Page 20 of Crow’s Shadow

“He wasn’t buying anything by then. He was past that.” I hold Buck’s eye. “And Byte’s money trail says the same thing the dead man did. Two roads, one house at the end of them.”

“Then somebody say it,” Mercy says, quiet, from the foot of the table. “We’re all doing the sum in our heads and nobody wants to be the one to write the answer down.”

I do not say the other name. I do not have to.

Every head at that table turns toward the same man. Loki. Secretary. Fifteen years patched. The man who taught our girl her letters in that black book, who set the safe in the floor with his own hands, who looped the key over her neck when she was nineteen and half-feral.

His mug stops halfway to his mouth.

“Now hold on,” Storm starts, because Storm keeps the peace. “We don’t put a brother in the ground on a dead man’s word and a trail Byte hasn’t finished walking—”

“Let him answer,” Stryker says, hard, watching Loki. “Look at his face and tell me we shouldn’t.”

And here is the thing that breaks it, the thing that turns my hands to fists under the table. An innocent man yells. An innocent man comes up out of his chair swinging and tells the room to go to hell for even thinking it. Loki does none of that. Loki goes white to the lips. The mug comes down slow and lands crooked on the wood. His mouth opens and closes on nothing, and his eyes go somewhere far off and sick, a man turning a thing over and over in his head and finding it worse every single turn.

“Loki.” Loco’s voice is a low warning mixed with grief in the same breath. “Look at me. Tell them it wasn’t you.”

Loki looks up. He looks past Loco, past all of them, straight at me, at the man who does the thing the table decides needs doing, and whatever he sees coming for him across that table he does not flinch from it. And when he finally speaks, it is barely a sound, and it is the worst answer a guilty man ever gave and the only true answer an innocent one could.

“I need to think,” he whispers. “God help me. There’s something I need to— I need to think.” His chair scrapes back.

Mine hits the floor as I stand.

Chapter ten

SHADOW

Three mornings I have watched the gray come down through the hole in the roof, and by the third I know my cage the way I once knew the clubhouse, corner by corner, blind spot by blind spot, until the fear has somewhere to sit and stop clawing at me.

They moved me off the open floor the first night, into a side room with a door, a bucket and a mattress soaked through with forty years of damp. An improvement, if you squint. Walls mean I only have to watch one way. The zip ties came off my wrists on the second day and a chain went on my ankle in their place, bolted to a ring set in the concrete, long enough to reach the bucket and the door and nothing worth reaching.

I have used the time. It is all they left me and I am using every second of it.

I know the guards now. Six of them, working in twos, and I have names for the ones who never offered theirs. Bad Knee, the slow one who fed me water the first day. Sleeper, his partner, who nods off on the late watch. Then the two day men, Church Shoes and the Quiet One, tighter, meaner, no gap between them I can wedge a finger into. The night pair I have barely seen. I file their rotations, their tempers, the way Bad Knee and Sleeper needle each other over old debts, because a house divided is a house with a door in it, and I am looking for the door.

I have not found it. What I found instead, sitting in the dark with my back to the wet wall, is worse.

The lights keep going out in my head.

Every time my eyes close, it starts again. Pressure building behind my breastbone. Nowhere for it to go. Then forty years of dead work lamps exploding at once, glass raining down around us.

Renner never even flinched.

He just stood there smiling as if he’d been waiting his whole life to see it happen.

There you are.

Three days and I have turned the thing over a thousand times, but I cannot make it a coincidence, a power surge, a fault in old wiring. I felt it leave me. Felt it rise from somewhere deep in my chest and reach.

That was me.

But how the hell did I do it?

And the not-knowing sits in me colder than the concrete, because I have spent my whole life being the one who knows, the girl behind the eyes who catalogs a room while everyone else is drinking, and now there is a room inside my own skin I have never once been let into.

Church Shoes brings the food when the light goes flat and high, which I have decided is noon. A heel of bread, a can of something with the label peeled off, a fresh bottle of water. He sets it down out of arm’s reach and shoves it the last foot with his boot, watching me the way you watch a dog you have been warned bites.

“Eat,” he says. “Boss wants you strong.”