Also introducing Sonja Marsden as THE KILLER WITH NO NAME and Achille Rose as the NARRATOR. A Girl-Like-Studios production.

Content warnings for violence, smoking, character death, and strong language.

ONE: I'M DOING THIS FOR REVENGE

When they came for Silent, they wanted something. That's the kind of story theirs was. Someone would come to them and say that there was a disaster, that a great beast had risen from the sea or descended from the mountains, and they required an even greater beast to deal with it.

This is not one of those stories. This is the story of how all that came to an end.

"Hello, Silent," said Charlotte Keller. "It's been some time."

She stood at the entrance to their home, in the deepest part of the cave where they had, after all the killing and the bodies and the children who stood in the way, been given leave to remain. It's not perhaps what you would think of as a home, but in the years I watched them there, I came to understand it. This was theirs. The only thing. Their friend brought them gifts, and the League gave them supplies, but they had found and claimed this place before anyone ever gave them anything. If you come from the places that Silent did, these are things you have difficulty giving up.

Silent watched Keller with hard, lifeless eyes, like silver coins staring up at an archaeologist from the silt. They were thinking of her last visit to their home. Only two containment squad field agents this time. An improvement, but not by much.

Hello, Keller. Their voice was rough and animal. This was better. In telepathy, they didn't sound human, but they sounded close enough. Deep and warm, like vinyl. Eight years.

Keller made a gesture; her men took up positions on either side of the tunnel mouth, and she came properly into the cave, her golduck keeping an even pace beside her. They were well matched: the same height, the same pace, the same fearless, depthless confidence in their eyes. The trick, Silent knew, was that Vice was actually the less dangerous.

"This has really come along since I last saw it," said Keller, looking around at the furniture. Speakers, CD towers, turntable, guitars, violins. One normal chair for visitors and one modified chair for them. A homemade fireplace, for the winter. A thick nest of pelts and dry leaves to sleep in. "Quite a character portrait."

I like what I like, they replied. What did you come here for? Normally you send your flunkies.

Silent, a gyarados has gone berserk near Fuchsia. Silent, a zapdos has moved into the old power plant on Route 10. Silent, a melmetal has eaten a train station up on the border. There were times when Silent wondered how the Indigo League's containment squad ever managed to defeat dangerous pokémon before Silent entered their service.

"This isn't about a job," said Keller. "We're managing quite well at HQ at the moment, thank you." Silent detected a slippage of her calm. They couldn't read minds well, or without skin contact, but they understood why people thought otherwise; most humans aren't used to the combination of animal instinct and human conversation. "There's … been some news that I thought I should deliver in person."

Silent had not ever borne witness to a tragedy before. They had been the architect of several, if you can apply a term like that to the violence of a wild animal brought brutally to bay, but taking a life is not the same as losing one. There was a sense now, hanging in the air like the first resonant shimmer of the guitar strings, that they were about to learn.

What is your news? they asked, dreading the answer the same way they dreaded their friend's, when they looked at him through the reinforced glass and asked if the League were going to keep them here.

Keller cleared her throat. At her side, Vice settled into a crouch, at once resting and ready to spring.

"Well, it's about Red," she said, in a businesslike way that could only have been masking something deep. "I'm afraid he's dead."

When I tell you that people came for Silent because they wanted something, there was one exception. His name was Red. There was a legal name, and a surname too, but he scraped those off early on, and soon enough they ceased to follow him around. At their first meeting, he was a child, like Silent themself. They were four and a half at the time – I can tell you with certainty – but they decided, when they were in a mood to decide on names and ages and the other baggage of personhood, that they were three.

Red was eleven. He wasn't sent by the League, although by then he was working for them. He came to Silent's cave on his own, following a rumour and finding instead the monster that had killed twenty-two people on Cinnabar Island and a dozen more on the mainland before the League counterattack drove it into hiding. This creature – still a child, in human terms, which are more or less the best terms you and I have with which to describe Silent – panicked.

It's hard for any of us to understand their desperation in that moment. My own situation is a comfortable one; I'm retired now, well situated, isolated from the troubles burning their slow way down the threads that stitch this little world together. I can't say I've ever really known fear. Not in the way a rabbit does when it sees the slow black muscle of the snake pouring in at the entrance to the nest. The way that Silent did, when they felt the change in the air and realised they'd been found.

