Page 29 of Crow’s Shadow

“Yeah,” Grim says quietly. “Up front. I’ll drive.”

We burn Colt at midnight, and I say words over him.

I make myself. Every man gets words, that is the whole of the job, that is the thing that is supposed to hold us apart from the men we feed to the fire. I stand at the mouth of the furnace where I have stood a thousand times feeling nothing, and I look at the boy’s big dead face, and I find that the words come out of me broken, small and real, and that they cost me. I understand that Mercy was right about the soul. It does not wait. It leaves a little every time you tell it to. Colt buys back a scrap of mine, dying at the quiet door, and it is the worst possible way to be reminded I ever had one.

Loco comes in while the fire is working. He stands beside me in the heat and watches the boy burn, and for a long while neither of us says a thing.

“You went against a direct order,” he says at last. No anger in it. Something heavier.

“I did.”

“There’ll be a reckoning for that. Not tonight. Not till she’s home. But it’s coming, and Stryker’s going to be holding the knife, and he won’t be wrong to.” He watches the flame. “You knew what you were doing when you did it.”

“I did.”

“Two nights,” Loco says. “You got him to give us two nights. Then Renner runs her up that mountain and we’re done.” He turns and looks at me. “So, we don’t get two nights. We get one. We hit the cannery tomorrow, in the dark, and we bring our girl home, and God help every man standing between her and that door.” He puts his hand on the back of my neck, hard, the way he did when I was young, half-broken and new to the smell of this place. “Get right. Whatever’s left of you, get it right by tomorrow night. She’s going to need the man, Crow. Not the fire.”

He leaves me with the boy and the roar.

The gauge climbs to sixteen hundred. I thumb the log and note the time in the careful shorthand Bones likes even for the jobs no coroner will ever read, and my hand shakes doing it, the first time in twenty years my hand has ever shaken over this book.

Somewhere north of here, past the flats, she is awake. I know it because the pull toward her is back, the same damn thing I feel every night she walks into my crematory and I refuse to turn around. I blamed it on the heat from the furnace because that was easier than admitting it was her.

I carried her out of a fire once when I was fifteen, went through the smoke and came out with her against my chest and never told a soul. Now Renner knows. He has her in the dark, and tomorrow I walk into another fire to bring her home.

Hold on, I tell her, across the black miles, in the place I have never once let myself speak to her.

Hold on. I’m coming for you first.

Chapter twelve

SHADOW

Four days in the cannery have taught me the shape of my cage. Now I go to work on the shape of the thing living inside my chest.

I practice at night. Sleeper drops off on the late watch near the second hour, chin to his collarbone, rifle slack across his thighs, and the gray bleeds out of the hole in the roof. For a stretch of black hours the whole ruin belongs to me. I set my spine against the wet wall, the chain a cold bracelet on my ankle, and I go looking for the place behind my breastbone where the hook lives.

Something waits down there. A second pulse beneath my own, faint but there.

Three nights back it tore out of me in one piece, and took forty lamps with it. Every dark hour since, I have tried to coax a sliver of it up on purpose. Not the flood. A thread. One drop off the end of a finger.

Tonight the water moves.

A puddle sits near the door where the roof weeps, a black coin of it holding the little light there is. I fix on the center and I reach down into my chest, slow and careful, until if find the smallest edge of the pressure. I press a sliver of it out through my eyes.

The water shivers. One ring rolls out from the middle. Gone.

My whole body wants to shout. I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep the sound behind my teeth.

Mine. Small, quiet, chosen. No lamps, no falling glass. A single ring in a puddle nobody saw. The first thing in my life that belongs to only me.

I keep it from him. First rule I write in the book behind my eyes.

The second rule is the guards.

Four days and I know them down to their bad habits. Bad Knee favors his right leg and hates the cold, so he stands too near the one working heater and leaves the water side thin after dark. Sleeper sleeps, which is a gift I will spend once and once only. Church Shoes counts my chain every time he brings food, a tug on the ring bolt, a tug on the cuff, the same order every meal, a man soothing himself with a ritual. The Quiet One never touches me and never looks away. He is the one I fear. He is the one I keep for last.

I feed them the girl they want. Small. Grateful for water. Chin down, shoulders in, eyes wet on command, because a lifetime of vanishing taught me tears cost nothing and buy plenty. Church Shoes has started leaving the food inside arm’s reach. Bad Knee talks to me now, low, when his partner steps out to piss, complaining about his money troubles, about Renner, about a promised cut gone thin. A man who complains to a prisoner is a man who has stopped seeing a prisoner. He sees a set of ears. Good. Ears are what I have always been.