tier walkways where the lamp-chains swung in the geothermal current.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a decent room.
Elijah was sitting on the edge of his bed with his jacket folded over his knee, and he looked like a person who had been placed very precisely in the exact position he was in, everything arranged with the negligent tidiness of someone who was always, at some level, presenting.
His dark eyes moved around the room in their habitual, unannounced inventory, window, door, ceiling, the gap under the second bed, the latch on the window frame, not anxiously but with the steady, automatic thoroughness of a habit so old it had stopped being a decision.
Rosette was at the window.
She was not looking at the walkway outside so much as standing in the direction of it, her arms folded across her chest, her weight on one hip, her red hair falling across one shoulder in its vivid, declarative way.
She had her dress suit jacket still on, the custom-fitted one in the deep charcoal with the nation's colours in the lining and the lapel, red, white, the golden star worked into the breast pocket detailing, and her crimson eyes moved over the walkway's foot traffic without appearing to settle on anything in particular.
The room had been quiet for a while.
Not uncomfortably quiet, precisely, it was a functional quiet, the quiet of two people who did not know each other well enough to fill silence automatically and had individually decided that filling it badly was worse than leaving it. But it had been going on long enough that its continuation was beginning to constitute its own kind of social position.
Rosette drew breath.
"So..."
"When we..." Elijah said, at the same time.
They both stopped.
Rosette looked at him. He looked at her. A beat of mutually acknowledged absurdity passed between them in the way of two people discovering they are operating in the same register.
Elijah deferred with a small gesture. Rosette pressed her lips together and looked back at the window.
"I was going to say," She stopped again. The sentence had seemed more formed a moment ago. "I was just going to say." She dropped it. The thought had not survived contact with the open air.
Another silence.
Elijah turned his jacket over on his knee, smoothed a non-existent crease.
"So," he tried.
Rosette glanced at him.
"Nothing," he said. "I also had nothing."
The silence reconvened.
Then Elijah smiled, not the full version of his smile, which had a quality to it like a card being laid face-down on a table, but something smaller and more genuine, the expression of a man finding his own situation authentically funny. "Were you surprised to see me?" he said. "When we woke up. Were you surprised it was me?"
Rosette looked at him with the particular flatness of her gaze that she deployed in place of an eye-roll. "No," she said.
"No?"
"I was told you were showing up." She said this without elaboration, in the tone of someone reporting a basic logistical fact. "Before the Clock Tower situation. I was told to expect you. So when I saw you, I thought," A brief pause. "Well. There he is."
Elijah absorbed this with the equanimity of someone who was not surprised to have been anticipated and was, if anything, slightly gratified by the confirmation. "Great," he said. Then. "This whole situation is genuinely very strange."
Rosette made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement but occupied the territory between them.
"The woman who runs this inn," Elijah said, leaning back slightly on his palms. "I spoke with her when I arranged the room." He said arranged with a brevity that covered whatever the actual mechanics of the arrangement had been. "She's Veythari lineage. One of the Nine Clans, the highland people, originally. Volcanic ridges, if the geography I found in the library reference holds." He looked at the ceiling. "She was born here. Underground. She's never seen the surface. But she knows everything about it secondhand, the way you know about a place from photographs, the shape of it, the colour, the loss of it."
Rosette said nothing, but she had turned away from the window slightly. The quality of her attention had shifted.
"Her mother came through the door," Elijah continued. "That's how she said it. Came through the door. Like it was a specific, known door, which apparently it was. Someone opened it for them, I don't have the full picture there, and the people who made it through came here, and the people who didn't..." He let the sentence end where it ended.
"Didn't make it through," Rosette said.
"Right."
A pause.
"I didn't know much about the war," he said. "With the Nine Clans. I knew the official version, the Archipelago Campaign, the Subjugation Act.
Rosette looked at him steadily. "From what the woman described," she said, "it sounded more like a genocide from the information you got off that lady."
Elijah was quiet for a moment.
Then he nodded. Slowly, with the weight of someone adjusting their internal architecture around a new load-bearing fact. "Mm," he said. The sound of genuine recalibration rather than acknowledgement.
He looked at her.
"What do you think about that?" he said. "The two of us, here. In a place built by the people our nation drove underground." He tilted his head slightly. "We're not exactly welcome guests. And depending on who finds us and what they know about the badge, we might be looked at as the continuation of something they never got to finish grieving."
Rosette didn't answer immediately. She looked at the floor between them, and something moved through her expression that was not quite discomfort and not quite thought but was somewhere between the two, the look of a person who processes things internally and thoroughly and resents being asked to produce the output before it's ready.
"I was adopted," she said. "My ancestry isn't Ostaran. It leads to Albion." She said this not defensively but as a correction of the record, precise and clean.
"You know what I mean," Elijah said. Gently. Without pressure.
Rosette was quiet.
She looked at the wall for a moment, and Elijah did not fill the silence, which was its own kind of intelligence, he had the uncommon ability to let a silence be what it needed to be rather than what was comfortable, and he applied it now with the patience of someone who was genuinely curious about what would emerge from it.
