Chapter 11

Ow-Ow Tears

Kyle had lived an eventful life.

No. Hold up. Kyle still, to this day, lived an eventful life. Ornery as he was, he'd not died, even if the general consent at this point was that he should have.

He'd been stabbed, yeah. A bunch of times, even, but never fatally.

He'd been shot. Again, a bunch of times. Gotta perfect those near-death experiences.

He'd also been defenestrated more times than he cared to admit, had voluntarily exited moving vehicles, involuntarily exited moving vehicles, and had even yeeted his parachute-lacking ass out of a chopper. That'd been a once-in-a-lifetime thing and it had been a fucking blast. Literally. There'd been an explosion.

Yet, to this day, he could count the time he'd broken a bone on one hand, which he thought was pretty damn impressive.

His shoulders though? He'd dislocated them often enough to have him wonder if they were detaching on purpose; just, like, hop out of their sockets and set his arms free, the bastards.

It sucked, okay?

Thankfully, Fi was about as good at popping them in as he was at popping them out. Except it hurt. Like a bitch. And Fi? Fi didn't do the whole on three thing, where you were supposed to brace yourself for the agony.

Or two.

Or, you know, at all.

"Mo-ther-fu—" Kyle squeezed through clenched teeth, his eyes tightly shut and leaking sad little ow-ow tears. "Have some fucking mercy, Fi."

"Wha, wha," she mocked from his side and then moved on to manhandle the arm attached to his shoulder. That's what it felt like, anyway, even if Fi was about the most gentle of field medics who'd ever had the displeasure of patching him up.

"Be nice," Kyle moped. "I'm suffering over here."

"And you'll be doing much more of that if you don't hold it still. You need a sling."

Kyle scoffed. "Just kiss it better—"

"Crane. You got batted in the arm. Bad."

"Gee. I didn't notice."

"Bad, Crane. It may not be proper fractured, but I'll eat a hat if your humerus isn't at least cracked. So, if you don't—"

"Hey, my jokes are fine," he cut in.

"I swear to God, Crane."

A snort snatched up their attention and they both looked over to where their surprise benefactor was busy setting a chair upright. They'd knocked that over when they'd barged in earlier.

Kyle's manners gave a sad whine. That hadn't been the end of it; they'd done a real number on the small space, what with how Aiden had been trashing around like a fucking maniac.

Hakon— said benefactor —traded them a smile from under his bushy moustache. A smile which Kyle had filed under genuine enough already earlier, back when the dust had settled and he'd told them they were welcome to lick their wounds in his "humble home".

Eh.

Kyle had seen humbler. While tight, the space had everything you could possibly need; from thick wooden walls to barred windows and unwashed curtains to keep the sunlight out. Or neighbours from spying, Kyle figured. If there were any. Neighbours. Kyle scuffed his feet over the ground and threw the sunlight lancing out from between the curtains in wide beams a glare.

A subtle glare.

The humble home also had weapons, which were mounted only one quick grab away from the entrance: a baseball bat, an axe hanging from a hook, and a machete right next to it. Far as interior design went, the room had a table (which Kyle currently parked his ass on since it was exactly the right height). Two (previously toppled) chairs. A makeshift kitchen (shelf, provisions, tools, heating plate). And a messy snooze nook in post-apocalypse chic. That was to say someone had stacked a thin mattress over two side-by-side pallets and thrown a bunch of moth-eaten sheets and pillows over it all. Then they'd plonked down a single upright UV rod encased in wire on a low 'bed'side table.

The light was on.

Much like the ordinary (non-UV) light fixture mounted to the ceiling. Both were wired up. Which meant electricity in this here humble home.

Anyway.

Kyle disliked the UV rod.

Politely. From a distance.

The sleeping nook was currently occupied. They'd dumped Aiden there after he'd passed out, though not before Hakon had covered the mattress and sheets up with a plastic tarp. Fair. Volatile bites liked to bleed. Profusely. And who wanted stranger-gunk on their bedsheets?

Not Kyle. No. He preferred his own gunk (and no, not in the whatever unnecessarily dirty way that'd just come out).

Moving on.

Yeah, his thoughts were riled up. They couldn't stand still for a fucking second and kept prancing off into whatever direction they so pleased, even if what he needed them to do right now was to fall in line and let him think.

Think about why they'd come here: for answers to Spike's mystery, for a lead on the elusive V. Waltz, for Aiden's wayward sister, and for a new lease on his and Fi's life.

