Prologue #2
And then a guard called my name and walked me to a room, and there was a man at a steel table in a leather cut I didn't recognize, big, scarred, still in a way that made the air around him go quiet.
He had my file open in front of him. He'd clearly read all of it.
He looked up at me with eyes flat as river stones and he didn't ask if I did it and he didn't tell me he believed in me and he didn't say a single one of the things the social workers said.
He just looked at me for a long moment, the way you look at an engine you're deciding whether to fix or scrap, and then he said two sentences that rerouted my whole life.
Get up. You're done wasting yourself.
I didn't know him. I found out later he'd known my father, years back, before my father became weather — that there was a debt or a grief or some old tangle of obligation between them that I never got the full shape of, and that Theo had decided, on the strength of it, to spend his own name on a kid he'd never met.
He got Marsh replaced with a real lawyer.
He stood up in front of a judge and said words about character that no one had ever said about me.
He got the felony pled down to something survivable, and then he did the thing nobody does — he didn't disappear after.
He showed up at the release door with a duffel bag of clothes that fit and an offer that wasn't really an offer.
You prospect for us. You earn it. You waste this too, that's on you.
But you don't get to waste it on my watch without me watching.
That's who Freya's brother is. That's the man whose one line I'm forbidden to cross.
He reached into the worst room of my life and pulled me out by the collar, and the only thing he ever asked in return was that I leave his sister alone, and I said yes, of course I said yes, it was the easiest promise I'd ever make.
I haven't drawn in seven years.
Freya finishes the rigging. She sits back, rolls her shoulders, snaps off one glove and then the other, and surveys her work with the cold satisfaction of someone who already knew it would be perfect and was only confirming it.
Briggs cranes his neck toward the mirror and makes a sound like a man seeing his own soul.
"Don't cry on it," Freya says. "It's still healing."
"I'm not crying."
"You're absolutely crying. Hollis, get him a tissue before he salts up my floor."
The room laughs. She doesn't. She's already cleaning down her station, wiping the armrest, capping the ink, moving through the ritual with hands that never hurry and never stop.
I watch the way she handles each tool like it's an extension of her arm.
I watch the line of her throat when she tips her head to crack her neck.
I watch the small frown of concentration she doesn't know she makes, the one that lives between her eyebrows, and I think: I would give a year of my life to know what she's thinking when she makes that face.
Which is exactly the kind of thought that gets a prospect thrown out on his ear.
I drop my eyes to the wrench. I am cleaning the tools.
I am a prospect who is cleaning the tools, and I want my patch more than I want air, and the woman across the room is a locked door with my brother's name on it, and I know — I know — what happens to men who try doors that aren't theirs to open.
So I clean the tools.
I clean them for another ten minutes. I clean them until they're cleaner than they've been since the club bought them. I clean them because if I stop, I'll look up, and if I look up, I'm finished.
I look up.
She's watching me.
It lasts a half-second, maybe less. She's at her station, packing her case, and somewhere in the middle of folding a cloth her gaze cuts across the room and lands on me, direct and unhurried, the way you'd look at a piece you were deciding whether to keep working on.
Not startled. Not flustered. Just — assessing.
One dark eyebrow rises a fraction of an inch, and the expression on her face says everything and nothing all at once.
It says I see you. It says I've seen you for three weeks. It says and?
My whole body goes hot and stupid. I do the only thing my pride allows. I look away.
I count to three. I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself she was looking at the toolbox behind me, or the door, or the clock. I tell myself a thousand things in the space between three heartbeats, and not one of them holds.
I look back.
She's already working again — head down, hands moving, packing the last of her ink into the case with that same unhurried precision.
For a second I think I really did imagine the whole thing.
And then I see it. The corner of her mouth.
The ghost of a smile, there and gone, the kind you'd miss if you weren't paying attention with everything you had.
She noticed me look away.
And she noticed me look back.
She zips the case shut, slings it over her shoulder, says her goodbyes to the room in a voice that's all warmth for them and gives nothing to me, and walks out through the big bay doors into the orange wreckage of a coastal sunset.
The doors swing. The light catches her for one frame, edges her in gold, and then she's gone, and the compound feels suddenly enormous and underlit and full of men I'm supposed to be earning my way among.
Briggs comes over while I'm still sitting there, admiring his own shoulder in every reflective surface he passes. "You see this?" he says, twisting to show me the gulls. "You see what she did with the water? It just — turns into birds. How does a person do that?"
"Room to breathe," I say, without thinking, and then have no idea where the words came from.
Briggs squints at me. "What?"
"Nothing. It's good work. You should buy her dinner or something. As a thank-you."
"She doesn't let anybody buy her anything.
" Briggs says it with the particular awe the whole club has for her, the awe you'd have for weather, for a thing too large to court.
"Tried once. Whole table tried once. She paid for her own and left before anybody could argue.
Theo's sister." He says the title like it explains the entire universe, which, around here, it does.
"Untouchable. Off a different shelf than the rest of us.
" He claps me on the shoulder, the way they all do, the way that says you're almost one of us, kid, almost. "Anyway.
Thanks for cleaning the tools. Place looks good. "
He wanders off. I sit on the crate with a clean wrench in my dead hand and a phrase in my mouth I didn't know I still owned — room to breathe — and I make myself a promise, the kind you make at twenty-four when you still believe promises are things you can keep.
I'm going to earn my patch. I'm going to leave the wrong side of Port Calloway so far behind me that the kid on the cell wall is somebody else's story. And I am not — I am not — going to ruin it for the one thing I can't have.
It's a good promise. I mean every word.
I keep it for almost no time at all.
Because here's what I don't know yet, sitting on that crate in the dying light, twenty-four years old and full of resolve: that in two weeks I'll find a reason to walk into a tattoo shop on the Anchor Bay boardwalk called Black Tide Ink, and I'll tell myself it's because I want to ask about her process, and that'll be a lie I half believe.
That she'll let me watch her work, and ask me questions I don't expect, and somewhere in the middle of those questions she'll find the kid with the pencil and the cell wall and drag him back into the light by the collar.
That I'll start drawing again. That a sketchbook will fall open on the wrong page at the wrong time and rearrange the geography of my entire chest. That the space between a teacher and a student can shrink one careful inch at a time until there's no space left at all.
I don't know any of it.
I just know the doors are still swinging, and the light is gone, and somewhere out on the boardwalk a woman with steady hands is driving home through the dusk, and the count I've kept for four months and eleven days has stopped mattering, because I've started keeping a different one.
Days since I last saw Freya Katsaros: zero.
I pick up the next tool. I work the rag along it, slow, the way I work everything, and I think about the ghost of that smile, there and gone, the one you'd miss if you weren't paying attention with everything you had.
I've spent my whole life paying attention with everything I had — to exits, to threats, to the shift in a man's shoulders right before he swings.
It's the one skill the streets gave me that I'm not ashamed of.
And now I've got nothing to point it at but her, and it's already too late to stop, and somewhere underneath the promise I just made to myself there's a quieter voice that's been waiting seven years to say the thing it says now, low and certain, in the empty bay with the doors still swinging:
You're going to draw again.
Not you should. Not you might. You're going to. Like it's already decided. Like the cell-wall kid heard her ask whether the gulls happened or whether they were drawn, and woke all the way up, and is already reaching for a pencil I haven't bought yet.
I tell the voice to shut up. I've got a patch to earn and a promise to keep and a line I swore to a man I owe everything that I am not going to cross.
The voice doesn't shut up. It never does, after that night. It just gets quieter and more certain, the way the truest things do.
I am very, very good at keeping my head down.
I have no idea I'm about to be terrible at it.