Well. Fortunately for both of them, Red was the one person in Kanto who could both weather their assault and hold back when he retaliated. He was good at what he did, unquestionably, but it wasn't his skill in battle that stayed his hand when his last pokémon, limping on bloody paws, finally brought Silent to their knees. Or that made him kneel at their side and start applying potions to their wounds.

This was Red. He worked out the terms of the deal, and he made the League of the time accept it. He made them release Silent back to their cave, perhaps knowing, coming as he did from that haunted little house in Pallet, that the first home you make for yourself is the one that matters. When the Elite Four first called on them, he was there at their side, making their presence normal. And when he disappeared into the wilderness for two years, Silent was the only one he told why and where and when.

He brought the CD player. When that proved a hit, he brought the turntable and the hi-fi. Later still, he brought the guitars and the basses, the mandolin, the veena, anything with strings that would answer to the touch of Silent's psionics. They rationed their requests with an iron will, too proud to be a burden, but he had a knack for seeing through them and a great deal of new money to spend.

These are the stories that I return to, time and again. How a man can make a person, just by loving them. How someone who was never meant to exist can live, if only you show them how.

Silent's first impulse was violent. Here was their fist, there was a human telling them something they didn't want to hear: the equations solved themselves. But they held back, gave Keller their empty stare for the ten seconds it took for them to master themself, and then they nodded and folded their arms.

How?

Keller nodded too, as if this was exactly what she'd expected. It probably was. She'd been director of the Indigo League Committee for the Containment of Hazardous Pokémon for almost as long as Silent had been its hostage; if anything surprised her any more, she never showed it.

"He was in Ju―"

Silent allowed a certain audible growl to build in their throat.

No. How?

"Ah." Keller nodded again. "Stabbed. I'm told it was a clean job, by the coroner's reckoning. Death would have been quite quick."

Silent had killed enough, both in their old life as a monster and their current one as a hunter of wild game, to know mercy when they saw it. They were grateful that Red had been shown that mercy, and then coldly furious that they were grateful for anything at all about this situation.

I see. A pause. One of the containment squad men shifted a little, scratched between the seams of his body armour, but if he was anticipating some kind of reaction, he came away disappointed. Where?

"Sinnoh. It's a small island nation, to the north of―"

I know what Sinnoh is. Red brought books, of course. One of the things Silent was most conscious of, in those early days, was their crushing ignorance; it still haunted them now, even with an internet connection and the whole digital half-world to drown in. What happened, Keller?

She smiled a bright, cold smile that let Silent know she was counting how many times they interrupted her, and that this count had a definite and hard upper limit.

"Officially, he was recruiting," she said. "I assume he told you about the Battle Tree?" Silent nodded. Red stepped away from the Champion role as soon as it had given him the assurance of a future that he'd needed; his latest project was some kind of battle facility in Alola, lending them his stardom to help it get started. "Well, it's for that. There's to be a Sinnish season; I think he and Blue wanted a few big-name Sinnish professionals. There was talk of their Champion making an appearance. He was in Jubilife, meeting people, and didn't show up for an appointment. They found him later that day, in some dismal little seaside town a few miles away."

Silent thought of the south coast of Kanto, the only shores they'd ever known. The gentle water, the long alabaster curve of the beaches, interrupted by a sticky black lake of clotting blood. You could die on those beaches. They'd seen it. But somehow, they couldn't map Red's body onto these particular contours.

Who did it? they asked, trying to picture a face.

"We don't know." Keller shrugged. "Someone with an axe to grind. Red's not exactly an easy target, and they managed to leave one of his partners alive without getting killed by it. It suggests a professional, which itself suggests Red might have had ulterior motives for going to Sinnoh in the first place."

This would make it problematic for Silent to hunt them down. Not that it would stop them. The moment Keller had told them it was murder, they'd known that their immediate future contained a long red road dripping down a mountainside towards the perpetrator. They had a strong stomach and a stronger arm; if these things couldn't be used to pull justice still-beating from the killer's chest, Silent wasn't sure what good they were.

