Page 31 of Crow’s Shadow

And I refuse.

The pull toward Grimstone comes again.

Crow.

He carried me out of one fire when he was a boy who owed me nothing. Whatever he buried, whatever lie he told himself afterward, I know the man who ran into that smoke. He is coming. The code says so. No one left behind.

But I am done waiting for a man to carry me out.

I was five then. I am not five now.

So I sit in the black with my ankle chained to the floor of a dead cannery, and I practice. All night. I move the water. I dim the one working heater bulb to a sullen orange, bring it back before Bad Knee turns around. I find the seam of the pressure. I learn to open it a hair, hold it, close it. Over and over, until my head splits, until my nose runs red, until I taste copper down the back of my throat. I keep going. A body still working is a body still in the fight.

I am not the girl who walked into the boathouse. I know what I am now and when the door opens next, whoever opens it, I mean to be the one who decides what come through.

I get my chance sooner than I plan.

Deep in the fourth night, past Sleeper’s nod, the cannery makes a sound it has not made in four days.

Not the drip. Not the birds. Not the wet shuffle of a bored man’s boots.

A crack, far off, hard and flat, rolling in off the flats through the broken glass. Then a second. Then a whole string of them stitched together, close, the sound I have written into my own book a hundred times without ever standing this near to it.

Gunfire.

The dead work lights are cold. The heater bulb throws its sullen orange. Down the length of the ruin men are shouting, boots slamming concrete, a rifle bolt racking somewhere close. Church Shoes crashes past my door with his gun up and his face wrong. Bad Knee is yelling for Sleeper, who is awake now, too late, always too late.

And under all of it, under the shouting, the shots, the water dripping patient into the dark, the hook behind my breastbone pulls so hard I come up off the wet mattress onto my knees with my hand pressed flat to my chest.

Taut. Screaming. A wire run out through four days of black miles, gone suddenly tight, hauling south to north, hauling him to me.

He is here.

I close my hand around the chain at my ankle. I reach down into the place behind my breastbone. This time I do not go looking for a thread.

I open the door.

Chapter thirteen

CROW

“Roof’s cold,” Byte says in my ear. “Both of them. I watched the last one drop an hour ago. You stripped it clean.”

We are flat in the salt grass a hundred yards from the cannery. Storm and Buck are with us, four more spread along the fence behind. Two nights we’ve spent thinning Renner’s men, taking them off the roof and the doors one at a time. Now, there aren’t enough left to hold the building.

“How many left inside?” I ask.

“Four, maybe five on the floor. Him. Whoever’s sitting on her.” A tap of keys. “Doors are soft. Use the man door on the south wall, and go now, before somebody down there gets nervous and counts heads.”

“Copy.”

“You hear him,” Grim says, low at my right shoulder. “Five, maybe. After two nights of this, five is nothing.”

“Five between me and her is not nothing.”

“No.” He racks a round, quiet. “Guess it isn’t.”

Storm and Buck fan wide across the broken tarmac behind us. My piece rides low. The pull hits again, stronger this time.