Chapter 719 | Shared Custody Arrangement

Chapter 719: 719 | Shared Custody Arrangement

Lamia stepped off the railing, let her frictionless field carry her down the outside of the ladder, and was gone into the alleys toward Rourke. I climbed down the water tower’s ladder. Demigod turned what should’ve been careful footwork into a controlled drop, my boots catching every third rung while the rest of me just fell through the gaps. The alley behind Miguel’s bodega smelled like old grease, with that particular chemical sweetness that hangs over the river district at night.

My phone lit up before I hit the pavement.

Sloane: something just hurt you. also you feel guilty and amused at the same time, which means a girl. explain.

Lukas: it’s lamia. she punched me. i deserved it.

Sloane: why did she punch you?

Lukas: i told her about friday. she’s been walking past the van for eleven months and didn’t know what it was.

Sloane: so she punched you because she was mad at herself.

Lukas: pretty much.

Sloane: is she okay?

Lukas: she will be. she’s coming tomorrow.

Sloane: good. text me when you’re back on the hill.

Five-thirty tomorrow, Lamia on the roof. A white panel van rolling out of Kask’s back alley with boxes full of things that used to be attached to kids. My job was to follow it and write down what I saw.

My actual job was to lie about all of that the second something went sideways, put on the mask, and handle whatever came next.

I walked the six blocks back to Lin’s at a pace slow enough that nobody watching would care. Camera coverage on the Eastside was thin enough that a guy could commit three felonies and a traffic violation between Halverson and Fourth without a lens ever catching his face. Streetlights dropped orange pools on the cracked sidewalk, and between the pools the shadows were deep enough to swallow a truck. Ramón’s TV still flickered blue above the barbershop. The old man’s paper sat folded on the chair outside, waiting for morning and whatever joke about my boots came with it.

The laundromat at 1147 looked the same, soaped-over windows and the handwritten sign warning people not to knock. Dryer four sat dark behind the locked door. It was empty now, but it remembered the canvas bag, and the forty-seven families who got their stuff back because a girl in a diving suit and a guy from the hill decided the ranking system was bullshit.

I took the side door with the oiled hinges and climbed the black stairs. The pressed-tin ceiling caught my footsteps and threw them around. The radiator clanked. Dralun’s chair sat empty, with the WORLD’S OKAYEST UNCLE mug dead center on his desk and a quarter inch of cold tar still in the bottom. Ophelia’s desk was clean except for Mr. Stitches, propped against her monitor with his X-stitched eyes aimed at the door like a sentry who’d seen better days and knew it.

The laptop sat open on my desk. The raccoon report was still loaded, the cursor blinking after two hundred and fourteen words the IHL would accept and Dravid would hate.

I sat down.

The chair creaked.

The skeleton Ophelia had put on the corner of my desk still held its faded WORK HARDER sign. Somebody had added a tiny paper top hat since my last visit. It was pink, cut from what looked like the same cardstock she used for bat stickers, and it sat at a jaunty angle that suggested either artistic vision or a sneeze during construction. I left it.

My phone vibrated. It wasn’t Sloane.

Felicity: u awake?

Lukas: shouldn’t be.

Felicity: same. thinking about you.

Lukas: that’s my line.

Felicity: it’s a shared custody arrangement. i get it on weeknights, you get weekends.

Lukas: what happens on holidays?

Felicity: we both think about each other at the same time and the universe implodes.

Lukas: noted.

Pink heart emoji. Knife emoji. Sleeping face. Then nothing.

I set the phone down and looked at the wall map. Red pins were scattered across the river district in clusters too tight to be random.

Every one of them marked a case Dralun had logged. Fires. Noise complaints that stopped being noise complaints when somebody opened the door and said everything was fine in a voice that said the opposite. Marks on wrists and excuses about double shifts, the same story running down different addresses.

The pins were thickest on the blocks where the buildings sagged and the streetlights worked half the time. They thinned out as the district climbed toward the commercial side, where everything got newer and the cameras got better, and the people who could afford distance lived close enough to hear what happened but far enough away to pretend it happened somewhere else.

Fourteen kids from Dralun’s blue notebook lived inside that spread of pins. Six had moved out since they started keeping count. Three were dead.

Tomorrow morning a van would roll out of one of those blocks carrying pieces of children who couldn’t afford to say no. It would be driven by somebody who didn’t show up in any database, and it would head somewhere Dralun’s Oregon contact had described in terms that made the dragon grind his teeth hard enough that I heard enamel crack over the phone.

I closed the laptop.

The raccoon report could wait another day. Dravid had already waited five weeks. One more wasn’t going to change his opinion of my work ethic.

I opened the quest log.

The Shed Ledger sat at the top, its progress bar at twelve percent after the spectral confirmation and whatever logistics data the System had pulled from sources it still wouldn’t name. Under it, The Frictionless Thief tracked the Lamia collaboration at forty-one percent. Under that, Sunday Dinner showed complete, with a note saying the congee had been excellent and Grandma Lin’s cleaver technique was something to discuss with a professional.

The Defiance counter read forty out of fifty.

Forty points of accumulated resistance to the System’s operational framework. Ten short of a Penalty Quest, and the number hadn’t moved since September. I’d been good. I’d completed quests and raised gauges and done everything the bracket notation asked of me since the dome. The reward was a body that healed from black fire in four days and a bond that let me feel Sloane’s moods from fifteen miles out. On top of that I had a second heartbeat under my own that nobody could explain and the System refused to discuss.

I pressed two fingers against my sternum.

The pulse answered. It was patient, and it felt less like biology than like a conversation with something that had been waiting longer than I’d been alive.

There was the old gold on the photograph frame, and the blue void where something had spoken in a voice that carried salt and bronze, under a sun I’d never seen. There was the Demigod trait, which the System had classified as Legendary and then never mentioned again, like naming something that big and putting it in a slot was the same as understanding it.

I was something the paperwork didn’t cover. Dravid said it first. Juno sampled it. Vivienne felt it through the mark she’d put on my shoulder. And the System confirmed it with the flattest, most honest sentence it had ever produced: SOURCE NOT SYSTEM-ORIGINATED.