Below Street Level
By the time Lena Vos kicked the last drunk out of the bar, the rain had changed.
It no longer fell in thin, steady lines; it came in fits, rattling the windows in bursts, then easing back into a whisper. The city felt indecisive, like it couldn't commit to a proper storm.
"Closing up," she called, even though there was no one left to hear it.
Her voice bounced back from the bottles lined along the shelves. Cheap whiskey, decent whiskey, two expensive ones she kept mostly for decoration and the rare customer who needed to impress someone.
The bar smelled like citrus rinds, stale beer, cleaning fluid, and the faint trace of fried food that never seemed to leave, no matter how hard she scrubbed. She liked it that way. Places that smelled sterile made her nervous.
She moved behind the counter, flipping switches as she went. Neon signs died one by one, their buzz fading. Only the overhead strip above the bar stayed on, casting everything in a flat yellow that made the scratches on the tables more visible.
On the far wall, the holoscreen still glowed, sound off. She picked up the remote, thumb hovering over the power symbol, and paused.
A red banner crawled along the bottom.
> BREAKING: DEFENSE CONSULTANT FOUND DEAD IN HOTEL PENTHOUSE
She turned the volume up. The screen's speakers crackled as the sound kicked in mid-sentence.
"…discovered earlier tonight in what authorities are calling an apparent medical episode," the anchor was saying. Her hair was perfect, not a strand out of place, as if tragedy required good lighting and a blowout. "Allan Dorrance, a senior advisor to multiple international security firms and former liaison to the Department of Defense, was pronounced dead at the scene."
Lena leaned on the bar, cloth forgotten in her hand.
They rolled footage: Dorrance at some conference, gesturing at a chart full of arrows and numbers; Dorrance shaking hands with a general; Dorrance on a panel next to an Aegis Consortium logo, smiling like he still had all his teeth.
He had the kind of face she'd seen a thousand times in the news. Soft, well-fed, smug in small ways. The kind that never worried about last call or rent. The kind who never came into her bar unless they'd already fallen several rungs down.
"Sources say Mr. Dorrance was staying at the upscale Harrington Towers hotel," the anchor continued. "Preliminary reports indicate heart failure. There is no indication of foul play at this time."
Lena snorted under her breath.
Nobody ever indicated foul play at first. They indicated heart problems, stress, medication. Foul play only came later, if at all, usually after someone with enough money decided the story needed a villain.
A photo of Dorrance's building filled the screen: glass, steel, a neat little canopy over the entrance. She recognized the area; it wasn't far, by city standards, but it might as well have been a different country.
The reporter's voice went on about his career, his contributions, the "shocked reaction" from colleagues. A small image popped up in the corner: the President at some podium earlier that day, talking about security reforms. The connection was obvious enough, even without the pundits spelling it out. Men like Dorrance didn't die quietly without someone wondering if the timing meant something.
Lena muted the sound again. The anchor's mouth kept moving silently, teeth flashing as if she were trying to bite the story into shape.
She went back to wiping down the counter. Her shoulders ached. It had been a long week. Not more customers than usual, not less, just longer faces and thinner wallets. People drank slower when they were worried about money.
The news flickered in the corner of her vision. Heart attacks, wars, reform bills. None of it paid her overdue invoice on the new fridge compressor.
The door at the top of the staircase rattled then, the latch clicking. Heavy boots on the stairs, steady, not the stumbling drag of someone who'd stayed too long and drunk too much.
Lena didn't look up immediately. There were only a handful of people who came through the door at this hour, and most of them had their own keys.
"You know we're closed," she called, picking up a glass to polish that didn't need polishing.
"I'm not here to drink," a man's voice said, calm, level.
She glanced up.
It was the third-floor tenant. The quiet one.
He came down the last few steps and into the light, pausing near the edge of the bar. The first time she'd seen him, months ago, she'd pegged him for ex-military. There was a particular way soldiers carried themselves when they didn't wear uniforms anymore: weight centered, eyes always measuring exits, posture relaxed enough not to draw attention, tense enough to move fast if they had to.
He dressed like an office worker who bought his clothes in places that didn't leave logos on the outside. Dark jacket, plain shirt, clean but not new. His hair was short without being aggressively so. His face was forgettable in the way that came from practice rather than genetics.
It wasn't his looks that stuck in her head. It was his quiet. Some people's silence was an absence. His felt like a presence, like another person in the room.
"Kieran, right?" she said. She'd seen the name once on a sloppy piece of mail that had been shoved into the wrong slot.
He hesitated a fraction of a second before nodding. "Yes."
