Static Heat (Neon Combustion #2)

Prologue

Wren

The thing about your own engagement party is that nobody notices when you leave it.

That's the part the romance feeds never tell you.

They sell you the dress and the toast and the ring catching the light, but they leave out the way a room full of people celebrating your future can make you feel like the one chair nobody's sitting in.

I stood at the edge of the Static Kings' clubhouse with a glass of something pink and untouched in my hand, and I watched my father laugh too loud at a joke I couldn't hear, and I thought, very clearly, I could climb out the window right now and it would take them an hour.

So I did.

Not the window, exactly. The maintenance ladder off the back of the loading dock, the one that runs up the spine of the old comms tower behind the clubhouse.

I'd been climbing it since I was nine. Back then it was to hide from my brothers.

Tonight it was to hide from a hundred people who all wanted to shake my hand and tell me how happy I must be.

The Sprawl spread out below me as I climbed, all neon and rust and the low electric hum that never stops in Kessler. Up here the noise of the party thinned to nothing. Up here it was just the wind and the relays clicking and the great glowing wound of the city breathing under me.

I got to the platform near the top, the little grated landing where the signal dishes huddle together like cold pigeons, and that's where I found the problem with my perfect escape.

Someone else was already there.

He was crouched over an open relay box, a coil of cable looped around one shoulder, the light from his work-lamp turning the side of his face gold. He didn't hear me at first. I had a full three seconds to decide whether to back down the ladder and pretend I'd never come up.

I didn't.

"You're in my spot," I said.

He didn't startle. That was the first thing I noticed about him — that he turned slow, unbothered, like a man who'd been interrupted in worse places by worse people. He looked at me, then at the glass still in my hand, then at the dress.

"Didn't realize the tower took reservations," he said.

"It's not a reservation. It's a tradition. I've been hiding up here since before you knew it existed."

"I've been fixing this relay since before you could climb." He turned back to the box. "So I guess we both have history."

I should have left. I knew the rules of my own life well enough to know that a stranger on a tower at midnight is a complication, and that I had exactly one complication too many already, the one with the ring.

But there was something about the easy way he ignored me, like I was weather and not the daughter of the most dangerous man in the district, that pulled me three steps closer instead of three steps back.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked.

"Corrosion on the primary feed. Somebody let it rot." He tugged a cable free. "Story of this whole city."

"Poetic. For a maintenance guy."

He glanced up at me, and I caught the flash of something in his face — amusement, maybe, or warning. "Who says I'm maintenance?"

"You've got a cable on your shoulder and your hands in a relay box at midnight. Either you fix grids for a living or this is the world's most boring mugging."

"Could be a hobby."

"Nobody's hobby is fixing other people's towers for free."

"You'd be surprised what people do for free at midnight when they can't sleep." He stripped a wire with his teeth, which should not have been as distracting as it was. "What's your excuse? You're not exactly dressed for tower maintenance."

I looked down at the dress, the ridiculous expensive dress, and felt the whole weight of the party press back in on me. "I'm escaping something."

"A party."

"How'd you know?"

"You're holding a drink you haven't touched and you climbed forty feet of ladder to get away from whatever it's celebrating." He didn't look up. "That's not a party you wanted to be at. That's a sentence somebody read out loud and called a party."

I didn't answer. He'd gotten closer to the truth in ten seconds than anyone downstairs had in three hours, and I wasn't ready for a stranger on a tower to be the most perceptive person I'd talk to all night.

That should have been my second clue. I missed it, because the wind shifted right then and the work-lamp caught the patch on his jacket, the one stitched over his heart, and I stopped breathing for an entirely different reason.

I knew that patch. Everyone in my world knew that patch. A skull with a halo of chrome thorns, the rocker beneath it spelling out the name I'd been taught to spit when I said it.

Chrome Apostles.

The one club my father had forbidden me to so much as look at. The club we'd been at the edge of war with my whole life. The enemy, in every story I'd ever been told around every table I'd ever sat at.

He watched me see it. He watched me put it together. And the thing he did then was the thing that ruined me, though I didn't know yet how completely — he didn't reach for a weapon, didn't tense, didn't run.

He just smiled, a little crooked, like he'd been caught doing something more embarrassing than being my enemy.

"Now you're thinking," he said. "Took you long enough."

"You should go," I told him. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "If anyone down there comes up here and sees that patch, they will throw you off this tower and call it an accident."

"Then it's lucky," he said, gathering his cable, slow and deliberate, "that you're not going to tell anyone."

"And why wouldn't I?"

He stood. He was taller than the work-lamp had made him look, and the wind moved his hair, and the neon turned his eyes a color I didn't have a name for. He looked at me the way no one at that party had looked at me all night — like I was a person and not a transaction.

"Because," he said, "you climbed up here to get away from all of them. And I'm the only person in this whole city who has no idea who you're supposed to be."

That landed somewhere it had no right to land.

"You don't know who I am," I said.

"No." He slung the cable. "And you don't know who I am either. Far as I can tell, that makes us the only two honest people in Kessler tonight."

He should have left then. I should have let him. Instead I heard myself ask the stupidest question of my entire life.

"What's your name?"

And he paused at the top of the ladder, one boot already over the edge, and the smile came back, the crooked one, the dangerous one.

"Memorize my face instead," he said. "Names are how they find you."

Then he was gone, down into the dark and the hum, and I stood alone on my tower in my engagement dress with my untouched pink drink, and I did the one thing he'd told me to do and the one thing I should never have done.

I memorized his face.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself I'd never see him again, that the Sprawl was eight million people deep and the odds were impossible, that by morning he'd be a story I didn't even tell Pixie.

I told myself a lot of things on the climb back down.

Not one of them turned out to be true.