Chapter Text
The city is hazy with summer heat on the day that Kaveh is supposed to kill a man.
He has found the blueprints to this man’s hotel and has downloaded it and committed it to memory. He has done all of his research. There are at least three ways into the building and a dozen routes into his target’s room without being detected by any of the hotel cameras. For a five star secure hotel that prides itself on hosting diplomats and persons of high political interest, Kaveh thinks that their security would be a little tighter. But then again, architects are often more concerned about drunk guests falling off of rooftops than would-be assassins.
As a result, it’s child’s play to climb up the fire escape route, shimmy over to an unlocked second floor window, unlocked because he had been the one to unlock it, two days ago, when he had rented out the room under a fake name and hadn’t paid, because he had no money.
The lack of money was the whole reason why he was doing this: pulling a gun with a silencer out at five in the morning and pointing it at the sleeping CEO of Akademiya Industries.
And his absolute idiocy and inexperience is why he is hesitating, staring at the man’s sleeping face, unable to shoot.
Confession: this is actually his third time doing this. He cannot fail a third time.
The first attempt had been in a high-rise office building with newly insecure elevators with access panels and default security codes left behind by the sloppy maintenance crew. Kaveh had climbed up the elevator shaft and had been able to get into the “top secret CEO floors” without so much as a badge or ever even seeing a scanner. Then, that time, he had been shocked by the sight of Alhaitham sleeping at his desk, his silver hair somehow at odds with his youthful face. Kaveh had expected someone older.
The second time had been at the site of a global conference. The elevator cord was supposed to shear at exactly twenty floors and have an accident. Kaveh had intentionally backdated the inspection records on the cable system so that an investigation would turn up shoddy maintenance, which should surprise nobody for a building in that area of town. But Alhaitham had disappeared out of the elevator at the last moment, flickering to a different level.
Kaveh had nearly thrown up from stress, and it had taken him days to convince himself that the relief he felt was for not getting caught, and not for the plan failing.
He has to do this. He has to. Dori will expect results soon, and if Kaveh can’t deliver…
The weight of his debt feels like a solid thing on his chest, constricting his throat, making it hard to breathe.
Kaveh’s finger tightens on the trigger. All he has to do is pull it. Get rid of Dori’s only business rival in the black market research sector. Clear the way for her to take over a multi-million dollar market, one with no rules or regulations.
His hands are stained already. What’s one more death, compared to all the rest?
On his luxurious four poster bed, the man shifts a little in his sleep. Kaveh’s heart rate surges with terror. The man’s breaths are slow and easy, and he could have had a good life. An easy life, blessed with sunlight and good fortune. Especially with his looks and his background. But no, he just had to get involved with Dori and her black market business. He just had to approach her contacts with offers of better, more lucrative deals.
Dori runs her empire on a shaky foundation of scams and lies, held together with a vast sum of money that she squeezes out, drop by drop, from the slums of Sumeru City. She does not have competition. She does not tolerate competition.
She already owns everything Kaveh used to call his. Why, why, why can’t Kaveh just sell his soul to her too? All he has to do is pull the trigger, and a silent explosion of red would bloom all across this fancy hotel bed, Alhaitham would never appear again on the streets of Sumeru City, and Kaveh would be free.
At the last moment, Kaveh lowers his gun. A line of light creeps in through the window. Somehow, frozen with indecision, he had stood here all the way until sunrise.
He is an idiot.
Still, sunrise means that he can’t stay here any longer. It will only be a matter of time before housekeeping is up and about, and then his escape route will be compromised. He will have to leave and try again, Kaveh tells himself. He still has time.
Hooking his gun back into his holster at his belt, Kaveh turns back to the window.
As soon as he does, an odd feeling creeps over him. Something is off. He doesn’t know how he knows. The room is too silent, the building too still. Something icy creeps into his veins as he pads over to the window and tries to lift it, expecting it to ease open soundlessly.
The window is locked.
Kaveh’s heart rate picks up, speeding until he can almost feel it thumping in his chest.
