Chapter 6
Wren
I found him in the old monorail yard, because of course I did.
It was the only place left that belonged to neither of us, a graveyard of dead transit cars strung out on a broken line that hadn't carried a passenger in my lifetime, suspended over the canal on rusted pylons like a sentence the city had abandoned halfway through.
He was in the last car, the one that hangs furthest out over the water, and he had a gun on the door when I climbed in, and the second he saw it was me he put it down so fast it clattered.
"Wren." My name came out of him like it had been punched loose. "What are you — it's a war night, the lines are live, you can't be—"
"You didn't do it." I dropped the bag. The car swayed under me, the whole thing gently rocking on its cables, the canal a band of broken neon a long way down through the gaps in the floor.
"The shipment. You didn't take it. I know you didn't, Dex, I know, and they're coming for you, my father put your name in the room, they're coming and you didn't do it and I had to—"
He crossed the car and caught me by the shoulders. "Breathe. Breathe. How did you get out?"
"Pixie. The dead camera. It doesn't matter.
" I grabbed his jacket in both fists, the gray patch right under my hands, the enemy's heart under my palms. "Somebody's framing you.
Same way they framed the Kings. Both clubs, Dex, somebody wants this war and they used your name to start it, and I'm the only one who knows you were nowhere near that truck because you were—"
"With you," he finished, very quietly.
"With me. Failing at tomatoes. Listening to me complain.
" A laugh tore out of me, half a sob. "That's your alibi.
A girl you can't admit you've ever met. That's the whole proof of your innocence and it's useless, because the second I open my mouth they stop hunting you for the truck and start hunting you for me. "
He didn't let go of my shoulders. The car rocked. Outside, far below, the canal carried the city's reflected lights past us in slow bright ribbons, sliding by the long windows like fireworks somebody had set off underwater and forgotten about.
"You ran across a war to tell me I'm innocent," he said. "When telling anyone else would ruin you."
"Yes."
"You could have stayed safe. Stayed home. Let me figure it out or let me die, and nobody would ever have known you knew."
"Yes, Dex, I'm aware, I've reviewed all the smarter options, I rejected them in the parts cage—"
"There's a third crew," I added, fast, because if we were going to do something insane I wanted him armed with the truth first. "There has to be.
Pixie said the splice on our relay matched our internal code — somebody's been inside both systems. That's not Kings, that's not Apostles.
Some salvage outfit out of the drowned districts, running dark, making us bleed each other so they can walk off with the crates. "
He went still, the soldier surfacing under the fear. "That's provable. Grid logs. Routing. If your runner can pull the path the truck pinged—"
"She's already pulling it."
"Then stay alive long enough for her to finish, and don't say my name to do it." He cupped my face. "You crossed a live front for me. Do you understand how long it's been since anybody crossed anything for me?"
"I couldn't not come."
"I know. That's the part I can't get past."
He kissed me.
Weeks of not touching, of four feet of nowhere, of foreheads almost-but-never — it all collapsed at once, the wall and the door and the careful civilized line, all of it gone in the space between one sway of the car and the next.
He kissed me like he'd been holding it back so long it had become a single solid thing he could finally set down, and I kissed him back the same way, both my fists still knotted in his jacket, pulling him into me instead of pushing him off, which is what a smarter girl would have done.
I have never claimed to be a smarter girl.
"Tell me to stop," he breathed against my mouth, the thing he always said, the honest man giving me the out one more time.
"Don't you dare," I said, and that was the end of the wall for good.
The car swayed and we swayed with it. There's no still floor in a thing hung from cables over water — every shift of weight sets the whole car rocking, slow and long, and we learned that fast and then we stopped fighting it and let it carry us, the rhythm of the car and the rhythm of us the same rhythm, the canal lights sliding past the windows in their slow bright ribbons.
He got my jacket off my shoulders without breaking the kiss, careful, like he was disarming something.
I got his out from under my hands, the gray patch and all, shoved it off him and onto the bench, and put my palms flat against the warmth of him, and felt his breath go ragged at that, at just my hands, which did something reckless to me.
I'd spent weeks keeping four feet of nowhere between us.
Now there was nothing, and I wanted there to be less than nothing.
"Slow," he murmured against my throat, but his hands said the opposite, sliding under the hem of my shirt, spreading warm and certain across the small of my back, drawing me into him until the swaying pressed us together and held us there.
"We've got all night. Nobody's coming. Let me—" His mouth moved to the hollow under my ear and whatever I'd been about to say dissolved into a sound I didn't recognize as mine.
