Chapter 21- Hiding(1)/Realisation

Chapter 21: 21- Hiding(1)/Realisation

The boiler station under the old tannery was a coffin made of iron and damp brick, smelling like an old person’s home.

There were no beds, just a raised steel grating that kept them out of the two inches of stagnant water covering the floor, and a single, massive cast-iron boiler that had gone cold long ago..

Valera slid the heavy deadbolt into place, wedged a thick iron bar under the handle for good measure, and finally let the heavy burlap sack slide off her shoulder. It hit the grating with a dull clatter.

Sol didn’t sit down immediately. He walked over to the trickle of water leaking from a cracked lead pipe in the corner, cupped his hands, and drank until his throat stopped burning from the phantom taste of his own blood.

Then he filled his hands again and washed the dried, crusty black sludge off his chest and stomach.

Across the small room, Valera dropped the dirty canvas cloak onto the grating.

She sat down on an overturned bucket, her movements stiff and jerky. She didn’t take off the Night-iron gauntlet, instead, she sat there staring at the dark, matte-black metal covering her forearms, flexing her fingers open and closed.

Clink.

"He used us," Valera said. Her voice was flat, echoing slightly off the hollow belly of the dead boiler.

"Of course he did," Sol said, scrubbing at the 7 edged star-shaped scar on his gut.

The new skin was thick and numb, like shoe leather, though the muscles underneath felt tighter than steel cables. "He’s a Slum King. You told me before that nobody down here does anything out of kindness."

"No, Sol, listen to me," Valera looked up, her white-blue eyes catching the faint, ambient orange glow of his eyes.

"He didn’t just pull back early because of a strike team.

Think about the layout. Think about what we left behind."

Sol paused, water dripping from his chin. He turned toward her, leaning his bare back against the cold iron of the boiler. "We left four dead guards and Kael."

"We left four dead guards with their throats melted" Valera corrected sharply. "And we left Captain Kael shattered into ten thousand pieces of pure, un-harvestable ice right in front of a vault door that had its Lock surgically frozen and melted."

The silence in the boiler room suddenly felt very small.

"Voss didn’t take a single prisoner at the front gates," Valera continued, her voice rising slightly as the noble training in her head connected the political dots. "He didn’t breach the inner sanctum. He made a lot of noise in the mud, stole a few pigs, and ran away after fourteen minutes. When the Vane elders walk into that Harvest House tomorrow morning, what do you think they’re going to see?"

Sol’s jaw tightened. "They’re going to see a slum gang that got scared off at the door."

"And in the basement, they’re going to see an assassination," Valera said bitterly. "Voss didn’t need us to open that lock, Sol. He’s a Level 1 Peak! If he wanted the crystals, he wouldn’t care about the kinetic triggers shattering, he could have smashed that door off its hinges with his warhammer in three swings once Kael was dead. He sent us down the blood pipe alone so our signatures would be the only ones in that room."

Sol looked down at the burlap sack of eighteen pure, inner-city crystals sitting on the grating.

"He didn’t pay us sixty percent because he liked our guts," Sol said slowly, the realization settling into his chest like cold lead. "He paid us sixty percent so we’d leave our signatures all over his crime scene. While he takes his forty percent of untraceable raw shards and disappears into the deep tunnels, the House of Vane is going to spend every coin and every hound they have hunting the man who melts steel and the girl with the ice bloodline."

"We aren’t partners," Valera whispered, resting her elbows on her knees and burying her face in her Night-iron gauntlets. "We’re the lightning rod. He threw us at a Noble House so they wouldn’t bother chasing him."

Sol stood by the boiler for a long minute, listening to the steady drip-drop of the lead pipe.

He expected to feel angry. A week ago, in the cellar with Rix’s coat on the floor, his core would have spiked so hard his nose would have bled.

He would have wanted to take his sword, march back up to Purgatory, and drive five inches of superheated silver through Voss’s good eye.

Instead, he walked over to the burlap sack, untied it, and pulled out two of the refined inner-city crystals.

They were warm to the touch compared to the raw ones, smooth, cut into neat octagons, completely free of the writhing, sickly purple veins of beast taint.

Sol walked over to Valera and held one out in front of her face.

Valera lowered her hands, looking at the glowing octagon, then up at his scarred chest. "Aren’t you furious?"

"Why?" Sol asked, sitting down on the steel grating right in front of her, crossing his legs. "Did you think the House of Vane was going to let us go after we killed the kid with the twin swords? Or after I butchered Anvil on the slaughter-line?"

"That was local," Valera argued, though she took the crystal from his hand, her gauntlet clicking against the stone. "An Overseer and a few patrol boys. The outer-ring branches handle that themselves. Captain Kael belonged to the main branch. And my frost... Kael recognized it before he died. If any residual mist lingered on those shards of ice, the Vane elders will know a Fyrn survived."

"Good," Sol said.

Valera stared at him like he had lost his mind. "Good? Sol, the main branch has Level 2s. Men and women who have shed their mortal blood entirely for silver ichor. They don’t need weapons, they can freeze an entire city block just by breathing. If they come down into the slums.."

"They won’t come down into the slums," Sol interrupted calmly.