Chapter 04 | A New Place

At six o'clock, the office building released its occupants into the evening in the usual manner, a tide of loosened ties and phone-lit faces, the accumulated relief of a day completed pressing everyone toward the nearest train station. Matthias descended the front steps with the particular blankness of a man whose internal landscape had become too complicated to wear on his face, and turned in the direction of the station.

He stopped.

A Skoda Octavia, slate grey, understated, clean, was parked at the kerb ten metres from the building entrance. It had the composed anonymity of a vehicle chosen by someone who had thought carefully about not being noticed. He would not normally have given it a second look.

He gave it a second look because he recognised the face behind the wheel.

Astreal sat in the driver's seat with the composed uprightness of someone for whom correct posture was not a habit but a default state. Her ruby eyes found him through the windshield immediately, he suspected they had been tracking him since he'd come through the door, and she offered a single, efficient nod in acknowledgement.

From the backseat, Belial leaned forward and waved at him. It was an enthusiastic wave, unhurried and entirely without self-consciousness, the wave of someone who had been waiting and was genuinely pleased the waiting was done.

Astreal was out of the car before he'd crossed half the distance, standing beside it with her hand resting briefly on the door.

"Please enter," she said.

It was not phrased as a request, exactly.

He reached the car. "You drove here to pick me up."

"We did not want to wait," Belial said, from inside, with the breezy logic of someone explaining something self-evident. She had arranged herself comfortably in the centre of the backseat and was watching him through the open door with warm expectation.

Matthias looked at the car. "Did you buy this today?"

"It's yours," Belial said.

He looked at the car again. It was a solid, well-kept machine, nothing excessive, nothing theatrical, just a well-made European car sitting at the kerb outside his office building with his name on the registration. Presumably. He hadn't checked the registration. He suspected it would check out.

"I selected the model," Astreal said, moving back to the driver's side. "Mid-range. Sufficient performance, low profile, practical for the city. It does not draw attention."

"I advocated for the Superb," Belial offered helpfully, from the backseat. "The higher trim."

"Unnecessary," Astreal said.

"It has heated seats on both sides."

"This one also has heated seats."

"Fewer of them," Belial said, with the tone of someone who has lost an argument and considers the defeat ongoing.

Matthias got in.

The interior was clean and uncluttered, smelling faintly of something he couldn't identify, the particular newness of a car that had been prepared for a specific person. He settled into the passenger seat and looked at the dashboard, which offered him no particular wisdom.

"Why a Skoda?" he asked.

From the backseat, Belial's expression acquired the quality of someone for whom the question had opened a door to a fond room. "We spent a considerable amount of time in Bohemia," she said. "Centuries, really, across several identities. The region, what is now Czechia and Slovakia, has a quality to it that is rather difficult to leave behind once it has settled into you. The people. The geography. The way the cities carry their history." A pause. "When it came time to choose a car, it seemed natural. You choose things that have meant something."

Matthias thought about this. It was, he decided, not an unreasonable way to choose a car. He had made decisions on flimsier grounds.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"Home," Astreal said, and started the engine.

She drove the way she did everything else, with precise, unhurried competence. Clean lane changes, correct following distances, no wasted motion. She navigated the evening traffic with the calm of someone who found it a manageable logistics problem rather than a source of distress.

"The items have already been moved," she said, as they merged onto the main road. "I arranged the transfer mid-afternoon. Everything from the apartment that was worth keeping has been relocated and placed."

"I supervised," Belial added. "I made several suggestions."

"You made fourteen suggestions," Astreal said. "I implemented three."

"The important three," Belial said.

"All fourteen were important according to you."

Matthias watched the city through the window. "Belial," he said, "why aren't you driving?"

A small silence.

"I get a little excited," Belial said.

He turned.

She met his gaze with an expression that contained complete sincerity and the very faintest trace of something that was not quite sheepishness. "Behind the wheel, I can become..." she considered her word choice "...unnecessarily animated. I may do things that are technically possible but not strictly advisable in a city environment."

"She once drove a carriage directly over a hill that was not a road," Astreal said, with the evenness of someone reporting historical fact.

"The horses were fine," Belial said.

"The carriage was not."

"The point is," Belial said pleasantly, "Astreal drives. It is better for everyone."

