Chapter 724 | We Ran Out of Architecture

Chapter 724: 724 | We Ran Out of Architecture

Below us, the white Transit took the corner at Fourth Street a little too hot, its rear tires kicking up a rooster tail of dirty gutter water as it swung west toward the river bridge. The morning traffic was waking up now, a sluggish line of delivery trucks and beat-up sedans with one working headlight each, all of it funneling toward the water so the people who actually worked for a living could go clean the offices of the people on the Strand.

Lamia popped up onto the balls of her feet. Her scaled thighs flexed once, and she threw herself down the sloped roof like a competitive figure skater with a death wish. It was honestly ridiculous to watch. The girl had zero formal training and planned her heists off movies that came out before either of us was born, but out here on the wet tin and tar paper she moved like she owned the sky. Her Frictionless Scale field ate every bit of resistance between her boots and the roof and let her build speed until she was outrunning the van below. She banked off chimney stacks and AC units like a pinball, hips rolling to keep her center of gravity low.

I stayed ten feet behind her left shoulder, matching her line across the angled rooftops without closing the gap. Part of that was tactical awareness. If she hit a dry patch of rust or a tar seam that hadn’t properly melted in last summer’s heat, she’d lose focus on the field for half a second and turn into two hundred pounds of momentum with nowhere to go but down. In that scenario, somebody needed to be in position to catch her before she painted herself across Fourth Street in a way that would definitely make the morning news cycle.

The other part was the view.

The suit she’d designed herself had almost no hips left to speak of. The neoprene stopped just below the waistband and picked back up mid-thigh, leaving her scaled lower body completely exposed to the November air. Every time she pushed off, every time she banked against a chimney stack or rolled her weight through a turn, all that lean green muscle flexed and coiled under the ambient streetlight glow. Wet scales caught the light differently than skin did. They shimmered when she moved, throwing off faint prismatic hints of color at the edges where the rain hadn’t dried yet. It was distracting in the exact way I’m sure she’d intended when she’d cut the material herself with a pair of fabric shears and way too much confidence.

I was a simple man. I could multitask.

Every time a gap between buildings stretched past twenty feet, I fired a construct ahead into the dark. The amber shimmer arced out ahead of me, semi-solid and just visible enough to track, and latched onto a fire escape railing or an exposed water pipe. The pull was immediate. I swung myself across the empty air like I’d been doing this for years instead of weeks, my boots clearing the gap with five feet of clearance to spare. With every stat sitting at a clean hundred after the Demigod multiplier had finished doing its work, I wasn’t even breathing hard yet. The cold morning air felt sharp and clean in my lungs. The second heartbeat under my sternum was still thumping along in that heavy, syncopated rhythm that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the fact that it was having the time of its life.

I’d read way too many Spider-Man comics in my previous life. This was me cashing in on the fantasy twelve years late and with significantly less witty banter.

The van hit the approach ramp for the Fourth Street Bridge ahead of us, its brake lights flaring once as it merged into the left lane behind a municipal garbage truck that was belching black diesel exhaust into the wet air. The bridge itself was a four-lane concrete span with rusted green iron trusses arching overhead in a lattice pattern that probably looked impressive in the architectural drawings back in 1952. Now it just looked like the kind of infrastructure the city budgeted maintenance for every other decade and hoped nothing important fell off in the meantime.

There were no rooftops on a bridge, obviously, unless you counted the top chord of the iron truss forty feet above the roadbed. It was about eighteen inches wide and slick with November river fog, in full view of every commuter with a dashcam between here and the Strand.

"Stay high on the girders," I called, pitching my modulated voice just loud enough to carry over the garbage truck’s diesel rumble below us. "The Veil’s static only covers me. If somebody spots a girl in a cut-out diving suit skating across the bridge at six in the morning, it’s going to make the local news."

"Please, darling, I am a shadow in the mist," Lamia purred, and immediately ruined it when her left boot caught a rivet head on the iron approach beam. "Whoa, crap, wet iron, wet iron!"

She windmilled both arms and dislocated her right hip with an audible pop that made my teeth itch, just so she could drop her center of gravity six inches lower. Then she rode the narrow steel I-beam up the incline of the truss on one knee, her scaled thigh flashing green against the grey fog, and slid into the overhead latticework like a snake going down a drainpipe.

I followed her up the diagonal girder in three long bounds, using two amber constructs to steady myself against the wet steel while the river slid past below us like a sheet of black glass. On the far bank, the west side’s industrial district squatted in the shadow of the downtown skyline, a maze of concrete tilt-up warehouses and rail sidings where the city kept all the ugly logistics that made the pretty glass towers work.

The Transit cleared the bridge first and swerved around the garbage truck the second the road widened into Waterfront Boulevard.

And that was where we ran out of architecture.

Waterfront Boulevard was four lanes of cracked asphalt lined with gravel marshalling yards and chain-link fences topped with razor wire, which put the nearest roofline a quarter mile back from the street. Lamia and I hit the last iron pillar of the bridge truss together and dropped twenty feet onto the roof of a shuttered weigh station at the edge of the marshalling yard, just as the traffic light a hundred yards up the boulevard turned red.

The white Transit didn’t stop. It blew straight through the intersection before the cross-traffic could pull out, hooked a hard right around a stack of forty-foot Maersk shipping containers, and vanished into the industrial maze behind them.

Lamia slid to a halt at the edge of the weigh station roof, and only stopped because she grabbed the rusted pole of a dead floodlight and let her momentum swing her around it twice. She peeled the domino mask off and stuffed it into a belt pouch, panting hard, a sheen of sweat making the pale skin of her collarbones shine in the grey pre-dawn light.

"Well, shit," she said, leaning way out over the edge to squint into the fog between the container stacks. "He ran the red. Who runs a red in a stolen van full of baby teeth? That’s like rule one of driving dirty, you don’t break two laws at the same time! Every heist movie says that!"

"Real criminals don’t watch heist movies, Lami. They just have a schedule to keep," I said, stepping up beside her on the gravel ledge. "Hang on. Don’t move."