The Con

POV: Ricki

Tucker told the truth like other men told jokes. Perfect timing. A straight face. The absolute certainty that the punchline would land later, when it hurt more.

Ricki watched him work the yard that afternoon, close enough to catch every word, far enough that Tucker's performance never once flickered toward him. A guard leaned against the chain-link, clipboard in hand, voice pitched to the flat drone of a man filling out a form he didn't care about.

"Word is Church's been moving product through the east block," the guard said, not looking up. "That true?"

"Church doesn't move product," Tucker said, unbothered, like a man reciting weather. "Never has. Not once, that I've seen."

The guard grunted, made his note, and moved down the row of names like Tucker's mouth was a form he'd already stamped.

Ricki waited until the guard drifted off before he caught up to Tucker along the fence, still turning the answer over. True, but incomplete in a way he couldn't name yet.

"That was true," he said, half a question. "Wasn't it. Everything you just said."

"Every word," Tucker said, grin spreading slow and genuine, the look of a man proud someone finally caught the trick. "Church doesn't move product through the east block. He moves it through three other channels that guard didn't think to ask about." He shrugged. "Can't lie. Never could. So I got real good at making the truth sound like whatever's needed in the moment."

"That's a hell of a skill."

"It's the only one I've got," Tucker said, dry, falling into step beside him.

The headache had come back around midday, dull at first, then sharpening behind his left eye until the sunlight felt like something aimed at him on purpose. He didn't mention it. Tucker glanced over once anyway, eyes flicking down and back too fast to be casual.

"You eating enough?" Tucker asked, light, like it wasn't really about food at all. "You're looking thin, Delano."

"I'm fine," Ricki said, flat.

Tucker didn't push, but the doubt sat plain on his face, and Ricki understood there wasn't much point pretending around someone who could smell a lie a mile off. He just didn't have a better answer to give.

"Fae can't lie," Tucker said, conversational, like he was explaining a rule of a game. "Not won't. Can't. Say something false out loud and something in your chest seizes up, refuses to let the words land clean. Guards figured that out about my kind decades ago. Made us useful for exactly the wrong reasons."

Ricki filed that away next to everything else he was learning about the building's real rules, the ones that never made it into any handbook.

They walked a while longer, Tucker's questions turning easy, ordinary, the kind of conversation Ricki hadn't realized he'd been starving for until it started happening around him.

"Your mothers," Tucker said, curious. "What are they like?"

"Different," Ricki said, and felt a smile crack loose, the first real one in days. "Liz cries at everything. Commercials, weddings, the news. Jules doesn't cry, not where anyone can see her, but she remembers every detail you've ever mentioned once and brings it back years later like she's been carrying it the whole time."

"Sounds like a good team," Tucker said, warm.

"They are," Ricki said, something loosening in his chest that had been wound tight for weeks. "What'd you study? Before all this."

"Pre-law, if you can believe it," Tucker said, laughing short and a little rueful. "Figured a fae who couldn't lie made a hell of an interrogator someday. Never got the chance to find out."

They kept talking, easy, unforced, and for a stretch of minutes Ricki forgot where he was. Forgot the fever climbing under his skin. Forgot the postponement sitting six weeks out on a calendar that felt built to torment him. That was the danger of it, he understood later. Normal felt good enough to make him careless about how far from normal his life had actually gotten.

Tucker's tone dropped when the conversation drifted somewhere closer to home.

"I've got a kid," he said, quiet, not meeting Ricki's eyes. "Junior. He's with his other father on the outside. Cruz." He dug a folded, soft-edged photograph from his jumpsuit pocket and held it out, a boy with Tucker's own eyes staring from a school portrait background. "Wrote me a letter a few weeks back. Haven't answered it."

"Why not?" Ricki asked.

"Because I can't lie in it," Tucker said, voice gone flat, careful in the way Ricki was learning meant something actually hurt underneath it. "Every word I write him has to be true. And there isn't a true version of this place I want a kid reading from his own father." He tucked the photo away, fast, protective. "So I don't write anything. Which is its own kind of lie, I guess. Just not one that costs me in the chest."

Ricki didn't have anything to say to that. He let the silence hold instead, the way he'd learned silence worked better than words in this building.

"Can I ask you something?" Ricki said, after a while.

"Always," Tucker said.

"What do you think I am?"

Tucker took his time answering, longer than Ricki expected, his easy expression settling into something more careful, more honestly uncertain than Ricki had seen on him yet.

"Honestly?" Tucker said, finally. "I think you're something that hasn't happened yet."

"That's not an answer," Ricki said, frowning.

"It's the only one I've got," Tucker said, quieter now, the humor drained out of him. "I can't lie to you, remember. And I don't know what you are. My glamour can't crack it. So all I've got is what I can see. You're changing. Whatever you're changing into, it's not finished."

That night, back in general holding, a folded note slid under Ricki's door the way the first one had. No knock. No warning.

*Package returned. Second task done. Dinner tonight. Undercroft.*

Ricki's stomach clenched before he understood why, then eased. The package. He'd returned it two days back exactly as instructed, no questions asked, the same trustee who'd delivered it collecting it without a word. He hadn't thought much about it since. One more small thing he'd done because refusing cost more than doing. Apparently it had counted for something.

Griff found him a few minutes later in the common area, and Ricki showed him the note without really meaning to, needing someone else's reaction to measure his own against.

Griff read it once, twice, something shifting behind his eyes, careful, guarded. "Church doesn't do dinner," he said, flat. "Not with new fish. Not ever."

"Maybe I'm not new fish anymore," Ricki said.

"You're new fish till you're not, and that line moves slower than you think," Griff said, jaw tight the same way it went tight on Kennel Detail, every time he swallowed something he wanted to say and didn't. "Don't go."

"What happens," Ricki asked, "if I do?"

Griff didn't answer right away, and the pause told Ricki more than any sentence could have. "Heard of a guy, few years back," Griff said finally, quiet. "Got invited down for a sit-down with Church. Walked in owing nothing. Walked out owing something he never fully explained, and he wasn't the same after. Quieter. Careful in a way that wasn't there before." He shook his head. "Don't know if that's true. Don't know if it matters. Point is, nobody goes to dinner with Church and comes back exactly who they were going in."

Ricki looked at the note again, the careful, unhurried handwriting. The same hand that had written *Eddie. Don't lose this* on the back of a photograph he still wasn't supposed to have seen.

He went anyway.