Chapter 728 | You Don’t Lie to Me

Chapter 728: 728 | You Don’t Lie to Me

"No," I said, and shifted so my shoulder blocked the wind off the river from hitting her wet back. "Kask is just the Eastside franchise. Whoever’s inside that building is buying from at least two other districts."

She let her chin drop onto her knees. Her vertical pupils had narrowed to black sewing needles against the toxic green. A raindrop hit the bridge of her nose and rolled down to the corner of her mouth, right where the tip of her left fang rested on her lower lip without biting.

"How many boxes do you think are in there right now?"

"More than two. And they’re not keeping them in the front bays. That’s a cold storage plant. The main freezer rooms are in the middle of the blockhouse, where there aren’t any exterior walls."

Her fingers dug into the neoprene over her shins hard enough to leave white dents in the rubber. Under the emerald scales the muscles in her thighs bunched and coiled, that constrictor strength she used to bend steel pipe and choke out corporate security guards, sitting there with nowhere to go and nobody to crush. Without the Faceless Veil on, the System probably would have popped a notification about her emotional state sliding into some new category. It stayed smartly quiet in the corner of my vision instead, and left the two of us alone with the smell of dead fish and ammonia blowing across the tracks.

"My little cousin had a fever when his scales came in," she said to the brick between her boots. "Danny. He was seven. My aunt didn’t have the forty bucks for the clinic co-pay, this was before Dralun got the free list set up with Dr. Espinoza, so she kept him in the bathtub with bags of frozen peas from the bodega for two days until the skin on his back stopped splitting. He shed a whole bucket of little green plates that first year. We threw them down the incinerator chute behind the building, because my uncle said if you leave Branded shedding in the regular trash, the stray dogs eat it and get sick."

She turned her head on her knees and looked up at the smooth white oval of my mask.

"They’re making something out of it, aren’t they?" she asked. "Out of the kids."

I thought about the twelve-foot white thing in the middle of the Crucible plaza, with six uneven horns coming out of its skull and black bands wrapped around joints that bent the wrong way. I thought about Cole Dravid flying thirty feet through the air with his ribs caved in, and Imara Steele’s right arm cooked black from wrist to elbow. I thought about the thirty-one seconds of leaked phone footage that had half the country calling me a hero while I lay in a hospital bed with my ribs knitting back together like a lizard’s tail.

"Yeah," I said. "They’re making something."

Lamia didn’t flinch, and she didn’t make a joke to cover the silence. She nodded once, slowly, like the answer had been sitting in her stomach since last night on the water tower and she’d only needed somebody who didn’t lie to her to say it out loud.

She uncoiled her legs and stood on the wet tar paper, her boots silent this time. She had the frictionless field dialed in to the millimeter, the soles of her shoes held a hair above the grit so she wouldn’t slip or make a sound. She reached up and snapped the aviator goggles down over her eyes. Then she gave the plunging neckline of her wetsuit one hard yank. It had nothing to do with showing off. She wanted the zipper not to catch if she had to move fast.

"Okay," she said from the edge of the parapet, chin up, shoulders squared under the wet faux leather. Her voice had dropped back into the sultry Lamia register, the one she thought made her sound like a femme fatale instead of a nervous nineteen-year-old. "What do we do now?"

I looked up at her. Five feet five inches of amateur Eastside cat burglar in safety-pinned boots, standing between me and a sky turning the color of dirty dishwater over the port cranes. She had a frictionless Aspect that could make seven security guards knock each other out by accident and a pair of thighs that could crush steel pipe. She had zero formal stealth training. And she was staring at me like I was about to deliver the briefing for a spy thriller, when the next step was the most boring one in this entire operation.

For a guy who’d woken up in this world six months ago planning to coast through college on a dead hero’s trust fund, unless a gacha machine forced him to grab somebody’s ass, I was collecting an alarming number of ride-or-die women willing to commit felonies before breakfast on my say-so. The System had opinions about the trend. I hadn’t asked what they were, because I already knew I wouldn’t like the answer.

"Now," I said, pushing up off my knees and patting the pocket where my phone sat with a dozen high-res photos and a forty-second video locked behind an encrypted screen, "we get off this roof before the seven o’clock yard crew shows up with the forklifts. Then we go back across the river, give the pictures and the address to Dralun, and let the dragon make the call."

Lamia stared at me through the tinted plastic of her goggles for two full seconds. Her mouth dropped open an inch as the grim vigilante resolve ran face-first into a brick wall.

"We’re telling on them?" Her voice jumped half an octave, straight back into her real register, and she threw both hands out to the sides. "Lukas, I am standing here in the rain in my good boots! We just tracked a secret bone-smuggling van across a bridge like we’re in a movie, and your big plan is to go home and tell my dad?!"