Chapter 717 | The Girl Who Walked Past the White Van

Chapter 717: 717 | The Girl Who Walked Past the White Van

"Teeth," I said. "Horn fragments. Scales. Bone spurs. Whatever comes off a kid during their first surfacing or a six-month growth cycle, when the parents are too broke to make rent and some guy in khakis offers them three hundred bucks in cash."

The wind came off the river again and rattled the rusted ladder against the side of the tank. Down on Halverson a delivery truck hit a pothole, and its suspension groaned across three blocks of empty street.

"That’s gross," Lamia said, and the theatrical purr was completely gone. Her shoulders came up around her ears, pulling the faux-leather jacket tight across her back. "Why would Kask buy baby teeth? You can’t pawn that on the Strand. Rich people don’t want Eastside scales, they want diamonds and stuff."

"He’s not selling it on the Strand," I said. "He sorts it in the back room on Thursdays and packs it into unmarked containers. Every Friday morning between six and seven, a panel van pulls into the alley behind Rourke, loads the boxes, and runs them north through the industrial corridor past the old cannery, then turns east onto Waterfront Boulevard."

I watched her face in the half-light. With my stats where they were, I didn’t need daylight to read the little expressions tugging at the corners of her mouth.

"Somebody at the end of that road is buying pieces of Branded kids in bulk," I went on, keeping my tone level. "And I’m going to find out who has the warehouse at the end of the route."

Lamia didn’t answer.

She didn’t make a joke about my hero complex, and she didn’t even chew her lip. She just sat there cross-legged on the rusted grating with the yellow paper in her lap, staring at a bolt on the tank three inches past my left shoulder. Her breathing slowed until her chest barely moved under the white tank top, and her fingers, which had been tapping a nervous rhythm on her knee since I came up the ladder, went dead still.

Ten seconds passed. Then twenty.

With anyone else in my life, twenty seconds of silence was just a pause while they worked out how to phrase their next complaint. With Alya Nagini, who treated quiet as a personal insult and filled every gap in a conversation with movie quotes or panicked rambling, twenty seconds of dead air was a four-alarm fire.

I leaned forward a little and tipped my head into her line of sight. "Hey. You didn’t fall asleep with your eyes open, did you? Because I know reptiles do that sometimes, and I’m not carrying you down that ladder."

She didn’t blink. Her toxic green eyes stayed locked on the bolt behind me.

"Alya," I said. The name from the System prompt was out before I caught it, and I covered the slip by tapping the toe of my nephew boot against her safety-pinned heel. "Earth to the master thief."

Her pupils contracted until they were barely wider than a sewing needle. When she finally looked at me, the goofy nineteen-year-old who tripped over skylights and forgot her calling cards in her other pants was gone. What was left underneath was a girl who’d grown up watching one overworked dragon try to hold eight square miles of poverty together with his bare hands while the rest of the city changed the channel.

"I’ve seen it," she said.

Her voice was so low the river wind almost took it before it reached me.

"Seen what?"

"The van." Her fingers curled around the edges of my yellow legal paper and crushed the corners into tight accordion folds. "White panel van. Ford Transit, the tall-roof model, with the dented rear bumper on the driver’s side. No plates, just a temporary paper tag in the back window, taped on crooked so the traffic cameras can’t read the numbers."

My second heartbeat gave one heavy thud against the back of my sternum. "When?"

"Every Friday." Her upper lip curled back just enough to show the white points of both fangs. "For like, eleven months. Maybe a year. I don’t know, I didn’t write it down!"

Her voice cracked on the last word and jumped half an octave as the stillness broke and all the energy came roaring back into her body at once. She scrambled off the grating and unfolded those ridiculous legs to stand over me on the tiny platform, fists balled at her sides.

"I walked past it!" she shouted at the water tank, and she kicked the rusted support leg hard enough to make the whole platform shudder under my boots. If her Constrictor Physiology had been fully engaged, she probably would’ve dropped the tank into Miguel’s produce aisle. "Thirty times, Lukas! At least thirty times! My window is midnight to four, right, because the private security shifts on the Strand change at four-thirty and the buses start running at five, so I always cut back through the Rourke alleys before sunrise to dump my gear at my cousin’s garage!"

She spun on her heel, her black bob whipping across her cheek, and jabbed a shaking finger toward the dark roofs of the south blocks.

"It’s always sitting there by the dumpster behind Kask’s!" Her words tumbled over each other so fast that the lisp came out hard as her fangs nicked her lip. "Idling with the parking lights on! Two guys in grey coveralls loading cardboard boxes out the steel door! I thought it was toaster ovens! Or stolen copper wire from the rail yard, or knockoff sneakers, or whatever Kask fences when he’s not robbing old ladies!"

She grabbed both sides of her head, fingers tangling in her hair, and knocked the cheap aviator goggles crooked on her forehead.

"I’m supposed to be the person who notices things on my block," she said. The swagger was so completely gone that it felt wrong to watch, like seeing Caden cry, or Sloane apologize without threatening to blow something up afterward.

"Dralun can’t be everywhere. He’s one guy, and his knees hurt when it rains, and he’s always at the clinic or fixing somebody’s stupid stairs, so I’m supposed to watch the roofs at night! That’s the whole point of me! And I walked right past boxes full of little kids’ teeth thirty times because my feet hurt and I wanted to go home and eat cereal!"