A Courtesy

Sage was out of bed before her alarm finished its second buzz, which was how she did most things now. Fast, before she could argue herself out of them.

The pull was already there. It had been there for three weeks, ever since a stranger's shoulder put her flat on a sidewalk outside the corner store, and it had settled into her the way a splinter does. Less an event than a fact. This morning it sat low behind her sternum, steady and patient, angled west and a little south, and she stood barefoot in the cold kitchen with one hand pressed against her ribs and let herself feel exactly where it pointed.

Comma watched from the top of the fridge, where the cat had decided sometime in the night that it now lived. Comma's opinion of the pull was that it was none of anyone's business. Sage found this restful.

"You're no help," she told the cat, and filled the kettle.

While the water heated she slid the street map out from under her mattress and unfolded it across the bed. A week of pencil marks now, one at the edge of Kesting Row every morning and every night, each with a tiny arrow off the end of it. They weren't random. She had been sure of that since last Wednesday. The arrows drifted, a little each day, the way a tide moves, and every time she tried to work out where the drift was taking them, the answer slid out of her hands like a wet bar of soap.

She put down today's mark. Then she got the spiral notebook out from under the loose floorboard and wrote the date, the time, and four words. *Steady. West and south. Closer?*

She looked at the last word for a while before she underlined it.

Six days. That was how long it had been since she stood in the alley behind Jade Palace and watched the pull aim itself at a dark sedan like a finger pointing. Six days of telling herself a parked car was just a parked car, that a shape behind a windshield was just somebody waiting for somebody, that the way her whole chest had leaned toward it was a coincidence. She used to be so good at this. Two years of practice, and lately the stories she told herself didn't hold any weight.

She had planned to walk the line of the pull on Saturday, all the way out to wherever it ended. Then Marsh had asked her for a double shift, and she'd said yes too fast, and she had not been entirely sorry. Walking toward something you couldn't name was easy to plan and hard to do.

She folded the map along its worn creases and tucked it back under the mattress. She ate her cereal standing at the counter, checked the balcony latch and then the front lock, twice each, and Comma watched her go with the calm of someone who had never once been late for anything in its life.

***

Olivia Bennett's mother was on the phone before the car had even left the driveway, which meant Olivia was going to hear about the fundraiser whether she asked or not.

"No, the community centre already has the tables," her mother told the speaker on the dash. "It's the linens. Somebody has to do the linens."

Olivia leaned her forehead against the passenger window and watched Ashford Heights slide past. Big brick houses. Tidy hedges. Lawns that looked like somebody had ironed them. It was a nice street. Everybody said so. She sometimes had the feeling everybody said so a bit too often, the way people repeat a thing they aren't completely sure is true.

Her mother hung up at the school drop-off. "Are you ready for Mr. Aldrich's test?"

"Yes."

"You said that about the last one."

"And I got an A minus."

"Which your father will say is one letter away from an A, and I will say is a very good grade." Her mother squeezed her hand, quick, the way she did everything. "Eat something real at lunch, sweetheart. Not just a granola bar."

"It's a very good granola bar."

"It is a granola bar," her mother said, and Olivia got out of the car laughing.

Her locker was on the second floor, halfway down a hallway that smelled like floor wax and body spray. She had ten minutes before first bell and every intention of using them to reread the Confederation chapter, because Mr. Aldrich was the kind of teacher who could tell when you'd only skimmed. She spun the combination without looking. Left, right, left. The lock popped the way it always did, with a little tired click.

She took out the history textbook and it opened by itself.

That was the first strange thing. Textbooks didn't open by themselves. This one fell open in her hands to the middle, and a card slid out of the gutter of the pages and landed on her shoe.

Olivia looked at it. Then she looked up and down the hallway, which was full of the usual noise, lockers banging, somebody laughing too loudly at nothing, two guys from the basketball team arguing about a video game. Nobody was looking at her. That was strange too, in a way she couldn't explain. Two hundred people in one building, and not a single one of them was looking at her.

She picked the card up.

