Chapter 2: A Name I Was Taught to Hate
The first thing Rowan did when he woke up was steal a tube of his own blood.
It sat in a plastic rack on the tray beside his bed, one of four the nurse had drawn while he was still drifting. Purple cap. His name printed on the label in neat black type. The other three were gone, sent to the lab. This one had been left behind, probably forgotten in a shift change.
He reached over, slipped it into the inside pocket of his father's denim jacket, which hung on the chair beside him, and lay back down.
Only then did he turn his head toward the door.
A man sat in a chair beside it, three meters from the bed. The door was open. He wore the same charcoal coat from the dock, and he was watching Rowan with the calm patience of someone who had been awake all night and did not mind.
"You're Theo's father," Rowan said.
"Good morning," the man said. "Yes."
The room was small and very clean. Pale green walls, a window with the blinds half open, gray morning light coming through. A private clinic, Rowan guessed, not the university hospital. The equipment was too new and the silence too quiet. On the other chair, curled up under a hospital blanket with her glasses pushed up on her forehead, Priya was asleep.
His head ached in a dull, even way, the kind that came after a long fever. He did a quick inventory. Pulse normal. Vision clear. Hands steady. He tried to remember the ambulance ride and found only a gray blank, like a page with the words scraped off.
Retrograde gap. Maybe two hours. Note it.
"Your tests came back an hour ago," the man said. "Standard toxicology panel. Everything was negative."
"That's not possible."
"The doctor said the same thing." The man did not move from his chair. "She thinks you may have been given something that doesn't show up on ordinary screens. She wants to keep you until noon."
Rowan thought about the tube in his jacket pocket and said nothing.
"My name is Cassian Rourke," the man said. "Theo is my son. I adopted him when he was eight, after his father died. His father was the man who raised me. Theo kept his birth name. Marlow." He paused. "I understand he didn't tell you about me."
"No."
"That doesn't surprise me." Something tired passed over his face and was gone. "What he did last night has no excuse. I'm not here to make one for him. I'm here because I want to know why he did it, and because I want to make sure you're safe."
"I'm safe."
"You were given an unknown drug in a public place by someone who knew you. I don't think you're safe yet." He said it without any pressure in his voice, as if he were reading a weather report. "I can offer you a private doctor, a lawyer if you want to press charges, and people to watch your building for a few weeks. No conditions. You don't owe me anything for any of it."
Rowan studied him for a long moment. There was a type of offer that came with invisible strings, and he had learned in the last three years to look for them.
"No," he said.
Cassian nodded, as if he had expected that. "May I ask why?"
"Because of your name."
"My name."
"Three years ago, a pharmacy on Harrow Street burned down," Rowan said. His voice was level. He had practiced this, alone, many times, never expecting to say it to the person himself. "The owner died inside. His name was Elias Quill. He was my father. The police closed the case in six weeks and called it an electrical fault. But there was a second file. A detective let me see part of it before they took it away. Your name was in it. Rourke Maritime. Written three times in the margins."
The room was very quiet. Priya shifted in her sleep.
Cassian did not argue. He did not defend himself. He looked at Rowan for a long moment, and then he asked a single question.
"Is that what you believe," he said, "or what you were told?"
Rowan opened his mouth to answer and found he did not have one ready.
Cassian stood. He took a plain white card from his coat pocket and set it on the end of the bed, within Rowan's reach but not in his hand. It had nothing printed on it except a phone number.
"If you change your mind about anything," he said. "Or if anything happens that frightens you. Day or night."
As he turned toward the door, his coat sleeve pulled back a few centimeters, and Rowan saw a narrow scar running along the inside of his right forearm. It was old and pale and very straight. Along its length, Rowan could make out the faint evenly spaced dots of stitch marks, set in pairs, one near the edge of the wound and one farther out.
Vertical mattress sutures.
It was the technique they taught in field first aid courses, because it held under strain. Rowan had learned it at nineteen, in a rented classroom that smelled of floor polish, during the EMT volunteer program.
It meant nothing.
He let the thought go.
Cassian left. The door stayed open behind him.
For about twenty minutes, nothing happened. Rowan lay still and listened to the clinic. Footsteps in the hall. A cart with a squeaking wheel. A phone ringing at the nurses' station, twice, three times, then answered. He took out the white card, looked at the number, and put it in his jacket beside the tube of blood.
Then a man knocked on the open door and came in without waiting for an answer.
"Mr. Quill? Detective Harlan, Port Calloway PD." He held up a badge in a leather wallet, just long enough to be seen and not long enough to be read. "I'm here about last night. Just a few questions."
