Chapter Seventeen
“THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUPPOSED ‘BOOK OF SIGNS’ IS A HERESY AGAINST THE HERALDS, WHO HANDED DOWN THE SACRED LAW TO US DIRECTLY. THE IDEA THAT ANOTHER, ‘PURER’ HOLY BOOK IS OUT THERE SOMEWHERE UNDERMINES NOT ONLY THIS ADMINISTRATION, BUT THE AUTHORITY OF OUR CHAPELS AS WELL. ANY APOSTATE SPREADING LIES ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF THIS BOOK MUST BE HARSHLY PUT DOWN.”
Orion’s supposed friend calls himself Fast Draw Ringo, which is exactly the name you give yourself when you’ve almost certainly never drawn a pistol in your life.
But he says he’s got hot information for us, so I swallow down any blistering comments and take a seat with Orion at the little round table tucked into the back corner of the dram shop.
It’s far enough away from the rest of the growing crowd that we should be able to talk without anyone being able to hear us over the jangling music and loud, crisscrossing conversations.
Fast Draw is a gangly man, a couple of years older than Orion and me, with a pointed chin and a longcoat that looks a size too big for him.
“Booker,” he says, low and entirely too serious, cutting his eyes around the room. “I’m taking a big risk coming here.”
I lean back in my chair, my hood pulled up, my arms crossed beneath the layer of my cowl. “What’s wrong with you? You watch too many serials or something?”
“Hey, play nice.” Orion nudges me in the ribs, hard enough for me to discover just how pointy his elbows are. “We’re kind of short on time, Fast Draw. What exactly do you know?”
The man scowls at me and lifts his chin, mouth twisting. “Not yet. Payment first.”
“Fair enough.” Orion digs into the bag he brought down and sets something on the table.
It looks like a bulky, oversize pistol, but there’s no visible charger on it and the barrel is plugged with a six-pronged iron grapple.
“My own invention. Nothing else like it out there. Pull the trigger and it’ll launch the grapple with a cord attached up to one hundred and fifty feet in the air.
Pretty handy for scaling buildings, boarding low-flying airships—all of that. ”
I glance at Orion, eyebrow raised. “You made that?”
He grins at me. “A guy needs hobbies.”
Fast Draw, however, seems much less impressed. “You want information on Gold Town business, I’m going to need something bigger.”
Orion takes a breath, looking like he’s about to haggle, but this is not a haggling situation. Not with Halle’s and Kelda’s lives on the line.
“What about that crystal, O?” I cut in before Orion can say anything. “The one you took off our pal Clarence? Something stolen off a high warden has to be worth a good deal, right?”
Orion gapes at me for a second, his expression flickering between shocked and kind of angry, but then he catches the look in my eyes, the hard set of my jaw, and all the fight goes out of him.
He sighs and reaches into his inner vest pocket, taking out the palm-size red crystal and setting it on the table.
“Final offer, Fast Draw,” he says. “A warden skeleton key. Good to unlock any door they’ve got—jails, precincts, prisons, everywhere.” Fast Draw’s eyes light up and he makes a grab for it, but Orion scoops it just out of reach. “Tell us what you got, then you get it.”
“Fine.” Fast Draw tugs up the collar on his longcoat, cutting his eyes around the room again.
“You familiar with the Gentleman’s Rack, down in the Shipyards?
There’s been some suspicious comings and goings in the last day or two.
I spotted them in the early-morning hours, when it was still dark, bringing in two people with bags over their heads.
One looked like a young woman maybe. The other was small, like a child. ”
Orion looks over at me. “Shipyards are South Parish. That matches up.”
So long as he’s telling the truth and not giving us the runaround. If he is …
I lean over the table, staring Fast Draw right in the eye from underneath the shadow of my hood. “If I find out you’re not being straight with us, I’ll hunt you down, squeeze every drop of water out of your body, and toss your pulverized remains into the street.”
“Ever hear of overkill?” Orion sighs.
