Chapter 216: Ash Colored Morning

Chapter 216: Chapter 216: Ash Colored Morning

They came out of the space at the same hour they’d gone in, and the roof was exactly as they’d left it: cold tar, a rusted water tank, and a sky the color of dishwater.

Erik stood still for a moment while his body argued with the change. Two days of sleep and warm grass had left him clear-headed, and the cold made it almost insulting. His right arm worked. A pale, branching scar ran from wrist to elbow like a pressed fern, a souvenir of too much current, and it itched in the damp.

"I hate this part," Kai said, shivering. He flexed his hands. The skin on his palms was pink and tight, the way healed burns look, and he held them a little away from his body. "Every time. It’s like stepping out of a bath into a freezer."

"You’ll live."

"That’s what you say about everything."

Killian had gone to the parapet and was studying the water. He looked better than he had, and Erik watched him with care. The gray was gone from his face, and his hands were steady. But when he laid his palm against the brick, he did it slowly, the way a man tests a bad knee.

"How much?" Erik asked.

"Maybe half of what I had yesterday." Killian didn’t pretend otherwise. "The headache’s gone. The edges are back, but they’re thin. If I push past one real use, it comes back fast. Penny says it’ll take days of rest in there before I’m at full strength, and we don’t have days."

"One real use."

"One. Then I’m a passenger."

"Then we plan around one," Erik said. "The skiff."

Kai laid a hand on the roof. It wasn’t Penelope’s gift to do so, but Erik’s silver thread had been drawn through her space since the contract, and he reached down and pulled. The skiff came back out of nothing with a faint damp sound, its plating gleaming dully, and settled onto the roof like a tired animal.

They lowered it over the edge by its rope. Hrimnir jumped the gap without waiting and landed in the bow, silent.

"Mom said dusk," Kai said, as he climbed down after him. "We’re two days late, according to my stomach. According to hers, we’re twenty minutes late."

"And she’ll tell us about it," Erik said.

"Loudly."

"I look forward to it."

Morning on the water was nothing like the previous day. The mist had thinned, and the light that came through it was flat and ashen, pale as old bone. It made everything look further away than it was. Cars slid by under the surface, and twice they passed rooftops where somebody had set a bucket or a tarp to catch rain, long abandoned.

They kept to the narrow side channels. Killian called the turns, and he did it from a seat at the stern with his eyes half-closed, because Erik had ordered him not to touch the street unless it mattered. Kai worked the pole instead of the engine. Every few minutes Erik asked Hrimnir what he thought, and the wolf’s answer came back along the bond as a steady, patient nothing yet.

It was an hour before they saw the first person.

A woman stood on a flat roof two blocks ahead, in a dark coat, with a white sheet tied to a broom handle and held up over her head. She waved it in long slow arcs. She was alone, and she looked thin, and when she saw the skiff, she shouted something Erik couldn’t hear and waved harder.

"Help," Kai said quietly. "She wants help."

"I know."

"We could just see what she needs."

"I know." Erik watched the roof. "Hrimnir?"

The wolf’s ears were pinned flat. His lip had lifted from his teeth, only slightly, but Erik had known him long enough to read it. Wrong.

"Look at the doorway," Killian said.

Erik looked. The roof’s stairwell door stood half open, and just inside it, something moved. A man’s shoulder, a shape in the dark, there and gone.

"That’s two," Kai said, very low.

"Three," Killian said. "There’s another one behind the water tank. His shadow’s on the wall."

Erik let out a slow breath. The woman kept waving, with a face full of desperate hope, and he had no way to know whether she was a decoy or a hostage, whether the hope was real or the best acting he’d ever seen. The not knowing was the whole trap. Anyone who stopped for a woman like her was someone who could be made to stop.

"We go around," he said.

"Erik—"

"We go around, Kai."

"If she’s real—"

"If she’s real, she’s in a worse situation than we can fix with a skiff and three people who can barely fight." He kept his voice level. "And if she isn’t, we’ve just handed them the boat. Pole. Left."

