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And just stayed there.
I felt my heartbeat, which had already been pretty fast, edge into the danger zone. All he had to do was look down. The area under the stairs was dark, but light from above striped it like Gertie’s damned wallpaper.
I could see the soles of his boots through the slats of wood, scuffed and worn but still solid. Like the bulk of him, heavy enough to make the boards groan when he shifted weight from foot to foot, although that could have been because of all the hardware he was wearing. Hardware I didn’t have, because I didn’t have anything, not anything, just a soaking-wet coat and a shivering body and a couple of—
My breathing, which had picked up speed to match my heart-attack-in-progress, suddenly caught in my throat.
And then slowly, so freaking slowly, my hand felt around the water-slick bricks beneath me. And pulled my box out from under my left leg, where it had somehow ended up. And began to raise it, trying to keep it out of the light, so that the shiny surface didn’t reflect anything.
Like the flash that suddenly flared across my vision, like a small red sun.
It dropped, rattling against the boards overhead. And then fell through a crack between two of them. And splashed in the mud in front of me.
Because the guy had stopped to light a cigar and had just dropped his lighter.
I looked up, in heart-clenching panic, and met a pair of narrowed blue eyes looking down. For all of a second, before the man’s face flushed and his mouth started to open. And I jammed a corner of the box against the underside of his shoe.
And then sat back against the building with my eyes closed, and just concentrated on breathing for a minute.
I could feel the mud squelching beneath me, and the rain coursing down the spaces between the bricks onto my back. But the coat was waterproof, and I wasn’t standing in a lashing torrent, so my brain seemed to be able to handle it. Like the box in my hands, which was smooth and shiny and slick, but also solid and unchanging. Reassuring.
Like Rosier’s presence would be right now, strange as that sounded.
He’d lived through this era; he’d know what to do.
Assuming I could find him.
I looked around, my heart back in my throat, where it should just stay and save me some effort, I thought viciously. And then I felt it, the other box, hidden under a fold of the coat, where I’d dropped it and then sat on it. I hugged it to my chest in dizzying relief.
And a second later, I was hugging the guy who popped out of it and onto the street beside me, which would have been great, which would have been awesome.
Except he wasn’t Rosier.
Chapter Twenty
For a second, I looked at him and he looked at me, a small wiry guy with a patchy reddish beard and abundant acne. And then he took off, scrambling out from under the stairs and into the blaze of light in the alley, which seemed to confuse him. He stopped, dropped into a crouch, and looked around wildly, this way and that. And then abruptly took off again, running toward the street.
Only to stop after a few strides, because that way was blocked. War mages had clustered in the opening to the bigger road, leather-coated bulks of solidity that were fortunately facing the street, not us, at the moment. But that could change any second, as the guy seemed to realize. He swung back around, only to find himself facing the building that constituted the other end of the alley, with bricked-up windows and no convenient fire escape.
Well, that’s why I’m still sitting here, I thought, as he joined me again.
“Wot’s all this?” he asked, gesturing around.
“War mages looking for me.”
“Why? Wot you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Wot a coincidence,” he told me. “I ’ave also been maliciously persecuted and unfairly detained.”
“How about that.”
He looked at the box I’d just let him out of, which I was currently shaking. And turning upside down. And beating on the bottom of, like a stubborn ketchup bottle, only nothing else came out.
“Wot’s that?”
“Nothing.”
