And now, at last, I couldn’t avoid Bazso any longer.

I wanted to face him still less.

Unlike Mylera, he knew nothing about my background save that my mother grew up in Lockport (and hence had an excellent taste in whiskey that she’d transmited to her daughter), married an Iruvian, and moved to U’Duasha. Cautious prodding on my part early in our relationship had established that the four Houses meant nothing to him beyond hazy notions of remote, irrelevant nobility, so even if he had known my lineage, he wouldn’t have leaped to conclusions about duplicity and double-dealing. After a lifetime of watching Iruvians slant sideways glances at me while they parsed my words for traps (don’t ask me why, but they expected even simple requests like “Whiskey, neat, please” to contain layers of hidden meaning), I’d found Bazso’s ignorance refreshing.

Now any honest conversation between the two of us had to involve my real name, my real motivations, my sword, my brother – basically, every single awkward topic that was going to make the Cat and Candle conference look like dinner-party small talk. Suffice to say that honest, awkward conversations were not integral to House Anixis training. At all. No, our tutors stressed that they were a thing to be averted.

But I couldn’t put off my weekly report any longer – Bazso was still paying me as an informant, after all – so off I slunk to the Leaky Bucket. Although I cravenly hoped that he’d be out on business, there he sat in his usual booth, with Pickett next door scowling at a cowering goon. She redirected her glower at me as I crossed the pub, passed two feet from her without acknowledging her existence, and halted before her boss.

At the sight of me, Bazso’s eyes lit up and he started to remove his hat, but I gave a quick shake of my head and announced formally, “I have news.”

Instantly, he snapped into business mode. “Have a seat.”

When I moved towards the bench across from him, he slid further into the booth and gestured for me to sit next to him. I obeyed, maintaining a distance decorous enough to satisfy the most draconian chaperon, and watched Pickett re-orient herself so she could eavesdrop. “I don’t know if you’ve heard this already,” I said to both of them, “but Commander Orris of the Hive is dead.”

Neither of them looked the least bit surprised. “I’d heard the rumor,” Bazso replied calmly, while Pickett stared at me as suspiciously as an Iruvian would. “Do you know the details?”

I summarized Mistress Slane’s report: “No, but it couldn’t have been from natural causes, because Djera Maha is calling for revenge.”

Again, he didn’t bat an eye, suggesting that he’d already heard that too. Why had I even come? Sometimes confessions were best saved for better – i.e. other – times. Sometimes the better part of spy craft involved running away. I started to edge out of the booth, but Bazso tensed and demanded, “Was it the Sashes?”

The possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. “Not that I know of,” I replied. Which wasn’t saying much, given that Mylera certainly wouldn’t have told me any of her plans, but – “It’s not their usual modus operandi. If Mylera has a problem with another gang, she’s more likely to declare war – ” I gave him a meaningful look – “than to quietly assassinate one of their lieutenants and not take credit.” I shot a meaningful look at Pickett, who glared right back in habitual animosity.

Bazso was already nodding agreement before I finished my sentence. “It didn’t seem like her style, but desperate times and all that.” When I opened my mouth to inquire whether aforementioned desperate times had prompted the requisite desperate measures and, more precisely, desperate reconciliations, he added curtly, “We have a meeting. Tangletown. Next week.” His clenched jaw showed just how much that prospect excited him.

“Oh, good,” I breathed, sagging a little. At least Mylera hadn’t scuttled those plans in a fit of pique.

Only after I’d indulged my relief did I realize that now I was well and truly out of time. Any Lampblack-Red Sash parley would end all compartmentalization between the two halves of my identity. Mylera would tell Bazso that I’d double-crossed both of them, reveling in the revelation when she discovered that he genuinely did not know. This honest, awkward conversation that I’d been dodging needed to happen right now, when I could still control what he learned – and how.

“We’ll see. We’ll see,” Bazso was saying, somehow managing to sound resigned and mutinous at the same time. “We’ll see,” he repeated once more, just in case he hadn’t made himself clear. With a deep sigh, he wound an arm around my waist and tried to scoot me closer.

Stiffening, I resisted the scooting, lifted my chin, and met his eyes. “Bazso.… You know how I said things were complicated and I’d explain sometime?”

His arm dropped from my waist, and he backed away slightly. “Yeeees?” His tone was wary now – wary, but not yet suspicious. That was about to change.

Folding my hands in my lap, I drew a deep breath and said determinedly, “So…it occurs to me that you’d prefer to hear this from me than someone else.”

“Oh gods.” He backed away even more, then glanced across the booth and grimaced at his second-in-command’s posture. Pickett had practically plastered herself against her table to eavesdrop.

Straightening with hauteur, she met his gaze challengingly. I told you not to trust her, her cold eyes reminded him. I told you over and over not to trust her.

Just as his jaw began to tighten, I tugged on his arm and gave him a pleading look. “Can’t we talk somewhere private?”

His carefully impassive expression gave nothing away. “That might be for the best.”

