Static

The nightlight was still glowing when Nate woke up, a small star throwing gold light across the ceiling of a bedroom that didn't feel like his. He lay there for a minute, letting his eyes adjust, letting his head catch up with the rest of him. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a bottle. His temples throbbed in time with his pulse.

He sat up slow. The apartment came into focus around him one unpacked box at a time. There was a lamp on the floor because he hadn't found the table for it yet. There was a stack of mail he hadn't opened, most of it addressed to a name that felt like it belonged to someone else. And in the closet, behind his coats, there was a box marked K'S ROOM in handwriting that wasn't his.

He didn't look at it. He never looked at it. He just made sure the closet door was shut all the way before he got up.

The bathroom mirror wasn't kind to him. Dark circles, a shadow of stubble he hadn't bothered to shave off in three days, eyes that looked older than the rest of his face. He ran the water cold and splashed it against his skin until some of the fog cleared, then found a clean shirt in the pile that hadn't made it to a drawer yet.

Friday. His first full shift on the floor, no more half days of orientation, no more sitting in a corner with a stack of forms. New city, new precinct, still new everything. He'd done this kind of morning before, a long time ago, back when it had meant something different. Back when Angela used to hand him his travel mug at the door with a kiss on the cheek and tell him to knock 'em dead, and Kimberly would yell some version of the same thing from the kitchen table with cereal in her mouth.

He pushed the thought down the way he'd learned to. Not gone. Just down.

He was also not thinking about Tuesday. He had made that decision somewhere around the second glass last night, and so far it was holding, mostly, if you didn't count the way his hand kept drifting to his left forearm like it was looking for something.

The walk to the precinct took him through the heart of Old Millhaven, past buildings that looked like they'd been standing since before his grandparents were born, their stone faces darkened with a century of weather. Modern glass towers rose up here and there between them, like the city couldn't decide what decade it wanted to live in. He liked that about the place, actually. It felt less like starting over and more like blending in.

The precinct itself was a squat brick building with tall windows and a flag out front that had seen better days. Nate stood across the street from it for a second longer than he needed to, one hand in his coat pocket wrapped around nothing in particular, and then he crossed and went in.

The front desk sergeant barely looked up from her monitor. "Bishop," she said, which was progress. Four days ago it had been "Transfer?" "Beaumont wants you. You know the way. Still the door with his name spelled right, because he's the only one who checks."

Nate thanked her and went.

The bullpen he passed through on the way looked like every other bullpen he'd ever worked in, desks pushed together in pairs, corkboards thick with case notes and takeout menus, a coffee machine that had clearly given up trying a long time ago. A couple of heads turned as he walked by, and one of them nodded. It wasn't much. He'd take it.

Captain Luca Beaumont's office door was open when Nate reached it, but he knocked on the frame anyway.

"Bishop." The voice came out low and even, the kind of voice that didn't need volume to carry weight. Beaumont didn't look up right away. He was somewhere in his fifties, grey threaded heavy through dark hair, forearms like he'd spent time doing something with his hands before he'd spent time doing paperwork. When he finally lifted his eyes, they moved over Nate the way a mechanic's eyes move over an engine that's making a noise it shouldn't be making. "Sit."

Nate sat.

Beaumont had a folder open on the desk in front of him. Nate recognized the shape of it before he could read a word, the particular grey-green colour of an interdepartmental transfer file, the kind that followed a cop from one jurisdiction to the next whether he wanted it to or not.

"Dispatch logged a civilian involved in your pursuit on Tuesday," Beaumont said. "Your report on it ran three lines."

"There wasn't much to say. I clipped her running the corner. She was fine."

"You were also carrying on your day off." Beaumont let that sit. "I noticed. I haven't decided what I think about it yet, so don't take that as permission." He turned a page, unhurried. "That's not why I called you in. Memphis PD, fifteen years. Riverside Precinct. Led the joint task force that brought down the Cordero operation. That's a hell of a case to have on a file."

"It was a good team. I didn't do it alone."

"Nobody ever does." Beaumont flipped another page and this time his eyes stayed on it a beat too long before he closed the folder altogether. "The day you signed on, I told you I wasn't going to make you say it out loud in my office. That was over a week ago. There's a gap in here, after the bust. Six months, give or take, where the file just stops talking. I've kept my word. Now I need to hear it from you, once, so we're not pretending with each other."

Nate's jaw tightened, just enough that he had to consciously loosen it again. "With respect, Captain, it's mine."

"It is. And whatever it is, it doesn't leave with you at the end of the day. It follows you into every room, every interview, every call you take. If something in that gap is going to climb up your back at three in the morning during a stakeout, I need to know it exists. I don't need details. I need to know it's there."

