53
“It’s dangerous for you and your sister to be out alone,” Matt told Claire as they opened the stands. He’d chosen his words in the silence of their morning rounds, which had not been silent at all but full of rocking wagon wheels, plodding golem feet, the leafy shiver of lettuce loose in crates. For the second day in a row, they had not talked on the road. Dark circles undermined Claire’s eyes, and she stared over the golem’s surging shoulders. She napped when he drove, which she had never done before.
While he waited for her answer he unlocked his stand’s cupboard, removed the carved wood signs and stepladder, and climbed the one to hang the others from brass hooks. The paint caught dawn’s blush. He hung EGGS, and ADORNE, and FRESH between them. “I was worried for you.”
“Worried” was too neat a word. He’d stayed up an hour past bedtime at the kitchen table with Donna, drinking mint tea brewed with leaves from their window garden. Hannah and Jake had abandoned their game of checkers and thunder lizards long before that; Hannah was sweet with the kid. Then again, neither Donna nor Matt was so free as Hannah to pin Jake down until he said sorry.
Waiting, Matt and Donna counted sirens through the open window, and fistfights, and curses, and mating cats’ cries. Matt wanted to go look for them, but Donna counseled him to stay. After an hour they switched roles, and after that again.
He slept, expecting to wake and find them still gone. But when he emerged robed after his morning shower, Claire was back, with a pot of coffee strong enough to double as industrial solvent.
He’d asked her a wordless question, which she hadn’t answered and still wasn’t answering.
“Your sister needs looking after,” he said, “and the city’s full of crazy confused people.” He arranged cartons of eggs, and a loose pyramidal pile in their center. Claire hauled a crate of eggplant onto the Rafferty stand’s counter and pulled plump dark plants out two by two. She set them down hard enough to bruise the flesh, but he didn’t say anything about that because she certainly knew. “What if your sister had another episode?”
“Stop,” was the first word she’d said to him all morning other than “hello.” “Matt.” She leaned against the counter, lowered her head so her blond hair fell across her face, then turned to him. He held one egg in each hand, and felt faintly ridiculous. “You think I don’t know?”
“I’m worried,” he repeated, and put down the eggs.
“Yesterday we met a blind old woman who fell, alone, in her house—her son who lives with her was stuck on a double shift dockside—she hurt herself and no one came to her but—” She pointed up, and she was not pointing to the sun. “A five-year-old girl’s cat escaped through a window cracked open at night and she chased it out of doors only to lose herself until Seril’s children found her. A university student was being”—she shook her head, to clear it—“raped. Until. A single mother lost her job and would have lost her home if not for. Ellen talks to them all. People I couldn’t see. You don’t let others’ pain inside, you know? Not if you have enough already, and everyone always has enough.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Everything’s dangerous in this city, Matt. Especially for women. I’m not a religious person, but Ellen is. Seril’s good for her, and for us. You’ve seen that.”
“Gargoyles can’t solve the world’s problems.”
“But they can help. They have helped. And Seril needs help now. Ellen wants to get everyone together, everyone who’s prayed to the goddess.”
“You can’t fight Craftsmen.”
“We can try. This will be over in a day or two, one way or another. For now, my sister needs me.” Lettuce shook as she dropped heads onto the counter. “You saw what happened to Ellen when they hurt Her. I won’t let that happen again.”
He finished his pyramid of eggs. Then he built a second.
“Hey,” he said after a while. “I’m sorry.”
Ray Capistano’s knife blade struck his butcher’s block.
“Donna and I care about you. If we can help, let us.”
When he looked at her, she was looking back.
“As a matter of fact,” she said.
*
The red lightning struck more often as Tara and Shale descended into the mountain.
Not without warning—always the growl behind them or ahead. When crystal veins in the rock took fire, they ran or hid. Once, they could not run. Tara knelt in the tunnel’s center, Crafted a ward, and held Shale close as the fire buckled her shield. If the mind that moved this mountain wanted to crush them, it would.
“Are you certain there’s a mind?” Shale asked.