Chapter 721 | The Smell of Yeast and Baby Teeth

Chapter 721: 721 | The Smell of Yeast and Baby Teeth

Friday morning on the Eastside smelled like wet asphalt and the bakery on Fifth Street, which opened before anything else in the district. Mrs. Okafor had her ovens going by four-thirty, so the fog rolling off the river picked up the heavy sweetness of yeast and brown sugar, carried it over the rooftops and dumped it into the alley behind Rourke Street. It was a great smell for a morning jog. It was a weird smell for crouching on a freezing brick parapet, waiting to watch a black-market courier load a van full of baby teeth.

I shifted my crouch on the gravel ledge and let the Faceless Veil eat the cold air before it reached my face. The bone-white mask sat locked against my skin. It muffled the Bond Resonance with Sloane down to cotton and turned the world into a high-contrast feed through the opaque material. Fifteen miles away on the hill, Sloane was probably just rolling over in bed and noticing the fuzzy wall of static where my heartbeat usually lived. She was going to be annoyed about it at breakfast, which meant I’d owe her another eight-dollar croissant. That was fine by me. The bakery girl on the Spine had started throwing in extra bacon whenever I showed up looking like I hadn’t slept.

Beside me, a piece of modified rubber let out a tiny squeak.

"You’re doing it again," I said. The Veil’s modulator made me sound like a guy who ate gravel for breakfast and washed it down with cheap whiskey.

"I am not doing anything," Lamia whispered back, and immediately froze with one hand halfway to the zipper of her wetsuit. "The humidity makes the neoprene stick. It’s a material flaw. I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to the manufacturer before my next heist."

"You bought it at a thrift store on Ninth and cut the hips out with kitchen shears."

"A master of espionage customizes her own tactical gear, Golden Boy."

She shifted her weight on the tar paper anyway, trying to settle lower without making the rubber talk. It didn’t work, mostly because the DIY diving suit was losing a fight with the geometry of her lower body. She’d washed the grease-trap smell out of it since last night, so now she just smelled like cheap strawberry lip gloss and laundry detergent. The black neoprene fit tight enough to trace the line of her spine, and where she’d cut it away at the hips, the morning mist beaded on the emerald-and-black scales of her outer thighs. She had those thighs pressed together for warmth, thick with enough serpentine muscle to crush a steel pipe, and they disappeared into thigh-high boots held together on the left calf by a row of silver safety pins. The black domino mask was back. Her terrible aviator goggles were shoved up into her hair for later, and her asymmetrical bob was tucked behind her ears, leaving her neck bare to the November damp.

Every time she breathed in, the plunging neckline of the wetsuit gapped half an inch and showed the pale swell of her chest, before the faux-leather corset belt cinched everything back in at her waist. Crouched like that, with her weight sunk onto her heels, the neoprene stretched over the curve of her ass so tight that the streetlamp glow bouncing off the wet brick below picked out every inch of it. I looked back down at the alley before the System could pop a notification reminding me I was a scumbag. I already knew. I didn’t need bracketed text to validate my lifestyle choices at five-forty in the morning.

"You’re staring at the safety pins," she said, dropping back into the rehearsed purr she used whenever she remembered she was supposed to be a femme fatale. "I told you, they’re structural. Very high-tech."

"I’m staring at the dumpster behind Kask’s," I told her, resting my forearms on my knees. "Because unlike you, I’d like to be done with this before homeroom."

"Oh, right, the little schoolboy has homeroom." She leaned her shoulder into mine, pretending she just wanted a better angle on the alley, and her body heat bled straight through my charcoal utility jacket. "What happens if the teacher catches you skipping, darling? Do you get detention?"

"She makes me run hill sprints until my lungs come up through my nose," I said. "Then she adds fifteen seconds to my plank hold because she doesn’t like my face."

Lamia snorted, a real sound that wrecked the purr completely, and her fangs nicked her lower lip before she caught herself. "Okay, she sounds awful. I like her."

Down in the alley, a rat the size of a small cat waddled out from under Kask’s dented green dumpster, sniffed a puddle of motor oil, and waddled back into the dark. The back of Eastside Pawn was thirty feet below us across a narrow two-lane service road. The ground floor had no windows, and the brick was painted over in three different shades of grey to cover the blocky crown tags that kept popping up around the district. A single steel fire door sat recessed into the concrete under a caged yellow bulb that flickered every few seconds like it was dying of boredom.

I blinked once and pulled Residue Sight to the front of my eyes.

The grey alley lit up like a cheap nightclub. Most of the ground was covered in the smeared tracks of garbage men and stray dogs, dull wisps of color that had already rotted down to nothing. Around the steel fire door, though, the brick was stained with a thick smear of black-violet. It was the same 397-nanometer suppressive signature Petra had matched to the clinic card on her father’s fancy Munich servers. Kask touched that door every day. He leaned on the frame when he smoked, and he propped it open with his hip when he carried things out. Under his dark purple stain sat patchy smears of teal and copper, with a dull yellow here and there. They were the leftover ghosts of whatever he’d been carrying in from the clinics on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

I shut the sight off and let the alley go back to plain grey. Looking too long made the second heartbeat under my sternum press against my ribs like it wanted me to jump down there and take that steel door off its hinges with my bare hands.

"Five-fifty," Lamia murmured. Her knee bumped mine as she checked a cheap digital watch strapped over her wetsuit cuff. "Give it two minutes. The guy who drives has OCD or something. He never hits the corner before fifty-two."