Chapter Text
MONTH ONE:
MYSTERIOUS RIFT FORMS ACROSS TRUE SEA, DISRUPTING TRADE AND CLOSING KERCH BORDERS: EXPERTS CLUELESS
Kaz clenched the newspaper in his fists, and he quickly flicked his gaze over to where his lieutenants sat playing cards. They seemed also to be discussing the most recent turn of events—The Rift.
The Rift had appeared last week, suddenly and without warning, like a huge slash that cut across the sea. Or, like the sea itself had sunken into the earth, creating huge chasms that were impassable by boat and seemed to buffet huge waves of energy that prevented any aerial routes and swallowed up Grisha's magic with a series of frightening earthquakes. It was impossible— there was no crossing the Rift.
He had been dealing at the Crow Club when the Rift opened when Inej left port. Inej liked to get an early start in the spring and avoid the storms, and this time she'd be taking Nina back to Ravka with her and dropping off Jesper and Wylan so they could catch another ship to Novyi Zem to visit Colm. Kaz would never admit it to them, but he wasn't looking forward to all of them being gone at once. He'd reconciled Inej coming in and out of his life like a gentle wave, but he'd come to expect the surety that Jesper and Wylan were always nearby. Perhaps he was going soft in his old age—maybe twenty-two was when he'd finally start to wise up and stop relying on other people so much.
If they had been a few hundred yards out of the harbor, they would be stuck on the other side; if they hadn't been—it didn't bear thinking about.
Although calling it the Rift seemed like a bit of a misnomer, when really it was several rifts, all circling the island nation of Kerch and cutting it off from the outside world, the Council of Tides had quickly passed a statement along to the Merchants Council stating that “at this time” they did not believe it was an attack on the Kerch people. Which seemed eminently unlikely but had seemed to soothe many Kerch citizens, who believed the issue would be solved soon.
Kaz had less hope. Mostly because hope had been a feeling that he had burned out of himself years ago, along with a multitude of other useless emotions. The Kerch government was incompetent at best and consisted of fantastically malicious storybook villains at worst, who were only interested in the Kruge lining their pockets. Any plan concocted by them was certain to fail. The other part of his brain, the one tricked by the sniveling children that made up his inner circle into believing in things like love or friendship, hoped beyond reason that it would be solved soon. But—it had taken centuries for Sankta Alina to come along and destroy the fold, the closest equivalent to the Rift Kaz could think of, and supposedly it had killed her. That happening twice seemed so unlikely it would take a miracle, and Kaz did not believe in miracles.
"What fucking experts could the council have called? Bunch of cocksuckers." Annika grumbled, tossing her newspaper onto an empty chair beside her. Many of the Dregs had gathered in the run-down parlor on the second floor of the Slat, a perpetually dark room with several little tables for playing cards, a large fireplace, and one overstuffed armchair with a footstool that only Kaz ever sat in. It was where most of the gang gathered in their time off during the day, as opposed to the spacious communal spaces on the first floor, and you could always guarantee a moment of quiet there—or the latest gossip. If Kaz were to be amongst the crew, he preferred to linger there, in his chair by the fire, where no one was tempted to ask him any questions, but he still had the chance to overhear something.
Pim, next to her, shrugged and took a disgustingly large bite of his sweet roll.
"I dunno, big pit experts?"
Kaz chucked his tongue irritably, soft enough that no one could hear him, and said nothing because it wasn't like he hired Pim for his great tactical mind. It wasn't the big bastard's fault his head was full of rocks.
" Big pit experts? " Annika echoed mockingly, dropping her voice into a low register. "Oh, and uh, where are these "big pit experts" from, Pim? Hmm? You great big podge!"
Great. She and Pim were on the outs again— Kaz would have to rearrange everyone's schedule for the third time this month. He had half a mind to leave them on duty together, but that would likely turn into torture so foul that the poor skivs forced to share the casino floor with them would stage a mutiny and push Kaz off Ghezen's pinky in retaliation.
