Page 59 of Ghost’s Awakening

I ate my art. It was good.

I didn't taste any of it.

Church at eight had the room full before the clock got there.

I sat at the table this time, halfway down the long side, Ghost on my left with his knee against mine under the wood. The morning I'd drawn the map he'd kept an inch between us. Today there was no inch. The oak was scarred right through the finish, decades of knuckles coming down on it, and the framed phoenix hung on the far wall over all of it.

Thirty-one, I counted. Then thirty-two, when Vega came in late and took the back wall with his left eye swelled shut and white tape across his nose, and I stopped counting. Somebody had put a straight hand into that face inside the last eight hours and known how to throw it. Nobody else was looking at him, and that told me more than the eye did.

Someone I didn't know stood next to Blade by the far wall, and he wasn't wearing leather. Jeans, and a flannel shirt hanging loose off shoulders built somewhere other than a gym, the arms thick and deep brown from years of sun, light brown hair in a careless mess that looked like wind and his own fingers, and it made him the easiest man in the room to look at. Stunning was the word. I didn't reach for it often. Blade, a bruise coming up dark along one cheekbone, was saying something to him low and close, their shoulders touching.

So he wasn't a patch. Declan wore no cut, and neither did Tyler or Nolan, and they were still the first names Hawk called when the room needed something done. Ghost had told me pieces of Montana in the medical bay, back when I was too wrecked to hold the names, and in those pieces a man had stood beside Blade the whole way through. I couldn't put a name to the face. What I could do was read him, and twenty years across mats and ring floors gave me nothing to work with. He stood easy, weight on both feet, and the calm on him went all the way down.

I'd been lucky. My parents had walked an eight-year-old with a temper into a strip-mall gym and left him there, and the discipline had fit the heat in me the way a lid fit a pot. This man looked like he'd come by his some other way.

Hawk stood, and that was all it took. The talk died between one word and the next, and every patch in the room turned toward one man who hadn't raised his voice. He gave respect out with both hands and got it back with both, and I felt my own back straighten at his table, which was a strange thing for a war to do to a man.

"Last night, Ghost and Blade read the back of Gravedigger's building." Hawk's hands came down flat on the wood. "Ghost found what Caleb's map said was there. Then the night went somewhere none of us planned for. He'll tell it. Ghost."

Ghost's knee left mine. He stood, opened a folder, and started laying photographs down the middle of the table.

"The north wall. Back of the building, the blank stretch." His voice came out at the right speed, a report and nothing else. "It's got a door in it. Steel, with brick glued on so it reads as wall from ten feet. Oil on the seam, fresh. Tire tracks in front of it, hours old." He fanned the last three out. "No cameras on that whole face. Whoever uses that door doesn't want anybody watching him use it. His own people included."

The photographs went hand to hand down the table. When they reached the wall, Blade passed them to the man in the flannel without looking, the way you'd hand over a thing you'd already read, and the man in the flannel held each one longer than anybody had. Sand, seam, sand again, measuring something I couldn't see.

That was when I noticed the far corner, the one Tank had taken every time I'd been in this room, held Tyler and an empty chair. Tank was missing. I wondered about that, and kept my eyes on Ghost.

"Best guess, it comes in under the mezzanine, or onto it." Ghost tapped the picture of the seam. "North side. That's his side. Every fighter who ever swore the man comes and goes up there without using the stairs was right, and this is how." He straightened. "And I heard something."

"Three of them came out of that door while I was standing on it. His inner circle, or close to it." Flat. Like he was reading a bus schedule. "I went through a window across the alley and listened from there, thirty feet off them. Thursday isn't a fight night. It's Initiation night. Everybody he's been watching these last months gets one more fight, in front of him, in a building full of his people. The ones who win go up the stairs into the box and collect. Then he makes his offer. A place next to him."

He looked at me then, just me, and I read it before he could say it.

"Let me guess." My voice came out level. "The night I walk back in."

"That's the night." His eyes didn't leave mine. "I heard your name, Caleb. Your pit name. His money's on you."

Thirty feet from three of Gravedigger's people in the dark, and he'd handed it over like it was a walk to the mailbox. I wondered, not for the first time, what every person at this table had been through for that to be an ordinary sentence.

"Let that Grave—" Ghost's eyes went wide, fast, and I watched him brace for it. "—digger call it whatever he wants." His breath went out of him. "Initiation. Fine. It doesn't change where I stand, and he'll get what's coming to him. If all of you—" I looked down one side of the table and up the other, "—are still in, of course⁠—"

"The Phoenixes voted." Hawk didn't raise his voice. He never had to. "We don't take back our word."

I nodded. It was all I had. "Thank you."

"We know where you stand." Ghost, still on his feet. "Everybody at this table knows it. The problem is he might know it too, and a man like that doesn't leave a thing like that to chance, so he went and got himself insurance, I mean he tried to, it didn't, he⁠—"

"Ghost." Blade, from the wall. Low.

Ghost stopped. His hands went flat on the table, and I'd seen this stillness once before, in a small room with yellow light on the floor, right before he handed me a folded paper. My stomach knew before I did.

"Before I say it, hear this part first." He was looking at me and nobody else. "Liam is safe. He's in his bed, in his room, with more of ours on that hospital than there were yesterday. Tank's one of them." One second.

"Last night at two, Gravedigger sent five men to take him out of that hospital. A van, two of them in uniforms, and a transfer order with the right account number on it, so the paper checked. We got there first. They're here now, at the compound." He swallowed. "Prisoners, basically."

The words came across the table and landed on me, and for one second nothing happened.

I was calm. I'd been calm a second ago, and the calm was still there, and the words went into it the way a knife went into something left too long in the walk-in. Slow. Then all at once. Take Liam. Liam with a tube down his throat, who'd found the strength this week to move his fingers twice and nothing else. Strapped to something. Rolled through a door into the dark.