“Let’s see.” She touched the back of his right hand with her fingertip, cool and smooth and hard-polished from gripping rock. He closed his eyes, consciousness slipping; when he opened them again, she was gone.
He fell, right arm wheeling and left jutting at an odd angle from the socket: an angel with one wing broken. He struck something heavy and round and human, and thick arms set him gently on the broken ground. Caleb looked up into Balam’s blunt face. Other cliff runners peered down, astonished and confused. They crowded him with warmth.
“You still want to catch her?” Balam asked as Caleb struggled against his body’s weight to rise.
“Yes.”
The trainer didn’t reply.
Caleb closed his eyes, and thought about Mal, and about this strange massive man, old in middle age, and about Shannon and her scar. Who was Mal, to have this hobby?
He levered himself into a sitting position, and the pain from his arm almost made him vomit.
“You love the ground too much,” Balam said. “Or it loves you.”
“Where’s the nearest hospital?”
All told, once he escaped the god-shattered wasteland, once he staggered into a hospital waiting room, once the doctor looked down over the gold rims of her glasses and reached through his skin to set his shoulder from the inside, once he woke from the swoon of pain and soul-loss, he judged the evening a success.
Seven days. More than enough time to heal, and prepare.
When Teo met him in the hospital, she looked so worried he almost didn’t tell her the story.
“I suppose you’ll call the whole thing off now,” she said as he tested his mended shoulder’s strength. “Hand her over to the authorities.”
“I can’t quit now.” He reached for his pants. “I’ve almost won our bet.”
10
Two days later, wounds healed and mind unsettled, he stalked Teo’s office.
“What do I have to do,” she said, looking up from a pile of paperwork, “to get you out of here so I can focus?”
“Thanks for your support. I’m in trouble.”
“What happened to the cocky attitude? I’ve almost won, all that stuff?”
“I have almost won.”
“But you’re pacing.”
“I’m so close. It’s this last little part that’s the problem.”
“The part where you have to beat a runner at her own race.”
“That’s the one.”
“You know what you should do. Tell Tollan, fall on your sword and”—she waved the quill tip of her pen at the door—“walk away.”
“Would you give up, if our situations were reversed?”
“Of course.”
“I think she’s innocent.”
“You’re infatuated.”
“I’m not. I want to help her.”
“Because she’s pretty.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She’s a verb.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You fall for people all the time.”
“Fall is certainly the operative word in this case.” Teo returned her pen to its copper stand with an exasperated click of quill on metal. “I’ve never dated a key suspect in an ongoing investigation. As far as I recall, and feel free to correct me, I’ve never come back from a date with anything worse than a hangover. How many bones did you break last week?”
“That’s beside the point,” he said, though it wasn’t. He studied one of the paintings on her office wall: a canvas awash with orange and brown and splashes of blue. A city rose, or fell, from the angry brushstrokes—a city suspended between two hells. “Would you rather I fold?”
She crossed her arms and reclined in her chair. Leather creaked to cradle her. “That isn’t fair.”
“I’m not blaming you. You’re right. I never would have let that hand pass four years ago. I got scared, got tight. I’m afraid of losing my job, my house, the shreds of soulstuff I’ve squirreled together. But this woman doesn’t deserve to be handed over to the Wardens just because she doesn’t listen when the world tells her where she can and can’t go.”
“She’s dangerous.”
“She’s amazing,” he agreed.
“I don’t think you get my point.”
“I don’t think I care.”
Teo leaned forward. Caleb steeled himself against whatever she was about to say.
A bell rang, interrupting them both. She grimaced and pressed a button on her desk. A tiny door opened in the baseboard behind her wastebasket. Two hesitant red eyes peered out from the shadows.
The white rat stepped cautiously into the room, nostrils flaring. Satisfied of its immediate safety, the rat darted up Teo’s desk and sat atop her paperwork. It wore black velvet barding blazoned with a silver spiderweb; a leather scroll case the size of a cigarette hung around its neck. Teo opened the case with a flick of her forefinger, and tapped a parchment scroll into her palm.
The rat accepted a few thaums of her soul in payment for the delivery, sketched a mechanical bow, and darted back through its hidden door, which snapped closed. Teo unrolled the scroll, read the message there, and swore.
“Heartstone?”
“Heartstone,” she confirmed. “This deal will kill me, or else I will kill every single person involved in it.”
“Please don’t. That would include me.”
“I might kill you anyway,” she said. “They want all our customer complaints for the last year, to prove some damn thing or other about our service. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.”
“I have five days to figure out how to run faster than the best cliff runner in the city.”
“Practice.” Teo grabbed a pen and scrawled a list on a spare palimpsest.
“Their practice almost killed me.”
“Then cheat.”
He raised one finger and opened his mouth. Ten seconds passed, twenty, and no words came out. A sun rose in his mind.
“Teo, you’re a genius,” he said, and left.
Caleb couldn’t beat Mal if he played by her rules. He was neither Craftsman nor athlete. His skills lay at the card table.
But Mal had challenged him to catch her, not to win. If he cheated, she might not talk, but since he couldn’t win by playing fair, he would lose nothing by stretching the rules. Balam would not approve, but Caleb didn’t need his approval.
Cheating at a footrace was difficult. There were no cards he could hide in his sleeve, no tricks of shuffling or sleights-of-hand. Fortunately, Caleb had other alternatives.
He descended winding stairs into RKC’s basement library, a labyrinth of twisting paths built centuries before as a ritual maze for the priests of Aquel and Achal. After the God Wars, the King in Red used the paths and dead- end chambers to store the millions of contracts by which the city maintained itself in the absence of divine grace.