Nate held his gaze for a long moment. There was something in the older man's face that reminded him, just slightly, of Frank on the days Frank was deciding not to push. It didn't turn his stomach the way most thoughts of Memphis did.

"It's there," Nate said finally. "I lost my family. My wife and my daughter. That's the gap."

Beaumont didn't offer condolences, didn't reach across the desk, didn't do any of the things people usually did when a man said something like that out loud. He just nodded once, like he was filing the information away somewhere it would actually be useful.

"All right," he said. "That's all I needed. You're partnered with Vance, and you'll stay partnered with Vance. He's sharper than he lets on and he talks more than he should, but he's good police. If you need anything from me directly, my door's open more often than it's shut." He stood, which Nate took as his cue to do the same. "Get back to work, Detective Bishop."

"Thank you, Captain."

Nate was almost out the door when Beaumont's voice caught him one more time.

"Bishop."

He turned.

"Whatever brought you here," Beaumont said, "it doesn't matter to me half as much as what you do here. Keep that in mind."

Nate nodded and stepped out into the hallway, and it was only once the door was shut behind him that he let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

* * *

Eli Vance was exactly where Nate had left him, leaning back in his chair with his shoes up on the corner of his desk like the place belonged to him. He was early thirties, dark hair a little too carefully styled for a man who spent his days chasing people through alleys, and he didn't bother getting up.

"Well?" Vance said. "Did he fire you, adopt you, or just stare at you until you confessed?"

"Third one."

"Classic." Vance finally dropped his feet and spun his chair half around to face Nate directly, elbows on his knees, and for a second the joking dropped out of his face entirely. "Look, I'll level with you. I've had four days of you going somewhere behind your own eyes, and I'm not asking where. A new partner with a chunk of his file blacked out makes people nervous. Not because we think you did something wrong. Because we don't know what we're walking into with you, and in this job, not knowing gets people hurt." He held up a hand before Nate could respond. "I'm not asking you to spill your guts. I'm telling you where I'm coming from, so when I ask a dumb question two weeks from now and you shut it down, I'm not gonna take it personal. I'll just assume there's a reason."

Nate studied him for a moment. There was something disarming about the honesty, a bluntness under the charm that reminded him, unexpectedly, of Frank. Not the build, not the voice, but the way both men had of laying their cards down just enough to earn a little trust back.

"There's a reason," Nate said.

"Good enough for me." Vance clapped his hands together once and the grin was back like it had never left. "Now. You eat lunch, or is that a Memphis thing too?"

Despite himself, Nate almost laughed. "I eat lunch."

"Great. There's a place two blocks over does a sandwich that will change your entire outlook on this city. I bought the coffee, so you're already in my debt. Consider this a chance to start paying it off."

They spent the afternoon on the unglamorous end of police work, first closing out the last of the Riverline paperwork, then working through a stack of open files that needed fresh eyes: a string of break-ins along a commercial strip in Kesting Row, a missing persons case gone cold, a handful of assaults that all had the shape of something connected without any evidence to prove it yet. Nate found the rhythm of it coming back to him faster than he expected, the particular quiet focus of reading through someone else's notes and looking for the shape of the thing they'd missed. It was the first time in almost a year that his hands had felt like they were doing something that mattered, instead of just moving through the motions of a life he was pretending to still be living.

Around midafternoon, Vance leaned back and stretched until his spine cracked audibly. "You're quiet."

"I'm listening."

"You're broody. There's a difference." He said it without any real edge to it, more observation than accusation. "That's fine. I talk enough for two people anyway. My last partner used to say I filled silences the way other people fill potholes. Constantly, and usually badly."

"What happened to your last partner?"

"Retired. Moved out to the coast, sends me a card every Christmas with a picture of him fishing, looking smug about it." Vance shrugged. "Beaumont does the soul-staring thing to everybody, by the way. He's not exactly warm, but he's fair, and he'll go to bat for you if you're one of his. Took him a while to decide I was one of his. Guessing it'll take you a while too, though I saw your face when you came out of there, so maybe not."

"I don't need him to like me," Nate said. "I need him to let me work."

"Around here those tend to be the same thing." Vance tapped a pen against the edge of his desk, a slow, thoughtful rhythm. "For what it's worth, whatever's in that gap, it doesn't have to define you here. Millhaven's got a short memory when it comes to a guy's past, as long as he shows up and does the job. Nobody's gonna care where you came from if you're good at what you do."

Nate thought of the box in his closet marked in Angela's handwriting, and the nightlight glowing on his nightstand every night whether he needed the light or not, and he wondered if that was true anywhere, in any city, for a man carrying what he was carrying.

"We'll see," he said, and went back to the file in front of him.

* * *

Across the city, in a classroom that smelled like dry-erase markers and the tail end of summer humidity, Sage Marchand's attention kept drifting somewhere it had no business drifting.

