Chapter 2
Wren
The Hollow Market sits under the old freeway overpass where the canal forks, and it's the one place in the Sprawl where everyone agrees to pretend they're not at war.
Neutral ground. Old custom, older than my father, older than any patch hanging on any wall.
You leave your colors at the edge, you leave your grudges with them, and for the length of the market you're just a person buying noodles next to another person buying noodles, even if you both know you'd happily run each other over in the street outside.
I went for solder. That's the lie I told Pixie, and it was even half true — she'd burned through our supply rerouting the grid, and somebody had to restock, and I'd volunteered before anyone else could, because the clubhouse had become a place where everyone wanted to talk about my wedding and I needed a few hours of being nobody.
I bought the solder in the first ten minutes. I spent the next two hours not going home.
The market does that to you. It's a river of light and smell and noise — frying oil and engine grease and the green electric smell of the canal, vendors shouting prices, kids running wires between stalls for tips, somebody's bad speaker pushing out an old song about a city that drowned.
I let it carry me. I bought a skewer of something I couldn't identify and ate it walking and felt, for the first time since the party, like my life was the right size.
Then I turned a corner around a stack of crates and walked directly into the chest of Dex Aldermore.
I knew it was him before I looked up. I knew it from the way the air changed, which is a ridiculous thing to be able to know about a person, and which I have never admitted to anyone, and which was completely true.
"You," I said.
"Me," he agreed.
He'd left his colors at the edge like everyone else.
Just a gray shirt, sleeves shoved up, the work-rough hands I remembered from the tower.
Without the patch he looked younger. More like a person and less like a verdict.
He had my skewer-grease somewhere on his shirt now, because I'd half-stabbed him with it on impact.
"You're bleeding sauce," I said, which was not the cool, withering thing I'd meant to say.
He looked down at the smear. "You attacked me with a kebab."
"You walked into me."
"You came around a blind corner doing eighty." He plucked the skewer out of my hand, took the last bite off it, and handed me back the bare stick. "There. Evidence destroyed."
"That was mine."
"It was a hazard. I disarmed it." He was fighting the crooked smile and losing. "Public safety."
"You owe me a kebab."
"I'll put it on the account."
"What account?"
"The one I'm opening right now. 'Things I owe the Calloway girl.'" He pretended to write in the air. "One kebab. One apology for the corner I definitely didn't walk into. We'll settle up later."
"There's no later. There's no account. We're not—" I lowered my voice, because saying it out loud felt like tempting something. "We're not a thing that has a later, do you understand that? You're an Apostle. I'm a Calloway. The later for us is a canal."
"Grim." He nodded thoughtfully. "Accurate. Still owe you a kebab, though. Debts outlive politics. Everybody knows that."
I should have walked away. The whole architecture of my life was built on the idea that I would walk away from exactly this.
There was a man two stalls down wearing a Kings-adjacent jacket who would absolutely tell my father he'd seen me talking to anyone, let alone an Apostle, and the smart thing, the only thing, was to turn around and lose myself back in the river of light.
Instead, when a pair of riders in Apostle gray drifted into the far end of the lane — his people, not mine — and Dex's whole body went quietly alert, I did the stupidest possible thing.
I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him sideways behind the noodle stall.
We ended up wedged in the narrow gap between the stall's back wall and a stack of crates, close, the steam from the woks rolling over us, hidden from both lanes at once.
His people passed on one side. A minute later a Kings rider passed on the other.
We stood very still in the four feet of neutral nowhere between our two worlds and waited to not exist.
"This is insane," I whispered.
"You pulled me back here."
"Reflex."
"You have a reflex for hiding enemy enforcers behind food carts?" His voice was low, right at my ear, warm under the steam. "That's very specific. You should get that looked at."
"Shut up. They'll hear you."
"They can't hear me. There's a man twelve feet away aggressively chopping scallions. We could stage a play back here." But he dropped his voice anyway, and the closeness of it did something to my pulse I chose not to examine. "Why'd you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Pull me back here. You could've let your guy see us.
