street molestation

They gave him long enough that the office had gone quiet, then they came back in.

Nefer was under the desk. Not posed. Not playing. Slack on her side, one arm thrown out, breath there if you looked for it and nothing else. Hair stuck to her mouth. A smear of green light dying on the far wall like a lamp someone had forgotten to put out.

(https://im.ge/i/QQOP0dT)
(artist: balecxi)

Citlali took in the scene, deadpan.

“Who could have predicted that.”

Dehya snorted and nudged a toppled chair with her boot.

“At least that cock of his gets us through a lot of doors without opening a purse.”

Aether checked the pulse at Nefer’s throat the way he had learned to after women dropped for reasons that were not injury, then left her where she was.
Moving her would have been a kindness she had not asked for.

The last specter did the explaining for her.

It had formed at his elbow, the same body, veiled, quieter than the ones that had pushed him. It held out a folded packet — thick paper, wax already cracked, her handwriting on the face of it — and pressed it into his palm.
No speech. The green went thin. Then it was gone, and the office was only a broker who had finished her side of the trade before she had finished being conscious.

Rosaria took the packet out of his hand before he could open it with the wrong look on his face.

“She wrote it beforhand,”
Lisa said, already scanning the top sheet over Rosaria’s shoulder.
“Of course she did. She hoped you would walk in. She was not going to let the afternoon depend on her being able to talk after.”

They read it standing.

The Frostmoon Scions kept to Hiisi Island. That was the useful line. A direction instead of a rumor with a knife in it.

Nicole was the opposite. The report did not give a street, a house, a harbor. Searching would waste the days. If the angel wanted them, she would arrive. If she did not, walking the scrap-metal streets calling her name would only tell the wrong people they were looking.

The rifts sat farther off. Northern islands, the cold ones, where the Abyss showed itself more readily. Nasha’s crooked roofs were not the front. That was luck, and the packet said so without dressing it up.

The last pages were the moon.

Her power had been thinning for a long time. Not a sudden break. A seep. Tides that came in wrong and stayed wrong. Temples that felt emptied even when the benches were full. Faith that reached and found less to hold. The Scions had recorded the fade the way fanatics recorded everything: too much feeling, not enough cause. The broker’s own files ran into the same wall. Older records were thin. Some were simply gone. No author, in this packet, was willing to name a reason and stand by it.

Aether folded the sheets when Lisa was done and put them inside his coat.

“Hiisi,” he said.

Xilonen was already looking at Nefer’s ankle, professional, making sure the unresponsive part was sleep and not something dumber.

“She will wake ugly and proud,” Xilonen said. “Leave her a strong drink, she needs it”

Lynette set the cup without being told.

Yelan and Cloud Retainer did not put the packet away.

They walked a half-step behind the others with the sheets open between them, heads tipped together over Nefer’s tight handwriting, already past the useful lines and into the useless one. Nicole would find them or she would not. That was not a plan. It was a shrug with better ink.

“She likes theater,” Yelan murmured. “Witches always do. Something loud enough to look like a coincidence.”

“One does not bait an angel with street noise,”
Cloud Retainer said.
“One constructs a condition she cannot ignore. A problem that belongs to her language.”

“Then we build the condition. The rest of them can go smile at fanatics.”

Ahead, the group had stopped in a cut between two metal fronts while Ineffa pointed the way toward the water that led to Hiisi. They were still standing there when the footsteps came up behind Shenhe.

A man from the street. Close. Hands already reaching, the local assumption written in how little he bothered to hide it — that a woman on this island might let herself be pulled off the cobbles and used because that was one of the ways the place worked.

(https://im.ge/i/QQONPpC)
(artist: 1-A dot)

The others looked up only when they heard the end of it.

The sound was not a scream. It was wood and scrap giving way at the far mouth of the alley, a body-shaped hole punched through a stack of crates. The man was in them. He was not getting up quickly.

Shenhe lowered her arm. Her face had not changed much. She was not offended so much as finished with the reflex. Something had grabbed. Something had left.

“He is alive,” she said, in case anyone was going to ask the wrong question.

No one in the circle looked shocked. Nod-Krai’s alleys had a reputation, and they had been told it on the ship. What they also knew, without a meeting about it, was simpler: none of them wanted a stranger for that.
Not as a game. Not as local color.
The only cock in the arrangement they were keeping was the one they had followed across nations.

Rosaria glanced at the crates, then at Aether.

“Keep walking before the next one tries the same lesson.”

Ganyu had been listening to the two women with the papers. She touched Aether’s sleeve once, brief, and then stepped back toward Yelan and Cloud Retainer.

“We will try to be found,” she said. “You go to the island. If she comes, we will send word.”

Aether nodded. He did not ask what the condition would be. Cloud Retainer would not have given him a clean answer in the street, and Ganyu already had the look of someone who had accepted an errand.

The three of them peeled off into the scrap-metal maze with the packet and a theory.

The rest turned toward the neighboring water and Hiisi, leaving the alley behind them and a man still learning, the hard way, that not every woman standing still in Nasha was an invitation.