Chapter 1
Wren
The morning after my engagement party, my father made me eggs.
This was not affection. In our house, eggs were a summons. Briggs Calloway only cooked when he wanted to talk to you without anyone else in the room, because nobody interrupts a man holding a spatula, and because the kitchen was the one place in the clubhouse without ears in the walls.
"Sit," he said, when I came down.
I sat. The clubhouse smelled like last night — spilled beer, cold smoke, the sweet chemical reek of the fog machine somebody had thought was a good idea.
Streamers in the Static Kings' colors sagged off the rafters.
Somebody had stuck one to the mounted boar's head over the bar, so the boar wore a little electric-blue party hat at a jaunty angle.
It was the most cheerful thing in the building, and it was dead.
My father set a plate in front of me. "You disappeared last night."
"I needed air."
"For ninety minutes."
"It's a tall building. Lot of air."
He sat across from me with his own plate, and for a second he just looked at me, and I saw the whole machinery of him working behind his eyes.
My father loved me. I never doubted that.
He loved me the way you love a thing you're afraid of losing, which is to say with both hands closed too tight around it.
"Vance was looking for you," he said.
"Vance can look. He's got the eyes for it."
"Wren."
"I'm here now. I came down. I'm eating your eggs." I forked some up to prove it. They were good, which was somehow infuriating. "What more do you want from me before noon?"
He leaned back. The chair creaked under him. Briggs was a big man going gray at the edges, with forearms like mooring rope and a voice that could fill a room or empty one. People in the Sprawl said a lot of things about my father. Most of them were true. A few of them I tried not to think about.
"I want you to understand what last night was," he said.
"A party."
"An alliance. Vance's people run half the water rights east of the canal. You marry into that, the Kings don't worry about a dry season for a generation." He pointed his fork at me, gently, like a teacher. "That's not a wedding. That's a treaty with a cake."
"How romantic. I'll have it embroidered on a pillow."
He didn't laugh. He almost never laughed at the things I thought were funny, which was its own small tragedy of our relationship.
"You think I don't know what you want," he said, quieter now. "You think I forgot what it's like to be young and stupid and certain the rules are for other people. I didn't. I just lived long enough to learn what the rules are for."
I put my fork down. "And what are they for, Dad?"
"Keeping you alive in a city that would eat you for the boots." He said it without drama, which is what made it land. "Everything I've built, I built so you'd never have to climb a tower at midnight to feel safe. The least you can do is let me finish."
I didn't tell him I'd climbed the tower for the opposite reason. I didn't tell him a lot of things. That was the architecture of us — a house with most of the doors painted on.
Pixie saved me, the way she always did, by kicking the kitchen door open with her boot because both her hands were full of cables.
"Morning, Mr. C," she announced. "Morning, bride-to-be. You look like a haunted painting, I love it." She dumped the cables on the counter. "Briggs, your west relay's still down. Whole grid's flickering. I've been getting ghost signals all night, it's a mess."
My father's whole posture changed at the word relay. That's a thing about my world — romance is optional, but the comms grid is sacred. Information is the only thing in the Sprawl worth more than water.
"Down how," he said.
"Down dead. I climbed up to check it and somebody'd already been at it.
" Pixie hopped onto the counter and started sorting cables by color, fast, the way she did everything.
"Which is weird, right? Because I didn't send anybody.
And you didn't send anybody. And the splice job was clean.
Like, suspiciously clean. Somebody who knew what they were doing rerouted our primary feed and then left. "
I kept my face very still. I'd had a lot of practice keeping my face still. According to Pixie, who told me this constantly and without mercy, I had the worst poker face in the entire club and possibly the hemisphere.
"What's wrong with you," she said, immediately, looking at me. "You've got the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have the face. You have the face you had when you broke my drone and tried to tell me it flew away."
"Drones do fly. It's the whole point of them."
"Not into a wall, Wren. Not on purpose." She narrowed her eyes. "What do you know about the relay?"
"Nothing." Which was technically true. I didn't know about the relay. I knew about the man who'd been fixing it. Those were different facts and I was going to hold onto that distinction with everything I had.
"Maybe it was a Good Samaritan," I said. "Maybe somebody fixed our relay out of the goodness of their heart and we're standing here being ungrateful."
"Nobody in the Sprawl has a good heart," my father said.
"You do."
"I have a functional heart. There's a difference." He turned to Pixie. "How clean was the splice. Exactly."
Pixie held up the cable she'd pulled down, turning it under the kitchen light like a jeweler with a stone.
"Surgeon clean. Whoever did this has done it a thousand times.
