---
[ THE FREAKSHOW — VIP LEVEL ]
Nico came down from the railing.
Not physically — he stayed where he was, elevated, the geography of the VIP section doing the work his posture wanted to do. But the weight of him shifted forward, and the air around the section shifted with it. The women who had been beside him a moment ago had migrated instinctively toward the edges of the booth. Spazzo had straightened. Bricco had put his phone down, which for Bricco represented a significant reallocation of attention. Torvo had simply become more present — the way large things become more present when the situation requests it, filling space he had technically already been occupying.
Nico's finger came up.
Pointed at Elijah below.
"Who." His voice carried over the bass line with the practiced projection of someone who had spent nineteen years being listened to in loud rooms. "Who does he think he is." The question was addressed to the general vicinity rather than any specific person. "Showing up to my place — my place — like he owns the floor. Talking back to me like—"
"Like what, mate?"
The voice came from below. Unhurried. Carrying an accent that arrived in Lower Fenwick like a visitor from a geography that had never heard of Morreca Brackside and would not have adjusted its behavior if it had.
Nico's jaw stopped moving.
Elijah stood at the base of the VIP stairs with his hands back in his pockets, head tilted up at an angle that managed to communicate looking up at someone while somehow not communicating looking up at them. Tyla beside him, one hand resting at the crook of his arm, her face arranged into the pleasant neutral of a woman who had decided to observe rather than participate for the immediate moment.
"You a drongo, yeah?" Elijah asked.
Silence.
Not the silence of a room that had gone quiet — the music was still running, the floor below still moving. The silence of a specific cluster of people who had all simultaneously encountered a word none of them recognized and were waiting for context that would explain whether to be offended.
Spazzo looked at Bricco.
Bricco looked at Torvo.
Torvo looked at Elijah with the expression of a man running a search that was returning no results.
Nico's brow pulled together. "A what."
"Dramatic." Elijah clicked his tongue. "The face you're pulling right now, the whole—" he gestured loosely at Nico's general expression, "—that. That right there. Very dramatic."
"What did you just call me."
"I asked if you were a drongo." A pause. "But I'll take back the question. Watching you now, I'm thinking you might just be a sook."
Another silence. Longer this time.
Nico's eye twitched.
"What," he said, and it was less a question than the sound a person makes when they are approaching a limit from one side and can see the edge clearly.
Elijah's expression arranged itself into something that was genuinely, almost convincingly, apologetic.
"Ah — mind me, yeah. Old habit." He waved a hand. "What I mean is — are you always this whingy? Cause you're giving off a real specific energy right now. The kind that usually comes with cramps." He paused for precisely the right duration. "If you know what I mean."
From below — from the edges of the crowd that had migrated toward the base of the VIP section with the collective instinct of people who had correctly identified that something worth watching was happening — a sound rose.
Laughter. The unguarded kind. The kind that comes out before the person producing it has finished deciding whether it's appropriate.
Phones were still up. Had not come down once.
On the Vtube stream, comments moved in the continuous scroll of a crowd that had found its evening's entertainment and intended to extract maximum value from it:
bro really said cramps 💀💀
nico is gonna explode someone call a medic
the accent?? what country is this man even FROM
SOOK?? WHAT IS A SOOK
Nico's finger came back up.
"You—" He stopped. Started again. "You—"
"Yeah?" Elijah tilted his head.
"You—"
"Take your time, brother. Really. No rush from me."
"You."
Elijah looked at Tyla. Genuinely, pleasantly curious. "Is he alright, you reckon? Cause this isn't really — this isn't forming into anything coherent. He might be going through some kind of fog up there." He tapped his temple twice with one finger. "The brain fog. Very real condition. My cousin had it once. Couldn't finish a sentence for a week."
Tyla's hand came up to her mouth.
He is going to give that boy an aneurysm,she thought, with a calm she was increasingly having to construct deliberately. He is going to cause genuine medical harm through conversational antagonism and there will be nothing I can do about it because I am supposed to be playing along and also I cannot currently feel my face from trying not to laugh.
She kept her expression composed.
Barely.
---
Torvo descended three steps.
He did not hurry. He had the build of a man who had never needed to hurry toward anything because things generally resolved themselves in his favor well before urgency became necessary. When he spoke, his voice was the low, settled register of someone delivering information they considered self-evident.
"You are addressing," he said, with the reverence of a man reciting something sacred, "Nico of the Morreca. A name that carries weight in every corner of this city." His eyes moved to Elijah with the assessment of someone measuring a distance. "And you — loose-tongued, far-flung, *country bumpkin* from whatever distant nowhere produced you — will apologize to him. Now. Directly. Or you will find that this evening concludes in a manner significantly less comfortable than it began."
