Epilogue
Wren
Six months later, the two clubs still aren't friends.
I want to be clear about that, because the romantic version of this story would have everyone holding hands by now, the Static Kings and the Chrome Apostles dancing at our wedding while doves do something symbolic overhead.
That's not how it went. My father and the Apostle president still can't be in a room together longer than a business meeting requires.
Tunny still calls Dex "the enforcer" in a tone you could sharpen a knife on.
There are tables in this city I'll never be welcome at again, and a few I built my whole childhood around.
But nobody's at war. Nobody's putting anybody in the canal. And in the long flat space between friends and war, there turns out to be room — a seam, a margin, a no-man's-land wide enough to build something in if you don't mind the wind.
We live in the seam now, Dex and me. Literally.
We took over the broadcast station under the garden, the building nobody's territory because it was nobody's anything, and we made it ours.
Neutral ground by tradition, now neutral ground by occupancy.
The dish that points at nothing is our roof.
The terrible tomatoes are, against all odds, slightly less terrible this season, which Dex takes as personal vindication and I take as the law of averages.
Pixie comes by most weeks. She pretends it's to check the relay we've patched into the old broadcast feed — we run a little signal now, a tiny pirate band between the two territories, news that isn't either club's news, which is its own kind of seam.
Really she comes by to eat our food and tell me I'm an idiot and let Dex teach her things about engines, which she'd never admit she enjoys.
She still brings up the battery. She'll bring up the battery at my funeral.
"You had it in backward," she said, last week, apropos of nothing, mouth full of the slightly-less-terrible tomatoes. "I think about it all the time. The most romantic gesture in the Sprawl and you'd have made it with a dead radio."
"I've apologized for the battery."
"You can't apologize for the battery. The battery is load-bearing. The battery is the foundation of my entire personality now." She gestured with a fork. "Worst rescue plan ever, saved by the one competent person in the room. That's the family motto. I'm having it stitched."
"We don't have a family."
"You absolutely have a family." She said it lighter than she meant it, the way she said all the true things. "It's just a weird one. Two clubs' worth of people who can't stand each other and a girl who married the seam between them. Don't make it a moment. I'll leave."
She didn't leave. She never leaves. That's the whole thing about Pixie.
My father came by once. Exactly once, so far.
He didn't climb up to the garden — I don't think his knees or his pride would survive the dish — but he stood in the street below the broadcast station one evening, hands in his pockets, looking up at the building his daughter had moved into out of spite and survival, and I climbed down to meet him because some climbs you have to make yourself.
We didn't say much. Calloways don't.
"The pirate signal," he said, looking anywhere but at me. "The one on the old broadcast band. That's you."
"That's us."
"It's not bad." High praise, from him. "Carried a flood warning last week the clubs both missed. Saved a block in the low districts." He cleared his throat. "People noticed."
"Is that you saying thank you?"
"That's me saying people noticed." But the corner of his mouth moved, just barely, the most I'd get and more than I'd expected.
He looked up at the dish one more time. "Your mother would've climbed up there with you.
First week. Just to spite me." He said it rough.
"I'm not built like her. I'm built like the wall.
But I'm — I'm trying to learn where the door is.
That's all I've got. That's the whole speech. "
"It's a good speech, Dad."
"It's a terrible speech." He turned to go. Paused. "The Apostle. Aldermore." A long breath. "He keeps you up that ladder safe?"
"Every night."
He nodded once, to the street, not to me, and walked off into the neon, and that was the closest thing to a blessing I was ever going to get, and I took it, because I'd learned by then that in my family you take the door however narrow it opens.
Dex and I aren't married, technically — there's no club that would host it and neither of us cares for the optics, a word I have personally retired — but we're permanent, which was always the better word.
He planted the new row he promised. It came up as some kind of climbing vine with red flowers, not a vegetable at all, and when I called him on the lie he just shrugged and said the catalog was aspirational, and the flowers are the best thing in the garden, and I haven't let him forget it.
It's a good life. Smaller than the one I was raised for, and stranger, and entirely my own.
I climb the dish at night sometimes and look out over the Sprawl, all neon and rust and the low electric hum that never stops, and I think about the girl in the engagement dress who climbed a tower to escape her own party, and I want to tell her: it gets so much worse before it gets better, and the better is worth all of it, and for God's sake burn the jacket.
She wouldn't listen. She never did.
The thing that's coming, I didn't see at first.
It came in on Pixie's pirate signal, a name out of the drowned districts, a rider rolling back into the Sprawl after years gone — someone the Rustborn club thought they'd buried for good, an old flame come home with the rust still on her boots and a grudge older than our war.
I only caught the edge of it, the way you catch the edge of weather before it turns.
But I've learned to read the edges now. I had to. The face that couldn't bluff turned out to be the face that could see things coming, once it stopped being so busy hiding.
Something's rolling back into Kessler.
Somebody's old fire, come home to burn.
I'd warn them, whoever they are.
But nobody warned me, and look how that turned out.