by Tessa Elwood
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit. It’s been, what? A half hour? What the hell happened in—” He stops, hand pressing the back of his neck. “The Brinkers?”
Lord, he’s smart. No one should be that smart.
“No, of course not.” I inch back. He follows. “Why would you think that?” My back hits wood. His hand flattens on the wall beside my head.
“They threaten you?” His mouth flatlines with his eyebrows, both drained of light. “Where are they?”
“Nowhere. There were no Brinkers.”
He’s close enough to kiss, whole body leaning in. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a really shitty liar?”
I swallow. “Once or twice.”
“What did the Brinkers want?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“Kit.” Dark. The kind of dark that’d go on the hunt for scary people, who would then land him dead in a ditch.
“Niles.” Dark and just as edged. He has to give this up. “You’re scaring me.”
That pulls him back, a full three paces as his fingers press to his nose, then run through his hair. “When did they grab you?”
“It’s fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine. Let it go, okay?”
“Nothing about this is fine!”
“Well, yelling about it won’t make it better.”
“I’m not yelling!” The words bounce off the ceiling, echo down the hall.
We stare at each other.
He scrubs his face. “Fine. I’m an asshole. A loud asshole.”
“You’re not an asshole.”
He looks ready to kick something. “Did they hurt you?”
“No, I told you. They weren’t even here.”
“Kit—”
I hold up my hand and he stops, hands knots at his sides. I move to the stairwell.
“You can’t just—”
But I’m gone.
The last address I have for Dee lands me in the heart of East 5th, between a skeletal flightwing dock and a shoptower of greasy takeout and hot sex. There’s a sign.
Dee’s tower sags in broken balconies and busted windows. No security or intercoms. I walk right into the lobby without a pass. Multilegged things skitter across the patchwork floor and up gray walls that might have had patterns once. Maybe still do, under the dirt.
Last I knew Dee had hooked up with some high-end dealer, who’d set her up with her own suite. It was all she could talk about, how Yonni’s place couldn’t compare.
She couldn’t have meant here.
If Yonni saw this, she wouldn’t have banned Dee from her suite—even after Greg’s fiasco with Missa’s meds.
Or maybe not. Maybe Yonni would have considered it justice.
The elevator doesn’t work. The narrow stairwell winds under spitting lights and empties into a de-carpeted hall. The carpet lies rolled in a corner. Door 210 sits under one of three busted lights, absorbing the dark between black wood and gray handles. I knock, soft knuckled.
No one answers.
Skip this. I should just turn around and go.
Except, without my transaction card, I won’t make any headway with Decker.
I need that bracelet.
I knock harder. “Dee, it’s Kit.”
Low swears filter through, followed by muffled thuds.
“I’m not joking, Dee,” I say. “Open the door or I’ll pop it.”
And considering I got that particular skill from her son, she knows I’ll make good. The door opens like magic.
Dee, pink-nailed, fluffy-haired, and grinning like she’s happy to see me.
So Greg’s here, then.
“Kit!” Bright and cheery, all Lady of the Tower. “What a happy surprise!”
“I bet.” I push past her. The suite’s even worse than the hall. Apparently, there was a reason for pulling the carpet. What’s left in here is black and crunches with my steps. So would the walls if I touched them. They’re crusted.
I bite my cheek.
Don’t get sidetracked, Kit. Not now.
“Come on out, Greg,” I tell the only other door in the place. Probably to the bathroom. Not a bedroom, because the bed sits next to the kitchen. If a rolling cart, a sink, and a fridge count as a kitchen.
Dee folds her arms. “Greg isn’t here.”
I cross the room and open the lone door. Greg tumbles to the carpet, hands and knees buried in whatever is growing on the floor.
“Dammit, Kit!” He scrambles, and my gut blackens with his fingers. He wipes his hands on his shirt—a new, crisp shirt that hasn’t spent the last week glued to his frame.
I’m going to be sick.
“I didn’t know what to do, okay?” he says, palms out, and I swear some of the dirt slithers. “Gerry’s kicking me out of the boarding tower and those kids swore they just wanted to talk to you. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.”
“You dosed me, Greg.”
“And obviously, you’re fine.” Dee jacks a cigarette pack from her back pocket and bounces one out with shaking fingers. “He’s trying to stay out of Feverfed.”
“The moon lockup?” I ask. Not even our planet’s moon, but the third one over. The worst of the lot. The one people don’t come back from. “How the hell did you get slated for that?”
“You saying you care?” Greg shakes, too, eye whites tinted yellow. He drops the cigarette his mother offers. It sinks into the carpet. He retrieves it, doesn’t notice the smudged dark coating its end. I snatch the cig before he puts it in his mouth.
He swears. “Really, Kit? I can’t even get a smoke?”
“Do you want to die?” I crush the cig to powder, drop what’s left on the floor. Then step close and jam my hand into his right back pocket—where he always kept his money as a kid.
Some things don’t change.
He jumps. “What the—?”
I pull away, my now-sticky transaction card held high. His cheeks burn with something like shame.
