Cranberry looked dismayed at the sight of Geir, when the bedraggled vulture dragged himself in to the Ironclad minutes before closing. Then he saw the battered duffel bags.
“No, no, no,” he pointed back out the door and charged from behind the counter. “I don’t know what you’ve got but I know it’s bad news.”
He shuffled Geir back out to the street, swatting at his shoulders with a bar rag. Still, he followed, and waited to hear what Geir had to say.
“Morning,” Geir wiped his glasses with his shirt.
“Tell me you just own more than one shirt now, and you didn’t—” Cranberry looked around before whispering, “—steal something from Grouch!”
“Just the one." And it was stained and tattered after a day of hitching rides on the bumpers of driverless trucks, falling off more often than successfully dismounting.
“I’m not hearing a no, hon.”
“For what it’s worth, Grouch was never in the chain of ownership.”
“Somehow that doesn’t make me feel a lot safer.”
“I’m going to be out of your hair. I just need to ask you something.”
“I’m not hiding your stolen goods, if that’s what you mean.”
Geir shook his head.
“Is Samuel still in hiding?”
“Last I heard.”
“Do you know any way of getting word to him?”
“May I remind you, honey, that I’m not involved with any of that? I serve drinks, and I manage some drops.”
“I understand.”
Cranberry sighed. He tried to stuff his hands anxiously into his pockets, but he was in a skirt today that didn’t have any. l
“There are some nerve centers I could press on that might reach him,” he said. “No promises, and not zero-risk.”
“I can’t give you anything in return.”
“No. No, you don’t have to. What’s the message?”
Geir had had plenty of time to think about it.
“Tell him that someone who wasn’t ready has gone home.”

***

Waiting outside the strip that stood where the Brightlove House had been, holding what might have been billions of dollars in cash, was neither wise nor safe, but Geir risked it for a few days. The machine shop in the strip was all automated, the other stores closed, and the human kids who came every day to play soccer in the parking lot thought he was a bum. He didn’t recognize the zoan who finally came to meet him on the evening of the fourth day, but he recognized the gait and demeanor of someone assigned to make contact.
“You’re the one who’s ready now?” the ermine-model said, when he had come just within earshot.
“And I’ve come home.”
The ermine typed something in on his wristband, probably an affirmative and a description, and waited for a reply. He kept one hand in the pocket of his long jacket, implying a gun. His fur was rusty brown over a white throat that he covered with a turtleneck. He wore large black boots, though zoans were designed not to need them; a protest fashion that recurred on occasion.
He held his wrist out to Geir. From it, a voice:
“Are you there?”
It was Samuel.
A rush of feelings made Geir smile involuntarily, and it took a moment to get any words out.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s me.”
A long pause on Samuel’s end, too.
“Ben says you have luggage.”
“Something that belongs to you.”
“Sorry if I’m cautious…”
“What Sike took from you.”
The pause was longer this time.
“I gave that to her,” Samuel’s voice was low. “I don’t want it.”
Geir’s brow constricted.
“I can’t just leave it here,” he said.
“No. No, you can’t. It’s okay. Go with Ben, he’ll bring you here.”
“Okay.”
“Geir—”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t know how happy I am that it’s you.”
“I’ll find out, I think.”
Samuel hung up, and Ben nodded. Geir hefted the bags over his shoulders and followed the ermine to the aircar waiting around the corner.
The complex Ben took him to was one of the taller ones in inner Terrace, twenty or thirty stories high and built like a concrete cube. Only narrow strips of windows running up its sides, thread-thin compared to its girth. There were probably hundreds of apartments in it: ancient, not wired for modern surveillance; the perfect place to lay low. The aircar deposited them on the roof. Ben had a key for the access stairs.
The inside was like all the old tenements in the city. Gray, poorly lit, with scratchy carpet and nothing to mask the noise from the tenants on the other side of any given wall. The restless unemployed stood in their doorframes, checking for signal on their wristbands and quietly ignoring passersby. Geir suspected that all the zoans among those were Samuel’s, keeping watch.
There were two undisguised guards at the door Ben brought him to, a rooster and a jackrabbit model, both dangerously skinny and both proudly wearing ZF tattoos on their shaven necks. The ermine exchanged a few words with them, and went inside for a few minutes before coming out to call Geir in with his luggage.
The apartment was wider and nicer than the hallway, if minuscule and spartan compared to the one from which Geir had taken the money. A kitchen on one side and a den on the other, where a stiff-looking couch faced a large television. A hallway across from the entryway, with doors on either side and at its far end. That last one opened, and Samuel emerged.
The maned wolf had done some growing since they were seventeen. He had easily six inches on Geir, standing on the long and spindly legs his model was designed with. His mane, previously always thick and rich, was thinner and faded, his muzzle had gray in it and his eyes were lined. But he was himself, the boy who had liberated the Brightlove House, and who had been Geir’s only love.
Samuel crossed the apartment without a word, clasped one of Geir’s hands in his. He looked into the vulture’s eyes for what felt like a long time, before they embraced.
“Jesus Christ, Geir,” he said. He didn’t finish the thought. There was an odd desperation in his voice, but outweighed by joy.
For his part, Geir wasn’t sure he could talk. He let Samuel hold him—so strange to be the smaller of the two, now.
Abruptly, Samuel backed away, standing stiffly and guarded. He looked at the two bags at Geir’s feet, and shook his head against a question he hadn’t asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s been eighteen years. You have to tell me where you’ve been. What you’ve been doing.”
“There really isn’t anything to tell,” Geir managed over the endorphin rush. “There really isn’t.”
Samuel smiled. The cloud was forming, of the question Geir was going to have to ask.
“But I’ve missed you,” Geir added, truthfully.
“It’s been the same-old, same-old,” Samuel said nervously. “Nothing you didn’t see at Brightlove. Nothing we didn’t do together.”
Geir nodded. He tried to keep his composure, he really did. And he tried to remember that had been burning for weeks, and right up until he had seen Samuel’s face. It had seemed so urgent, but he couldn’t keep his mind on it. He couldn’t keep any thoughts straight, until he stepped forward and touched Samuel’s hand with the backs of his fingers, until he clutched at it and rested his other hand in the thinning mane. Then he was bracing himself against the wall, and they were kissing, and it was so much like the times they had before, so long ago. Almost alike—but not, and better for it.
“Wait,” Geir said, as much to himself as to Samuel.
And Samuel in turns was anxious, too, but neither could stop for what felt like several minutes.
They made it to the end of the hall before they managed to part, overwhelmed by each other’s presence. Geir looked to the floor, and Samuel slid partway down the wall, hands on his knees.
“I thought you were dead,” the chrysocyon managed. His face, never without an edge of worry, became serious.
“I guess I did, too,” Geir. “I was working.”
“I know.”
“Sam.”
Part of Geir refused to believe they were together again; another part of him accepted it but disbelieved the intervening years. It made him feel foggy and slow, like he was asleep and awake at the same time.
“Sam,” he tried again. “I have to ask you something. I came all the way here to ask it.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Samuel met Geir’s eyes. There was a tremor to his voice. “I’m not ready.”
“I think we’re both doing things today we weren’t ready to before.”
Samuel pursed his lips and looked away, and relented.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t us.”
Relief flooded Geir, but it was diluted with a twinge of disappointment. He had to relinquish the small hope he’d let build, that he would find a Samuel who was newly fierce, dangerous, and earthshaking, despite the horrors done in his name.
“What do you know?” the vulture asked.