CHAPTER 2 #2
She was shouting in my ear over the wind, and I'll give her this, the things people usually shout she'd skipped clean past. No what's happening, no who are you, both of them already filed somewhere I couldn't see. She aimed her shouting at the next thing instead.
"Where are we going."
"Out."
"Out is a direction, Holloway, not a destination, and I've now committed three felonies in the last ninety seconds by leaving a crime scene, so I'd like the destination."
"You committed zero felonies. You survived, which is its own thing, and you'll get used to it. " I leaned us into the river road. "What happened back there, they did. You were the one it happened to. Get that straight now or it'll eat you later."
She went quiet. For about a block. Then it came lower, dragged down out of the shouting into something she had to make herself say:
"That man had a face I recognized. From the firm. The neighbor on twelve. And it wasn't his face. It moved wrong. Like it didn't fit the skull."
So she'd seen it. She'd caught the seam where the lie didn't sit flush, which is its own kind of sight, a coarser one than Cady's, who reads the touched ones all the way down to the glamour itself. Good. That meant she wouldn't waste my time arguing the world was the shape she'd been told.
"Glamour," I said. "Witch-work. It dresses up the eye and leaves the nose untouched, every time. That's why you've got us instead of the cops."
"Witches."
"Mm."
"And the man with the leash. " She'd pieced more than she was letting on. "The one who threw the bag. He smelled like the office on the eleventh floor. Like the conference room. Like the deal."
I didn't answer that. The deal was hers to carry and not mine to explain, and Omar or the woman with the pink in her hair would do it better than me, with words that didn't sound like a casualty report.
All I knew was the shape of it. A lawyer who read a clause she wasn't supposed to read.
A signature somebody needed and a body somebody would settle for.
The brief Dane had given me was four sentences long and the last one was the rider dies before the cargo, which was the only line of it that meant anything to me, because it was the only line that was a vow.
"And you're—"
"Yeah."
A long pause, the kind a person takes when they're deciding whether to file a thing or fall apart over it, and she filed it.
I felt her decide. Felt her arms ease half a degree off the death grip, nothing like trust in it, only a triage that had ranked the species of the man keeping her alive somewhere below her bigger problems.
"Fine," she said. "On the record, then. I have no notes."
I almost said something back and swallowed it instead.
The river ran black on the right and I tallied the bridge supports out of pure habit, three, four, five, marking cover I'd never get to use, and somewhere underneath the resin-and-oiled-metal scent that's only ever how I read to myself, I caught the last of the ozone burning off her coat, and I didn't like how long it clung.
Her phone went off.
I felt it before I heard it, the buzz of it against my spine where her body was pressed in, and then the chime, bright and obscene in the dark, and a sick certainty dropped in my gut like a round into a chamber.
"Phone," I said. "Kill it."
"It's my office. They'll be wondering—"
"Kill the phone."
"That's my whole life on there, my files, my contacts, the only copies of—"
"Mercer. " I kept my voice flat. Flat is what people hear under panic.
"That phone is how they found you in a structure with the lights off.
They didn't follow you. They didn't have to.
You've been carrying a homing beacon you pay a monthly bill for.
Pull the battery or throw it in the river, those are the two choices, and you've got about—"
The light came up in the mirror.
I'd been half-watching it for three blocks, a single headlamp, the way it sat, the way it held distance.
City traffic falls back. It speeds up, it turns off, it does the hundred small human things that traffic does.
This one did none of them. It hung at exactly the range a hunter hangs at, close enough to close, far enough to deny, and it did not fall back, and when I rolled the throttle to test it the light grew to match me, smooth, unhurried, a thing that had all night.
Tail. Single. Pacing me dead steady. A patrol drifts and wanders; this one's running on a leash with somebody's fist around the far end, and they want to watch where I bolt before they close.
I'd been here. A city I won't name. A vehicle I reached too late.
I'd had her hand, the translator, I'd had it in mine through the broken glass and then the fire took the angle from me and I had a glove and no hand inside it, and the kid in the back I never even got to, and the brass round in my pocket was for that, for the ninety seconds, for the soft I'd been at the wrong corner.
It wouldn't go that way twice. I set it flat in my chest, no heat on it, the way you lay down a decision you mean to keep. This one stays attached to her arm. This one breathes.
"Holloway. " She'd twisted to look back and I felt her go still against me, that particular stillness, the one that arrives when the body finally believes what the mind's been arguing about. "That car's been there since the bridge."
"I know."
"It's not slowing down."
"I know that too."
Her arms tightened, all the way, the triage gone, both hands fisted in my cut now, and I felt her breath go short and fast against the back of my neck and then, deliberately, felt her haul it back down to something she could use.
Screaming would have been the easy answer.
She passed it up and did the brutal one instead. She got ready.
"What do we do," she said.
Every road out of a thing like this lies to you but one, and tonight the honest one was speed and the river road and a man under an overpass humming to himself over a paper map that no jammer could ever blind, and I was going to put us in his hands, and after that I was going to make sure the thing in the mirror understood it had picked the wrong corner to be soft at.
But first the beacon. First the thing she could fix that I couldn't.
I leaned us into the dark and felt the engine open up under us, felt her go with the lean instead of against it for the first time, her body learning mine the way a body learns a bike, and the headlight in the mirror stretched long and patient and stayed.
"Hold on," I said. "And kill the goddamn phone."