CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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LUCA
Bex set a plate in front of me at nine on Friday morning and said, “Luca, eat something.”
Eggs, and toast cut in halves the way you cut it for a kid. The mug had been sitting there since seven and the coffee in it had gone cold, and I had been looking at it the whole time like it might climb into my hand by itself.
Both palms wrapped to the second knuckle. Gauze, burn cream tacky underneath it, and under that a thing I was not going to think about at breakfast.
“I can’t hold the mug, Bex. That’s the whole problem with the mug.”
“So I’ll hold it.”
“That’s worse.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”
She held it anyway. Two fingers under the base, tipped at my mouth, and I drank cold coffee in my own building and got half of it in my beard. She wiped it off with the side of her thumb.
Then she picked up the fork.
“No.”
“You haven’t eaten since Wednesday night.”
“I said no.”
“Okay.” She did not put the fork down. “I’m going to stand here holding it, though.”
She waited me out, and at the end of it I opened my mouth and let her feed me eggs off a fork at my own table, in my own shop, with my own hands lying on the wood in front of me like two things somebody had left there.
I had been up since four.
The rain quit around five. The yard was steaming where the low sun hit it and every puddle wore an oil rainbow. Light reached under the roof glass and found the place where the forge had stood.
I walked the fence line twice before anybody else in the pack was awake. Iron, salt, a name cut into the iron. The new ward was holding fine.
That was the trouble. It was holding against nothing.
No cars on Rosewood. Nobody parked on the corner pretending to be on a phone. The scanner had been flat since midnight, and there was no scent on the air off the yard except wet asphalt and cold ash, and that absence was the loudest thing in the building.
Marcus came through the roll-up with one hand against his taped ribs.
“Dock contact’s gone quiet,” he said. “His wife says somebody brought him an envelope and he put his phone in a drawer.”
“Alive?”
“Alive. Bought. It’s a better answer than the other one.”
Bex put the fork down. “They took Corinne because she kept a page. Now everybody who’s got a page is being taught what it costs.”
Marcus sat carefully. “Then we stop asking people to keep secrets alone. Copies out today. Enough of them that a van can’t collect them all.”
He had spent his life making information scarce. I watched him start giving it away.
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Teddy Ashby found me at the dead forge around ten.
The corner was ash and gray brick and a firepot with nothing in it. Half the frame was gone. He stood at the edge of the ash with his hair flat on one side.
“Are you the guy that makes stuff?”
“I was,” I said, and then I fixed it. “Yeah. I am.”
He looked straight at the wrapping. Kids do that. Grown men look at the wall.
“My mom was gonna take me on my birthday. Is the big one still there?”
There was only one thing in this city he could have meant. The long neck going up into the roof, the ribs like a boat turned over, the little sign underneath with the name nobody can pronounce.
“Yeah. Yeah, buddy, he’s — he’s still there.”
“Okay,” he said, and that was all of it.
Daniel stood at the foot of the loft stairs. He had arrived the night before with a duffel and a face I had not yet seen relaxed. He put a hand on Teddy’s head and walked him back upstairs. The boy leaned against his leg the whole way.
I went out the side and stood in the cold yard with my arms held out from my sides like a man carrying two full buckets. It rode me the rest of the day.
Bex waited at the bottom step.
“You said you’d never make one you couldn’t unmake.”
“The wedge still comes out. Anybody can do it. The heart’s a wall, not a cage.”
She looked at my hands. “And you?”
I had no useful answer. She took the empty plate out of my way anyway.
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Victoria came down at eleven with her hair up in the clip and her eyes bruised underneath from not sleeping.
Last night she had found her grandmother’s nomination and the line that said she could not be pledged before she was born. The book had gone back in the box after. The charter stayed out on the church table.
She had a smear of ash along the outside of her wrist she had missed washing off. I found it from across the room. I told myself I was checking her for damage the way a man checks anybody after a bad night, and that was not what I was doing.
She was looking at the wrapping. Not at the wall the way the men do — straight at it, the way the kid had. Then she caught me catching her and went for the coffee pot.
Bex was rinsing plates. I tried to move the empty glass away from the table edge with the side of my wrapped hand. I pushed too hard.
It fell.
“Sorry — I’ve got it—” Victoria was on her knees before the last piece stopped rolling.
“That was me,” I said.
“I know. I’m just—”
I went down beside her, slowly, without hands to help me land. “Then neither of us needs to say sorry to the glass.”
She looked at the shard in her palm. Put it down.
“Dustpan,” she said to Bex. Her voice was rough. “Not my hand. I know.”
Bex brought it. I sat on the floor while Victoria swept, and for once I was the person who could not make himself useful.
“I thought I could manage a glass,” I said.
Victoria glanced up. No pity in it. “You can manage telling me what you need.”
I wanted to argue. I had nothing that would not sound childish.
“Help me up.”
She put an arm under mine. Bex took the other. Both of them pretended not to notice how much I needed it. I let them pretend.
