Fox Kirby's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Seven years passed on those rooftops. Fox grew into his height and his aim. Rhys stayed at his shoulder through every job. They worked the docks, the alleys, the coach roads outside the city. They ate. They earned. They were brothers in the way the older boy had meant it, and Fox had stopped counting knots in floorboards a long time ago. The accident took Rhys on a wet night in spring. A cart wheel broke on a slope above the market. The horse bolted. Rhys was crossing below with a sack of stolen bread. Fox was ten paces behind him and saw it happen with the gold eye, saw the shift of the wheel and the angle of the shaft and knew before Rhys did. He shouted. Rhys turned the wrong way. Fox held him in the wet street until the freckled face went slack. Someone tried to pull him off. He shot the slingshot at the man's ear and would not let go until the body was cold. He buried Rhys the next morning. He did not go back to the rooftop. He walked to the harbor with the slingshot in his belt and Rhys's knife in his boot, and he bought passage to New York with coin he lifted on the way. He was nineteen. He had never been on a ship. He was sick for four days and slept on the deck for the rest. New York rose out of the water like a wall of teeth. Towers stacked on towers. Glass and stone in colors he had no name for. He stood at the rail and looked at it with the gold eye and could not find the edge of it. He took work at the docks the day he stepped off. He slept in a stairwell for a week. He did not speak unless he had to, because his mouth still carried Rhys in it and his accent drew eyes. A woman found him on the eighth night. She was short, dark-skinned, with locs twisted through with gold thread. She was sitting on the step above his with a paper cup of something hot, watching him like she had been watching him a while. "You're going to freeze," she said. "Honestly. You've been shaking an hour." He looked at her with the good eye. "I'm grand." "You're not." She held the cup down to him. "Take it. I'm Nadine. I live upstairs. I've watched you not eat for three days." He took the cup. His hands shook against hers. She did not pull away. "Come up," she said. "There's a couch. That's all it is." He followed her because he had nothing left to guard. On the landing she stopped and looked back at him, and he felt her reading him the way Rhys used to read a lock. "What's your name?" "Fox," he said. "Fox Kirby." She nodded once and opened the door.