Chapter 3: Who He Works For
You confirmed.
You typed the word with your thumb while he slept behind you, one wing hanging off the edge of the bed, his face pressed into the pillow and his hair sticking up in every direction like a fledgling's. You stood at the window with the city going pink below and looked at that one word on your screen for a long time. Then you put the phone in your pocket and went back to bed, and when he woke up and reached for you, you let him, and you said nothing at all.
It was the first lie you had ever told him. It was not a good feeling.
Pier seven was the far end of the Hakata container docks, where the cranes stood idle at night like enormous sleeping birds and the stacks of steel boxes made a maze of narrow alleys. You got there at half past ten, ninety minutes before the tactical team, in dark clothes with your hair tied back and your gloves in your pocket.
You didn't have a plan. You had a quirk, a radio, and a deep, cold certainty that if Superintendent Mori's people came around the corner and found the No. 2 Hero sitting with Dabi, they wouldn't ask him a single question before they put him on the ground.
You found the warehouse by the smell of smoke.
It was an old customs shed at the end of the pier, rusted and half-collapsed. The roof was mostly holes. You climbed the outside of a container stack beside it, slow and quiet, and lay flat on the cold steel at the top, and looked down through a gap in the corrugated iron.
There were two of them inside. Hawks was leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed and his wings folded tight, visor on, chewing on a toothpick. He looked exactly as he did in his office. Relaxed. Bored, even. Across from him, sitting on an upturned crate with his long legs stretched out, was a thin man in a dark coat with spiky black hair and a face patched together from skin that didn't match, purple scar tissue held at the seams by gleaming surgical staples. A small blue flame was dancing on the tip of one of his fingers, and he was watching it the way other people watched a television.
"You're late, Number Two," Dabi said.
"Traffic." Hawks shrugged. "Bird traffic. It's murder this time of year."
"Funny." The flame flickered. "You know what else is funny? Our friend in the Fukuoka prefectural office says the police sent someone to your agency this week. Some liaison." The turquoise eyes slid up. "Cute, apparently. Spends all day at your desk. Goes home very late."
Your heart stopped.
Hawks didn't move at all. "Oh, her? She's a babysitter. Some task force thing. They do it every year."
"Mm." Dabi stood. He walked slowly toward Hawks, the blue flame growing on his palm until it was the size of an apple, lighting the underside of his ruined face. "See, the thing is, I don't believe you. I think you're getting sloppy. I think you've got cops in your bed and you're about to tell me you can still be trusted." He stopped a foot away. The heat of the flame rippled the air between them. "Convince me."
From here you could see something Dabi couldn't. Behind Hawks's back, at the root of his wings, the feathers had gone flat and rigid. Every one. You'd felt them do that under your hands, two nights ago, when he was trying very hard to hold still.
You checked your watch. Ten fifty-two.
You looked at the radio on your belt.
Then you did the second worst thing you'd ever done in your career. You keyed the radio, pitched your voice low and fast and breathless, and said, "Command, this is Echo. Target is not at seven. Repeat, target is not at pier seven. Visual on target moving north toward the cold storage terminal at pier three. He's alone. He's running."
A crackle. Then Mori's voice, calm and cool. "Copy, Echo. Redirecting."
Down in the warehouse, Dabi's head snapped up.
Not because of the radio. He couldn't have heard you. But a moment later, all along the far side of the docks, a dozen engines started, and headlights swept across the steel walls of the container stacks, moving away north, and somewhere a siren whooped once and was silenced.
"Well, well," said Dabi softly. "Looks like somebody's having a party. Friends of yours, Number Two?"
"If they were my friends," said Hawks, "they'd be coming this way."
Dabi looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, a dry, unpleasant sound, and closed his hand, and the flame went out.
"Thursday next week," he said. "Bring me something I can use. And get rid of the cop, or I will." He turned up his collar, walked out of the back of the shed into the dark, and was gone.
You stayed flat on the container for a full minute, not breathing. You listened to the sirens recede. You were just starting to think about how you'd climb down without making a sound when something brushed your cheek.
A single crimson feather hung in the air beside your face.
"I told you not to follow me," said Hawks, from right behind you.
He didn't take you back to his apartment. He flew you out over the bay to a disused breakwater lighthouse, a stubby white tower on a spit of concrete with the black sea all around it and the lights of Hakata far away, and he set you down on the narrow gallery at the top and stepped back. The wind was very strong. His wings were half open to balance against it.
"You lied to your handler," he said.
