The Art of Almost Honesty

"Convincing someone isn't about what you say—it's about what you let them believe they decided on their own."

I took the last two strides slow and easy and settled myself onto the low wall that ran along the front of Gladys's verandah, the way you'd ease onto a fence rail you meant to sit on a while. The render was cold enough through my legs to bite—winter had Claremont by the throat, the gutters still dark with the night's rain, a hard little wind coming up off the river and straight through me. Bare-legged in it, too, in a pair of navy shorts that made no sense at all against the morning; but that was a question for another day, and not one I was going to answer to a wall.

The wall gave me what I'd come for: a clean line down the driveway, an easy step off if a neighbour got curious, and a slouch loose and harmless enough to make me look like I'd grown there. I'd chosen it the way I chose most things now—for the angles. Beside me stood a bottle of Gladys's shiraz, set close to the edge, tipped just enough to look like I'd put it down without thinking and steadied just enough that it wouldn't fall. A peace offering. A prop. The two had stopped being different things.

And that was the whole trouble with the morning, sitting there waiting on her. The farm my father ran had taught me plain dealing—a handshake, a straight answer, a man's word being the whole of a man. Everything I'd rehearsed on that wall broke every last one of those rules, and I was going to do it anyway, to a woman I was fond of, for reasons she'd never be let to know. It left me feeling stripped to the skin. Not the shorts. The other kind.

The Civic announced her before I saw her—that little silver Honda straining at the pitch of the drive, tyres grinding over the concrete, the exhaust rattling away in the way she was forever meaning to get seen to and never did. It crested where the ground levelled off and stopped, sparing her the slow, mortifying roll backwards she'd done the once, which I'd found the funniest thing in the world and she hadn't found funny at all.

Something in me pulled two ways at the sight of her. I'd spent the walk over turning approaches over and throwing them out—one too obvious, the next too cold, the one after that not cold enough. The whole art of it was to steer her at Luke without her ever feeling the hand on the tiller, to lay a thing down and let her pick it up believing she'd found it herself. Jeremiah had taught me the trick a lifetime ago. He'd never once said what it would feel like to use it on somebody I shared a bed with.

"You're out early," I said, keeping it light, easy, like turning up on her wall of a morning was the most ordinary thing in the world. She came up out of the car and I couldn't help the roll of my eyes—she had a bottle with her too, another shiraz, the pair of us landing on the exact same bright idea about how to soften a morning. It would have been funny on any other day.

"Cody," she said, her eyes climbing to find me perched up there like some stray that had followed her home hoping to be fed. There was that particular note in it I'd come to know over the months—surprise and irritation braided together. Gladys guarded her own ground, and here I was, already sitting on it before she'd got out of the car. "What a pleasant surprise. You haven't been by for a few weeks; I thought you'd moved on."

It landed harder than she'd have known, because it wasn't far wrong. I'd been in Belkeep, up to my neck in the wreck of another crossing gone bad, in Freya at me about Krid, in the daily sum that never came out right—three hundred and twenty-six souls to keep breathing on stores meant for half that. Every reason true. Not one of them a thing I could say out loud, and none of them changing the fact that I'd let this go slack while I tended the rest.

"Looks like I shouldn't have bothered," I said, sharper than I'd meant to let out. I lifted the bottle so the dark glass caught what light there was—a flag of peace with a bit of wounded pride wrapped in it. Part of me meant it. The other part had already noted it working, the old push-and-pull I'd learned ran well on Gladys, offer and withdraw, the same as bringing a wary beast up to a gate.

She was up the steps fast, hurried in a way that gave the lie to any notion this was a casual call. "Come inside," she said, and there was an edge under it, too much urgency for a plain cold morning. "I've told you before not to be so obvious."

The scold had weight to it. Ours was a thing that needed keeping quiet, for reasons she'd never spelled out and I'd never pushed her to. Everyone carried something. Mine ran to other worlds and duties that spanned them; hers, near as I could tell, ran to a past she was outrunning and a present she was working hard to keep in its box.

"Perhaps you should give me a spare key then," I said, half a joke, closing the gap between us. Only half. It was a sounding line too—how much of her door she'd hand over, how far in she'd let me, whether she was in this as deep as I needed her to be for what came next.

"Perhaps another day," she said, final as a gate swung shut, and went in still holding her own bottle, not about to surrender even that much to my cheek.

I stopped on the threshold, honestly not sure whether I'd been asked in or seen off with good manners. Pure Gladys, that—keeping me a half-step off balance, holding the reins by never quite telling me where I stood. Part of me admired the craft of it. Part of me was worn out by it. Still an invitation, or had I pushed too far?

