The tea was thin.
Fourth steeping, maybe fifth.
Cole could see straight through to the bottom of the cup where a few brown fragments still clung to the porcelain.
Maren set her own cup down without drinking and folded her hands on the table between them.
“I need to know if there’s anything,” she said.
“Anything real.”
Cole kept his hands around the cup.
The warmth was mostly gone, but it gave him something to hold.
The front room was small enough that the table took up most of it two chairs, a shelf against the wall, a narrow window that looked out onto the landing.
Clean.
Spare.
The kind of room you kept when you didn’t have much and couldn’t afford to waste any of it.
“I’m doing everything I can,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Her voice stayed level.
No anger in it, no accusation.
Just the plainness of someone who’d run out of patience for anything but the truth.
Cole looked at her.
Maren’s face was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
The posting had been up for two days.
The whole silo knew by now.
Pell Ott, recommended for cleaning, sentencing to follow upon review.
Inside the month, someone in Records had said.
Maybe less.
“There’s a chance,” Cole said.
“I can’t tell you how good a chance, but it’s real.”
Maren’s hands tightened against each other.
She held his gaze, unflinching.
“You’re not just saying that.”
“No.”
“Because if you’re saying it to be kind, I’d rather you weren’t.
I’d rather know it’s gone and stop waiting for something that isn’t coming.”
Cole set the cup down.
The porcelain made a faint sound against the table, louder than it should have been in the quiet.
“I’m not saying it to be kind.”
Maren closed her eyes.
Breathed in through her nose, slow and deliberate, the way you did when you were trying to hold something together that wanted to come apart.
When she opened her eyes again they were wet, but she didn’t let anything fall.
“What do you need from me?” she asked.
“Nothing.
You don’t have to do anything.”
“There has to be something.”
“There isn’t.”
She shook her head, sharp and final.
“Don’t lie to me about that too.
If you’re doing something, it costs.
Everything costs.
Tell me what you need and I’ll get it.”
The truth was he hadn’t yet worked out what it would take.
Whether the Stacks could give him what he needed, or if the thing he’d have to spend was something he lacked enough of to begin with he couldn’t say.
The only thing he knew for certain was that he’d already decided.
Sometime between the posting and this table, the choice had stopped being a question and started being a fact.
He was going to try.
The shelf behind Maren caught his eye.
Small wooden figures lined up in a row animals, people, shapes he couldn’t name from this angle.
They were worn smooth in places, the kind of wear that came from being handled, not from being old.
A child’s work, maybe.
Careful and uneven and made with enough patience to get the details almost right.
“Pell made those,” Maren said, following his look.
“When he was eight.
Drove our mother half to distraction, always carving something when he was supposed to be working.”
Cole looked at the figures.
A dog.
A bird.
A man with his arms out like he was balancing on something.
“He was good at it.”
“He was good at a lot of things.” Maren’s voice stayed steady, but something in it had gone brittle.
“Never anything useful.
Never anything that kept him out of trouble.”
The knock at the door came exactly when Cole didn’t want it to.
Three sharp raps, businesslike, and then Fenn’s voice from the landing.
“Delivery for Ott.
You ordered it three weeks ago and I’ve been holding it ever since, so if you’re not home I’m leaving it in the stairwell and calling it your problem.”
Maren stood.
Wiped at her face once, fast, and went to the door.
Fenn came in with a crate under one arm and his manifest in the other hand, already talking.
“Two bolts of good fabric, or what passes for good when the looms are running one shift out of three.
Sixty-two flights up from the depot, which I’m billing as seventy because nobody checks and the difference pays for my knees.
You owe me eight chits, or six if you’ve got something worth trading that isn’t another promise to pay later.”
He set the crate down on the table, glanced at Cole, and didn’t miss a beat.
“Didn’t know you were entertaining.
I can come back if you’re in the middle of something.”
“We’re done,” Maren said.
She pulled a small cloth pouch from a drawer and counted out chits onto the table.
“Eight.”
Fenn counted them back, gave a satisfied grunt, and tucked them into his satchel.
He tore the manifest slip free and handed it to her, then pulled a second scrap of paper from his pocket and set it on the table in front of Cole without looking at him.
“Dropped this earlier,” Fenn said.
“Figured you’d want it back.”
He was gone before Cole could say anything, the door clicking shut behind him and his footsteps already fading down the stairwell.
Cole looked at the scrap.
A number written in Fenn’s tight, economical hand.
Just a number.
No context, no explanation.
But Cole knew what it was.
The level where they were holding Pell.
She asked nothing about the paper.
Kept her eyes on the cloth, her attention fixed there, careful and deliberate, giving him the space to put the paper away without her seeing it.
Cole folded it once and slipped it into his pocket.
“I should go,” he said.
Maren made a small sound of acknowledgment.
Stayed facing the crate.
“Thank you for the tea.”
“It wasn’t any good.”
“It was fine.”
She did turn then.
Looked at him straight on, the same way she’d looked at him when she’d asked if there was anything real.
“When you said there’s a chance,” she said.
“Did you mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m going to believe you.
And if it doesn’t work, I’m going to know you tried, and that’ll have to be enough.”
Cole trusted himself with no words after that.
He dipped his chin once and left, pulling the door shut behind him.
The stairwell was empty.
Quiet.
The kind of mid-shift lull when most people were already where they needed to be and the traffic thinned out to nothing.
Cole stood on the landing for a second, his hand still on the rail, feeling the weight of the folded paper in his pocket and the heavier weight sitting in his chest.
The air was cooler here than in Maren’s front room.
He breathed it in, let it settle.
The quiet stretched around him not peaceful, just empty.
The kind of silence that waited for something to fill it.
He’d made a promise.
Not out loud.
Not in words Maren would ever hear repeated back to her.
But he’d made it all the same, and the wound and the want had lined up behind it not like a choice, but like something that had already been decided a long time ago.
The wound had its own gravity.
Always had.
It pulled things toward it whether he willed it or not, and this time he wasn’t going to fight the pull.
He started down.
Counted the landings.
Let the routine of descent settle over him as it always did, automatic and steadying.
Inside the month.
Maybe less.
The clock was not his to set, but the vow was his to keep.
Somewhere between this landing and the next he stopped trying to talk himself out of it and started trying to figure out what it was going to cost.
The Stacks would answer, or they wouldn’t.
Either way, he’d know soon enough.
He had the level number now.
He had Fenn’s silent partnership.
He had Maren’s fragile trust resting on a promise he’d spoken plainly, without softness or comfort to cushion it.
What he lacked was a plan.
That, at least, was a problem he could solve.