In the exact opposite order. Naturally.

What he didn't need right now was to get distracted by UV-rods, loopy thoughts, and, yeah, by more questions, such as the curious case of one Aiden-sleepy-pants who'd skipped most of the usual incubation period of a typical Volatile bite.

Kyle sighed, gripped the table with his still functioning hand, and whipped his thoughts into order.

Get it together, dude.

He needed to get his priorities straight. Itemise the suck. Make a plan; at least a pretend one.

So, uh, number one: The compound Hakon had jabbed Aiden with. Yeah, good start. That nugget made it right to the top, but that didn't mean he'd run headfirst at it.

Number two: The slim, black electronic bracelet on Hakon's wrist; and all the identical ones Kyle had seen people wear at the refurbished church where he'd gotten front seats to an attempted lynching. It looked familiar. In the kind of way that made Kyle's skin itch. They were markers, he figured. Infection Trackers. What-have-you gadgets. He wrapped that up for later, too.

Number three: Hakon himself.

Kyle's eyes cut back to their host, who'd finished setting all his chairs up straight, but still gave Fi and him plenty of room. He'd wandered over to a stubby dresser near the snooze nook and had begun to root around in a drawer. When he turned back to them, he carried a faint smile tucked under his thick moustache, along with a folded-up piece of cloth. The smile was reasonably disarming. Maybe even genuine. But they'd only just met, so what the fuck did Kyle know?

Not a whole lot, that was what.

The dude was French, that much was evident. He was also about Fi's age, give or take a few years, and reasonably quick on his feet, but none of that meant jack. What was his deal?

Why'd he help a bunch of strangers?

"Your friend is lucky," Hakon commented when he noticed Kyle's attention had shifted to him.

"Yeah?"

"First he survives a bite," Hakon said, "and then he lives through the inhibitors? Lucky."

Oh. Yeah. That. Not only had Hakon helped them get away from a mob, he'd also shared something entirely too valuable with them and he'd done so without bartering. No gotta give me your kidney first.

There were about a hundred tiny alarm bells tripping over themselves in his already overcrowded brain and they were all a pain in the ass to snooze. But snooze them he did, for now, and then he swiped up the spent injector. He'd kept it near, right by his hip when he'd sat down.

"That's what you call them?" Kyle wagged the injector at Hakon. "Inhibitors?"

Hakon nodded and Kyle turned the injector between his fingers. It had a flattened white case with a red tip and it carried enough baggage to make Kyle's arm (the one not already throbbing) ache. The ache was distant. Back in time, kinda distant. A memory, really; an unpleasant one which crawled under his skin like a slick worm.

But, baggage or not, this stupid thing was exactly what he'd hoped to find. Why he'd convinced Fi to go North, rather than South, and here it was. In his hands.

Empty. Because Aiden had needed it.

Kyle rolled the injector until he found its barcode, a batch number, and the drug's designation: HMV-5.

Hope rattled its ratty cup at him.

Yep. This was it.

Kyle rotated the injector one more time and then he stuck it right under Fi's nose, HMV-5 label side up. He didn't say Told you so or We did it, babe, just held it there for her to inspect. Her brows scrunched together. Her lips pulled really tight. And then she looked straight at Hakon.

"Where'd you get it?" she asked.

Hakon's posture straightened. Which was really fucking funny to Kyle, because, yeah, sure, his Paper Tiger could get pretty intense when she wanted to. But, seriously? Look at her. Right now everything on her screamed kitten.

"GRE stockpiles," Hakon said and took another step. It brought him close enough so he could offer Fi the cloth he'd pulled from the drawer, but not close enough to be an immediate threat. An observant French dude then. Kyle took note. "They used to hand them out to their staff as a sort of Hail Mary." He held up the cloth. "This should do for a sling."

Fi swiped up the cloth. "Ta."

And Kyle picked up where she'd left off. "You got any more?"

"No, this was my last. They've been getting more and more difficult to get a hold of over the years."

"And yet," Kyle said, squared his— ow— shoulders and— ow okay, did not fold his arms, Jesus Christ. "And yet," he repeated, "you shared." He pointed the injector at Aiden. "Why'd you do that? Why'd you help us at all? What's your, you know, deal?"

"Let's get to know each other and find out," was Hakon's answer to that. There was about as much commitment to the line as Kyle felt for his sanity. "You're Pilgrims, aren't you?"