It wasn't a torn scrap or a folded note. It was an index card, thick and cream-coloured, the expensive kind, not the flimsy ones from the drugstore. One side was blank. The other side was covered in handwriting so neat it looked like it had been done with a ruler nearby. Every letter was finished. Every line sat straight.

*Olivia,*

*You are right that something about your friend is different. You are also right not to say it aloud. Please keep it that way. There are people who would very much like to know what you have noticed, and they are not gentle.*

*This is not a threat. It is a courtesy.*

*Please do not show this to her. She has been frightened long enough.*

That was all. No name at the bottom. No initials. She turned it over twice, then held it up to the light from the window at the end of the hall, looking for a watermark, or a smudge, or anything at all. There was nothing. The ink was black and even. The corners were sharp.

She read it again. Then a third time, slower, and by the third time her hands had gone cold.

Here was the thing. She had not told anyone.

She had not told her mom, or her dad, or her best friend from before, who she still texted on Sundays. She had not written a word of it in the notebook she kept in her desk for things like this. On a windy path down at the Landing, a few weeks ago, Sage had said something Olivia had never told a single living person, and Olivia had stood there with the wind in her face and understood that she was standing next to something she didn't have a name for. And then she had said she wouldn't bring it up again unless Sage wanted to. And she hadn't. Not once.

So how did somebody else know what she had noticed?

Her mind went fast in the way it did when she was scared, and it went first to the worst, silly place. Sage. Sage had handwriting like this, careful and tidy, the kind of neat that was really a kind of armour. Olivia held the card next to her memory of Sage's notes from history class and almost laughed at herself, because the two didn't match. Sage's neatness had a little lean to it, a tired lean, the writing of someone who wrote everything down in a hurry and then went back over it. This was different. This handwriting didn't lean at all. It wasn't tired. It looked like it had never been tired in its life.

And besides, Sage would never write *she has been frightened long enough.* Nobody wrote that about themselves.

No. Whoever wrote this was somebody else. Somebody who had been close enough to hear a conversation on a public path, or somebody who was close enough to Sage to know exactly what Olivia would see when she looked at her.

Olivia checked the lock. She ran her thumb over the face of it, looking for scratches, and found none. She checked the inside of the locker door, the top shelf, the floor. Nothing. Only her gym bag, her umbrella, and the smell of a banana she had definitely thrown out.

The bell was going to ring in six minutes. She could walk down to the office right now. She could put the card on the vice-principal's desk and say someone had left it in her locker. She even got as far as picturing it, the little frown Mr. Danvers would make, the questions. Who's the friend? What does she mean, different? Who might want to know? Somewhere in a filing cabinet, a folder with Sage's name on it, opened for the first time.

It was a very quiet, very clear picture, and Olivia did not like any part of it.

She had spent months learning how to be around Sage. Not pushing. Leaving the door open a crack and standing far enough back that nobody felt cornered. It was the hardest thing she'd ever tried to do, harder than pre-law, harder than any test. And she had promised. *You don't have to say anything back to that.* She had meant every word.

Olivia folded the card once along its own centre, gently, as if it might tear, and slid it into the inside pocket of her jacket, the one with the zipper. She closed the history book without reading a single line of the Confederation chapter. She shut the locker.

By first bell she had decided on three things. She would tell no one. She would watch everything. And she would act exactly as normal as she always did.

She was going to be terrible at the third one. She knew that already.

***

Kesting Row at nine in the morning smelled like wet pavement and fryer oil, and Eli Vance had been talking since they left the precinct.

"That bakery," he said, pointing out the windshield with the hand that wasn't on the wheel. "Best butter tarts in the city. Owner hates me. I stole one in Grade Four and she has never once let it go."

"You stole a butter tart."

"I was hungry and she was distracted. It was a crime of opportunity." Eli parked in front of a laundromat with a piece of cardboard still taped over one window, and killed the engine. "You want to know the worst part? I'd do it again."

Nate almost smiled. It was becoming a habit, almost smiling, and he wasn't sure yet if that was a good sign.

