Page 52 of Ghost’s Awakening

I remembered to breathe out. I'd been holding it since the door's seam went bright. My hands were steady. My knee was steady. I'd been standing in the open with the door swinging and I'd gotten out of the light before the light found me, and I let myself have one second of that. One. It felt like the first clean thing I'd done near this building.

"Ghost?" Blade, in my ear. "You stopped talking and I heard crunching. Report."

My hand went to the earpiece. "Had to improvise a hiding spot." Half a whisper. "The door opened. Men came out of it, three at least. I can hear them from here, Blade. I'm going to get closer and listen."

"The job was eyes, hermano. Not ears." Blade's words came out fast and clipped at the end.

"I'm inside the building across from them. Dead building. They won't see me."

"Ghost—"

"I need to focus now." I pressed the earpiece until the click told me I'd gone one-way, and the last of whatever he said cut off in the middle of a word that was probably coño!

The camera went into the chest pocket of my jacket. I stayed down. One knee on the floor, glass through the denim, right boot flat, and I put my gloved fingertips on the floor and started to move.

The lamp outside threw enough light through the window frames that the glass on the floor shone, every piece a little star on the boards, and I had to get across the room without putting my weight on a single one. I went slow, folded over my own hands, my eyes on the floor a foot ahead.

I reached with a boot for a bare patch. Brought the weight over. Stopped and listened. Reached again with the other foot. Twice I had to turn my whole body to find a clean spot, and once I had to put my foot down a long way out and trust my hips to follow it, the stretch pulling all the way up the back of my leg.

Somewhere in my head a movie played, some thief going over lasers in a museum, and I'd have laughed if I'd had the breath to spare.

The far wall had windows all along it, the frames empty. Kids with nothing to do in a district with nothing left to break but glass, and right then I could have hugged every one of them. I came up under the window that faced the pit's wall, my back to the plaster, and the door the men had come out of sat a little to my left across the alley, and I could hear every word.

"—not what I asked." The hoarse one. "I asked if he's ready."

"He's ready." The loud one. "Says he's ready. Everybody says they're ready."

"Thursday's the big one." The hoarse one again, calm, like it was a schedule. "Initiation." A beat, like he was letting the word sit. "Everybody who showed something these last months gets one more look… The ones who win go up and collect."

"Same as we did." A third voice, easy about it, a man describing a road he'd already driven. "Up the stairs, into the box, and he makes you the offer."

"And the ones he keeps stand next to him."

My scalp went tight.

Thursday. Caleb's Thursday. The night an enforcer had set for him in a parking structure, two weeks on a clock, and now it had a title. Initiation.

"So who goes through?" The loud one. "Out of the ones he's been watching."

"I heard the boss's money's on the kid with the kicks." The third man, quieter now. "The one who put two of ours on the floor backstage."

"Monk." The loud one, the name coming out of him like it tasted bad.

The name went through me. Hearing it in that mouth, across an alley, put something hot in my throat that had no business being there on a job.

"Yeah. Him." The third man. "Impressive. I'll give him that. But I don't trust a guy like that. Man says no to the boss's face and the boss wants him more? Somebody's going to end up sorry, and I'd bet it's not the boss."

I sat under that window with my fists closed on my knees and let him not trust Caleb. Let him. He'd find out Thursday exactly what that was worth.

"That's above you." The hoarse one's words came flat and final.

"I'm just saying…" Sulky. A man used to being talked over.

"Say it in the car."

Their boots stepped on concrete, moving away. Down the alley toward the wide streets, the ones with room to park a car, the ones I'd stayed out of on purpose.

I heard a car door close. Then two more. An engine turned over, headlights swinging across the empty window frames above my head and gone, and then the sound of it shrinking toward the main roads.