12. The Wall
THE WALL
GHOST
My knee wasn't bouncing this time.
I noticed it the way you'd notice a clock had stopped.
Blade and I sat our bikes in the black behind an abandoned warehouse a little under a mile from the one that held the fighting pit, engines off, and my right leg lay still against the frame.
Eight nights ago, behind the tire shop, that leg had been running a second engine.
Tonight it sat there like it belonged to somebody calmer.
Calm was the top layer. Under it, something else was awake and excited, and I didn't have to look hard to name it. I wanted this. I wanted the wall and the dark, the one thing I was built for, and I wanted to nail this mission.
"Run it." Blade, low, three feet to my left. It wasn't a question. It never was.
"Back alley, all the way in. I read the wall. Every seam, every lens. I photograph. I come back."
"And?" His eyes stayed on the dark alley, in the direction of the pit.
"And I don't go in. I don't get seen. Just eyes." I tapped the earpiece. "You'll hear me breathe the whole way. If I stop breathing, feel free to get worried."
"Ghost…" Lower still.
"I'm good, Blade." It came out level and slow. I made him hear that.
Because a week ago I'd sat at a breakfast table and said I got seen.
Trenza's eyes had come up off her plate wide, all the warmth gone out of them in half a second, and that look had crossed the table at me like something thrown at my face.
I'd made myself a promise right then, with my knee going under the bench, that nobody at that table was ever going to look at me like that again on my account.
Hawk wasn't going to hear the same story twice.
Hawk had said tonight or tomorrow night, my call, and I'd taken a third night, and Blade hadn't said a word about it, which was how Blade said plenty.
He didn't answer now either. His hand landed on my shoulder, and he gave me one squeeze. Then I was off the bike and around the corner of the wall we'd hidden behind.
The old warehouse district outside Henderson had been dying for twenty years and hadn't finished.
Brick and steel buildings packed shoulder to shoulder, most of them empty, the few still working locked up tight at one in the morning with nobody inside them.
The alleys between ran narrow and black, and every fourth street lamp still worked, throwing pale circles on the concrete that only made the dark between them darker.
I knew the way. I'd walked it once in the other direction with Caleb's arm against mine and two hundred people screaming behind a wall.
I turned right. Something small scrambled ahead of me, claws on concrete, rats going for the gap under a roll-up door, and I let them go. Animals were the only things out here that could hear me coming.
Half a mile out, and I was already choosing where my boots went. Around the gravel the desert had blown in. Around a bottle on its side. Over a spray of glass that would've sung under my heel. Too early to matter, and I did it anyway.
I passed two blocks of warehouses stacked with shipping containers, rust-streaked, doors hanging open on nothing.
The smell came off them in layers. Old grease.
Something that had died in a corner and dried there.
Piss, human, near a doorway where somebody had slept and moved on.
The wind pushed it all down the alley at me and I breathed through my mouth and kept going.
The next left was the one. After it there would be no more turns, just one straight run to the back of the building where a wall had thirty feet of nothing on Caleb's map.
I stopped at the corner. In through the nose. Hold for four. Out slow through the mouth, the way I'd watched Caleb do it in a hospital chair. Then I made the turn.
Everything in me dropped a gear. My body came down an inch, knees soft, shoulders rolled in. I'd never been the tallest man in any room the club put me in, and in an alley at night that was the best thing about me.
I took the run container by container, stopping at each one, listening. Metal ticking as it cooled. A far-off highway. My own pulse in my ears, slow.
One more block and a crossing, and the back of the warehouse came into view.
A single street lamp stood near the corner, the last one working on the row, and it wasn't working well. The light came out of it pale and lay across the brick, showing the wall without warming it. The rest of the alley stayed black.
I went all the way down. My back to the brick of the building behind me, cold and pitted, holes and cracks where twenty years of nobody caring had gotten into it. I put one eye around the edge of the last container and looked.
There was only brick. The whole back face of the building was old, soft-edged and dark, where the sides I'd seen from inside were block and steel.
I looked over the corners twice, the roofline, the lamp pole.