As usual, we wound up evicting Sawbones and taking over the storeroom. Sitting down heavily on the sometime-operating table and folding his arms across his chest, Bazso pinned me in place with a level stare, one that said that whatever his gut instinct, he’d resolved to hear me out first. “So what’s going on?” he prompted.

Standing before him, I clasped my hands loosely in front of me. “Things got a little complicated….”

“You mentioned that.”

I tried to delay the inevitable by going off on a tangent. “I was forced to tell Mylera my real name, so I thought it only fair to tell you as well.”

“Okay.” He waited, thinking – correctly, but for all the wrong reasons – that the matter of my real name wouldn’t have provoked this rigamarole.

Even though I knew he wouldn’t react as Mylera had because he lacked the context, the words still stuck in my throat like eel bones. I hacked them out: “I’m Signy Anixis.” Deliberately, I omitted my title, but honesty impelled me to add, “My brother is the heir to House Anixis of U’Duasha.”

As expected, Bazso drew a complete blank. From “heir” and “House Anixis,” he could infer that my family was important, but that was about it. “So…,” he said slowly, frowning as he puzzled out the implications, “you’re like…royalty?”

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As close to it as you got in Iruvia. A tiny, treacherous part of my mind wished that he were Mylera so I didn’t have to spell it all out. “Not really,” I replied shortly.

He took a moment to process both the answer and the half-truth. “Okay,” he said at last, accepting them for the time being. “So what are you doing in Crow’s Foot?”

Seemingly of their own accord, my fingers twisted into the fabric of my trousers. Bazso’s eyes followed the movement, and I forced myself to stop. “Things were…a little complicated at home. I ran away.”

He nodded, as if he heard that story all the time. And perhaps he did. Perhaps “complications at home” encompassed everything from vicious vendettas to showers of toxic, mutation-inducing rain.

Waving a hand helplessly in the direction of the common room (and Pickett), I said, “I got here and…and you know what happened next.”

He nodded again, more impatiently this time.

“I – I guess what I haven’t been forthcoming about – ” (besides everything) – “is…is that I haven’t actually been working for either you or Mylera,” I spilled out in a rush.

“What?” Like a wave in the Void Sea, he surged off the table and loomed over me, ready to crash down on me. “Explain.”

Although I locked my knees and stood my ground, I couldn’t help cringing. Shakily, I reminded him, “I told you once: My family has a lot of branches that are always killing one another, which is why I ran away. When I came here and saw what was going on in this district, I thought that if I could figure out how to fix Crow’s Foot, I could figure out how to fix my family too….”

“So, you’ve been trying to…,” he began, a note of disbelief surfacing.

I finished for him, “To reconcile you and the Red Sashes. Yes.”

“So you lied to me. You never worked for me.” Fury, shock, and betrayal swept through his voice. My mind skittered away from the fear that I’d lost him and caught on, of all things, that oil painting of the naval battle that hung in Mylera’s office, all roiling storm clouds and brilliant lightning and ship-killing waves….

Like one of those electroplasm-powered automaton toys, my lips protested, “I have been working for you,” then clamped shut a second too late. I’d just admitted that I hadn’t been doing that, had never done that.

Bazso advanced on me, his rage threatening to drown me. “You’ve certainly been taking my money, yes,” he growled, each word like a physical blow.

(Faith’s voice, mocking me from far away: Is the nature of your relationship with Bazso Baz a transactional one?

No, I insisted. No, it isn’t. It’s not like that.)

Folding his arms, Bazso stared down at me contemptuously, as if he’d just figured out what I truly was: an informant for sale to the highest (or most recent) bidder. “You know, I believed you had some loyalty to me, to this gang. I didn’t realize we were just, what – a puzzle for you to solve?”

It was uncannily close to Mylera’s reaction, down the very last drop of anger, disbelief, and hurt.

I wanted to apologize. I needed to apologize.

But I was an Anixis, and I didn’t know how to apologize.

“I thought you cared.” There was a hint of wonder in his voice now, wonder that he of all people had misjudged my character so badly and for so long. “I thought you genuinely cared about us.”

“I did care!” I burst out. “If I didn’t care, why would I have worked so hard to bring about something neither of you wanted – for your own good?”

His fists clenched, and for a split second I thought he would strike me. I’d been with him for two years, after all. I’d seen firsthand what he did to those who betrayed him and his gang, had even advised him on some of it. Much like the Ankhayats, Bazso preferred to punish traitors in the most straightforward manner – and at that moment, I would have welcomed it.

But then his eyes re-focused on my face, and whatever he saw there stopped him just long enough to reign in his rage. Very deliberately, he took one step back, followed by another. Subsiding back onto the table, he conceded in a calmer voice, “Yeah, you did, at that.” Then, as if he’d just registered the shabbiness of our surroundings, he gestured around the dried-goods-storage-turned-doctor’s-clinic-turned-secret-conference-room. “I suppose we must seem very…I don’t know. You’re probably used to much fancier things.”

