Page 13 of A Friend in the Glass

All of it might have been happening on another planet as far as Sam was concerned. Lew’s conversation with the older man had clearly escalated, and Lew had shifted to the edge of his seat, gesticulating sharply, although he held his hands low as though trying to keep them hidden. Then Lew shot to his feet, head bowed as he snapped off something else in a low voice.

Sam pushed Rufus toward the door.

“What the—Sam,” Rufus hissed, stumbling over his own feet. “What the hell?”

“Go,” Sam muttered, shoving him again. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Rufus slapped both hands down on the push bar. He’d just stepped into the hallway before he was shoved sideways so hard that he crashed into a nearby table display.

Sam turned around as Industry Bro, the one who had bumped him in the hall minutes before, threw a punch at his head.

Chapter Eight

Rufus clipped the table with his hip hard enough that there was a moment—a second, really—as he was falling to the floor, that he wondered if he’d broken the bone. He had no idea how much force it took to break a hip. Not as much as breaking a femur, that he knew. He’d read all about bone breaks after his bully at PS14 had chucked him down a flight of stairs and Rufus had broken his arm on the asbestos-ridden linoleum.

4,000 newtons of force.

And maybe he remembered that so well because he’d been a dumb kid and thought the book meant newtons as in Fig Newtons. So he’d asked the school’s librarian about it, and they’d gently corrected him, which was how Rufus had come to learn that 4,000 newtons of force actually meant about 900 pounds.

Anyway. He didn’t break his hip.

“Sonofabitch!” Rufus shouted as he hit the floor. White-hot pain, like the senses in his body momentarily lost all reason, shot up and down his hip, his leg, all the way to his toes. But when Rufus looked up from where he’d landed, all pain ceased—likehis body suddenly waved a white flag and his brain had accepted its surrender. He watched a well-built guy sucker punch Sam and knock him back against the wall beside the doors they’d just exited.

“—shouldn’t have shown your face again, Auden,” the guy in a too-tight suit was saying as he grabbed the front of Sam’s shirt, pinning him in place.

Stumbling to his feet, Rufus ran at the guy and punched him in the right kidney as hard as he fucking could. When the stranger reared back and screamed, Sam shoved him away, but the movement didn’t have much force behind it—Sam still looked a little cross-eyed.

Rufus pushed the asshat out of the way, grabbed Sam’s hand, and dragged him along the hall that opened back up on the lower floor’s exhibition area. Over his shoulder, Rufus shouted, “Piss blood and get fucked!” He plowed through the crowd, making a beeline for the escalators, his vision tunneling, noise turning into something staticky—like an old television set with bunny ear antennas.

Rufus wasn’t even entirely sure why he was running.

Instinct.

He’d survived this long because he wasn’t stupid enough to stick around. But being here—surrounded by rich people, powerful people, smart people talking in another fucking language—and then someone touching Sam, hurting Sam, calling Samby name… Rufus knew nothing started here would end in their favor.

He didn’t stop moving, didn’t stop dragging Sam along, not until they were upstairs and out the glass doors of the Javits. Only then, with the salted sidewalk crunching under his every step, did Rufus stop to take a breath.

“Come on,” Rufus said once he had enough air in his lungs.

He started toward Thirty-Fourth Street, looking over his shoulder a few times, but no one was following them. It was just Rufus, Sam, theclankof the flagpole overhead, and a few dozen other attendees leaving for the day, wandering in different directions to various hotels surrounding the Javits.

“Who was that guy?” Rufus finally asked. “I hope he wasn’t someone important, because I punched him pretty good.”

Sam rubbed his jaw. “That sucker-punching, shit-eating, pusillanimous walking cock hole is Brady Ellsworth. He looks like shit; that’s why I didn’t recognize him at first.”

They crossed the street and Rufus tried for something lighthearted—to cut the tension. “You’re cute when you talk like that.”

“He’s Lew’s best friend—that’s how he’d describe it. Lew, being an even bigger and more gaping bloody gash than Ellsworth, doesn’t really have friends, though, so Brady is really more like Lew’s pet troll he sends out to fuck things up.”

Across from them was Fifty-Five Hudson Yards, a new skyscraper with weirdly rounded glass walls that sort of looked like LEGO pieces. Rufus didn’t like it. He thought Sam probably didn’t either. That is, if Sam were in the right mindset in which to take in the surrounding architecture. After passing the glass abomination of fifty-something stories, Rufus turned onto Thirty-Third to escape a wind tunnel.

On the corner, he stopped to look up at Sam. “Why would Brady appear out of nowhere just to pop you one? Are you ok, by the way?” Rufus touched Sam’s face.

“Fine. And Brady is here because Lew is here.” For a moment, the tension seemed to go out of Sam, and he rested against Rufus’s touch. His eyelids lowered, a heartbeat passed, and thenthey snapped open again, and Sam straightened. “He was in that room. The Conasauga panel, I mean. That’s who I saw, and that’s why I freaked the fuck out and sent us right back into Brady’s path.”

Rufus lowered his hand, tucked it into his jacket pocket. “Lew was in there? Which guy was he? The one talking?”

“No. Lew was sitting in the front. He was having some kind of argument—that’s what it looked like, anyway.”

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