Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
We work into the small hours.
The Salt District purchase leads us through holding companies, planning applications and maintenance orders. Each document opens another branch of the same maze. I try to follow them all, but the words begin to blur.
“You’re falling asleep,” Cáel says.
“I’m thinking.”
“With your eyes closed?”
I open them. “It helps.”
His mouth twitches. “Go to bed, Elenora. I’ll keep working.”
“You need sleep too.”
“I’ll wake you when it’s my turn.”
I search his face for mockery and find only concern, along with the quiet assumption that we will share the work as readily as the danger.
“Two hours,” I say. “Then you wake me.”
He nods.
Mina follows me to bed and curls up beside the mattress. I lie down fully dressed and listen to Cáel turn pages in the next room until the soft rustle gradually blends into silence.
Grey light gathers around the boarded window when I wake.
He never woke me.
Cáel is slumped against the wall, his head drooping, Bob’s papers spread across the floor around him.
“Hey,” I say, considerably louder than the room requires.
Should I have whispered?
“Come on,” I try again, softly.
“Just resting my eyes,” he grumbles.
“I can tell.” I help a half-asleep Cáel onto the mattress, tuck him beneath the covers and note with relief that the sheets are tolerably clean.
A few hours later, a much more alert Cáel rummages through his seemingly bottomless bag and produces bread and jam.
“Toast first,” he says. “Then we go.” He prepares it with easy domestic competence, slathering each slice with an extraordinary amount of jam while I put the kettle on.
Mina devours her breakfast—tripe and chicken—and could not be happier.
After walking her, we are ready to set out for the Salt District.
We leave Cáel’s car outside the tower block and take mine. Before we climb in, Cáel murmurs a spell I do not recognise.
My car shimmers.
Its dark paint fades to a tired off-white, the number plate changes and enough surface rust blooms along the doors to make it unremarkable without appearing abandoned.
It becomes the sort of car no one will remember seeing.
“Couldn’t stretch to heated seats, then?” I ask.
“An unremarkable person driving an unremarkable car,” he replies. “The illusion covers all three of us. Anyone looking through the windows will see only a man at the wheel.”
As I settle into the driver’s seat, my shoulders drop, and I realise how tense I have been. Driving with your shoulders level with your ears is no pleasure. I fix my attention on the road and let the tension ease.
We know the location of the Salt anchor from the records, but when Cáel raises the issue of navigating without the map, I cave.
Perhaps I should keep it to myself, but Vivian and Thea are in danger, and so are we. We can’t do this properly if habit keeps me silent.
I pull over and show him.
He stares, dumbfounded, as the map traces itself across my forearm.
“May I?” He gestures towards the design.
I rest my arm in his hands.
Gently, he runs his thumb over the illustration: the Salt District rendered as precisely as I can manage in fine black lines, its anchor pulsing silver beneath my skin.
“This is incredible. When did you discover it?”
I wince. “Yesterday. While you were getting drinks from the coffee shop. When I was sitting on the wall.”
“That’s why you looked guilty.” He studies me. “Are there other things you’re keeping from me? Other abilities you haven’t mentioned?”
“No. Not really.” I shift beneath his gaze. “I simply haven’t had time to experiment.”
“Right,” he says.
I cannot tell whether he is angry.
He closes himself off, only slightly, but I feel the distance all the same, and I have no idea how to reach across it.
We drive through the Districts towards the coast and enter Salt.
The Salt District handles Elyrion’s shipping. Its trades and families overlap with Iron’s, and it shares the same creeping decay. Warehouses hunch beside the roads, their loading bays shuttered, while the sea air leaves a crust of salt on windows, railings and abandoned machinery.
Rather than head directly towards the anchor, we circle the area and pass it at a distance so Cáel can scan for anything out of place.
He sees nothing obvious.
In my experience, that proves nothing.
I park in a supermarket car park. The building is vast and half-empty, a retail behemoth that made sense once, before the Districts became what they are. Its shelves now struggle to hold basic stock, yet the car park remains busy, with people coming and going on foot and by car.
We should blend in easily enough.
The supermarket sits almost directly opposite the anchor site. From here, I can see the ground but no sign of recent work. Nothing like the exposed repair site in Iron.
I call up the map on my arm, coaxing the magic until the runes sharpen.
Tilting my forearm towards Cáel, I say, “There. That’s us. That’s the anchor. Can you see it pulsing?”
He nods.
Beside the anchor stands a long-abandoned leisure centre, once attached to the public sea baths. Rust furs the metal doors, and seagulls perch along the roofline, calling harshly into the wind.
But what catches my attention is the lorry parked at an angle outside it.
I glance from it to the map. “I think something in that lorry is interfering with the network.”
Cáel opens his door and climbs out.