His almost wistful resignation made me wish that he’d punch me instead. Anxious to reassure him, I blurted out, “It’s true I was used to fancier things, but I don’t think that fancy things are worth having when they’re coated in blood.”

It was a line worthy of the worst penny dreadful on sale in Brightstone. Sigmund would have groaned at the melodrama and then quoted it every time he wanted to humiliate me, but Bazso, like the straightforward gang leader he was, homed right in on the “blood” part.

“You do know,” he warned, “that even if I manage to reconcile with Mylera, it’s not like there won’t be blood. It just won’t be between us.”

I concealed a start of surprise. I genuinely hadn’t considered that, hadn’t planned beyond wrangling and manipulating the two of them into sitting down in the same room and just talking. Some Anixis I was. “It’s a start.”

“Presumably, the next thing is for us to move jointly against the Hive.” Bazso’s voice took on a scathing edge he’d never directed at me before, as if he wouldn’t put anything past me at this point. “Unless you’re planning to negotiate with Djera Maha?”

That might not be a bad idea, although I certainly wasn’t going tell him that. I hedged, “I don’t know much about her.” Yet.

“She’s ruthless. It won’t work,” he enunciated flatly, cutting off that avenue. “Also, she’s a monster and I have no interest in working with her.”

“Sounds like a tempting challenge, but it’s probably not worth it…,” my tongue supplied on autopilot while my brain searched frantically for a way to salvage our relationship. It was a truly Anixis thing, was it not, to recognize my friends only after I betrayed them?

Bazso, I’m sorry…. But I couldn’t speak the words.

“A tempting challenge…,” Bazso quoted back incredulously. “So what about us?” He waved an arm between the two of us, encompassing everything we’d shared, or that he’d thought we’d shared. “Am I just a means to an end?”

“No!” I cried, lurching forward. “Of course not!”

“I don’t know if it’s an ‘of course’ anymore.”

The matter-of-factness in his tone stopped me short. I thought of my family’s reputation, of how Mylera always assumed the worst of me, and wondered if Bazso too would scan my every action for deceit from now on. My shoulders slumping, I whispered, “I don’t know what I can say to make you believe me.”

He echoed, “I don’t know either.”

In a last-ditch attempt to show good faith, I offered intel on myself unbidden. “Will you trust me more if I tell you that I promised Mylera not to report on the Red Sashes to you anymore?” I asked hopefully.

While Mylera would have recognized the gesture at once, Bazso didn’t know a thing about how House Anixis operated. “I don’t see how that will make me trust you more!” he exploded. “At all, actually!”

Taken aback by how badly that had backfired, I struggled to make him understand. “It means that I’m not feeding you their lies, for one thing – ”

“That’s not better!” he stormed. “You do see how that’s worse, right?” At my utter bewilderment, he caught himself, breathing hard. “Look – Glass, Isha, Signy, whoever are you – I’ve been relying on your information for a long time!”

“And I’ve brought you good information for a long time – ”

“Except apparently you’ve also been feeding me their lies at the same time! Which I suppose makes sense if you’re the quintessential double agent, because it means that you’ve been feeding them our lies too – ”

As if by magic, a bottle of whiskey appeared in his hands and an empty glass on the table, and then he was gulping liquor straight from the bottle while he strove to compose himself. I watched anxiously, trying and failing over and over to frame an apology.

“So what happens now?” Somewhat calmer, Bazso set the bottle on the table with a dull thud and searched my face with his eyes. Perhaps, once he took a minute to think, he had grasped the significance of my admission, because he asked, “Why are you even telling me this?”

“I don’t know.” It might have been the most honest thing I’d ever said to him. More softly, hanging my head so I didn’t have to meet his baffled gaze, I mumbled at the floor, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Isha.” I glanced up just in time to see him start to extend a hand, wanting out of habit to comfort me. Then he dropped it to the table, where it lay like a beached whale. “Okay,” he said. “This is a lot to take in. I need to think about a lot of stuff.” With a shake of his head, he repeated grimly, “A lot of stuff.”

My heart sank as I waited for his dismissal. Unlike with Mylera, I had no tricks for winning him back – no special etiquette to disarm him, not enough of a shared background, save for a love of whiskey, to draw on. Somehow I didn’t think that begging or stealing a bottle of Skovlan’s best from Sigmund would help me here.

As I prepared to slink out of the storeroom and flee the pub before Pickett could organize a charge, Bazso asked abruptly, “What do I call you?”

My head jerked up. He was regarding me thoughtfully, perhaps reading the sincerity in my remorse. Hope flared at his use of the present tense, and I whispered, “I’ve gotten very used to ‘Isha.’”

“Me too,” he agreed gently. “We’ll stick with that. Okay. I’m going to go home and think this over. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”

“You know where to find me,” I offered, in what anyone from U’Duasha would have recognized as a gesture of supreme trust.

Bazso, however, merely nodded absently.