“No,” she said.
“Too bad.” Aidan closed her bag and threw it to her. She snatched it out of the air, angry and even angrier that he was giving her something to be grateful for.
“You better not lose that marker,” Tana said, stomach churning, resigning herself. “You better not give it to some hot kid you want to impress. It’s still mine.”
“I won’t,” he said, bringing it to his mouth and kissing it with his dried-blood-stained lips. “Come for me after it’s dark.”
Tana rolled onto her back, lying on the roof and looking into the faded blue of the sky. She was exhausted, her mind supplying only the words I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m tired over and over, a chant that felt more true every time she thought it.
She blinked and a shadow fell over her. She sat up to see a Latino boy walking toward her across the peak of the roof. She yelped in surprise.
He was the same boy she’d seen that morning. He had short, cropped jet hair, multicolored tattoos snaking up the dark skin of his arms, and bright gold hoops in both his ears, but no bird this time. “You okay?” he asked.
She nodded.
He walked over to the skylight and looked down into it. “They locked you in there with that boy? What’s wrong with him?”
She nodded. “Aidan’s infected. They fed him blood. He’s going to turn.”
The boy shook his head. He seemed piratical enough to fit in with Rufus and Zara and Christobel, and he’d known they were a they, but he hadn’t called out to them that morning from the rooftop. She really, really hoped they weren’t friends.
He stuck out his hand. She took it, letting herself be hauled onto her feet. The gentle slope of the roof made her steps unsteady, but she didn’t think she was in any danger of falling unless she tried to go fast.
“I saw you,” she said. “With the bird.”
“I live around here,” he told her. “Lived here since before the quarantine. It’s safer higher up. My name’s Jameson.”
Tana looked around at the sea of rooftops, some connected and some not. “If you show me the way to the street, I’ll buy you dinner.”
“The sun’s going down,” he said. “They call that meal breakfast around here.”
She looked up at the clouds, painted with the scarlet and gold of dusk. “Breakfast, huh?”
Jameson shrugged, walking toward the peak of the roof. “Welcome to Coldtown. Breakfast at dusk. Lunch at midnight. Dinner at dawn. And don’t expect everybody to be as nice as me. C’mon.”
Hesitating, Tana glanced back at the skylight. “He’s dying down there. By himself.”
“Everybody dies alone,” Jameson said, and kept going. “Not everybody wakes up right after. Come on.”
After a moment, not knowing what else to do, she followed him. He led her from rooftop to rooftop, until they came to a fire escape, which they clanked down noisily.
Coldtown was a city running upside down, where day was night and night was day. As they got closer to the town center, the streets filled with shopkeepers and street vendors setting up for the coming night. Kids on torn blankets selling dented canned goods for a quarter apiece called out to her as she passed. There were other makeshift stalls, one full of small generators that ran on solar power and operated by hand crank; another with an array of dresses and coats on racks; and a third with chickens and rabbits in cages. A woman stoked a fire underneath two enormous soup pots while a man on a stool stirred them furiously; a sign behind the couple promised a ladle-full of vegetable broth at half price if you brought your own bowl. A man in a top hat and red suspenders called out gleefully from behind a smoking barbecue grill, “rat on a stick, better get ’em quick, crispy and sweet, meat for a treat!”
Tana’s stomach growled, but she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to eat. She wondered if it was the infection, if it was finally going to steal her hunger for anything other than blood. At that thought, her stomach churned worse than ever.
By the time she got to High Street, her head was spinning.
“Go grab a seat,” Jameson said, gesturing to a place with small grubby plastic tables and mismatched chairs. “I’ll get us something. You can pay me back.”
She wondered what his game was, but since they were in a public place and running off might land her in a weirder or worse situation, Tana sat. He returned a few minutes later with two plates filled with what looked like scrambled eggs with chives, a couple of warm tortillas, and two mugs of black coffee with a film of grounds on top.
“Okay,” Jameson said. “I helped you out and I bought you food. Now maybe you could tell me a little about the Thorn of Istra.”