Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Kira had not slept. She sat on a tile bench with the towel across her knees and listened to the pipes hiss above her. Somewhere past midnight, a woman came in from the front room and set a cup of tea beside her without a word. On the saucer lay a folded scrap of paper. Kira opened it. Three words in pencil: seen at post. She knew what it meant. A runner had watched her cross the street last night under the broken lamp on the corner. He had sold the sighting for coin. By dawn the buyers would have men at every door of this building. She had maybe an hour before the block closed around her. She dressed fast. The spa sat below street level, one steel hatch on the roof and one wooden door at the front. The front was already lost. She went to the woman at the counter and asked about the hatch. The woman named a price. Kira had nothing left in her jacket, so she pulled the thin silver ring off her thumb and set it on the counter. Her sister had given it to her four years ago. The woman took it, weighed it in her palm, and pointed at a narrow stair behind the boiler. Kira climbed. The hatch groaned open onto the flat roof, cold air on her wet hair. She stayed low and crossed to the back edge. Below her, a rusted chain-link fence stretched across the alley mouth, a yellow closure notice bolted to the middle. Fresh. It had not been there yesterday. Two men stood on the far side of it, waiting. She turned and looked toward the front street. Under the cracked lamp on the corner, three more men had gathered around the runner who had sold her. They were pointing at the front door. She had guessed right about the hour. She had guessed wrong about the number of exits. She went back to the hatch and dropped down one floor, into the pipe room above the baths. A vent shaft ran along the outer wall, wide enough for a body. She worked the grate loose and crawled. The shaft dumped her into a service tunnel two buildings over, ankle deep in warm runoff. She followed the water until it fed a drain under a different street, then climbed out through a loose grate behind a shuttered stall. She was three blocks from where the hunters stood. She was also broke, wet, and out of hiding places. The bathhouse was burned. The ring was gone. But she was walking, and the buyer she needed to find would not be awake for another two hours. She started moving toward the factory district before the sun came up.