Chapter 3
Wren
The note came folded inside my solder order three days later.
I don't know how he did it. I've thought about it a lot — whether he bribed the vendor, whether he followed the supply chain backward, whether he just knew I'd come back to that stall because it was the only one that carried the flux I liked. I never asked. Some magic you don't poke at.
The note said one thing, in handwriting like a man who learned to write on engine manifolds: Garden. The dish that points at nothing. After dark.
I knew the dish he meant. Everyone who'd ever climbed the towers knew it — a dead satellite dish the size of a swimming pool, bolted to the roof of a derelict broadcast station, angled at a patch of empty sky that hadn't held a satellite in twenty years.
Kids dared each other to climb into it. It pointed at nothing, listened to nothing, and over the years somebody had filled the great chrome bowl of it with soil and seedlings, and now it was a garden, the most pointless and beautiful thing in the whole district.
Neutral ground, technically. Nobody's territory because it was nobody's anything.
I told myself I went to tell him to stop. To end it. To explain, in small words, that we were not a door, we were a wall, and walls don't get notes.
I climbed up into the great chrome bowl after dark and he was already there, sitting in the dirt among the bean rows like he'd grown there, and the whole speech evaporated out of my head.
"You came," he said.
"To tell you to stop."
"Sit down and tell me to stop, then." He patted the soil beside him. "I'll listen better sitting."
I sat. The bowl of the dish curved up around us on all sides, chrome gone soft with moss, and it held the garden like two cupped hands, and the neon glow of the Sprawl pooled in the bottom with us.
It was, I realized, the only place I'd ever been in the whole city where you couldn't see the city.
Just sky above and green below and the two of us in the dish that pointed at nothing.
"Who made this?" I asked, the speech still not happening.
"Nobody knows. It was here when I found it." He rolled a bean pod between his fingers. "I added the tomatoes. They're terrible. Worst tomatoes in the Sprawl. I'm very proud of them."
"You garden."
"Don't tell anyone. Enforcer with a vegetable patch, I'd never work again." He said it light, but I caught the real thing underneath. "It's quiet up here. I needed somewhere quiet. The job doesn't come with much of that."
And that was how it started, the real thing, the dangerous thing. Not with a kiss. With tomatoes.
We talked. That's all we did that first night, and it was somehow more intimate than anything I'd done with anyone — we just talked, in the dish that pointed at nothing, while the beans grew and the city glowed somewhere we couldn't see it.
He told me he'd grown up three blocks from me and we'd probably passed each other a hundred times as kids, on opposite sides of a line drawn before either of us was born.
I told him about the tower, about climbing it since I was nine, about how the engagement felt like a door closing in a house that already had too few doors.
He didn't tell me to feel differently. He just listened, the way nobody in my life listened, like my words were information and not a problem to be managed.
"They had you wrong, too," I said, at some point. "My people. The stories. Dex Aldermore, the enforcer. The thing they say to scare new prospects."
"Oh, I'm sure they do."
"You're supposed to be a monster."
"I am, a little." He didn't flinch from it. "On the clock. You don't get to be the thing that keeps a club alive in this city by being gentle about it. But—" He gestured at the beans, the dirt, the dish. "A man's allowed to be two things. Most of us are."
"And which one's the real one?"
He thought about that longer than I expected. The neon caught his face the way it had on the tower, and I memorized it again, because apparently that was just a thing I did now.
"The one up here," he said finally. "The other one's the rent I pay to keep this one alive."
"That's a depressing lease."
"Most leases are." He pulled a weed, examined it, flicked it over the rim of the dish. "You want to hear the depressing part or the funny part?"
"There's a funny part?"
"There's always a funny part. That's the only rule I actually believe in.
" He sat back on his hands. "Funny part is, the brothers think I come up here to do recon.
Strategic high ground, eyes on Kings' territory, very tactical.
I let them think it. I've got a whole fake intel report I update.
'Subject observed watering tomatoes. Threat level: low. '"
"You write reports about your own gardening."
