Chapter 5
Wren
The war started over a truck.
That's how most of them start, I've learned.
Not over honor, not over old graves, not over anything you could put on a banner.
Over a truck. A shipment. Forty crates of grid components — capacitors, relay boards, the unglamorous guts of the thing that keeps the Sprawl breathing — that left an Apostle depot one night and never arrived, and turned up two days later, empty, abandoned in Kings' territory with Kings' tire tracks all around it.
I heard about it the way I heard about everything now: by standing very still at the edge of a room while men who loved me decided things that would ruin me.
"They hit our shipment," Tunny was saying, except Tunny had it backward, Tunny thought we'd been hit, that's how confused it already was. "Forty crates. Capacitors we paid for. Apostles took them and dumped the truck on our ground to make it look like us."
"Or," my father said, slow and dangerous from the head of the table, "they're saying we hit them. Same truck. Same crates. Their tracks, our ground. Depends who you ask and which way the story's pointed."
The room churned. I stood at the edge with a tray of nothing, pretending to clear glasses, and I felt the whole thing tilting toward the cliff.
Three years of cold truce, of leaving colors at the market, of careful nobody-starts-it — and all it took was one truck and a set of tire tracks that pointed whichever way you needed them to.
"It was Aldermore," Tunny said. "Has to be.
Their enforcer. He's been on our ground before — the relay, remember?
Dex Aldermore was sniffing around our towers weeks ago.
Now suddenly a shipment goes missing and the tracks come back to us?
" He slapped the table. "He set it up. Framed us to start a war his bosses wanted anyway. "
I put the tray down before I dropped it.
"That's a leap," said Marisol, one of the older riders, the one my father actually listened to. "Tracks can be faked. A man who can splice a grid clean can fake a tire pattern. Doesn't mean it was him. Means it was somebody who wants us to think him."
"It's always the simple answer," Tunny shot back.
"It's never the simple answer," Marisol said. "Twenty years in this city, kid. The simple answer is the one somebody built for you to find."
For one shining second I loved Marisol more than anyone alive. She was three sentences from the truth. I held my breath and willed her forward.
"Maybe," my father allowed. "But simple or not, the crates are gone, the truce is cracked, and the street already believes it was the Apostles. Belief moves faster than proof in this town. By the time we prove who really did it, we'll have buried people over who they think did it."
"So we look weak," I said.
The whole table turned. I hadn't meant to speak. My mouth had gotten ahead of my survival instinct, a recurring problem.
"Better weak than wrong," I said, because I was in it now. "If you're not sure, and you move anyway, and you're wrong — that's not strength. That's just being loud on the way to a grave."
My father looked at me a long moment. Something flickered, and for half a second I thought I'd reached him. Then Tunny muttered "bride's got opinions now," and the table chuckled, and the moment closed.
Because I knew where Dex had been on the night of the relay.
He'd been on a tower, splicing a corroded feed, being interrupted by a girl in an engagement dress.
I knew where he'd been most nights since.
In a dish that points at nothing, growing terrible tomatoes, arguing with me.
I knew the shape of his weeks better than I knew my own, and there was no version of those weeks where he was running shipments and framing clubs.
He was being set up. The same way the Kings were being set up. Somebody wanted these two clubs at each other's throats, and they'd reached for the most flammable name on each side — Aldermore for the Apostles, Calloway's grudge for the Kings — and struck the match.
I knew it the way you know a thing in your spine before your mouth catches up.
And I couldn't say a word. Because the only way I knew Dex couldn't have done it was that I'd been with him, and the moment I said that, the war would stop being about a truck and start being about me, and the body my father would want would be Dex's, and then mine, metaphorically, and then maybe Pixie's for knowing, and the whole thing would come down.
So I stood at the edge of the room and watched my father pick up the match someone had handed him.
"Put the word out," Briggs said. "Nobody at the market.
Truce is suspended. Anybody crosses a line, they answer for it.
" He looked older saying it. I'll give him that.
He didn't want the war either. He was just too proud and too burned to be the one who didn't pick up the match.
"And I want Aldermore. Alive if we can. Either way if we can't."