The overdose cluster was three names on a page now, all from Kesting Row, all in the past month. Three people in their twenties and thirties, and nothing else in common except the same chalky powder and the same look on the paramedics' faces when they talked about it. Beaumont wanted people asking questions, so Nate and Eli were asking. It was slow, unglamorous work. It was the kind of work Nate had always been good at, and he was grateful for it in a way he still couldn't say out loud.

They started at the pharmacy on Alder Street, where a woman behind the counter said she'd never seen anything like it and then talked for ten minutes about what she had seen. They tried a rooming house whose landlord said he ran a clean building and slammed the door before Eli finished his second question. Around eleven they found the outreach van parked at the end of the block, its side doors open, a folding table set up on the curb with coffee and boxes of clean supplies.

The woman running it wore a reflective vest and the look of someone who had not slept properly since spring. She looked at their badges and then at their faces, one after the other, and said, "You're not the first, and you won't be the last."

"We're trying to figure out where it's coming from," Eli said. "Same batch, same cut. Somebody's not being careful."

"Somebody's being careful in exactly one way." She poured coffee into a paper cup and held it out to Nate without being asked. "They keep the supply small. Tight. Whoever's selling this has one source and no interest in a second one, and they don't like customers who talk. That's why nobody's talking."

"You hear anything?" Nate asked.

"I hear everything. It's my job." She shrugged. "Nobody tells me anything useful, though. That's the point of me. People tell me their feet hurt, or they're hungry, or they lost a kid. They don't tell me who sells to who. If they did, I'd be no good to them."

It was a fair answer, and a better one than most cops got. Nate wrote it down and thanked her. When he turned back toward the car, the coffee already going cold in his hand, he noticed that they had walked the whole length of Alder Street, and that the far end of it opened onto a corner with a red and gold sign, half its neon dead.

Jade Palace.

It sat there under the grey sky looking like any other tired diner in any other tired neighbourhood. A woman in a green coat was locking a bike out front. Somebody had left a bag of takeout on the ledge of the window. He should have felt nothing. It was a restaurant.

The tug came anyway, low and quick behind his ribs. It wasn't the sharp pull he'd felt on the night he sat outside, the one that made his hand close on the door handle. This was smaller. It felt like a hand resting for one second on the back of his neck, and then lifting.

"You keep looking at that diner," Eli said.

"It's a diner."

"It's the best dumplings in Kesting Row. Also, apparently, a place people whisper about. I'm not saying those two things are connected. I'm saying if you're going to stare at it, we could at least eat there."

"Not today."

Eli studied him for a beat, easy on the surface and not easy underneath, and then shrugged. "Suit yourself. But I'm getting the almond chicken one of these days, and you're going to have to watch."

They walked back to the car. Nate did not look at the diner again, which took more effort than he wanted anyone to know.

He'd been up until two last night with the filings spread across his kitchen table, five years of Jade Palace's public records laid out in a fan, and a pencil. The numbers weren't wrong. That was the trouble. They were small, tidy, and slightly too regular, the sort of regular that made a man's back teeth itch. Not enough to take to Beaumont. Not enough to make anyone else look twice. Just enough to make him look a third time, a fourth, and then a fifth. He had used his precinct login again to pull the last two quarters. He told himself nobody checked those.

*Flag it. Don't chase it.*

He was chasing it. He knew he was chasing it. He knew it the way he had once known, in a warehouse in Memphis, that the floor plan didn't add up. The difference was that back then, he'd had a reason he could say out loud.

"You're doing the thing," Eli said, starting the engine.

"What thing."

"The thing where you go somewhere else. It's not a complaint, Bishop. I'm only saying it's getting more frequent."

"I'm tired."

"Everyone's tired. You're something else." Eli pulled out from the curb. "Beaumont wants a status on the cluster by Friday, by the way. So whatever's in that head of yours, do me a favour and file it somewhere I can't see it, so I can pretend you're paying attention."

