Soft As A Blade

ADRIAN — AURELIS, Y0

Berth Nine

The vendors had been talking for fifty minutes, and Adrian Kastellan had stopped listening at eleven.

Not out of contempt. He had simply reached the end of the useful part. Halvard Meng, who ran a container-handling concern out of the eastern quays, had made his case in the first four minutes — his cranes were older than the contract required, he wanted eighteen months to replace them, and he was prepared to shave two percent off his rate to get it. Everything after that was Meng talking himself into believing he had negotiated.

Adrian let him. It cost nothing, and Meng’s father had worked the same quay as Adrian’s grandfather, which in Vell Harbour was a currency that still spent.

“—so what I’m saying, and I want to be clear, is that nobody’s asking Kastellan to carry us.”

“Nobody thinks you are.”

“Because the last thing I want is for anyone at this table to think—”

“Halvard.” Adrian turned his pen over. “Eighteen months. Two percent. Berth nine stays yours through the winter cycle. If the crane inspection in the spring comes back bad, we revisit.”

Meng blinked. “That’s — yes. That’s the ask.”

“Then that’s the answer.” He looked down the table. “Ilse, minute it. Halvard, go home.”

There was a small ripple of laughter, the kind that happens in rooms where the outcome has been decided and everyone is relieved about it. Chairs moved. Somebody’s phone buzzed against the veneer.

At the far end of the table, Anton Kastellan had not said a word in fifty-one minutes, which was normal, and had not moved in about four, which was not.

Adrian noticed it the way he noticed most things — peripherally, filed, no alarm attached. His father had been coming to these meetings for forty years and contributing to roughly one in six of them. He sat at the end. He listened. Occasionally, at the exact moment a discussion was about to go wrong, he would say eleven words and the discussion would stop going wrong. Then he would go back to not speaking.

The old man had one hand at his collar. He was straightening it. He did that.

“Adrian.”

“One second, Halvard.”

“No, I only meant — you’ll thank your father for me. About the spring. I know it’s him that decides, at the end.”

It was not him that decided, and had not been for six years, and both of them knew it, and it was still the correct thing to say. Adrian nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

He turned to do it.

Anton’s hand was still at his collar. The fingers had stopped working. They were resting against the fabric without gripping it, and his face had gone the particular grey of a photograph left in a window, and his mouth was open a little on the left side and not on the right.

“Dad.”

The room did not understand yet. Ilse was still typing.

Anton looked at him. That was the part Adrian would carry: his father looked directly at him, with complete comprehension, and could not do anything about it. Then the hand came away from the collar and the collar stayed crooked and Anton Kastellan went sideways out of the chair.

The next eleven minutes were noise. Adrian was later unable to reconstruct them in order. He remembered the sound the chair made. He remembered Ilse on the floor with two fingers on Anton’s throat, saying he’s got one, he’s got one in a voice like a woman reciting a number. He remembered telling somebody to move the table and the table not moving because it was bolted, and telling them to move the chairs instead, and them doing it.

He remembered that at no point did he panic, and being aware, even then, that this was going to be held against him.

The paramedics came up in the freight elevator because the passenger cars stopped at the fourth floor after six. Adrian had known that for years without ever having a use for it. He gave them the floor plan in one sentence and stood out of the way.

Then they were gone, and there was a boardroom with the chairs pushed against the wall and Halvard Meng standing in the doorway with his coat over his arm, crying, which Adrian had not expected and did not know what to do with.

“Go home, Halvard.”

“Adrian—”

“Berth nine’s still yours. Go home.”

He took the stairs. Ten flights, because the elevator would have meant standing still.

In the car he opened a note on his phone and began, because there was nothing else to do with his hands.

Board — call tonight, not tomorrow. Vendor letters — Ilse, hold all outbound until Monday. Port authority — my credentials cover the winter chain. Confirm. Press — nothing. If it leaks, nothing. Marguerite — trust instruments. She’ll want to come to the house. Let her.

His thumb hovered.

Theo — he’ll already know. Rafe — tell him before he reads it. Nico — is he in the country? Elias — send someone. He won’t answer a phone.

He looked at the list. It was a good list. It was, he thought with some distant part of himself, an extremely good list for a man who had watched his father’s face go grey eleven minutes ago, and he understood that other people would find that horrifying, and he did not have the equipment to care.

There was one line left to write, and he did not write it.

He drove another two kilometers, through the tunnel and up onto Ostren Hill where the streetlights changed color, and then he pulled over and sat with the engine running.

Then he typed it, because it had to be done.

Sera.

He looked at it for a while. Four letters, at the bottom of a list, under a note about who to send for his youngest brother.

He deleted it and let Josefa make the call instead.