"Let him go," Min said, the sites of her pistol fixed steadily on a point just between the other Titan's eyebrows.
Nara let out a long-suffering sigh and lightly tossed Lev toward Minerva. Tumbling a little, he vanished back into her tag the instant he was in range.
"You have no sense of humor. I wasn't going to hurt him," she said, irritated. Min, watching her levelly, slowly lowered her pistol.
"You did before."
"The little fucker burned me!" Nara scowled, half turning away from her and looking around the pub. "And it was hardly more than a static shock, no worse than if he'd scuffed his little non-existent feet on a good thick carpet. I swear, the Vanguard get bigger sticks every damn year for Christmas and take turns shoving them up each other's asses. I'm not a Guardian Killer, Guardian. Not outside the Crucible anyway."
{Little static shock my spinning behind!} Lev said angrily from her tag. While he could speak from her tag where Nara could hear it as well, he didn't seem to want to risk it.
"What are you doing here?" Min asked, holstering her pistol.
"I was just going to ask you the same thing," Nara said, giving her a little bit of a side-eye. "I'll bet we have the same answer."
"I doubt it," Minerva said. She didn't trust Nara, not by a long-shot, but if she truly had meant to hurt her she'd have done it. A single shot into Lev before either of them knew she was there, and Min would have been as mortal as any other citizen of the City.
"Do you? So you're not looking into your past?"
Minerva stared at her, and Nara moved over behind where the bar had been, poking in a few cubbies on the far wall that were still in place. One held the remains of a safe so rusted it looked like some kind of infectious life-form.
"Are you looking into my past? Why?"
"I still want a fucking answer," Nara said with a sneer. Finding nothing of note in the cubbies she straightened again, fixing Min with a hot look. "Zavala threw me out of the damned Tower before I could get it."
"Answer? To what-"
"Why you? Why did they send you to the moon and not me? I'm far older, far more experienced, and I came with the added bonus that I actually wanted to go! Instead, they pitch up that fool Tychon and when he doesn't come back, they pick a little baby Lightborn who's still learning not to shit her nappies. I'd almost think they were trying to get rid of you, if they weren't such self-righteous pricks!"
This time, apparently Lev wanted to be heard. "Min's ten times the Titan you are!"
Instead of erupting into fury, Nara only snorted, planting her hands on her hips and looking upward at the half-gone ceiling, her response almost thoughtful. "Oh, I doubt that."
Min was unconcerned with who was or was not the better Titan. If pressed, she would have answered Nara as well, though she rated her personality a -5.
"I don't know why," Minerva said, and Nara snorted again.
"Yeah, I found that out, thank you ever so."
"Where did you learn that I had any ties to St. Petersburg? This pub?"
"Do you really think that a Guardian who gets banished from the Tower doesn't still have contacts inside?" Nara seemed genuinely surprised at this. In her surprise, for a moment, she even more strongly resembled her sister, and Min could see the person she had been before she'd gone up to the moon. "Friends? Please, tell me you're not so naïve as to think that?"
No, Min was not that naïve. She knew that quite a lot of Guardians didn't live in the Tower save for when they were first Lightborn. Several lived in the City, even had families, though rarely. Others, like Saladin and an astounding amount of Hunters, lived in holdings all across Earth, or wherever out in the solar system they chose to hang their hats that night. Kalina herself, at least before Min had been born, was only in the Tower a handful of times a month, and that mostly because of her beloved PT collection. And while it was difficult to imagine Nara having friends outside of Blayd, that didn't mean she didn't have them.
"There are only very few people who know anything about this," Minerva said. "Even fewer who know about this pub. I doubt your resources include anyone in the Vanguard, so who told you?"
"Does it really matter?" Nara asked. "It wasn't the Vanguard, and it wasn't that self-involved little Hunter or that glum Warlock you run around with, all right?"
When she called Kalina 'self-involved' Min's hand fisted and her eyes narrowed a little. If Nara noticed the reaction, she made no comment on it.
"No," Minerva said evenly. "It's not all right. This is my life to dig into, my past, not yours. I don't want you anywhere near it."
Nara leveled Minerva with a look that the Russian could easily picture on her face right before she tore apart an entire army of Fallen. Her eyes seemed to turn to silver, and as she stalked closer Min could see tiny licks of lightning in their depths.
Min didn't back down, her hand only clenching harder, meeting Nara's glare with one of her own, wisps of flame lovingly dancing with her eyelashes.
"This isn't your life, child," Nara said dangerously. "This is the life of some insignificant Collapse Russki who died centuries ago among millions of others. You are an insolent little wisp of Light that happened to get stirred up out of her ashes, but don't mistake her for who you are, or what she lived as your life."
"I am not your child," Minerva said, just as dangerously. "Nor am I the one acting like a child. You want to go up to the moon? That's just fine with me. I'll pack your bags for you. Will that stop you bawling and whining over it like a teething little whelp?"
"Don't you condescend to me you-"
"Nara, get out of her face, right now."
