Chapter 716 | A Deal on a Water Tower is Still a Deal

Chapter 716: 716 | A Deal on a Water Tower is Still a Deal

I stayed on the fire escape another twenty minutes, because the alternative was climbing back through Ophelia’s window and explaining why my face looked like somebody had just told me my dead parents used to walk the streets I was planning to stake out tomorrow morning. Ophelia would notice. Ophelia noticed everything. She logged it in her point system and saved it to use against you at the worst possible moment, which was how she showed affection.

The night air tasted like river water and distant diesel. Somewhere south a siren climbed up through the octaves and faded into the kind of quiet you only get in districts where the response time averages fourteen minutes and people have learned to handle their own problems or die waiting.

A little before midnight I dropped off the fire escape into the alley behind Lin’s. The nephew boots soaked up the landing with the broken-in comfort of footwear that had finally stopped trying to murder my heels. The bunny-ear laces held. Ophelia’s double-bow technique apparently had more structural integrity than her combat training, which tracked.

I walked north on Halverson, past the shuttered tax office and the barbershop where Ramón’s television had finally given up and gone to sleep. The fresh white paint on the plywood caught the sodium-vapor glow. A three-pointed crown. The tags had been multiplying for two weeks, spreading from the commercial blocks toward the residential strip like somebody staking a territorial claim one spray can at a time.

The water tower above Miguel’s bodega had a maintenance ladder that hadn’t seen a city inspector since the first Bush administration. I climbed it anyway, because my hundred-point Agility treated rusted iron rungs as a polite suggestion instead of a structural hazard. The platform at the top was maybe eight feet square, ringed by a waist-high railing that wobbled every time the river wind hit it.

Down below, Halverson Avenue was doing its usual midnight impression of a district the municipal budget had forgotten existed. One sodium-vapor streetlamp on the corner flickered in a dying orange pulse. The rest of the block sat in deep shadow.

Lamia was already there.

She sat cross-legged against the curved steel base of the tank, and she’d ditched the modified neoprene diving suit for civilian clothes that somehow covered even less territory. Low-rise black jeans were painted onto a pair of thighs that could crush a cinderblock into powder.

A cropped faux-leather jacket hung open over a white ribbed tank top that was fighting for its life against her chest and losing by a wide margin.

The jeans sat so low on her wide hips that the place where pale skin turned into smooth emerald scales was completely bare, and it caught the orange glow from the streetlamp like oiled jade.

Her glossy black bob hung loose past her chin instead of pinned back for a heist, and she had a pair of cheap aviator goggles pushed up on her forehead.

"You’re four minutes early, Golden Boy," she purred, dragging out every syllable in the breathy femme fatale register she’d definitely copied off a late-night cable movie. She leaned back on her palms, which arched her spine and pushed the front of the tank top out until the white cotton went close to see-through. "If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were eager to see me."

"I’m always eager to climb condemned municipal infrastructure at midnight," I said, stepping off the top rung and letting my boots settle onto the grating without a sound. "It’s right up there with filing tax returns and getting hit by trucks. You forgot your wetsuit."

The purr died in her throat, and her actual nineteen-year-old voice came out instead. "It’s in the wash, okay! Neoprene holds smells if you don’t air it out, and I crawled through a grease trap behind the deli on Tuesday because somebody told me to use the back approaches."

She crossed her arms, which did catastrophic things to the neckline of that tank top, and glared up at me with vivid acid-green eyes. Her vertical pupils narrowed to thin black lines. "And don’t look at my scales like that, it’s rude. It’s humid out."

"I wasn’t looking at your scales," I lied. My hundred-point Intelligence was perfectly capable of tracking her scales and the safety pin holding her left boot zipper together at the same time, with eighty percent of my brain left over to appreciate the view.

?Advisory: Host’s ocular tracking data contradicts verbal statement by 100%.?

?Subject: ALYA NAGINI (Alias: Lamia) | Temptation Gauge: 14%. Stage: NEUTRAL. Unregistered; unchanged.?

?Note: Ecchi Logic is currently attempting to unfasten the top button of her jeans.?

I ignored the box and sat down on the grating across from her, forearms resting on my knees. The metal was cold through my reinforced trousers, and the wind off the river smelled like wet concrete and old fish.

"So," she said, sliding back into the sultry voice and losing it halfway through the word when her fang caught on her lower lip. She cleared her throat loudly and tried again.

"You texted me on the burner line before a non-heist night. Which means either you missed my face, or you have a job for the Eastside’s premier infiltrator."

"I have a schedule," I said, reaching into my utility jacket.

I didn’t pull out the page Petra had handed me at the fountain that morning. Giving a nineteen-year-old underground thief a sheet of Heinrich Lang’s personal cream stationery with a federal security watermark on it was how you ended up explaining yourself to a Senate subcommittee before your nineteenth birthday. What I pulled out was a folded square of yellow legal paper. I’d copied the routes onto it in Dralun’s office while Ophelia threw bat stickers at my head.

I held it out between two fingers. "Kask’s pawn shop on Rourke."

Lamia reached for it, and because she was leaning forward to make sure I got a comprehensive view of her collarbone, her fingers brushed mine. Her Frictionless Scale passive was humming at a low idle, so her skin felt like warm silk over glass. It slid right off my calluses before she pinched the paper between her thumb and forefinger.

"I already robbed Kask," she said, unfolding the note and squinting at my handwriting in the dim orange light. "Twice. Well, once, and then we did that weird reverse-robbery thing last month where I put the hairpin behind the Buddha. Which, by the way, Socorro got it back this morning and cried on my aunt’s porch for twenty minutes, so you’re welcome for my flawless execution."

"You screamed at a rat," I pointed out.

"It was a very large rat, Golden Boy, it had shoulders." She shook the paper at me. "What is this? Times? License plate formats? I don’t steal vans, Lukas, I have standards. And I don’t know how to drive stick."

"You’re not stealing it." I let my voice drop out of the banter and into the flat, quiet one that usually made Caden stop joking. "Kask has a second business running out of the back office on Rourke. The jewelry and watches in the front cases are just the tax write-off. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, a guy in a navy windbreaker hits the free clinics and the walk-ups in the district and buys shed material off Branded kids."

Her thumb stopped moving on the edge of the yellow paper.

"Shed material."