The question hung there while I weighed it. Turn back now and I'd be starting the whole approach cold later, spending time we didn't have. Jeremiah's ultimatum sat over all of it—bring Gladys round to becoming a Guardian, or lose her, one road or another. It made me reckless in a way I generally wasn't.

So I took her going in as a yes, stepped through, and shut the door quiet behind me. "Gladys," I called, gentle, letting her know where I was, trying to throw a rope over whatever gap the weeks had opened.

Her handbag hit the kitchen bench with a soft thud that managed to carry irritation and tiredness and welcome all at once, and she set her bottle down beside it. I stood a moment and looked at the little domestic picture of it—her bench, her house, the careful life she'd built—and I was there to take a crowbar to the lot of it, for the sake of prophecies and settlements and a duty she'd never signed on for.

The guilt of it sat low and cold in me.

"Gladys, I've missed you," I said, and drew her in, and the embrace was the truest lie I'd told all morning—my hands finding her waist easy and sure, the touch meant to say I cared and, underneath, to hold her still a moment. A small smile pulled at the corner of her mouth despite herself. I knew it: annoyance at my being gone wrestling the peace my being gone had bought her.

She kept herself to herself, Gladys, holding her own company close and hard—like it was the one thing she'd sworn never to hand over again. But the weeks had stretched even her patience for distance. I could feel it in the set of her, a tension that said she'd felt my absence more than she'd ever say.

"Where have..." she started.

I cut her off with a kiss—dodging the reasonable questions, going for the place under the words where lies didn't have to be built. My mouth asked the question of hers and she gave way, a soft parting I read as leave to go on, the kind of open she didn't show often.

My hands went across her back, over ground I knew, and for that stretch of it there was nothing calculated in me at all. Whatever else was performance, this wasn't. What I felt for her sat on its own, apart from the Guardian work—even as the work was leaning on me now to turn it into a tool. I couldn't hold the two of them apart in my head and it left me reeling.

Then she put the moment out as fast as it had caught, drawing back with purpose, and the sudden want of her warmth felt like being marked down for a liberty I'd thought I'd earned.

"I'm sorry," I heard myself say, the apology out before I'd chosen it. "I've had to travel for work this past week. I should have contacted you." The lie came smooth, greased by long practice. Travel for work—true enough, if you counted crossing between worlds as travel and Guardian duty as work. The half of it went down easier than the whole of it would have, and still it tasted of ash.

The vow to do better by her, to close the gaps that duty and distance kept tearing open, formed even as I knew it for the empty thing it was. It was all about to get worse, not better. If Jeremiah had his way she'd soon be walking the same tightrope I'd walked the length of my grown life—a human love held in one hand while the other did inhuman work.

Her shrug gave nothing away. Forgiveness, or not? The hope of it flickered. I leaned in for another kiss, hunting the reassurance her words hadn't given.

"Cody, stop," she said, palms flat and firm against my chest. It landed hard, and my face slipped into something wounded before I could stop it. This—right here, with her already prickly and half-turned from me—was the moment I'd picked to work her into Luke Smith's disaster. Rotten timing. Which meant it would either go beautifully or blow up in my hands.

"What's wrong?" I asked, and the worry in it was real even as I aimed it.

She shook her head, brushing it off or ducking it, hard to say which. "Nothing. I just have a lot on my mind at the moment, that's all."

I couldn't let it lie, couldn't let her back away behind the walls she kept up so carefully. My fingers ran the length of her spine, gentle, practised. "You can talk to me, Gladys."

Her sigh came heavy, freighted with trouble I doubted she had any intention of setting down in front of me. "I'm sure it's nothing."

"With a sigh like that, it doesn't sound like nothing," I said, soft, coaxing it out of her while already turning over how to bend whatever came loose to my own ends. She slipped my hold and made for the cupboard, shoulders set, going at it like a bolt-hole.

"It's a bit early for that, isn't it?" I said, watching her reach down the wine glasses like she needed the drink more than she needed the answer. I put a hand out to stop her, gentle but meaning it—she needed a clear head for what came next, needed to be choosing, or believing she was.

She paused, a hand going up to work at her left temple, the way she did before a headache or a hard conversation. "I suppose it is just a little early," she allowed, her back to me, her shoulders a shut door.

I set my own shiraz on the middle shelf of her pantry, in among a crowd of other bottles. There were a lot of them, and they said something I'd clocked before and never asked about—how readily she reached for a drink to take the edge off a bad day, how she used it to put distance between herself and whatever she was running from. Not my place to judge. I'd been using the crossings the same way for years.

