Lily Marx sat on the bench beside him.

By now, she’d probably seen the state of her room. Reed had hidden in his office the rest of the day to polish off his bottle and stare at the ceiling. Undoubtedly, the rumors were making their rounds. There was shit all else to do in this low-tech world, after all.

Lily said nothing.

Reed stared at the ground, elbows on his knees, hands dangling between them. The sun had set a while ago, and the air had gotten cold. The whisky had warmed him to the point that the chill felt refreshing. He stared at the ends of his hair where it had fallen over his shoulders. I went bald at twenty-five before. Will I get reincarnated again? Man, I don't want to go through puberty for a third time.

“I noticed the roof fell in my room,” she said after a long minute of silence.

“Yep.”

“I heard Sir Salvage visited.”

“Yep.”

Lily went silent again, staring at him. She expected him to be more talkative about the day, but he just didn’t have it in him. “Reed,” Lily pushed his shoulder. "What’re you going to do?”

She waited for him to say something more, and when he didn’t, she gripped his sleeve. “Reed,” her voice broke. “They’re talking about beheading you.”

“That’s faster than hanging, at least,” Reed said.

“You have to run away!”

“Why?” Reed asked. “And do what?” He wiped his face with both hands as he sat up. “Go back to being Guild? These assholes will put out a warrant. I ain’t exactly generic-looking. I’d have to go live in the wilds to get away. Living in isolation isn’t fun or easy. At that point, I may as well die.”

“What if we get all the requests together and show them?” Lily asked, grasping for straws.

“They don’t give a shit,” Reed stared at the sky. He heard the door below them open. Marigold’s voice floated up. Reed didn’t immediately recognize the male voice but figured it was probably Prince Solace. “You hear how the dinner went?” A shooting star crossed the sky in a blaze. I wish life was easier.

Lily didn’t want to change the subject, though. She frowned at him, her eyes shining with tears in the moonlight. “There has to be something we can do to save you, Reed. You don’t deserve this.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Reed told her and stood. “The worst people live forever while the best die young. Railing against it doesn’t change a damn thing.” Going to the banister, he leaned against it. The dark garden shook gently in the chilly breeze. A cat slunk through the flowerbed, heading to the fish pond to drink.

“Aren’t you… don’t you want to live?” Lily asked as she stood.

“Of course I want to live!” Reed accidentally used English in his frustration. He caught himself and corrected to Durrish. "What the hell am I supposed to do about this situation? Trying to defend myself is like trying to kill an ogre with a stick.” His mouth quirked slightly as he recalled his first encounter with an ogre. He’d tried to strangle it to death. He probably would’ve died there if it hadn’t been for that Guildsman finding him.

“You could run,” Lily said again. "Go back to Hanbul. You wouldn’t stand out there. They wouldn’t kill you on sight.”

“I haven’t the slightest clue about their culture. I wasn’t there long enough to learn it or the language,” Reed pointed out. “I ain’t gonna fit in. Starting over again doesn’t really appeal to me.”

“You don’t want to try,” Lily said, lowering her head.

“I’m just tired right now. I’ll think about it in the morning,” Reed said, stepping around the bench to open the balcony door and go back inside. He had reports to write, and Kelvin would beat him if he didn’t have them done. Though a mere Disciplinary was the least of his concerns at the moment.

He stopped at the door to his office. It was ajar, and the lamp on his desk was out. He’d not left it that way.

Pushing the door open fully, he let the dim light from the hall in. Books and papers were scattered on the floor. He could tell the shelves had been denuded, and everything had been upended.

He carefully crossed the room to his desk, got the lamp, and lit it again. As he'd thought, the room had been ransacked. Whoever had come in had been in a hurry to find what they wanted. He could immediately tell there were things missing, but what they'd taken wasn't immediately obvious.

Lily stepped into the doorway and gasped. “What happened?”

"Got robbed. Probably destroying evidence so I can't defend myself." Reed started picking up things to see what was missing. Again, though, it was only evidence to defend himself if someone cared to look at it. He didn't have much hope that Lady Gwenivar would stand up for him. In this world, Reed was a foreigner in body and soul who had risen well above his allowed station. Aristocratic party aside, the nobles, in general, didn't like his existence.