It started small. A restlessness under her skin, like she'd had too much coffee, except she hadn't had any that morning at all. She tapped her pen against her notebook without meaning to until the girl next to her shot her a look, and Sage mumbled an apology and made herself stop.

By lunch it had grown into something harder to ignore, a low hum at the base of her skull that pulled, gently but insistently, toward the west. Toward downtown. She sat across from Olivia at their usual table near the window, half listening to a story about a group project gone sideways, and found herself glancing out at the street more than she was looking at her friend.

"You okay?" Olivia asked, not for the first time. "You've got that face again."

"What face?"

"The one where you're somewhere else." Olivia said it lightly, no accusation in it, the way she said most things that got a little too close to the truth. "You don't have to tell me where. I'm just saying I noticed."

"I'm fine," Sage said, and made herself smile, and the smile even felt mostly real. "Tired. Didn't sleep great."

Olivia let it go, the way she always did, and Sage was grateful for it in a way she never quite knew how to say out loud.

But the pull didn't let go. If anything, it sharpened as the afternoon wore on, a thread she could almost feel behind her sternum, tugging her west and a little south, toward the old stone buildings and glass towers of downtown Millhaven, a part of the city she rarely had reason to visit. Her whole world lived in a much smaller radius than that: school, her apartment in Kesting Row, the walk to Jade Palace and back. She hadn't set foot downtown in months.

She pressed her palm flat against the desk during her last class and tried to breathe through it the way she'd taught herself years ago, back when she was thirteen and first learning what it meant to have a gift that didn't come with an instruction manual. Back then, the Reach had felt like a wound that wouldn't close, information bleeding into her from every hand that brushed hers, every crowded hallway a wall of other people's grief and fear and small private shames she had never asked to know. She had built her control the hard way, alone, with no one to teach her, until she could walk through a room full of strangers and touch a doorknob a hundred people had touched without hearing a single whisper of what any of them carried.

She had not felt anything like this since.

This wasn't the Reach, exactly. There was no voice, no flash of someone else's memory, none of the things she associated with her gift slipping its leash. This was something simpler and somehow stranger, a direction instead of a feeling, a compass needle instead of a message. It didn't feel like it was coming from a person at all. It felt like it was coming from a place, or maybe from something that hadn't happened yet.

By the time the final bell rang, she'd made her decision three times and unmade it twice. She told herself she was going to walk straight home, straight to her shift at Jade Palace, and put this down to a bad night's sleep and a body that had apparently decided today was a good day to be strange. She got two blocks toward Kesting Row before her feet simply stopped listening and turned the other way instead.

She stood on the corner for a long moment, breathing hard, feeling faintly ridiculous and more than a little afraid.

"This isn't real," she said under her breath, to no one, to herself. "I'm imagining it."

But she wasn't imagining the way her chest tightened when she pointed herself back toward Kesting Row, or the way it eased, just slightly, when she let herself turn west instead. It was the strangest kind of relief, the kind that made her feel like she was losing an argument with her own body.

She checked the time. She had almost two hours before her shift started. Marsh wouldn't care if she was a few minutes late, not really, not the way he looked out for her, but she'd never once been late in the eight months she'd worked there and she didn't especially want to start now. Still. Two hours was enough time to walk downtown and see whatever it was that kept tugging at her, and walk back, and still make her shift with room to spare.

She told herself that was a reasonable plan. She didn't examine too closely why it felt less like a plan and more like giving in.

The walk from her part of Kesting Row into Old Millhaven took the better part of forty minutes on foot, long enough for the neighbourhood to change around her one block at a time, the cracked sidewalks and boarded storefronts giving way slowly to older buildings that had been kept up instead of left to rot, stone facades and brass fixtures and the occasional flower box someone actually bothered to water. Sage kept her hands shoved deep in her jacket pockets the whole way, partly out of habit and partly because the pull seemed to sharpen whenever her palms were open, like her skin itself was trying to reach for something before the rest of her caught up.

She passed a coffee shop with a chalkboard sign out front advertising a fall drink special two weeks too early, passed a bookstore with a cat sleeping in the window display, passed a bus shelter where two older women were arguing cheerfully about a card game. None of it meant anything to her. None of it was what she was looking for. The pull kept moving her forward, past all of it, deeper into the heart of Old Millhaven, toward a part of the city she couldn't have named on a map even now that she was standing in it.

A block ahead, she caught sight of a squat brick building with a flag out front, tall windows catching the late afternoon light, and something in her chest gave a sharp, unexpected tug, hard enough that she actually stopped walking and pressed her hand flat against her sternum like she could hold the feeling still.

It eased almost as fast as it had come, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk with her heart going too quickly and no idea why.

