Chapter 607 | From Late Evening to a Code Three

Chapter 607: 607 | From Late Evening to a Code Three

I picked up the folder. I did it by hand this time, crouching on the cracked linoleum and gathering loose pages while my constructs hovered overhead like dogs who knew they’d done something wrong. The folder was the raccoon. Of course it was the raccoon.

I carried it back to the wheezing laptop and opened a blank document. The cursor blinked at me in the corner of a screen that had a dead pixel directly in the center.

"Okay," I said, and I cracked my knuckles. "Let’s talk about June fourteenth."

Dralun gave a long grunt. From behind the parasol, Ophelia translated in a voice muffled by lace.

"That means he’s thinking about his feelings."

"It means shut up," Dralun said.

"It means both, and I’m fluent."

I typed the header while they argued. Date, location, responding Hero, incident classification. Classification took me a minute, because the IHL didn’t have a code for raccoon, and I settled on Wildlife Interference, Non-Aspect Related. Then I turned around on my wobbly stool and looked at the dragon.

"Where did it happen?"

"Behind the laundromat," he said.

"What time?"

"Night."

"Can you get more specific than night for me?"

He considered this. I watched a man who could punch through cinder block try to remember whether it had been dark. His face went still in a way that looked like actual concentration, which was the closest thing I’d seen to self-doubt since I walked in.

"Late night," he said finally.

I typed Late Evening. I figured the IHL would accept that, since the IHL seemed to accept most things if you used enough words and structured them like someone who’d passed an exam once.

"Describe the raccoon."

"Big."

"I need more words, Dralun. I need two hundred of them, minimum, and you’re giving me one at a time like I’m paying by the syllable."

He shifted in his chair. The wood creaked. He picked up his mug again, wrapping one massive hand around ceramic that looked too small for the purpose, and his voice went flatter. I was starting to learn that meant he was actually remembering something instead of deflecting.

"It was the size of a dog, and it was in the dumpster." He paused, looked into his coffee like the details might be floating in there, and kept going. "Mrs. Okafor from the bakery called it in because she thought it was a Branded kid stuck in there. It had gotten into a bag of her day-old pastries, and it wouldn’t come out. She was worried it was hurt."

This was more than he’d said in a row since I met him. I typed it all down before he could change his mind, my fingers moving fast across keys that stuck occasionally and made me retype the word dumpster twice.

"How did you resolve the situation?"

"I asked it to leave."

I stopped typing. I looked up at him.

"You asked it."

"I asked it nicely." He said it completely straight, no irony, like this was standard operating procedure and I was the weird one for questioning it.

"Did it leave?"

"It bit me, and then it left."

I stopped typing again. I looked at his hand holding the mug, at the bronze scales across his knuckles that caught the overhead light in a way that made them look almost metallic, and at the dozens of pale old scars that crisscrossed them like a map of every bad decision he’d survived. One of them near his thumb looked newer than the rest. It was a little crescent, the right size for a set of small sharp teeth that had managed to get through dragon scales somehow.

"A raccoon bit through your scales," I said.

"It was a big raccoon, Belmont." He said it like I’d insulted the raccoon personally. "Write that down."

I wrote it down. Behind me, the parasol dipped an inch, and I heard a high breathy giggle, the horo-horo kind that apparently lived in her throat and escaped whenever someone else was suffering. When I looked over, she snapped the parasol back up so fast it nearly took out the desk lamp.

"I wasn’t laughing," she said from behind the lace. "Mr. Stitches was laughing, and he laughs at everything."

"Tell Mr. Stitches the raccoon report is going to be a masterpiece."

"Mr. Stitches thinks you’re a pervert."

"Mr. Stitches can take that up with my construct."

The parasol lowered one more inch. Her grey eyes came over the edge of the lace, ringed in all that black eyeliner, and she held my gaze for three long seconds. Her face was still pink. She didn’t say anything, which from Ophelia Lin was apparently a sentence of its own, and then she vanished again.

I turned back to the laptop. I was at a hundred and sixty-four words. The raccoon was close to living its best bureaucratic life.

Downstairs, Grandma Lin shouted something up through the floor in Cantonese that sounded like a threat and smelled like five-spice duck. Ophelia yelled back a single word I didn’t recognize. Dralun ignored both of them and watched me type. His arms were crossed, and the tail had started moving again, sweeping slow arcs across the floor.

"You type fast," he said.

"I’ve been told I’m good at talking. You said so yourself."

"Talking’s easy, and up the hill everybody’s good at it." He pushed his chair back from the desk, and the wheels groaned across the linoleum. "Let’s see if you’re good at it down here."

The scanner on the filing cabinet crackled. A dispatcher’s voice came through in a flat Verano drawl, reading off an address on Delancey and a code number. I recognized the code because I’d read it forty minutes ago on a report from April, and that report had said FIRE in capital letters.

Dralun was already standing up. He grabbed a black tactical vest off the hook by the door and shrugged into it, and the whole office got smaller when he finished. Ophelia’s parasol closed with a snap, and she slid off the desk, bear under her arm, already swapping her Mary Janes for a pair of spiked combat boots she’d pulled from under her chair.

"Save it," Dralun said, and he jerked his chin at my laptop. "You’re coming with me, and you’re standing where I tell you to stand."

I hit save on the raccoon, collapsed my constructs back into my palms, and followed the dragon down the black stairs toward the smell of smoke.