Ghost Commander: Sovereign of Ashes

Greymere

He told the front desk his name was Daniel Morrow.

Nephew, he said, visiting his aunt. He'd called ahead, he said. He smiled in a way that was warm enough to be believed and forgettable enough not to matter.

The woman at the desk checked her screen, checked it again, and handed him a visitor badge.

Greymere Psychiatric Facility sat twenty minutes north of the Eastside on a hill that managed to feel both removed from the city and owned by it. Clean grounds. Maintained paths. The kind of institutional care that cost real money and came with no questions about where the money came from.

Marius Valdren had been paying for it for twelve years.

Dante had known that before he came. He'd told himself it wouldn't matter.

He was wrong about that.

A nurse led him down a corridor through a set of double doors. Past a common room where three residents watched a television that nobody was really watching.

"She doesn't have many visitors," the nurse said, not unkindly but just as a fact. "She's been quiet this week. Some weeks are better than others."

Dante said nothing.

She stopped at an open doorway and gestured once, then left him.

His mother was by the window.

She sits in a wheelchair, a blanket across her lap, despite the room being warm. Her hair had gone fully gray, pulled back loosely. She was fifty-four years old, and she looked a decade past that, not from age exactly, but from the particular way a person looked when they'd been somewhere far away for a long time.

Dante stood in the doorway for three seconds.

Then he pulled a chair from the corner, set it beside her, and sat down.

"Hey, Mom," he said.

Nothing.

She was looking at the window. Not through it. At it. The glass itself. Like there was something in the surface worth reading.

He'd prepared for this. He'd told himself he'd prepared for this.

"It's me," he said. He kept his voice low and even. "I know I'm not supposed to be here. I know it took too long."

The tree outside the window moved in a slow wind. His mother's eyes tracked it.

"Sera's here," he said. "In Meridian. I've seen her." He paused. "She looks like you. Around the eyes."

The blanket across her lap didn't move.

He sat with her for a while and talked. Not about the Syndicate. Not about Blackridge or the list or the years in between. He talked about small things. The way the Eastside smelled in the morning. The gym below his room. An older man who carried a ledger like it was evidence of his life.

His mother looked at the window.

He let the silence run out, and then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands loose between them, and he sang.

Quietly. Under his breath. The melody his father used to push through a half-open door on the nights the city got loud.

He got through eight bars.

His mother's hands, resting on the blanket, didn't move.

Her eyes didn't shift.

Nothing changed.

He stopped singing.

He sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, at the clean white expanse of it. He breathed in once and out again, slow and controlled, and whatever was moving through him he kept inside where it belonged.

He stayed another twenty minutes.

Then he stood, set the chair back where he found it, and rested his hand briefly on top of hers.

"I'll come back," he said.

He walked out.

He was almost to the exit when the voice stopped him.

Not his name. Just the volume of it, someone speaking in a register meant to stay inside a room, reaching him through a door that sat three inches open.

He slowed.

"Yes, Mr. Valdren." A woman's voice. Precise, careful. "No changes this week. She's been completely non-responsive." A pause, listening. "She's still compliant. I'll send the monthly report as usual."

Dante stopped.

Through the gap in the door, a nameplate on the desk was visible.

ANNALISE REHM. CHIEF PHYSICIAN.

He didn't move. He kept his breathing even and his body still and listened to the shape of the silence that followed, the listening pause of a person taking instruction.

"Of course," Rehm said. "Understood."

The call ended.

Dante walked out.

He moved through the front lobby at the same unremarkable pace he'd come in with. Handed the visitor badge to the woman at the desk. Thanked her. Pushed through the front door into the cold.

Marius Valdren was funding his mother's care.

Marius Valdren was receiving monthly reports on his mother's condition.

The same man who had profited from the destruction of her family was keeping her alive and monitored and contained on a hill twenty minutes from the city, and nobody in that building was going to ask why.

Dante walked to the edge of the parking lot and stood with the wind coming off the hill and the city spread below him in the gray afternoon light.

He gave himself thirty seconds.

He counted them.

Then he put it away and took out the burner phone to check the transit schedule back to the Eastside.

The screen showed an incoming message.

Unknown number. No area code.

He opened it.

I know you're not Dante Morrow. Meet me at the south pier. Midnight. Come alone, or I walk. — R.

He read it twice.

Three people alive knew the name he'd been born with. Two of them were currently unreachable. The third wasn't supposed to be within a thousand miles of Meridian. If Rook was in the city, then this wasn't a reunion. It was a test, or a trap, and Dante needed to know which before midnight.

R.

He stood very still in the parking lot with the wind pushing at his jacket and the city below him and the phone in his hand.

Then he typed back two words.

How long?

The reply came in under a minute.

Two weeks. Sorry. You would have said no. Or worse, you would have tried to stop me.

Dante pocketed the phone.

He looked out at Meridian.

Two weeks. Rook had been in the city for two weeks without telling him. Two weeks of Dante building a careful, controlled re-entry while someone who knew his real name was already somewhere inside the city limits. And now that someone had asked for midnight at the south pier.

Someone whose presence doubled every risk Dante had spent three years calculating.

Someone who was also the only person left alive that he trusted.

He started walking toward the bus stop.

Midnight. South Pier.

He had six hours to decide how angry he was going to allow himself to be.