4. Gone #2
Then the braid gave her something else. Thick as my wrist, black, hanging down past the middle of her back, and I'd never once seen her cut it.
Eight months back a street crew came to collect bikes we'd rebuilt and decided they'd rather not pay for them.
Their leader got loud. Shoved Mateo. Started in on what he'd do to the shop with a can of gas.
She crossed that floor so fast nobody caught the kick. Mateo swore all he saw was the braid whipping around behind her, and then two of the guy's teeth were on the concrete six feet away and the room had gone very quiet.
The rest of them paid cash, folded their leader across a back seat, and never came around again.
Blade got there first, that same night. Trenza. Braid. The name was on her before she'd even patched in, and it never came off.
She hadn't said a word through any of it, and she didn't say one about the name either. She just started answering to it. Right away, every time.
It was the first name she ever took on purpose.
"Your brain's running again, hermano." Blade's voice landed on me sideways, and I came back to the room and found my fork stopped halfway to my mouth. No idea how long it had been there. "I'd cut a vein if I had to live in your head for a day."
Heat climbed my face. "Sorry. I was thinking about Trenza putting that guy's teeth into orbit." I set the fork down. "And how strong the club is now. It's just, I don't know. It's good."
"Deja al chico tranquilo, Diego."
"Leave the kid alone, Diego."
Trenza kept her eyes on her plate and switched to English. "He's doing fine with that head of his. He runs everything at once, all of it, all the time. Nothing gets past him." A glance at me, and a quick wink before she went back to her pancakes. "Makes him dangerous. That's a compliment."
I turned toward the counter before anybody caught me smiling.
The counter was a performance every morning.
Irish had one hand on a pan and the other in the air gesturing at nothing, talking the whole time.
He flipped something with a wrist snap that was more theater than technique, the contents airborne for a second before dropping back with a sizzle that spat grease across his forearm. He didn't so much as blink.
"Peppers need another thirty seconds." Nolan stood at his left with a laptop open beside the cutting board, eyes going screen, stove, screen. "You pulled them early last time and they were basically raw."
"They were al dente." Irish's grin widened.
"Peppers aren't pasta, Sean."
"Everything's pasta if you believe hard enough."
Declan stood behind Nolan, quiet, working a knife through tomatoes in cuts you could've checked with a ruler, every slice the same, no motion wasted.
He didn't get into it with them. Declan never got into anything.
He just kept the knife moving and let the two of them fill the room while he did the work.
"Morning, hermano." Mateo dropped onto the bench beside me and slid a plate across.
Omelette, bacon, fried peppers, a little tomato salad off to the side.
Heavy on the protein and good enough that my stomach woke up and started making demands.
"Slept okay? Figured you'd come back in one piece. How'd it go?"
The accent rolled through his words, soft on the r's, the vowels sitting wider than English usually lets them. Over a year here and his English had gotten sharp, but the accent stayed, and I was glad every time.
Nobody ever tried to hang a road name on him. It came up once, early on, and Hawk killed it before the sentence was out of the guy's mouth.
Every one of us knows what Mateo said the night Blade found him.
Eighteen years old, shaking hard enough that you could hear it riding under the words, and he crossed that bunkhouse to a stranger with a blade on his belt and told him his name wasn't Tomás.
That it was Mateo. Mateo Sánchez, from Guatemala.
Then he pushed his sleeve up past his shoulder and showed him the H inside a circle that High Basin had burned into him to keep him counted.
He spent a year fighting to hold onto that name. He wasn't about to trade it in for a better one.
So he stayed Mateo. That was the whole thing. He gives it to strangers with his chin up and both halves of it landing hard, and every man at this table would put somebody through a wall over it.
Trenza let her name go, along with her past. Mateo kept his.
I picked up the fork. "Rougher than I wanted. I got seen."
The word dropped into the table like a stone into still water. Blade's fork stopped moving. Trenza quit chewing. Mateo's fork clattered onto his plate, and his English went out from under him the way it did whenever something got to him.
"?Qué dices, hermano?"
"What are you saying, brother?"
Trenza's eyes came up, and the warmth went out of them inside half a second, replaced by something flat and working.
