Page 16 of Ghost’s Awakening

She crossed that floor so fast nobody caught the kick. Mateo swore all he saw was the braid whipping around behind her, and then two of the guy's teeth were on the concrete six feet away and the room had gone very quiet.

The rest of them paid cash, folded their leader across a back seat, and never came around again.

Blade got there first, that same night. Trenza. Braid. The name was on her before she'd even patched in, and it never came off.

She hadn't said a word through any of it, and she didn't say one about the name either. She just started answering to it. Right away, every time.

It was the first name she ever took on purpose.

"Your brain's running again, hermano." Blade's voice landed on me sideways, and I came back to the room and found my fork stopped halfway to my mouth. No idea how long it had been there. "I'd cut a vein if I had to live in your head for a day."

Heat climbed my face. "Sorry. I was thinking about Trenza putting that guy's teeth into orbit." I set the fork down. "And how strong the club is now. It's just, I don't know. It's good."

"Deja al chico tranquilo, Diego."

"Leave the kid alone, Diego."

Trenza kept her eyes on her plate and switched to English. "He's doing fine with that head of his. He runs everything at once, all of it, all the time. Nothing gets past him." A glance at me, and a quick wink before she went back to her pancakes. "Makes him dangerous. That's a compliment."

I turned toward the counter before anybody caught me smiling.

The counter was a performance every morning. Irish had one hand on a pan and the other in the air gesturing at nothing, talking the whole time. He flipped something with a wrist snap that was more theater than technique, the contents airborne for a second before dropping back with a sizzle that spat grease across his forearm. He didn't so much as blink.

"Peppers need another thirty seconds." Nolan stood at his left with a laptop open beside the cutting board, eyes going screen, stove, screen. "You pulled them early last time and they were basically raw."

"They were al dente." Irish's grin widened.

"Peppers aren't pasta, Sean."

"Everything's pasta if you believe hard enough."

Declan stood behind Nolan, quiet, working a knife through tomatoes in cuts you could've checked with a ruler, every slice the same, no motion wasted. He didn't get into it with them. Declan never got into anything. He just kept the knife moving and let the two of them fill the room while he did the work.

"Morning, hermano." Mateo dropped onto the bench beside me and slid a plate across. Omelette, bacon, fried peppers, a little tomato salad off to the side. Heavy on the protein and good enough that my stomach woke up and started making demands. "Slept okay? Figured you'd come back in one piece. How'd it go?"

The accent rolled through his words, soft on the r's, the vowels sitting wider than English usually lets them. Over a year here and his English had gotten sharp, but the accent stayed, and I was glad every time.

Nobody ever tried to hang a road name on him. It came up once, early on, and Hawk killed it before the sentence was out of the guy's mouth.

Every one of us knows what Mateo said the night Blade found him. Eighteen years old, shaking hard enough that you could hear it riding under the words, and he crossed that bunkhouse to a stranger with a blade on his belt and told him his name wasn't Tomás. That it was Mateo. Mateo Sánchez, from Guatemala. Then he pushed his sleeve up past his shoulder and showed him the H inside a circle that High Basin had burned into him to keep him counted.

He spent a year fighting to hold onto that name. He wasn't about to trade it in for a better one.

So he stayed Mateo. That was the whole thing. He gives it to strangers with his chin up and both halves of it landing hard, and every man at this table would put somebody through a wall over it.

Trenza let her name go, along with her past. Mateo kept his.

I picked up the fork. "Rougher than I wanted. I got seen."

The word dropped into the table like a stone into still water. Blade's fork stopped moving. Trenza quit chewing. Mateo's fork clattered onto his plate, and his English went out from under him the way it did whenever something got to him.

"¿Qué dices, hermano?"

"What are you saying, brother?"

Trenza's eyes came up, and the warmth went out of them inside half a second, replaced by something flat and working.

My knee started going under the table. I could feel it running up through my thigh into the bench. "Yeah. Gravedigger was there. He clocked me. It was my fault, all of it, I was watching one of the fighters and I held a look way too long and he tracked the line right back to⁠—"