No cameras. The front of that building had a dome on every corner, and the back had nothing at all, and that told me something before I'd touched a single brick.
Whoever used the back of this building did not want anyone watching them do it, including their own people.
I came out from behind the container and stepped into the shadow. The lamp lit the middle of the alley and the wall across from it. The wall on my right sat in its own dark, and I put my shoulder to the brick and moved along it with my hand flat on the stone.
"Ghost." Blade, in my ear, barely a breath. "Update."
I'd forgotten him. All the way forgotten, and the sound of his voice landed in the middle of my head like a dropped wrench.
"At the wall." I kept it under my breath. "Back face. Old brick, the original building. No cameras. Not one, Blade. Whoever comes and goes back here doesn't want a record of it."
"Read it." Two words, and his breathing had gone slower than mine.
I walked the wall slowly, one hand on it, letting my palm read what my eyes couldn't in that light. Mortar crumbled under my glove and fell away in dust. Brick edges rounded off by wind. "Mortar's gone everywhere. Except?—"
My hand had stopped.
Except here. Twelve feet of wall where the mortar held, where the courses ran a quarter inch off from the courses on either side, like somebody had matched the pattern from memory and got it nearly right.
I stepped back into the alley and let my eyes go soft, and the rectangle showed itself.
Ten feet wide, nine high, flush with the ground.
A loading door, bricked over. Up close, with your hands on it, it revealed itself as a steel door with brick faces glued to its skin.
I crouched at the base. The seam was there, a hairline, and along the bottom of it the blown sand had gone dark. I rubbed it between my gloved thumb and finger and the smell came up sharp.
"Blade."
"Here." Right in my ear, like he'd leaned into it.
"The blank stretch on Caleb's map." My pulse had picked up and my hands hadn't. "It's got a door in it. Steel, covered with brick. And there's oil on the seam. Fresh. Somebody wants a door this heavy to swing without a sound."
I heard him breathe out through his nose, all the way back at the bikes. "Photograph it."
Tyler's camera came out of my jacket, the small one that drank light. I shot the seam, the courses. Then the sand at the foot of the door, because it had tire marks in it. Two tracks, wide, the edges still sharp. The wind out here filled a track inside a day.
"Tire marks. Hours old." I kept shooting. "Something drives up to this door a lot."
"We still don't know where it leads inside."
"Nobody does. Caleb fought seventeen nights in there and never saw it." I lowered the camera. "Yet."
I backed off the way I'd come, slow, into the dark end of the alley away from the lamp, thumbing through the shots on the little screen. Seam. Courses. Tracks. All there, all sharp.
"Got the seam clean, got the courses, the tracks came out better than I?—"
Then it came. A sound like a breath being let out of a wall.
My eyes snapped up. The door was opening. A line of dim light down the seam I'd just had my thumb on, widening, pouring out across the alley, and I was standing in the middle of that alley with a camera in my hand, and the lamp had the dark thinned out just enough that someone could still see me.
My brain worked at double speed and my neck went with it. Left, nothing, the container thirty feet back, too far. Right?—
A window. Ground floor of the dead building across the alley, big, the glass long gone except for the bottom of the frame, where what was left stood up along the rail in cracked daggers.
My body had already decided. Two steps and I went through it horizontal, a dive straight through the middle of the frame with my arms out and the glass daggers going by under me.
I hit the floor inside on my hands and rolled over my right shoulder, glass crunching under the leather across my back, and came up out of it on one knee with my right boot planted and the camera still in my right hand.
I froze.
The dive had been quiet. The roll hadn't, not all the way, wood and glass grit under my weight, but the building was dead and the sound had nowhere to go. I didn't know if they'd seen me go in. I didn't know if they'd been slow coming through the door or fast.
I knelt in the dark with every sense I owned turned up to where it hurt. I smelled dust, plaster, old wood. I heard my own heart, loud. My ears reached out through the empty window frame for the one sound that would tell me to run or to fight.
The signal never came.
What came was a laugh. A man with a hoarse, raspy voice, laughing at something, and another man talking too loud for the hour and the place, the way people talked when they'd never once had to worry about who was listening.