“Caught you,” a man’s voice says.
Alhaitham has been chasing after a ghost for over a month now.
Of course, ghosts don’t actually exist. Alhaitham doesn’t believe in ghosts. His grandmother had raised him in the outskirts of Sumeru City, in a rural area miles away from any skyscrapers or city streets, but they had not been uneducated or superstitious. She had always been practical, and she had taught him to be the same. There was always a logical explanation. There was always a reason for something.
So when he had woken up one day after dozing off at his desk, only to be met with the sight of a young, blonde haired man pointing a gun at him, Alhaitham had not jumped to any conclusions.
Even if his first thought was: am I still dreaming?
The man pointing the gun at him is the most beautiful man Alhaitham has ever seen. Dark red eyes and a slim, heart shaped face, full lips, an artist’s hands.
Alhaitham does not believe in being visited by gods in your dreams, although there are plenty of stories about the God of Wisdom speaking to people in their dreams. He does not believe in gods either, but for a moment he wonders if angels are real after all.
Because right in front of him is someone that must be an angel of death of some kind. His expression is shattered like he is looking at the end of the world, like he is the one staring down the barrel of a gun, helpless, not Alhaitham.
When Alhaitham wakes up and sees him, the man’s eyes widen. He drops his gun. For a heart-stopping moment, they just stare at each other in total confusion.
Then, the man’s expression twists. Like a magic trick, he just disappears. Alhaitham gets out of his chair seconds too late. All that’s left is empty space where his visitor had been. By then, it was clear that he was no longer dreaming. But then why had the man run away?
Later, he finds out that the man did not appear on any visitor logs or camera records. No one in the building had ever seen anyone matching his description. It was as if he truly had been a ghost, but Alhaitham knows his own mind, and knows that he had not dreamed this encounter up.
It had been real.
The next encounter had been two weeks later at a conference. Alhaitham had been trying to put the incident out of his mind for days now, walking the line between religion and atheism, when all of a sudden he catches sight of blonde hair tucked under a working man’s hat.
He turns as if he had been waiting for this, heart in his throat. He feels as if he’s suddenly in an alternate reality, a parallel universe where only this man exists.
The man is slightly shorter than him when they cross paths. He’s carrying a green and white tool box with gold accents. There’s something about him that stops Alhaitham dead in his tracks.
“Wait,” he calls out, too stunned to believe that this is actually happening. That this man had actually appeared in front of him once again.
The man turns a corner and disappears.
Alhaitham knows by now that there will be no camera evidence. He had been in an unmonitored hall. There is a ghost haunting him, only he’s not a ghost, just a man that Alhaitham has started to see in his dreams.
Minutes later, when the elevator cord snaps and breaks, Alhaitham almost expects it to happen.
By now, he has figured out the following things: that man is an assassin, albeit an ineffective one. He must have been hired by Dori Sangemah Bay, the underground merchant known for her ability to find anyone and anything. She owned half the undercity and had been a part of Sumeru’s landscape for over half a century before Alhaitham showed up. If anyone wanted him dead, Alhaitham was pretty sure it would be her.
If this man is working for her, he probably comes from the slums of the Treasure District. He has probably never known anyone’s rule other than Dori’s. The only question is: how has he learned how to infiltrate some of the most secure buildings in Sumeru City? And not just once or twice either, but multiple times.
The third time, Alhaitham makes a plan.
There are several factors that tend to line up whenever he and this strange man meet. It always seems to happen in a secure building, or one that should be secure, but is later proven not to be. It always seems to happen in one of the rare blind spots of Sumeru City’s many cameras. And finally, and perhaps most strangely, Alhaitham can always seem to sense him coming.
Kaveh spins around only to find that Alhaitham is no longer sleeping on the hotel bed. Instead, before he can even register any movement, he is slammed into the wall with his hands pinned above his head. His head spins with a combination of confusion and fear. How did Alhaitham get across the room so fast?