Hakon's chin bobbed from Fi to Kyle and then made a quick detour over to Aiden-sleepy-pants.

Yay. Interrogations. My fav.

"Mhm."

"We haven't had Pilgrims visit in a long while." Hakon grabbed one of his recently rescued chairs, pulled it over, and sat right in front of Kyle and Fi. The way he carried himself— and the way he sat, with a bounce in his ass cheeks and wobble in his knees —betrayed a restless kind of energy to the man. An energy which he squarely pointed at them. "Or anyone, for that matter."

"Yeah, well," Kyle said. "Pretty hard to pop in if you plug up all your gates."

Hakon nodded in a nnyyeaaah kinda way, his head bobbing up and down and then a little sideways for good measure. "Sorry about that. We've had a bit of a year."

"A bit of a year, huh? What happened?" Look, Spike, I remembered to ask. Be proud.

"Politics, mostly. Territory disputes. We had a drought two years ago that turned entire fields to dust. After that, people started squabbling. Then dying. And it's been downhill ever since."

"Mh. Summer of thirty-four was pretty shit, yeah, but you'd think you'd want trade if you were running low on food."

"Politics," Hakon repeated, explaining away about ninety percent of Earth's past, present, and future disasters.

"Yeah. Okay— Auuow?"

Fi had returned to fussing with his arm and he'd squeezed about the wimpiest of whimpers. She'd McGyvered a sling out of the cloth Hakon had given her, along with what looked suspiciously much like a thin ladle. Kyle, ever agreeable, submitted to her fussing until she'd braced his arm against his chest and fastened the sling over his shoulder and neck.

All of which she did slowly and carefully and without making a sound.

And that last bit there? The bit where she had to stand on the tips of her toes to get the sling over his neck? He liked that. It allowed him a moment to close his eyes, lean his head to the side, and nudge at her cheek with his nose.

What he got in return was a sharp look. A look he loved so deeply, he had no choice but to smile.

Was it a dopey smile? Yeah. Absolutely. Was Hakon watching the whole thing? Tots. But, c'mon.

Fi huffed, flicked at his nose, and moseyed off to check on Aiden, her pack with all their medical supplies hanging loosely from one of her shoulders.

. . .

Abandoned, Kyle cleared his throat and shifted gears. "You were saying?"

"We plugged our holes as you said, but that goes both ways. No one can come in and no one can leave. And me? I want to leave. So, when I saw the Bazaar hang themselves a pack of Pilgrims, I thought that'd be my chance."

Kyle's right brow kicked up into his forehead. "You wanna trade Villedor for the territories? Aren't you lot always on about how this is the last bit of civilisation still standing and we out there in the— watchu call them?" Kyle twirled the injector near his ear. "Outlands? We're just a bunch of unwashed savages who live in huts and eat worms?"

"We do eat worms," said Fi from over where she'd begun to turn Aiden's wounded shoulder up.

"Shush."

"And bugs. They got crunch," she added — only for Aiden-sleepy-pants to wake up.

The kid gave a sudden jolt.

It was a kind of jolt Kyle recognized, vividly; the sort where you got shaken out of unexpectedly restful sleep only to realise something was about to eat you. Maybe that something was a crocodile. Or a mountain lion. Or— more recently —a zombie. Or, you know, just a cat.

Either way, you woke up ready to throw fucking hands and that meant Aiden committed to the fatal mistake of rising and lunging right at Fi.

Four things followed nearly instantaneously.

One, Hakon made to get up. To help, Kyle assumed. Which was pretty dope of the guy.

Two, Kyle threw his good arm up in a hold on sorta way.

Three, Hakon sat back down.

Four, so did Aiden.

Though not at all voluntarily.

A Pilgrim slept light.

The Pilgrim who didn't, slept through their death; the unusual rustle of leaves; the footfalls; the snap of a branch; the soft creak of hinges as a door opened; or the creak of a floorboard before the inevitable.

The sleep Aiden woke from was deep.

He came to with his heart already knocking against his throat and the overwhelming realisation that he was not alone. Someone had snuck up on him.

A Pilgrim slept light. Or died.

Aiden's first instinct was to get his attacker off their feet. He shoved himself up, lunged—

—and then his arm wasn't where it should be and he was thrown forward. His face landed in… plastic? Aiden wheezed. Spluttered. And tried to rise again, but that got him nowhere. His arm wrenched back, hard, and a sharp point of pressure dug in deep, right next to his spine.

