Chapter 4
Wren
Vance proposed a date for the wedding over dinner, and I knocked my wine into his lap.
It wasn't entirely an accident. I'd like to claim it was entirely an accident, but Pixie was watching from across the room and she told me later that my hand made what she called "an executive decision," and I trust Pixie's read on my hands more than my own.
"It's fine," Vance said, blotting at himself with a napkin, smiling the way he always smiled, like a man who'd practiced it in a mirror. "It's fine, it's just a suit."
That was the worst part of Vance. He was never anything but pleasant. You can't even hate a man for being pleasant. It's like trying to get angry at a doorway.
"Spring," he went on, as if the wine had never happened. "Briggs and I think spring. The water tables are stable, the season's good for the alliance optics. People like a spring wedding." He looked at me with those mild, agreeable eyes. "Don't they?"
"People love a spring wedding," I said. "It's all anyone talks about. The optics."
"Exactly." He missed it completely. That was his gift.
My father, at the head of the table, did not miss it.
My father missed very little. He watched me over the rim of his glass, and I watched him watch me, and Pixie watched both of us, and the whole dinner was four people pretending to eat while two separate silent conversations happened in the air above the bread.
Later, in the corridor, my father caught my arm.
"What's wrong with you lately," he said. Not unkind. Searching.
"Nothing. I'm getting married in the spring. I'm thrilled. Can't you tell? This is my thrilled face."
"That's the problem. I can't tell." He let go of my arm but stayed close, lowered his voice. "You used to be easy to read. Pixie says it too. Says you've got a face on these days that she can't get behind. That's new, Wren. That's not you."
The cold went all the way down. Because if Pixie had said it to him — Pixie, who'd promised me she wouldn't say anything to anybody — then Pixie was worried enough to break a promise, and a worried Pixie was a Pixie who'd eventually start following me.
"Maybe I'm just growing up," I said. "Learning to keep things to myself. You're always telling me to."
He studied me a moment longer. Then something in him decided to let it go, the way he always eventually let me go, both hands opening just enough.
"Spring," he said. "Make your peace with it."
I made my peace with nothing.
What I did instead was find Pixie in the parts cage and let her read my face for ninety straight seconds while I pretended to organize fuses.
"You're sorting those by color," she said. "We sort by amperage. You know we sort by amperage."
"I'm reorganizing. New system."
"The new system is 'pretty.'" She took the fuses out of my hands.
"Talk. You've had the face for a month. It's getting worse.
Last week it was a 'thinking about something' face.
Now it's a 'planning something' face, and your planning face scares me, because the last time you had it we both got grounded for a month. "
"That was twelve years ago."
"Trauma doesn't have a statute of limitations, Wren.
" She hopped up on the bench. "Is it the wedding?
Because if it's the wedding, I have a list of seventeen ways to delay a wedding, ranging from 'mild food poisoning' to 'small controlled fire,' and I've been refining it since the engagement party out of pure spite. "
"It's not—" I stopped. "A small controlled fire."
"Controlled. I'm not a monster. Symbolic flames.
" She studied me. "But it's not the wedding.
The wedding face is annoyed. This is the other face.
This is the face you'd make if you wanted something you weren't allowed to want.
" Her voice dropped. "And I really, really hope I'm reading that one wrong. "
"You're reading it wrong," I said.
She held my eyes. "I always know when you're lying."
"Then you know I'm telling you the truth. You're reading it wrong."
It was the cleanest lie I'd ever told her, and the worst, because it worked precisely because it was so unlike me — and I watched her decide to believe it against her own instincts because the alternative was too frightening to hold.
"Okay," she said quietly, and I knew she didn't mean it.
I made it to the garden two nights later, and I was so wrung out from the dinner and the corridor and the constant exhausting labor of being unreadable that I climbed into the dish and just sat down in the dirt and put my face in my hands.
"Hey." Dex's voice, careful. "Hey. What happened."
"They picked a date."
He went still.
"Spring," I said into my hands. "It's good for the optics. People like a spring wedding." I laughed, and it came out wrong, more like the other thing. "I knocked wine in his lap. It's the most I've ever felt about him."
He didn't say anything for a moment. Then I heard him move, and felt him sit down in the dirt in front of me, close, and his hands came up and gently pulled mine away from my face so he could see it.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked at him.
"You don't have to marry him."
"That's not how my world works."
"Then your world's broken and somebody should say so.
" His hands were still around mine, rough and warm.
"You're not a water right, Wren. You're not optics.
You're a person who climbs towers and hides enemies behind food carts and grows nothing but argues about tomatoes she didn't even plant.
You don't get traded for a stable season. "
"You sound like a man who's never met an obligation."
"I'm an enforcer for an outlaw motorcycle club. I'm made of obligations." His thumb moved over my knuckles, absent, like he didn't know he was doing it. "I know exactly what it costs to walk away from one. I'm just telling you the cost is sometimes worth it. That's all. That's the whole heresy."
"Easy for you to say. Nobody's marrying you off for water rights."