Lily immediately knelt to pick up the nearest book. "What would they bother destroying?"

Putting several notebooks onto the shelf generally where they were supposed to go, Reed determined that they'd left the employee records. "Betcha the accounting books are gone."

"I know better than to make bets with you," Lily retorted, putting the stack of books and papers she'd collected on his desk to sort. She stuffed his collection of assorted novels onto the shelf nearest his desk where he usually kept them and started looking through the papers more thoroughly. "Reed, if they're going this far, then you're not getting out of this alive." Her voice broke.

Reed ignored her emotional turmoil and kept cleaning. It was becoming clear that the remaining rejected requests had disappeared, and as he'd guessed, the account books.

Clearing her throat, Lily asked, "Are you finding anything missing?" She started putting the papers into their proper folders in his desk. She was being more thorough about putting things back in their place than he was.

“Repair requests and account books. I gave Lady Lorraine four years’ worth of rejected requests. Maybe that wasn’t enough, and she wants to destroy the rest, too?”

“The Progressives don’t act like that,” Lily admonished.

“The situation has changed,” Reed pointed out. “Prince Solace will end up with his own faction whether he wants it or not. The queen probably announced him as a candidate. If Lady Lorraine is serious about wanting the throne, then our resident meat sack is in the way, and by extension, we are in the way of getting rid of him. You have a lot of faith in her, but she's still a high noble, and I'm a foreigner.”

Her hands slowed as she put away the papers she was holding. Lily gripped the edge of the drawer, her lips pressing together into a hard line. “You could go to Hanbul. No one would be able to follow or find you there. And if you wore a tabba, no one would know what color your hair is. You could blend in.” She was pushing his patience by repeating the plea. Sure, he got along with the Hans in town, but that was only because he did nice things for them. He couldn't speak the Hannish language at all, though it sounded similar to Hispanic Spanish and Arabic combined. However, the time he'd tried using house Spanish, he'd gotten stabbed. Even if it had been eight years ago, Reed wasn't going to try it again.

“I don’t think I’d fit in. The Hannish here in the capital stare at me weird,” Reed said. That seemed like a better excuse than I don't know their language and I don't want to learn it. Immersion had forced him to learn Durrish, though his vocabulary left much to be desired. The problem was that the more languages he learned, it felt like the worse he got at using them. Having so many words for one thing meant that he forgot which was which, and he'd use the wrong one. Learning Hannish would make that his fourth language since he'd grown up with English and Spanish, then learned Durrish ten years ago.

“They do not stare at you. They respect you. They don't call you Amro just because.”

Reed tipped his head back to look at the ceiling, then wiped his face again, then realized that the ransack had revealed just how much dust had accumulated on everything.

“Patrick told Fatima. Hannish Street will fight to the death for you. You know that, right?”

“Good God! That’s the last thing I want!” Reed blurted in English and turned to look at her.

Lily bit her lips together. “You always seem to forget how many people care about you.” She'd probably guessed his meaning by the tone, even if she'd not understood what he said. Her eyes shone in the dim light of the lamp. “So you’d better figure out how you’re going to survive this, or the whole city will be running with blood.” She came to stand in front of him. A tear had gotten free and slid down her cheek. Reed didn’t like that. He wasn’t worth crying over. Lily’s tears, especially, made him do stupid things; like get involved in stuff he had no business in. He'd started a company and housing project because of her. He'd incited a worker's strike because of her... Rightly, neither of these projects should've worked, but they did because, for some weird reason, the Hannish just listened to him when he asked them to do things.

Reed pressed his palm to his forehead, leaning against the shelf behind him. He could believe that there would be blood in the streets if something happened to him, and he wasn’t sure if his simple survival would be enough. It would soon be outright class warfare if something weren’t done.

Her lips trembled, and Reed was again fighting the urge to kiss them, a fight he’d had with himself hundreds of times in the last four years. He looked away awkwardly. “I’ll stay out of sight. They can’t hang me if they can’t find me. Lady Lorraine took four years of the rejected requests. I don’t know what she’s going to do with them.”

Wiping her face with her sleeve, Lily said, “If she knows that it’ll come to bloodshed, she’ll do what she can. She just needs time.”