CHAPTER 6
Sloane
◆
The hangar door rolled open on a long iron groan, the kind of sound a building makes only once a night, and warm light spilled out across the wet tarmac like something poured.
I had spent two days being moved. Pulled out of a parking structure, put on the back of a stranger's bike, fed a gas-station sandwich I'd pretended not to need, lied to by a safehouse that turned out to be a trap, and ridden through a rising storm by three men who wouldn't tell me anything I could put in a deposition.
I had catalogued every inch of it the way I catalogue everything, because the cataloguing is the only handhold I have ever trusted.
The exits, the liars, the running tab of what each kindness would eventually cost me.
And then the door opened, and I walked into Chrome Sanctuary, and for the first time since Sable folded mid-sentence I forgot to take notes.
It was chrome, first. That was the joke in the name and also the truth of it.
A whole floor of bikes under work-lights, the steel of them pooling the light, throwing it back up in long soft smears so the whole bay seemed lit from underneath.
Above the bikes, a cathedral of steel trusses ran up into a dark I couldn't see the top of, riveted and old, 1943 if the stencil over the door meant anything, a structure built to hold something that flew.
It smelled like cold jet fuel and machine oil, sharp and industrial, and then, underneath, impossibly, like warm bread.
The bread was the part I had no clause for.
"Try not to fall in love with the place," Julian had said at the door, turning the crown of an old watch under his thumb, the little ratchet of it already a sound I'd learned to pick out of a room. "Everyone does."
I had every intention of disappointing him.
A man came down off the bike floor toward us, and the room reorganized around him the way a meeting reorganizes around the person who actually signs.
He was built like a load-bearing wall, fair and gray and scarred, somewhere past sixty in the face and nowhere near it in the shoulders, and when he stopped in front of me he looked at me for a long moment the way you look at a deal you've decided to make before you read the terms.
"Dane Voss," he said. "This is my house. You're safe in it. " A beat. "Safer than you were."
"That's a low bar, Mr. Voss," I said. "I was recently informed I'm already dead."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Grant tell you that?"
"He led with it."
"He would. " Dane's gaze flicked past me to Grant, then Omar, then Julian, a fast circuit, a count, the same count I'd watched Grant run on every room since the parking structure.
Whatever he read in them seemed to settle something.
He nodded once, to himself. "Cady's got the loft.
Eat something. We'll talk when the storm tells us how long we've got. "
He went, and the warmth went with him, and a girl took his place at a dead run.
Pink-streaked hair, an oversized flannel, a headset shoved down around her neck, and a grin so unguarded it made my chest hurt.
"Oh my God," she said, "you're her. You're the lawyer.
You read the clause. Okay, I've been monitoring the firm's traffic for a week and I have opinions, hi, I'm Cady, Cady Marlow, comms and everything that plugs in, and also I'm the only one here besides me who can see what they really look like, so. "
"What who really looks like," I said.
"The witches. " She said it the way you'd say the weather.
"Glamours. They make a face and most people just see the face.
I see the seams. " She studied me, briefly, professionally, and then visibly relaxed.
"You're clean. Good. You'd be surprised.
Come up, there's coffee, it's terrible, you'll love it. "
I have one friend at the firm and she is a calendar app. I had known Cady Marlow for ninety seconds and I was already, against every standing order I'd ever issued myself, calculating how much it would cost me to keep her.
The loft was reached by an iron stair that rang under my boots.
Up top, the cathedral compressed into something human-sized: a row of bunks under wool blankets, a galley kitchen barely wider than its own table, a nest of monitors and cables that had to be Cady's.
An old man sat at the head of the battered farm table with a flask and a deck of cards and the deadpan calm of a man who had survived everything once already and found it overrated.
"Hollis," he said, not getting up. "I run the wrenches. " He tipped the flask an inch toward me. Cheap whiskey, by the smell. "You'll want this before the night's out."
"I don't drink on the record," I said.
"There's no record up here, miss. " He poured two fingers into a tin cup and slid it across the table anyway, the way you'd leave food out for something half-wild. "That's the whole point of the place."
A kid hovered at the edge of the galley, all elbows and eagerness, young enough that I felt suddenly ancient.
