Page 36 of Reaper

They came out from behind a stack of hay bales on the east side of the concourse, three of them, then a fourth from the shadow of a shuttered funhouse trailer. Cheap plastic Halloween masks—a skull, a devil, something with fangs. Carnival getups underneath: striped shirts, sequined vests, one of them in a top hat that looked run over and reshaped by hand. They moved with the urgency of men who’d been told to watch the front and hadn’t expected anyone to walk through it.

They were easy to clock. The way they scrambled instead of spreading told me everything about their training, or the lack of it—amateurs wearing costumes and holding weapons they’d been handed an hour ago by someone who didn’t care if they lived through the night.

I didn’t give the signal. Didn’t need to. The first shot came from my right—one of the seniors, a clean crack that caught the skull-mask in the center of his plastic forehead and dropped him into the wet straw without a sound. The other three froze for half a heartbeat. Long enough.

We hit them fast.

I closed the distance to the nearest one—devil mask, sequined vest, a pistol coming up too slow—and my left hand found his wrist before the muzzle cleared his hip. Twist, pull, the bone grinding under my grip, and the shot went into the ground, wet straw kicking up in a dark spray that hit my boots. My right came around and connected with the edge of his mask where it met his jaw. The plastic split, clean down the middle, and I felt the impact travel through my knuckles and into my wrist.

He went down. Face meeting a steel support post on his way to the ground, the mask coming apart entirely, plastic fragments scattering across the straw. I didn’t watch him land. Already turning, already moving toward the next one, because a fight this size didn’t give you seconds to confirm what you already knew.

The sounds layered. Boots skidding on slick concrete where the straw had worn thin. The wet crack of knuckles on bone—not mine this time, one of the seniors putting a guard down behind a game booth. Someone grunted, low and animal, the sound of a man taking a hit to the solar plexus with nowhere to put the air that just left his lungs. A mask hit the ground and skittered across wet straw, small and wrong in a way that registered behind my sternum before my brain filed it under handled and moved on.

Two down. The third guard broke for the funhouse trailer. Sprinting, his top hat flying off, his weapon still holstered because he’d forgotten it existed the moment the first shot went off. One of the prospects cut his angle. Young, fast, the radio still clipped to his belt from the clubhouse corridors, and he hit the guard from the side with a tackle that drove both of them into the side of a popcorn cart. The cart collapsed. Kernels scattered across the straw, hundreds of them, pale against the dark wet, and the guard didn’t get up.

The fourth was already running when I turned. Back toward the inner compound, toward whatever the Kings had set up in the heart of the grounds, and I let him go. Let him run. Because running men draw attention, and attention was the point.

From the rear of the fairgrounds, beyond the carousel and the spilled popcorn and the bodies in the straw, I heard the distant sounds of Gauge’s crew hitting the service gates. No gunfire yet. Just boots on metal, a gate protesting, a voice cut short.

The Kings’ attention would be flooding toward the front now, every eye fixed on the concourse where the noise had started. Which meant the back was emptying, and Gauge’s crew was sealing the perimeter without a word exchanged.

I checked my piece. Dragged the slide, confirmed the chamber, holstered. The blood on my knuckles had gone tacky in the cold air. I flexed my fingers once, felt the skin pull, and set the sensation aside because there were more important things happening.

The front was secure. Four guards down, no alarms raised that mattered, the concourse quiet except for the wind in the rotting bunting. The men knew what came next. They were already moving, spreading through the fairgrounds in the pattern we’d mapped from Gauge’s intel, clearing each stall, each trailer, each dark corner where a man with a weapon might be waiting with more patience than the four we’d just put down.

I cut left. Between a row of shuttered food stalls, past a collapsed strength tester whose hammer lay in the mud beside its base, toward the side of the grounds where the service road ran parallel to the main concourse. The ground here was worse—mud deeper, straw thinner, my boots sinking with each step in a way that would have slowed me if I’d let it. I didn’t. Adjusted my weight, found the packed earth beneath the soft, and kept moving.

The service road opened up ahead. Gravel, mostly, rutted from tires that had come through too many times without maintenance. Beyond it, half-hidden behind a collapsed cotton candy stall with its pink and blue stripes faded to the color of old bruises, I could make out the rusted service gate that Gauge had marked on the map.

The Kings’ leadership would be breaking for it soon. If they hadn’t already. Men who ran operations instead of standing post had instincts that kicked in the moment the front door started taking fire, and those instincts always pointed toward the closest exit that wasn’t the one making noise.

I checked the time in my head. Two minutes forty since the first shot. Give them thirty more seconds to realize what was happening. Another thirty to mobilize. Another thirty to reach the gate.

I’d be there in twenty.

I moved.

LILA

Gauge kept me three steps behind him and one shoulder to the left, which put me exactly nowhere a bullet would expect a body to be. I’d stopped asking questions about formation two days ago. Now I just moved where I was put and kept my eyes on what he told me to watch, which tonight was the tree line between the service road and the back half of the fairground, where the dead ticket booth leaned like something that had given up standing up straight.

The front had already gone loud. I heard it the way you hear weather from inside a house — muffled, distant, close enough to feel in the ribs I was still babying under my jacket. A single crack, then nothing, then a particular quiet that follows a fight nobody’s won yet.

“Service gates,” Gauge said, low, not looking back at me. “Two men on it, maybe three. We go quiet as long as quiet works.”

He didn’t say Teller’s name. Didn’t need to — we’d had two days to learn exactly what we were hunting, ever since I’d finally said it out loud in the back room with the surveillance stills.

Quiet worked for about ninety seconds.

I saw the first man break off the rusted gate before Gauge’s men did — a man breaking wrong, away from his post instead of toward the noise, moving with the particular haste of somebody who’d already decided which fight he wasn’t going to be part of. He wasn’t running toward the front, where the guards in cheap Halloween masks were falling. He was running toward the tree line. Toward the county road. Toward anywhere that wasn’t here.

Gauge’s hand found my shoulder and pressed down. Stay. I stayed.

The man broke into the weak spill of light from a dead jack-o’-lantern string, and something about the way he moved — the way he carried his weight, the particular economy of a man who’d spent years learning to move without announcing himself — snagged in my memory the same way a name half-heard two months ago had snagged there and waited.

I didn’t know his face. I’d never seen it. But I knew, the way you know a storm by the way the air changes before the first drop falls, that this was the man whose name I’d finally handed to Reaper two nights ago in the back room, the one Ethan had said once, easy and trusting, before any of us understood what it would cost.

Teller.