Could've let him run home and tell Briggs the Apostle was harassing the princess.
Would've solved your whole problem." His eyes moved over my face, reading it, and I remembered with a lurch that I had the worst poker face in the hemisphere. "Instead you hid me. Why?"
"Because you'd have bled on the noodles. Health code violation."
"Try again."
"Because the lighting back here is very flattering and I wanted a closer look."
"Getting warmer. Still lying." He tilted his head. "You do this thing where the lie gets funnier the closer you get to the truth. Did you know that? It's a tell. You joke harder the more honest you're about to be."
"I do not have a tell."
"You have nothing but tells. You're a walking confession with good hair." He said it gently, not cruel, almost wondering. "It's the most disarming thing I've ever seen. Briggs Calloway's daughter and you couldn't bluff a child out of a cookie."
"I'll have you know I am a feared and respected figure in this district."
"You're hiding behind a noodle cart with the enemy because you didn't want me to get hurt." He let that sit. "That's the truth. You don't have to say it. I watched you not-say it. That's enough."
The honest answer was that I didn't want him hurt, and I didn't have the slightest right to that feeling, and admitting it out loud would have made it real.
"Because if they catch you, there's paperwork," I said. "Bodies are a whole thing. I didn't want to deal with it."
He laughed — not the smile, an actual laugh, quiet and surprised, his breath stirring the loose hair at my temple. "Bodies are a whole thing," he repeated. "Saints. You're funny. Nobody told me you'd be funny."
"What did they tell you I'd be?"
"Spoiled. Soft. A trophy with a pulse." He said it plainly, no apology, and somehow that was better than a gentler lie. "Briggs Calloway's daughter. The princess in the tower. We had a whole picture."
"And?"
He looked at me a long moment, in the steam, in the four feet of nowhere.
"And the picture was wrong," he said. "Which is annoying. It was a good picture. Easy. Hating you was going to be the simplest thing I did all year."
"Sorry to inconvenience your hatred."
"You really are." He shook his head. "Come around a corner, stab me with a kebab, save my life, and now I have to revise my entire opinion of the enemy. Exhausting."
The scallion man started wiping down his board, which meant the lane was clearing, which meant in about thirty seconds we'd have no excuse to be standing this close. I was aware of every one of those seconds. I think he was too.
"They lost people," I said. The thing I'd been carrying since the bar. "When the truce broke. My friend's cousin. Real grave. Did you—" I made myself ask it. "Were you part of that?"
The humor went out of his face. Not into anger. Into something heavier.
"I was there," he said. "I didn't start it.
I didn't want it. But I was there, and I did things, and I'm not going to stand behind a food cart and tell a Calloway my hands are clean.
They're not." He held my eyes. "I won't lie to you.
That's the one thing I can give you that nobody else in your life will.
I'll be the enemy, but I'll be an honest one. "
It shouldn't have moved me. A confession to violence against my own people. It should have ended it right there, in the steam, for good.
It didn't. Because everyone in my life lied to me with love — my father, Vance, the whole machine of treaties and cake — and here was a man who would hurt me with the truth before he'd comfort me with a lie, and some broken part of me had been starving for exactly that without knowing it had a name.
"The lane's clear," I said.
"I know."
Neither of us moved.
"You should go first," I said. "I'll wait. We can't walk out together."
"No," he agreed. "We can't."
He went first. He stepped out into the river of light and didn't look back, the way you're supposed to, the way that keeps you both safe.
And I stood in the four feet of nowhere a moment longer, breathing steam and scallions and the green smell of the canal, holding a bare wooden skewer like the world's worst souvenir, and I understood that something had changed that I was not going to be able to change back.
Forbidden, it turns out, doesn't feel like a wall.
It feels like a door somebody left open, just to see if you're stupid enough to walk through it.
I'm very stupid. I want that on the record.