Chapter 67: Don’t Let Them See What You’re Carrying

Ethan’s brows lifted before he could stop them.

Sasha’s Beauty Score sat under Debbie’s. Her Rarity did too. The return didn’t care. Seventy times. Higher than it had any right to be.

His eyes dropped, just for a second, to the long line of her legs in those rolled jeans. The system, apparently, had opinions.

She didn’t catch the mutter. She lifted the Core to her mouth and swallowed it the way a person swallows a pill they don’t trust.

The pale-blue crystal didn’t last. It broke apart on her tongue, cold, then gone. Heat followed. Not fever. Something deeper, running the length of her spine and out into her arms, her hands, the muscles along her ribs. Her breath caught. The fruit knife was still in her fist from habit, and her fingers closed before she meant them to.

Crack.

The plastic handle split. Shards hit the floor between her boots.

Sasha went still.

She opened her hand slowly. Broken plastic. A smear of her own grip in the dents. She stared at it like it belonged to someone else.

"I..." She looked at him. The dark eyes were wider than they’d been on the windowsill. "Something’s wrong. Or right. I can’t tell."

"Giant Strength," Ethan said. He tipped his chin at the wardrobe in the corner, solid wood, the kind that took two people and a bad mood to shift. "Pick that up."

She didn’t believe him. He could see it. She crossed the room anyway, set her boots, and got both hands under the base.

The wardrobe came off the floor like it had been waiting for an excuse.

Sasha froze with it at her waist. The wood creaked. A drawer slid an inch and stopped. She wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t even breathing hard. After a second she raised it higher, over her head, the hem of her tank riding up to show a strip of stomach and the full, heavy swing of her chest as her arms locked. No flush. No strain. Just the quiet fact of the weight, and her holding it.

She set it down with more care than she’d used to lift it. The legs kissed the floor. She stepped back and looked at her hands.

Then the grin broke across her face, sudden and young, nothing like the woman who had slept with a knife because the city had taught her to.

"I’m a superhero," she said, and laughed once, short, disbelieving. She bounced on the balls of her feet like the floor might give under her. For a moment the apocalypse wasn’t in the room.

Ethan smiled. It didn’t reach very far.

Another SSS-rank ability. If the integration went deep enough, the Survival Space could open again. That was the shape of it. The system didn’t pay for a Core and a thank-you. It paid for real cooperation. Trust with weight on it. He had known Sasha since before dawn. That wasn’t a door he could knock on today.

Penny was the same problem in a different coat. Daisy Miller was the one who already fit. Daisy, and whoever had come into the city center with her. He had no fix on them. Century Skyline was a guess. A place to look when he could afford to look.

Not now.

Diesel first. Ten hours, maybe less, and the generator under the casino would cough itself dead. When the lights went, the Survival Space stopped being a shelter and turned back into a pocket he couldn’t live in. And he couldn’t go hunting Daisy while the Tiger King was still bleeding somewhere to the west. If that thing caught his scent and followed him home, everyone standing near him paid for it.

He turned to her. "Where do people get diesel?"

Sasha blinked, still half somewhere else, then dragged herself back. She crossed to the window and pointed east, past the broken lots.

"Under the Post Office Building. Market opens at five, shuts at seven. Don’t be late. They don’t hold the doors."

"Who’s selling fuel?"

"Oil Rats." She made a face. "That’s the whole business. They’ll sell it. They’ll also smile while they take the fillings out of your teeth. Prices are a joke."

"Who runs the market?"

"Chairman Elon. That’s the story." She dropped her hand. "Ability users on the floor, keeping the peace. Start a fight in there and you don’t finish it. Outside that, it’s still a market. New faces get measured. Some of those people make a living off anyone who doesn’t know the price of things yet."

Her eyes moved over him, quick, practical. The bandages. The way he stood now, too easy for a man who’d been opened up the night before.

"If you go, don’t let them see what you’re carrying."

Ethan nodded. The plan was already setting.

"Tonight. You know the way?"

He stood and rolled his shoulders. The pull never came. Skin where the gashes had been felt whole. Breath sat clean in his chest. Whatever the system had taken from the gift, it had spent some of it putting him back together. The Space ability answered when he reached for it, full, no drag at the edges.

Sasha hesitated. Two seconds. Maybe three.

"Fine," she said.

By sunset the room was stripped of anything worth stealing. Ethan buckled the sword at his hip. Sasha took the baseball bat from beside the door, weighed it once, and didn’t tape her hands. They killed the lamp, locked the door behind them, and went east through streets that had started to remember what evening looked like.

Neither of them looked back.

Several blocks over, someone else did the looking for them.

In a villa on the Silvermont side of the city, Chairman Elon sat with a list open across his knee. The paper was soft from handling. Names. Notes. A few lines crossed out hard enough to tear the fiber. Lamplight made a small island of the sofa and left the rest of the room in quiet.

Blaze stood in front of him. The metal arm caught what light there was and gave it back cold.

Elon folded the list.

"Trading market. Tonight."

Blaze nodded.

"Two things." Elon held the paper out. "Cores that don’t look like the usual trash. Special-grade, if anyone’s stupid enough to walk one through the door. And information. The Tiger King. The Golden-Winged Corpse. Anything with a spine to it, I want it before the rumor finishes crossing the street."

Blaze took the list. "If something moves?"

"You tell me. You don’t wait for morning."

"Understood."

Blaze turned for the door. The metal arm swung once and settled. Out on the step, the evening had already gone the color of rust. He headed for the Post Office Building without hurrying. He knew the streets. He meant to be inside before the shutters came up.

He was.

Under the last of the sun his arm flashed once at the edge of the crowd, then vanished into it. The market doors were opening. Fuel, food, rumors, and men who priced all three the same way.

Ethan and Sasha were still walking toward it.

They didn’t know Blaze was already there.

Blaze didn’t know the man Elon wanted eyes on had just stepped into the same street.