Chapter 17: Fifth Street

Chapter 17: Chapter 17: Fifth Street

The arm was broken.

Not badly. Elias had seen enough porters with snapped bones to know the difference. When he finally peeled back his sleeve in the grey light of his kitchen, he found a purple bruise the size of a fist across his left forearm and a deep ache in the bone beneath it. But the hand still worked. He could make a fist. It just hurt to.

[Injury: Fractured ulna (minor). Estimated recovery: 3 days.]

Three days. Awakened bodies healed fast, even E-rank ones. A normal person would have spent six weeks in a cast.

He wrapped it tight with an elastic bandage from the drawer where he kept everything Mira’s doctors had ever sent home, pulled a long-sleeved shirt over it, and set the chieftain’s core on the table. It glowed a deep orange, warm enough that he could feel it from across the room.

Then he looked at the plan he’d copied onto the back of a pink envelope. Rule three. Two buyers.

The Association exchange on Calder Street opened at eight. He was there at 8:05 with a duffel bag of goblin junk: a bundle of spearheads, two dozen pea-sized warband cores, a wolf rider’s hooked lance. The clerk scanned it all without looking up and logged it under his license: E-rank Assassin, solo clear, D-rank gate. The payout covered groceries and bus fare. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, like an E-rank scraping by.

Ozzie’s opened at ten.

Ozzie took one look at the orange core and spat out his gum.

"Kid," he said slowly, "that’s a boss core. D-rank boss, out of a gate everybody in this city forgot about." He turned it under his loupe. "You know what usually happens to guys who walk in here with boss cores and E-rank licenses?"

"They get paid?"

Ozzie stared at him. Then he laughed, a wheezing, delighted sound, and counted out more cash than Elias had held since Garrick’s envelope.

"You’re gonna make me rich," Ozzie said, "or get me killed. Come back soon either way."

He brought oranges to the fourth floor. Mira liked to peel them herself, slowly, in one long spiral. She said it was the only thing in the hospital she could still do perfectly.

She took one look at him and narrowed her eyes.

"What happened to your arm?"

"Nothing."

"You’re holding it like it’s made of glass."

"I slipped on the stairs at my building."

"Your building has twelve stairs, and you’ve climbed them a million times." She tossed an orange at him, hard, at his left side. He caught it with his right. She watched him do it. "Eli."

"I slipped," he said. "Very carefully."

Mira gave the long-suffering sigh of a sister who’d decided not to win today and held out her hand for the orange.

He sat in the cracked chair, left side, and they talked about nothing for a while. A night nurse who sang to the patients. A boy on the third floor who’d started leaving paper cranes outside her door. The ocean, which she’d been dreaming about again.

"I want to see it," she said. "When I get out. A real one, not a picture."

"Okay," Elias said. "When you get out."

He meant it. He thought about the cash in his pocket, the core he’d just sold, the month it bought. One month at a time. One month closer.

Then every phone on the fourth floor screamed at once.

It was the harsh triple tone of an emergency alert, coming from every pocket and nightstand on the ward. Nurses looked up. A man in the next room swore. Mira grabbed Elias’s good wrist.

He pulled out his phone.

GATE BREAK — FIFTH STREET STATION — D-RANK — SHELTER IN PLACE

Fifth Street was two blocks away. From Mira’s window, he could see the station entrance: the green railing, the stairs going down, and people pouring up out of them, running.

"Eli," Mira said. "Don’t."

"I’m just going to look."

"You’re a porter. With a broken arm."

"It’s not broken. I slipped." He squeezed her hand and stood. "Stay inside."

He was in the stairwell before she could argue. At the security desk on the ground floor, he passed the lost-and-found box and grabbed the first thing on top, a grey knit scarf. By the time he hit the street, it was wrapped over his nose and mouth and his hood was up, and he was running toward the green railing while everyone else ran away from it.

A cop at the top of the stairs was waving people out. "Association’s twelve minutes out! Nobody goes down. Hey! Hey!"

Elias went down.

At the bottom, in the dark, he said two names. The air folded open twice, white-gold, and Aveline and Marcus stepped out on either side of him. Aveline took one look at the bandage on his arm and raised an eyebrow. Marcus took one look at the station and said nothing at all.

The lights were out. Emergency strips glowed a sickly green along the floor, and in that glow, they could see the train: eight cars, stopped at the platform with its doors sealed shut. Faces pressed against the windows. Hands slapped the glass. Somewhere inside, a child was screaming.

And on the ceiling, things were moving.

"Link," Elias said.

The station redrew itself in thin white lines. The train lit up with soft blue dots, sixty-three of them, each one a person. Above it, clinging to the tiles and the curve of the tunnel mouth, hung the red ones: twenty-two pale, eyeless stalkers the size of grown men, upside down like bats with their claws hooked into the grout. At the far end of the platform, the tunnel mouth opened in a black brick arch nine paces wide, and more red dots were streaming out of it.

Aveline looked at the arch, and her face almost became a smile.

"Nine paces," she said.

On the ceiling above the train, twenty-two eyeless heads turned toward them at once.