“Come here,” I said. “Take the tarp off the corner.”
“Luca—”
“The tarp, trouble.”
She pulled it, and it came off in one go and hit the floor.
A chair. A plain offcut from the old hearth frame made the seat, not the heart plate. That still stood at the gate, untouched. The back and arms were oak from the hood support. Pike had cut the joints. Bex had sanded them. I had spent the early morning telling both of them they were doing it wrong.
It sat crooked. The front left leg was long by a hair, the back was too tall for the table, and one arm was still rough where the saw had wandered off the line.
“It goes there,” I said. “Head of the table. Back to the wall.”
She looked at the chair and did not sit.
“Sit down, trouble. It’s yours. It’s not going anywhere.”
She put her hands on the arms first. Then she sat, carefully, as if somebody might tell her it was reserved. Nobody did.
Bex said something behind me about the front leg being long.
“It’s her chair,” I said. “It can sit crooked. Anybody who’s got a word to say about where she sits at that table can come down here and say it to me.”
Victoria did not turn around. Her fingers went tight on the arms of it and stayed tight.
Her thumb found a gouge in the old steel. I had made it years ago, slipping with a cold chisel. We had left it instead of grinding the whole past out of the thing.
“A ward needs a name cut in it. This isn’t a ward. It’s a chair.”
She did not say anything. Not one word. Her free hand pressed down on the plate beside her leg, and her chin came up, and her mouth was doing something she was not going to let it finish doing.
So I let the silence run. Nobody in this club has ever been able to shut up long enough to let a thing land. I sat down across from her and I shut up.
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The dressings had to come off at noon.
Mara brought the dressing tray. She showed Victoria what could be touched and what had to be left alone, then stayed at the next bench while Victoria helped.
I sat on the stool by the bench. Victoria stood in between my knees, because that was where the light was and because there was nowhere else to stand.
Her hands came up under mine. That is the whole of it now. Every part of the touching in that room was hers. I could not lift a cup, I could not put a hand on her waist, and I could hold my arms out like a man being measured for a suit.
She started at my wrist and worked the gauze off in a spiral.
“Slower. Start at the thumb and work out.”
She went slower. Her breath was landing on the inside of my forearm and her scent was all over the front of my shirt, and I could not do one thing about either.
The last layer stuck. Victoria stopped. Mara loosened it for her, then let her go on.
“Keep going.”
She looked at the right hand, then the left. A shifter heals in days what a man carries for weeks. These burns were closing at the edges like ordinary wounds. The ward had taken the part of me that would have made it fast.
Then she bent her head and put her mouth on the inside of my wrist, above the burn line, on the only piece of me she could reach that was not ruined.
I felt that in the backs of my knees.
“Stay exactly there,” I said. “Don’t move your hand and don’t look at me.”
She stayed. Her mouth stayed.
My hands were out on both sides of her, close enough to her ribs that I could feel the warmth coming off her on the insides of my forearms, and I could not close them. I could get near enough to know the shape of it and not one inch further.
Mate was a fine word until a man could not hold a cup. I wanted to know she still wanted the man who came with the word, and I hated needing to know it.
“If these worked, trouble, you would not be standing up right now.”
Her breath went out of her all at once.
“You’d be face down on that bench with my thumb under your jaw, and I’d take my time about it, and I wouldn’t ask you one question, because you don’t want asking. You want handling. Marcus asks. I don’t.”
She shifted her weight, and then she got a fist in my shirt and pulled. Her forehead came down. My head went down with it, against her sternum, and I stayed there and listened to the whole thing running under the bone.
“Luca,” she said.
“I know.”
I had my hands out to both sides the entire time, like the floor was wet paint.
The left dressing spotted red when I moved. I pulled both hands back before I could stop myself.
Victoria did not follow them. She looked at my face.
“You can tell me it hurts.”
“It hurts.”
The words cost more than the burn had in front of the whole yard.
She put her forehead against mine while Mara took over the dressing. “I’m not here because you can lift me.”
“No?”
“No. Though you’ve been insufferable about the advantage.”
I laughed. One damaged sound. She stayed close enough to feel it.
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Adrian came in around one. Mara had my left hand on a clean pad.
“The papers are copied,” he said. “Every page Marcus asked for. There’s a set for Victoria and one outside the building.”
I looked at him.
He did not ask whether that made us even. That helped.
“Good,” I said. “Now tell her before she has to ask you.”
He went upstairs.
I was walking past it when the gate monitor caught the edge of my eye.
Little screen, black and white, the gate in the middle and the far sidewalk of Rosewood in the corner of the frame. A man standing on it. Hands at his sides. Not smoking, not on a phone, not leaning on anything. Facing us.
“Bex. Get Adrian. Now.”
I knocked the recording back with the side of my wrist. He was on the monitor at four. At five. Dry through the rain.
I had walked that stretch of fence twice. There had been nobody on the pavement.
Then a black car stopped at the curb in the live picture. Crane got out, and the waiting image vanished.
This time the gravel moved under his shoe.