I don’t take my eyes off Fast Draw. “Booker here is a good guy. Tries to do right by people.” I slap my hand down on the table for emphasis, and Fast Draw nearly startles out of his chair. “I’m not burdened by things like that. We clear?”
“Clear,” Fast Draw croaks out and then snatches up his payment and bolts with a speed that is frankly impressive.
I watch Orion stow his device in his pack, trying to read the shadow of a frown creasing his brows.
“Hey, O, I…” I have to stop and clear my throat at least twice before I can get the rest out. “I’m sorry. About the skeleton key. I didn’t know what it was.”
Orion gives me a lopsided grin, shrugging. “It’s fine, V. At least I know where it is now. Maybe I can steal it back from him or something later. Come on, we need to gear up and get going if we’re going to get to South Parish by sundown.”
An hour later, Orion and I are back out on the streets, headed for the Shipyards.
Situated on the southern edge of Covenant, it’s a place with a name that’s only gotten more ironic over the years.
Some of the first airships on Trinity were built there, a long time ago, welded together in enormous warehouses poised at the edge of the Crater—a gaping, bottomless pit almost two miles across that cuts right through the alloy down into the Elysian Depths.
Back in those peak days, the Shipyards buzzed with activity, drawing an influx of people and paper.
But then some skyliners developed hovering docking platforms and started building ships way up in the air where they’d never have to know the indignity of touching the ground.
The flow of cash shifted, and the Shipyards gradually became a place not where things were made, but where they were discarded.
In and around all the old warehouses and facilities are cluttered with scraps and junk and communities of people making the best out of a place that commerce and the Heraldic Ministry would rather forget.
Orion leads me past clusters of residences built into half-tumbled buildings and storefronts that never seem to do just one thing, selling everything from food and clothes to knockoff apothecary remedies and used furniture.
I wipe at my chapped lips, resisting the urge to reach for my canteen just yet.
Even with the sun dropping below the horizon, the heat is heavy enough to steal your breath, robbing us of the relief dusters used to at least get in the evenings and at night.
I haven’t been in this part of Covenant since we buried Papa, a memory that grips my body with tension, makes my movements awkward and stiff.
A lot of dusters around here bury our dead in the Crater.
We’re supposed to go all the way out to the Elysian Depths north of town to offer their bodies back to the Heralds, but when you don’t have the cash for that, you make do with the Shipyards and the Crater.
Orion’s steps are loping and steady as he twists his way along the streets, nodding at the yarders who make a living digging through the scraps at the Shipyards and selling what they can. He could just be any other guy out for an evening stroll.
He keeps touching his vest, though. Right over that same inner pocket. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen him do that since we set out.
Orion finally stops in a precariously narrow, shadowed alley, waving for me to stop behind him. He takes a small mirror out of his pocket and angles it so he can look around the corner, down the street, to where the Gentleman’s Rack sits, half a block from the edge of the Crater.
The Gentleman’s Rack is a billiards hall and card room that serves as the gaudiest, fanciest gambling den in Covenant.
In the Shipyards’ heyday, it was considered high-end, and these days it still draws a good amount of paper from dusters looking to escape for a little while and skyliners who want to experience the dangerous thrill of mingling with the riffraff on the ground.
The Gold Towners who run it don’t really care who’s handing over their paper, as long as it keeps making them a shipload of cash.
I watch Orion carefully, tapping my fingers impatiently on Wrath’s hilt, waiting for any signal that might mean, Yes, Val, they’re here, go. But all I see is the small crinkle of a frown cross his face.
“What?” I step up next to him so I can see the mirror, too. The dark edge of the Crater flashes in the reflection, and I look quickly away again, pushing back on the memories that hang around that place. “You look like something’s wrong. Are they not there?”
“Oh, I think they’re here.” He taps a finger on the mirror’s surface. “I just don’t think it’s only the Gold Town Gang who’s got them.”
I take a deep breath and look back at the reflection, seeing now what he’s talking about. There’s a slim figure standing on top of the Gentleman’s Rack, a man wearing basic duster gear and squinting into the growing darkness.