I wipe the map clean, let the feather settle back into place and pull on my coat as I follow.
He is already striding across the car park with rather more purpose than I would choose.
He has not walked ahead of me once since we met. Not at the freight yard, not with the track worker, not anywhere. He waits. He lets me set the pace.
He is not waiting now, and I know exactly why.
He is mad at me.
I need to get Mina out.
“Cáel, don’t you think we should—”
We are surrounded before I can finish.
Dark vehicles sweep in around us and block the supermarket from view, their tyres grinding across the tarmac. Operatives wearing government insignia spill from the vehicles.
The few shoppers close enough to notice lower their heads and hurry away.
People in the Districts know better than to interfere when the government takes an interest.
With weapons drawn, more than a dozen goons—some of them familiar—close in.
Cáel raises his hands. This time, he does not bother with the diplomatic speech.
Blondie strides towards me. Her nose appears fully functional. Someone with serious healing magic has repaired the damage her colleague inflicted yesterday. She stops close enough for me to touch her.
“We put a tracking device on your car while you were inside the freight station,” she says. “All that doubling back was entertaining.”
My stomach drops.
Cáel spent ten minutes this morning giving that car a new colour, a new plate and a coat of rust, and none of it mattered, because somebody had already screwed a box to the underside of it.
“The ward on the tower block was a nice touch. It made getting inside inconvenient, so we waited.” Her smile is narrow and unpleasant. “We began making the Salt and Iron grid points twitch a few days ago. Once you left this morning, we increased the interference and let you come to us.”
“You knew where I was,” I say. “You could have taken me off the pavement outside my own front door.”
“We could.” She says it as though I have asked something rather sweet. “But then we should not have learnt anything, and my employers wanted to be certain.”
The lorry.
Not interference.
Bait—and a question.
I have been answering it ever since. Salt twitched, and I noticed. Iron twitched, and I noticed that too, then drove out and stood on top of it.
They did not know I could feel the grid. They suspected. They are certain now, because I demonstrated it for them twice without once being asked.
And it worked because yesterday that pulse made no sense at all, and I came anyway, since a thing that makes no sense is a thing I have to look at. They did not need to understand me. They only needed to know that much.
My apartment is compromised, but Vivian, Thea and the diplomatic case are already gone.
Small mercies.
A puff of breath condenses in the cold air. I resist the urge to bury my face in my hands.
What was I thinking?
“Right,” I say.
She punches me.
She aims for my nose, but I tuck my chin, and her fist connects with my forehead instead.
Pain blooms behind my eyes.
Her technique is poor. She strikes solid bone at the wrong angle, and from her hissed curse and the way she clutches her wrist, I suspect she has broken it.
“Now, now,” I say. “Mind your language. I moved. You did that yourself.” I glance at the assembled goons. “Do none of you receive proper training? It’s rather embarrassing.”
More than ten weapons point towards me.
One is aimed at Mina.
Another at Cáel’s head.
I could take the two nearest me. Possibly three, if they remain as badly trained as yesterday’s group.
I can’t take all of them without someone shooting Cáel, Mina or one of the shoppers crossing the car park.
“Take her,” Blondie snaps.
Two goons seize me and drag me towards the waiting cars. They wrench my hands behind my back and fasten magic suppression cuffs around my wrists.
The metal bites cold against my skin, and every sigil on my body seems to recoil.
The operatives who escaped the fight in Iron clearly gave a thorough report. This is why I usually kill people.
Behind me, two men keep Cáel at gunpoint. They do not cuff him. By all indications, abducting a foreign governor is a diplomatic complication even Preston would prefer to avoid.
My fingers find the car keys. With the most awkward throw of my life, I manage to drop them at Cáel’s feet.
“Mina, stay.” Through my car’s window, I give her a clumsy hand signal as Cáel stoops to retrieve the keys.
“I’ll come for you,” he says.
I nod.
Just before the door slams, I glance towards the supermarket and the abandoned leisure centre. “Get that lorry away from the anchor,” I mouth.
He sees.
He understands.
The door closes.
Well. This is all uncomfortably familiar.
Outside, Blondie argues with the colleague who flattened her yesterday. She wants to ride with me, and he refuses.
The boxer wins.
He climbs into the back beside me while two more goons take the front, and we set off.
They neglect to fasten my seat belt.
Terribly irresponsible.
With my shoulders aching and my hands pinned behind me, I plant my feet against the floor to stop myself sliding across the seat.
I do not want to land in his lap.
Soon, we enter the lift and ascend towards the Immortal Zone.
I brace myself for Bob’s building, but we travel past it, deeper into the Zone, until the vehicle slows before a gate I know.
A wall I know.
A house I know.
I have not seen this place since I was sixteen.
Home sweet home.