Nate laughed, once, short and surprised, and looked out the window at the buildings sliding past, all those windows, all those closed doors. Somewhere on the other side of one of them, he thought, someone was having a day exactly as strange as his.

He didn't know why he thought it. He put the thought down, the way he put down most things now. Not gone. Just down.

***

Sage noticed the granola bar first.

It was such a small thing that she almost missed it. She had sat down across from Olivia at their usual table, the one by the window in the cafeteria, and slid her tray into place, and gone through the ordinary motions of lunch, and only when she reached for her milk did she realize that something was missing from the routine. Olivia had unwrapped her granola bar. She had broken it in half. And the half had not come across the table.

It had come across the table nearly every school day for months. It was one of the small rules of their friendship, unspoken, like a handshake nobody ever mentioned. Olivia broke the bar, slid half over, and never once said a word about it. Today, she ate her half quickly and left the other half sitting on its wrapper by her elbow, and when she saw Sage looking at it, she said, "Oh, do you want that?" in a voice that was a little too bright.

"I'm okay," Sage said.

"You sure? I'm not that hungry."

"I'm sure."

"Okay!" Olivia said, and it was the exclamation mark that did it. Olivia did not talk in exclamation marks. Olivia talked in long, easy, slightly sarcastic sentences, with pauses in the middle where the joke went.

There were other things. Sage noticed them the way she noticed everything, without meaning to, without being able to stop. Olivia had picked a different seat. Not by much. She had taken the chair with its back to the wall, where she could see the whole cafeteria, and she kept looking at the door every time it opened. Her left hand kept going to the inside pocket of her jacket, resting there a second, and drifting back down to the table, the way you check that your keys are still with you.

"How was Aldrich's test?" Sage asked.

"Fine. I think. I mean, I didn't study as much as I should have." Olivia laughed, and it sounded almost right. "Mom's fundraiser has taken over the whole house. There are boxes of napkins in the front hall. Napkins, Sage. Three hundred of them."

"That's a lot of napkins."

"It's an unreasonable amount of napkins."

Sage waited for the rest of it, the story behind the napkins, the part where Olivia would do her mother's voice. It didn't come. Olivia picked at her sandwich, put it down, and picked it up again, and Sage watched her and thought, with a small, sinking feeling, *this is about the waterfront.*

Of course it was. She'd known it would be. She had said something on that path, on a grey afternoon almost four weeks ago, something she had no business knowing, and Olivia had stood there and looked at her the way you look at a door you've just realized was never locked. And then Olivia had said all those kind things. *I don't care what it is. You don't have to say anything back.* And Sage had thanked her, and walked away first, and had spent every day since not knowing how to stand near a person who had offered her the whole world and asked for nothing in return.

Olivia was being careful with her now. That was what this was. She'd probably thought about it all weekend, and decided the kindest thing was to give her space, and it was working, in the worst possible way.

"You don't have to be careful with me," Sage said.

Olivia's head came up. "What?"

"You've been weird today. Not bad weird. Careful weird." Sage kept her voice light, the way Olivia would have. "If you want to ask me something, you can. I might not answer. But you can ask."

For one second, Olivia's face did something Sage could not read. It was fast, a flicker, and underneath the flicker was something that looked almost like fear, and then it smoothed out into a smile that didn't reach very far.

"I don't want to ask you anything," Olivia said.

It was so plainly a lie that Sage almost said so.

She could have known. That was the thing that sat on the table between them, quiet and heavy. Olivia's tray was inches from her hand. A sleeve, a wrist, the edge of a fingertip. It would have taken nothing. A little skin, a second of contact, and whatever Olivia was holding behind her eyes would have come pouring into Sage the way Mrs. Okafor's fear had poured into her at the diner, whole and unasked for, no permission and no warning.

She put her hand flat on the table. Then, deliberately, she slid it back into her lap.

She did not do that. She did not read people. It was the one rule she had built her whole self around, and it was the only thing that had never let her down. Even now, with Olivia lying to her across a cafeteria table, even now she wanted to keep it more than she wanted the answer.