"Place upstairs alright?" she asked. "Roof didn't come off in the rain?"
"No," he said. "Roof's fine."
His voice was low, not rough, but flat enough that she guessed he was tired. His eyes were a pale gray that looked almost colorless under the bar's bulbs. They took in the room in one sweep and then settled, deliberately, on her.
"Sorry," he added. "Didn't mean to intrude."
"Relax," she said, tossing the cloth into the sink. "You pay rent. You're allowed to exist in the building. What do you need?"
He held up a small paper envelope.
"This was in my box," he said. "Wrong apartment number on it. It's for you, I think."
She wiped her hands on her jeans and came around the bar to take it.
The return address was some distribution center code. The label read: VOS, LENA – ACCOUNT STATEMENT.
"Thrilling," she said. "Maybe they're finally writing to tell me I'm rich and I just didn't know."
He didn't smile, but something at the corner of his mouth shifted, like a muscle considering the possibility and rejecting it.
"Long day?" she asked, slipping the envelope into her back pocket without opening it. No point depressing herself while the bleach bucket still needed emptying.
He shrugged. "Long enough."
"Same," she said. "You heading out or in?"
"In," he said. "For a while."
She nodded. His answers were all minimum necessary syllables, but none of them were rude. He wasn't avoiding conversation so much as… limiting it.
The holoscreen behind her switched to a shot of the Harrington again, lights flashing in front of the entrance now as emergency vehicles hovered nearby. The silent footage showed body bags, blurred faces, a medic wheeling a stretcher just out of frame.
She saw his eyes flick past her shoulder, catching the motion.
"You see that?" she said, jerking her chin at the screen. "Some big security guy dropped dead in a penthouse. Heart gave out. City's acting like gravity changed."
He looked at the screen for a moment. The image reflected faintly in his eyes.
"People die in hotels every day," he said.
"Not that kind of people," she replied. "That kind gets a scroll and a statement. Maybe even a moment of silence if he signed enough contracts."
"You know him?" he asked.
"No," she said. "But he looks like the kind of man who worked with the kind of men who made my father disappear."
She hadn't planned on saying that. The words slipped out, cleaned of emotion by the years but still tasting bitter on her tongue.
He didn't jump on it. Most people would have. Your father disappeared? How? Why? Where? Curiosity masquerading as concern.
He just watched her for a heartbeat.
"I'm sorry," he said.
It sounded like he meant it in a general way, not the cheap, reflexive one.
"It was a long time ago," Lena said. "He worked for some guys. Did some collecting. One day he went to work and never came home. Cops shrugged. His friends suddenly didn't remember his name. My mother pretended she didn't care and drank herself into a new marriage within a year. End of story."
"Not much of an end," he said.
"No." She picked up the cloth again, more for something to do with her hands than because the bar needed it. "But it makes for good late-night bartending conversation when people want to feel like their problems are small."
A siren wailed somewhere outside, distant and thin behind the rain.
"Anyway," she said, forcing a half-smile. "You look beat. Go sleep or stare at the ceiling or whatever it is you do up there. If the roof collapses, come down and I'll give you a drink before we both die."
This time, the corner of his mouth moved enough that she could call it almost-smiling without stretching the definition.
"I'll keep that in mind," he said.
He stepped back toward the stairs, then paused.
"Lena," he said.
"Yeah?"
"If anyone offers you a lot of money to tell them who lives in which apartment here, or what their schedules are, don't say yes."
Her brows rose.
"Does that happen often?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But the world's getting stranger. Better to pick your price early."
She snorted softly.
"My price is 'no,'" she said. "I've dealt with enough men with clipboards and too many questions. I don't plan on helping any of them get anyone killed."
He studied her face one more moment, as if memorizing it under this light, in this room, with this conversation attached.
"Good," he said.
Then he turned and went up the stairs, boots thudding softly on the worn wood.
She watched the door close behind him.
On the screen, the news had moved on to a speech from President Cross, talking about "accountability" and "chains of command" and "ensuring that those who operate in the shadows are brought into a framework of law."
Lena turned the sound off again.
She wasn't sure which part bothered her more: the idea that there were people out there killing on someone's order, or the idea that someone thought putting them in a framework would make them safer.
She finished cleaning in silence, the image of the hotel lobby still lingering in the corner of her eye.
When she finally shut the lights and locked the door, the rain had eased to a fine mist. The city smelled like wet asphalt and electricity. Somewhere above, on the third floor, a man who watched exits more than faces closed his own door and presumably vanished into whatever life he kept pressed flat between four walls.
Lena went home, told herself she'd sleep, and stared at the ceiling until dawn instead.