The city never stopped coughing smoke. It threaded through gutters and up between bricks, crawled along the ledges of tenements, and pooled under the bridges like the breath of some exhausted animal. Brendon moved inside that smoke as if it were a garment he had worn all his life — hood up, collar turned, a movement that made him less humanoid and more shadowy. People now calls him Predator Wolf now; with a sense of warning. He had been a thief once, a quick hand with a greedy streak. He had been a prisoner later, and then, for reasons he was still half-afraid to admit, a sheriff. Labels stuck to him like old blood on fabric. They kept changing, but they never came off.
Tonight the city smelled like copper and old meat.
The alley behind the market was a cut of darkness, narrower than his stride and littered with the detritus that clung to the edges of commerce: spilled bones wrapped in greasy paper, the rotting scaffolding of a broken crate, a moth more stubborn than the rest. The meat shop he was following was an honest little nihilist of a place — sign half-hanging, a window film that blurred the light into the wrong kind of fog. He had been tailing the lead for three days: a scrappy tip that had come to him through an old contact who still owed him for a favor that smelled of whiskey and bad decisions. The tip had said nothing useful, only a name and a time: Flim & Flam Enterprise.
Brendon kept himself to the alleys because alleys kept secrets. They were where deals were done and decisions were made when daylight offered inconvenient witnesses. He had learned to read an alley the same way a musician read a score: the beat of a loose shutter, the hesitation of a rat, the way a reflection bent and didn't match the window from which it came. Alleys had rhythms and he walked with them.
On his shoulder his breath puffed into the night. He listened for the sound of boots — ordinary boots, the clumsy thunk of someone paid to carry goods — and the whisper of rubber soles when someone cared not to be heard. He listened for voices, the low, husky kind that matched the city's throat. Sofie was on his ear, quiet and present through a thin wire, her voice tinny and soft in his skull.
"License plate's a match," she said. "The van left ten minutes ago, headed east. I pulled feeds from two street cams. There's an unmarked crate offloaded at the rear. Morales closed up at quarter past nine. No permit on that crate."
Sofie always sounded smaller than she was: neat, precise, the kind of person who could map a man's life with the click of a keyboard and an LED screen. She was the only person inside the force he trusted without reserve, and he trusted her because she trusted him back. She'd been the one who had helped him when he'd first walked into the station as a hired problem rather than a cleansed hero; she'd fed him data and given him the small kindness of not believing the worst of him. Sofie was a line, sometimes the only straight thing in a crooked world.
"Good," he murmured. "Stay on it. I'll check the back alley."
There was a pause in the comm. Sofie probably felt it right then — the way he went quiet when he had to think — but she said nothing. That was her: simple and patient and dangerous.
The back of Flim & Flam Enterprise stank like brass and old sorrow. Its loading door sagged, and the layer of grime on the latch had the polished sheen of things handled by hands that handled secrets often. He pressed himself flat to the brick and watched. A solitary man in an apron argued with a phone against his shoulder and shoved boxes not with the practiced care of a butcher but with the distracted force of someone anxious to finish. The crate the van had dropped was made of rough wood and bore a brand: a circle crossed by three short lines, like a sun pricked with talons. The mark was faint, as if whoever'd stamped it had wanted it to look ordinary and not shine.
He watched one of the men — younger, with a scar that cut across his cheek like an old map — run a cloth over the crate, a meaningless motion until Brendon saw the pause. The man's hand trembled. He kept glancing toward the street as if he expected someone to appear at any moment with a gun and a warrant and a small, triumphant smile. That nervous energy was the kind of thing Brendon had learned to read. He could smell it in the sweat of the man's breath: fear not of law but of something worse.
"Two in the rear," Sofie said. "I'm pulling their phone pings. One of them called 'Ramos' twenty minutes ago. The number's odd — not on the local registry. Routing through a shell in the south district. Someone's cleaning the trail."
Brendon watched the crate again. The brand had something else about it that made a coldness creep up his spine, a memory without context. There were old tales — half-children's songs and half-whispered warnings — about marks that meant things. He tried to shove the feeling away. He had learned to keep superstition in the pocket with other useless things that had no place in a precinct with fluorescent lights and stamped forms.
But there was still a thrumming in his palms. A thread that tightened at the sight of that brand.
He slid down the brick to the gutter and moved like a thought across water. The back door was a sliver of darkness and he pressed his palm against the lip. The lock was cheap but the hinges were old; it would take him five seconds and his patience would be rewarded with the smell of marrow and old grease. He had his gloves off — he liked the feel of cold metal against skin; it made him real. He reached in, his fingers finding the lock and pushing.
Before his hand closed, a shadow peeled off the far wall and slipped into the mouth of the alley like a knife sheathed for a long time. For a second Brendon thought it was his imagination; the city cast small ghosts everywhere. Then the shadow became a body: lithe, taut, the outline of a woman with a hood that flattened her face into a suggestion. She was small — slight but not frail — and she moved with the kind of silence that was learned, not gifted. Ninjas were romantic inventions. This woman's movements spoke of practicality: each step had purpose, each breath timed. He should have known to be wary. He should have known better than to be surprised.
"Careful," she said, in a voice cut from glass and silk.