"Don't tell me slow," I breathed. "I've been doing slow for a month. I'm done with slow."
I felt him smile against my skin. "Bossy."
"Briggs Calloway's daughter. Comes with the name."
Then he lifted me — the car lurching with it, the whole car, the cables groaning as our weight shifted — and laid me back along the long bench, and came down over me, and the slow he'd promised turned out to be its own kind of devastating.
Because he was slow. Maddeningly, deliberately slow, learning me the way he learned everything, his hands and his mouth taking inventory of every place that made me gasp and then returning to each one like he was memorizing it, like he'd be tested.
My terrible poker face, for once, exactly as useful as it should be.
He could read every single thing he did to me right off it, and he used what he read, and I let him, arching up into his hands with the city sliding gold and blue across the ceiling above us.
Clothes came away between the swaying — mine, then his, the canal chill finding the new warm skin and losing every inch of that argument to him.
There was a moment where he stopped, braced over me, just looking, the neon ribbons washing down his face and shoulders, and the wanting in it was so undisguised that I reached up and pulled him down by the back of the neck because I couldn't stand to be looked at like that one second longer without being held.
"You're shaking," he said.
"It's the car."
"It's not the car."
"It's not the car," I admitted, and felt him laugh, low, and then he settled against me, into me, and the laugh became something else for both of us, a shared indrawn breath, his forehead dropping to mine.
After that the car did half the work and neither of us minded.
Every long pull of the cables rocked us together; the floor's sway became our sway, unhurried, deepening, the broken line creaking overhead like it was keeping time.
He moved with it and I moved with him and the whole derelict thing carried us, cradle and metronome at once, the cold air off the canal meeting the heat of us in the gap between our bodies and nowhere else.
He kept his eyes on my face. He kept saying my name like it was the only word he'd kept when they'd taught him to be a weapon.
I pulled him closer until there was no daylight, no daylight at all, just the swaying and the slow fireworks on the water and the climb of it building in me like the city's hum building toward a surge.
"Stay with me," he breathed, when I started to come apart, "stay—" and I did, I stayed, I fell with my eyes open and his name in my mouth and the canal throwing its stolen light across us both, and he followed me a few rocks of the car later, my name again, broken in half this time, his face buried in my throat.
The car kept swaying after. Slower. Settling. Winding down to match us the way the city winds down at the gray edge of morning, the lights still sliding past but lazier now, like they'd seen and decided to be kind about it.
We lay tangled on the long bench, his jacket pulled over us against the canal chill, my head on his chest. I could hear his heart under where the gray patch had been, going hard, slowing. The forgotten war waited politely on the other side of the windows. I let it wait.
"Worst tomatoes in the Sprawl," I said into the quiet, "and you can do that. Where are your priorities."
His laugh moved through his whole chest, under my ear. "Now she tells me. Should've led with the tomatoes from the start. 'Hi, I'm bad at gardening but—'"
"Don't finish that."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He pressed his mouth to the top of my head, and I felt him go serious, the laugh draining out into something heavier. "Wren. What you did tonight. Coming here. I'm never going to be able to pay that back."
"Don't pay it back. Just don't be dead." I tipped my head up to look at him. "Stay alive. Let me figure out who framed you. Let me find the proof that isn't me, the one I can actually say out loud. That's the whole price. Stay alive long enough for me to clear you without burning us both down."
He looked at me a long time, in the sliding light, his hand moving slow through my hair.
"Deal," he said. "But you understand what we just did, right?
Up here? That wasn't goodbye-this-can't-happen.
I'm not built for goodbye-this-can't-happen.
I did this because I'm in it. All the way.
War or no war, Calloway or no Calloway. You went and made me a man with something to lose, and now you're stuck with me being insufferable about keeping it. "
"Insufferable how?"
"Watching towers. Leaving notes in your solder. Crossing every line in the city to make sure you got up the ladder." He said it like a vow, which is exactly what it was. "That kind of insufferable. The permanent kind."
I lay back down on his chest, over the patch, over the hard slow heart, and outside the long windows the canal carried the last of the bright ribbons past us into the dark, and the car rocked us like it had decided we were worth holding up.
"Permanent," I said, testing the shape of it.
"Permanent."
It was, possibly, the worst possible night to promise a man forever.
There was a war starting on both sides of us with his name written into it and mine waiting to be.
Everything we'd just done would get us killed if anyone ever knew.
By every rule I'd been raised on, this was the moment to be most afraid.
I had never in my life been less afraid.
That should have worried me more than it did.