3. SOMETHING IS WRONG.

MICAH

I did the Sunday Mass with a split lip and a bruise the shape of a fist along my left cheekbone.

I stood at the altar of the Cathedral of Saint Anselm in front of six hundred people and delivered the homily on the road to Emmaus and I watched the congregation try to be polite about the state of my face and mostly fail.

Three old women in the fourth pew exchanged a look that could have stripped paint. A man near the back stared at my cheekbone for the entire offertory. A child in the second row pointed and her mother pulled her hand down.

Deacon Farris got me after the service, in the sacristy, with the look of a man who had been waiting to say something since he'd first seen me that morning.

"What in God's name," he started, looking at me confused and concerned.

"I fell."

"You—" He stopped and looked at the shape of the bruise. "Micah. That is not a falling injury. That is a someone's-fist injury."

"The first night in a new city. I took the wrong shortcut. I'm fine."

He looked at me with the exhausted patience of someone who wanted to drop this. "You need to report it."

"To whom?"

"The police."

"Nothing was taken. I'm fine." I started removing vestments. "I need the week's schedule. And I need to get the home visits organized."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed. "The home visit list is on the desk," he said. "And the youth group is Wednesday at five. And the hospital pastoral rounds are Tuesday and Thursday." He paused. "And for the love of God take a main road at night."

"Yes," I said. "Noted."

********

The week taught me things about the new Haloshul.

It taught me that the community around the cathedral was tight and frightened in equal measure. I did home visits and I listened, which is most of what the job is, and what I heard was a city that had calcified around certain realities.

Businesses paying for protection they didn't name directly. Young men who'd gone one direction and not come back. A woman on Cassidy Street who'd had her car taken from outside her house and the police had come, wrote things down and nothing had happened after that.

But more glaringly, they all avoided one name.

Kaius.

I filed it but didn't push. You learn, in pastoral work, that people tell you things when they're ready and not before, and pushing only teaches them that you can't be trusted with the pace of their own disclosure.

What I did push on— once, on Wednesday, with a man named Ben who ran the hardware store two streets from the cathedral.

He looked at his counter when I asked. "Safe is complicated here, Father," he said.

"How so?"

"Depends who's keeping you safe," he said. "And what they want for it."

He didn't say more and I didn't ask more. But I thought about it for the rest of the day.

I was staying in a city where safety has a price and someone is always collecting it.

*********

Thursday afternoon. I came out of the hospital after the pastoral rounds to find a black car parked across the street that hadn't been there when I went in.

I knew it was him before I saw him. The car was too still.

I crossed the street. The window came down before I reached it.

He looked worse than the alley— not physically, he looked fine physically, more than fine, which was a thing I wasn't going to think about.

He had a cigarette going. He hadn't been smoking it, just holding it, watching the ember. "You put your schedule online," he pointed out.

"It's on the cathedral's community board. People need to know where—"

"Addresses. Times. Specific locations." He looked at me. "You might as well have posted your route with a flag."

"For the community—"

"Take it down."

"I won't."

He stared at me.

"The community needs to reach me," I adjusted uncomfortably. "That's the entire job, Blaze. I'm not going to make myself inaccessible because—"

"Because what? Because this is Haloshul and not whatever seminary town you've been living in for three years? Because the city changed?" He flicked ash out the window. He was not agitated, that would have been something I could work with. Blaze wasn't agitated. "Take the schedule down. Keep a private line for people who already have it."

"I'm not restructuring my ministry because you have some concern you won't explain."

"I have some concern," he said, very levelly, "that you're walking around this city like God put a shield on you that makes you immune to the actual physics of Haloshul, and you're going to learn that He didn't in a way that's going to be very permanent."

"My faith—"

"Your faith." Something shifted in his voice and it sounded like venom now. "She had faith, Micah. My mother. Every Sunday, in the front row, hands up. Believed every word your father ever preached." He looked out the windshield. "Lot of good it did her."

Oh.

I stood at the car window and didn't say anything because there was nothing to say that wasn't going to make it worse, and I knew it.

"Take the schedule down," he said again, his tone final,then he put the window up and drove away.

I stood on the hospital pavement and felt something I wasn't sure I had a clean name for.

He was bluffing. Just trying to get me scared.

That was what I said. I got home at six and my door was unlocked.

I stood in the hallway with my key still in my hand and looked at the door standing two inches open and did the math. I had locked it this morning. I remembered locking it.

I pushed the door open fully.

Nothing was overturned and nothing broken. At first glance the apartment was exactly as I'd left it — coat on the hook, books on the table, the Seiko sitting on the kitchen counter where I'd put it before the hospital visit.

Then I looked closer.

The books were wrong. I stack them spine-out by height, always have, seminary habit. But now, they were on the table at the wrong angles, someone had looked through them. My wardrobe was slightly open too.

Someone had been through my apartment.

Oh no.

I checked the Seiko first. It was still there. Nothing was taken, that was the part that didn't make sense for a burglary. The laptop was on the table, the small amount of cash I kept in the bedside drawer was untouched. This was not a burglary. It was a search.

They'd been looking for something. Or they'd been making a point.

I went to the kitchen to put the kettle on because my hands needed something to do.

I needed to think and I was not going to call Blaze even though someone went through my flat and was not—

Suddenly, I froze.

There was something on the kitchen table.

It was a photograph. Face-up, positioned in the exact center of the table, which was not where I'd have left it even if it was mine to leave, which it wasn't, because I had never seen this photograph before.

I picked it up.

It was a picture of me. At the cemetery, at my father's grave. I was standing with my head bowed, my hands clasped and the collar visible, which meant it had been taken since I arrived — I had visited the grave before Sunday, and in the photograph I was in the same shirt I'd worn on Monday.

Monday.

Someone had followed me to my father's grave on Monday, taken a photograph and put it on my kitchen table while I was at a hospital visit.

Fuck.

I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the photograph of myself at my father's grave.

There was only one person who would know what this meant.

I had been in Haloshul for six days. I had a bruised face, a searched apartment and a photograph of myself grieving, and the only person I could think to call was the one person I'd decided I wasn't going to let control me.

I looked at my phone for a long time.

Absolutely not.

I did not call Blaze.

I sat up until two in the morning instead, with all the lights on and the door bolted, reading Psalms because it was either that or spiral, and somewhere around Psalm 91, I fell asleep at the table.

I woke up at six with my cheek on the Bible and the photograph still on the table.

But I knew I had to face reality soon.

This was not going to go away on its own. And I needed help.