Chapter 715 | The Conversation, Belmont

Chapter 715: 715 | The Conversation, Belmont

The bear disappeared. The window banged shut hard enough to rattle the bat stickers on the inside of the frame, and a little flurry of glitter came drifting down through the fire escape grating like the world’s most aggressively themed snow. One piece landed on Dralun’s horn and stayed there, a defiant speck of pink against the dark bronze.

The tension that had been sitting on the fire escape since I unfolded the first page cracked down the middle. It didn’t go anywhere. It just broke open enough to let some air back in between us.

Dralun looked at the glitter on his horn and didn’t brush it off. In the economy of gestures I’d learned to read over two months of daily exposure, that was an entire paragraph of emotional expression. He put up with Ophelia’s glitter for the same reason he put up with her point system, her bear, her refusal to file incident reports, and her habit of posting photos of his tail online without consent. All of it belonged to the Eastside, and the Eastside belonged to him. Everything in it was his to carry, including the girl who’d hidden under a reading carpet at six years old while a bat flew through her teacher’s chest, and nobody came to tell her she hadn’t done anything wrong.

"Six-fifteen." I folded my arms across my knees. "I’ll be at the corner of Rourke and Fifth in civilian clothes. No jacket or crest."

His eyebrow ridge moved a fraction of an inch.

"No mask," I added. "I’ll follow the van on foot as far as the cannery, switch to rooftops past the loading zone, and track it through the industrial corridor until I can confirm where it stops. I’ll write down the address, how long the stop takes, how many people handle the delivery, and anything I can see of the place receiving it. Then I’ll come back here and give you the report."

"On paper."

"On paper. Your format. Seven sentences or less."

His tail twitched once. The glitter on his horn caught the streetlight.

"The mask stays in your pocket."

He wasn’t asking.

"The mask stays in my pocket."

That wasn’t a lie, exactly. I planned to keep the Faceless Veil in my inventory, which didn’t exist in physical space and couldn’t be found by any standard search. The difference between a pocket and an inventory was a level of detail Dralun’s instruction hadn’t covered, and I chose not to volunteer it.

He studied my face for four seconds, three seconds longer than I’d ever seen him study anything that wasn’t a structural problem on Mrs. Alvarez’s stoop or a fire spreading through a second-floor window. His brown eyes had the quality of earth that had carried weight for a very long time without complaining, and had recently been handed something new it never chose and couldn’t put down.

"Your parents walked this district." It came out with no warm-up and no apology. "Marcus covered the north route, Halverson to the river. Reina covered the south, Fourth to the overpass. They rotated on Tuesdays. Marcus believed rotation stopped hostile operators from learning the pattern, and Reina believed it stopped her from getting bored, and they were both right about different things."

My second heartbeat pressed against my sternum so hard I felt it in my back teeth.

"I worked with them for seven months before the incident. Marcus filed reports the way I file reports. He wrote what happened and didn’t add opinions about what it meant. Reina filed reports the way you file reports. She wrote what happened, and then she wrote what she thought about what she thought about it, and every single time the extra thinking was right and I wished she’d kept it shorter."

The rusted frame of the fire escape held both of us, a Rank C dragon with eleven years on the same seven blocks and a boy wearing a dead man’s face in a dead man’s district.

"You have her habit. The extra sentences. The part where you see the thing that matters underneath the thing everybody else is looking at, and you can’t keep your mouth shut about it."

I couldn’t answer him. My throat had closed around something the Demigod trait couldn’t heal and the System couldn’t put a number on.

"Follow the boxes." Dralun picked up his empty mug and stood, and his full height filled the platform until the iron groaned under him. "Write down what you see. Come back to me."

He climbed through the window with the care of a man moving through a space too small for his body and too important to damage. His tail swept once across the sill and sent two bat stickers spiraling off into the night.

I sat on the fire escape alone.

The Eastside breathed around me in layers of sound and smell, and in the particular kind of dark you get when a city decides a district isn’t worth the electricity bill for better streetlights. Ramón’s television had gone off. The dog had found something new to bark at. Upstairs, through the pressed tin and the creaking floor, I heard Ophelia’s platform shoes clatter from her desk to the radiator, and then the fainter sound of Mr. Stitches being set in his spot on the windowsill, facing out, keeping watch over a block the ranking system had forgotten and a dragon who couldn’t.

My phone lit up.

Sloane’s side of the bond was a faint murmur from a campus fifteen miles across the river.

Sloane: your heart is doing the thing again. the heavy thing. the one that happens when someone tells you something about your parents you didn’t know.

I stared at the message until the screen dimmed.

Lukas: dralun worked with them.

Her answer came two seconds later.

Sloane: i know. mom told me three years ago. i never found the right time to tell you.

The Bond Resonance carried her guilt across the river like a frequency I could taste. Three years. Sloane had known for three years that the dragon who drank terrible coffee and fixed stoop railings on his weekends had walked the same streets as the two people whose photograph I kept face down on my desk, because I couldn’t look at it without feeling something I had no right to feel.

Lukas: we’re going to talk about that.

Sloane: i know.

Lukas: after friday.

Sloane: okay.

Lukas: love you.

Sloane: that is not going to save you from the conversation, belmont.