“My cousin who works down at the wharf says there were ships out there when the Rift opened, and there's no way anyone survived it. That they got crushed up and sunk, that one of them was The Wr –”
Kaz slammed his cane down onto the floor, and silence crept over the room, his stomach clenched. Rotty looked over to catch sight of Kaz lounging in his black suit, and his face went white.
“There’s no way to know for sure, and no fucking point in whinging about it like a group of nursemaids. So get off your asses and get to your posts, or you’ll find yourself personally investigating the bottom of that rift .”
The room cleared out quickly, leaving Kaz there to stew in anxiety and a not-inconsiderable amount of rage.
The rest of his day dragged on miserably, full of mind-numbingly boring meetings with vendors, manning the floor of The Silver Six, and working through the ledgers. He paced around his room like an animal in a cage, trying not to think of Inej, Jesper, and Wylan lying dead at the bottom of the bay. Finally, he lay his head down in the early morning light and slept a few fitful hours before throwing himself back into work.
His days followed a similar pattern for weeks, interspersed by parleys or minor skirmishes along territories. Kaz would take the time to choke down at least a roll or something, but his stomach never handled food well when he was waiting for the end of a job. That's how he had to think of this— this was just a job, the Rift was an obstacle that popped up as they did on all jobs, and Kaz needed to trust in his crows to get their side of things settled before they met back up.
MONTH FOUR:
He had hoped, naively, that this time alone would allow him some measure of space to settle his own issues—that it would be a few months of lowering his armor and that he would have something to show for it when his friends returned. Make himself into a man Inej could be proud of, but the Rift did not close within a few weeks. It would stretch on longer and longer still, with no updates, no message of life from the outside world. What tiny flicker of hope Kaz managed to keep lit, despite his innate cynicism, was swiftly extinguished.
It was a bleak kind of hopelessness, where the silence, the not knowing, was enough to make it torture. If they were dead, if the harbor had swallowed the last bit of family Kaz had left, he would rather know for sure. This limbo was becoming unbearable.
The longer it went on, the more sure Kaz became that this whole thing, his whole life, all that pain and suffering, had been for nothing. For Jordie? He was fooling himself, Jordie was dead, rotting somewhere at the bottom of the sea, not that it mattered. Dead men tell no tales, or so they say, but that had never been the case for Kaz. Jordie dogged his every step, whispering vitriol in his ear, standing by his bedside, shivering from the cold. With every breath Kaz took, he felt his brother's ghostly hand squeeze tightly around his lungs. Kaz would blink awake at night, torn from nightmarish dreams, and find Jordan Reitveld looming, covered in pox sores, bloated and pale, water pouring from his open mouth. The sight had been horrifying when he had still been some pathetic amalgamation of Rietveld and Brekker, freshly orphaned and roaming the streets of Ketterdam, but these days the sight of his brother's ghoulish corpse settled into bone-deep exhaustion. Kaz had been seeing him more and more these days, especially since the Rift had opened, and as fucked up as it was, he had become numb to the sight of it. It had gotten better for a while after he had driven out Pekka Rollins, but the hallucinations soon returned with a vengeance after Inej's first tour on the Wraith . Inej would tell him that his nightmares were always worse when he didn't eat, didn't sleep, or took in no water, but Inej wasn't here to speak sensibly to him, more patient than anyone had ever been. And Inej had never known how bad it really was; no one did. He hadn't told anyone about the way the nightmares seeped into the day, the way he could turn a corner and come face to face with his life's greatest regret.
Who would he tell now? Inej, far away, separated by an ocean that had suddenly become as good as the bars of a cage? Or the ghost of his rotting brother, who tormented him? Kaz was on his own.
MONTH SIX:
Pekka Rollins would never be back to Ketterdam; Kaz thought that would've been enough, that he would finally be able to shirk himself of this last responsibility. Be free. But now he was more sure that though Pekka Rollins would never return, neither would his friends, his family, and the specter of his brother hung over him like a heavy fog.
Pekka Rollins had killed the Rietveld brothers, but he hadn't made Kaz a monster– Kaz had done that all on his own. Inej had asked him once, and he had brushed her off then, but he knew now for sure. Dirtyhands was not Pekka Rollins' shadow; he was Kaz Brekker's.