They chewed the tip of one blunt, nailless thumb, then pulled a pack of Camels from their jacket pocket. Keller raised an eyebrow, though Silent was sure she must have seen them smoke before; the two containment squad men just looked disconcerted.

What happens now? they asked, lighting it with a weak Will-O-Wisp cupped in one hand.

"Red is considered a national treasure. And he does still work with the Indigo League, when we need him. Largely off the books; it's all quite tediously secretive. The Kantan government feels – and the League, of which you and I are a part, agrees – that it would be prudent to embed one of our own agents in the Sinnish investigation. I understand they're leaning quite hard on the Sinnish authorities for cooperation." That white, wintry smile again. "Shouldn't be an issue. I don't know how closely you follow international politics down here, but Kanto is quite good at throwing its weight around."

Silent didn't know that, but they weren't surprised. Everything they'd experienced of Kanto had shown that it considered itself a powerful country. A large fish in a very small pond, to the outside observer like you or I, but Silent didn't have the distance to know this.

"I won't be managing this operation, of course." A coil of Silent's smoke ventured too close to Keller's face; she wrinkled her nose minutely and leaned her head back an inch or so. "That will be my counterpart in External Affairs, Will Simony. Perhaps you know him; he also serves in the Elite Four during the challenge season. Still, I've asked him to keep me informed, and I'll pass on whatever his agent finds to you."

Silent smoked in silence all through her monologue, flexing their patience as if it were a muscle that could be tempered. Only when they were sure she was done, and that she wouldn't add this to her count of interruptions, did they speak.

Send me too.

This time, Keller raised both eyebrows. Next to her, Vice tensed and cracked open his long, hooked beak, scenting violence in the air.

"Red always said you were funny," said Keller mildly, placing a hand on his shoulder and easing him a step back. "I don't think that's gong to happen, Silent."

I need to know―

"No, you need to kill them. Isn't that right?" Something danced in her eyes for a moment, the way a volcarona might before it turns the world to flame. "Forgive me, but I'm not going to send a national secret to another country to embark on a killing spree. You'll understand how this is more or less the exact opposite of my job."

Silent snorted, smoke puffing from their nostrils.

I'll go anyway, they said. You can't stop me―

"Yes, we can, and if you think otherwise you've been alone down here too long." Keller's nostrils flared a little, as if in answer to their own. "Besides, you can't get to Sinnoh alone. There's sea travel involved. A border to cross."

Silent kicked gently off the floor, rising two feet on air warping blue-purple with the force of their psionics.

You've only seen what I can do in your files. There was no pride in their voice; this was simply a fact. They had put long years of work into chiselling their passions down into a smooth, implacable calm. I can cross oceans and I am very good at killing.

The two guards' hands moved in unison, left to their poké balls and right to their pistols. Not much threat, but perhaps it made them feel better, just as it made Vice feel better to crouch and hiss.

"Yes, yes, you're great and mighty," said Keller, with an air of put-upon patience. "But you're also an international incident waiting to happen. Sending an agent is permissible; Kanto has a stake in the fate of her favourite son. Sending you is an act of war."

She still didn't get it. Maybe humans couldn't; maybe Silent ought to have been speaking to Vice. If someone had stabbed Keller, he would have held them down with his mind and savaged them with beak and claw; Silent knew this without needing to ask. When your human is at risk, you will forget the civilisation they trained into you and respond as an animal.

My partner has been murdered, they said. You should know what that means.

A long silence, punctured by the distant chugging of the generator and the carefully even breath of the two containment squad men. Keller's brow furrowed; Silent's cigarette transmuted itself slowly into a slender ashen finger.

"Fascinating," she said, at length. "We weren't sure you had it in you."

This is not an answer, Keller.

She sighed, brushing a lock of hair that wasn't really out of place back into position.

"I've made use of the partner instinct before," she said. "It's rather useful for getting our contained pokémon under control. So believe me, Silent, I understand what you mean."

But.

"But," she agreed. "But you are a national secret and a homicide risk."

Silent flicked away their cigarette and sent it down to the ashtray with a minor flexion of their psionics.

Give me an answer, they said. Or I'm going alone, without a League agent to rein me in.

