Page 50 of Ghost’s Awakening

And I was done fighting alone.

12

THE WALL

GHOST

My knee wasn't bouncing this time.

I noticed it the way you'd notice a clock had stopped. Blade and I sat our bikes in the black behind an abandoned warehouse a little under a mile from the one that held the fighting pit, engines off, and my right leg lay still against the frame. Eight nights ago, behind the tire shop, that leg had been running a second engine. Tonight it sat there like it belonged to somebody calmer.

Calm was the top layer. Under it, something else was awake and excited, and I didn't have to look hard to name it. I wanted this. I wanted the wall and the dark, the one thing I was built for, and I wanted to nail this mission.

"Run it." Blade, low, three feet to my left. It wasn't a question. It never was.

"Back alley, all the way in. I read the wall. Every seam, every lens. I photograph. I come back."

"And?" His eyes stayed on the dark alley, in the direction of the pit.

"And I don't go in. I don't get seen. Just eyes." I tapped the earpiece. "You'll hear me breathe the whole way. If I stop breathing, feel free to get worried."

"Ghost…" Lower still.

"I'm good, Blade." It came out level and slow. I made him hear that.

Because a week ago I'd sat at a breakfast table and said I got seen. Trenza's eyes had come up off her plate wide, all the warmth gone out of them in half a second, and that look had crossed the table at me like something thrown at my face. I'd made myself a promise right then, with my knee going under the bench, that nobody at that table was ever going to look at me like that again on my account. Hawk wasn't going to hear the same story twice.

Hawk had said tonight or tomorrow night, my call, and I'd taken a third night, and Blade hadn't said a word about it, which was how Blade said plenty.

He didn't answer now either. His hand landed on my shoulder, and he gave me one squeeze. Then I was off the bike and around the corner of the wall we'd hidden behind.

The old warehouse district outside Henderson had been dying for twenty years and hadn't finished. Brick and steel buildings packed shoulder to shoulder, most of them empty, the few still working locked up tight at one in the morning with nobody inside them. The alleys between ran narrow and black, and every fourth street lamp still worked, throwing pale circles on the concrete that only made the dark between them darker.

I knew the way. I'd walked it once in the other direction with Caleb's arm against mine and two hundred people screaming behind a wall.

I turned right. Something small scrambled ahead of me, claws on concrete, rats going for the gap under a roll-up door, and I let them go. Animals were the only things out here that could hear me coming.

Half a mile out, and I was already choosing where my boots went. Around the gravel the desert had blown in. Around a bottle on its side. Over a spray of glass that would've sung under my heel. Too early to matter, and I did it anyway.

I passed two blocks of warehouses stacked with shipping containers, rust-streaked, doors hanging open on nothing. The smell came off them in layers. Old grease. Something that had died in a corner and dried there. Piss, human, near a doorway where somebody had slept and moved on. The wind pushed it all down the alley at me and I breathed through my mouth and kept going.

The next left was the one. After it there would be no more turns, just one straight run to the back of the building where a wall had thirty feet of nothing on Caleb's map.

I stopped at the corner. In through the nose. Hold for four. Out slow through the mouth, the way I'd watched Caleb do it in a hospital chair. Then I made the turn.

Everything in me dropped a gear. My body came down an inch, knees soft, shoulders rolled in. I'd never been the tallest man in any room the club put me in, and in an alley at night that was the best thing about me.

I took the run container by container, stopping at each one, listening. Metal ticking as it cooled. A far-off highway. My own pulse in my ears, slow.

One more block and a crossing, and the back of the warehouse came into view.

A single street lamp stood near the corner, the last one working on the row, and it wasn't working well. The light came out of it pale and lay across the brick, showing the wall without warming it. The rest of the alley stayed black.

I went all the way down. My back to the brick of the building behind me, cold and pitted, holes and cracks where twenty years of nobody caring had gotten into it. I put one eye around the edge of the last container and looked.

There was only brick. The whole back face of the building was old, soft-edged and dark, where the sides I'd seen from inside were block and steel.

I looked over the corners twice, the roofline, the lamp pole. No cameras. The front of that building had a dome on every corner, and the back had nothing at all, and that told me something before I'd touched a single brick. Whoever used the back of this building did not want anyone watching them do it, including their own people.