“Yes,” Caleb said. I just want to talk with her, a small part of him railed. He ignored it.
“You like the ground too much. Run from it, and it’ll break you.” Balam turned back to the pillars. The runners there, who had paused to watch the conversation, sprang once more to motion. The audience on the ground remained, because Caleb remained. Balam ignored them. His fingers tapped his stomach like a drum. He smelled of leather, and smoke, and animal sweat.
“I’ll find Mal.” Don’t blink, Caleb told himself, any more than normal. Count your heartbeats. This is no different from bluffing any player at any table in the world. “Or I’ll tear the city apart looking for her.” Or the Wardens would.
“Best get started.”
Caleb had almost decided to leave when he noticed the runners beside him staring into the southern sky. Beyond the pillars rose the warehouse wall, and on top of the wall a woman stood silhouetted against the gray night. Caleb recognized her, even before wind fanned the flames behind him and threw flickering red light on her face. She was a blaze of sunset wrapped in skin: hands on hips, elbows out, head back. She wore tan trousers, thin-soled boots, a sleeveless shirt and brown gloves, all worn, all torn.
Caleb recognized her, and ran. There were no ladders, no stairs leading up the wall, but a few pillars rose nearby. From those he could leap and reach the wall, grip the edge, pull himself up. She could escape before he reached her, but if she wanted to escape why show herself at all?
Long use had worn handholds into the nearest pillar. He climbed. She watched him. The other runners paused.
He reached the top of his pillar. Monkey-fear seized his gut as he sought the next: five feet away. Five feet, easy, he told himself, you used to jump from rock to rock in your back yard all the time, five feet apart give or take. Nothing to worry about, only tense and go.
He landed before he realized he had jumped, and the shock shot through his body, every cell screaming: never do this again. He might have listened, but his balance was too far forward. Stopping wasn’t an option.
He leapt to the next pillar. Fear pounded through his veins instead of blood. Three more pillars, two, one, and then only the gap between pillar and wall. He was moving too fast to stop, and airborne above broken stone.
He struck the wall chest-first. The world inverted, and he coughed up dust and dry rock and coppery blood. He didn’t fall.
His arms splayed out atop the ruined wall, and the rest of his body dangled over the drop. Legs flailed for a foothold in pitted brickwork. His fingers slipped and found no purchase.
He tried to pull himself up, but his left arm was a solid bar of pain, an exploding universe contained in the shoulder joint. Broken? No, that would hurt more. Dislocated, maybe. Damn.
Footsteps on brick. Brown thin-soled boots stepped between his arms, and she knelt. He saw the curve of her calf, and remembered her jumping, twisting, falling from Bright Mirror Dam into night. The closed-eye pendant dangled around her neck, but it did not glow. She cocked her head to one side like a bird either curious or about to strike. Her eyes were wide, her eyebrows raised.
“If it isn’t the policeman,” she said.
“I’m no Warden. I’m not trying to arrest you.”
“Then why are you here? You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find me.”
“I need to talk to you. For your own safety.”
“You do know how to make a girl feel safe,” she said, and: “A week from tonight, on top of the Rakesblight Center, at ten. Come. Race. If you catch me, then we’ll talk.”
“I’ll catch you.”
“Let’s see.” She touched the back of his right hand with her fingertip, cool and smooth and hard-polished from gripping rock. He closed his eyes, consciousness slipping; when he opened them again, she was gone.
He fell, right arm wheeling and left jutting at an odd angle from the socket: an angel with one wing broken. He struck something heavy and round and human, and thick arms set him gently on the broken ground. Caleb looked up into Balam’s blunt face. Other cliff runners peered down, astonished and confused. They crowded him with warmth.
“You still want to catch her?” Balam asked as Caleb struggled against his body’s weight to rise.
“Yes.”
The trainer didn’t reply.
Caleb closed his eyes, and thought about Mal, and about this strange massive man, old in middle age, and about Shannon and her scar. Who was Mal, to have this hobby?
He levered himself into a sitting position, and the pain from his arm almost made him vomit.
“You love the ground too much,” Balam said. “Or it loves you.”
“Where’s the nearest hospital?”
All told, once he escaped the god-shattered wasteland, once he staggered into a hospital waiting room, once the doctor looked down over the gold rims of her glasses and reached through his skin to set his shoulder from the inside, once he woke from the swoon of pain and soul-loss, he judged the evening a success.
Seven days. More than enough time to heal, and prepare.
When Teo met him in the hospital, she looked so worried he almost didn’t tell her the story.
“I suppose you’ll call the whole thing off now,” she said as he tested his mended shoulder’s strength. “Hand her over to the authorities.”
“I can’t quit now.” He reached for his pants. “I’ve almost won our bet.”
10
Two days later, wounds healed and mind unsettled, he stalked Teo’s office.
“What do I have to do,” she said, looking up from a pile of paperwork, “to get you out of here so I can focus?”
“Thanks for your support. I’m in trouble.”
“What happened to the cocky attitude? I’ve almost won, all that stuff?”
“I have almost won.”
“But you’re pacing.”
“I’m so close. It’s this last little part that’s the problem.”
“The part where you have to beat a runner at her own race.”
“That’s the one.”
“You know what you should do. Tell Tollan, fall on your sword and”—she waved the quill tip of her pen at the door—“walk away.”
“Would you give up, if our situations were reversed?”
“Of course.”
“I think she’s innocent.”
“You’re infatuated.”
“I’m not. I want to help her.”
“Because she’s pretty.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She’s a verb.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You fall for people all the time.”
“Fall is certainly the operative word in this case.” Teo returned her pen to its copper stand with an exasperated click of quill on metal. “I’ve never dated a key suspect in an ongoing investigation. As far as I recall, and feel free to correct me, I’ve never come back from a date with anything worse than a hangover. How many bones did you break last week?”
“That’s beside the point,” he said, though it wasn’t. He studied one of the paintings on her office walclass="underline" a canvas awash with orange and brown and splashes of blue. A city rose, or fell, from the angry brushstrokes—a city suspended between two hells. “Would you rather I fold?”
She crossed her arms and reclined in her chair. Leather creaked to cradle her. “That isn’t fair.”
“I’m not blaming you. You’re right. I never would have let that hand pass four years ago. I got scared, got tight. I’m afraid of losing my job, my house, the shreds of soulstuff I’ve squirreled together. But this woman doesn’t deserve to be handed over to the Wardens just because she doesn’t listen when the world tells her where she can and can’t go.”