Keller smiled a third time, colder and brighter still. They'd pushed her further than most people dared to, but Silent had always suspected she liked that as much as she disliked it. Tyranny was not in her nature; it was simply thrust upon her by the weaker personalities that surrounded her.

"Give me two hours," she replied. "One to think, one to talk to Will. This is an order, not a request."

Silent narrowed their eyes.

Two hours, they repeated.

"I'm sure you can spare the time from your busy schedule." Keller raised a hand; the two guards stepped away from the wall like two limbs of the same creature. "Wait here. We have people watching the exits."

She left without waiting for an answer. Vice lingered for a moment, drawing himself up to his full height, but even on the ground Silent was taller, so he settled on spitting out a low, threatening honk before stalking out after her.

Silent watched him go, and the guards after, and then they listened to their retreating footsteps, and then when they were sure no one could possibly hear they floated back down to the ground and took all the skin off their knuckles against the wall.

Two hours is a long time, on a day like that. Silent sat in the chair Red had had altered for them, smoking and staring at the baritone guitar hovering in the air before them; their thick, three-fingered hands could never have managed the strings, but their mind was sharp and precise. They picked out a note, then a chord progression, then decided they hated it and tried again. This time was better. The next time was worse. The time after that was something stolen from a record Red had brought them earlier that year, the one where they'd first encountered baritone guitar in the first place, and then they felt the present moment extending in segments toward the past like a telescope and closed their eyes.

"I found this while I was in Unova," Red signed. His silence was legendary, though it had a prosaic enough explanation. But this is not his story. "Oceanator. American, so it's in Galish and I barely understand any of it, but it sounds like something you would like. I asked what they had playing on the shop stereo and the woman on duty talked for five minutes about how good it is."

Underneath the shrink-wrap and the cardboard, the LP was the soft orange of an apricot; Red always chose coloured wax, where possible. Silent's colour vision was poor enough that these things didn't matter to them, but they never told him that. The implication that he believed their life should be beautiful was a soft, rare treasure they held close to their chest.

They sat there listening together, Red with his coffee and Silent with their cigarette. If anyone had been there to witness these moments, they would have understood their partnership immediately: their twin presences echoed one another like two rests between three notes, invisible and indispensable. Silent remembered that Red closed his eyes somewhere during the second track, around the moment when the vocalist had said that anything could happen without needing a reason, and didn't open them again until the last note faded.

"How did you like it?" he signed.

"You never choose badly," Silent replied. Their signs were as clumsy as their hands, but they liked the honesty of it, with Red. "Sometimes strangely, but not badly. Thank you."

He smiled with all his fragile human teeth. Silent had been shocked to learn that they don't grow back, that the two his candy addiction destroyed would stay lost forever.

"I thought so. You didn't move the whole time, except to turn it over." He indicated their cigarette, forgotten in the ashtray somewhere at the height of the fourth track. "That's all I ever aim for."

Silent believed him. But anything can happen, and it doesn't need a reason why, and so seven months later their friend was stabbed to death in the icebound heart of a Sinnish winter.

They opened their eyes. The guitar was still hovering in front of them, squawking dismally, two of its strings shorn in two and hanging loosely from the bridge. They growled and lifted it from the air by hand, inspecting it for any further damage; there was a chip or two in the fingerboard where their mind had pressed too hard, but nothing that would put it permanently out of commission. Fortunately. It was still new, and they had a feeling that nobody was going to buy them musical instruments any more, or take them in for repairs if they broke.

"Anything can happen," they signed to themself. "No reason why."

They thought about putting on the record, to hear the thought echoed back at them. But when they saw in their mind's eye their hands moving over the record, the liner slipping free and the tone arm descending, they found they couldn't move at all. They were still there when Keller returned, without her honour guard or any accompaniment but Vice.

"Come with me," she said, beckoning. "You're going to the Indigo Plateau."

Most of the time, Silent was transported in their ball, a heavy custom-made machine with a master ball's innards and bisharp steel plating on the outside. In order to take them to the League doctors, Red had caught them in a cheap black-and-pink plastic ball, part of the Silph anniversary range, that had appealed to his child sense for the shiny. Silent could have broken out of it in under a minute; this was a security risk; the League had remedied it; long years had worn down the indignity to a cold, resentful resignation.

