The send off was three days later.

  Reva organized it the way she organized everything, quietly and completely, without asking anyone if they wanted her to because the question was beside the point. It needed doing and she did it. A small space in the Underlayers, not a temple, not anything official, just a room that a contact of Reva’s owned and had made available for the evening without asking why.

  Seven people. The crew, Marie, and a woman Zelig did not recognize who sat in the corner and did not introduce herself and who Reva later said had known Ervan before the Hollow Hand, before Luren, before whatever Ervan had been before he was the thing Zelig had known him as. Zelig did not ask more than that. Some things belonged to the people who had them.

  There was food because Reva had arranged food and drink because Flint had arranged drink and at some point in the evening it became the kind of gathering that Zelig had not expected it to become, not solemn exactly but full, the way spaces become full when the people in them are genuinely trying to be present rather than performing presence.

  Flint talked.

  Of course Flint talked. But he talked differently than he usually talked, without the performance quality, without the layer of charm that he deployed in rooms the way other people deployed tools. He talked about Ervan the way you talked about someone when you were talking for the room and not for yourself, finding the things that were true and putting them out where everyone could have them.

  He talked about the first time he had met Ervan. The specific quality of the man’s attention in that first meeting, the way he listened to Flint’s pitch for the vault job with his arms crossed and his face doing nothing and then asked exactly the two questions that got to the center of it and ignored everything else.

  “I had prepared for twenty minutes of convincing.” Flint said. “He gave me four. The other sixteen I just stood there wondering if I’d said enough.” He paused. “I had. He just didn’t need the rest.”

  Reva smiled at the table. Small, brief.

  “He was like that with everything.” She said. “He had a way of knowing when something was sufficient. Most people don’t know that. They keep going past sufficient because they’re not sure they’re there yet.” She looked at her cup. “Ervan was always sure.”

  Petch said nothing. He sat in his chair and drank and listened and his face was the face of someone who had known Ervan longer than any of them and had more to carry and was carrying it privately, which was his right.

  Aldo told a story about a job from two years before Zelig and Flint had joined the crew, something that had gone sideways in a specific way that was clearly not funny at the time and was now, told in Aldo’s large plain voice with the details slightly wrong in the way details went slightly wrong when they had been told and retold, very funny. The room laughed. Actually laughed. Zelig felt the laugh move through him and felt the strangeness of laughing and let it be strange rather than stopping it.

  Marie had come.

  She sat beside Zelig and did not say much and did not need to. She had not known Ervan well but she had known what he was to Zelig and that was enough to be here, and the fact that she was here without being asked was the kind of thing she did that he had stopped being surprised by and had started simply being grateful for.

  At one point she leaned over and said quietly: “He sounds like he was worth knowing.”

  Zelig thought about the handshake. The dark room. The two questions Ervan had asked that first night that had gone to the center of everything.

  “Yes.” He said.

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  Later when the food was gone and the drink was mostly gone and the room had thinned to just the crew and Marie and the woman in the corner who had not spoken all evening, Reva looked at Zelig.

  “He talked about you.” She said.

  Zelig looked at her.

  “Not often.” Reva said. “He didn’t talk about people often. But he mentioned you a few times in the last months. The way he mentioned things that he thought were going somewhere.” She paused. “He said you reminded him of someone.”

  “Who.” Zelig said.

  Reva looked at her cup. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.” She looked up. “That was Ervan. He gave you the piece he wanted you to have and kept the rest.”

  Zelig thought about that.

  He thought about who in Ervan’s history might have been worth the comparison. The woman in the corner. Whatever Ervan had been before Luren. The long life of a man who had been many things before he was the thing Zelig had known and who had arrived at decided through a road Zelig would never fully see.

  He did not know who the comparison was.

  He thought he would spend a long time wondering.

  The woman in the corner stood up when the room was almost empty.

  She was older than she had looked sitting down, the kind of age that settled differently on people who had spent it in difficult places. She looked at the room, at the remaining crew, at Zelig last.

  She said: “He was proud of what he built here.”

  Then she left.

  Nobody said anything for a moment after.

  Then Flint said quietly: “Good.” In the tone of someone receiving information that mattered and putting it somewhere it would stay.

  They walked out into the Underlayers in the late evening, the night air cold and the Row in the distance doing its nighttime thing. The crew dispersed in ones and twos. Aldo first, then Petch, then Reva who stopped at the corner and looked back at Zelig.

  “The crew.” She said. “We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.”

  “Wednesday.” Zelig said.

  She nodded. Walked.

  Flint stood beside Zelig on the empty street.

  “He was proud of what he built.” Flint said. Not repeating it emptily. Turning it over.

  “Yes.” Zelig said.

  “That’s the thing.” Flint said. He looked at the street, at the buildings, at the specific texture of the Underlayers at night, something moving behind his eyes that Zelig recognized as the look Flint had when something was crystallizing, when the shape of something he had been moving toward was becoming clear. “Building something you’re proud of. That’s the thing.”

  Zelig looked at him.

  Flint’s jaw was set in the way it had been set after the Burgalow office. The way it had been set on the Row when Ervan went down. The expression of a man who was filing something not as grief but as instruction.

  Ervan’s death had done something to Flint too.

  Different from what it had done to Zelig. But real.

  “What are you thinking.” Zelig said.

  Flint looked at him. “I’m thinking that the Hollow Hand is one way to build something.” He said. “And there are other ways.” He paused. “I’m thinking about the other ways.”

  Zelig said nothing.

  “Not leaving.” Flint said immediately. “Not the crew. Not you.” He said the last part plainly, without softening it, the way he said things that were true and did not need dressing up. “Just. I’ve been running cons and jobs and schemes since I was twelve years old and I’m good at it and it’s never going to be enough.” He looked at the Shining Place above the rooftops. “The people up there didn’t get there by lifting ledgers out of offices.”

  “Some of them did.” Zelig said.

  “And then they stopped.” Flint said. “At some point they stopped and built something legitimate on top of it. Something that had its name on it. Something that stayed.”

  Zelig thought about the cloth merchant who had left without a note. The twelve year old on the Row who had understood from that day forward that the only reliable thing was himself.

  “You want your name on something.” He said.

  “Yes.” Flint said simply. “I want my name on something that’s still there when I’m not.”

  He said it without embarrassment, without the performance that usually accompanied things Flint actually meant. Just the plain fact of it, set down on the street between them.

  Zelig looked at him for a moment.

  “Then build it.” He said.

  Flint looked back.

  “Yeah.” He said. “I will.”

  They stood on the street a moment longer.

  Above the rooftops the Shining Place glowed the way it always glowed. The same as it had looked from the Row when Zelig was ten years old and the same as it had looked every day since. Pale and steady and indifferent and there.

  Still there.

  Still the same distance away.

  But the distance had a number on it now and the number was smaller than it used to be and below the Shining Place two people from the Underlayers stood on a street in the dark and knew exactly where they were going and had enough of the right things between them to get there.

  That was something.

  That was, in fact, more than most people ever had.

  They walked home in the quiet and the night went on around them and the Underlayers went on being the Underlayers and Ervan Birch had been proud of what he built and that was going to mean something for a long time.