“This is my choice to make.”
“And yet I seem to be the one making it.” Kaz headed toward the sitting room. He didn’t intend to argue with Jesper, especially when he wasn’t entirely sure why he was saying no in the first place.
“Who’s Jordie?”
Kaz paused. He’d known the question would come, and yet it was still hard to hear his brother’s name spoken. “Someone I trusted.” He looked over his shoulder and met Jesper’s gray eyes. “Someone I didn’t want to lose.”
Kaz found Nina and Matthias asleep on the couch in the purple sitting room. Why the two biggest people in their crew had chosen the smallest space to sleep on, he had no idea. He gave Nina a nudge with his cane. Without opening her eyes, she tried to bat it away.
“Rise and shine.”
“Go ’way,” she said, burying her head in Matthias’ chest.
“Let’s go, Zenik. The dead will wait, but I won’t.”
At last she roused herself and pulled on her boots. She had discarded her red kefta in favor of the coat and trousers she’d worn during the disastrous botch that had been the Sweet Reef job. Matthias watched her every move, but he did not ask to accompany them. He knew his presence would only increase their risk of exposure.
Inej appeared in the doorway, and they headed for the lift in silence. Curfew was in effect on the streets of Ketterdam, but there was no avoiding this. They would have to rely on luck and Inej’s ability to scout the path ahead of them for patrolling stadwatch .
They left the back of the hotel and headed toward the manufacturing district. Their progress was slow, a circuitous route around the blockades, full of stops and starts as Inej vanished and reappeared, signaling them to wait or rerouting them with a flick of her hand before she was gone once more.
At last they reached the morgue, an unmarked, gray stone structure on the border of the warehouse district, fronted by a garden no one had tended to in some time. Only the bodies of the wealthy were brought here to be prepared for transportation and burial outside the city. It wasn’t the miserable human heap of the Reaper’s Barge, but Kaz still felt like he was descending into a nightmare. He thought of Inej’s voice echoing off the white tiles. Go on.
The morgue was deserted, its heavy iron door sealed tight. He picked the lock and looked once over his shoulder at the shifting shadows of the weedy garden. He couldn’t see Inej, but he knew she was there. She would keep watch over the entrance as they got this grim business done.
It was chilly inside, lit only by a lantern with the blue-tinted warning flame of corpselight. There was a processing room and beyond it a large, icy stone chamber lined with drawers big enough to hold bodies. The whole place smelled of death.
He thought of the pulse beating beneath Inej’s jaw, the warmth of her skin on his lips. He tried to shake the thought free. He did not want that memory tangling with this room full of rot.
Kaz had never been able to dodge the horror of that night in the Ketterdam harbor, the memory of his brother’s corpse clutched tight in his arms as he told himself to kick a little harder, to take one more breath, stay afloat, stay alive. He’d found his way to shore, devoted himself to the vengeance he and his brother were owed. But the nightmare refused to fade. Kaz had been sure it would get easier. He would stop having to think twice before he shook a hand or was forced into close quarters. Instead, things got so bad he could barely brush up against someone on the street without finding himself once more in the harbor. He was on the Reaper’s Barge and death was all around him. He was kicking through the water, clinging to the slippery bloat of Jordie’s flesh, too frightened of drowning to let go.
The situation had gotten dangerous. When Gorka once got too drunk to stand at the Blue Paradise, Kaz and Teapot had to carry him home. Six blocks they hauled him, Gorka’s weight shifting back and forth, slumping against Kaz in a sickening press of skin and stink, then flopping onto Teapot, freeing Kaz briefly—though he could still feel the rub of the man’s hairy arm against the back of his neck.
Later, Teapot had found Kaz huddled in a lavatory, shaking and covered in sweat. He’d pleaded food poisoning, teeth chattering as he jammed his foot against the door to keep Teapot out. He could not be touched again or he would lose his mind completely.
The next day he’d bought his first pair of gloves—cheap black things that bled dye whenever they got wet. Weakness was lethal in the Barrel. People could smell it on you like blood, and if Kaz was going to bring Pekka Rollins to his knees, he couldn’t afford any more nights trembling on a bathroom floor.
Kaz never answered questions about the gloves, never responded to taunts. He just wore them, day in and day out, peeling them off only when he was alone. He told himself it was a temporary measure. But that didn’t stop him from remastering every bit of sleight of hand wearing them, learning to shuffle and work a deck even more deftly than he could barehanded. The gloves held back the waters, kept him from drowning when memories of that night threatened to drag him under. When he pulled them on, it felt like he was arming himself, and they were better than a knife or a gun. Until he met Imogen.
He’d been fourteen, not yet Per Haskell’s lieutenant but making a name for himself with every fight and swindle. Imogen was new to the Barrel, a year older than he was. She’d run with a crew in Zierfoort, small-time rackets that she claimed had left her bored. Since she’d arrived in Ketterdam, she’d been hanging around the Staves, picking up small jobs, trying to find her way into one of the Barrel gangs. When Kaz had first seen her, she’d been breaking a bottle over the head of a Razorgull who’d gotten too handsy. Then she’d cropped up again when Per Haskell had him running book on the spring prize fights. She had freckles and a gap between her front teeth, and she could hold her own in a brawl.
One night, when they were standing by the empty ring counting up the day’s haul, she’d touched her hand to the sleeve of his coat, and when he looked up, she’d smiled slowly, close-lipped, so he couldn’t see the gap in her teeth.
Later, lying on his lumpy mattress in the room he shared at the Slat, Kaz had stared up at the leaky ceiling and thought of the way Imogen had smiled at him, the way her trousers sat low on her hips. She had a sidle when she walked, as if she approached everything from a little bit of an angle. He liked it. He liked her.
There was no mystery to bodies in the Barrel. Space was tight and people took their pleasures where they found them. The other boys in the Dregs talked constantly about their conquests. Kaz said nothing. Fortunately, he said nothing about almost everything, so he had consistency working in his favor. But he knew what he was expected to say, the things he was supposed to want. He did want those things, in moments, in flashes—a girl crossing the street in a cobalt dress that slid from her shoulder, a dancer moving like flames in a show on East Stave, Imogen laughing like he’d told the funniest joke in the world when he hadn’t said much at all.