They curled tight around themself in the dark and turned Red's ball over in their fingers. It was small enough to be forced into the killer's mouth; they imagined it happening, listened hard to the crack of broken tooth as they jammed it in and expanded it to full size, felt the plastic splinter as they started working the face with their fists. Eventually it would break enough for the killer to scream. But it wouldn't matter. There wouldn't be anybody listening.

Silent had not killed a human in over twenty years, and not intentionally in twenty-seven. They had promised Red they never would again. If he'd been around to see them, they understood, he would have reminded them of that now.

"I'm sorry, Red," they signed, as all around them the helicopter roared on to the north. "My life isn't as beautiful as you thought."

The Indigo Plateau: once the capital of the old Tohjo Empire, before the succession muddied and the Johto side took its chance to break free. It's important, I believe, to be aware of these things – to consider why Johto and Kanto share a League, but the higher echelons are almost always uniformly Kantan. It is useful for Johto to have an avenue of access to at least one branch of Kantan power. It suits the Kantan temperament to pretend that, at least on the important level of pokémon affairs and other such preternatural phenomena, they still have some hold on their former possession.

You'll have to forgive me: these are my thoughts, not Silent's. If they had any opinions of their own, once they arrived at Indigo Palace and were finally released from their confinement, it was only that they were glad of the chance to stretch their legs.

Where is this? they asked, cracking each of their necks in turn and looking around. They'd never seen anything like it, though you or I could have easily identified it as a conference room, somewhere in the endless back offices that supported the League as a mushroom's hungry roots do its cap.

"Backstage," said Keller succinctly. She was sitting at the far end of the table, Vice crouched as usual at her side. No guards in here, but Silent could sense simple animal mindprints beyond the curtained windows and smell the charred, musky odour of arcanine. The pokémon of choice for law enforcers the world over: tractable, powerful, and comfortable with regular changes of master. "It's been decided that Red's partner, particularly one capable of speech and finely tuned to his mindprint, might prove to be a uniquely useful asset in this investigation."

Silent put Red's ball back in their pocket and took out their cigarettes.

Did you persuade them, or did they persuade you?

"Put those bloody things away before you set off the fire alarm. We had a drill on Monday and that was painful enough." She paused. "And yes, I may have had a hand in it. Not," she added immediately, "because I think it's a good idea. Not even because I think you'll make it to Sinnoh on your own if we say no. I am sending you because if we refuse you and you realise you can't do it alone, I suspect you're going to start leaving headless bodies on the front steps of the Indigo Palace like my sister-in-law's cat."

She was right, but Silent didn't like to admit it. The idea of being so thoroughly understood by someone they so thoroughly disliked felt like an insult.

Are you quite done? they asked.

"No." The lines of Keller's face deepened. "Here are the rules. You are going to pose as the agent's partner pokémon. This means you are not going to talk, you are not going to smoke, you are not going to wear that jacket, you are not going to walk around with your headphones on, and you are absolutely not going to kill anyone. You are going to stick close to the agent and assist as required, conferring with them by private telepathy only. If I hear that you've crossed these lines, you are coming back to Kanto and directly to the containment facility. Is that understood?"

Silent made her wait a moment before answering, just to prove that they could.

It's cold in Sinnoh, they said. I'm wearing my jacket. Besides, I need the pockets.

Vice hissed, the crystal in his forehead flickering strange colours. Golduck can't understand verbal telepathy, but they can pick up on tone, and Silent's did not meet his approval.

"What for?" asked Keller, in a tone of voice that suggested she had already considered every possible answer and found them wanting.

I need music and I need nicotine. If it'll satisfy you, I won't indulge in either in public, but I am not going to live like an animal any more than you would.

Her mouth compressed itself into a thin, sour line.

"Acceptable," she said. "But the agent carries them for you. You don't wear your jacket in public."

Fine.

"Good. Do you see, Silent? We can negotiate. I set out my ideal position, you set out yours, we find the compromise."

They didn't answer. There was an answer inside them, deep down in the cyst in which the wild animal of their childhood was sealed, but they stayed true to their name and purpose and let the world move on without it. Red mattered. Finding the person who had taken him from them mattered. Everything else was ash on the wind.