"I'm Wren," he said. "I'm the one who isn't scared of the storm.
They make a thing about it. It's not even a big deal.
" He was scared of the storm. It was all over him.
I liked him immediately and filed the liking somewhere I could deny it later.
So this was the inventory. Granite, glamour-sight, deadpan, eager.
A found family assembled in a steel barn at the end of a flooded road.
I stood in the middle of it holding a tin cup I hadn't agreed to, and I understood, with the cold clarity I usually reserve for spotting a poison pill in a term sheet, exactly how dangerous this place was to me.
I have armor against threats. I have no armor at all against warmth.
The storm decided the timeline for us.
It came over the airfield the way the front had been promising all day, except all at once, and the first I knew of it was the lights, not ours but the far ones, the horizon itself.
Through the loft's high window I watched the far line of the world go from a scatter of distant town-glow to nothing, a dark wave rolling toward us, swallowing it pole by pole.
Cady was already at her monitors. "And there it goes," she said. Her voice had lost the grin. "Grid's down. Whole corridor. This isn't some flicker that comes back in a minute, it's a hard down."
"How wide," Julian said. He'd come up the stair without a sound and was standing at her shoulder, coat still on, watch in his hand.
"Wide. I've got the substation feed for about four more seconds and then I won't have anything. " She typed. The screens flickered. "There. Gone. We are officially off the map."
"Comms?"
"Sat phone. " She held up a battered handset like a relic. "One. That's it. Cell's useless, the towers are dead, the landline's been dead since the second Gulf War. We've got me, this phone, and a prayer."
Grant had come up too, and Hollis, and the loft that had felt cozy a minute ago now felt like the inside of a held breath.
Outside, the rain hit, nothing like the soft fretful start I'd ridden through earlier, but the real thing now, driven sideways and sustained, the wind behind it a long unbroken push against the steel.
"Roads?" Dane's voice, from the foot of the stair.
Hollis crossed to the window, looked, came back. "Flooded by now or flooding. The low spot at the county line goes under at half what's coming. You don't drive out of here tonight. You don't drive out of here tomorrow, probably, neither."
"And the storm cell's parked," Cady said, frowning at a satellite loop that had frozen the instant the grid died, the last frame she'd ever get. "It was moving and then it just. Sat down. On us."
I am a person who reads clauses for a living, which means I am a person who notices when the math is too clean.
A regional grid that fails the same hour a storm cell parks itself directly overhead, while the only road out drowns at the county line, every exit sealing in concert on the very night they brought the marked woman to ground.
I opened my mouth to say it. That's not weather, that's a contract. And then I closed it, because I had no evidence yet, only the prickle at the back of my neck that had never been wrong in my life and had never once been admissible.
"How long," I asked instead.
Julian answered, because Julian was the one who'd already done the arithmetic.
"Storm cell like that, off-grid, roads under.
" He pressed the watch flat to his palm as if reading the time through the back of the case, and I understood now that the gesture was how he thought, the way some men count beads.
"Thirty-six hours. Give or take. We're locked in until the grid comes back or the water goes down, whichever loses first."
"Thirty-six hours," I repeated.
"There's worse places," Omar said, dropping onto the bench beside Hollis like the news was an invitation. He'd shed his jacket somewhere and looked completely at home, which I was learning was his entire native condition. "We're dry, we're armed, there's bread."
"And heat," Dane said, and he raised it like a flag rather than a comfort. He looked at Julian. "How's the bowser?"
"That," Julian said, "is the actual problem."
He took me down to the generator bay himself, maybe because I wouldn't stop asking, maybe because he'd figured out faster than the others that I would believe a problem I could see the size of and fight a comfort to the death.
The generator was a hulking diesel thing in a concrete annex, running with a steady industrial cough, and beside it crouched a fuel bowser like a fat steel tick.
"This runs the lights, the heat, Cady's nest, the cold room compressor, all of it," Julian said.
"We keep it fueled for transit ops, not for siege.
Hollis topped it three days ago. " He laid a flat palm on the bowser's flank, a gesture I'd have called affectionate on a man who admitted to affection.