The house was exactly as the photograph had described it, which was, Matthias reflected, a reasonable outcome when the photograph had been taken for precisely this purpose. Three stories of clean pale concrete and dark-framed glass, the lines stripped down to their essentials, a low stone wall around the property that was decorative enough to seem intentional and solid enough to be something else as well. The garden was lit softly at intervals. The yard at the front was large, open-paved, unhurried.

Astreal parked the Skoda on the paved yard with the consideration of someone selecting a precise position rather than simply stopping the car.

Matthias sat for a moment after the engine cut.

"It looks just like the photo," he said.

"I took a precise photo," Astreal said.

They got out. The evening air held the particular stillness of a residential district that had been chosen for it. Belial fell into step beside him as they approached the front door, and there was a quality to her movement, a quiet, held-in anticipation, that reminded him suddenly of someone walking a guest toward something they had spent a long time preparing.

Inside, the house was the photograph made real and then improved by dimension. The ground floor opened into clean, high-ceilinged space, warm materials, spare furniture, nothing superfluous, nothing missing. The kitchen was generous. The living area had the feel of a room that had been arranged by someone who understood how people actually moved through spaces rather than how photographs arranged them.

On the dining table, something was covered by a deep, pleasant warmth that reached him from the kitchen, the unmistakable architecture of a meal that had been prepared and was waiting to be eaten.

He stood in the entrance and looked at the table, and then at the house, and then at the two women standing slightly back from him, watching him take it in with the quiet attention of people who have put something down and are waiting to see how it lands.

Something happened in his chest that was not quite any of the emotions he had names for, and so he did not try to name it.

He turned, and he opened his arms, and he pulled them both in.

Belial made a soft sound against his shoulder, not surprise, exactly; something closer to relief, the exhale of someone who has been standing very straight for a very long time and has finally been permitted to set something down.

Astreal did not make a sound. But she did not pull away, and after a moment her hand settled once, briefly, against his back, just long enough to be deliberate.

"Thank you," he said. "Both of you. For all of this."

"Your happiness is what I work toward," Belial said, without moving. "It always has been. Seeing it, that's enough."

A beat. Then, from Astreal, quiet and without inflection: "Your happiness is ours as well."

He held them for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and then they moved apart and there was dinner, and the evening continued.

The meal was unhurried. Belial had prepared it earlier and it had held its quality, which said something about how it had been made. Matthias ate and listened and occasionally looked up from his plate, at the room, at the clean run of windows, at the Skoda sitting in the yard beyond the glass, stolid and grey and entirely real.

"The security system," Astreal said, somewhere between the second and third course, with the air of someone covering items on a list. "I have reinforced it extensively. Perimeter sensors, internal motion mapping, a secondary failsafe network that does not rely on the primary grid."

"It is, I will note, quite excessive," Belial said.

"It is sufficient," Astreal said.

"There is a camera in the garden that covers one-point-seven metres of lawn."

"It is a relevant one-point-seven metres."

Belial looked at Matthias in the manner of someone inviting him to weigh in as a tie-breaking authority. He found he had no strong opinions about the specific coverage of the garden camera and returned to his rice.

"There is also a basement," Astreal continued, undiverted. "Below the ground floor. Empty. We were uncertain what purpose you might wish it to serve, so we left it as it is. It can be fitted for whatever is required."

"A training space, perhaps," Belial suggested. "Or storage. Or..."

"We will leave it," Astreal said, "until he decides."

Matthias nodded. He looked at the window again. The Skoda. The house. The garden with its one-point-seven relevant metres of camera coverage. Two women across a table, one watching him with open warmth, one watching him with the quiet, steady attention of someone taking inventory of something precious.

He smiled.

He did not fully understand it, the mechanism, the mathematics of how he had arrived here, in this house, having been met at his office by two immortal women in a car they had selected in memory of a country they'd loved for centuries. He did not understand, in any concrete sense, what he had done in a former life to deserve a devotion of this quality and this duration. He did not know what price, if any, came attached to it.

He looked across the table, and at the yard beyond the glass, and at the life that had arranged itself around him in the space of forty-eight hours.

He found, searching for the catch, that he could not locate one.

Not tonight, at least.

For now, that was enough.