Chapter 8
Wren
The third crew had a name, in the end. They always do.
Pixie's logs cracked it open — a dark-running salvage outfit out of the drowned districts who'd figured out that the cheapest way to take a city's grid components wasn't to fight two outlaw clubs for them, but to make those two clubs fight each other and then walk off with the crates in the smoke.
They'd been doing it for months. The relay Dex fixed the night we met had been their first tap into Kings' grid; the shipment was their masterpiece. They'd nearly pulled it off.
They had not counted on a girl with a terrible poker face falling in love with the wrong enforcer, and they had definitely not counted on Pixie.
It took three weeks to unwind. Three weeks of my father and the Apostle president sitting across a table neither of them wanted to share, looking at the same logs, arriving at the same furious conclusion.
Three weeks of a truce that nobody called a truce, held together by the inconvenient fact that the war they'd almost fought had been sold to them by someone else.
Three weeks of not seeing Dex, because the lines were still raw and my father still wouldn't look at me and the smart thing was to wait.
I am, as established, not built for the smart thing.
The day before the clubs made it official, Pixie found me on the clubhouse roof and sat down without a word, the way she did when she was building up to something.
"He looked at me today," I said. "My dad. First time in three weeks. Across the yard. Didn't say anything. Just looked. Then looked away."
"That's progress."
"That's a man who can't apologize to his daughter without apologizing to an Apostle, and would rather chew glass than do either."
"So. Calloway men." Pixie nodded. "Tracks.
" I laughed despite myself. "He'll come around.
Not all the way — Calloways don't do all the way.
But the part of him that's furious you fell for the enemy is losing to the part that watched you be right in front of the whole club.
He hates being wrong more than he hates Apostles. "
"That's not a redeeming flaw."
"In your family it's basically a virtue." She bumped my shoulder. "Go see your gardener. Lines are quiet. I'll cover the door."
"You always cover the door."
"It's my whole personality now. Me and the battery.
" She stood. "For the record? Worst taste in men.
An enforcer. But he came up clean when it counted, and so did you.
That's more than most people in this city can say.
" She pointed two fingers at her eyes, then at me.
"Now go be disgusting in a vegetable patch. No details."
The night the clubs made it official — not friends, the two of them would never be friends, but not at war, the salvage crew run out of the Sprawl with both clubs' boots behind them — I climbed the broadcast station after dark, up into the dish that points at nothing, the garden where it all began to bloom.
He was already there. Of course he was. Sitting in the dirt among the terrible tomatoes like he'd grown there, like he'd never left, like the whole war had been a thing that happened to other people.
"You came," he said. The same words. The first words.
"To tell you to stop," I said, and watched the crooked smile break across his face like sunrise, because we both knew exactly what came next, and exactly what didn't.
I didn't tell him to stop.
I crossed the garden and I climbed into his lap right there in the dirt, and there was no wall this time, no four feet of nowhere, no war on the other side of the windows, no jacket to burn and no name to fear.
Just the dish curved up around us like two cupped hands, and the neon pooling in the bottom with us, and the empty sky above broadcasting our nothing to no one, and the two of us finally, finally allowed.
"In the open," he murmured against my mouth, wondering at it. "We're doing this in the open. Anybody could climb up here."
"Let them." I kissed the line of his jaw, the place I'd memorized on a tower a lifetime ago. "I'm done hiding behind food carts. I told my father I love an Apostle in front of the entire morning shift. There's nothing left to hide."
"How'd that go, by the way? I keep meaning to ask. Casual breakfast conversation, 'pass the eggs, I'm seeing the enemy—'"
"There were no eggs. That was the whole problem. It's a long story and I'm not telling it right now."
"No?" His hands found the hem of my shirt, slow, asking. "What are you doing right now?"
"This," I said, and pulled the shirt over my head myself, and watched his breath catch in the neon light, and decided that was a better answer than any story.
It was different here than the monorail.
The monorail had been fear collapsing into wanting, two people who thought they might not survive the night reaching for each other in the dark.
This was the opposite. This was after. This was two people who'd come out the other side of the thing that should have killed them, taking their time in a garden that grew out of a machine built to listen to the stars.
He laid me back in the soft turned earth among the bean rows, careful, his jacket spread under me against the dirt.
The soil was warm from the day, warm all down my spine, and the plants made a green curtain around us, and above all of it the open Sprawl sky hung hazed neon-pink with its one or two stubborn stars.
