“I—well. ‘Enemy’ is kind of a strong word.”
“Jamie.”
“Just—take your shot.”
He looked back down at the table and, very deliberately, scratched.
I picked the cue ball off the floor. “You didn’t do anything to me, so you don’t need to feel bad. I don’t need a pity win.”
“No,” he said. “I think you need a chance to play.”
“That sounded like you’d been rehearsing it for a while.”
He scowled. “I’m trying to be nice to you.”
“Stop trying. You’re not nice. Or if you are, you’re out of practice.” I paused. “I’m not very nice either. God knows Holmes isn’t.”
That pried a smile from him, a real one, if sad. “I am nice, Jamie. I just . . . I haven’t talked to anyone in a while.”
We traded shots after that. August began playing with an ease that he hadn’t before, pointing out angles, lining up a shot for me when I couldn’t figure out how to get my blue two into the side pocket.
“Are you in love with her?” I asked him as he sank another ball.
His face went blank again. Was it his tell? Is this what he looked like when he was upset? “Are you?”
“It’s complicated.” I watched him, but his expression didn’t change. “If you aren’t, then why did you look at her the way you did? When we first arrived?”
August sighed. “I’ve been in Berlin for a few years now. I do data entry. Milo gives me a pile of spreadsheets—numbers, usually, about which air base has x number of metal gaskets—and I put it into a computer. They came from a computer in the first place, so it’s totally unnecessary. It’s fake-work. Make-work. There are actual things I could be doing for Greystone, but—”
“But you’re a Moriarty.” The waitress came by with her tray. I took a glass and offered it to August.
With a half smile, he accepted it. “Because of who my brother is, and who my aunt and uncle are, and so on, and so forth, I can’t be trusted with sensitive information. Or an interesting job, apparently.”
“Milo hates you that much?”
“Milo is a spymaster. God knows how that one worked out, for someone so determined to not leave their building. He doesn’t hate anyone. He doesn’t like anyone either. But he does love his sister, and she wanted me to have a place to go, so he did her a favor. I’m dead. Nobody out there can know I’m not dead. Nobody out in the world can recognize me. I had limited options. So I took it.” He downed his wine in a determined gulp. “Do you want to know why?”
“Yes,” I said, because I’d been wondering why for weeks.
“I took that job because there’s a ridiculous war on between my family and theirs, and I wanted to wave the white flag. If I made friends with Milo, if I convinced my parents to extend an olive branch, if I was able to smooth things over . . . but I was younger, then, and stupider. My parents won’t even talk to me anymore.”
I whistled. August made an ironic little bow. “You know what they say about good intentions,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“So here I am. No friends. No family that aren’t criminals or would-be ones. Just me, and a mathematics dissertation I can’t finish researching, because dead men don’t do postdocs, and I work on fractals. In Antarctica. There are no dead man ships headed that way anytime soon. I live in a sad little room in Milo’s sad little palace. I can’t leave the building because . . .” He shook his head angrily. “Look, when Charlotte walked in, I was . . . I don’t know. It was like my past hadn’t been erased after all. The good and the bad, all of it—it was like it still existed somewhere out there. I still existed. I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been until I saw her.”
“And it’s as simple as that.”
“She’s my friend. Maybe it’s self-destructive for me to like her, but I do.” He shrugged. “I try not to blame her for what happened. Her parents—well, never mind. You can’t keep her in a box, Jamie, and you can’t let her do that to you, either. She and I were quite close, if you can believe it, and when it didn’t play out between us the way she needed it to, she threw a grenade at me and ran away.”
“August—”
“We were trained in the same way. We think the same way. We have the same self-destructive solutions to problems we face. . . .”
“So you’re casual bros now? I don’t buy it. You want me to believe you can just hang with the girl who ruined your life.” The words came out more caustic than I’d planned.
August blinked rapidly, almost as if he was fighting off tears, and there it was, the real emotion I’d been waiting to see—and it was brutal.
“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” he said finally. “Dead, remember?”
I eyed him. Despite the clothes and the polish and the heaps of self-pity, he was hard to dislike. Later I would wonder if it was because he reminded me of a version of Charlotte Holmes who’d been raised by the enemy.
“Do you ever get sick of playing the victim?” I asked him, because I was good at taking those kinds of openings.
“No,” he said, “it’s actually quite fun,” and he sank his last few balls one right after the other.
“Asshole.”