There’s doping your cousin, and then there’s robbing her unconscious form. Of course, he also stole pain meds from the love of his grandmother’s life, so maybe nothing was ever sacred to him.
“Sorry,” he says.
“No.” Dee starts forward, trips on a half-eaten chair. “You do not apologize to her.”
Of course not. I am the heartless daughter of a mass-murdering god.
I turn around and walk out.
Thirty-two.
I stand at the cross street four blocks from Dee’s and ask the transaction card to repeat the balance. The big red digits don’t change.
0 3 2.
In the space of a day, Greg managed to burn through whatever the Brinkers paid him and my three hundred reds.
Sorry, two hundred sixty-eight.
Drugs? A second debt to Decker?
I can’t bargain with this. I’ll have to steal the bracelet back. And figure out how the hell it works before Decker tracks me down.
And he will. Nobody crosses Decker.
Decker’s alley growls in the deepened light and chomps its graffiti teeth. His impassive door barricaded from the inside out. A lost cause even with my popping skills. What little they are.
But like Mom says, there’s more than one way to rewrite the grid.
I look up. Past the teeth and the stone walls, the busted lights and the barred windows, to the half-chewed roofline eight stories above. For a tower, it barely warrants the name.
And along all eight of those stories clings an escape lift. A skinny ladder that turns into a skeletal stairwell around level four or five. Rusted and splitting from the wall in places, but workable. I’ve seen worse.
A subeight-story fall probably wouldn’t kill me. If it does, well, my deal with Niles ended last night.
&
nbsp; I climb.
The rungs flake hot. Stick to my palms and crawl under my nails. My shoes scrape and the ladder creaks—if Decker’s here, I’m screwed—but the metal holds. And Decker shouldn’t be here. He has a schedule, and I knew it by heart when I was trying to track down meds for Yonni.
I zoom up the first story and a half, slow into the third. My arms burn by the time I hit the stairwell, but then my legs take over and it’s smooth flying. The escape lift returns to ladder form for the last story, and I haul myself onto the roof. Stand on the ledge and survey my conquered mountain. Or rather, the alley and the flat stone wall of the tower across the way.
I am a roof-climbing god.
Something skitters in the edge of my vision. Or someone. I jump backward onto the rooftop and drop behind the ledge. Wait a beat and peek over. Lots of painted teeth and grime. No people.
None visible. Probably a bird. It was totally a bird.
Right.
Life loves to kick you when you’re high, Yonni used to say. And low. And whenever the hell else it feels like.
Missa had been at breakfast that morning, the only one of Yonni’s entourage ever allowed to stay overnight even before Missa gave us the suite. I liked Missa better at breakfast. She looked like a messy old lady with oily hair and pale pink lips. At dinner Missa looked exactly like what she was—a picture-perfect lordling who could buy, sell, and fillet us with the flick of a finger.
But at breakfast Missa’s skin had spots and lines. She’d leaned in and whispered loud enough for Yonni to hear, And when it does, you run to the people who love you, because even life can’t kick that.
Don’t you go filling my girl’s head with bullshit, Yonni had snapped from the kitchen. But she smiled, too. That sly, subtle twist she backed by warm eyes and a heart that never faded.
Not until Missa died.
I twist onto my back and lay. Just lay. Sky a golden ring of towers and smog. A tiny, tight, impossible band that shrinks until it rips my chest in two.
“And what if there isn’t anybody?” I ask the small, cragged sky. “What if there’s no one left?”
Then go out and find more someones, says Yonni, except, no—that sounds more like Missa. Yonni would say something like, then be the one someone else runs to.
Or maybe they wouldn’t say anything, and I’m just lying on my back on a dealer’s rooftop in East 5th having conversations with the dead.
Because that’s how I roll.
I peek over the ledge. The alley’s clear, so whatever I thought I saw either didn’t exist or plans to ambush me. Guess there’s only one way to know.
I stand, brush myself off, and head across the empty roof to the stairwell door. It opens without hassle.
So far, so good.
The stairs are dark and I’m quiet going down. Round and round the stuffy concrete box, hand light on the support rail.
The door at the bottom opens easily. Quiet, but not silent. I hold my breath in the patchy dark.
Nothing. No answering sound.
Okay, maybe too good.
I creep down the hall, right along the edge. The peeling wall scrapes my shoulder, even burns, but there’s no helping that. The central strip creaks. Ceiling lights spit as I pass under, spotlight my progress. Hopefully Decker doesn’t have cameras.
He probably has cameras.
Just find the bracelet, I tell myself. Then run like hell.
The Brink kids will probably get to me first. Decker will have to wait his turn.
The hall ends in the final door. It’s cracked, just a sliver. Not locked and barricaded but silent and beckoning.
Much too good.
Decker knows I’m here.
Run, scream the hairs on the back of my neck. Why aren’t you running yet?
Because everyone I know doesn’t deserve to be hunted down by the damn Brinkers. Especially not Niles. He didn’t sign up for that. Nobody signed up for that. Not Dee, in her damn hovel. Not Dad or his latest. Not even Greg.
And they would be hunted. Vengeance is like that.