"I write fake reports about my own gardening. There's a dignity to it." He grinned. "Last week I wrote 'subject appears to be losing a war of attrition against aphids.' My president initialed it. Filed it. It's in a drawer somewhere. Official Apostle record of my aphid problem."
I laughed, the real one, the one that filled the chrome bowl, and he watched me do it with the look he always got, the one I had no defense against.
"See, that," he said. "That's the real one.
The other guy, the enforcer, he doesn't get to hear that sound.
Nobody down there does. Just up here. Just you.
" He shook his head slowly. "Which is a problem, because I've started doing the math on how many days it is until you climb back up, and that is not a thing enforcers are supposed to do.
We're supposed to be unbothered. I am extremely bothered. "
"By aphids."
"By you. The aphids I can handle." He held my eyes a beat too long. "You're the infestation I can't get rid of, Calloway. And the worst part is I keep leaving the gate open."
I came back the next week. And the one after that.
I'd like to tell you I fought it, but the truth is I started counting days, started getting irritable on the wrong side of them, started lying to Pixie with a fluency that frightened me.
Solder run. Parts run. Air run. The clubhouse thought I was finally taking an interest in the grid.
My father thought I was sulking my way toward accepting Vance.
Nobody thought I was climbing into a dead satellite dish to argue about tomatoes with the enemy, because that was insane, and I was the spoiled princess, and spoiled princesses don't do insane things.
We never touched. That's the part I want understood. For weeks it was only talk, only the garden, only the slow terrible work of learning that the enemy had a sense of humor and a green thumb and a wound where his old life used to be that looked an awful lot like mine.
"You laugh different up here," he told me once.
"Different how?"
"Down there you laugh like you're checking who's watching. Up here you just—" He shrugged. "You just laugh. It's a good sound. The city doesn't have enough of it."
"That's the worst line I've ever heard."
"It's not a line. Lines are for people I'm trying to fool." He pulled a terrible tomato off the vine and handed it to me. "I'm not trying to fool you. That's the whole problem. I'd have an easier time if I were."
I turned the tomato over in my hand. "Can I tell you something I've never told anyone?"
"That's the only kind of thing worth telling up here."
"When I was a kid, I used to think the tower talked to me.
" I felt stupid saying it, and said it anyway, which was the whole magic of the place.
"The relays click at night. Different patterns when the weather changes.
I made up a whole language for it. Decided the tower was the only one in the family who'd tell me the truth.
" I shrugged. "Then I grew up and learned it was just corrosion and current.
Nothing was talking. It was always just static. "
He was quiet a moment. "And then a guy turned up fixing the static."
"Don't," I said. "Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it a thing. It's already a thing. I'm just standing near the thing." But his voice had gone soft. "For what it's worth — the tower wasn't lying to you. Static's just a signal nobody's decoded yet. You were closer than the grown-ups. You usually are."
"That's definitely a line."
"That one's a little bit a line," he admitted. "Sixty-forty. But the math underneath it's true."
That was the night I understood I was in trouble.
Because it had gone past forbidden being sweet. Forbidden being sweet, I could have survived — it's just sugar, it burns off. This was the other thing. This was the dangerous thing the stories never warn you about, because the stories are too busy warning you about the danger you can see.
It had gotten real.
I wasn't sneaking out to do something stupid with a beautiful enemy.
I was sneaking out to be the actual version of myself with the only person who'd ever met her.
And that — not the patch, not the war, not the body my friend's cousin filled in the ground — that was the thing that was going to ruin everything.
You can give up sugar. I've done it.
You can't give up the only place you're real.
"I have to go," I said, that night, the terrible tomato still sour on my tongue.
"I know."
"Dex." I stood, brushing soil off my legs, and made myself say it, because one of us had to be honest and he'd already volunteered for the job too many times. "This can't keep happening."
"I know that too."
"Then tell me to stop coming."
He looked up at me from the dirt, among his terrible tomatoes, in the dish that pointed at nothing, and he didn't say it. He just held my eyes, and the not-saying was louder than anything either of us could have said out loud.
"That's what I thought," I said.
I climbed down out of the garden, back into the city that could see me again, and I came back the next week anyway.
Of course I did.
I'd run out of places to be real. He was the only one left.