Page 67 of Ghost’s Awakening

Nobody had told me I was wrong yet. That was the part I hated.

The second floor of the warehouse two blocks off the pit was one long dark room with a spine of steel columns, and we'd been in it since sundown. Twenty-two of us spread along the south windows, every pane painted out years ago except where we'd scraped sightlines at the corners. Through my scrape I had the angle on the pit's east door, a wedge of it, the entrance lit up hard and the line of the crowd long gone inside. Cars packed the block nose to tail, more than I'd counted on the night I'd entered the pit myself.

Behind me the room breathed. Twenty-two people could be quiet, but they couldn't be silent, and the dark was full of the small sounds of waiting. A boot easing on grit. The slow zip of a jacket. Somebody's knuckles, cracked one at a time. Kai had claimed a folding table under the far scrape and laid his kit out on it in rows, clamps and gauze squared off like a parts tray, and he'd checked the rows so often his hands had memorized the checking.

My knee was going. It had been going since the sun went down, bouncing off the ball of my foot, and I'd quit telling it to stop somewhere around nine.

It had started going hard at half past eight, when Declan's voice came over the radio from the roof into every earpiece on the block, flat the way only Declan and dial tones ever managed.

"Hold your people. They're screening the door."

The glasses were up in two seconds. There it was, at the east entrance, where for months two bouncers had patted chests and waved men through: a gray arch, portable, airport surplus, planted square in the doorway with a guy running a wand behind it for beeps.

Metal detectors. At a warehouse fight ring in a dead district, where half the crowd carried knives out of habit.

Our six were still a block from that door when Declan's warning came through. Early enough to fix it. Trenza turned the crew around, walked them back to the cars, and six earpieces went into a door pocket. Then I stood at my window and watched the people I love walk into that building deaf. Trenza with her hair loose down her back, a stranger without the braid, laughing at something Cuervo didn't say. Mateo with her beer and his own, a bored nephew, nineteen years old and selling it. Then Faro. Anima. Norte. One at a time, spaced out, nothing to see.

Declan had called each one through the door. "Four in. Five in. Six in." Then, later, the one that mattered. "Monk's at the arch." A pause I could've parked a bike in. "He stopped. Three seconds. He clocked it." Another pause. "He's in."

He'd seen the trap change shape at the door, and he'd walked in anyway. Of course he had.

"I don't like this." It came out of me again, to the window this time, and my breath fogged a coin of glass and shrank.

"Jake." Kai left his table and came to stand beside me, and he didn't touch me. He just put himself where my eyes would have to trip over him on their way back from the pit. "You'll have to have faith in Caleb. And in the others. They know the walk-away rule. If nobody can confirm the man's in the building, they finish their beers and they leave, and we try again another way."

"They never screened that door, Kai." I kept my voice down and it wanted not to be down. "Months of Thursdays. A pat on the chest, in you go. Tonight, the one night six of ours and Caleb walk in wired for sound, there's an arch in the doorway? That's not a coincidence. That's a man who's been told something, or smelled something, and either way he changed his building for it. I don't like it."

"You've mentioned." A thread of dry came through it, which from Kai counted as a hug. Then it went again. "Rosa's got the infirmary at the compound set up like a field hospital, and I've got this. Whatever comes out of that building tonight, we're ready. That part I can promise. The rest I can't."

"Caleb saw the arch and went in anyway." Hawk's voice arrived from the dark to my left, where he'd stood so long I'd quit seeing him. "That was his decision, and he made it knowing everything you know. We made ours when we voted. We wait for the signal that puts Gravedigger in that building, because the hit has to count. This ends tonight or it doesn't end. The earpieces were a comfort. Comforts get taken. They were never the plan. The plan is Nolan's wire, one word into that mic, same as it's been since Church. Our six don't need earpieces to stand up for Caleb if it comes to that, and they don't need them to walk out that door whenever they choose. The bet was always the mic." His head turned, and even in the dark I felt it more than saw it. "And if that mic gives us nothing and the night runs long, we go in anyway and we take our people back. All of them. That was always the floor under this plan, Ghost. Nobody's being left in there."

I looked at him. Boots planted, arms loose, the shotgun slung across his back, and he hadn't touched it in an hour, and not one part of him moving that didn't have to. I'd have paid money for ten minutes inside that calm. Some people were born with an idle that low. The rest of us bounced a knee.

And he'd planned it like a man with that idle. I'd sat in Church while he built it and I could still see the map. Thirty-five of us staged on this block, if you counted the four who'd never worn a patch, and tonight everybody counted. Twenty-one patched members here at the windows with the east door in view, and Nolan under the middle window with his receiver. Declan on the roof over our heads with the rifle, Logan spotting for him and Tyler on the long lens beside them, three men who'd never worn a patch holding the high ground for everyone who did. If cars full of reinforcements came up that street, Declan would stop the street. Ten more at the north wall two blocks over, flat in the dark against the bricked-over door only I had ever seen open, and Blade running that ten. If the big man tried to leave through his secret wall tonight, the club hadn't needed much discussion about what should be waiting to meet him.

And back home, the gate crew and a dozen more holding the compound with more rifles and RPGs than people to carry them, because a man who sends five fighters after a sleeping kid is a man who might send fifty at a clubhouse the night its patches are elsewhere. Hawk had planned for that too.

Tank wasn't on this block. Tank hadn't been off that hospital since the night the white van rolled into its parking structure. He'd taken the second level for himself, a van of our own backed into the far corner with the windows blacked out, and he'd slept in it every night since, the shotgun on the bench seat and his boots on. He never once took a night in his own bed. Cuervo, Santos and Valkyrie had rotated through with him, so somebody was always awake at the ramp, and tonight Hawk had pulled all three back for this, because tonight we needed every hand that had ever thrown a punch.

Two of the gate crew were sitting in that van with Tank instead, with orders to call, not to fight. Valkyrie was ten feet from me on an ammo crate. Cuervo was inside that building with a beer in his hand. Santos was below with a rocket. And Tank was where Tank had been for five days, and nobody was getting past him.

The plan was solid. I'd checked it the way my head checks things, forty angles at once, and it held from every one.

So why were my hands cold?

"Windows." Declan, in my ear, on the hour. "Front's quiet. Line's gone. Lot's full."

"North door." Blade, a whisper with gravel in it. "Nothing moving. A rat. Big one."

"Copy." Hawk, one word, and the radios went quiet again.

Down the window line a lighter clicked, once, and died under somebody's hand and a hissed word from three directions. Valkyrie sat on an ammo crate with her forearms on her knees, turning a folding knife over and over without opening it. Reaper stood at the next scrape with his arms crossed, and he'd been watching the pit's glow so long and so still he could've been part of the building.

Nolan sat at his card table with one headphone cup on and one ear free, the little green level meter the only light in the room. He'd been staring at it for hours the way other men stare at fires.

"Anything?" I knew the answer. My legs took me over anyway.

"Quiet." He didn't look up. "That mic's still off. Nobody's lowered it or pressed a button. No fight's been called through it yet." He turned a dial a hair and turned it back, giving his hands a job. "The bug works, Ghost. I planted it myself last Thursday. Bought a beer in there like everybody else, and tucked the bug out of sight where the mic's wire runs down the wall. Declan drank his ten feet away in case anybody looked twice. No colors, faces nobody in that place has ever seen. Same trick you pulled your first night. I sat in the van after and heard that mic run from the first bout to the last drunk. The second somebody switches it on tonight, we hear everything. The only way we sit deaf all night is if they brought a new mic and never touch ours."