Chapter 718 | Point it at the Guy in the Pawn Shop

Chapter 718: 718 | Point it at the Guy in the Pawn Shop

She slammed her palm flat against the curved side of the tank. Her Frictionless Scale flared on impact by accident, some panic reflex she didn’t control, and her hand skidded sideways across the wet steel with a loud screech that threw her off balance before she caught herself on the wobbling rail.

"Stupid," she muttered, staring at her own hand like it had betrayed her. "Stupid amateur, playing dress-up in a wetsuit while Kask is right there—"

I stood up.

The platform was small enough that standing put me less than two feet behind her. I didn’t use Blitz, and I didn’t use Spectral Reach. I just reached out with my actual hand and grabbed the back of her cropped jacket between her shoulder blades, where her frictionless skin couldn’t dump my grip, and hauled her back six inches until her heels were flat on the grating and away from the eighty-foot drop.

She froze when her back bumped my chest.

"Quit kicking the water tower," I said into the crown of her head. "Grandma Lin uses the tap water on this block for her broth, and if you drop ten thousand gallons of rust onto Miguel’s roof, Ophelia’s going to deduct a million points from my score and I’ll never financially recover."

Lamia let out a furious snort and tried to twist free, but with a hundred Strength reinforced by Demigod, my hand on her jacket might as well have been a construction crane bolted to a foundation that had never moved once in its entire structural history. She craned her head around to glare up at me over her shoulder with an expression caught somewhere between outrage and something that looked like she’d just been caught doing something she had told herself she wouldn’t do. Her acid-green eyes had gone glassy in the orange streetlamp glow, reflecting the industrial light like wet glass.

"Don’t make jokes right now, Golden Boy, I’m having a crisis!" Her voice pitched high and sharp on the last word, the register of someone who was doing a very bad job pretending they weren’t about to cry.

"You’re having a tantrum," I corrected, and let go of her jacket now that she wasn’t actively trying to throw herself over the railing for dramatic effect. "And it’s wasting calories. You know what the difference is between you missing that van thirty times and every top-fifty Hero on the Strand missing it?"

"What?" she snapped, spinning around to face me with her chin up and her chest heaving against the thin white cotton that was currently doing absolutely nothing to hide the fact that she was furious, humiliated, and breathing like she’d just sprinted three blocks.

"They never walked down the alley," I said flatly. "You were actually out on the street at five in the morning. You didn’t know what was in the boxes because nobody had the clinic card until last month, and nobody ran the ledger until Dralun pulled the names off the burner account. Beating yourself up for not having X-ray vision in April is idiot behavior, and I don’t work with idiots. It ruins my brand. Also Ophelia would give me another lecture about my social skills and I’d have to sit through it while she types everything in sparkle emoji font, which is genuinely unbearable."

She stared up at me for three seconds, jaw working, while her brain tried to figure out whether I was insulting her or comforting her. That was how people usually looked at me after a pep talk, because my pep talks were mostly me pointing out the math in a tone that implied everyone else was bad at addition.

"Anger is useful," I told her, tapping two fingers against the yellow paper still crumpled in her fist. "Being mad at yourself is useless. Point it at the guy in the pawn shop."

Her pupils dilated and swallowed half the green, until her eyes looked dark and bottomless in the shadow of the tank. Her breathing evened out. She took one deep pull through her nose that made the cropped jacket slide back off her shoulders.

Then she rotated her left hip, planted her safety-pinned boot on the grating, and punched me square in the left shoulder.

It wasn’t a leg strike, where all her Branded constrictor muscle lived, so it didn’t put me through the water tank. It was still a solid sixty-five-point hit with zero windup and maximum spite, and it landed with a heavy thud right over the joint capsule I’d torn in the dome two months ago. Pain Tolerance ate the worst of the nerve signal and filed it as a mild notification, but I felt the muscle bruise under my utility jacket anyway.

"Ow," I said flatly, without moving an inch. "That’s assault on a class representative. I’m telling Dralun."

"Tell him and I’ll tell your scary pink girlfriend you were staring at my hips," she shot back, shaking out her knuckles and wincing, because hitting a hundred-point Endurance body was a lot like punching a bag of wet cement. She hit me a second time in the exact same spot, softer, barely more than a tap. "You’re annoying. And your pep talks suck."

"They have a hundred percent success rate," I said, rubbing my shoulder purely for theatrical value. "You’re not kicking the tank anymore."

She blew a strand of glossy black hair out of her eyes, since she refused to use a hairpin even in the middle of a moral reckoning, and smoothed the crumpled paper flat against her scaled thigh. The emerald plates on her hip shifted under her palm and caught the light while she read the timetable one more time.

"Six to seven," she said. The fake purr was gone, and so was the panicked Eastside squeak. What was left was a voice I hadn’t heard from her yet, level and cold around the edges. "The Transit comes in off Fifth, because the turning radius on Rourke is too tight for the long wheelbase. It backs up to the steel fire door. They take about twelve minutes to load."

"Dralun told me to watch the boxes and write down the address," I said, watching her fold the paper into a sharp little square and tuck it into the little pouch on her belt beside her bent lockpicks. "No engaging. No going inside the warehouse."

Lamia looked up at me from under her lashes, and the sharp little fang-smile came back. It was smaller and much meaner than the one she rehearsed in her bathroom mirror.

"Good thing I don’t work for Dralun," she said.

She stepped backward onto the waist-high railing in one boneless motion and balanced on the rusted two-inch pipe in her chunky boots like it was a four-lane highway. The river wind caught her open jacket and whipped it out behind her. She hooked her thumbs into the belt loops of her low-rise jeans and leaned out over the eighty-foot drop into the alley without looking down.

"I’ll be on the roof above Kask’s at five-thirty," she said. "Wear the creepy white mask, Golden Boy. And don’t be late, or I’m slashing the tires without you."