The second bridge shows up as a gray line over black water. Past it, set back off the road in a wide gravel apron, the old weigh station; a dead building with boarded windows and a rusted scale-house, the kind of place that exists so trucks can stop without anyone asking why.
There’s a vehicle on the apron. Long, dark, engine off, lights off.
I stop in the tree line and let the magic go. It falls off me in one long shiver, and the sweat on my spine goes cold all at once. No point carrying it further. I’m not here to be unseen.
I’m here to be bought.
The eastern sky has gone the color of dishwater. First light, or near enough. I look at the dark vehicle and the dead building, and for one second, the whole night tips—Decker’s shoulders against the floodlights, Kaylin’s spoon in the air, everything I’m leaving behind—and I let it pass.
Then I step out of the trees where they can see me, and I walk toward the car with my hands loose and my chin level, the way I walk toward everything that scares me.
Halfway across the gravel, both front doors open at once.
Two men get out. Big, unhurried, spreading left and right without being told to, and neither of them is looking at me like I’m a person. They’re looking at me like freight.
Behind them, the rear window slides down two inches.
“Grace.” A woman’s voice comes out of the dark gap, level, unhurried, no hello.
I know that voice. My knees know it. My stomach knows it. Months of night calls, and here it is ten feet away with a face I’ve never seen behind it.
“Right on time,” she says. “Get in.”
Chapter 40
Decker
No breathing. I stand at her door with my hand up and my ear turned, and there’s nothing on the other side of the wood. No breath. No heartbeat—and I can hear a heartbeat through a door; I’ve done it all my life. It’s the first thing I listen for and the last thing I doubt.
I knock anyway. “Grace.”
Nothing.
“Grace. It’s me.”
I try the handle, and it turns. The door swings in, and that’s the second wrong thing, because she bolts it. Every night. I made her promise, and she keeps her promises.
The room is dark and neat and empty.
I stand in the doorway running possible explanations, because that’s what I do. Maybe she’s in the washroom down the hall. Or Vanya called her early. Viktor moved the seven o’clock up, and nobody told me. Each one lasts a second before the smell of theroom kills it. Her scent’s here, but it’s old. Hours old. Cooled all the way down, the way a room cools when the person walked out of it and didn’t come back.
The duffel is still against the wall. The bed is made. On the blanket there’s a dent where somebody sat for a long time in the dark.
I came here with the words in order. Sorry first. Then how I’d make this right. I’m still holding them, standing in an empty room, and there’s nobody to give them to.
“Sir?” The night guard has come down the corridor behind me—young, big, awake now. “Is there a problem?”
“Where is she?”
“She’s—” He looks past me at the empty room and his face goes white. “She’s inside. She has to be. Nobody passed me. I’ve been on that junction since midnight, and nobody passed me, I swear—”
“I believe you,” I say, and I do, and that’s the horror of it.
Something passed him. A woman wearing the one gift that’s entirely hers walked out of this wing right by him. She turned it back on. All these days I watched her choose to be seen, and this morning she pulled the magic back over herself and walked out. And the one man on this mountain her gift has never worked on wasn’t here to stop her.
I was a hundred feet away. I was looking at her dark window, telling myself she was asleep behind it.
Something starts coming up through me from a long way down.