Both hurt.

A lot.

"You're a handful," his attacker said lightly. She sounded amused.

Aiden blinked dumbly at the plastic and then it all came back to him:

The tunnel.

The Volatile.

The bite.

The seizures. The rope around his neck.

Him. Turning.

Turning.

Except he... hadn't.

He was still very human and with being human came the pain; from the pressure of Zofia's knee on his spine to her tight grip as she bent his arm back, and all the aches that began to bloom over his body as his nerves began to report in on all the damage he'd come away with.

Aiden stared at the plastic squished up against his face and tried to ask her if she could, by any chance, let him go. The moment his lips parted, the stupid plastic got into his mouth though and that was absolutely disgusting, so he spent a moment smacking his mouth and worming uncomfortably under that unnecessarily sharp knee.

A knee that finally lifted, along with the grip on his arm.

Aiden sat.

Which was all well and good, except then he found himself stared at by three people. And Aiden had, in all his life, always tried his best not to be around when the staring started, since that usually meant he'd gotten caught. Stealing. Brawling. Getting into places he shouldn't. You name them, he'd done them.

So what'd he done this time?

Zofia knelt next to him, with one of her pointy knees perched on the plastic tarp, and Crane half-sat, half-leaned on a table across a room which Aiden had no memory of walking into.

As Aiden looked up, his head positively swimming, Crane lifted a hand and pointed at him. In that same hand, he held a—

—syringe.

Aiden's fingers curled.

Yeah. Okay. Everything was coming back now; even the bit where he'd been rushed into the room and how he'd nearly knocked his own teeth out on the floor.

Crane pointed the syringe directly at Aiden, wagging it twice.

"Aiden," he said, before jabbing the syringe sharply to the side and at the man seated on a plain wooden chair. "Hakon. Hakon, Aiden." The syringe wagged back and forth accordingly. "He saved your life, kid. Say thanks."

"Thanks," Aiden parrotted like an absolute idiot. Irritation ballooned in his chest, quick and merciless, and he considered— briefly —to get up right then and there and walk out the door.

Except he wasn't sure his feet would carry him just yet. So he stayed where he was: on a plastic tarp, getting stared at.

"Nonsense." Hakon waved dismissively. "It was a team effort. Your friends here were very stubborn about keeping you alive."

Aiden glanced from Crane to Fi.

Her left shoulder twitched up in a faint shrug. "It's a character flaw. He gets attached."

Grunt, was Crane's reply.

And Aiden (still freshly irritated and generally out of his depth if he was going to be perfectly honest with himself) let his mouth do the talking before his wits caught up. "He was going to leave me in the tunnel."

That was how he remembered it anyway. Also, his throat hurt. A lot. Like he'd been gargling sharp rocks.

"You cocked up and that put him in a mood," Zofia said. She also seated herself closer to Aiden and ducked around him to look at his stinging back. "But Crane wouldn't have left you. He's a big softy."

"Crane is also right here. And banged up. And hungry. And grouchy. So you both wanna be nice now, yeah?"

Zofia rolled her eyes, which Aiden caught because his neck kept swivelling left and right trying to keep up. Then she jabbed a finger at him and said, flatly: "Take the shirt off."

Now that— that'd come out of nowhere. Aiden blinked. "What?"

"Your shirt," she repeated. "You were bitten by a Volatile. Have you got any idea how awful their mouths are? Or any Biter mouth for that matter. If we don't clean it, it'll be sepsis that gets you, not the virus, and considering everything you've put us through that'd be rude, don't you think?"

"…right," he mumbled and fumbled to do as she'd said.

Crane and Hakon carried on with a conversation which Aiden had missed all the context for. Which was just as well, he had to focus on the shirt anyway since it was a lot harder to get out of than he'd expected. He'd barely gotten it up to his chin when, suddenly, a detail sprang into focus that he'd entirely missed at first. Someone had taken his pack from him (his belongings, his life) and, for a moment, Aiden felt panic knock. He looked around.

"Where's my—"

"Here," Zofia said, without him having to finish his sentence, and twisted her thin and reedy body around. She pulled his pack forward. It was in a sorry state, with half of it soaked in drying blood. "We didn't open it. Now, your shirt. Before I get the scissors."