This is your fault, Jordie hissed, ghostly lips brushing his ear when he visited him at night. You have escaped death too many times, and death demands recompense. You are selfish, and it has killed all of your friends. Ghezen demands it— a life for a life; the deal is the deal. You've had a great many lives, brother. Who dies at your hand next?
Kaz found himself fighting the water constantly, holding in his heart-stopping terror and disgust throughout the whole day. Even the sensation of Annika's arm brushing his as she reached for something was enough to send him gagging into his bathroom. It was the worst it had been in years since he had climbed out of the harbor.
He tried to wave Jordie away, but he clung like a horrible grasping hand tugging him down into the water; clung to him like cigarette smoke.
MONTH EIGHT:
He had been smoking more cigarettes, packs of them, really, one right after the other, huddled on the stoop or leaning dangerously out of his office window. It was Kaz's one true vice, aside from the occasional shot of Kvas or greed, which Kaz saw less as a vice and more as a natural state of being for a creature as low as he was. Usually, Kaz had them imported in from Ravka, real Jurda cigarettes, packed with spices, and likely rolled by some old man in an Os Alta slum for pennies each day. They were fucking heavenly, tasted like sunshine and the crisp air of the countryside in fall. They eased his nerves after miserable dreams or an accidental touch as long as he smoked them slowly.
He had not been smoking them slowly.
Kaz burned through one after another in strings of four or five until his next rushed break, and they made his hands shake and his headache miserably. But he couldn't stop. The cigarettes had become as much of a crutch as his gloves, and it picked away at him— the thought of acquiring another weakness.
Or maybe it was the same old weakness come back to haunt him, the sentimentality that he just couldn't crush, even after all these years. His own father had smoked a similar brand from Novyi Zem, but when Kaz was old enough to remember, to chase any tiny memory of the man who had been so gentle and kind, he'd found they stopped making them years before.
Strangely, he found himself thinking of his Da more than he had in years. It was a strange sort of grief, not as sharp as the constant reminder of Jordie, but it surprised him every time. The only thing he could compare it to was when he would herd sheep as a child, and his count would be perfect, but then he would turn and find that one of the babies had vanished. Confused and terrified, like something precious had been swiped from him when he had not been looking, he would wander for hours calling for them only to find they had gotten themselves stuck in a fence a few yards away. Only his father was not a few yards away. The cigarettes from Ravka were the closest to his father's he'd been able to find, the closest he could get to him now. If he closed his eyes and cast away the sneering voices whispering in his head, he could almost imagine that his father had sent him some in the mail, that he was still alive to share this small treasure with his adult son who had gone off to the big city. He could pretend like he wasn't a monster and that his father, who wouldn't even kill spiders, who cried when he had to put down a sick animal, would still love him as he was now-- like anyone could love him as he was now.
It was a silly fantasy, a stupid, avoidable expense, but he couldn't tear himself from them. The cigarettes you bought in the Barrel tasted of blacktop and that shit that they used for insulation in factories and workhouses. Filled with sawdust and tar and made not of Jurda leaves but their chopped-up stems to cut costs, they could not compare. They stunk and tasted so bitter it turned the stomach; there was nothing of his father in them— and it made it easier to realize that there was nothing left of his father in him, either.
Inej hated them, she didn't understand why he wasted his money, and she certainly didn't care for the smell, even of the Ravkan ones. For years she tried to get him to stop, citing the smell, and the cost, the way they stained his teeth and tore at his already damaged throat. He couldn't bring himself to do it, and when he tried, he became a raging monster, his temper even shorter than before, and it stopped suppressing his hunger, so his stomach ached all the time. So, he'd started to stop smoking around her, waiting until she left Berth Twenty-Two to light up again, and he would spend the weeks until she sailed back chain-smoking them like a true Barrel rat. Here, without her and without Wylan, who would pluck them out of his fingers and toss them into the canals, there was no one to curb his sprees.