Nara's storm-cloud eyes reluctantly edged to the side, toward the door, and then faded back into their usual brown.
Blayd stood in the pub door, rifle in hand although it was pointed at the ground. Nara didn't even glance at Minerva again as she walked over to the door.
"There's nothing here anyway," she said tersely, pushing past Blayd with a rough motion and heading out into the sunlight.
Min's hand loosened, the fire going out of her eyes. A disturbance in the air told her that Lev had left the tag again.
"She needs to be kept away from Min," he said angrily at Blayd. She held a hand up complacently.
"We didn't know you were going to be here," she said.
"Why were you-"
"Lev, it's ok. None of this is Blayd's fault."
"I thought it would help," Blayd said apologetically to Min. "She's obsessed with going back to the moon. It's been eating at her like you can't believe, knowing you went there instead. It's not you, not really. She's incensed Tycho went as well. She's tangled up in this idea that something must have happened in your first life to somehow make you different, make the Vanguard send you instead."
As she spoke, Min realized that Blayd thought this was just part of Nara's 'condition', whatever that turned out to be. She didn't know that Min had somehow survived the Deathsong, nor that the Vanguard were planning to send her back. She thought it prudent not to share that information.
"Why does she think that?" she asked warily.
"Damned if I know," Blayd said.
"How did she know about this pub?"
"I don't know that either. She got a ping from someone at the Tower and next thing I know she wants to come out here."
"Why doesn't she just go to the moon, if she wants to so badly?" Lev asked petulantly. "She clearly doesn't care about what the Vanguard say."
Blayd's shrug was helpless, and Min felt a weary sort of grief for the woman. "I honestly don't know. I keep expecting to wake up and find she's gone and done just that. And I'm afraid to ask."
"Afraid she won't say?"
"Afraid she will," she said. "Minerva, I am so sorry about all of this. I know this isn't your fault, and I can't really expect you to believe that it isn't really her fault either. I wish, more than anything, that I could remember what happened to us up there. I feel like knowing that, I'd at least be able to help her, but I don't, and I can't."
"This isn't your fault either," Minerva told her. "I don't blame you for any of this. You don't know who at the Tower could have told her about my past, about this place?"
"She has a…had a lot of friends in the Titans," Blayd said, with a mirthless little laugh punctuating her correction. "Several in Dead Orbit and Future War Cult, though she wasn't a member of either. I honestly couldn't tell you. I've been the only one who still speaks to her for quite a while now."
Minerva nodded. She'd have to let the Vanguard know that someone was passing along information about her past to Nara. The only two people she thought might have done so would be either that Cryptarch, Rahool, or Eris Morn. Min didn't know Rahool beyond her experience with him the previous day, but Gen trusted him and she trusted Gen. At the same time, she could hardly imagine Eris would do something like that either.
Blayd looked like she wanted to say something, perhaps apologize again, before she just made a helpless gesture. "I'll do my best to keep her out of your hair."
Min watched her head back out into the sun, watched as she shimmered away in a haze of transmat energy only halfway across the square. Only after she'd gone did she look at Lev.
"Are you ok? She didn't hurt you?"
"No, I'm fine," he admitted. "Just angry."
"She shouldn't have put her hands on you."
He turned to her. "I'm ok, Min. Really," he said. She blew out a breath, turning and regarding the ruined pub again. After the silence had stretched out, he asked, "Do you want to head back to the Tower?"
"Not yet."
He went over to the window and kept an eye out on the square. Min looked at him affectionately as he did this, then started to poke around the pub again much as Nara had done. The cubbies held no more answers for her than they had seemed to for Nara.
Crouching by a pile of tumbled stone and old timbers she half-heartedly shifted them a bit, then wiped at her face.
What am I doing? There's nothing here. I could take this place apart brick by brick and there would still be nothing.
She had closed her eyes a moment, now as she prepared to stand up and tell Lev that they might as well go back she opened them again, looking at the tumble-down of debris.
A doorway, a set of stairs leading upward. A sign is attached next to the stairway: GUESTS WHO HAVE RENTED LODGINGS AND EMPLOYEES ONLY PAST THIS POINT. 'It's right up here,' she said, with a gentle smile. 'It's no trouble at all.' Min knew she was going to get no end of ribbing from the others in the morning, when they realized-
"Lev!" She heard herself say, rising to her feet with her pistol in her hand. Then it was tumbling out of her fingers, dropping with a distant unheard clatter on the ground.
White. An unbelievable, mind-searing white burned through her head. Brilliance, overwhelming, constricting her every molecule. She couldn't hear her own cry, couldn't feel her own body as the heels of her hands crashed with bruising force into her eyes, as she bent forward, screaming.
Then everything was dark, the air choking her. Through the haze, she saw Lev- battered and scorched. His oculus filled up her eyes. A voice that wasn't his was so loud in her ears she felt like a candle flame caught in a hurricane, before everything went to black.
IS THAT YOU?