"But hang on," she said, turning, curiosity sharpening her. "Didn't you bring wine too?"

I put my head out of the pantry, caught for half a second. "I thought we could share it later," I said, smooth over the churn of everything I wasn't saying. Now wasn't the hour for the deep conversation—Clivilius, leaving her world, the change waiting for her if Jeremiah got his way. That one needed ground I hadn't broken yet.

"Hmm," she said, her gaze drifting off past me as though the pantry shelves might hold the answer to something she hadn't put into words. She started to speak, stopped, left the sentence hanging.

The quiet after it had weight, worry cutting deeper lines in her brow. Her solemn look pulled a disappointment out of me I didn't have to fake—I wanted her trust and I was building it on a foundation of things she could never be told. You can't have both. I knew that and reached for both anyway.

I backed further into the pantry, scanning shelves for something, anything, to bridge the widening gap—and then she gave it to me, out of nowhere. "I just had a rather strange conversation with Jamie's partner."

It went through me like a live wire. My eyes must have widened; things were dropping into place with a click I could all but hear. Since the jetty—since Jeremiah—I'd been running back over every name Gladys had ever let fall, every face at the edge of her life, trying to draw a line between her world and mine. Jamie. Luke Smith's partner. Which put Luke—the one Clivilius had had us watching a lifetime for, the one the whole Prophecy hung on—one short step from Gladys, through a circle of hers I'd been too wrapped up in my own troubles to properly walk.

It thrilled and it frightened me in the same breath. Could it be that someone out of her own circle was tangled in the very knot Jeremiah and I were pulling at? And hard on that came a colder thought—that Luke might be the one to take my place, or worse, take Gladys off Earth and into Clivilius, into the teeth of things I'd barely lived through myself. My mind bolted a dozen ways at once.

"Ah, Luke?" I ventured, keeping it idle while my heart went at my ribs. I made a show of still reading the shelves, giving her room, every part of me bent on what she'd say next.

"Yes," she said. "You're starting to remember them all, then."

There was a note of pleased surprise in it. A silver lining, at last, I thought, and came out of the pantry with a grin that wasn't all show. "And what did Luke say?"

"He said that Jamie was sick," she relayed.

I kept my first reaction mild, playing the good fella hearing a bit of news rather than the Guardian with the ground shifting under him. "Well, that hardly seems strange. I'm sure Jamie has been sick before."

But her face changed, worry clouding it in a way that said this was more than a dose of something going round. She went quick to her handbag and dug out a folded sheet of paper, urgent enough that it put me on point. "But then he gave me this really weird list," she said, unease in her voice as she handed it over.

I unfolded it with all the care I could fake and ran my eye down it—and it was worse, or better, than I'd braced for. It read like a Belkeep manifest to anyone who'd ever had to keep people alive on the wrong side of a crossing. Concrete. Sheds. Storage and shelter, and fast, I sorted it, before I'd thought to.

My mind went, unbidden, to Belkeep—to the winds that had come through and taken us apart more times than I cared to count. Walls we'd broken our backs raising, gone to splinters inside an hour; every hard-won yard handed straight back to the weather. The cold that got into the bone. The storms that drove us into the caves in the cliffs to wait them out. Every word on Luke's list rang off my own years like a struck bar—and that was the comfort and the alarm of it both.

This was no birthday surprise. This was a man scrabbling to keep alive people who'd been pulled into Clivilius with none of what they needed—no shelter, no stores, no notion of what was coming. Luke was making the mistakes I'd made at the very start, only he was making them at pace and in numbers, hauling people through before he'd so much as made the ground safe.

The recklessness of it took the breath out of me. It was also the very thing Jeremiah had warned of—Luke running on instinct where he wanted wisdom, driven by whatever private disaster had lit him up as a Guardian rather than by any kind of plan. The Prophecy had promised a saviour to bind the worlds together. What we had was a frightened amateur making the sort of choices that spread out and cost everyone.

"Looks like he has plans to build something," I said, aiming for calm over the top of the churn. Understating it on purpose—I wanted her curious, not frightened; leaning in, not backing off.

"Luke said it was a surprise for his birthday," Gladys said—the cover so thin I wondered she could stand to repeat it.

"But he didn't say what he was building?" I pressed, angling for anything that told me how deep Luke had got himself.

"No," Gladys said, picking up her pace like she wanted past the whole subject. And then she said the thing that stopped me dead. "And he also gave me his brother's credit card."

My head came up sharp; I couldn't get the whole of the shock off my face. "And where was his brother?"

