“Not right away. When you didn’t … when I didn’t hear anything. But while I was in Porachis, when I met Lillian, some information came to light. I heard you had been seen in Liso. Asiyah was very accommodating, though he didn’t believe you were still alive. It’s why I came. This would have been what, five years ago? Anyway, he said you’d been trying to get me out, with your ill-fated machinations. It seems we were working at cross-purposes. I felt … compelled to search for you.”

It was like walking through a swamp, unsure of the ground in front of him. This was not some heartfelt confession. If Ari was telling him this story, there was a sinkhole somewhere in it. One wrong step would drown him in mud and crush his lungs.

“You didn’t find me,” Cyril said, because sometimes one could count on facts.

“Well,” said Aristide. “I stopped looking, didn’t I?”

Cyril didn’t want it to hurt. It shouldn’t have. But it was delivered with theatrical perfection, calculated to pass between his ribs and kill. “Why?”

“Sorry?” Aristide cocked his head, one ear closer to Cyril. “Didn’t catch that.”

He was being needlessly cruel now. Cyril gritted his teeth and forced the words between them. “Why did you stop?”

“Well, darling.” Now he had cut himself with his own vicious edge, and a thread of pain slid through his words like blood. “How long were you out there? Eight years? I wasn’t exactly keeping the lowest of profiles, and there are newspapers, even in the jungle. It just finally hit, like a sandbag to my head: Even if you were alive, you never came looking for me.”

And Cyril, who had nearly drowned before—who knew the sensation and still lived in fear of it—felt the waters of guilt close over his head. “I suppose you want an apology.”

Aristide, apparently feeling better for having got that pettiness out of the way, put the ember of his straight into the ashtray and said, almost cheerful: “I’d settle for lunch.”

And because Cyril owed and owed and owed—Aristide, Amberlough, everyone—he went along.

Cyril’s intelligence and experience had been gold to cells of royalists in northern territory, but it wasn’t worth much to the LSI with the war as good as ended. They’d wrung him like a dishrag over the course of a week holed up in that family compound. They wouldn’t have brought Ari to the house if they weren’t done with all that it required.

He was free to go.

Liso owed him a pension. It felt very academic. A set of requirements to fulfill so he’d have somewhere to set his carcass down until it died.

In the meantime, he let himself be bundled into a car and driven through the city, and sat on his stool when he was pointed toward it.