Chapter 714 | My Fire Escape

Chapter 714: 714 | My Fire Escape

"Oregon says the van goes north." Dralun’s voice dropped half a register. "Through the industrial corridor, past the old cannery. It turns east on Waterfront Boulevard and disappears into the commercial district before seven. Friday morning traffic gives it cover. Nobody looks twice at a delivery van in a loading zone at that hour."

"How far past the cannery?"

"Don’t know. Oregon’s information stops at the boulevard. My contact hasn’t worked this district in eleven years, and the route may have changed."

"And if it has?"

Dralun picked up his empty mug and turned it in his claws. The chipped rim caught the overhead light as he studied it the way he studied a crack in somebody’s stoop, slow and careful, the way you examined damage on an old friend who’d stopped asking for help years ago. "Then you follow the boxes until the route makes sense, and you come back and you tell me. You don’t improvise and you don’t engage."

His tail twitched once. The motion reminded me of Sloane right before she started lecturing, when she’d already lost the argument in her head and was trying to win it out loud anyway. "You don’t put on the mask and decide you know better than the man who’s been watching this pipeline run since before you could shave."

I touched my jaw. The Demigod trait had been handling my facial hair without consulting me for the last nine years, so I’d never actually needed a razor in this body and the point was technically moot. I let it land anyway. Dralun needed to feel like he’d made it, and correcting him on the technicalities of divine grooming maintenance was not a conversation I was equipped to have.

"I can shave."

"You can also get killed. Both happen faster than you expect, and neither one leaves you in a position to file a report afterward."

The fire escape groaned as he shifted his weight. The sound carried up through the pressed-tin ceiling into the office above us, where the radiator clanked its eternal complaint and Ophelia’s bat stickers caught whatever light leaked in from the street.

I thought about the logistics map folded inside my jacket. Three corridors out of the district. White or grey panel vans on rotating plates, every Friday between six and seven. Petra had pulled all of it out of federal security infrastructure in the hours after I left her room, which meant she’d started while the sheets were still warm and the emerald lace was still on the floor, with a word she’d never said before still ringing in her ears fourteen times over.

Then there was Mateo Ibarra, five years old, with bone spurs pushing through the dinosaur hoodie his mother sewed by hand at two in the morning. His growth curve projected three or four more spurs over the next eighteen months. Shedding would start at eight or nine. Three years from now, the bone that fell off that kid would be worth money to a man in a navy windbreaker who handed out cards to desperate parents in clinic waiting rooms.

And there was Dralun’s blue notebook. Twenty-three names. Fourteen still here. Six moved. Three dead, and two of those three in attacks the reports called unidentified multi-Aspect, in the same district where Marcus and Reina Belmont died on a Tuesday afternoon six blocks south while backup took too long to arrive.

Something hit me on the top of the head.

It was small and sticky, and it was well aimed. It clung to my hair with the stubbornness of a thing thrown straight down by someone who’d spent six years perfecting the art of passive-aggressive projectile delivery from elevated positions.

I peeled it off my scalp. A bat sticker. The bat was pink, with little fangs and a bow.

"You are on my fire escape." Ophelia’s voice dropped from the window above like a stone wrapped in velvet. "My fire escape. Without a latte or permission. You didn’t even knock. Mr. Stitches saw you come out here fourteen minutes ago and he’s been keeping a list."

She leaned out far enough that her drill curls swung forward into the streetlight and went from pink to copper. Tonight’s dress was black with silver trim, the corset bodice laced so tight that the square neckline had given up any pretense of professional restraint, and leaning out a window over a fire escape pushed everything it held right up against the silver edge. One arm braced on the sill. The other dangled Mr. Stitches over the alley by one patchwork leg, like a hostage negotiator making a point.

"Minus twenty points for trespassing. Minus ten for the sticker, which was limited edition. Minus five for making me lean out this window to yell at you, when I already told you this outfit does not accommodate leaning."

It was accommodating plenty. The lacing creaked every time she breathed, and the streetlight sat on the pale curve above her neckline like it had nowhere better to be. I looked at the pink bat in my hand instead, because there was a dragon three feet away who could read my face, and I had a strong preference for living through Friday.

"I brought you a latte last time."

"That was days ago. Lattes expire. My patience expired in August. You owe me a fresh one and a formal apology addressed to Mr. Stitches, for the emotional distress of watching you sit on our fire escape having serious conversations about boxes when you could be upstairs finishing the raccoon report."

Dralun made the sound. The good one, which Ophelia had once translated as a grunt of agreement delivered with the absolute minimum of enthusiasm available to a sentient creature.

"The raccoon report is done." I stuck the bat to my jacket collar, where it looked ridiculous against the charcoal field fabric, which made it perfect. "Two hundred and fourteen words. IHL compliant. Dravid will hate it."

"Dravid hates everything. That’s his job. Your job is lattes. Also not dying on fire escapes that belong to other people."

She pulled Mr. Stitches back inside and vanished. A second later the bear reappeared, held out at arm’s length with his X-stitched eyes aimed at me. Her voice came from somewhere behind him, muffled, like she’d put the bear between her face and the conversation on purpose.

"Mr. Stitches says you look tired. He also says whatever you’re planning to do tomorrow is probably stupid, and he would like it noted that he formally objects."

"Tell Mr. Stitches I appreciate his concern."

"Mr. Stitches says appreciation does not count as an apology, and you still owe him a latte."