this even though I could’ve walked away. When you trust someone—not just know them, but trust them—the idea of tying your fate to theirs becomes less daunting, somehow. Maybe I was in it for the money, too, but even selfish jerks like me like to think we do things for the right reasons every once in a while.
Chaz smiled at me, the kind of smile a person gives you when he’s scared out of his mind and doesn’t care that you know. I guess he trusted me too, a little.
There was worry in Sable’s eyes, but hers was masked; an attempt to be brave and uncaring, even though there was more at stake than she was ready to admit. She didn’t want me to know she was worried about me, but that was okay. I didn’t want her to know how I really felt either.
“See you down there,” I said.
I stepped overboard. I was falling, a bullet through the fog, toes pointed, arms clutching the pouch to my chest, my stomach grabbing me by the throat. Dangit Chaz, I hope you got this right. The pouch tried to get away from me, slipping up under my chin. I fumbled for it and held on. There was a moment when my whole body seized up like a dry engine, my mind driven wild with the thought of slamming into some unseen obstacle in the fog.
As I plunged, the larger of the two driftmetal ingots began to lighten, pulling back against the weight of my body. I had the distinct sensation of slowing, but I had no idea how fast I was going or how close I was to my destination until I saw the border lights below me, blinking through the fog.
I slowed to a halt like an elevator coming to rest in its guides, my toes scraping the roof of the building. When I started to rebound upward again I ripped open the velcro panel, releasing the larger of the two ingots. I hit the roof with as soft a clatter as I could manage, coming to rest on one knee. The ingot shot up into the clouds. A second later it came back down, bobbed up, and settled about twenty feet above me. The breeze caught it, and before I knew it the fog had wrapped it in its delicate arms and swept it away.
Chaz came next, his legs flailing to reach the roof but getting no closer to it than I had. He didn’t release the ingot in time, bobbing up and down with it until he came to rest two stories up. Once he’d settled, he found himself with no choice but to let it go. He fell sideways onto the roof, landing in an unathletic heap. I caught him before he started rolling.
Vilaris followed, his timing better than either of ours. He released the ingot just as he was reaching his lowest altitude and landed on his feet, graceful as a cat. Blaylocke released too early, realized it, and grabbed the ingot with a bare fist before it got away. He tiptoed down before he let the ingot slip from his fingers and float upward into the fog. Everything happened in a matter of seconds, each of us arriving right after the last like the first snowflakes in a winter storm. They were the ugliest snowflakes I’d ever seen.
Gilfoyle’s home was a glass-and-stone monstrosity of high arches and thin spires, set atop his largest grav platform like a haunted castle. The fog was clearer from the roof down, just a light mist swirling over the platform below. I couldn’t see another soul from where I was. Anyone inside this wing of the house would’ve had to be fast asleep not to have heard us. I motioned for the others to follow as I slid down a gable and dropped onto one of the second-floor balconies, expecting to find some thug with heavy augments waiting for me.
Instead I found myself facing a glass door and a set of tall windows, peering into the bedroom on the other side. A low flame burned within an oil lamp on the dresser, casting flickering shadows over the toys strewn about the floor. A small form lay still beneath the thick yellow comforter of an overlarge bed. I checked the door. Locked.
Vilaris and the others dropped down beside me, looking about warily. Chaz knelt, produced a set of lock picks, and began to fiddle with the door. I lifted a foot to the glass and triggered my solenoid, reached through the empty space, and unlocked the door from within.
The ground crunched beneath my boots as I strode into the room and plucked the child out of bed by the pajamas. In the hallway, I saw light from downstairs. I clunked down the steps, the child tucked beneath my arm like a sack of flour. I felt her beginning to squirm as she woke up and found herself dangling above the floor. My companions’ footsteps were tentative and careful behind me. They may have been whispering at me to get my attention, but I wasn’t listening.
