Chapter 729 | Pork Buns and Paperwork

Chapter 729: 729 | Pork Buns and Paperwork

"He’s not your dad, and you have a crush on him that is frankly embarrassing for everyone in the zip code," I said, walking past her toward the rusted ladder at the back of the shed. "Also, yes. We’re telling on them. Between us we’ve got one unlicensed first-year on an IHC observation flag and one C-tier misdemeanor with a grappling hook held together by electrical tape, and Dralun has a badge that lets him call people who own battering rams."

"I am not a misdemeanor, I am a master of espionage!" she hissed, and skated after me across the tar paper so fast she nearly slid off the edge of the roof. She caught my elbow with both hands at the last second and used my arm as a braking post. Her chest slammed into my tricep with a damp thump that squished her breasts flat against the sleeve of my utility jacket, and her grip was tight enough to cut off circulation. "And I do not have a crush on Dralun, I respect his community leadership, which is completely different! Stop walking away when I’m being brooding and cool!"

"You’re squeezing my arm like a blood pressure cuff, Lami." I glanced down at her white knuckles. "Turn your feet back on."

She let go with a sharp huff, cheeks flushing pink above the collar of the wetsuit, and stomped her left boot into the gravel to kill her momentum. Then she just stood there looking annoyed at the universe in general.

"You’re the worst partner I’ve ever had," she muttered after a second. She hooked her leg over the top rung without using her hands and slid down the iron rails like a fireman’s pole, scaled hips flashing emerald in the grey light. She hit the alley puddles at the bottom without a splash, her boots landing like she’d been dropped from six inches instead of two stories. "Next time I’m bringing the goth girl. At least she has bats and doesn’t tell me my calling cards are stupid."

I looked back once at the grey concrete wall of Pacific Coast Cold Storage, where Bay Two and Bay Four sat shut and quiet under a row of sleeping seagulls.

Somewhere behind those doors were forty-eight months of stolen pieces from kids who just wanted to get through kindergarten without their shirts ripping or their ribs puncturing something important at recess.

The faded placard beside the office door listed the warehouse as a "specialty distribution hub for medical-grade polymer components." People wrote that kind of phrase when they wanted paperwork to look boring enough for auditors to skip.

Except medical-grade polymer components didn’t arrive on unmarked trucks at six in the morning. And they definitely didn’t get stored in a building with security cameras pointed at the loading docks and none on the interior bays.

?QUEST UPDATE: The Shed Ledger?

?Primary Distribution Hub Identified: Pacific Coast Cold Storage (4100 Waterfront Blvd).?

?Secondary Supplier Confirmed: Unidentified (Bay 2 / Metro East).?

?Progress: 48%.?

?System Note: Host exercised restraint and did not punch a warehouse full of unknown hostiles at 6:34 AM before homeroom. The System is almost proud, in the way one is proud of a dog that finally stops eating the drywall.?

I closed the box with a mental flick, reached up, and pulled the Faceless Veil off my face. The bone-white oval dissolved back into my inventory, and the wet harbor wind hit my real cheeks.

Fifteen miles away, up on the hill where the lawns got mowed on Tuesdays and the security pillars hummed their invisible biometric grids through the pre-dawn fog, the Bond Resonance came back through the cotton like a guitar string let go under tension. There was no ignoring it. A solid wall of sleepy pink heat dumped straight into my sternum as Sloane rolled over in her bed in Room 302 of Prometheus 1-A, felt me come back on the grid, and decided that wherever I’d been for the past hour, I’d been there long enough.

The bond didn’t send words. It sent texture: warmth threaded with annoyance, the possessive irritation of somebody who’d reached for the other end of the line before she was fully awake and found it somewhere off the ridge. It didn’t pry, and it had no edge to it. It just settled into my ribs, like she’d reached across the city and poked me in the chest to make sure I hadn’t died somewhere inconvenient.

I had my phone out before I even swung a leg over the parapet, my other hand on the cold brick coping.

Lukas: mask off, heading to the bus

The screen glowed pale blue in the fog. Three dots appeared almost instantly, which meant Sloane had been awake enough to grab her phone the second the bond pinged her. Whatever she was typing was probably three sentences longer than it needed to be and definitely louder than the hour called for.

I pocketed the phone, vaulted the parapet in one motion, and hit the top rung of the ladder with both boots.

Down in the alley, Lamia stood by the dumpster with her arms crossed, blowing a wet strand of glossy black hair out of her eyes. She kicked a pebble against the rusted base of the dumpster with the toe of her safety-pinned boot, and the clink echoed off the brick like a petulant little drumbeat. Her neoprene was still damp from the river spray and her goggles had fogged. Her shoulders were hunched against the harbor wind, and she was visibly shivering, even while she leaned on the wall in what she probably thought was an unbothered pose.

"Hurry up," she called, dropping back into that breathy, purring movie-thief register even though her teeth were audibly chattering. It came out like somebody trying to seduce a man while fighting off early-stage hypothermia. "Grandma Lin takes the pork buns out of the steamer at seven, and if you make me miss the first tray because you’re up there texting your harem, I’m telling Dralun you touched my butt on the bridge."

I stopped halfway down the ladder and looked at her over my shoulder. "I grabbed your belt because you were falling into the river."

"Semantics, darling," she purred, tilting her chin up at what was clearly meant to be a mysterious angle. Mostly it showed off how red the cold had made her nose.

Then she sneezed.