I walked because the house had got too small.
That was the honest reason. Polly's careful was still on the stairs where she'd left it, Arthur was groaning through the wall, Finn had been told to stay indoors and had found a way to make the whole house feel like the inside of that order. I took my hat and went out into Watery Lane and didn't decide where until I'd got to the end of it.
The body carried me. That was new. I went up the hill toward the market without thinking about the hill, and my heart didn't argue, and I caught myself at the top testing it — walking faster, then faster, to see where the edge was — and the edge wasn't there. Somewhere on the hill I'd stopped being a man in a borrowed body and started being a man in a body, and the difference was two points of stamina and a night's sleep, and it was worth more than the hundred pounds under the board.
The hand still hurt like hell. I kept it in my pocket.
Useful. That was the word Tommy had used without saying it. I see you. Don't waste it. What he'd meant was: you're a tool that's started working again, and I've noticed, and I intend to use it. Which was more than I'd had when I woke up. It was also exactly what you'd say about a good dog, and I'd spent the whole walk up the hill deciding whether I minded.
I minded.
Not because it was unfair. Because it was dependent. Every point on the form came through Tommy — the round was his, the yard was his pitch, the kitchen was his table. If he took the round back tomorrow I was a man with a swollen hand and a hundred pounds I couldn't explain. Nothing on that list was mine. Territory: None. I'd read the words on the first day and been bothered by them without knowing why, and now I knew why.
I wanted something that didn't run through him.
I didn't know what yet.
I saw her before she saw me, which was luck, and I'd had none of that so far.
Lizzie Stark was coming down the steps of the house at the end of the row with a basket on her arm and a shawl over a dress that was better than the street. She stopped at the bottom to shift the basket, and looked up, and saw me, and her face did three things in a second and settled on the last one, which was nothing at all.
I knew her.
That was the problem with the memories. They came when they wanted, and they came whole, and this one came whole — her rooms at the top of those stairs, the paper on the wall, the specific weight of her leg across mine in a bed too narrow for two, and the sound she made, and the price. It all arrived at once and I stood in the street with it and had to look at the basket instead of her face until it had passed.
Because there was a second thing under the first, and the second thing was worse. It was that I'd remembered the price before I'd remembered the sound.
"Jack Shelby," she said.
"Lizzie."
"Heard you were dead." She came the rest of the way down. "Then I heard you were drunk. Then this morning I hear you've cut a man in Kaplan's yard, and I think, well, one of those is wrong." She looked at the hand in my pocket. "Not that one, then."
"Not that one."
"You look different."
"I've been eating."
Something that might have been a laugh got as far as her mouth and stopped. She was too careful for it. Everyone on this street was careful with me now, I'd noticed — the baker, the woman with the tin, and Lizzie, who'd had no reason to be careful with the man I was wearing for as long as she'd known him.
I looked at her and I did two sums at once.
The first was the obvious one. She was handsome and she was standing close and the memories were still warm and I wanted to go back up those stairs with her, this afternoon, now.
The second was colder. She was on this street every day. She knew every man who came up those stairs and what he was ashamed of. She'd know when a bookmaker was short before Tommy did, because a man who's short drinks, and a man who drinks talks, and a man who talks does it in a bed. She had a room at the top of a staircase that nobody watched, and a name nobody respected, and nothing — that I could see — that was hers.
Which meant she was for sale, and not the way the street thought.
"I'll come by," I said.
"Will you." She shifted the basket again. "You've said that before."
"I know."
"Then say something else."
"I've got money now."
She looked at me a while longer. Then she went past me up the street, and I let her, and neither of us said anything about when.
I found a wall to lean on out of the wind and did what I'd been not doing all morning.
JACK SHELBYAffiliation: Shelby FamilyRank: AssociateTerritory: None
Influence: 15Fear: 8Reputation: 50
Cash: £103
Strength: 11Stamina: 10Vitality: 10Agility: 9Luck: 4
Reputation full. Influence up. Fear unmoved. Either it meant something different from a few men being frightened in a yard, or twenty witnesses simply weren't enough. I didn't know which. Rank the same. Territory the same.
Associate. A day's work and a razor and a kitchen full of people listening to me, and the word hadn't changed.
I was standing there thinking about the word when the task came.
I hadn't asked for it. There was no chime. It simply replaced the status, the way the status had replaced the tab list on the first morning — and I'd got used to the interface enough by then to feel the difference in the way it arrived. The first task had been waiting when I opened the menu. This one arrived without my asking.
NEW TASKTarget: William "Billy" Kimber.Objective: Eliminate.Time limit: none.Reward: £1,000. 10 Stat Points. Skills Shop unlocked.
I read it standing against the wall with the market noise going on behind me and a woman selling eels six feet away.
Then I read it again.
Billy Kimber. I knew the name the way I knew Grace's — from the other side. The man who owned every racecourse between here and London, who had the police in his pocket and an army in his pubs, who was going to sit in the Garrison and put a coin on the table like Tommy was a barman. Who Tommy was going to spend six months dismantling, one track at a time, and then walk into a room and shoot in the face.
That was Tommy's. That was the fight that put Tommy Shelby on the map, and something behind my eyes had just written it on a form and put a price on it and addressed it to me.
A thousand pounds.
I had a hundred under a board and it had already changed what I was. A thousand was — I couldn't do the sum. It was more money than anyone on this street had seen in a life. It was a house in Edgbaston. It was a way out that didn't go through Tommy, that didn't go through anyone, and the thing had known that was exactly what I'd been thinking about on the hill, and had waited until I'd finished thinking it, and then it had made its offer.
Ten stat points. Twice what I'd spent last night, and last night had given me a new body.
And the Shop. The greyed word that I'd looked at on the first day and understood as not yet.
Eliminate. Not defeat. Not remove. It had chosen the word.
I stood against the wall and understood, slowly, the way you understand a bill you'd known was coming, that the thing had escalated. Yesterday it had wanted me visible. Now it wanted me to kill a man. It had gone from reputation to murder in one step, and it hadn't asked whether I minded, and it wasn't going to.
The worst part was, I wasn't horrified. I stood there and did the sums — the money, the points, the Shop, the way out — and somewhere in the middle of the sums I noticed that my heart had picked up, and it wasn't fear.
I put my hat straight.
Then I went to buy a gun.