I heard voices from the kitchen as I came through the living room, its walls lined with mahogany wainscoting and built-in bookshelves. I passed the tufted oxblood sofa and its matching armchair while the cracked painting of some gray-bearded ancestor brooded over a black marble fireplace. The scent of an earlier meal grew sharper when I rounded the corner and set the child down on the tiled kitchen floor. Gilfoyle and the woman I assumed to be his wife were leaned against the counter, she in a blue silk nightgown and he in green plaid pajamas, glasses of dark red wine in their hands and an empty bottle behind them. Chaz, Vilaris, and Blaylocke waited in the living room. I could see them from where I was standing, but Gilfoyle and the woman didn’t know they were there.
Gilfoyle looked at his wife. “Run. Hide.” He turned his body toward me, putting himself between me and the woman. He put a hand on the counter to steady himself.
When the woman saw the child standing in front of me, tears welled in her eyes. She bent down and held out her arms, flicking her fingers inward. The little girl began to move toward her, but I grabbed her and pulled her back.
“You should ignore your husband’s advice,” I told the woman. “You don’t want your little girl to get hurt. I don’t either. You’d better stick around.”
Gilfoyle was almost as brave drunk as he had been surrounded by his thugs. He held up an arm to block the woman from coming any closer to me and repeated the two words to her again. She shook her head and stood her ground, eyes darting between me and the child. The little girl was whimpering now, starting to cry.
“Everybody stays right where they are and things are gonna be fine,” I said.
Gilfoyle squinted at me. “You. It’s you. You’re that thief. The one who tried to steal my truck.”
“Wasn’t the truck I was trying to steal,” I said. “But never mind that. We’re here to collect the money you owe the city of Pyras.”
Gilfoyle looked at me like I’d just said something in another language.
“To the tune of three million chips,” I continued. “Pyras has yet to see a single chip for that whole truckful of gravstone. You severed your contract with the city and took off without paying for it.”
“Oh yes… it was the gravstone you wanted,” Gilfoyle said. “And then my medallion.”
He was wearing it. I saw the medallion’s chain glinting in the light of the oil lamps, gold links against the pale skin alongside his collar.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Gilfoyle said, “but that’s not what happened. Our contract expired and Lafe Yingler chose not to renew it. Then he raised the price and said he’d bring me one last shipment if I was interested. I said yes and paid him in full—exactly the price he asked.”
“Which was…”
“Four million. I had no choice but to move my operation after that. Without a contract giving me exclusive rights to Pyras’s gravstone, that area isn’t worth mining anymore.”
“Four million chips? Yingler jacked up the price by an entire million and you agreed? Didn’t you find that weird or suspicious?”
“I didn’t like paying extra, but gravstone is gravstone. You get it where you can. And as for being suspicious of Yingler, I had no reason to. I’ve always dealt with Lafe. He’s been Pyras’s go-between for as long as we’ve done business together. I never thought to second-guess him.”
I didn’t like the look of desperation in Gilfoyle’s eyes. “That’s a lie,” I said. “You’re covering your tail so you can send us on a wild goose chase and disappear again.”
“Let’s settle this,” he said. “Let my daughter go and I’ll give you whatever you want. My family has nothing to do with this situation. Leave them ou
t of it.”
I knew he was right. I released the girl’s arm and let her run, sobbing, into her mother’s arms. The woman fled the kitchen in the opposite direction I’d come from, into the formal dining room and down the hallway beyond.
“There. Your daughter’s safe. And Pyras is out four million chips that Lafe Yingler never delivered. Give us the chips now, and you have my word that if we find four million in Yingler’s possession we’ll return the difference.”
Gilfoyle sneered. “You expect me to part with four million chips based on the word of a common thief?”
“You said if I let your daughter go—”
“I know what I said. Takes a thief to know a thief, doesn’t it? But there’s one thing you didn’t account for, Mr. Jakes. I will always be a better thief than you are.”
“Well, naturally,” I said. “I hold myself to a much lower standard.”
I dove at him. He sprang onto the counter and flipped over the island. I followed in lockstep, launching myself into the air and firing my grapplewire after him. He lifted an arm to let the wire zip past his side, then sliced it in two with a single stroke, using the razor-sharp thinblade on the side of his wrist. My grappler crashed into the dining room wall, the severed length of wire whipping to a standstill behind it like a trapped snake.
Gilfoyle ducked to the