Chapter 29: Tailed

Chapter 29: Chapter 29: Tailed

Day One.

Iris found him at Merridan General at nine in the morning, exactly where the file said he’d be.

She watched from the end of the fourth-floor corridor, leaning against a vending machine with a paper cup of terrible coffee, just one more tired visitor. He didn’t look like much. Medium height, thin in the way of someone who forgot to eat, wearing a jacket with reinforced shoulders that had seen better years. His hair was uneven, as if he’d cut it himself.

He carried a paper bag into a room halfway down the hall. Through the gap in the door, Iris saw a girl sitting up in bed, maybe sixteen, with blue scars like frost climbing her forearms. The girl looked at the bag, and her whole face changed.

Custard buns. Iris could smell them from the corridor.

She watched him sit in a plastic chair with a crack down the middle, on the left side, as if he’d learned the hard way which half held. She watched the girl mock him about something and him take it, grinning. She watched him peel an orange in one long spiral and hand it over without a word.

Then she noticed where she was standing, and her coffee went cold in her hand.

The gate-sickness ward. She knew this corridor. She knew the smell of it, disinfectant and the faint mineral tang of raw mana. Ten years ago, she had walked down this same hallway every week for a year, visiting children she’d pulled out of a collapsed building on Ashby Street, before the doctors stopped letting her visit and Crane started sending her to schools instead.

She hadn’t been back since.

Iris set the cup down on the vending machine and left before anyone could ask her who she was there to see.

Day Two.

She watched his apartment from the top of a water tower across Larch Street, perched on the rusted steel rim with her coat pulled tight against the wind. The tower’s iron legs hummed faintly under her hand. She could have stayed up there for a week.

He got home from the hospital at four. Through his kitchen window, she watched him boil water and pour it over a cup of instant noodles. He ate them standing at the counter, still in his jacket, in about ninety seconds. Then he wrote something in a notebook, stared at it, crossed it out, and wrote it again.

At six, an old woman in a bathrobe knocked on his door, and he opened it. She handed him something small. He laughed, the first time Iris had seen him laugh when his sister wasn’t in the room, and the old woman poked him in the ribs with her cane and shuffled away.

At nine, he lay down on his bed fully dressed. At eleven-thirty, he got up again.

She followed him across the city, roof to roof, riding the steel in the buildings beneath her. He took two buses to the edge of the industrial district, to a fenced lot where a D-rank gate hung above a drainage culvert. He signed in at the public kiosk, flashed his license at the bored attendant, and walked through alone.

Iris checked the kiosk log from her phone. Pierce, E. E-rank Assassin. Solo.

She didn’t follow him in. A gate was one enclosed space, and anyone already inside would see her coming. So she waited on the roof of a warehouse across the lot for two hours and eleven minutes, and counted.

When he came out, he was soaked to the knees and walking with a slight limp. He carried a duffel bag over one shoulder, and it hung wrong: heavy, the strap cutting deep into his jacket. Through the canvas, at the bottom, something glowed faintly orange.

Behind him, the gate shuddered, folded down to a line, and vanished.

Closed. Boss dead.

Iris sat very still on the warehouse roof and watched an E-rank porter limp to the bus stop with a D-rank boss core in his bag.

Day Three.

At 8:05 a.m., he walked into the Association exchange on Calder Street with a backpack. Iris watched through the glass from a bench across the street, pretending to read her phone. He emptied the backpack onto the counter: a handful of pea-sized cores, a bundle of something that looked like dried reeds, a cracked shell. The clerk scanned it, logged it, and paid him. He folded the bills into his pocket without counting them.

It was exactly what an E-rank would sell. Exactly enough to look like nothing.

At 10:00, he walked into a salvage shop in the Market District with the duffel bag.

The sign in the window read WE BUY GATE GOODS. NO QUESTIONS. Through the dusty glass, Iris watched a bald man with a jeweler’s loupe on a chain take one look at what came out of the duffel and spit his gum into the trash. The bald man counted out cash for a long time.

Osgood Brill, Iris thought. Ozzie.

Two buyers. Small sales at the Association, logged and boring, so the records looked clean. The real loot went to a man who asked nothing and wrote nothing down. It was careful. It was smart. It was, she had to admit, exactly what she would have done.

Who taught a porter to think like that?

She followed him onto the bus back to the hospital, hood up, two rows behind him. He sat by the window with his head against the glass and his eyes closed, so still she thought he’d fallen asleep.

Then, very quietly, without opening his eyes, he spoke to the empty seat beside him.

"Not now, Marcus," he murmured. "I’m on a bus."

Iris went very still.

There was nobody in the seat. There was nobody near him at all. He wasn’t wearing an earpiece, and his phone was in his pocket. But for a second, Iris could have sworn the air beside him shimmered, faint as heat over asphalt, and then went still again.

He smiled a little, eyes still closed, as if somebody had told him a joke.

She wrote Marcus in her notes app and underlined it twice.

Night Four.

On the fourth night, he didn’t go to a D-rank gate.

He took the bus all the way out to the old rail cemetery on the north side, where a C-rank gate had been sitting unclaimed for nine days. The Association board listed it as the Glass Orchard. Iris had read the survey: crystal trees, glass-winged insects, a boss that had never been confirmed. And all through it, the rusted iron fences of whatever farm had stood there in the world on the other side.

Iron. Miles of it.

She almost smiled.

He signed in at the kiosk. Pierce, E. E-rank Assassin. Solo. The attendant didn’t even look up. An E-rank walking into a C-rank gate alone was the kind of thing you read about in the obituaries, but the kiosks were automated, and nobody had been paid to care.

He walked through the gate.

Iris counted to sixty. Then she dropped off the cemetery wall, crossed the gravel, and stepped through after him.

The Glass Orchard opened around her: a valley of trees made entirely of crystal, their branches catching a pale green light from a sky without a sun. Every leaf chimed faintly when the wind moved. Old iron fences ran between the rows, rusted and leaning, and she felt every meter of them like a hand resting on her shoulder.

He was forty meters ahead, walking alone down a path between the trees, his dagger loose in his hand.

She followed, silent, riding the fences.

At the bend in the path, he stopped. He looked around once, carefully, the way someone checks a room before undressing. Iris flattened herself behind a crystal trunk.

Then he said, in an ordinary voice, "Aveline."

The air in front of him folded open, white and gold, bright enough to light up every crystal leaf in the orchard. And out of it, out of nothing, stepped a woman in full plate armor, with a sword at her hip and a shield on her arm.

The knight looked down the path. Then she turned her head, slowly, and looked straight at the tree Iris was hiding behind.

Observe, not engage, Iris reminded herself.

Then she stepped out from behind the tree.