The threat sounded genuine enough and so Aiden kept struggling his aching arms out of a piece of clothing that'd long ago outlasted its welcome on this cruel, cruel word. Which was to say it had holes inside old, patched holes, and, to make things worse, it hurt like a bitch as it peeled from his back.

Once done, he slumped forward, the grimy, bloody shirt bundled in his hands as they landed in his lap. His fingers dug into the damp fabric and he looked stubbornly down.

Aiden did not like being stared at.

He liked being exposed even less.

Who did?

While Zofia rummaged around in her pack and began to set out whatever it was she'd use to clean his wound, he kept his eyes turned down and tried not to think of how many scars he carried on his torso; most of which were badges he'd earned because he'd not yet learned a lesson he hadn't even known he was supposed to look out for.

He turned his forearms up, to where punctures textured his skin.

His oldest scars. Collected at five years old. He'd done nothing wrong then, except for being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people.

Aiden's brow furrowed. There, near hidden among the old, scarred holes, was a fresh welt. He rubbed at it with his thumb.

"Why didn't I turn?" he asked finally and looked up. He'd interrupted Crane mid-sentence, but if that'd annoyed the gruff Pilgrim (who had an arm in a sling, as Aiden now noticed), he didn't let it show. He only looked at Aiden. "I've seen enough people go before," Aiden continued, "and no one came back from where I was. Not even with an Antizin shot." He raised his arm and tapped at the fresh puncture. "What did you give me?"

Hakon opened his mouth, though Crane was quicker.

"Antizin on steroids. Kinda. It's nasty stuff." Crane held up the syringe, pointing it straight up. When he spoke again, his voice had a deceptively cheerful cadence to it. "Side effects include, but are not limited to, excruciating pain upon injection, exploding hearts, anger management issues, or a straight trip to the munchies."

Aiden stared blankly. And then twitched when cold fingers gingerly landed on his shoulder.

"Not literal exploding hearts," Zofia said. She held a small, cloudy plastic bottle in her hand, which she pointed at his shoulder. Its cap dangled freely from a short length of string. Then she pushed his shoulder forward, making Aiden hunch more than he'd had before. "He means cardiac arrest. A heart attack." She squeezed the bottle.

Disinfectant. It stung. A lot. Aiden's teeth ground together. His eyes filled with tears. But, no. He didn't make a noise. Not again. He'd screamed enough the last few hours. Enough was enough.

The disinfectant ran down his back in a cold trickle.

"But if you live through the injection," she continued, "they get ahead of the THV virus. Something about strengthening your blood-brain barrier and changing how the virus interacts with your cells. It's no cure, of course. You're still infected. Just not, you know. Dead." She'd moved on to dabbing a clean square of cloth against his back. The touch was light, but he winced anyway.

"You were holding out on me," Hakon said, his thick French accent laid on thick. "You knew?"

"Sorta?" Back across the room, Crane flipped the syringe into the air, caught it deftly, and then tossed it the short distance over to Hakon.

Hakon snatched it up with a precise grab.

"It's why we're here. For a stash of your, ah—" Crane raised his one good arm and wrapped air quotes around the next word. "—inhibitors."

"Hold on," Aiden blurted, "I thought you were looking for Waltz?"

The cloth on his back suddenly pressed down hard enough to have Aiden nearly bite down on his own tongue.

Hakon sat back on his chair, evidently, surprised (even if only briefly). Which told Aiden two things: one, he knew Waltz, or he'd at least heard of him; two, neither Crane nor Zofia had mentioned Waltz's name while Aiden had been unconscious.

"Waltz?" Hakon looked between the three of them. "What do you want with Waltz?"

"Talk to the man," Crane said quickly, even as his brows slanted down in a blatant scowl. A scowl that he aimed squarely at Aiden. "That's all. Talk."

The cloth on Aiden's back stopped scrubbing (that's what it'd felt like, anyway) and left him feeling sore. Or peeled. Yeah, peeled. She'd peeled all the skin off, probably. And she wasn't done. Zofia balled the now bloody cloth up, grabbed another one, and suddenly had a slender finger under his chin.

All the while, Aiden tried to keep his eyes on Crane. To hold his stare. His scowl. Which Zofia ruined by turning his head her way instead, breaking the stare so she could give him a quick, sharp look. Okay. So he should have kept his mouth shut. But it wasn't his fault he'd been unconscious and unaware of what they'd shared and what they hadn't.

