Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
Saint saw more than the lack of shoes. He saw those too. The bare curl of toes that flashed over grass and loose-chip stones, and then over asphalt sticky-black. He didn't think of shoes as an assumption. There were too many people Saint had met who lacked them. When he'd met Wren, whether she'd had them or she hadn't, hadn't really registered in the poverty of concerns that she tucked around herself like a blanket.
Filth didn't cleave to Saint. Perhaps because he'd always been observer, behind a lens, with his head cocked to look, to listen. Patience, and h was patient now, as he put together the boy and the yellow sunshine dress and the door opened onto a picture that Wren snapped as he framed it in his mind's eye instead of the convex curve of the glass lens. Filth didn't cling, but nor did he care much about it. It was part of the lives he walked among, and he minded it there in an abstract way, the kind of way that collected dollars along with gas-money at convenience stores out of town, the kind that wrote hopefully lettered signs and left them in supermarkets. Filth came second to a cup of tea, to a full belly. It always would.
But the man's gaze was shrewder than the boy's when Saint lifted his lens - not to take a picture, but to see. He looked like danger, heavy-muscled, looming in a doorway and Wren's picture wasn't forgotten, but there was a prescience in Saint that had perhaps been lacking before the ambulance and the blood and the stairs and Preston.
"You need to stay out of the light," he said, quietly. There was no urgency immediately apparent in his voice: Saint's voice lent itself to quiet and to stillness and to mirth. But it was tense, in the back of his throat, like soap bubbles balanced on water. "Too bright. Too obvious."