Jolt Jinx's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Jolt Jinx crouched on a busted fire escape and counted walls. Twelve blocks of brick, and not one big enough for the piece she wanted to leave on this city. She had three jars on her belt — Pickled Surprise, Toxic Love, and Scream — and a slingshot loaded with a paint bulb the size of her fist. Her crew called her the queen of the dead zones because she painted where nobody else dared. Three of them had vanished in those same dead zones last month. No bodies. One of the missing had shared her bedroll. Jolt had decided, kneeling over an empty mattress, that she would answer the disappearances the only way she knew how: she would tag the whole city with one piece so loud nobody could paint over it, and whatever took her people would have to come look her in the face. But a back-alley tag would rot behind a dumpster in a week. She needed a wall the city could not ignore, and she did not have one. She went to Crownfall because Velvet Mirage always knew which walls belonged to who. The rooftop lounge smelled like smoke and cut limes. Velvet was already pouring two glasses when Jolt climbed over the ledge, grit on her boots, jars clinking. "Relax," Velvet said. "I already know why you came." Jolt set a paint bulb on the bar between them. "I need a wall. Something nobody can scrub." Velvet turned the bulb in her fingers like fruit at a market. "The road council commissioned forty miles of highway. One painter, one brush, first frost deadline. She's on mile one." Jolt's jaw tightened; she knew the painter, and the painter was a friend. "I'm not stealing from her." "I'm not asking you to. There's an old windmill above the second bend. Every car on that highway sees it. Every day. For years." Velvet slid the bulb back across the bar. "The wall is yours if you want it. I only ask one favor, named later." Jolt looked at the jar called Scream and thought about the bedroll and the three names she was carrying. She picked up the bulb. "Named later," she said. Velvet smiled without showing teeth. By dawn Jolt was on the ridge, rope in her hand, the windmill's white flank waiting above her like a page nobody had turned yet. She had her wall. She also had a debt to a woman who never forgot one, and forty miles of somebody else's paint about to run under her masterpiece.