"One more thing, while we're setting out terms," said Keller. "You're a Legend-class pokémon. Needless to say, moving these across national borders unannounced is somewhat frowned upon. You're going to need to restrain yourself. When you crush the heads of those unfortunate stantler you hunt, you give psychics a headache as far away as Fuchsia; pull any similar stunts, and you will draw the attention of the Sinnish government's own psychics, who I can guarantee will not be pleased to see you."

Silent could see no way to argue with that. Low-powered moves, then. Brute force, not telekinesis. It wouldn't be a problem, they were sure. They liked the idea of getting a little blood on their teeth. Someone who would kill a man like Red did not deserve the quick, clean death of their Psystrike.

Acceptable, they said, echoing her. When do I meet this agent?

"This afternoon. I'll have someone take you to one of the gardens to wait, if you really insist on poisoning yourself on League time; once she arrives, you'll have an hour or two to get to know one another before you need to leave for the airport." Keller was not a woman who hesitated often, and she almost didn't now, but Silent was the kind of person who noticed small details. "She's … competent, I suppose, if not who I'd have chosen. Annoying, but dependable in a crisis; she's part of the Blackthorn dragon clan, but not nearly as stuffy as some of her cousins. Their second-best dragonmaster. Although I wouldn't recommend calling her that to her face. It's something of a sore point."

Then what should I call her?

"Clair Serris," said Keller. "You might have heard of her."

Silent had not heard of Clair Serris. Perhaps you have; either way, we ought to consider her now. The way Keller told it, she had been the leader of the Blackthorn pokémon gym, until one year previously the League realised how capably she served the Blackthorn clan as a fixer and moved her into a role that made full use of her skills.

And this is all true, if you look at it from Keller's perspective. But I think you, like me, like to think of yourself as someone who takes the long view – who knows the value of carrying a little history in your back pocket. You'll be interested to learn, if you didn't already know, that the Blackthorn clan is older than Kanto, older even than Tohjo; that the mysteries of their draconian religion are firmly closed to outsiders; that they are resolutely Johtonian in their sympathies. You will definitely have suspicions about how these sorts of things are received by Will Simony and his ilk.

Hold onto these thoughts. You may need them later. But this is still Silent's story, and they wouldn't learn the full truth for quite some time to come. For now, we'll let them meet Clair for themself.

"Silent?"

They unclamped one headphone from their ear, spilling alto sax through the air in a long golden arc. Part of them welcomed the intrusion; there was something about how comfortable it was to curl up beneath this tree and lose themself entirely to the rhythm that didn't sit right with them. When your partner dies, they felt, it should poison every moment of every day, until you bury it for good underneath the perpetrator's skin.

This was a thought for later. For now, there was a shortish woman standing at a wary distance, wearing a cloak and a long, bright ponytail. Some way behind her was a small but menacing kingdra, free-floating a few inches from the ground.

Silent picked themselves up off the grass and cut the music, folding their headphones back up to fit into their pocket. The kingdra wound her tail around the stem of a nearby bush, rooting herself in readiness for a fight, but they ignored her. Kingdra are slow on land, even buoyed up by dragon energy; Silent had every confidence they could take her, if needed.

You must be Serris.

The woman in the cloak tilted her head back slightly, chin jutting in a pugnacious sort of way that Silent suspected was covering her surprise.

"Clair," she said. "Serris is … well, it's Clair. And this is Lune."

The kingdra blinked, transparent membranes slipping sideways across her eyes.

All right, Serris.

The angle of her chin steepened.

"Yeah, they said you were hard work," she said. "Thought I'd come meet you alone first. Will's going to brief us in ten minutes."

What was there to be briefed about? Silent didn't understand why the League needed all these words, piled high as plague victims ready to be burned. Red's death was not something that required talk. It required action. All Will had to do was put them on a plane to Sinnoh, and yet somehow they were still here, feeling their way through these endless conversations like the Minotaur through his labyrinth.

All right, they said. What will he say?

"What we know about Red, I guess. Who we'll be speaking to when we get there. Where to start looking. The usual." Clair scratched at her cheekbone. "Maybe not the usual, for you. I guess they probably just aim you at things."