"You planted these," he said, mouth moving slow down my throat, my collarbone, lower, "and I'm going to ruin the whole row."
"They're terrible tomatoes. It's an improvement."
"Mealy and sour, I believe were your words—" but I caught his face in both hands and kissed the rest of the sentence out of him, and after that neither of us said anything about tomatoes for a long while.
He took his time. He'd taken his time on the monorail too, but that had been patience under pressure; this was patience as a gift, patience because we finally had the thing we'd never had, which was time.
No war night. No live lines. No climbing back before dawn.
The rest of our clothes came away into the warm dirt and the warmer dark, and he learned me all over again, slower, like the first reading had been an emergency and this was the real study — his hands unhurried, his mouth attentive, mapping me by the moving light until I was the one who couldn't be patient, until I pulled him up and over me and said his name like an instruction.
"In a hurry," he murmured, smiling against my jaw.
"You've had me waiting a month and a war. Yes. I'm in a hurry."
"Then we'll do slow second," he said, and gave me fast first, and the garden gave it back to us — the give of the soft earth beneath my shoulders, the green curtain stirring in the warm wind off the canal, the great chrome bowl of the dish rising around us and throwing the whole Sprawl's worth of stolen neon down soft across our skin, pink and gold and electric blue, moving when we moved.
We found a rhythm and the bean rows swayed with it the way the monorail had swayed, the only two places in the city that had ever held us, both of them rocking us through it.
I kept my eyes open. I'd spent my whole life being unseen and I wasn't going to close them now, not for this, not with him looking back at me like that, like I was the thing the dish had been pointed at all along, the signal it had waited twenty years to catch.
The climb of it took me the way the surge takes the grid, sudden and total and lighting up everywhere at once, and I said his name into the open sky where anyone could hear it and didn't care who did.
He followed me a breath later, my name and something rougher, his face dropping into the curve of my shoulder, his whole weight coming down warm and trusting in a way the enforcer never got to be anywhere but here.
And then he did do slow second, like he'd promised, because we had time now, because nobody was coming, because the seam between two worlds turned out to be a place you could lie down in and stay.
Afterward we were a tangle in the crushed bean rows, his jacket half under us and forgotten, the warm soil and the warm sky and the cooling sweat and the wrecked tomatoes sweet and ruined beneath us. My head found his chest, over the heart where the patch used to mean enemy and now just meant his.
"I love you," he said, into the curve of my shoulder, like it was a thing he'd been carrying up the ladder for weeks and finally got to set down in the soil. "In the open. On the record. Where anyone could hear."
"Let them hear," I said again, and meant it more than I'd ever meant anything, and pulled him the rest of the way down to me.
We stayed in the garden until the neon started to fade toward the gray that passes for dawn in the Sprawl, tangled in his jacket and the crushed bean rows, the chrome bowl holding us up the way it had decided weeks ago we were worth holding.
I watched the one stubborn star give up against the lightening sky.
I'd spent my whole life being told this would cost me everything.
And it had cost me plenty — a father who still couldn't quite look at me, a life I'd have to rebuild from the seam outward, a whole identity as Briggs Calloway's good daughter that I'd set down for good on a kitchen table next to a torn-off patch.
But lying here in the warm dirt under the brightening sky, the math came out the other way.
I hadn't lost everything. I'd traded a life where I was safe and unseen for a life where I was neither, and where someone knew me all the way down anyway, and stayed.
"We ruined your garden," I said.
"It was already ruined. Worst tomatoes in the Sprawl, remember." His hand moved slow through my hair. "Besides. I'm planting a new row. Saw it in a catalog. Supposed to be the most romantic vegetable there is."
"There is no romantic vegetable."
"There's one. I'll show you. It's a surprise."
"Dex. What's the vegetable."
"Permanent," he said, which wasn't a vegetable, which was the word from the monorail, the vow, set down again now in the open where it could finally grow.
"Permanent," I agreed.
And the dish that points at nothing held us both, broadcasting our nothing to the brightening nowhere, the most pointless and beautiful thing in the whole district, and for the first time in my life I was exactly where the lines said I couldn't be, and nobody was coming to drag me back.
The seam, it turns out, is a place you can live.
You just have to be brave enough, and lucky enough, and have a best friend with grid logs and the worst rescue plan in the history of the Sprawl.
I had all three.
I have them still.