Chapter Eleven — Run #3
Her left hand slipped and she grabbed with bare fingers before catching the industrial
piping beneath the ledge.
Cold metal.
Not skin.
Safe.
She crawled along the underside of the arch while the city screamed green emergency light
below and the enforcers shouted coordinates into comms she couldn’t hear over her own
heartbeat.
Across.
Over.
Down into the adjacent building’s service alley.
Her boots hit standing water hard enough the impact shot pain up both knees.
She ran.
She didn’t look back.
She tried not to look back.
She looked back once.
The apartment window glowed amber-warm in the dark for half a second before House
lights flooded it white.
Then the window went black.
And Avery ran until the city swallowed her whole.
Still Warm
She found shelter in a collapsed textile building four districts from her apartment.
Third floor.
Half the outer wall had come down years ago, leaving a gap that looked out over the rain-
soaked city like a missing tooth. Green filtration lights pulsed somewhere below through
the smog while acid rain turned black in the gutter channels running between abandoned
buildings.
Avery sat against the remaining wall and pressed both knees to her chest and did not move
for a long time.
The data drive sat in her hand.
Still warm.
It wasn’t warm anymore, actually. She knew that. The warmth had transferred out of the
metal minutes ago. She was imagining the heat that lingered in it from his pocket.
She closed her fist around it anyway.
Her left hand hurt where she’d grabbed the piping barehanded.
She hadn’t noticed until now.
A blister forming along the knuckle.
She looked at it without much feeling.
Somewhere below, sirens wailed through the lower transit corridors. House patrols
expanding the search radius. They would reach this district eventually.
She should move.
She didn’t move.
The journal rested against her hip still strapped in the leather bag. Avery pressed her palm
flat against the outside of it.
Still there.
Still here.
She tried to think clearly.
Vinny was—
She stopped.
Started again.
Vinny had stayed behind.
He was alive when she left. She knew that. She’d heard his voice through the apartment
door until she was halfway down the arch and then the building noise drowned everything.
Alive.
He was alive.
Maybe they only wanted information. Maybe the Moretti name still protected him from the
worst of it. Maybe his father had limits. Maybe—
Avery pressed the back of her head against the crumbling wall.
She had learned years ago not to do this.
The math of maybe.
It always ended the same direction.
A Breath tablet remained in her coat pocket. She’d taken two from the strip Vinny gave her
already tonight. Her lungs ached with the recycled textile-building air and the exertion and
the acid rain catching at the back of her throat.
She took the tablet.
Held it on her tongue until it dissolved.
It tasted like metal and careful charity and the look on his face when he handed her the first
strip:
You can breathe or you can argue. Pick one.
God.
She pressed both gloved fists against her mouth and breathed through her nose until the
nausea passed.
The data drive bit into her palm.
She should look at it.
She should understand what he stayed for.
She set the drive carefully on the floor in front of her.
Stared at it.
Didn’t open it.
Not yet.
Not while she was still trying to keep her breathing even.
Sometime before dawn the rain eased. The city moved from crisis-pitch to its ordinary
ambient hum while green ventilation light pulsed wearily across the gap in the wall.
Avery thought about the café.
The way the air tasted different there.
The way he’d set one finger beside her hand on the table and said then we stay like it was
the simplest thing in the world.
Like choosing to stay somewhere difficult was easy if you were doing it beside the right
person.
She thought about the flower he’d pressed into her hand in the rain outside the dead stall.
You said poison flowers survive better than people do. Seemed important.
She thought about black veins spreading beneath pale skin.
The way he smiled when he shouldn’t.
The way he always—
The city screens flickered alive.
One by one across the skyline the emergency broadcasts began.
Avery watched a distant screen through the gap in the wall. Too far to read the words. But
she saw the image.
She saw the image.
Dark curls brushed neatly back.
Sharp suit collar.
That particular crooked smile he almost never used around his own family.
Her chest collapsed.
No.
She read the words when she finally made herself cross to the window edge.
VINCENT MORETTI DEAD AT 27.
The city below kept moving.
Poison City kept moving.
It always kept moving.
Avery sat back down on the cold floor with the data drive in her hand and Vinny’s warmth
long gone out of the metal and the journal bag heavy at her hip and thirty-two names that
no longer felt like enough.
She didn’t cry yet.
She just breathed.
Because that was what you did in Poison City when everything was gone.
You breathed.
You survived.
And in the morning—
you figured out who killed him.