Very Good at Burial
Thess
The whiskey at the Tarnished Spur was enchanted, which was either its best quality or its worst depending on what you were trying to forget.
Mira—the owner, a broad-shouldered woman with iron-grey braids and the practiced exhaustion of someone who had seen everything twice and found it wanting both times—brewed it herself. She ran the copper still housed inside what had once been the saloon’s prayer alcove. The steam pipes behind the wall hummed faintly if you pressed your ear against them, a trapped devotional stirring against its own forgetting. You could still see the faint tracings of old Fae incantations above the still’s housing, worn nearly smooth by fingers and time. Mira had never mentioned them. Neither had I. We had an unspoken agreement about the things we both noticed and chose not to discuss.
The enchantment wasn’t anything sinister. It just made the whiskey taste like whatever you missed most. It was different for everyone. A little cruel if you thought about it too hard, which was why most of the Tarnished Spur’s regulars had made a personal policy of not thinking about it at all.
I didn’t drink it. I just poured it. This was either discipline or cowardice. The distinction had grown increasingly academic over the nine years.
“You’re short,” said the man across the bar.
He had the look of someone who’d been handsome once and had spent the intervening years ruining it with commitment. Dust coated his canvas coat. A clockwork brace bound his left knee, the brass gears grinding faintly when he shifted his weight. He was staring at his glass like it had personally offended him.
“I’m exactly the right height,” I said. “You wanted two fingers. That’s two fingers.”
“That’s one and a half.”
I looked at the glass. I looked at him. I poured the half finger with a heavy hand. He grunted, which was as close to gratitude as frontier men usually got.
I moved down the bar to where Rue was sitting with a glass of water and an expression that meant she was listening to three conversations at once and tracking all of them. She had that gift—the ability to look completely unoccupied while cataloguing everything in a room. It was why she ran our communications. It was also why I’d learned never to lie to her. Not because she’d call me on it immediately. But because she’d wait until the worst possible moment.
“Back table,” she said, without moving her lips much. “Two men. They’ve been watching the stairs.”
“Watching for someone coming down or someone going up?”
“Down.”
We had a job tonight—a courier package, nothing complicated, just moving something from the Tarnished Spur’s back room to a contact in the morning market before dawn. The kind of job you took when you needed coin and didn’t want trouble. The kind that still found it anyway. I had opinions about this pattern. Opinions that had not yet proven useful.
The saloon was full for a Tuesday. Steam heat breathed through old radiator grates beneath the floorboards, carrying the bitter metallic tang of the railworks through the saloon like old blood warmed near a fire. A woman in a miner’s coat leaned half-asleep against her husband’s shoulder near the stove, his hand wrapped loosely around the back of her neck like he’d forgotten he was touching her.
The sight caught somewhere beneath my ribs. Ache. I looked away before the feeling could finish becoming anything recognizable. Softness was a luxury for people who still used their real names.
Above the bar, soot-dark arches disappeared into shadow where the chapel ceiling had once risen another story before the upper structure burned out—nobody talked about what had burned it, in the way that nobody talked about most things in Coppergate. Coppergate existed because a prospector once heard the ground humming beneath the canyon and mistook curiosity for wisdom. Now, the railworks bled sulfur into soil that still remembered the Old Courts.
The Territories attracted a particular kind of person: the desperate, the exiled, the ones trying to become unrecognizable. Humans mostly, though the Fae drifted quietly among them like salt in a wound. You learned not to stare at the tells. The slight, oily wrongness of a reflection in a brass fixture. The way glamour bent the lantern light half a heartbeat too slowly, like a mirage over dead desert scrub.
I was obviously not thinking about any of this in relation to myself.
I called myself Thess Vayne. Let’s not debate the originality. Warm brown hair, unremarkable eyes, and a face people forgot inside ten minutes—which was exactly how I’d built it. My crew attributed my knack for finding the safest corner of a room to instinct, and my ability to talk anyone into almost anything to charm. Personally, I called it basic survival.
I had been with the Company for six years, and by every measurable account, I was completely ordinary. It was exhausting. It was a fatigue that had nothing to do with the midnight hour. I was running on the fumes of a lie so thorough, so heavy, that the pretending had become a constant pressure against my ribs. It was always there. The way the low thrum of the town’s steam turbines never truly left your ears, even when you slept.
Nine years was a long time to hold a glamour. Not the surface layer—that part was easy now, as unconscious as breathing. The harder glamour was structural. It was the daily architecture of becoming someone else. Someone who didn’t wake in the dead of night reaching for a hand that wasn’t there. Someone who didn’t feel that hollow pull beneath the left side of her chest, constant as a compass needle, pointing toward a life buried with her own hands.
I was very good at burial.
Tonight, the Spur seemed just as tired as I was. Gaslights flickered low, and the radiator grates hissed in uneven, jagged breaths. The shadows in the far corner behaved with enough intention that I decided ignorance was the healthiest choice available—not that I was an expert in healthy choices.
“Another round,” someone called from the end of the bar.
I grabbed the bottle, but before I could lift it, the batwing doors slammed open. A sudden, unholy storm of dark magic flooded my senses. The ambient steam from the radiators curdled, the moisture souring in the back of my throat. Every copper pipe behind the walls gave a sharp, resonant ring, like a struck tuning fork resisting a curse.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic rhythm matching the sudden, violent jerk of the compass needle in my chest.
I exhaled shakily. Goddess dammit.