It stacked up ugly. If Luke was handing out his brother's money with the brother nowhere in it, the brother was as good as through already—pulled into a world he'd have no way to make sense of. And if Luke was scrabbling to build with borrowed money, the thing was further gone than even Jeremiah had let on.

"No idea. I didn't see him. But I didn't think to ask until after I'd already left," she said, the words trailing off into a charged quiet.

The shape of it came clear then, and it was a bad shape. If Jamie and the brother were both tangled into Clivilius now, Luke's nightmare wasn't ending—it was only getting started, breaking out on every side at once, the way it always does when you've pulled people through with nothing ready to catch them. I knew the truth of that in my own bones. Bring somebody into the crossing before the ground's prepared and you buy yourself chaos, a flat run of scrambling just to keep everyone breathing, and the lies pile up thicker and more brittle by the day to cover where they've all gone.

I'd lived that for years before Grace died—before I had children born to Clivilius rather than smuggled into it, needing a cover story stitched over them day and night. Even now the double life took everything I had. Luke was going at it with nothing ready and other lives hanging off him. The gall of it was breathtaking.

I let out a breath, barely a sound. The Luke we'd waited on—the one wrapped in prophecy and every hope we had—was steering onto the rocks before he'd properly left the dock. I'd let myself believe he'd come to it with some foresight, some sense. What I was hearing was panic, and poor judgement, and choices made in the middle of a crisis instead of ahead of one.

The question was whether any of it could be pulled back, and whether Gladys might be the steadying hand in it—or just the next one dragged under by the mess Luke was making.

"That is quite odd," I agreed, careful, my whole attention on her while my mind worked the angles. "I think you should help him."

It landed just as I'd meant it to—surprise, and then her back up straight away. Her mouth fell open. "What? Help him? Why?" The confusion was honest, a straight-out refusal to be pulled into a drama that wasn't hers.

"So many questions," I said, with a gentle laugh, turning Jeremiah's own words from the jetty back into the room with an irony only I could taste. The manipulation ran smoother now, the old trick finding its groove. "I'm sure Luke had a good reason for it all."

The quiet after it was thick with the sums she was doing. Our eyes held, a standoff—my look a dare, telling her to find me a reason good enough to beat the pull of her own curiosity, which I knew tugged at her the way it tugged at me. Gladys was generous down to the ground, couldn't leave a person in need once the need had been set in front of her. I was turning that decency of hers to Guardian ends, and the self-disgust of it was sharp enough to draw blood.

"You've already got the week off work anyway, don't you?" I put to her, a little push in the direction I needed her going.

"Yeah, but..." she started, the conflict plain in her voice.

I gave a shrug, all easy indifference. "May as well," I said, light as anything. "It's not like you're spending your own money." The last nudge dressed up as plain sense, so the choice would feel less like a thing I'd walked her into and more like a thing that had simply arrived.

I opened my arms and she came into them, stepping in out of all that uncertainty. The hold was comfort and strategy at once, in a mix I could no longer cleanly pull apart, and I pressed a kiss to the top of her head with real tenderness in it and a guilt that went bone-deep. It wasn't only about turning her towards Luke. It was about keeping hold of the thing between us even while I got ready, maybe, to smash it.

"You can stay here and wait for me to get back," she said into my chest, warmth in it that sat badly against the cold thing I was doing. "The cats would like it."

It pulled a wide smile out of me in spite of all of it—a scrap of the ordinary in the middle of the whirl. Gladys, with her shadows and her locked rooms and the troubles she never named out loud, was a thing I was only starting to read. The strength under that generous streak of hers showed in everything she did. I held her tighter, and felt the whole delicate balance of it—her standing on her own two feet, and the two of us roped together whether she knew it or not.

The wanting her with me in Clivilius went to war with everything I knew of the risk—that bringing her through meant setting her in front of dangers that had killed hard, seasoned Guardians; meant loading her with secrets that had broken stronger backs than hers; meant maybe wrecking whatever peace she'd built out of the rubble of her past.

But it also meant not standing in it alone. Someone to share the weight, someone who'd know both worlds instead of needing to be lied to across them. It meant Belkeep might get the Guardian it was dying for want of. It meant my two might have someone besides a grieving father to look to.

The sum of it was as cold as anything the wind ever brought down off the Belkeep ridge, and I hated myself for adding it up.

She came out of my arms decided, all of her set to it now. She left her shiraz standing on the bench—a bit of the ordinary neither of us was going to get to—and took back Luke's list, snatching it from me and gathering her handbag in a hurry that said more than any answer she'd given.

"I'll be as quick as I can," she said, determination and haste both in it. The door shut behind her with a sound like a full stop, and left me standing in the quiet of her house with the cats and the weight of what I'd just done.