Most unforgivably, they were almost certainly a weakness others could pick up on. Teeth in the Barrel were never in the best condition, but you could always tell a smoker a mile away just from the look of the yellowing on the front incisors. He had fine enough teeth, except for those ones on the bottom he needed replacing after bouts of sickness, but his canines didn't escape the stain of cigarettes more than anyone else's. And from there, it wasn't hard to check shipping manifests to see what brand of cigarettes Dirtyhands had shipped in— it was sloppy work. It had become so bad that other gangs had started bringing packs of his brand to parleys to try to gain his favor. It never worked, but if the stupid skivs were going to buy him smokes, who was he to turn them down? There were crates of them stored down in the cellar, but at the rate he was going, he'd run out by the end of the year, and then where would he be? With the Rift, he wouldn't be able to purchase more.
MONTH TEN:
He started rationing himself, but he'd gotten so used to chain smoking that he became almost unbearably cruel. He prowled the streets at night, the way he hadn't for years, searching out any rival gang members and starting horrible, bloody fights that he always won. He always won these days, not like back in the day when he'd been a nothing piece of Barrel scum and not the king of the whole miserable pile. When Kaz walked down the street, people crossed to avoid him, shopkeepers trembled, and men tipped their hats. Every day his clubs brought in more and more kruge; even without the steady flow of tourists, the visitors began pouring in from around Kerch instead, desperately trying to circulate kruge through a stalled economy or distract themselves from the existential horror of being trapped with nowhere to go. It was like he couldn't fail. It should've pleased him, and he was a king like he'd meant to be. But he didn't care; he couldn't bring himself to give a single fuck about any of it, about anything.
Nachtspel passed without a single piece of tinsel wrapped sadly around his bedframe by a manic Jesper. His birthday came and went with no acknowledgment whatsoever. Twenty-three years old, ten years more than Jordie was ever given, and what did Kaz have to show for it? A pile of shit, and him the king of it.
When he managed to push away the cloud of despair and apathy, he would be taken over by bloody, red rages. He would tear through the Slat and the clubs like a hurricane, snapping and snarling like a rabid dog, and only his most dedicated lieutenants— Rotty, Pim, Annika— would approach him. He had known them for so many years that although they were still scared of him, they knew it was unlikely he would lash out physically without serious provocation. Those three approached him about everything, schedules, information gathered by his spiders, concerns that popped up around the Slat, and he would grit his teeth and dull his tone. Everyone else tip-toed around him like he would fly off the handle and kill them all without warning— or like someone had died, which they hadn't. Because they weren't dead, no matter what Rotty's shithead cousin thought he saw.
MONTH ELEVEN:
"Maybe you just need to sleep more." Annika had snapped at him one day before going pale and hurrying out of the room at the dark look he sent her way.
If only he could. Kaz had never slept as little as he did in the past few months. He tossed and turned on his lumpy mattress, the bed frame creaking dangerously at each turn. Maybe he needed a new bed? So he bought himself a new mattress, which made no real difference. He tried tea but found he hated the taste; he tried reading but would only get a page in before he lost concentration— he even tried naming all of Inej's saints, but his breath always caught when he reached Sankt Vladimir, and it became difficult to breathe. Patron saint of the drowned. He didn't want to court the favor of that particular Saint— they were not drowned, so he did not need to call for him. After that failure, desperate enough that he had started getting horrible headaches and his body shook like a tree in the wind, he visited a medick who gave him tablets for sleep.
The tablets worked, at least at first. They would drag him into a heavy, confusing slumber that dried out his mouth and left him scrambling for any intelligent thought upon waking. And they didn't stop any nightmares. Usually, he would wake from nightmares, shaking and gasping for breath, before becoming sick. It was nasty and frightening and humiliating but it was better than with the tablets— where he would be stuck there buried under the crush of rotting bodies as the water rose up around him. He would wake, choking on salt water, perfectly well rested and terrified, usually in a puddle of his own sick. However, the improvement in his mood, which was well-received by his gang, and his ability to concentrate on his business made him accept the nightly torture as a necessary measure.
That had been before the other side effect had kicked in. He'd been warned about this particular one but had been less worried about it due to his leg rather limiting his possibilities for motion. Kaz had been…sleepwalking. Or something like that. All he knew was that he would down a pill with a shot of Kvas, lay his head down in his bed, and wake up somewhere else entirely.