A man in a uniform came out of the building's front doors, laughing at something a colleague had said, and for one absurd, disorienting second Sage was sure the pull had something to do with him, before he got into a parked car and drove off and the feeling in her chest didn't change at all. Not him, then. Something else. Or someone else, somewhere close, but not close enough for her to see.

She stood there a long time, scanning the street, the windows, the people coming and going, looking for anything that might explain the thread she could feel tugging somewhere just past her line of sight. Nothing jumped out at her. No face she recognized, no voice that made the pull sharpen the way it had a moment ago. Just an ordinary street on an ordinary afternoon, cars and pedestrians and a flag hanging limp in the still September air.

"What is this," she muttered, not really expecting an answer.

The Reach had rules, or at least the ones she'd built for herself over the years. It worked through touch, mostly, sometimes through proximity if someone's feelings were loud enough, but it had never once worked like this, pulling her body somewhere the way gravity pulled water downhill. She had spent two years since she was thirteen learning to keep her gift leashed, learning to walk through the world without every stranger's grief bleeding into her uninvited, and she had been good at it. Better than good. She hadn't had an incident, not a real one, not since she'd first learned control.

Until today.

She thought, with a small cold twist in her stomach, of her aunt. Of the last stretch of weeks before she died, the ones Sage still couldn't remember clearly no matter how hard she tried, like someone had taken an eraser to that particular part of her memory and rubbed until the page went soft and grey. She thought of the years since, the quiet insistence she'd built her whole life around, that whatever had happened to her aunt, whatever had happened to her parents before that, was a closed door, a thing she couldn't fix by picking at it. She had survived by not looking too hard at the things that didn't add up.

This felt like one of those things. A thread that didn't add up. A door that wasn't supposed to be open, cracking anyway.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. It was just a reminder, an alarm she'd set that morning without really thinking about it, telling her she had an hour before her shift. The mundane ordinariness of it, a phone alarm on a random Friday, was almost enough to make her laugh.

She took one last look at the brick building down the block, the flag, the ordinary strangers moving in and out of its doors, and made herself turn around.

"Whatever you are," she said quietly, to the pull, to the city, to no one in particular, "you're going to have to wait. I've got a shift."

The walk back to Kesting Row felt longer than the walk out had, every block a small negotiation with the tug at her chest that didn't want to let her go, that eased more slowly this time, reluctant, like something on the other end of an invisible line was disappointed to be losing her. By the time she reached the familiar cracked sidewalks and tired storefronts of her own neighbourhood, the feeling had faded down to almost nothing, a faint hum she could have mistaken for nerves if she hadn't spent the last two hours knowing better.

Jade Palace's neon sign was flickering the way it always did on the character in the middle, a small familiar imperfection that steadied her more than she expected it to. She pushed through the door into the warm, greasy-sweet smell of the kitchen and the low murmur of the dinner rush starting up, and for a moment, at least, the strange tug of the afternoon receded into the background of her mind.

Vincent Marsh was behind the counter when she came in, resplendent as always in a shirt that was slightly too sharp for a diner, sleeves rolled with theatrical precision. He glanced up and something in his face shifted, just slightly, the practiced charm dimming a degree into something closer to actual attention.

"You're pale," he said, before she'd even gotten her apron on. "Long day?"

"Something like that."

"Mm." He studied her a beat longer than she was comfortable with, the way he sometimes did, like he could read more off her face than he ever let on. "Table six needs their order taken. Table six has been needing their order taken for ten minutes, and they are getting restless in a way that suggests they've never worked a service job in their lives."

Sage huffed something close to a laugh, grateful for the deflection whether or not he'd meant it as one, and tied her apron on and let the rhythm of the shift take over, order pads and steaming plates and the particular choreography of moving through a crowded diner without spilling anything. It was easy, in its way. Familiar. A kind of order she could control, unlike whatever had spent the entire afternoon trying to drag her somewhere she'd never had a reason to go.

But even hours later, wiping down the last table after close, the memory of that tug behind her sternum lingered at the edge of her, faint and stubborn, like a held note that hadn't quite finished ringing. She didn't know what it meant. She didn't know what had caused it, or whether it would come back, or what she was supposed to do if it did.

She only knew, with a certainty she couldn't explain and didn't like, that something had changed today. Something in her, or near her, had shifted for the first time in two years, and whatever it was, it hadn't finished with her yet.

Across the city, in an apartment above a street he still didn't quite think of as his, Nate Bishop sat on the edge of his bed with a case file open on his knees and Kimberly's star nightlight glowing soft and steady on the nightstand beside him, and felt, for reasons he couldn't have named if anyone had asked him, unaccountably restless. He told himself it was just the first day. New job, new city, too much coffee, not enough sleep.

He didn't think about it any harder than that. He had no reason to.

Not yet.