At least Yonni’s well out of it. Death has its upsides.
I slide my fingers through the door handle and grip it tight.
“‘I don’t believe that fate falls on us no matter how we act,’” I say under my breath. Gilken steadies best when said aloud. “‘But I do believe in a fate that falls on us unless we act.’”
So we act.
If it’s a game, let’s play.
I press the door hard enough that it bounces back off the wall. Stride into the black pitch. “Hey, Decker.”
“See?” A high purr just behind my ear as the door clicks shut. “This is why I like you.”
I jump, spin away from his scraping voice. Lightning skids from my neck to twist with my shoulder. Not quite a knife, not quite a needle, but hot and spitting.
I flail, hands tangled with the dark and an endless collection of things—smooth, grated, sharp, rough—a sliding racket, ricocheting junk.
Decker swears. I crash to my knees amid the junk piles, burning up and dizzy as hell. Skin crawling away from where his blade hit. It fizzes.
Not again. No goddamn asshole is dosing me again.
My fists hit the floor, and I focus every fiber on keeping the fire out of my brain before it shuts me down.
Awake. I will stay awake.
Light flares. Yellow refracting stars bounce off a thousand tumbled surfaces to cluster behind my eyes.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” says Decker.
I look over my shoulder—on your feet, Kit, grab something heavy—and see him, kneeling, his green shirt patterned red. He holds the shattered pieces of something painted and pretty. Splintered glass and gold trim halo his feet. He pets each shard. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”
“Put it on the tab,” I think. Say?
Decker’s eyes snap to mine with the force of a sparkbomb.
Shit.
He lunges.
I grab the steel lamp near my elbow and swing. Smash his head as he rams my chest. We fall. His slimy body dead weight. Ribs and chin and knees. I kick him off, heels skidding as I scramble through the endless junk. His collected treasures. My shoulder collides with something sharp, and the world upends in clatter—trinkets and tools flooding the gap between me and him.
Decker doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even move.
“No.” I crawl close, reach his side and turn him over. “I did not just kill you, you asshole. You are not dead.”
His temple oozes, hair matted. There are red dots on the floor.
I freeze.
No, I move. Place two fingers to his neck and search. Nothing, more nothing.
A line of blood runs the gully of his nose, crests his upper lip.
“Artery’s on the other side,” I say aloud. Calm, even cold. My fingers are cold, skinny ice packs against his skinny neck. “Come on. Where are you? Where are you?”
A beat. Rhythm under my fingertips, strong and hot.
I sit back on my heels, hand sliding to the floor. Bone-less. Relief and beauty, my whole body an open world in a massive sky.
Alive. He has all his hopes and tomorrows. I didn’t steal them.
I just busted half his shit.
The room spins as I haul myself up. Another table crashes, but I manage not to fall.
The bracelet. Get the bracelet and get out.
I weave my way to the big counter in the room’s center. Peer through the smudged glass. So much glitter. Strings and pendants, rings and customized digicom earpieces. They sparkle.
My head sparkles. My shoulders and neck. Bright hot flairs.
“Bracelet,” I chant, under my breath. “Bracelet, bracelet.”
I move behind the counter, bust the lock, and open its sliding back wide.
Dig through the shallow boxes, cushioned displays, and hanging racks. I sort and pull. Check and recheck. Scan the same three shelves three times.
It’s not here. Not Mom’s bracelet, not Yonni’s pendant. Which makes no sense, because this is where all the pricey stuff is kept.
All the stuff that’s on display.
Shit.
The room stretches, vast and frantic. The bracelet could be anywhere. It could be somewhere else entirely. A back office? His private collection?
Another customer’s pocket.
The floor sways. I brace my hands against the counter, arms straight and legs locked.
“No, you don’t,” I say. “You don’t pass out. You go over, wake him up, and ask.”
Because that worked so well last time.
My arms shake. They’re heavy. Everything’s heavy. My head weighs as much as a planet and wants to rotate more.
I’m going to fall over.
Not until I reach Decker, I won’t. He’s not that far. Just the other side of the House. Room. Whatever.
I round the counter and walk in a semistraight line. Manage not to step on anything. Not even Decker, spread-eagled and bloody.
He has a pulse. I checked. I remember checking.
I check again.
Somewhere down the hall a door scrapes, swooshes, and slams.
“Decker!” Deep, unknown, and male. “Where the hell are you, man? We were supposed to meet an hour ago.”
My heart jumps through my throat and out my ears.
I move, trinkets scattering with my sliding feet.
Loud, too loud, there’s nowhere to step that isn’t loud.
“Decker?”
I hit the wall by the door and slam the lights off just as the door opens.
A man steps in, biceps inches from my nose. He has big, massive, both-my-hands-together-couldn’t-wrap-around-them arms. I only come up to his shoulder.
I really am going to be sick.
He steps past me into the dark. “God dammit—stop with the games, Dec. I know you’re here.” His forearm rises and he half turns, reaching for me, the wall, the light.
I bolt.
“What the—?”
My legs are heavy, but my feet don’t care. I burn through the hall, pass door after door. Footsteps behind, harsh and gaining.
