Chapter 678 | Burning Through the Table

Chapter 678: 678 | Burning Through the Table

Ophelia made a sound from her desk. She had climbed back up onto the surface at some point during my report, her legs folded beneath her and Mr. Stitches retrieved from whatever corner he’d landed in during the Card Incident. The parasol remained on the floor, closed and abandoned. Without it, she looked smaller in a way that had nothing to do with height.

"The dinosaur hoodie," Ophelia said. "She made that?"

"By hand. The felt spikes and everything."

Ophelia’s fingers tightened on the bear. Something moved behind her eyes, fast and bright and wet, before she blinked it away and buried her face against Mr. Stitches’ head. Her voice came out muffled by the stuffing.

"That’s forty points."

"For me?"

"For her." Ophelia lifted her face just enough that one grey eye appeared above the bear’s ragged ear. "You’re still at negative three hundred and forty. Don’t get excited."

I held up both hands. "I would never."

"You would always. You’re the most always person I’ve ever met." She set the bear down carefully on the desk beside her, adjusting his arm so it pointed toward the window. "Grandma’s going to want to send food. She sends food to every Branded kid on the block when they surface. It’s a whole thing. There’s a system."

"A system," I repeated.

"Don’t say it like that. My grandmother’s system is better than your mother’s system, your school’s system, and any other system combined, and it runs entirely on congee and guilt." Ophelia turned to Dralun. "Tell him about the system."

Dralun did not tell me about the system.

He stood. Crossed to the filing cabinet. Pulled out a drawer that screamed on its rails like something dying. From inside he produced a spiral notebook with a faded blue cover and a rubber band holding it shut. He dropped it on my desk beside the skeleton.

"Names and addresses," he said. "Every Branded kid who’s surfaced on my block in the last four years. Twenty-three of them. Your grandmother," and he pointed the chipped horn at Ophelia, "feeds them all. Once a month minimum. More if the family’s behind on rent."

I opened the notebook.

The handwriting inside was tight. Precise. Annotated with symbols I didn’t recognize. Dates. Ages. Aspect classifications in a shorthand that predated the IHL’s current system. Little notes in the margins in both English and what I assumed was Cantonese, some of them circled in red pen. This wasn’t a list. This was a ledger. The kind you kept because someone had to keep it and no one else was doing the job.

A name on the third page stopped me cold.

Mateo Reyes, age 5, bone-type, Moss St.

Fresh ink. Written within the last week.

Beside it, in a different pen, someone had drawn a tiny dinosaur.

That was Ophelia’s pen. The same pink gel she used to number the jewelry on paper towel squares in the laundromat.

I looked at her. She was already looking away, her chin lifted and her arms folded across the corset, the picture of theatrical disinterest. The tips of her ears were still pink from the card incident. The pink had crept down to the tops of her cheekbones in a way she could not control and clearly hated.

"You drew the dinosaur," I said.

"Mr. Stitches drew the dinosaur. I don’t draw dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are a five-point category and I haven’t assigned them yet."

"There’s a five-point category for dinosaurs?"

"There’s a five-point category for everything." She sniffed, adjusted Mr. Stitches’ angle on the desk so the bear’s X-stitched eyes pointed at the door rather than the window. She pulled her phone out without looking at me. "Now shut up and finish the raccoon report while I figure out how to tell my grandmother about the clinic card without her grabbing the cleaver and walking to Rourke Street."

The cleaver comment landed flat and specific in a way that suggested Grandma Lin had, in fact, grabbed the cleaver before. Probably more than once.

I looked at Dralun. Dralun looked at his empty mug. The mug had a chipped handle and a coffee ring that had been there since I’d walked in. He rotated it a quarter turn clockwise on the desk, a slow grind of ceramic against wood that suggested he was thinking about something he wasn’t saying.

"She’s not wrong," he said.

I sat down in the creaky chair. The skeleton’s sign still read WORK HARDER in permanent marker that had faded to a dull gray around the edges. The tiny paper top hat sat crooked on his plastic skull. My new boots knocked against the desk leg with a heavy steel thunk as I shifted my weight, the sound louder than it should have been in the small office. The boots were too big. The chair was too small. The coffee was terrible. The card in Dralun’s vest pocket connected to something that had killed six Heroes nine years ago in this district, eleven blocks south, on a Tuesday, while two people in costumes ran toward it and the backup took too long.

I opened the laptop. The screen flickered to life with a desktop wallpaper that was a stock photo of a mountain I was reasonably certain Dralun had never been to. The raccoon report document was still open, the cursor blinking at the end of the last sentence I’d typed before the card had shown up and reframed the entire morning.

Ophelia was typing something on her phone with both thumbs, fast and angry, the kind of typing that suggested the recipient was about to receive a paragraph they had not asked for and could not avoid. Her gloom bats circled her head in a lazy orbit, translucent pink and faintly glowing in the fluorescent light. They moved when she moved, tracking her mood in real time. Right now her mood was defensive and cornered and looking for something to bite.

The notebook sat open beside the laptop. Mateo Reyes, age 5, bone-type, Moss St. The tiny dinosaur in pink gel pen. I didn’t close it.

The second heartbeat pressed once beneath my sternum, warm and patient and aimed at the river.

Ophelia’s phone rang. She answered it with a single Cantonese word that sounded like a command and a question at the same time, and then she went quiet, and her face did something I hadn’t seen before, a quick compression of features that pulled everything inward and down, the way a building looks in the half-second between the first crack and the collapse.

"Okay," she said in English. "Okay, I’m coming down."

She hung up and slid off the desk, her platforms hitting the floor with a double clok that echoed off the pressed tin. She didn’t pick up the parasol. She didn’t pick up Mr. Stitches.

"Grandma says there’s a woman at the counter asking for Dralun," Ophelia said, and her voice was flat and stripped of every frequency that normally made it hers. "She’s got a little girl with her. The girl’s hands are burning through the table."