Plus, he was here for Waltz. And how was he supposed to find him without asking for him?

Zofia's finger pushed up. Aiden's chin followed. Soon, all he could look at was a dusty wooden ceiling no one had bothered to clean for years.

"Good luck with that," Hakon said off to the side. "Waltz isn't the type to make himself available for just anyone. Plus, I'm sorry to say, but, you're on the wrong side of town."

"What do you mean?" Crane. "With us being on the wrong side of town, I mean."

"It's a long story."

"We're not going anywhere."

Aiden huffed. He certainly wasn't. Not right now, anyway, with Zofia swiping a fresh square of cloth (this time pre-soaked in disinfectant) along his neck. She wasn't being gentle about it either, pressing down hard enough to really remind him that he'd had a rope strung around his neck only a short while ago. And that rope had left him with, well, rope burn.

Though Aiden didn't know what was worse: the insistent burn of the disinfectant, or the mortified flush of having another living, breathing human being so unusually close, he thought the world had begun to shrink and would soon finish what the rope had ultimately failed at.

He set his jaw. And winced. Over and over again when the cloth landed.

"You're in Old Villedor right now," he heard Hakon say. "And Old Villedor is Bazaar territory." A pause. "That's the people with the rope."

"Got it."

"Waltz though, he's with the Church, who've got their foothold in the Inner Loop. So, if you want to talk to him, you'll first need passage into the Villedor centre."

"And that's a problem, because...?"

"Because you have shit timing and because you don't have Biomarkers."

Zofia slipped around to Aiden's other side. Aiden, his breathing gradually shallowing out, strained his eyes to try and look at what she was doing, but only managed to catch a look at her scarred face. In particular at the heavily pockmarked burn under her hairline, which had an oddly symmetrical look to it. For a moment, he forgot about her proximity and wondered, idly, what lesson she hadn't known about when she'd collected it.

A painful one, he figured.

"Biomarkers," Crane said. "The thing you're wearing, right? I saw them on the mob at the— watchu call it? Bazaar? Yeah, looked like most people there had one, too."

"Everyone there has one. Most holds won't permit access to anyone without a Biomarker and the same goes for using the Villedor metro tunnels."

Zofia's fingers finally stopped applying pressure to his chin and returned to her medical supplies. Right on time for him to see Hakon point vaguely at one of the shack's windows.

"Those tunnels are your only way into the centre. But even if you had Biomarkers, which, you know, you don't, you'd still need to make it past a blockade. Hence, shit timing."

"Fun," Crane said. "But doable. So. How do we get our hands on those markers?"

"You buy them. In the centre."

Crane's head tilted sideways. "Where we can't go."

"Where, presently, no one can go."

"There's gotta be some other way to get our hands on them."

Hakon held up the injector Crane had thrown his way earlier. "Theoretically. The GRE stockpiled biomarkers and inhibitors in their research labs. Most of those were looted years ago, but there are two labs which were never breached. The GRE techs sealed them up tight before they hauled ass, meaning you can't get in without a genuine GRE access key."

Zofia froze where she'd been spooling bandages off a thin roll. Bandages meant for him, he figured, but which she momentarily forgot about. Aiden, curious, noted how her eyes fixed on Crane and how Crane's gaze shifted to her. Then her left shoulder hopped up in a minuscule shrug, which Crane returned with an equally faint nod.

Then he dug into his own pack sitting on the table with him and pulled out a narrow leather satchel bound with an orange string. He loosened the string, flipped the satchel open, and pulled out a square cylinder about two or three centimetres in width and twenty-or-so long.

He lifted it, casually almost, and gave it a lazy wag.

"You mean one of these?"

Hakon stared. Blatantly. "Where the fuck did you get that from?"

Crane's lips twitched into a crooked smile. "Oh. That? That little thing?" He wagged the cylinder again. "That's none of your business."

Hakon snorted, shook his head, and smiled a smile so bright, Aiden could see a flash of teeth behind his beard.

"That's fair, Mister Crane. Then let me make you an offer." He leaned forward, his hands planted on his knees. "I'll help you get those Biomarkers. I'll even be your tour guide until you've finished… what did you call it? Talking to Waltz. And in return, I get a share of the markers you don't need."

Crane rose to his feet. "—and we help you get a change of scenery."

Hakon nodded.

"Deal," Crane said, shoved the oddly shaped key into a pocket, and snatched up Hakon's hand in a firm grip.