Amberlough(97)

He took out one of his white envelopes and stacked it on top of the packet. “There’s more in here than you’ll see the rest of your career, if you stick to selling papers.”

She reached out again, with a filthy hand. He jerked back. “What a wretched habit,” he said. “Why don’t you wait to be handed things?”

“Aren’t you in a hurry?” she snarled. “What else do you want?”

“Hit me.”

“What?”

“Hit me. Here.” He pointed to his right eye. “Careful, though. Don’t hurt yourself.” When he showed up at the train station to book his passage north, he wanted to present a bewildered bumpkin fed up with manic city life. This is really the last straw, sir, I tell ya. Besides, a black eye would further obscure his identity.

But the paper seller didn’t ask for reasons. Before he had a chance to brace for it, her bony knuckles landed an expert blow between his cheekbone and his eyebrow. He fell to his rear on the pavement.

“Very good,” he said, when he’d recovered the power of speech. It had been a long time since anyone struck him.

“Thumb on the outside,” she said, “and punch from the shoulder. I ain’t some kind of powder puff.”

“No one said you were.” He stood, clearing his weeping eye, and handed her the packet and the envelope of cash. “Go back home, or wherever it is you live. Get off the street until things clear up.”

She nodded, and was gone. He didn’t worry about whether she would follow orders. She was ambitious, and stupidly brave. The streets of Amberlough were peppered with children like her. He’d been one, once—a little older than the paper seller, but that just proved her precocity. Cyril would get his message.





CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

After Cordelia told them everything she knew, a doctor-type came to bandage her bleeding stumps—she’d lost two fingertips before she folded.

When the sawbones was done, he gave her a shot of something that knocked her out for a few hours. She was struggling to sit up, cursing at broken ribs and bruises, when the hinges of her door squealed. Flinching, she hissed at the pain.

“We’re transferring you.” It was a man she hadn’t seen before, and probably wouldn’t see again, the way things were going lately. A new face every time they sent for her, and none of them kind.

“Come on.” He waved her out the door. “I got more coming in every minute for questioning, with the mess outside. We need all the room we got.”

Blackboots thronged the corridors, jostling her until she went dizzy. From behind the placketed iron doors she could hear muffled shouts and pleading. She hobbled along like an old lady and hoped there was a lift. She couldn’t have managed stairs.

They put a hood over her face before they took her outside. Through the burlap, she got a good gulp of sea breeze, flavored with rancid garbage and … smoke.

“What’s burning?” she asked, but didn’t get an answer.

The bumpy ride in the back of the van took an age. Each time the tires struck a pothole, waves of nausea broke over her, from the drugs and the pain. The driver’s maneuvering slacked off the longer the ride went on. Shackled in the back of the transport van, she could hear raised voices from the driver’s compartment, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Something struck the side of the van, once. She startled away just as they took a sharp turn, and sprawled across the floor. Her broken ribs burned, but the lingering remnants of morphine kept her from caring much. The purple lump of her shattered wrist was beyond regular hurting by now. Everything from her shoulder down felt like she had molten metal on her bones. All she wanted was sleep. The smell of smoke followed them as they drove, growing stronger, then fading, but never leaving the air entirely.

It took so long to get where they were going, she was surprised when her minders opened the rear doors and she found they were still within the city limits. Outside the Department of Corrections, in fact. Then again, maybe the place they’d brought her from was somewhere out in the weald, or on the sea cliffs. They could have been keeping her anywhere.

“City’s gone crazy,” said one of her minders, talking over her head to his partner. “Brains leaking outta their ears, you’d think.”

Cordelia remembered the blow to the side of the van, the smell of smoke. She risked a look over her shoulder, back toward the central city, and saw the orange glow of fire against the night sky.

“Eyes front, copper top.” One of her minders shoved her forward.

Whatever was going on in Amberlough, she got a tiny glimpse of it inside the DOC. Uniformed officers scrambled around the corridors, screeching orders at one another. Telephones rang at desks and behind doors. She wanted to cover her ears and lie down, but her two guards moved her along, winding through crowded, noisy hallways until they found the proper office.

She didn’t have a good sense of what happened next, but it seemed whoever they needed was out, or busy. Time skipped oddly as exhaustion and agony overtook the drugs she’d been given earlier. Whenever she blinked she felt as if she’d missed whole minutes. Eventually, after a flutter of her eyelashes, she found herself sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair in a noisy corridor, cuffed to a cold radiator by her good wrist. Her severed fingertips throbbed with her heartbeat. Both her minders were gone.