Page 13 of Rust of Control

A man who owed money like that, to people like that, didn't get beaten in an alley. The people he owed beat what he loved instead, where he'd have to look at it, so he'd remember to pay. Jude was the reminder.

Nate's hand was flat on the seat. He drove.

The light over the safehouse door was burning.

He saw it from the end of the street. He'd sent Marcus three words from the alley and the light was the answer: a bed was being made. He pulled into the gravel and cut the engine and sat a second. His chest had been tight since the alley. a fist closed under the sternum, and it did not open, but it loosened by a finger. Enough to get out of the truck. Enough to carry Jude in.

He got the passenger door open, got a hand behind Jude's shoulders, woke him part of the way.

"Hey," he said. "We're here."

Jude looked at the building through the windshield. He looked at it a long moment, the brick and the chain-link and the light over the door, and his face did something Nate didn't try to read.

"Okay," Jude said.

They went in.

The house was warm and dark but for the kitchen light and under it the cold mineral smell of old brick the building never lost. Marcus stood in the kitchen doorway with a mug he wasn't drinking from, a sweater pulled on over whatever he slept in. He didn't look woken. He looked like a man who'd turned the light on and waited.

He looked at Jude. One read, quick and complete, and then his eyes went to Nate and back.

"Second room's ready," Marcus said. That was all.

Nate took him up the stairs. Jude was missing a shoe, gone somewhere in the alley; Nate had noticed it crouching and now matched his pace to whatever Jude's bare foot could manage on the cold runner. Down the hall, second door on the left. He got it open, got Jude to the bed, sat on the edge while Jude lay back and let his eyes close.

The lamp was low. The river moved black in the window. The room hadn't changed since the last time Jude had used it: a bed, a chair, a lamp. The bed was made the same as he'd left it.

"Ribs are probably cracked," Nate said. "Two, maybe three. Nothing to do but not move wrong. Ice on the eye when you can stand it." He'd brought a cloth of ice up from the kitchen and set it on the nightstand. "Concussion's mild. But if you wake at two with a headache or your stomach turns, you wake me."

"Okay," Jude said.

Nate looked at him. Eyes still shut. The concealer on his left arm had worn off between the alley and here, and the marks showed under the lamp: four ovals and a wider one below the thumb, red going toward plum. A hand's grip, days older than tonight's beating. Nate had seen it in the alley. He'd said nothing then. He said nothing now.

"You're not going back," Nate said.

He hadn't planned to say it. He'd been holding it in his back teeth for four blocks and it came out plain, no weight laid on it, and he couldn't take it back, and he didn't want to. It was true.

Jude was quiet. His chest rose and fell in the careful, shallow way. The room around them held its breath.

"Okay," Jude said.

Nate looked at the side of his face in the lamplight, the swelling, the jaw, the worn-out set of his mouth. Whatever was going on under it was Jude's. Nate left it there.

"I've got you," Nate said.

Not a question. Not quite a promise. Something he'd known for years and never had reason to say until he was sitting on the edge of a bed he'd carried Jude to.

Jude's throat worked. He didn't open his eyes.

Nate stayed until the breathing dropped out of its careful count into something slower, and when it did, he stood. Turned off the lamp. The room went dark but for the strip of light under the door and the river in the glass.

He went back down. Marcus was where he'd left him, same chair, same mug. He looked up when Nate came in. Nate took the other chair and for a while neither of them said anything.

The light over the door was still burning. Nate could see the edge of it through the kitchen window, yellow against the dark.

That was the whole of what the house did. Turned the light on. Made the bed. Kept the door for whoever needed it kept.

Marcus drank his coffee, or pretended to. Nate looked at the window.