My knee started going under the table. I could feel it running up through my thigh into the bench. "Yeah. Gravedigger was there. He clocked me. It was my fault, all of it, I was watching one of the fighters and I held a look way too long and he tracked the line right back to?—"
My head finished the sentence without my permission. Because I couldn't stop staring at the most skilled fighter I had ever seen in my life.
"Caleb." His name got out before I'd cleared it for takeoff.
"Have you guys seen a new guy around? Tanned, dark hair, bit taller than me, banged up, Kai would've patched him, kind of…
" My mouth kept going somewhere my brain hadn't signed off on.
"Pretty muscul… I mean, strong. Strong-looking. Built. Like a fighter."
Blade looked at me for two full seconds without blinking.
"Medical bay." He reached for his coffee without lifting his eyes. "Probably still asleep. Which is not where your head should be, because you're briefing Church in"—he checked his watch—"fourteen minutes."
"Oh, crap." The clock over the kitchen door said 7:46. "Right. Yeah. I should probably?—"
"Keep it short?" Trenza leaned back and folded her arms. "Without walking everybody through every square foot of the building? It's a report, Ghost. You're not writing a novel."
I shut up and ate. The omelette was good. Nolan's timing on the eggs was dead-on, and Declan's tomatoes came the same thickness in every bite.
My head went to work on the briefing. What happened. What order. What mattered.
And Caleb. Who didn't feel like something I could trim out.
He felt like the point.
Somewhere off to my left I heard Mateo, faint, like he was talking from another room instead of eight inches away.
"And he's gone. Nothing out of him now till Church."
I got to the Church room five minutes early.
It was what it always was. The long hardwood table that took four men to move the one time we tried.
Chairs worn into whatever shape the man who sat in them had pressed into the leather over the years.
The patch framed on the back wall, the steel phoenix coming up out of the flames, the club's name under it.
Hawk was already at the head, seated, hands folded, still. Gray strands in his hair and in his stubble, and eyes that tracked me the whole way to my chair.
Reaper sat at his right with his boots up on the table, one ankle crossed over the other, cut hanging open over a dark shirt.
Kai had the chair beside him, turned toward the window, morning light picking the violet out of his hair.
Reaper's hand rested on Kai's thigh, easy, automatic, so worn-in it had stopped being a gesture at all.
"Morning." I dropped into my seat.
Hawk nodded. Reaper lifted two fingers.
Kai turned from the window and got up, crossing to me with that quick, purposeful walk of his, and put a hand on my shoulder.
"Hey. You slept all right?" His dark eyes went over my face. "I heard it was an intense night. Stuff like that sits in your head whether you invite it or not."
"Slept fine. Always do. My brain works so hard all day it just cuts out the second I'm horizontal."
Kai's mouth pulled sideways. "That's an actual superpower. Some nights I'd trade my nursing license for it."
"You'd trade it and then we'd all bleed out."
"Fair." He squeezed my shoulder once and sat on the chair next to me.
I liked Kai. More than liked. I was grateful for him in a way I'd never worked out how to say without it coming out too big for whatever room I was standing in.
He'd stitched me back together more times than either of us bothered counting.
He sat with me through the worst nights of that recovery, changing the packing on a hole that wouldn't close while I stared at the ceiling and worked on not screaming, and he talked the entire time.
Never once about the wound. Food, music, the time he set his apartment on fire trying to make ramen.
He kept talking until I stopped shaking.
He wasn't much older than me. He just had his life together in ways I was still running after.
Boots echoed in the corridor, several sets, and the room started filling.
Tank came through first and the doorframe took notice, his shoulders turning to fit the way they always did.
Tyler followed, lean next to all that bulk, easy in his stride, a tablet under one arm.
The size difference never stopped being funny, but you could read the rest of it in how they moved, close, in step, Tyler's hand brushing Tank's arm as they split toward their chairs.
Irish came in grinning with Nolan half a step back still going on about pepper cooking times.
Irish caught my eye and winked. I grinned back.
Declan came behind them, one hand on Nolan's neck, the other loose at his side, wearing that flat quiet that might have been peace and might have been him counting exits.
With Declan you never got to know. Both, probably.