“The moon lockup?” I ask. Not even our planet’s moon, but the third one over. The worst of the lot. The one people don’t come back from. “How the hell did you get slated for that?”
“You saying you care?” Greg shakes, too, eye whites tinted yellow. He drops the cigarette his mother offers. It sinks into the carpet. He retrieves it, doesn’t notice the smudged dark coating its end. I snatch the cig before he puts it in his mouth.
He swears. “Really, Kit? I can’t even get a smoke?”
“Do you want to die?” I crush the cig to powder, drop what’s left on the floor. Then step close and jam my hand into his right back pocket—where he always kept his money as a kid.
Some things don’t change.
He jumps. “What the—?”
I pull away, my now-sticky transaction card held high. His cheeks burn with something like shame.
There’s doping your cousin, and then there’s robbing her unconscious form. Of course, he also stole pain meds from the love of his grandmother’s life, so maybe nothing was ever sacred to him.
“Sorry,” he says.
“No.” Dee starts forward, trips on a half-eaten chair. “You do not apologize to her.”
Of course not. I am the heartless daughter of a mass-murdering god.
I turn around and walk out.
Thirty-two.
I stand at the cross street four blocks from Dee’s and ask the transaction card to repeat the balance. The big red digits don’t change.
0 3 2.
In the space of a day, Greg managed to burn through whatever the Brinkers paid him and my three hundred reds.
Sorry, two hundred sixty-eight.
Drugs? A second debt to Decker?
I can’t bargain with this. I’ll have to steal the bracelet back. And figure out how the hell it works before Decker tracks me down.
And he will. Nobody crosses Decker.
Decker’s alley growls in the deepened light and chomps its graffiti teeth. His impassive door barricaded from the inside out. A lost cause even with my popping skills. What little they are.
But like Mom says, there’s more than one way to rewrite the grid.
I look up. Past the teeth and the stone walls, the busted lights and the barred windows, to the half-chewed roofline eight stories above. For a tower, it barely warrants the name.
And along all eight of those stories clings an escape lift. A skinny ladder that turns into a skeletal stairwell around level four or five. Rusted and splitting from the wall in places, but workable. I’ve seen worse.
A subeight-story fall probably wouldn’t kill me. If it does, well, my deal with Niles ended last night.
I climb.
The rungs flake hot. Stick to my palms and crawl under my nails. My shoes scrape and the ladder creaks—if Decker’s here, I’m screwed—but the metal holds. And Decker shouldn’t be here. He has a schedule, and I knew it by heart when I was trying to track down meds for Yonni.
I zoom up the first story and a half, slow into the third. My arms burn by the time I hit the stairwell, but then my legs take over and it’s smooth flying. The escape lift returns to ladder form for the last story, and I haul myself onto the roof. Stand on the ledge and survey my conquered mountain. Or rather, the alley and the flat stone wall of the tower across the way.
I am a roof-climbing god.
Something skitters in the edge of my vision. Or someone. I jump backward onto the rooftop and drop behind the ledge. Wait a beat and peek over. Lots of painted teeth and grime. No people.
None visible. Probably a bird. It was totally a bird.
Right.
Life loves to kick you when you’re high, Yonni used to say. And low. And whenever the hell else it feels like.
Missa had been at breakfast that morning, the only one of Yonni’s entourage ever allowed to stay overnight even before Missa gave us the suite. I liked Missa better at breakfast. She looked like a messy old lady with oily hair and pale pink lips. At dinner Missa looked exactly like what she was—a picture-perfect lordling who could buy, sell, and fillet us with the flick of a finger.
But at breakfast Missa’s skin had spots and lines. She’d leaned in and whispered loud enough for Yonni to hear, And when it does, you run to the people who love you, because even life can’t kick that.
Don’t you go filling my girl’s head with bullshit, Yonni had snapped from the kitchen. But she smiled, too. That sly, subtle twist she backed by warm eyes and a heart that never faded.
Not until Missa died.
I twist onto my back and lay. Just lay. Sky a golden ring of towers and smog. A tiny, tight, impossible band that shrinks until it rips my chest in two.
“And what if there isn’t anybody?” I ask the small, cragged sky. “What if there’s no one left?”
Then go out and find more someones, says Yonni, except, no—that sounds more like Missa. Yonni would say something like, then be the one someone else runs to.
Or maybe they wouldn’t say anything, and I’m just lying on my back on a dealer’s rooftop in East 5th having conversations with the dead.
Because that’s how I roll.