He pointed.
One finger. Elijah's direction. Commanding.
Elijah looked at the finger.
Looked at Torvo.
Looked at the finger again.
Then turned to Tyla.
His eyes moved across her face with an expression that belonged to a man who had just spotted something slightly concerning over her shoulder and was trying to determine whether it warranted mentioning. His brow pulled in. Slightly. The performance of a man distracted from the current conversation by a minor but genuine concern.
"You hear that?" he asked her.
Tyla blinked. "Hear what?"
"That sound." He tilted his head. Turned it slightly, tracking. His hand came up near his ear — fingers spread, then cupped, the gesture of someone trying to locate a source. His mouth produced something: a faint, intermittent, high-pitched droning. Not loud. Just persistent. The kind of noise that, once identified, becomes impossible to un-hear.
He did it again.
Moved his hand. Followed an invisible trajectory through the air between himself and Torvo. The droning continued — mimicked through some combination of the back of his throat and filtered breath, surprisingly accurate in its irritating frequency.
His expression was one of genuine, slightly worried concern.
"Something's buzzing around here," he said, to Tyla, in the tone of a man reporting a minor household inconvenience. "Can't quite figure out where it's coming from." He looked at her with the perverse, warm attention of someone whose focus on her face was doing double work — both performing devoted concern and being extremely deliberate about what it was ignoring. "Probably nothing. Just — been going on since we walked up. Annoying little thing. Can't see it though."
From the crowd, someone lost their composure entirely.
It spread. The laughter moved through the watching cluster like a current — people grabbing each other's arms, phones shaking, the Vtube stream's comment feed achieving a velocity that made individual comments impossible to track except in fragments:
HE CALLED TORVO A MOSQUITO
WITHOUT SAYING IT 💀💀💀
bro the hand gesture I'm DECEASED
nico's face rn is sending me to another dimension
Bricco had his phone turned toward Nico.
On the screen — the stream comments. Visible. Nico's name appearing in configurations that were not flattering. Morreca Brackside apparent successor sitting up there getting sonned by a tourist.Another: yeah I heard baby Morreca is real sensitive always was real bitchy about his territory somebody shoulda told him.
Nico looked at the screen.
His face did a specific thing.
The kind of thing faces do when multiple systems — pride, rage, humiliation, authority — all receive an input simultaneously and the processing cannot prioritize fast enough.
"Guards." His voice had dropped. Quieter was worse, somehow. Quieter meant he had moved past the part of anger that performs itself. "Torvo."
Torvo looked up from the invisible mosquito trajectory.
"Get him." Nico's jaw was tight. "The buffone down there. I want him handled. Now." His eyes moved — cut sideways to Tyla with the specific attention of a young man who had decided that the evening could still recover something for him. "And her.Bring her up here."
The transition in the air was immediate.
Tyla felt it before she processed it — the shift in the weight of the room, the way the guards at the VIP perimeter reoriented. She stepped closer to Elijah. Her chest met his arm. Her head turned toward him and her voice dropped below the music.
"You're terrible," she murmured. "Genuinely. As a person." A pause. "So what now."
Elijah's hand settled at the small of her back. Firm. The kind of grip that communicates a plan without elaborating on it. He was still looking at Nico. His expression — the perverse, unbothered warmth of a man who had decided this particular evening was going very well — had not shifted.
"Exactly where I predicted," he said quietly. "Relax."
Then, louder. Upward. Carrying the accent like a flag planted in territory it had no business being in:
"See — this is what I mean, yeah?" He looked at Nico with an expression of patient, almost sympathetic observation. "I give you two options. You could've been decent about it. Shown us around. Had a good night." He tilted his head. "Instead you're proving my point for me, mate." A beat. "Might want to consider adding a skirt to the wardrobe. Seems more your speed."
The crowd reacted the way crowds react when something exceeds their expectations — not with measured appreciation but with the full, physical, uncontained response of people who had not expected to receive this much value from a Tuesday.
Nico's face was the color and temperature of something that had been left on a heat source past the recommended duration.
Torvo came down the remaining steps.
He was not alone. Two guards flanked him — the kind of men whose professional function was visible in the way they moved, the space they assumed, the direction their eyes tracked. They spread as they descended. Patient. Geometric.
Torvo stopped six feet from Elijah.
His eyes moved down. Then up. The assessment of a man who had broken things before and was now calculating the specifics of the current situation with professional interest.
"Little man," he said, and the quietness of it was the worst part.
"I'm going to break your bones."