Chapter 74: Cream of the Crop

Nyra coughed until her face went dark red, slapping the table with one hand and fumbling for a napkin with the other. The waitress at the counter looked over with a coffee pot in her hand, decided nobody was dying, and went back to the ticket rail.

“B,” Nyra rasped. She wiped her mouth, balled up the napkin, and dropped it onto what was left of the pie. “A B-rank. Rain. Do you know how long I’ve been doing this?”

“A while?”

“Long enough to have watched crews twice our size go into B-ranks and come back short.” She leaned over the table, dark hair slipping loose from its knot. “We have zero clears as a unit. Zero. A first run together is supposed to be something you can walk back out of when it goes wrong. You don’t walk out of a B-rank when it goes wrong. Somebody carries you, if there’s anybody left to do the carrying.”

“I know it’s big.”

“You know it’s big.” She sat back. “You know the word. That’s different.”

Rain turned his mug a quarter turn on the table. “Okay. Then tell me what I’m missing.”

“Everything you’d need to answer my questions, for a start. Who picks the rift? How many of her guild people are watching? What happens to four independents if a Red Dragon director’s daughter gets hurt on our license?” She ticked them off on her fingers and ran out of fingers. “You can’t answer one of those.”

“No,” Rain said. “I can’t. Not yet.”

“So why are you sitting here?”

“Because if we say no, she finds somebody else by next week, and we go back to losing every bid on the board to crews with deeper pockets.” He kept his voice low. “This doesn’t come around twice, Nyra. I’m not saying we jump. I’m saying we look.”

Nyra picked up her mug, found it empty, and put it down again. She stared out the window at the dark municipal yards across the street for a long moment. The neon sign by the door buzzed.

“I’m not saying yes,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“I’ll meet her. Theo and Peter are there, and nothing gets decided until all four of us have heard it from her mouth. I pick the place.”

“Deal.”

“And if she turns out to be a Red Dragon nepo kid who thinks a rift is an obstacle course, it’s over right there.”

“Fair.”

Nyra slid the check across the table with two fingers. “Pie’s on you.”

Rain paid for the pie.

—

He found Peter the next morning on a bench outside the mess hall, eating toast out of a napkin.

“You look like you didn’t sleep,” Peter said.

“I slept a little.” Rain sat down next to him. “I need to tell you something before Nyra does.”

Peter stopped chewing. “That’s a terrible way to start a sentence.”

Rain told him: Abby, the guild review, the condition, the party, Dell’s. He saved the rank for last.

Peter swallowed his toast. “What rank?”

“B.”

Peter looked at him. He looked down at his toast. He folded the napkin over it very carefully and set it on the bench.

“I’m F-rank,” Peter said.

“I know.”

“You’re F-rank.”

“I know that too.”

“Two F-ranks in a B-rank rift. Rain, that’s not a raid, that’s a news story. ‘Local Cadets Found in Pieces.'” He rubbed both hands over his face. “I’d be the one they find first. I’m not even fast.”

“Nobody’s agreed to anything yet,” Rain said. “Nyra wants to meet her this afternoon. All of us. If it’s bad, we walk.”

Peter dropped his hands and stared at the mess hall doors for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

“This is about Corwin, isn’t it.”

“Partly.”

Peter nodded slowly. He picked his toast back up and didn’t eat it.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll come. But I’m sitting nearest the door.”

—

Nyra picked a tea house in town, two streets back from the transit stop: a narrow place with a long wooden counter, mismatched chairs, and a back room with a single round table nobody else was using. She was already there when Rain and Peter walked in, a black notebook open in front of her. Theo sat beside her with his chair tipped back on two legs and his arms folded.

Peter took the seat nearest the door.

Abby came in at three exactly. She had on her dark grey coat with the collar up and her blonde hair pulled back in a braid. She stopped at the edge of the table and looked at each of them in turn, ending on Rain.

“Sit,” Nyra said, pointing her pen at the empty chair across from her.

Abby sat and laid her hands flat on the table.

“Nyra,” Nyra said. She tipped her head at the others. “Theo. Peter. You know Rain.”

“Abby.”

