Chapter 8 #3
Instead, the outsider turned the boat in a half circle.
My nails carved half-moons in the hull’s weathered varnish, knuckles white from his reckless driving.
But he saw what I didn’t—an opening into the pump house where fire had eaten away at the building’s foundation.
Everything about the station looked unstable—the roof moments from caving in, the masonry crumbling where the warped windowpanes bowed around broken glass.
Inside, the place was flooded. The canal had risen high over four beam pumps lining each half of the room. Above the submerged main floor, an upper deck ran around the sides of the building, accessible by a stairwell covered in blue moss and sludge.
“Smells like shit,” the outsider murmured.
“Because it is shit. This particular station used to pump sewage away from the Fissures and out to the sea.” The whir of the other boat sped by outside, but then it puttered to a stop before humming to life again, as if turning around. I looked to my counterpart. “We need to help Bernard.”
“Does he know something about the buyer?” he asked flatly.
I shrugged. “I assume he knows more than me… but that doesn’t matter—”
His eyes pinched. Apparently, it did mean something—to him at least. There was no such thing as a good deed to this man, only opportunities.
“I’ll save your surgeon, but I get my time with him,” he demanded, drawing his weapon.
He trolled the motor to the staircase and beckoned me out.
“Stay here. And take this…” He tossed the gun to me without waiting for my agreement, and I caught it instinctively.
The barrel was warm in my hands from where he had tucked it beneath his waistband.
I looked to the steps leading to the balcony, rusted and bent from time and neglect.
Moonlight spilled through broken rafters, lighting the way.
The waters churned a foamy black, licking the sides of the steps.
I swallowed the bad taste burning my throat and tested the metal handrail before stepping out of the vessel.
I turned to face the outsider before he left. “Do not hurt Bernard, or I swear, I’ll make you disappear myself. You know I can.”
“But you don’t kill people, remember?” He smirked.
“You’re not a person,” I scoffed. “You’re a monster.”
Something about my remark pricked him. His upper lip thinned in a snarl, but instead of his usual retort, he threw up his hood and turned the boat hard, sending a wash of foul water over the steps where I stood.
Cursing him and shaking filth from my boots, I started up the stairs, testing my weight on each one first, to make sure it was sturdy enough.
Every step was worse than the last, taking me farther from solid ground and out over shit-infested water.
I covered my nose and mouth with a hand to filter some of the stench of it.
Windows lined the east side of the building where the canal ran parallel with it. I peered out one of the openings, careful not to slice myself on fractured glass that looked as filthy as the canal. Forget a bullet or the Commissioner—an infection from this place would be enough to kill me.
The outsider didn’t have me or his Forge die down there where he waited for the copper to return, making himself vulnerable. I watched the canal but didn’t see any sign of the guard who’d pursued us, not even the glow of Bernard’s chains through the filter of night.
“Where are you?” I whispered. The time that had passed was impossible to guess when my heart could barely keep pace with my breath. My thoughts jumped from one bad explanation for the quiet to the next…
The metal deck groaned beneath me, but I hadn’t shifted my weight, hadn’t moved a muscle while I watched over the canal.
I whipped my head around and saw him—the guard from the boat, his hand over Bernard’s mouth as he pressed a gun to his temple to keep him quiet. He’d snuck up behind me, utilizing another access point on the other side of the pump house.
The gun shook in my hand.
“Easy, girl,” he murmured. This guard had no mask, but his face was just like the rest. Clean-shaven, young, trigger-happy. “Drop the gun and get on your knees.”
I couldn’t reach the Forge die in my pocket to siphon from it. The guard was watching my hands closely, waiting to see if I complied. With few available options, I gently placed the gun on the deck. “Let him go free, and I’ll come with you. I’ll be quiet about it. My friend won’t even know.”
“I don’t need to make deals with you. I have the upper hand.” He pointed the gun in my direction. “Get on your fucking knees.”
Bernard said something that was muffled by the guard’s gloved hand, but I kept my attention on the copper, where he wanted it.
He began tying Bernard to the side of the railing, still pointing the barrel of the gun at me.
But the surgeon began to struggle, stomping his foot hard where a joist held the deck together.
The guard shouted an order to stop, hitting his temple hard with the butt of his gun, but Bernard stomped again, separating the screws and crumbling metal beams supporting the deck. With a final blow from his foot, the joist snapped, and the floor fell out beneath them.
“Bernard!” I shouted, lunging for him as the other side of the balcony gave out. It was a desperate, futile attempt. I could never cross the distance between us in time, but by some true favor of fate, I didn’t have to.
I peered over the edge and found him dangling from the broken frame.
Bernard’s chains were still tied to the handrail, holding him up over the wastewater.
The guard had crashed into the flooded work floor with a sickening crack, his spine meeting something submerged by the sewage.
His scream was short before silence took hold again.
“Nina!” Bernard’s voice trembled as I reached into my pocket and claimed the die, bending the metal with a quick and forceful tug. The surgeon flipped, landing on his back with his wrists still bound and connected to the twisted metal bridge.
“Where did you learn how to do that?” He stared widely at my eyes, leaving another question unspoken.
I blinked the darkness away. “I guess we’ve both been keeping secrets.”
“Nina, I’m so sorry. This is all my fault… I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” I cut him off. “You shouldn’t have, but I made the choice in the end. I did this.” The chains burned my bare fingers as I untied them from the handrail, laced with a poisoned magic and reacting to my Siphon. I winced at the sting. “How are you?”
“Devastated.” He spoke the word quietly. “You have to get out of the city, Nina. You need to—”
“What happened after I was arrested? Where is my mother?”
His eyes shut briefly, showing off a shiner on his right side. “Bria took your mother.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I asked. “At least she’s with a friend. Bria has everything she needs until I can catch up to them.”
Bernard shook his head. “As soon as you left, Bria started acting strange. I caught her more than once in parts of the surgery she shouldn’t have been in. Before they left, she was giving her a sedative, adamant about needing to leave.”
Nothing was making sense, and yet my hopeful heart tried to rationalize it anyway. “Maybe she took her upstairs. Mother gets agitated—”
“I followed her, Nina,” he said. Something about the look in his eyes, the gravel in his voice, told me it wasn’t anything close to what I’d imagined. “She took her to the canal. There was a boat waiting.”
Bile climbed my throat. “What?”
“I confronted her, tried to make her give your mother back, but she only told me the buyer would reimburse me for the final drops. When I tried to take her by force, Bria screamed for the guards. They were on my trail in a moment.”
“She knows about the buyer?” I could barely whisper the words, I was so deeply in shock.
He licked his scabbed lips. “I think… I think she’s been working for the buyer the whole time. I think she was the one sending us the bodies to deliver to him. It makes sense. You said she has links to the black market. And she helped connect us to the captains like Maurice—”
“Broussard!” I snapped, grabbing him by the shirt with my free hand. “Where is my mother? Say it. So I know it’s true.”
His reaction told me all I needed to know. The apologetic look in his eyes, the defeat hunching his shoulders. She was gone.
“Bria took your mother to the buyer.”