It was true, but she didn't have to say it. Silent snorted softly to themself and lit a cigarette.

"Never seen a pokémon that smokes before," she said, eyebrows colliding somewhere in the middle of her forehead.

You have now. They paused. Did Keller tell you?

"She said I'd have to carry your things for you. Didn't tell me what those things were." She gestured at the pack, still floating by Silent's elbow. "Well, are you gonna offer me one or what?"

You don't smoke, said Silent, not knowing what she was trying to do but instinctively distrusting it.

"You don't know that."

Silent sniffed deeply: warm human skin, shoe polish, the various chemical spices humans used to forget that they were living creatures that sweated and shat. No hint of tobacco.

Yes, I do. I can smell it.

Clair shifted her weight back on one leg, this new piece of information visibly soaking through her like blood into dry dirt. The drape of her cloak shifted along with her, revealing a short knife in an inscribed sheath on her hip. A surprise, to Silent; they'd never met a member of the clan before, didn't know the symbology of cloak and dagger.

"Well," Clair said, scowling. "Gimme one anyway. It'll be funny, you can watch me choke on it."

This seemed more and more like a trap the longer Silent considered it, but they weren't good enough at talking to people to see where the snare lay.

Fine, they said, grudgingly. Here.

The pack floated toward her, ejecting one cigarette in slow motion; Clair snatched it awkwardly between two fingers and held it with all the grace of a teenager about to smoke her first joint.

"Got a light?"

They lit it with their palm and watched impassively as she filled her lungs with smoke as far as they would go. There was no choking, which was a shame. No League agents had ever retched at their feet before, and the idea had a lot to recommend it.

Neither of them spoke. All around them, the cut-glass whistles of the bullfinches rose in the chilly November air; and all around that, the Indigo League hummed and whirred and stared out of windows waiting for coffee machines to finish; and all around that, the crumbling fingers of the Silverblack Mountains grasped in their slow, doomed way at the suggestion of sunlight above.

"Look," said Clair. "You don't have to like me. Lots of people don't. I get it."

She did not, but Silent chose not to explain it.

"This isn't what I wanted, either," she went on. "But here we are." She jabbed the cigarette at them for emphasis. She was given to movements like this, jabs and juts and the other outward spines of inner prickliness. "Red was one of the good ones. Even I know that. So let's just … get through this, all right? Figure out what happened and who's responsible."

Silent considered the proposal. It was more than they'd expected, if also less than they wanted.

I'm going to make them suffer, they said, testing her resolve.

Clair sighed and trod out the back half of her cigarette.

"I'm supposed to stop you doing that."

You can certainly try.

Her lips parted slightly on one side, too slightly to be a smile. Behind her, Lune tensed, taking some subtle cue from the line of her shoulders or the curvature of her spine.

"You know," said Clair, "that cig was fucking disgusting."

Silent snorted and took a long, pointed drag on their own that took it down to the filter.

"Whatever." She shook her head. "C'mon then, killer. We've got a briefing to attend."

Killer. There was something to that. Something honest.

All right, they said, slipping Red's ball from their pocket and turning it in their hand like a prayer bead. Lead on, Serris.

"Clair."

But they didn't dignify that with an answer.

Do you believe that certain people deserve to die? The time has been when I passed judgement freely and recklessly, like any young person convinced they alone have the keys to the future in their hands. Now I try to hold back, to consider all perspectives. The person who killed Red is still a person. So too is Silent, and they've spilled far more blood than most, often for very little reason at all.

They certainly did believe that some people deserve death. I can't say I would have made the choices they did, but of course someone like me would never have faced those choices at all. They had skin in the game; I have a safe, warm home, with no threats on the horizon and no one trying to pull my strings. No, I can't judge. But I can tell their story, and you can listen, and in the meantime we'll leave them here, in this garden on a crisp winter's afternoon, jazz in their headphones and a direction in their heart.

Undoubtedly there's more to be done. But I think you owe them that much, at least.

This week in Silent's headphones: Oceanator's 'From the Van'; Snowboy's 'Funky Djembe'; Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

Next time: a tenuous accord, an old flame, a problem with the clocks.