Page 32 of Ghost’s Awakening

The room itself told me more. Fifty people fed in shifts, plates coming off the line in a steady rotation, and the noise stayed under a ceiling. All those hard-built men and women, and the volume held at a working hum, no shouting matches, no chairs going over. Almost military. I'd cooked for crowds this size, and crowds this size did not behave like this on their own. Somebody had built this, drilled it in, and the whole room kept the discipline without a single order being given.

My eyes swept the tables and stopped.

Blue. Two points of pale blue across the room, already on me.

Ghost sat at a table halfway down, and heat climbed my face before I could stop it, straight up from my collar, because the last time I'd seen those eyes they'd been six inches over mine, and the time before that they'd been looking up at me from his knees in a place that only existed inside my skull. I knew exactly what I'd done to the memory of that face an hour ago.

Before I could decide what to do with my own expression, Ghost's hand came up and he was waving me over, both arms, too much energy for the hour, nearly clipping the coffee mug of the woman beside him.

My legs were already moving. I caught up to them halfway there.

The table sorted itself as I came up on it. The woman Ghost had almost decaffeinated sat directly across from him, and she was hard to look past, built like a bull through the shoulders, a black tank top doing nothing to hide it, a black braid thick as a wrist running down past the middle of her back. She was mid-list, ticking items off on her fingers, her English clean and sure under a Latin Spanish accent that rolled every r.

"—the torque wrench that disappeared, a case of fork seals, brake lines for two of the client bikes, and the bearing press is still buried behind the quads, so I need two hands that are not mine to dig it out. Six bikes by Friday. Six."

"Take a van." The mountain across from her. I knew that voice. I'd sparred its owner into a sweat yesterday. Tank sat with a mug swallowed inside one fist. "Load the press once instead of making four trips on two wheels."

The man beside the braided woman gave a single nod at that, short dark hair, forearms crossed on the table with lines of sharp-edged geometric ink running up both of them, listening the way some men lift, no wasted motion. And pressed in at Tank's side, close enough that their shoulders brushed and neither of them adjusted, a leaner guy, dark-haired, worked through a plate one-handed while his eyes ran down his phone screen with the focus of an audit.

I sat down next to Ghost. The bench was warm where the room had been at it all morning.

"You slept." He said it like an accusation and a victory at once, angled toward me, knee already bouncing under the table. "I can tell. You had the medical-bay face for three days, this is a different face, this is a face that got hours. How many? Six? Seven?"

"Eight."

"Eight." He turned to the table as if presenting evidence. "Eight hours. First night in the guest room."

"The mattress helped." I reached for the water pitcher. "So did getting thrown around by him." I nodded at Tank.

"You threw yourself around. I mostly supervised." Tank's mug tipped a fraction in my direction.

A kid had Ghost's other side, pressed in at his left while I took the right. Nineteen, maybe twenty, younger than Liam. He'd been talking at Ghost when I walked up, and now he sat with his fork stalled over his plate, and every few seconds his eyes cut past Ghost to me, quick passes, the way a fighter checks an opponent between rounds.

"So anyway, the carb," the kid pushed on, angling his shoulder to put me out of the frame. "You were going to show me the float adjustment. Today, you said. Before lunch."

"After breakfast, I've got you." Ghost didn't even turn his head, already reaching to slide the water pitcher closer to me.

"You said before lunch yesterday too."

Each time Ghost spoke to me, the kid rushed back in with something, anything, a question about a bike, a story from the shop, his words crowding into the gaps like he could box me out of the conversation with volume. I read it in one pass. He didn't trust me, and there was something under the distrust with more heat in it, aimed at the space between Ghost and me.

I let him have the gaps. I'd been someone's older brother too long to take that personally.

An older woman came down the row with a coffee pot, filling mugs without asking, and when she reached me she looked at the fading bruise under my eye, then at my plate, which did not exist yet.

"Better." Aimed at my eye. Then, at the empty table in front of me: "Worse. Eat." She moved on before I could answer. Rosa. Three days of her marching in and out of the medical bay had taught me that arguing added time to the sentence.

Ghost was mid-ramble about the guest-room mattresses, where they'd bought them, a story involving Irish and a flipped truck, when he stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. His mouth stayed open a second. Then he smacked the table lightly with both palms.

"I haven't introduced anyone. You've been sitting here for five minutes and I just—okay." His hand started moving around the table like a tour guide's. "Blade." The inked forearms. "Trenza." The braid. I matched the name against the story he'd told me in the medical bay, the man's teeth on the concrete, six feet away, and the match came back clean. "Tank you've met, at speed. That's Tyler glued to him, watch out, he sees everything." The lean man raised two fingers off his phone without looking up. "Mateo." The kid gave me a nod with nothing in it.

Then Ghost's arm swung toward the kitchen line. "The loud one is Irish. The tall one in glasses is Nolan, and that's Declan on his neck. They're together."

I had the water halfway down my throat and it tried to come back up. I got the glass onto the table and coughed once into my fist.

"Together." I said it carefully.

"Together together. All three." Ghost delivered it with the exact weight he'd give a parts list, already moving on, arm swinging toward another table. "Kai you know. That's Reaper next to him, our VP. Down that side you've got Vega, Santos, Anima's the one with the sleeve, Valkyrie's on watch so you'll meet her at lunch⁠—"