“I know who you are.” Nyra wrote something in the notebook without looking down. “Ratchford. Red Dragon. Your mother sits on a guild board, and last night she called our friend here an embarrassment.”

Abby kept her eyes on Nyra. “She did.”

“And now you need our license.”

“I need a party,” Abby said. “Yours is the only one that’s offered.”

“Because nobody in your own guild will touch you.”

“Not for this. No.”

Nyra tapped her pen against the notebook twice. “So a Red Dragon kid with a director for a mother walks into a tea house and asks four independents she’s never met to take her into a B-rank. Tell me why I shouldn’t think we’re being used.”

“You are being used,” Abby said. “I need you. That’s the whole reason I’m sitting here. I’d rather say it than have you find out later.”

Theo let his chair drop back onto four legs.

“What does Red Dragon want from outsiders?” he asked. “Paperwork, inspections, someone of theirs in the rift with us?”

“I don’t know all of it yet.” Abby turned to him. “I meet a guild clerk on Monday to get the requirements in writing. I know the clear has to be logged against a registered independent unit with no Red Dragon money in it. That’s the unassisted part. I’d expect an observer, but I can’t promise you that until Monday.”

“Who picks the rift?”

“The guild, I think. From what’s open at the time.”

“You think.”

“I think,” Abby said. “I’d rather tell you I think than make it up.”

Theo looked at her for a long second, then at Nyra. Nyra wrote something down.

“Is your mom going to be there?” Peter asked.

Everyone looked at him.

“In the rift, I mean,” Peter said. “Not… I don’t know why I asked that.”

“No,” Abby said. The corner of her mouth moved. “She doesn’t go into rifts anymore.”

Peter nodded and looked at the door.

“Here’s my problem,” Nyra said. She set the pen down. “We’ve never run together. Not once. The first time this unit goes through a gate, it’s supposed to be something we can afford to get wrong. You’re asking us to make our first run the one we can’t afford to get wrong.”

“I know.”

“How would you run it? With us.”

Abby was quiet for a moment. “I’d want time with all of you before we go in. Training. Smaller runs if we can get them. I’m not asking for next weekend.”

“How much time?”

“Whatever the guild gives me. I’ll know Monday.”

Nyra leaned back. “Monday.”

“Monday,” Abby said.

Rain spoke for the first time since sitting down. “She’s not hiding anything, Nyra. She just doesn’t have it yet.”

“I can see that,” Nyra said, without looking at him. “That’s half the problem.”

She picked the pen back up. “Share.”

“You keep the yield,” Abby said.

Theo’s eyebrows went up. Peter stopped fidgeting with his cup.

Nyra put the pen down again, slower this time. “All of it.”

“All of it. I need the clear on my guild record. The drops don’t matter to me.”

“A B-rank yield doesn’t matter to you.”

“No.”

“That’s the part I don’t like,” Nyra said. “People don’t hand over money like that unless they’re paying for something they haven’t told you about.”

“I’m paying for my contract,” Abby said. “If I fail, I’m behind a desk in Sector Four. That’s what I’m buying.”

“Then why not take half and still have your contract?”

Abby opened her mouth, closed it, and for the first time since she’d sat down, she looked down at her own hands. “Because if I take half, the guild can say I hired you. If I take nothing, I joined you.”

Theo let out a low breath through his nose. Nyra studied Abby’s face for a long time. She closed the notebook over her pen.

“I’ll think about that,” she said.

“That’s fair.”

Nyra leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and looked at Abby across the table.

“One more thing,” she said. “What rank are you?”

Abby looked up from her hands. Her face was calm.

“B.”

Nobody said anything.

Theo’s chair creaked as he shifted his weight and then went still. Peter’s hand stopped halfway to his cup and hung there. Nyra’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she stayed exactly where she was, arms crossed, watching Abby as if the answer had moved her somewhere on a list.

Rain stared at Abby.

‘B,’ he thought. ‘I’ve been joking around with her in Krav Maga for weeks. She sat next to me on a train last night and I told her she was going to crack her phone.’

He thought about the Husk Regent and the flooded basin, about how close the C-rank boss had come to finishing him.

‘Everything I’ve ever survived, she’s ranked above.’