Chapter 679 | The Stove Coil Girl

Chapter 679: 679 | The Stove Coil Girl

"Hold on," I said, and I was already halfway out of the chair. "Back up for one second, because I need to process this out loud. A woman walked into a restaurant, asked for Dralun by name, and brought a little girl. Is Dralun a baby daddy?"

The office went dead silent.

Ophelia stopped at the top of the stairs with one platform hovering over the first step, and she turned around slowly enough that her drill curls had time to swing back into place. Her face had drained of the panic from the phone call. Now it held pure, radiant disgust.

"Did you just say baby daddy?" she asked. "In this office? In front of Mr. Stitches?"

"Mr. Stitches is facing the door. He didn’t hear it."

"He hears everything through his back. That’s how bears work." She pointed one black lacquered nail at my chest. "Negative fifty for the phrase, negative twenty for the timing, and negative ten for the face you’re making right now, because it’s smug and I hate it."

I turned to Dralun, because the smug face had a target and the target was six and a half feet of scaled denial sitting in a chair that was losing its fight against gravity.

Dralun had not moved. His tail had, though. It lay across the floor between our desks, and the tip had curled up into a tight hook that I had never seen in two weeks of watching that tail have opinions. His jaw worked once. The grinding of his molars sounded loud enough to register on the scanner.

"That’s a firm maybe," I said. "I can work with a firm maybe."

"It’s a firm no," Dralun said. He stood up, and the chair groaned in relief. "Get your boots off my desk leg, and move."

"I would like the record to show that you didn’t deny knowing her."

"I didn’t confirm it either." He grabbed the vest off the hook and shrugged into it, and the office shrank by a third. "Downstairs. Stand where I tell you to stand. If you say those two words in front of the kid, I’ll put you on the bus to Fresno myself."

"What’s in Fresno?"

"My sister," Dralun said, and he walked past me down the stairs.

Ophelia waited until he was gone before she leaned close to me on the landing. She smelled of baby powder and something dark underneath, cloves maybe, and her grey eyes were huge and bright inside all that black liner. Her corset had shifted during the card incident, and nobody had told it to go back where it belonged. The silver cross on its ribbon sat in the shadow of her neckline and caught the light every time she breathed.

"If he is," she whispered, "I want to know first. Before you. Before Grandma."

"Your grandmother knows everything. Dralun said so."

"Grandma knows everything except his business, because he won’t let her into it." She bit her lip, and the black lipstick left a tiny smudge on her front tooth. "Six years I’ve worked here. He’s never had a woman come in asking for him. He’s had landlords and cops and a guy from the IRS once, and a really angry plumber. No women."

"So you’re invested."

"I’m documenting," she said, and she went down the stairs ahead of me, her skirt bouncing on every step and the garter clasps flashing white through the gap at the back of her stockings.

? Ecchi Logic Event logged. The Host is now following a heroine down a narrow staircase at a viewing angle the interface considers statistically unavoidable. ?

I looked at the pressed-tin ceiling for the rest of the stairs, which almost killed me twice.

The smell hit me before the restaurant came into view, and the smell was wrong. Five-spice and duck fat and steamed rice had all stepped back to make room for burning laminate, the sharp chemical stink of a tabletop melting from the inside out. Somebody was crying. Somebody else was swearing in Cantonese at a volume that rattled the soy sauce bottles on the counter.

Lin’s had six tables, and one of them was on fire.

It sat in the back corner by the kitchen door, a cheap two-top with metal legs and a fake wood surface that was currently turning black and bubbling in two hand-shaped craters. Smoke curled off it in grey ribbons. Grandma Lin stood three feet away with a spray bottle in one hand and her cleaver in the other, and she was alternating between spraying the table and pointing the cleaver at it, which did not seem to be helping the table or the cleaver.

The little girl sat in the chair behind the burning table.

She was six, maybe, with a round face and a gap where her front teeth should be and two thick black pigtails tied in yellow ribbons. She wore a purple t-shirt with a cartoon cat on it and jeans with glitter on the pockets. Her hands were pressed flat into the table. They glowed orange, from the wrists down, the deep pulsing orange of a stove coil, and the laminate under her palms had melted into soft black puddles that held the shape of her fingers.

She was sobbing so hard her whole body shook, and she wasn’t lifting her hands, because every time she tried the glow flared brighter and she yanked them back down in panic.

The woman kneeling beside her chair made me forget the table entirely.

She was early thirties, with brown skin and a body that her work clothes had been designed to hide and had failed at completely. She wore a grey housekeeping uniform from one of the big hotels on the Strand, the kind with a zipper up the front, and the zipper had come down far enough during whatever had happened here to show the black edge of a sports bra and a lot of cleavage underneath it. Her hips filled the uniform pants until the fabric pulled tight across them when she knelt. Her dark hair was pulled up in a clip that had given up halfway through the afternoon, and loose curls fell around a face built of high cheekbones and a full mouth and eyes the color of strong coffee. A scar ran along her jaw on the left side, thin and pale and old.

She had one hand on the girl’s back, rubbing small circles, and she was saying something in Spanish too fast and soft for me to catch. Her other hand held a cup of ice water, which she kept pouring over the table in small careful splashes that hissed on contact and did nothing.

She looked up when Dralun came through the kitchen door.

Her whole face changed. The fear stayed, but something else came up underneath it, something old and tired and almost fond, and her mouth pulled into a crooked half-smile that wanted to be a joke and couldn’t manage it.

"Oliver," she said.

The restaurant went quiet. Even Grandma Lin stopped spraying.

I had read his file. I had read every file within six degrees of my own name since the plaza, because reading files was the only hobby I could do at three in the morning without waking anyone up. The Hero Network listed Dralun as Dralun. His IHL license said Dralun. His agency registration said Dralun. Nowhere in any public record did it say Oliver, and the only reason I knew the name at all was a single line in a scanned PDF of his independent path examination from eleven years ago, where somebody at the testing center had typed his legal name into a box and nobody had ever bothered to redact it.

Nobody on this block called him Oliver. I would have bet my legendary stick on it.

"Nayeli," Dralun said.

He said it in a voice I had never heard come out of him. It was low and rough as always, but the gravel had gone soft at the edges, and there was a beat after the name where he stood in the doorway and didn’t move at all, his tail frozen in that tight hook.

? New Heroine Detected: Nayeli Torres. Classification: Unmarked (Civilian). Temptation Gauge: 2%. Status: Wary. Note: The subject’s attention is not on the Host. The subject’s attention has not been on the Host at any point. ?