The room went hard and certain around me, all those men I'd grown up with sharpening into the thing they'd been built to be, and I slipped out the side before my face could tell anyone the truth my mouth couldn't.
I had to warn him. That was the only clear thought.
The market was closed, the lines were live, every road between us was a road that could get one of us killed — and I had to warn him anyway, because they were coming for him with a war he didn't start, and I was the only person alive who knew he was innocent and the only person alive who couldn't prove it.
Pixie found me in the parts cage, jamming a comms unit and two batteries into a bag with hands that wouldn't stay steady.
"Okay," she said, shutting the cage door behind her. "Okay. I've been not-asking for weeks. I'm done not-asking." She leaned against the door so I couldn't open it. "Where are you going, Wren."
"Out."
"It's a war night. Nobody goes out on a war night.
You know that. You've known that your whole life.
" Her voice was scared, which scared me, because Pixie running scared was a thing I'd seen maybe twice.
"I told your dad you had a face I couldn't read.
I'm sorry. I broke the promise. I did it because I'm worried, because the face you've got right now is the face of somebody about to do something that gets her killed. "
"Pixie. Move."
"Tell me it's not him."
I stopped.
"The relay," she said quietly. "The face. The solder runs that took four hours. The way you went white when Tunny said Aldermore's name just now — don't, don't make the face, I watched you do it." She swallowed. "It's the Apostle. Isn't it. The enforcer. That's who's behind the face."
The cage was small and quiet and full of the things we used to keep the Kings alive, and I looked at my best friend, the one person besides Dex who'd ever read me true, and I made the second most dangerous decision of my life.
I told her the truth.
"He didn't do it," I said. "The shipment.
He couldn't have. I know where he was, Pixie, I know exactly where he was, because he was with me.
Every night they think he was running trucks, he was sitting in a dead satellite dish failing to grow tomatoes and listening to me complain about my wedding.
" My voice cracked. "Somebody's framing him.
Same way they're framing us. And I'm the only person who can prove he's innocent and the proof is me, and if I say it out loud I lose everything and so does he, and if I don't say it there's a war. "
Pixie stared at me for a long, long moment.
Then she did the thing that told me why I'd loved her since we were nine years old.
She didn't yell. She didn't run to my father. She didn't tell me I was insane, even though I was.
She pushed off the door, came over, took the second battery out of my shaking hand, and seated it properly into the comms unit because I'd had it in backward.
"You had it in backward," she said. "You'd have warned him with a dead radio.
World's most romantic gesture, ruined by a battery.
" She zipped the bag. Her hands were steadier than mine.
"Okay. Okay. If you're going to do something this stupid, you're not doing it stupid-stupid.
You're doing it with a working radio and somebody covering the door. "
"Pixie—"
"Don't." She wouldn't look at me, busy with the bag, and I realized she was crying a little and pretending not to.
"Don't make it a moment. I'm furious at you.
I'm going to be furious at you for a year.
You fell for an Apostle, Wren, you absolute disaster, you couldn't have picked a nice neutral disaster, you had to pick the one club that—" She stopped.
Wiped her face on her sleeve. "Marco was my cousin's friend.
You know that? The one Tunny lost. I knew him a little. "
"Pixie, I'm so—"
"And his club still didn't do this. The thing tonight.
" She finally looked at me, fierce and wet-eyed.
"I believe you. That's the part that's killing me.
I believe you, which means somebody's lying us all into a war, which means somebody wins if your enforcer dies tonight for something he didn't do.
And I'll be damned if I let the liars win because I was too scared to cover the door for my idiot best friend.
" She shoved the bag at me. "Go. Back stairs.
The east gate camera's been dead since Tuesday, I never fixed it, you're welcome.
I'll tell your dad you're crying in your room about the wedding.
He'll believe it. Everybody believes a sad bride. "
I grabbed her and held on. She let me for about two seconds, then shoved me off.
"Go, before I come to my senses."
I went.
Out the back stairs, past the dead camera, into a war night I had no business being out in, with a working radio and a battery she'd fixed and the whole impossible certainty that I was running toward the exact thing that would cost me everything — because the cost had finally stopped being a word in a story.
The cost was a man in a garden who hadn't done it.
And I was the only one coming.