"No. They tried to marry me off for peace once.
Years back." He said it lightly but his jaw had tightened.
"There was a girl in an allied crew. Good match on paper.
Sealed an arrangement, kept everybody calm.
My president sat me down, told me it was for the good of the club, told me I'd learn to want it. "
I went still. "What happened?"
"I told him I'd die for the club a hundred times before I'd lie to a woman's face for it for fifty years.
" He shrugged. "The match fell through. The crew took it as an insult.
Some of the bad blood we're still living in started right there.
So when I tell you the cost of walking away is worth it — I'm not guessing.
I paid it. I'd pay it again. And I'd rather pay it again with you than watch you pay the other kind for the rest of your life. "
"You never told me that."
"You never asked the right night." His thumb kept moving over my knuckles. "Everybody in your life sells you the wedding. I'm the one guy who's seen the inside of the cake. It's not romance in there, Wren. It's just arithmetic with a band playing."
"That's the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."
"And yet." He looked at our hands. "You haven't pulled away."
I hadn't. I should have pulled my hands back.
The not-touching had been the one rule we'd kept, the thin civilized line that let me tell myself this was just talking, just two real people in a fake garden.
His thumb on my knuckles was the line dissolving, and I felt it dissolve, and I didn't pull away.
"You crossed into Kings' territory to leave a note in my solder," I said. "Didn't you."
He went a little still again. "Maybe."
"That's how you got it into the order. You didn't bribe the vendor. You went to the supply depot. On my ground. Where if anyone had seen you—"
"Nobody saw me."
"You could have died, Dex. For a note."
"I'm very good at not dying. It's most of my résumé." But the joke was thin, and he knew it, and he let it drop. "Yeah. I crossed over. I'd do it again. I have done it again — you think the note's the only time I've been on your side of the line these last few weeks?"
I stared at him.
"I watch the tower sometimes," he admitted, quiet, like a confession in a place built for confessions.
"From the next roof over. When I can't get a note to you and I just want to know you got home okay.
I know it's insane. I know exactly how insane it is.
I've explained it to myself a hundred times and the explanation never holds.
" He looked at our joined hands. "Spoiled princess in a tower.
That was the picture. And now I'm the idiot on the next roof making sure she got up the ladder safe.
The Apostles would put me in the canal if they knew. "
"The Kings would help them," I whispered.
"They would. It'd be the most cooperative those two clubs have been in years. We could broker the truce ourselves, posthumously."
I laughed — the real one, the unguarded one, even there, even then — and he watched me do it with an expression that I had no defense against, and the four feet of nowhere we'd been keeping between us for weeks finally, quietly, closed.
We didn't kiss. I want that on the record too, because it matters that we didn't, that night.
We just stopped pretending there was a wall, and we sat in the dirt in the dish that pointed at nothing with our hands tangled together and our foreheads almost touching, breathing the same small pocket of air, and it was more than any kiss I'd had, because it was the first time in my life I'd let someone see exactly how much I wanted something and trusted them not to use it.
"This is going to get us killed," I said.
"Probably," he agreed.
"You should be talking me out of it."
"I tried that. I watched a roof for three weeks instead. Turns out I'm bad at it."
A sound came from below us — the scrape of a boot on the access ladder, somewhere down in the building beneath the dish.
We froze.
It came again. Closer. Someone climbing.
Dex moved faster than I've ever seen anyone move, pulling me back behind the great curve of the dish's rim, into the shadow where the chrome blocked the neon, his hand over my mouth before I could make a sound and his body between me and the edge.
We crouched there in the dirt, in the dark, his heart going hard against my shoulder, and we listened to the footsteps reach the roof, pause, scuff around.
A flashlight beam swept the garden. Swept the bean rows. Swept right over the lip of the dish above our heads.
"Anybody up here?" A voice. Young. Bored.
A maintenance kid, or a scavenger, or — I couldn't tell whose, couldn't tell if it was Kings or Apostle or nobody at all, and that was the whole terror of it, that there was no longer any nobody in my life, that every footstep in the dark was now a thing that could end us both.
The beam moved on. The kid muttered something about wasting his time. The boots scuffed back to the ladder and went down, and the night closed back over us, and I realized I was shaking and Dex's hand was still over my mouth, gentle, his face an inch from mine.
He took his hand away.
"That," he breathed, "was too close."
"Yeah."
"We can't keep meeting here."
"I know."
Neither of us said the obvious thing — that we wouldn't stop, that knowing better had never once stopped either of us, that we were two people who'd been handed every reason in the world to walk away and had instead just learned to crouch quieter in the dark.
"Same time next week?" I whispered.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was almost smiling, the crooked one, the doomed one.
"Same time next week," he said.
We were idiots. I knew we were idiots. I climbed down out of that dish with my hands still shaking and my whole chest full of light, and I thought, very clearly: this is the happiest I have ever been, and it is going to cost me everything I have.
I was right about both halves.
I just had the order wrong. The happiness came first. The cost came faster than I thought.