Page 57 of Ghost’s Awakening

It never touched him. It didn't have to. Blade held it low where the kid could see it and asked his questions in a voice that never rose and never hurried. I stood a foot off the kid's other shoulder and asked mine, and between the two of us the answers came out of him wet and fast.

"Thursday." His voice cracked on it. "It's Thursday, it's always been Thursday, the whole crew's there, he's there, everybody he's been watching goes one more time and the winners go up⁠—"

"How many of you?" Blade.

"Forty. Fifty. I don't know, man, forty at least, everybody who came up through the pit and got kept⁠—"

He said the number proud, even then, with his back against a wall and a knife a foot from his belt. Blade let him, because a proud man told you more than a scared one, and either way the number was an army.

"The brother." My voice came out at the speed I'd used on the concrete, and I didn't try to change it. "Why?"

"I don't know why. Nobody tells us why." His eyes went from the knife to me and couldn't decide which was worse. "Bring him alive, keep him under, take him to the clinic the boss has paper on. That's it. That's all they said."

I stood a foot from that kid and understood what it looked like to be a tool in that man's hand. You picked up what you were pointed at. You didn't ask.

"Steel Phoenixes." I let it sit. "Mean anything to you?"

His face didn't move. His eyes didn't go anywhere. He looked at me like I'd asked him the capital of a country he'd never heard of.

"He's fresh." Blade, beside me, the knife still low. "Or he's good."

"Nobody's that good."

"You are." The knife slid home in its sheath.

Two options, and my head ran both. One, he was lying, and better at it than at everything else. Two, he was fresh, weeks out of that pit, and the ranks were fighters, gym rats and cell-block brawlers, men who'd never worn a patch or heard the word club used for anything but a place you drank. Gravedigger didn't tell his tools what he was afraid of. He pointed them.

I leaned toward two. I didn't like how much I wanted to.

The ride home was the cold hour.

Four in the morning, and the desert had gone as cold as it got, the air so dry and clear the stars sat right down on the ridgeline.

I rode point with the highway empty ahead. In my mirror the van's lights rode the dark a hundred yards back, Blade behind the wheel, and behind the van one more headlight, Vega on his own bike with one eye closing and a nose that was going to need Rosa's hands before it needed sleep. Santos and Valkyrie had stayed at the hospital. They'd taken hits and stayed standing, and they'd hold the doors until Tank and Cuervo got there to double them. Reaper had made that call over the phone before I'd finished asking.

Five zip-tied men rode in the back of that van with Blade's bike between their legs, and if any of them had wanted to complain about the room, none of them had found the breath.

Prisoners. The word sat strange in my head. We'd started the night with a camera and a whisper.

My hands were steady on the bars and my knee was still, and all twelve channels were running the same thing.

He hadn't sent a gun.

Gravedigger owned a revolver. I'd stood in a room and watched him put Whitfield on a marble floor with it and straighten his cuff after. And tonight he'd reached for a man with a tube in his throat and a brother in my bed, and what he'd sent was a folded piece of paper. A transfer order with the right account number on it. The same as the bill he'd built under Liam for four months, until the number had a weight Caleb carried. The same as the wire, a hundred and fifty grand and a headstone emoji, dropped on that bill like beer money. Every time that man had reached for the Rossi brothers, he'd reached through paper, and the men with fists were only what he sent to carry it.

Bills. Wires. Patient transfers.

The compound's floodlights came up out of the dark, and the gate started rolling before I reached it.

Caleb was asleep in there, in my bed, the deep sleep he'd only found this week, with his brother's fingers still moving against his somewhere behind his eyes. He'd wake in three hours and go stand in the clubhouse kitchen and feed fifty people.

Or he'd wake in ten minutes to my hand on his shoulder and the words they came for Liam, and I'd watch everything he'd built this week come apart on his face in the dark.

I rolled through the gate with the van's lights in my mirror and the whole ride's cold in my hands, and I still didn't know which scenario I owed him. Whether to wake him now… or to tell him at all.

14

SEEING RED