“Finally,” Alhaitham breathes. There’s a strange light reflecting from his green eyes in the low light of the room, and it makes Kaveh shiver. He looks almost fanatically pleased.
Kaveh makes a sound that’s caught somewhere in between shock and fear. Alhaitham is insanely strong. One hand is more than enough to keep Kaveh completely pinned. Kaveh has never been good at fighting with brute force. All of his plans had always relied on not getting caught. Terror spikes through him like a cold metal rod, tearing apart his rationality.
“Let go of me,” Kaveh snaps, but his voice is shaky. A strange heat is burning from his wrist where Alhaitham is touching him, all the way up to his spine. “What are you doing?!? Let go of me -”
He struggles for a few more moments before realizing, down to his bones, that this will get him nowhere.
“No no no no let go of me, please, let go of me -”
It takes him a moment to realize that those desperate words spilling out of his mouth are his. His fear seems to do something unexpected to Alhaitham. The other man stares at him, some unfamiliar expression flickering across his face.
“Easy,” Alhaitham soothes. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just have some questions.”
Kaveh slowly stops struggling, but his body is still trembling with adrenaline and fear. Having Alhaitham this close is every waking nightmare made flesh. Only his eyes are not blank and he is not dead, and instead of cold flesh his hands are warm where they press against Kaveh’s wrists.
“Please,” Kaveh manages to get out. He feels like he has been reduced to prey, mindless and frantic, caged in a place that’s impossible to escape.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Alhaitham repeats, and there’s something strangely gentle in his tone. Kaveh can’t understand it. He doesn’t want to trust Alhaitham’s words. A lifetime in the Treasure District had taught him enough about the value of words, even when they came from well-dressed, powerful people. But somehow, inexplicably, he stops trembling.
“Good,” Alhaitham smiles. His other hand comes down to brush against Kaveh’s cheek. Confused, Kaveh goes still, staring at him wide eyed.
Something clicks onto his ear. In the next instant, Alhaitham lets go of him.
Panicked, Kaveh reels back and reaches for it, but his fingers meet something hard and metallic covering the outer shell of his ear.
“You - what is this? What did you do to me?”
Alhaitham doesn’t stop him as he backs himself away. Kaveh’s fingers scrabble against the device. It’s small and intricately made, but it’s impossible to remove. The cold metal almost seems to fuse against his skin, not constricting it, but not leaving any gaps for him to pry through either. Taking it off would involve taking his entire ear off, and Kaveh doesn’t want to be that desperate just yet.
Is it a tracking device? Is it a bomb? Kaveh goes cold at the possibility.
“It’s called an Akasha Terminal,” Alhaitham says. “Relax. It won’t hurt you.”
Kaveh knows better than to trust him by now.
“Please let me go,” Kaveh says, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing himself back against the wall like it can afford him any protection. “You’ll never see me again. I promise. I’ll never appear in front of you ever again.”
Alhaitham shakes his head.
“After all that work I did to trap you here?” he asks, amused. “That would be a poor return on investment indeed. No deal.”
“This was all just a huge mistake,” Kaveh insists. He has both hands covering that Akasha Terminal on his ear, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything to him. Surely it can’t be a bomb. Surely Alhaitham wouldn’t be insane enough to set it off while they were both in the same room. “Just take this thing off of me. You’ll never see me again. Please believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Alhaitham steps in closer.
Kaveh looks up, startled.
“Sumeru City has over 80,000 Kameras,” Alhaitham says. “And yet you show up on none of them.” He tilts Kaveh’s face up by the chin. “You want to tell me how?”
Kaveh’s mind races through the blueprints of the city streets, the underground tunnels of the subway station, the blind spots on the older streets, the faulty ones on the gilded high rises that bought cheap, broken equipment. He doesn’t know how Alhaitham knows the exact number of cameras, but he bets that if he took all his blueprints and laid them out, the number would be about right.
Alhaitham’s lips part in delight.
“I see,” he says. “You’re an architect.”
Kaveh’s mind stutters a little and goes blank.