First, it had been at his desk, where he had apparently written out a full budget for the next fiscal year in abhorrently illegible writing. (Though surprisingly, it wasn't a bad plan.) Then it had been underneath the kitchen table, clutching an empty tin of cookies— he hadn't even known they bought pistachio cookies. He didn't even like pistachios. Then another time, the stairs, then the stoop, the cellar, the common area couch, each place more absurd and confusing than the last. All of that had been….concerning, certainly, but nothing too worrying. He was still in the Slat and hadn't done anything too worrying, although it was a good thing he wasn't allergic to nuts. Then he started waking up outside. On the grass, in a park, on a bench outside the six, he even woke up once to find himself seated inside the Kooperom and making his way through a large stack of waffles. He was even fully dressed. He wasn't sure if this was how sleepwalking even worked. This seemed too serious, too complex to fit with the signs the medick had mentioned until, one day, it reached a terrifying head.
ONE YEAR:
Kaz woke with the confusion, nausea, and horror that often accompanied his mornings, and it carried with it a kind of loose-limbed weightiness like the weight of his own body was too much to bear. He came to awareness slowly, flexing his muscles, breathing deeply, trying to pry open his eyes. He was standing; he knew that at least—his leg was killing him. The familiar creeping dread that accompanied one of his nightmares washed over him, the ones that the tablets now made so difficult to recall, and he felt the waters rise as he so often did these days. The waters lapped at his knees, cold and sharp, and his trousers clung to his legs. His trousers.
He looked down and was startled to see water.
Kaz had always used water to understand the animal fear that overtook his mind at his worst moments, but it had always been a sensation— a feeling and never a real experience. But this was real water, real water lapping at his legs and weighing down his trousers. Kaz was standing knee-deep in the harbor and he had no idea how he had arrived there. His cane was not in his hand and he seemed to have shed his boots at some point before getting into the water because he could see them lying on the dock. The smell of fish and salt made him gag and made him think of the smell of rotting flesh. Rocks cut at his feet, and the rough rock of the tide threatened to push him backward into the water.
Would that be so bad? A voice whispered in his head. Maybe there’s a reason you’re here.
With a start, he realized that each time he'd woken up, it had always been just that little bit closer to the harbor. It was a horrible, clawing horror, and he fought down a terrified moan, his teeth chattering with the strength of it.
Maybe it was always meant to end here; you were always meant to end here. Wouldn't you like to rest? Lay down your load Kaz Brekker.
The moon was full, and it reflected back off the water like it was a large, black sheet of glass. It cast an eerie, menacing glow and made it impossible to see through the water if the pollution from the factories downstream hadn't clouded it enough already. He looked down at his bare hands, white and ghostly in the moonlight; they had never looked more like the hands of a corpse.
Rest, real rest, and all Kaz would need to do is wade in just a little farther until the water finally took him. It was barely even a choice when you looked at it that way, just a natural progression of events. The thought was tempting, and it certainly wasn't the first time Kaz had it. Something about returning to that harbor that he had dragged himself out of seemed good, seemed right. Jordie was down there somewhere. Jordie, who had promised they would look out for each other, that he would never leave. They had always come as a pair. Kaz had never been meant to be alone like this like he was now. He had been able to ignore that fact for years, first because of his single-minded dedication to ruining Pekka Rollins and then because he had grown soft, used to the company of friends. Ghezen, his friends. His friends, who were likely dead. He could admit that to himself, just this once, in the prison of his own mind.
Kaz was a pale imitation of Jordan Reitveld, cruel, unkind, and wicked. His father would turn in his grave to see his sweet little Kaspar turned into a monster—- whatever was left of him after he'd been torn into pieces by that plow. He stood there trembling because not even now could he force tears to come the way they had the night he'd swam back from the barge. The monster remained dry-eyed and cruel, even in grief. What was he?
The low cry of a bird startled him, and he tore his eyes away from the horizon, away from Reaper’s Barge. Behind him, he could hear people start to stir on the streets, and a few lights turned on in the distance— he could almost hear the turn of the Makker’s Wheel.
He had work to do. He turned from his grave and waded back to shore.