Something shifted in Rosette's face. Not softening, exactly. More like a resolution of competing tensions into something quieter and more honest.
"I've always struggled," she said, "to understand people. Why they feel the things they feel. The," She searched for the word with the slight frustration of someone who knows the concept and cannot find the vocabulary for it. "The internal logic of other people's pain. I can observe it. I can identify it. But the feeling underneath it," She shook her head slightly. "It doesn't come naturally."
Elijah watched her.
"But." She unfolded her arms. "If the men who adopted me were killed. If they were driven out of their home and their home was burned and then everything they had built in their lives was taken from them, systematically, legally, with the full authority of a government," She paused. "I would carry something from that. I don't have a word for what it would be. Resentment isn't large enough. Hatred isn't specific enough." She looked at Elijah directly. "I would carry it and I wouldn't know what to do with it and it would be in me until I died. And anyone who came to me wearing the face of the people who did it," She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
She reached up and began undoing the lapel buttons of her dress suit jacket. It came off with the deliberate care she applied to anything she wore, she had had it made, and the making of it had been an expression of something she'd believed in, so the removing of it was not casual. She laid it across the foot of the bed and looked at it.
The Ostaran colours were vivid even in the room's amber light. Red, white, the golden star worked into the breast pocket with the neat, confident embroidery of a nation that had never had cause to question whether its flag was welcome where it went.
"Back home," Rosette said, "people hang those colours outside their houses. On the motorways, on the overpasses, enormous flags. And the people driving past them feel, I don't know. Pride. Reassurance. The warmth of belonging to something." She looked at the jacket. "I imagine those same colours, to someone living down here," She paused. "I can't feel exactly what they'd feel. But I can imagine it. And what I imagine is something very close to fear. The specific kind that comes from knowing you already lost once and that what you lost to is still out there larger and bolder."
The room was very quiet.
Elijah looked at her for a long moment. He had the expression of a man recalibrating, not his threat assessment, not his strategic positioning, but something else. Something more personal and less frequently used.
"I wasn't expecting that," he said. Sincerely. Without the edge his sincerity usually carried. "From you."
Rosette looked at the jacket on the bed. "I don't usually," She stopped. Started differently. "I don't say things like that."
"I know." A pause. "Thank you for saying it."
Rosette picked up the jacket and folded it precisely and set it on the table beside the lamp, face-down. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and straightened her posture and the composure returned, not as a wall but as a garment she'd put back on, present but worn differently now, looser at the collar.
"I want to change the subject," Elijah said. Not to dismiss what had been said, but with the care of someone recognising that the subject had been fully honoured and anything further would be extraction rather than conversation.
Rosette cleared her throat once, a small, brief sound. "Paul Strahm," she said.
"Yes."
"That's why we were there. The Clock Tower, the boy, the gas," She settled her hands on her knees. "Ruben Rayo, Corbin Monet. Oscar Lorian." She said the last name with a slight change in register, not emotional, but deliberate. The name of a child being given its proper weight.
Elijah leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I read the boy's file." He said this without the usual light tone he applied to information he'd acquired through unofficial means. "Before the operation." A pause. "I feel quite bad for him, if I'm honest."
"If he's alive," Rosette said, "he's going through it." She said going through it in the flat, factual way she said most things, but underneath the flatness was something that functioned like care and was probably the closest she regularly got to it in expression "The drugs Paul was putting in him, and whatever his Ego was doing under that, his body was not handling it well when Lance's attack hit."
"No," Elijah agreed. "But." He looked at her. "Ruben was keeping him close. Through all of it. That boy wasn't left alone once from the moment they pulled him out of the sewers."
Rosette looked at him. Then she snapped her fingers, a single, clean snap, the sound of a conclusion arriving.
"Hospital," she said.
Elijah opened his mouth.
"Ruben will take him to a hospital," Rosette said, and the speed of her reasoning was already ahead of her words. "Oscar needs immediate medical attention for whatever Paul injected into him, and Rayo knows that, and the first thing he will do in any unknown location is find the nearest facility equipped to handle it. He's not going to sit on it." She looked at Elijah. "If we want to find them,"
"We find the hospital," Elijah said. He had the expression of someone who had arrived at the same conclusion approximately three seconds before being told it and was deciding whether to mention this. He decided not to. "And if other people landed here too, Lance, Elise, anyone else, they're going to work through the same logic eventually." He considered this. "Grouping up might be in our interest. Before the situation gets more complicated than it already is."
"Keep the outlaws close," Rosette said. "So that when we find our way back, they come with us. Properly."
"Right." Elijah looked at the window. "It's unfortunate timing, though."
"Why."
He gestured at the room, the clean walls, the warm lamp, the narrow beds with their Nemorei-weave blankets. "We just checked in."
Rosette stood, picked up her jacket from the table, and put it back on. She did the lapel buttons up halfway, leaving the Ostaran emblem turned slightly inward, the golden star less visible. She straightened the collar.
"Think of it as sightseeing," she said.
Elijah picked up his own jacket and looked at it for a moment, then at her, and the small genuine smile returned briefly before the other one, the card-face-down one, settled back over it like a lid.
"I love sightseeing," he said.