The crimp's perfect, the weatherproofing's perfect, they even matched our color code.
" She frowned at it. "That's the part that bugs me, Mr. C.
They matched our internal code. The one we don't publish. Either we've got a leak, or—"
"Or it's somebody who's worked our grid before," my father finished.
"Right." Pixie set the cable down. "Which is a short list. And it's a list of people who really shouldn't be on our tower at midnight."
I drank my soda and said nothing and concentrated very hard on the boar in its little party hat.
My father, thank every saint in the Sprawl, wasn't paying attention to my face. He was paying attention to the problem. "Somebody from another crew was on our tower," he said, slow, and I watched the temperature in the room drop. "On Kings' ground. Touching Kings' grid."
"Could've been freelance," Pixie offered. "Could've been a Rustborn scavenger looking for copper."
"Rustborn don't splice clean. Rustborn rip and run." My father stood. The chair shrieked. "I want to know who was on my tower."
And there it was — the moment where my night and my morning collided, where the man with no name and the patch over his heart stopped being my secret and started being my father's question.
I sat very still in my chair and ate my treaty eggs and said absolutely nothing, because I had finally, finally understood what the crooked-smile stranger had been telling me on the tower.
Names are how they find you.
He hadn't been talking about himself.
He'd been talking about me.
By noon, the whole clubhouse knew the west relay had been touched, and by the time the afternoon shift rolled in, the story had grown a tail. By dusk it had a name attached to it, because nothing stays secret in the Sprawl for longer than it takes someone to brag in the wrong bar.
I learned the name the way I learned most dangerous things — by pretending I wasn't listening.
I was at the bar nursing a soda when Tunny and two of the other riders came in arguing, and Tunny slammed his glove down and said it, said the name, and the whole bar went quiet in that specific way a room goes quiet when a curse word gets said in church.
"Dex," Tunny spat. "Dex Aldermore was on Kings' ground. Chrome Apostles' own enforcer. Splicing our grid like he owns it."
Dex.
I had a name now. I had the one thing he'd warned me not to want. And the worst part, the part I'm ashamed of even now, is that the first thing I felt wasn't fear, and it wasn't anger, and it wasn't loyalty to the club whose colors I'd worn my whole life.
The first thing I felt was relief.
Because now, when I closed my eyes and saw that face I'd been ordered to memorize, I had something to call it.
"Dex Aldermore," I said, very quietly, to my soda.
"What was that?" Pixie slid onto the stool beside me, a cable still draped around her neck like a scarf. She lived in those cables. I think she'd have worn them to her own funeral.
"Nothing," I said.
"You said a name."
"I said nothing. It's a versatile word. I use it a lot."
She looked at me for a long second. Then she looked at the bar, where Tunny was still ranting about the Apostles, about the truce that fell apart three years ago, about the cousin he lost when it did. She looked back at me.
"You've got the face," she said softly. Not teasing now. Careful.
"Pixie—"
"I'm not saying anything to anybody. I'm just saying.
" She pulled the cable tighter around her neck like a kid hugging a blanket.
"Whatever it is. Whatever's behind the face.
The Apostles aren't a story we tell to scare you, Wren.
Tunny lost Marco when the truce broke. Real blood, real grave.
That's not poker. You can't bluff that."
"I know."
"Do you, though? Because you've got the bluffing face and the knowing face, and they look identical, which is your whole curse." She propped her chin on her hand. "Tell me a thing. Anything true. I'll know if it's true. I always know."
I thought about it. I thought about the tower, the gold light, the crooked smile, memorize my face instead. I thought about how badly I wanted to tell someone, and how telling Pixie would make it real, and how real was the one thing it couldn't be allowed to become.
"I hate my engagement party hangover," I said. "True thing. It's pounding."
Pixie sighed. "That's true. It's also not the thing. But fine. I'll take the small true thing for now." She slid off the stool, gathered her cables, and pointed two fingers at her own eyes, then at me. "I'm watching you, Calloway. Not because I'm nosy."
"You're extremely nosy."
"I'm protectively nosy. There's a difference." She backed toward the parts cage. "Drink water. You look haunted. Marry rich. Et cetera."
And she was gone, off to coax the grid back to life, and I sat alone with my soda and my hangover and a name I had no business carrying.
I told myself it was nothing. The versatile word again. I told myself I'd never see him again, that the Sprawl was eight million people deep, that by next week Dex Aldermore would be a story I didn't even tell Pixie.
I drank my water. I looked haunted. I did not, it turned out, marry rich.
I told myself a lot of things that week.
Not one of them survived contact with the Hollow Market.