In the empty nothingness of his higher level consciousness, only vague, meaningless thoughts flicker through his mind: things like how if he had managed to kill Alhaitham before this, he never would have been able to see him smile.
“This is a brilliant little invention, made by Rukkhadevata,” Alhaitham says, tapping the device on his own ear. It glows a soft, digital green. “I’ve repurposed a little, with her successor Nahida’s permission. If I ask you a question, and you know the answer, that information will be shared between us. Anything you know, I will know. So don’t try to hide anything, and don’t try to lie. It won’t have any use.”
Kaveh barely catches the last bit. He’s still too stunned by the first part. One of Rukkhadevata’s inventions? The genius engineer had all but disappeared from the public eye before Kaveh had even been born, but her works were all the stuff of legends. All of a sudden, the sleek design of the Akasha Terminal and its unusual appearance makes so much more sense.
“Let’s get started then,” Alhaitham says. “What’s your name?”
Kaveh keeps his mouth shut, but it feels like something answers in him. It feels like a thrum of energy that gets pulled out of him and into the Akasha Terminal on his left ear.
Alhaitham smiles. “Nice to meet you, Kaveh,” he says softly.
This is messed up. This is technology that shouldn’t exist, at least not in the human realm. Kaveh can’t help but be horrified and fascinated in equal parts. He almost wants to take the device apart and study it, see how it works. If it’s one of Rukkhadevata’s inventions, like Alhaitham says, then it must be decades ahead of anything else on the market right now.
Alhaitham’s lips quirk into another smile. “You seem to know an awful lot,” he observes. “Who are you?”
Kaveh does not want to answer this question.
Archons above, he is terrified of answering this question.
He looks away, as if that will do anything to stop what happens next.
“Stop,” he whispers, almost pleading. “Please, I don’t want - stop - whatever you’re doing to me -”
He doesn’t want Alhaitham to know about the blood on his hands, the taste of dust in the air, the moment his life had irrevocably changed. If Alhaitham ever finds out about the Palace of Alcazarzaray and Kaveh’s role in it, he’ll never look at Kaveh the same. Somehow, the shame of it feels like it will be too much to bear, even though this man’s opinion of him shouldn’t matter to him at all. For a moment, Kaveh desperately wishes that he were anywhere but here.
“It won’t hurt you,” Alhaitham says, studying him. Then, softly, he adds: “Unless you’re hurt by memories of the Palace of Alcazarzaray.”
Kaveh squeezes his eyes shut.
The Palace of Alcazarzaray is simultaneously his greatest achievement and his greatest failure. His life’s work. A graveyard. Seven floors of complex corridors, courtyards, hallways and gardens. Seven years of construction. All destroyed by an earthquake that had killed over two hundred people, all because he could not finish it in time.
It had been the most expensive mistake of Dori’s life, and she had never allowed Kaveh to forget it.
Alhaitham’s gaze sharpens. The device over his ears glows a brief, muted green.
“Is that how you ended up here?” he asks, and Kaveh flinches.
“If you already know, then why are you asking me?” Kaveh mutters. He tries to get the thing off of him again. Alhaitham stops him with one hand, his fingers catching against Kaveh’s wrist.
“You’re wrong, you know,” he says. “You aren’t a mistake. That debt of yours is something she made up. You don’t owe her anything. Not your life, and certainly not your soul.”
Something about the way he says it, the bone-deep certainty, sets Kaveh’s teeth on edge. Kaveh looks away. He can’t believe this. He can’t let himself believe it, or else he’ll start to hope, and hope is a dangerous thing for someone like him.
“Do you want to know what the most expensive mistake of Dori’s life actually is?” Alhaitham asks.
He grabs Kaveh’s wrist, then in one smooth motion, pulls up his sleeve and lays their arms side by side to reveal matching soulmate marks along their wrists.
Kaveh breaks. He looks up at Alhaitham, eyes wide.
“Sending you to me,” Alhaitham says, his mouth curving into a wicked grin.