Page 51 of Ghost’s Awakening

I came out from behind the container and stepped into the shadow. The lamp lit the middle of the alley and the wall across from it. The wall on my right sat in its own dark, and I put my shoulder to the brick and moved along it with my hand flat on the stone.

"Ghost." Blade, in my ear, barely a breath. "Update."

I'd forgotten him. All the way forgotten, and the sound of his voice landed in the middle of my head like a dropped wrench.

"At the wall." I kept it under my breath. "Back face. Old brick, the original building. No cameras. Not one, Blade. Whoever comes and goes back here doesn't want a record of it."

"Read it." Two words, and his breathing had gone slower than mine.

I walked the wall slowly, one hand on it, letting my palm read what my eyes couldn't in that light. Mortar crumbled under my glove and fell away in dust. Brick edges rounded off by wind. "Mortar's gone everywhere. Except⁠—"

My hand had stopped.

Except here. Twelve feet of wall where the mortar held, where the courses ran a quarter inch off from the courses on either side, like somebody had matched the pattern from memory and got it nearly right. I stepped back into the alley and let my eyes go soft, and the rectangle showed itself. Ten feet wide, nine high, flush with the ground.

A loading door, bricked over. Up close, with your hands on it, it revealed itself as a steel door with brick faces glued to its skin.

I crouched at the base. The seam was there, a hairline, and along the bottom of it the blown sand had gone dark. I rubbed it between my gloved thumb and finger and the smell came up sharp.

"Blade."

"Here." Right in my ear, like he'd leaned into it.

"The blank stretch on Caleb's map." My pulse had picked up and my hands hadn't. "It's got a door in it. Steel, covered with brick. And there's oil on the seam. Fresh. Somebody wants a door this heavy to swing without a sound."

I heard him breathe out through his nose, all the way back at the bikes. "Photograph it."

Tyler's camera came out of my jacket, the small one that drank light. I shot the seam, the courses. Then the sand at the foot of the door, because it had tire marks in it. Two tracks, wide, the edges still sharp. The wind out here filled a track inside a day.

"Tire marks. Hours old." I kept shooting. "Something drives up to this door a lot."

"We still don't know where it leads inside."

"Nobody does. Caleb fought seventeen nights in there and never saw it." I lowered the camera. "Yet."

I backed off the way I'd come, slow, into the dark end of the alley away from the lamp, thumbing through the shots on the little screen. Seam. Courses. Tracks. All there, all sharp.

"Got the seam clean, got the courses, the tracks came out better than I⁠—"

Then it came. A sound like a breath being let out of a wall.

My eyes snapped up. The door was opening. A line of dim light down the seam I'd just had my thumb on, widening, pouring out across the alley, and I was standing in the middle of that alley with a camera in my hand, and the lamp had the dark thinned out just enough that someone could still see me.

My brain worked at double speed and my neck went with it. Left, nothing, the container thirty feet back, too far. Right⁠—

A window. Ground floor of the dead building across the alley, big, the glass long gone except for the bottom of the frame, where what was left stood up along the rail in cracked daggers.

My body had already decided. Two steps and I went through it horizontal, a dive straight through the middle of the frame with my arms out and the glass daggers going by under me. I hit the floor inside on my hands and rolled over my right shoulder, glass crunching under the leather across my back, and came up out of it on one knee with my right boot planted and the camera still in my right hand.

I froze.

The dive had been quiet. The roll hadn't, not all the way, wood and glass grit under my weight, but the building was dead and the sound had nowhere to go. I didn't know if they'd seen me go in. I didn't know if they'd been slow coming through the door or fast.

I knelt in the dark with every sense I owned turned up to where it hurt. I smelled dust, plaster, old wood. I heard my own heart, loud. My ears reached out through the empty window frame for the one sound that would tell me to run or to fight.

The signal never came.

What came was a laugh. A man with a hoarse, raspy voice, laughing at something, and another man talking too loud for the hour and the place, the way people talked when they'd never once had to worry about who was listening.