Page 44 of Odder Still
The alarms finally cut out, the distant clamoring of a small crowd taking its place. Tavish shifts from one foot to the other, gnawing on his tongue so hard it looks like it hurts. He says nothing. Waiting for me.
I force a breath. “Just don’t let them step onyou. You can’t help anyone from a prison cell, least of all yourself.”
It feels like a harsh, badgering good-bye after what we’ve gone through over the last two days. But it’s all I have to give. He doesn’t respond.
The moment I open the door, the commotion down the hall seems to eat me up. I slip away from it, making my way to the kitchen before my feet or heart can rebel. Only three chefs remain in the kitchen, whispering fiercely while kneading dough, their expressions tense. They startle when they notice me, but I recognize two of them from last night. When I explain my situation, they give me a roomy, grey staff outfit to don over my clothing. I wipe Ailsa’s blood from the knife and fit both it and Malloch’s pistol into the rim of my pants, hiding it under my disguise. One of the chefs whisks me down a workers’ hall to a back exit with a cracked brooch reader and a security guard who barely glances at my uniform.
Blue mews from behind me. She hesitates, giving Lavender time to pad daintily up to her side before stepping toward me. I shake my head, hoping some part of her understands. They’re safer here. Lavender rescues me by wrapping her tail around Blue’s shoulder and guiding her back toward the kitchen. The tabby offers me one last blink before vanishing.
I can do nothing but close the door on them, sinking into the realization that I’ll probably never see them again. Or Tavish. It shouldn’t matter. The cats are not my pets. Tavish is not my family. This is not my home.
I turn my back on it.
The exit whines as it flings back open behind me.
“Ruby?” His voice is nearly diamond again beneath his gasping and wheezing, and I feel it cut into my heart like a physical blade. He rushes out the door with his cane extended, his grey staff uniform only half donned over his outfit. His curls bounce around his face, one of them falling into his open mouth.
He nearly crashes into me before I manage the words “I’m here.”
A tainted sort of relief floods his features. “You’re right. Not about leaving Maraheem, but the rest of it.”
It’s the best I could possibly expect of him, and it fills me with a thrill as bright and fluttering as a rush of butterflies. “I’m glad you’re coming.”
“If we want to do this, we’ll need Sheona.”
“I get the feeling she’ll find us.” I laugh, and the sound is already half out of me by the time I realize it’s genuine. A little jittery, a lot tired, but still genuine.
I am out of options in the upper, fleeing with an aristocrat who will require energy I so desperately need for myself, yet I can’t find it in me to despair. Perhaps that’s the thing about hope, though. It’s sustainable for however long you choose to hold on to it. If the bottom of the well runs dry, you can always keep digging.
Keep digging until it kills you.
Tavish runs a hand through his hair, and the curls tangle up on one side of his face. “This whole thing is absolute shite, you ken that, aye?”
“Oh, I know.”
The pristine alleyway beyond the staff entrance winds around to a main street, just as lavish and vacant as all those I traveled on my way into the Findlay Estates the day before. I tuck Tavish’s cane beneath my arm, lest anyone recognize him by it, and walk with the tips of our fingers touching. He takes us down and down and down again. After a final slew of wide stairs, he leads us to a gate. A small line of level-eight and -nine workers wait on the other side, peeking around each other as one of the guards shouts into a phone beside the two open archways.
She waves an arm at no one in particular. “I’m not closing the whole gate for some fucking air lock alarm ten stories up. For fucks—you, you there twiddling your damn thumbs, check the radio! They giving another citywide call or not?”
A young man leaning against a brooch scanner snaps into action.
I pull Tavish through the gate behind him. The security gives us half a glance, too preoccupied with some crackly, clearly upper-city voice announcing on a portable communication device. As we pass under the lower districts’ archways, a muffled groan arises from the woman on the phone, and one of the younger guards slaps a coin into his grinning fellow’s palm.
“Gates are closed!” the woman shouts. “Better luck tomorrow, folks.”
The metal barriers slam shut behind us, stranding Tavish and I in the lower districts. I grab hold of his wrist, drawing him down the steps and into the hot, steam-strewn world of bustle and chaos. He lifts his hand, sliding his fingers around mine instead. Holding to me. And maybe it’s nothing more than a thoughtless repositioning to help him maneuver better. But right now, that one purposeful touch feels like the physical incarnation of all my hope.
I don’t let go.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Effect of the Foot
I want to call you mine, to be the only one you hold.
I want our path to intertwine into one smooth, golden road,
not the landslide, the grave, the all-too-cleansing rain,
