So much for people, Adrian thought, with her life in a prison-battered suitcase, with the thought of the discharge clerk's scowl still stinging, fumbling the keys to a tired new apartment. She was free, she was mended -- now what?
Takeout grease lingered on the air as she got to unpacking, perched on a rickety folding chair and sifting through immaculate plastic bags. That pair of earrings. Her wallet. A silver radio transmitter that sent a bolt down her spine.
Clerical error, Adrian thought as she found the nerve to pick it up. And peel open the bag. And gingerly, begging herself not to, search for the on switch.
It still worked: it crackled harmless. Why would a ... professional bother tracking down one small piece of equipment, with a frequency that had served its purpose? What harm could it do? She left it on while she gathered the greasy cardboard boxes-- white noise drowned away thought.
She turned it on when she got home, sometimes, the nights the quiet made her itch and she was tiny and the wind shrieked outside the brick walls. She grew braver and fiddled with dials: the radio caught static-laced talk programs and classical music, and something in jabbering Spanish. Almost like people, tantalizingly close, so Adrian talked to them. To the white noise, too. Told them all about her day, and the weather, and petty worries. About needing someone, one weak evening.
She never expected to hear an answer.
Forgive him, he asked, soft and crisp as snow while Adrian clutched at her racing heart. He had rediscovered the frequency, and the voice on it; he never had contacted her about the trial.
She didn't have the card, Adrian blurted. She could feel it suddenly, turning phantom between her fingers.
He knew that, Shelly de Killer said. This business was of a strictly personal nature. He wished to inform her that he regretted the slander of her name; he hadn't forseen that.
Adrian lowered her hand from her heart. She thought of Engarde's smirk and Juan's breath in her ear, and long nights of wondering why she bothered with anything. She looked back to the grimy floor -- she told Shelly that he seemed nice.
She kept talking to the radio, to the operettas and the grinning DJs as dusk fell. Sometimes she got an answer, from an man whose name tasted less and less like death. Adrian smiled on those nights.
It was summer -- smotheringly humid, lava-still -- when Adrian put a crumb-covered dish in the sink, and lifted her hair's weight off her neck just for a moment, and caught a tall shadow out of the corner of her eye. She stopped; certainty flitted over her skin, and his monocle caught moonlight.
Pardon his intrusion, he asked -- that voice, Shelly's gentle voice -- but he once again had unfinished business with her.
How did he get in, she should have incinerated the thing, were her threadbare shorts decent? A salvo of things through Adrian's mind and her mouth worked, and she worried one hand with the other. Was there a problem, she asked, with one bright grain of terror inside her.
Shelly lurked motionless. A de Killer, he began, could did not leave loose ends. Did she wish to be a client?
Huge, and it took a moment to grasp. She didn't, Adrian blurted.
No change in his face, paleness soaked with shadow. Then, did she wish to be a successor?
Not that either, no, and the terror grew, but--
Ms. Andrews -- a frost-delicate name when he said it -- she did not need audience with Shelly de Killer. He had come only for the transmitter.
This was the end of everything. He moved like smoke past her and Adrian knew, it squeezed the breath out of her, that he'd pick up that radio and fade away into the night, and that would be it and this would be over no more guide no more friend in the night and he'd be gone she'd be alone--
He tensed at her touch, coiled dangerous but she needed this weight of a human hand between her own. Explanation poured from her, please, please, all the shivering things Adrian thought when the quiet got too loud but didn't Shelly know already?
He said nothing, as the last of her begging sputtered away. Features crept out of the dark as she stared -- bird's eyes, thick dark of a mustache, blade-edge mouth. Adrian's own breathing heaved like a weak beached thing between them and she choked on the quiet, if he'd just say something or leave or--
Touch, on her head and down her hair. She saw Shelly's crisp glove rise and now touch burned perfect on her neck; Adrian gripped his hand tighter, ached all over and breathed please.
Ms. Andrews, he said--
Please, please. She pressed closer, and he let her.
Adrian was doing it again, she thought as Shelly relented, and loosened, and freed his hand to hold her -- high on her back like a gentleman. She was clinging, a limpet, a barnacle and Shelly was jagged rock, his shirt summer-humid and his weight sure. First brush and she turned her face toward him, but it stayed there, the heavy tickling of his whiskers on her forehead, the slow rush of his breath and a line pressed to her skin. Tracks. Maybe a scar: she thought of a baseball with stitches glossy, like blood.
Most of a moment, and he pulled back, hands resting to grip her shoulders; she watched those dark features and she braced.
The secret to strength, Shelly told her, was finding one's own path.
And he let go then, stepping back. He lifted Adrian's radio off the kitchen table -- like lifting a silvery glass at breakfast -- and he smoke-darted again and without a sound, Shelly de Killer was out in the night and gone.
Finding her own path -- he was right. He was right, hadn't Adrian learned anything from bleeding on the witness stand? The words struck her so she rang hollow and off-key; she went to the breezeless window and banged it closed. She choked again, fingers spasming tight on the wooden sill, and clinical words swarmed back and that night, Adrian cried hard until she forgot them.
She bought a clock-radio, the next bright morning. She listened, and she hummed along; she smiled, sometimes, on the glowing days. She never had to say a word.