Chapter 723 | How to Catch a Shark Fin

Chapter 723: 723 | How to Catch a Shark Fin

Stamped across the brown cardboard in thick industrial red ink was a stencil mark. It was a plain circle, about six inches wide, with three straight lines running out from the dead center to the top and the sides, splitting the inside into three equal slices. It looked like a simplified sun drawn by somebody who’d never seen the sky, or a radiation warning stripped down to the bone.

My thumb hit the shutter four times. The digital zoom caught the red stencil clean between the bands of fiberglass tape, sharp enough that I could see where the ink had bled into the vertical grain of the cardboard.

"You got that?" Lamia whispered, her chin all but resting on my shoulder as she squinted at my screen.

"Got it." I locked the phone and slid it back into my inner pocket. "You ever seen that stamp around the district?"

"No." Her teeth clicked together once. "And I look at boxes. That’s not local. That’s corporate."

Below us, the loader muscled the hand truck up the little ramp at the back of the Transit, slid the two boxes onto the ribbed metal floor, and strapped them to the wall with a yellow ratchet tie-down. He slammed the rear doors, locked them with a physical key, and walked back around to the passenger side. A second guy I hadn’t seen, the actual driver, sat behind the wheel with a baseball cap pulled low enough to hide his face from our angle. He put the van in drive before the passenger door had even finished closing.

The white Transit rolled out of the alley, turned north onto Rourke without a blinker, and sped up into the fog toward the industrial corridor.

I stood up on the parapet.

"Alright," I said, rolling my left shoulder once to loosen the joint. "Cardio time. Keep up, snake girl, or I’m telling Dralun you tripped on a skylight again."

"Bite me, Golden Boy," Lamia snapped, already moving.

She didn’t jump the gap to the next roof the way I did. She just stepped off the brick ledge onto the slanted corrugated tin awning of the building next door, switched her Frictionless Scale on at the soles of her boots, and skated across forty feet of wet metal like it was greased ice. Her arms went out for balance and her hips swung to catch the pitch of the roof. Then she hit the far brick wall at a dead sprint and kicked off the masonry, launching herself over a six-foot alley gap without losing a single mile an hour.

I didn’t need Blitz to keep pace with a panel van doing thirty-five on wet city streets. I let my hundred Agility do the work.

I cleared the alley gap in one quiet stride and landed on the gravel roof of a closed dry cleaner with barely a crunch. The cold fog tore past the bone-white face of the Veil as I opened up my stride, running parallel to Rourke three stories above the sidewalk. Below us, the white roof of the Transit slid through the mist like a shark fin. It caught every green light heading north, because whoever had mapped their Friday schedule knew the municipal traffic timers down to the second.

We crossed four blocks in ninety seconds. The flat tar-paper roofs of the residential walk-ups gave way to the uglier sprawl of the industrial corridor as we came up on the old cannery, where Camille spent her placement afternoons teaching twelve-year-olds how to throw a jab. The buildings out here sat farther apart, separated by chain-link service yards and gravel lots full of rusted shipping containers, and the gaps were too wide for a normal person to jump.

Neither of us was a normal person.

Lamia hit the edge of a two-story machine shop, dropped to one knee, and slid across the slick metal cap of the parapet to a thick black telephone cable strung across the fifty-foot lot to the next warehouse. She didn’t bother with a zip-line handle. She threw herself onto the cable feet first, hooked the arches of her safety-pinned boots over the wire, and let her zero-friction field shoot her across the gap like a railgun slug. Her cropped jacket flapped wildly behind her, and she tucked into a somersault and landed in a crouch on the warehouse roof.

Show-off.

I skipped the telephone wire, because putting a hundred and ninety pounds of Demigod-reinforced muscle on a municipal utility line was a great way to plunge four blocks of the Eastside into the dark ages, and Dralun had been very clear about his coffee-can insurance budget. Instead I hit the edge of the machine shop roof at a dead run and kicked off the brick cap into forty feet of open air.

Halfway across the gravel lot, gravity remembered I was technically still bound by physics and started pulling me toward a rusted-out shipping container. I flicked my right wrist forward. Two amber constructs shot out of my palm like liquid sunset and reached fifteen feet to clamp their oversized fingers around a steel gantry beam sticking off the side of the next warehouse. My hundred Dexterity handled the geometry on instinct. The phantom arms locked and took my weight with a dull throb of feedback in my real forearms, then yanked me forward in a high pendulum arc that dropped me right beside Lamia on the corrugated roof.

She looked up from her crouch as the river wind whipped her glossy black bob around her jaw. The domino mask sat crooked on her face, and her chest was heaving hard enough inside the plunging neckline of that DIY wetsuit to put the zipper’s structural integrity in serious doubt.

"Okay," she gasped, falling out of the breathy femme fatale register and straight into nineteen-year-old Eastside gremlin. "Okay, that was actually kind of hot. I hate you."

"Save your breath, Nagini, your wetsuit’s squeaking again," I said through the Veil’s modulator, which turned my teasing into the gravelly rasp of a guy who smoked two packs of unfiltered cigarettes before breakfast. "He’s turning onto Fourth."