Page 90 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Good,” I said. “Do we have time to grab something to eat?” The light spell I’d used back in the sewer hadn’t been enough to exhaust me, but my stomach was growling, and I had that sort of weightless feeling in my limbs that meant I needed to get food in me sooner than later.

“We probably don’t want to move until after three o’clock,” said Verity. “Between last call and dawn is the least populated you’ll ever see Manhattan.”

“So we’ve got a few hours?”

She nodded.

“Great.” I turned to Sally. “You’re finally going to get your pizza.”

Her smile was the brightest I’d ever seen her wear.

This time, the pizza made it back to the slaughterhouse, possibly because Verity had asked a few of the dragons to go rather than letting us out alone again. I had looked at her with some amusement when she announced her intention to essentially order dragon delivery, but now here we were, me, Thomas, and Sally, sitting around a folding card table in our shared room, paper plates of melted cheese and hot grease in front of us, while the mice sang the praises of garlic knots and devoured their own portion of the spoils with wild abandon.

Sally’s desire for pizza hadn’t been born of a small appetite: she had put away her first slice even before I could finish handing out napkins, and was well into her fourth. I eyed her warily across the table.

“If you make yourself sick, you can’t come with us to fight the Covenant field team,” I cautioned.

“Why would anybody fight, ever, when they live in a world where there’s pizza?” she asked, mouth full of pepperoni, cheese, and half-chewed dough.

“Fundamental disagreements about the nature of the world, generally,” said Thomas. “The Covenant believes that if they ever share the pizza, it will run out, and no one will get to have it anymore.”

Sally rolled her eyes and grabbed another garlic knot.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked, turning to me. “I’m not going to hover, but you were drugged and abducted, and then used one of your tattoos. I’m allowed to worry.”

“It was a minor one,” I assured him. To my own surprise, his concern was comforting rather than cloying. Maybe I was getting used to being someone people were concerned about.

“Is it always going to be like this?” asked Sally.

“Not usually,” I said. “This has been an exciting day, even by my standards.”

“Good.” She took another slice of pizza. “When we get home, I’m going to sleep for a week. I’ll wake up to eat, shower, and put on clean socks, and then it’s back to bed.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, and it did. It really did.

I had a slice of pizza in my hand and we all had the rest of our lives ahead of us, and maybe this was going to work out after all. This was a world I could live with.

Twenty-one

“I don’t care what you have to do, I don’t care how you do it, but baby, promise that you’ll always come back home to me.”

—Alexander Healy

Midtown Manhattan, preparing to take on a Covenant field team

GETTING UPTOWN FROM THE slaughterhouse was rendered somewhat easier by the fact that we now knew where we were actually going, rather than taking wild stabs in the dark and hoping we would hit something: according to Sarah, the Covenant field team was holed up in a residential building a few blocks from Times Square. That put them way too close to a lot of tourists for my comfort. It also meant they’d have trouble keeping track of everyone coming and going, since literally thousands of people would be doing it throughout the night. Sarah hadn’t found any indications in the first team’s minds that the others were paying any special attention to the Meatpacking District, so we didn’t have to worry the Nest was under surveillance and that we might be seen leaving. After extensive discussion, we decided that if we headed uptown by three, even with fewer trains running, the subway would be safe enough to ride, and get us to Times Square in plenty of time for the planned pre-dawn strike. Once we got there and surrounded the building the Covenant occupied, we’d wait for Mary to pop over and give us the signal to move.

Kitty’s team was taking the sewers—something that came naturally to the bogeymen, and that their allies had long since learned to deal with—while Cara and her van would be accompanying Verity’s team into New Jersey. So it was after a short but much-needed nap and with our stomachs still full of pizza that Thomas, Sally, and I found ourselves on the subway heading uptown, bathed in stark industrial light and surrounded by the city that really did never sleep.

It was all so mundane and believable that it made me want to laugh. I would have, if not for the fact that Thomas was visibly struggling not to gawk at everything, while Sally looked once again like she was on the verge of a panic attack. I reached over and squeezed her knee with my free hand, earning myself an annoyed look, which I answered with a smile. She was growing on me. It wasn’t her fault that Thomas didn’t feel the need to protect her: despite our long history together, he’d had a lot more opportunity to see Sally at work in the field.

That was a sobering thought. But a good one, because it meant we had a lot of firsts still ahead of us, even after everything. A woman with electric green hair and tattooed roses twining up and down her arms got onto the train, giving Thomas’s tattoos a frank look. He didn’t seem to notice, leaning back in his seat and holding on to my hand for dear life.

“Nice ink,” said the woman, after several minutes of noisy silence. “Who’s your artist?”

“I do my own work, miss,” said Thomas, as the train pulled into the station we’d been told to disembark at. We stood as a group, Thomas still holding my hand, Sally practically pressing herself against his other side. No one looked at us twice. In a population as diverse and chaotic as the New York subway, a blonde woman who cut her hair with a knife, a heavily tattooed man, and a younger Korean woman were basically normal.

“Okay,” I said, once we were safely off the train. “This is where we split up, get up to street level, and circle the building. Everyone remember the directions Sarah gave us?”