Chapter 5 A Deal Made in Blood and Silence

Can you trust someone who tried to kill you?

Zara got up slowly.

Not because she was hurt. Because she was being careful, the way you are careful around something you don't have a category for yet. She brushed off her knees with a practiced gesture that seemed more like muscle memory than actual composure and stood at her full height and looked at Caelith with an expression that had not quite decided what it was yet.

"Talking," she said. "Right."

"Right," Caelith said.

Neither of them moved toward the other. The courtyard held its particular nighttime quiet around them, lamppost light pooling on cold stone, the distant campus sounds muffled and irrelevant.

Zara exhaled slowly through her nose.

"I don't actually know that much," she said.

"Start with what you do know."

A pause. Zara looked at the ground briefly, then back up, something shifting behind her eyes that looked almost like a calculation being run.

"I got a job," she said. "I get jobs sometimes. It's not something I advertise."

Caelith said nothing. She had already decided that silence was the most useful thing she could offer right now. Zara was the kind of person who filled silence. She could see that already.

"The brief was simple. You. Campus. Make it look like something that happens to girls who stay too late in libraries." She said it without flinching, which told Caelith something about how many times she had done this kind of thing before. "No connection to anything. In and out."

"Who gave you the brief."

"A contact. Someone I've used before." She hesitated, just slightly. "They were more urgent than usual. That should have told me something. As for the contractor, I don't have direct contact with them”.

"Urgent how."

"Like it needed to happen now. Like waiting was not an option." Zara's jaw shifted. "They mentioned something. About why you specifically. I didn't ask, I never ask, but they volunteered it anyway which was unusual."

Caelith kept her voice even.

"What did they say."

Zara looked at her for a long moment. The calculation again, behind the eyes.

"They mentioned a journal," she said finally. "Said your death was necessary to keep its location from surfacing. That you were connected to it somehow even if you didn't know it yet." A pause. "I didn't ask what journal. I didn't care what journal. It was just context, the kind they give you so you feel like the job has a reason."

The word sat in the cold air between them.

Journal.

Caelith filed it carefully. Behind her sternum something shifted, that familiar pressure, like a string being tightened from somewhere she couldn't locate.

"And now," Caelith said. "What do you want now."

Zara blinked. Like that was not the question she had expected.

"What do you mean."

"You came here to kill me. You didn't. Now we're standing in a courtyard at nine thirty on a Thursday and you're talking to me instead of running." Caelith tilted her head slightly. "So what do you want."

Zara was quiet for a moment. A real quiet this time, not tactical. She knew why she didn't just leave, all her senses were screaming at her to stay and talk. She felt like she would literally stop breathing the moment she steps away without permission. She couldn't just say”I feel like I'm gonna die the moment I leave now”. Yet, she knows the implications of a failed mission.

"I don't know," she said. And it sounded true in a way that surprised both of them.

Caelith studied her for a brief moment.

Whatever the invisible force had done to her it had not just frightened her.

It had changed something.

Caelith didn't fully understand that yet. But she filed it away.

"I have questions," Caelith said. "A lot of them. About the journal, about who sent you, about what has been happening to me for the last week. You probably can't answer all of them." She paused. "But you can answer more than anyone else I currently have access to."

Zara watched her.

"And in exchange," Caelith continued, "I don't report what happened tonight. To anyone."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

Zara laughed. Short and humourless, more like an exhale with shape than an actual laugh.

"You're not going to ask me to protect you. To be some kind of bodyguard."

"I'm asking you to answer my questions," Caelith said. "Whatever comes after that we figure out as it comes. I can't exactly trust someone who tried to kill me”.

Another silence. Longer this time.

Zara reached into her jacket pocket. Caelith went still instinctively but what came out was nothing threatening. A small folding knife, the kind that was more tool than weapon. Zara opened it, turned it once in her hand, and then without ceremony drew it lightly across her own palm.

Caelith stared.

"Old habit," Zara said flatly. "From the people who trained me. A deal made in blood holds." She looked up. "Your hand."

"You just tried to kill me."

"And now I'm offering you a blood deal so you know I won't again." She held Caelith's gaze. "You can say no. But you asked if you can trust someone who tried to kill you." A beat. "This is how I answer that."

Caelith looked at the knife. At Zara's palm. At the courtyard around them, empty and cold and absolutely absurd as a setting for any of this.

She held out her hand.

Zara made a small, careful cut. Barely anything. Caelith hissed through her teeth more from surprise than pain.

They pressed their palms together briefly. Cold skin and something warmer underneath it.

Then Zara stepped back and folded the knife away and looked somewhere past Caelith's shoulder with an expression that was difficult to read.

"The contact who gave me the brief," she said quietly. "I can find them again."

Caelith wrapped her hand in the cuff of her sleeve.

"Good," she said.

They walked out of the courtyard separately. Different gates, different directions, the way two people do when they are not yet ready to be seen leaving the same place together.

But before Zara reached her gate she stopped without turning around.

"The journal they mentioned," she said. "The way they talked about it." A pause. "It wasn't like talking about a book. It was like talking about something alive."

Then she was gone.

Caelith stood in the empty courtyard and let that sit in the cold air where Zara had left it.

Something alive.

She pressed her cut palm against her jacket and walked home.