He was around thirty, with a shaved head and a small dark tattoo of an anchor behind his left ear. He wore a gray suit that did not fit well across the shoulders. He took the chair Cassian had used and pulled it closer to the bed. Much closer.
Rowan sat up a little. "Of course."
"Tell me what you remember. Start with the party."
Rowan told him the truth, but slowly, and in very small pieces. While he talked, he watched.
The badge first. He replayed the half second he had seen it. Silver shield, number on the bottom line, and above it the precinct number. Precinct Seven. Port Calloway had five precincts. Every medical student who had ever done a shift in the university emergency room knew that, because the officers who brought in patients came from one of the five, and the paperwork required the number.
Then the shoes. Black leather, narrow, pointed at the toe, polished to a high shine. Uniformed officers wore thick-soled work shoes. Detectives in Port Calloway, from what Rowan had seen, wore whatever let them stand for twelve hours. Nobody chose pointed dress shoes for this job.
"Who drove you to the hospital last night?" Harlan asked.
"The ambulance."
"Before that. Who were you with, on the dock? Did you see anyone's face?"
That was a strange question. Not what happened to you, but who did you see.
"I don't remember much," Rowan said. "It's all a bit blurry. By the way, is Captain Brennan still running things at the Central precinct? I met him once, during a rotation. Nice man."
Harlan blinked. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, he's still there."
There was no Captain Brennan. The Central precinct was run by a woman named Delgado, whose face was on a poster in the ER break room about reporting assaults.
Three lies. Rowan felt his pulse rise and made himself breathe slowly through it.
"Look," Harlan said, and his voice dropped. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, close enough that Rowan could smell his cologne. "I'm going to be straight with you, kid. Things happen at parties. People take stuff. People say things they shouldn't about who gave it to them. It's better for everyone if you just don't remember very much. Do you understand me?"
"I understand," Rowan said.
He let his right hand drift down along the edge of the mattress, as if he were shifting to get comfortable. The wall panel beside the bed had a call button for the nurse, a light switch, and a small red lever behind a plastic cover, labeled FIRE in white letters. He had noticed it when he first woke up. He noticed exits in every room he entered. It was a habit he had never been able to explain to anyone.
"Good," Harlan said. "So let's go over it one more time. On the dock. Who was there?"
Rowan flipped the plastic cover up with his thumb and pulled the lever down.
The alarm was enormous. A shrieking electronic wail filled the room, and a white strobe light began to pulse above the door. Priya jerked awake with a gasp. Out in the hall, a door banged open, and someone started shouting instructions.
Harlan was on his feet. For one moment, his calm face slipped, and Rowan saw something hard and angry underneath it.
"What did you do?"
"I think there's a fire," Rowan said mildly. "You should probably go."
Two security guards appeared in the doorway, followed by a nurse. Harlan looked at them, then at Rowan, and made a decision. He pushed past the guards and walked quickly down the hall toward the stairs, without once showing his badge.
At the doorway, he turned his head just enough for Rowan to hear him over the alarm.
"Pretty little psychopath," he muttered.
Then he was gone.
It took almost ten minutes for the staff to reset the alarm and check every room. When the noise finally stopped, Rowan explained to the head nurse that a man pretending to be a police officer had threatened him. She called the real police. The real police, when they arrived an hour later, said there was no Detective Harlan in the department and took a description.
Priya sat on the end of the bed through all of it, her glasses back on her nose, staring at him.
"Did you just pull a fire alarm on a cop?" she said finally.
"He wasn't a cop."
"How did you know?"
Rowan told her. The precinct. The shoes. The captain who did not exist.
Priya was quiet for a moment. "Ro," she said. "Most people would have just answered his questions."
"Most people didn't notice he was lying."
She did not reply to that. He could see her turning over the name the man had called him, the same way he was.
Pretty little psychopath.
He had been called worse things. But it stayed with him through the discharge papers and the taxi ride home, sitting just under his thoughts like a splinter.
He was discharged at noon with instructions to rest. He went home to his small apartment near campus and put the tube of blood in the back of his refrigerator, behind a carton of eggs, where no one would think to look.
On Sunday night, after a day of sleeping badly and waking often, he lay in the dark and went over everything again. The glass. Theo's face. He said you'd forget. A man in pointed shoes asking who he had seen on the dock. And a scar on a stranger's forearm, closed with stitches Rowan had been trained to make.
At 11:48 p.m., his phone lit up on the nightstand.
The message came from a number he did not recognize.
Want to know who really burned Harrow Street? Tomorrow. 10 AM. Bellwether Café.