Page 34 of Branding the Bat

"That's mine," Sero said, watching the last of the gold disappear. "Not yours. Not the Grizzly's. Mine. And I decide what happens to it."

He set the empty vials on the bar.

The club was silent. The amber light hummed. Behind the counter, Amani picked up the empty vials, dried them with a bar cloth, and set them aside with the quiet efficiency of a man who understood ritual.

"I'm going home," Sero said. He stood. The stool scraped against the floor, a small, ordinary sound in a room that had held extraordinary things. "Don't contact me, Trevor. I'll find you when I'm ready."

"How long?"

"I don't know. However long it takes."

"Takes for what?"

Sero looked at him. Trevor was sitting at the bar in the low light with his hands flat on the wood and his eyes red and his arrogance gone and his machine destroyed and his gold poureddown the drain, and he looked like a man who'd lost everything and knew he'd done it to himself. He looked, for the first time since Sero had met him, like someone who couldn't pretend.

"However long it takes to figure out if what I felt was bigger than what you did," Sero said. "I think it might be. But I need to be sure."

He walked to the elevator. The doors opened. He stepped in.

"Sero," Trevor said.

He turned.

"The space you went to. That place I took you." Trevor's voice was barely steady. "That wasn't the machine. That was you. It was always you."

Sero held his gaze for a long moment. Then the elevator doors closed, and he rose toward the lobby, and the amber light let him go.

Chapter Eleven

Weeks passed.

Sero worked. He dealt blackjack five nights a week, ate fruit in the break room, and watched documentaries alone in his apartment. He shifted every evening before bed, hung in the closet for an hour, let his bat brain reduce the world to echo and scent, then shifted back and slept in his bed like a human person who didn't have a second body that craved the dark.

He did not contact Trevor. Trevor did not contact him. The silence between them was not the held-breath silence of their first fight. It was larger, more deliberate, a clearing that had been burned and was now waiting to see what grew back.

He noticed the change in his own habits before anyone else could have. He was eating apricots again, good-mood snacking, but he was also still eating figs. He'd never mixed moods before. The fruit drawer had become uncharted territory, and Sero didn't know what it meant to want both comfort and hope at the same time.

Thanksgiving fell on the second week. Sero worked a double at the casino because holidays paid time and a half and because the alternative was eating dried figs on his couch while the rest of the city pretended to be grateful for things. The casino floor was quieter than usual. There were fewer tourists, more regulars, the desperate and the lonely shuffling chips under fluorescent light while somewhere in the city normal people ate turkey with their families. Sero dealt blackjack for eleven hours and ate a persimmon in the break room at midnight and called his mother, who told him she was proud of him and that he should eat more papaya. He didn't mention Trevor. She didn't ask. The pronghorn had taught her not to ask about Sero'srelationships until Sero brought them up first, and Sero was grateful for that particular piece of damage, which was not the kind of gratitude the holiday was designed for but was the only kind he had.

***

He went to KK on a Friday, two and a half weeks after the night he'd poured the gold down the drain.

The club was busy. A normal Friday was filled bodies and music and the particular energy of people who'd come to the one place in the city where they didn't have to pretend. Someone had decorated for the holidays since Sero's last visit. Gold tinsel looped along the bar, and a miniature Christmas tree sat on the counter near the register, hung with tiny ornaments shaped like paddles and handcuffs. A string of white lights traced the edge of the ceiling where the Halloween cobwebs had been two months earlier. It was tasteful by KK standards, which meant it was absurd by anyone else's.

Sero sat on his stool. Amani appeared with a Shirley Temple before he'd opened his mouth.

"You look better," Amani said.

"I feel better. Mostly."

"Mostly is an improvement over where you were." Amani set the drink down and leaned on the bar. He was in his usual uniform, the tiny shorts, the bare chest. "He's been in, by the way."

Sero's jaw tightened. "Trevor?"

"He came by last week. Not to play, he's still banned. He came to talk to me. Asked about you. I told him you were alive and that was all I was authorized to share." Amani straightened up. "He looked like shit, for the record. Like a man who hasn't slept in a month and deserves exactly that amount of insomnia."

"What did he want?"