Or almost more. She wasn't sure. It scared her that she wasn't sure.

"Okay," Sage said.

"Okay." Olivia looked at her phone, though it hadn't buzzed. "Hey, I can't do history after school today. I'm sorry. Mom's got a thing, and I have to be home."

"That's fine."

"We can do tomorrow."

"Sure."

"Sage." Olivia's voice went quiet. She looked up, and for the space of a breath she wasn't the bright, careful person from a minute ago. She looked like the girl on the waterfront, the one who had stood there with the wind pulling at her hair and said *I want you to know that.* "I'm not going anywhere. Okay? I need you to know that."

It should have made her feel better. It did, a little. But under the warmth was something else, a small, cold edge of wrongness, like a step that was a half inch higher than she'd expected. People who weren't going anywhere didn't usually have to say so.

"I know," Sage said, because she couldn't think of anything else. "I know."

The bell rang. Olivia gathered her tray and her bag and left the other half of the granola bar on its wrapper, untouched, and Sage sat there for another moment looking at it, this small dry thing that had been cut off at the wrist, and did not pick it up.

***

The house in Ashford Heights had gone quiet at last.

Olivia sat cross-legged on her bed with the lamp on and the door closed and a pillow in her lap. Downstairs, her parents were still discussing linens, her father's low patient voice and her mother's fast one, going around and around like clothes in a dryer. The front hall was, in fact, full of napkins. She had counted them on the way up. Three hundred and twelve.

She took the card out of her jacket and held it under the lamp.

She had read it maybe twenty times since morning. In the girls' washroom between second and third period. At the back of the library. On the bus home, hunched against the window with the card flat on her knee. Each time she had told herself she was looking for something new, a clue, a mark, a name, and each time the card had simply looked back at her, neat and calm and patient.

*This is not a threat. It is a courtesy.*

That was the line that bothered her most. Not the warning. She could almost understand a warning. It was how gently the warning was made. It read like a note from a very polite adult, a doctor, or a teacher, or a lawyer, someone who had never in their life had to raise their voice because they'd never needed to. No one her age wrote like that. She wasn't sure anyone anywhere wrote like that anymore, except in old books.

And there was something else. Something she had been circling all day and couldn't land on. It sat somewhere behind her eyes like a word on the tip of the tongue, that feeling of a sentence with one piece slightly off. A word swapped for a cousin of the word. The right idea in the wrong clothes. She read it a twenty-first time, slowly, aloud, in a whisper, letting each line sit in her mouth.

Nothing. It refused to come.

She sat there a long time, holding it.

There was a shoebox on the shelf above her desk, an old one, where she kept the postcards from the Gull and Anchor. She had a whole collection now, Bill and Margaret and the train station that didn't exist anymore, and she had loved every one of them for exactly the reason she'd told Sage. *It's the best kind of mystery, the kind with no answer.*

She got up, took the box down, and lifted the lid. Then she slid the card in between two postcards, one from a beach somewhere warm and one from a city she had never heard of, and pressed the lid back down.

It felt like burying something. It also felt, she realized, like the only honest place to put it.

Olivia turned off the lamp. She lay on her back in the dark and listened to her parents' voices rise and fall below her, and for a long while she did not sleep. She thought about Sage's face at lunch, that small flat calm she wore when she was trying not to be seen. She thought about a hand sliding off a table and into a lap. She thought about the granola bar, and how much it had cost her to leave it there.

*I'm not going anywhere.*

She had meant it. That was the whole trouble. Whoever had written the card had known she would.

She reached over to her nightstand and picked up her phone, and typed *you okay?* and looked at it for a minute. Then she deleted it. She typed, *see you tomorrow.* She looked at that for another minute, and sent it.

Three dots came up almost right away, and vanished, and came up again.

*See you,* Sage wrote back.

Olivia set the phone face down on the blanket. In the shoebox on the shelf, between a beach and a stranger's city, the little card lay in the dark and waited, calm and polite, for the next thing to be true.