Kai stood a second longer, his jaw working. The woman’s voice reached them across the water, high and cracked, and he flinched as though it had touched him. Then he planted the pole and shoved, and the skiff slid sideways into the next channel.

She kept shouting until the building closed over her. Nobody looked back.

"Don’t," Erik said, after a block, without turning.

"I wasn’t going to say anything."

"You were thinking it."

"I was thinking it was a really, really crappy thing to do."

"It was." Erik finally looked at him. "It’ll stay crappy. It doesn’t stop being the right call."

Kai didn’t answer. After a while he said, more quietly, "I hate that I know that."

"So do I."

They stopped at noon in the lee of a half-collapsed parking structure, where the concrete overhang kept the thin rain off. Erik handed out dried fruit and the last of the salt water. They ate in silence. Killian had gone quiet and thoughtful, running a thumb along the seam of the hull.

"Something on your mind?" Erik asked.

"Ten people attacked us," Killian said. "Three powers. Dumb as bricks, no discipline, but equipped. Speedboats. Radios, maybe. The woman who drowned our keel had real training in it. The giant knew how to take a hit. None of them were new to this."

"They’ve had weeks."

"Weeks of what? Hunting boats?" Killian frowned. "Those speedboats are expensive. Somebody paid for them before the red sun, or somebody took them from a marina. Either way, they were prepared. For this. Before it started."

Kai swallowed a mouthful of apricot. "You’re saying they planned the apocalypse?"

"I’m saying nobody gets that organized in three weeks out of nothing. Somebody had a structure beforehand and just found a new use for it." Killian shook his head. "I don’t know. It’s a feeling."

Erik turned it over. It sat uncomfortably beside what Silver had said in the space, that the boss punished failure. A man who punished failure had a structure he trusted to carry the punishment.

"Keep that to yourself for now," he said. "We tell Silver when we’re back."

"Fine."

A faint sound reached them then, down the channel. Not an engine, but a soft, regular splash, like something large dragging itself across shallow water.

Hrimnir rose.

Nobody moved. The splash came again, and then a long, wet exhale, and the smell reached them a moment later, rank and sweet, like fish left in the sun. Past the edge of the overhang, something dark slid across the mouth of the channel, slow and heavy, trailing weed.

It was longer than the skiff. It never turned its head.

"Don’t paddle," Erik breathed. "Don’t breathe loud. It’s feeding."

They sat motionless under the concrete while the creature passed. It took a long time. Rain ticked on the overhang, and Erik watched the water between the pylons, and the small cold part of his mind counted seconds. When it was finally gone and the ripples had died, Kai let out a breath so long it shook.

"I’d really like to go home now."

"Same," Killian said.

"After Alex," Erik said.

By late afternoon the buildings had thinned. Tall towers gave way to low brick blocks, and the dull gray of the water opened into a wide, flat stretch that Erik slowly realized had been a park. A few tree crowns stood out of it in a ragged line, and a street lamp leaned at a drunken angle, its glass long gone.

He knew the place. He had walked here with Alex on a Sunday, a lifetime ago, past a duck pond and a bench that had faced the wrong way.

"There," he said.

Beyond the lake of the old park stood a four-story brick building, its lower floors drowned. And all the way up its face, from the waterline to the roof, ran green.

Thick, pale vines climbed the brick in tight braids. They wrapped the fire escape and curled over the windows, and where one window had been shattered, the stems had been woven across it like wicker.

"That’s him," Erik said quietly. "That’s his work."

"It’s beautiful," Kai whispered.

"It’s a fortress," Killian said. "Which means he’s been afraid for a long time."

Hrimnir had gone rigid in the bow. His growl began low, deep in his chest, and it wasn’t pointed at the building. It was pointed past it, toward a flat rooftop on the far side of the lake, where a rusted antenna stood against the sky.

A glint of light flashed off something up there, and was gone.

"We’re being watched," Killian said softly.

Erik’s hand went to the pole, and his eyes went to the green wall, and for the first time that day he had no plan at all.