“That’s a warden,” Orion mutters, pulling the mirror back and tucking it into his vest.
I raise an eyebrow at him. “How can you even tell from this far away?”
“Look at his hair. He’s tried to fluff it up a little bit, but he’s got an indent all around his head from his hat. His stance, too. He’s cocking his left hip out, but his gun and holster are on his right-hand side. Which means it’s probably not his usual holster. He just took it off someone else.”
Wardens. It doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots. Walking into that shadow session already proved that Gold Towners are in good with the law, and Kilpatrick wasn’t the only boss I sent to the Depths that day. “They teamed up. Brought in the wardens as backup against the Butcher.”
I scan the surrounding streets and buildings, looking for other out-of-place figures like our friend on the roof.
I spot one person very obviously loitering at a trinket stall keeping their eyes on the billiard hall’s front doors and three others on different rooftops a little farther down a branching road.
Five total. Probably five times as many inside, I’d guess, at least.
Orion sighs and leans up against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “We need to take a step back and make a plan this time, V. This can’t be a straight hack-and-slash job like back at the Clock Tower.”
Before I can respond, a faint sound catches my ear—the soft scuff of a boot against smooth alloy—coming from the alley behind us.
I react instantly, whipping around, darting up and over the stray crates and trash bins, and dropping down onto the person crouched behind them.
They grunt as I pin them flat against the alloy, flipping them over onto their back and pressing Toothpick’s sharp point against their neck.
It’s Dani. Again.
Pinned under my knives. Again.
She quirks an eyebrow, her mouth curling. “Just can’t stay off of me, huh?”
I’m suddenly aware of how heavily I’m straddling her hips and how close my face is bent to hers. I pull back a little bit with a sneer. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question. I live in the Shipyards. What’s your excuse?”
“You know exactly why I’m here.”
“Couldn’t stop thinking of me, huh, ghoulie?
” Quicker than I can anticipate, she traps my left foot, hitches her hips up hard, and forces me into a roll until now I’m the one on my back and she’s over me, grinning fiercely.
“Not nearly as tough in a fight when you don’t have phasing to fall back on. ”
The sound of a pistol being cocked right by her ear makes Dani freeze. Orion stands over us, the barrel of his gun pressed against the side of her head, although from my angle, looking up at him from the ground, he almost looks … amused? That bastard.
“I gotta figure you can’t be too bad of a soul or Val would’ve killed you back at the Clock Tower,” he says, his voice nonthreatening even if his pistol is the opposite. “That being said, you should probably get off them.”
Dani snorts but raises her hands, palms out in surrender, as she stands.
I immediately jump back onto my feet, retracting Toothpick but keeping one hand on Wrath’s hilt.
For comfort. There’s another salty comment for Dani on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t even get the chance to say it because Orion reaches over and claps a hand over my mouth without even taking his eyes off Dani.
“I see that you have a few more things on your mind, V, but hold on to them for a second,” he says. “This little reunion isn’t doing us any good all out in the open like this. We need to get inside before we sort anything else out.”
I glance at the buildings all around us, dotted with windows that anyone could be sitting behind, watching, hoping to see something important enough to tell the wardens about in exchange for paper. He’s right, of course, but …
“There’s nothing to sort out,” I snap. “I’m not going anywhere with her.”
“Fine by me if you want to act like a petulant child,” Dani says with a shrug, all casual, like she doesn’t have a gun barrel still pointed right at her face. “But I know this area and everyone in it backward and forward.”
Orion gives me a look. “Unless you’ve got someone else lining up to help us with this, I suggest we hear her out.”
I can’t respond to him because I’m clenching my teeth too hard. I hate that he has a point.
“Perfect,” Dani says after a beat. “My place is close by. Come on.”
She turns and starts back down the alley, and I move quickly up behind her, hissing low in her ear. “No tricks, Dani.”
Her shoulders tense, and she shoots me a disdainful look over her shoulder. “You don’t have to threaten me, Butcher. I know you better than anyone.”