"Yes."
"You redirected an entire tactical team on a hunch. On your own career. For a guy you've known four days."
"Yes."
"Why?" His voice cracked on it. "Why would you do that? You don't know who I work for. You don't know anything. For all you know I really am a traitor. For all you know..."
"Then tell me," you said. "Tell me now. I just threw away everything I had for you, Keigo. I think I've earned it."
He stared at you. The wind tore at his hair, at the fur of his collar. Then all at once, the fight went out of him. His shoulders dropped. His wings sagged behind him.
"The Commission," he said quietly. "The Hero Public Safety Commission. They sent me in. I'm supposed to get close to the League, find out what they're planning, where they are, who's funding them. I'm supposed to make Dabi trust me. I'm supposed to do whatever it takes." He looked out at the sea. "Whatever it takes. That's the exact phrase. I'm a double agent. Or a triple one. Some days I genuinely can't remember which way round it goes."
You knew it, really. You'd known it since the factory roof. Hearing him say it was still like being struck.
"Why you?"
"Because I'm the best at it." He laughed, without any humor at all. "And because they've owned me since before I could fly properly. They found me when I had nothing. They took me out of a very bad house and made me into this, and I owe them, and every single thing I am belongs to them. I've never told anyone that. They'd kill me if they knew I told you. They might kill you." He looked at you, and his eyes were wet. "So now you know. Now you're in it. I'm sorry."
You stepped across the gallery and took his face in both your hands.
"I'm not sorry," you said.
He made a small, broken sound.
"I'm going to write a report," you told him. "It's going to say that the No. 2 Hero is loyal. That the photographs are explained by an authorized operation I'm not cleared to know about. That Dabi was never at pier seven. That I've seen nothing at the Hawks Agency but a man who works too hard and eats too much chicken." Your thumbs brushed his cheekbones. "It's going to be the most honest lie I've ever written."
"You'll get burned for it."
"Maybe. You'll just have to catch me."
He kissed you then, desperate and shaking, his arms locking around you so hard your ribs ached. His wings came up and closed around you, and the wind cut off, and the noise of the sea dropped to a hush, and it was just the two of you inside a warm red dark that smelled like smoke and feathers and him.
"Here?" you gasped against his mouth.
"Nobody comes out here. Nobody can see." He pulled back just enough to look at you. "Is that a yes? I need you to say it."
"Yes. Keigo, yes."
It was slower this time. Much slower. He spread his jacket on the cold concrete and laid you down on it and undressed you with his wings sheltering you both from the wind, and every time his hands shook, he stopped and took a breath and started again. He kissed you like he was apologizing for something. You kissed him back like you were forgiving it.
When he finally pushed into you, he did it with his forehead pressed to yours and his eyes open, and neither of you looked away. You moved together in the dark of his wings like the tide outside, long and deep and unhurried, his hips rolling into yours, your legs wrapped around him, his breath catching every time you clenched around him. You ran your hands down his back to the roots of his wings and stroked, slow, and he shuddered and moaned your name into your mouth, and a hundred feathers trembled around you at once.
"I can feel you everywhere," he whispered. "Through all of them. I can feel your heart."
"What's it saying?"
"That you're mine," he said, barely audible. "That I'm yours. That I'm so screwed."
You laughed, and the laugh turned into a gasp as he shifted and hit something deep inside you, and he did it again, and again, until you were arching up off his jacket with your nails in his shoulders. You came apart slowly, in long rolling waves, and he held you through every one of them, murmuring things you couldn't hear over the blood in your ears, until he broke too, with a low, shaking cry, his wings snapping wide open above you so that for a moment you saw the whole sky, black and enormous and full of stars.
Afterward, you lay curled into him on the concrete with his wing tucked over you and his heartbeat steady under your cheek.
"So," you said. "Who do you work for?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"The Commission," said Keigo. "And the people I'm trying to keep alive." His fingers found yours in the dark and laced through them. "And apparently, as of tonight, you."
You smiled into his chest.
At dawn, sitting on the gallery rail with his jacket around your shoulders, you typed out your report and sent it to Mori. You watched the little icon spin. You felt Keigo's chin settle on top of your head and his arms come around you from behind.
Your phone buzzed four minutes later.
Report received. Interesting. It contradicts the Hero Public Safety Commission's own file on Hawks in several places. The Commission has requested a meeting with you, alone, at nine o'clock this morning. They did not say how they knew your name.
Behind you, Keigo went very still.