Chapter 218: Counting the Losses

Chapter 218: Chapter 218: Counting the Losses

Sasha watched the green die.

It began at the arch near the waterline, where the vines went gray and slack. Then the color drained upward through the braids, floor by floor, until the whole face of the building hung from its own brick like old skin. She had spent two weeks studying that wall through binoculars, and she had never seen it do anything but grow.

The man inside had let go. That told her he was leaving, and it made her thumbnail find her teeth.

She crouched behind the parapet of a flat roof with a gray coat over her shoulders and rain gathering in the hood. Across the lake a plated skiff slid away from the dead building, riding low. She counted the people aboard twice. Three men she had watched arrive. A heavily pregnant woman, helped in by a thin man with a bow. A girl clutching a wire cage. And the older sister.

Valerie.

At that distance the faces were smears, but Sasha knew the set of her shoulders and the way she sat upright beside the small gray animal in the bow. Third-year vet student, steady hands, trained to keep things alive. A boy from Valerie’s old cohort had come to Sasha himself, thin and sweating, dragging a sled of sealed crates up the stairwell of the parking structure. Canned protein, antibiotics, water filters, two full cases of batteries. More than most families saw in a month. Valerie had refused him twice in lecture halls, he said. He didn’t intend to be refused a third time, and he wanted her delivered whole and unmarked. Mine, he had said, as though it were a legal term.

Sasha had smiled and said it could be arranged. It was what she did. She kept a ledger of people who paid and a ledger of people who could be delivered, and her whole career was matching one to the other. The powerhouses that had risen in the last weeks, with their walls and generators and men who paid in whatever they had, had made her very good at it.

She bit down on the nail and tasted grit. A sliver tore free, and she spat it onto the tar.

Two weeks. You had two weeks.

She had not moved because Chris had told her not to. Nobody touches the wall, nobody touches the family. She had pushed twice. The first time he had looked at her with that calm, patient face she knew from another life and said, "The wall is the only thing keeping you out. Let it work." The second time he hadn’t answered at all.

Now the wall was dead, and the one moment she might have walked in was behind her.

The skiff’s engine coughed to life, a thin mutter across the water. They had stopped caring who heard. Sasha dug the satellite phone out of her coat. There were only three handsets. Chris had pulled them from a dead executive’s office in the first week, and they ran on a hand crank and one stolen solar panel. Every call was counted, and every minute had to be argued for. She dialed the second handset, and it was answered on the first ring.

"Report," Chris said.

"They’re emptying the building. Seven aboard, one boat. The sister’s with them." She heard her own voice go tight. "I need a pursuit. I can have it in the water in twenty minutes."

"No."

"They’re going out in the open, in daylight, loaded down. We’ll never get a cleaner chance."

"I said no." His voice didn’t rise. "Not until I know who they are. Hold your position and keep the count. That’s all."

The line went dead. Sasha set the phone down very carefully, because the alternative was throwing it across the roof.

The skiff shrank into the mist until it was a shadow, then nothing. She stayed where she was a long time with her chin on her knuckles. She had barely looked at the three men. A lean one at the oars, a taller one with wrapped hands, one slumped in the stern. They were strangers with a good boat. She filed them as an obstacle and moved on, because she had no reason to do otherwise.

What she thought about was the crates, and the boy who’d carried them up, and how long she would have to wait now before she could tell him anything. She picked at the nail again.

Behind her, the rain kept falling on a building that no longer had anyone in it.

Chris read the report standing, the way he read everything now.

The room was on the fifth floor of a parking structure his people had cleared and sealed in the first month, high enough that the flood couldn’t reach and low enough that the rain didn’t sweat the walls. A kerosene lamp sat on a crate. Two men stood against the far wall with their hands behind their backs, and the one in front of them was Gruber, who was too big to be afraid and was doing his best anyway.

"Say it again," Chris said. "Slowly."

Gruber’s gold tooth caught the lamplight when he swallowed. His left eye had swollen nearly shut, and the rag around his forearm was still darkening. "They came out of the fog, boss. Three of them and a dog. We had ten, with Maddox’s boys and the water girl. I told them it was easy. A little plated boat, nothing in it."

"The plating."

"Thick. Rifle round didn’t go through. One of them was working it with his hands, I think, but I couldn’t see how." He stopped.

"Go on."

"There was ice. A lot of it. It came off the one at the front and froze my boat solid. Another threw fire. Real fire, not like Dale’s. It lit the whole channel. And the third one stopped Jess’s wall of water, boss. He made it thick like mud."

"The gun."

"Mallory’s rifle blew up in his hands. Just the chamber, like the metal fell apart. And his bat went to dust, barbed wire and all." Gruber’s voice shook. "I think the same one pulled the air out of Deke’s chest. Deke was breathing like a fish for ten minutes after."

Chris held very still.

Metal that fell apart. The thought arrived before anything else, quick and cold and unwanted. Killian.

Killian’s gift in the last life had been metal. Everyone had agreed on that, his own people most of all. Steel bent in his hands like wire. Chris had watched him do it across a conference table, and later across a rooftop, and he had been very careful not to stand too close. A rifle chamber coming apart under a man’s fingers was exactly the sort of thing he would have expected.

Then the rest of it landed. Ice. Fire. A bat turned to dust, which was wood, not metal. A man pulling the air from another man’s lungs. None of that was metal, and none of it belonged to Killian.

Unless he has people now. Unless he’s grown.

He turned it over, and he did not like how much he wanted it to be true. Killian had stopped coming to the family house in the weeks before the red sun, and on the day he stopped, the ring had gone missing from the glass case in the study. A small gold ring, the Remington heirloom, passed down through three generations. Chris had assumed it was a coincidence for months. In this life, with everything shifting under his feet, he was no longer sure he believed in coincidence.

"How many of the three had powers?" he asked.

"All of them, I think."

"And the wolf."

"Big. Gray. It went straight for the stone-skinned guy." Gruber swallowed. "We ran, boss. I’m not proud of it. But I figured you’d want what we learned more than you wanted another dead boat."

Chris looked at him for a long moment, and the room seemed to shrink around the look. One of the men against the far wall shifted. Gruber’s face went the color of old paper.

"You were right," Chris said.

Gruber blinked. ℴ

"A boat I can replace. Information I can’t." He folded the paper once and put it in his coat. "You’ll be docked for the engines, not punished, because you ran in the right direction. Take your people and get them seen to."

Gruber stumbled out, and the others followed. When the door had closed, Chris crossed to the window.

The water below was the color of lead. He had been so careful. He had come back remembering everything, and he had followed the old map: the boats, the men, the territory, the single object that mattered most. Every place he had searched for the ring had turned up nothing, and every trade he’d made for rumors had come back empty. Something had moved it. Possibly the same something that had made the strangers.

He rested his palm against the cold glass.

"Find out who they are," he said, to the empty room. "Quietly. And find out whether my cousin is alive."

Outside, the rain kept falling on the drowned city, and nobody answered him.