Chapter 3

Someone was following me.

I knew it the way you know a wound is going to hurt before you look down at it, a low certainty under the skin. I had felt it since the rail yard, that same careful footstep on gravel, gone quiet now that I'd left the tracks behind for city stone, but still there, always one turn behind me, never close enough to see.

I did not run.

Running tells a follower you are afraid of being caught. I walked instead, slow, past the pawnshop with no sign on the door, past a noodle stall closing for the night, down into a side street narrow enough that only one person could walk it without turning sideways.

I let my footsteps slow just enough to invite him closer, then stop, the way you leave a door open a crack when you want to see who's brave enough to push it the rest of the way.

Then I stopped, and let him catch up to a mistake.

He came around the corner a step too fast, already reaching for something at his belt, and I had the revolver against his throat before he finished the motion.

He went still. Not scared still. Careful still, the way a man goes still when he has done the math on a gun before and knows exactly how fast it wins.

"You've been following me since the rail yard," I said.

"You noticed sooner than I expected." His voice was low, even, more curious than afraid. Brass buttons on his coat, oil under his nails, goggles pushed up into dark hair. Brass Skull, but not the office kind. The kind who builds things with his hands.

"Give me a reason not to end this here."

"Because I'm the only person in this city who can tell you what's happening to you," he said, "and you already know it."

My finger did not move on the trigger, but something under my ribs did, a low pull like the wraith recognized him before I did.

"I don't know you," I said.

"You don't remember me." He said it carefully, like the difference mattered to him more than it should. "That's not the same thing."

I pressed the barrel harder against his throat. "Talk fast."

"A year ago I was working a salvage crew on the edge of the pit," he said. "We weren't supposed to be that deep. Cursed ground, bad air, the kind of place that eats men who stay too long. I found a hand sticking up out of the dirt. Still warm, which shouldn't have been possible, not after what they'd done to you." His eyes did not leave mine. "I could have left you. Everyone else did. I didn't."

"So you're the one who put this in me." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "The thing under my ribs. The hunger."

"I fed you what the ground already wanted to give you," he said. "I didn't put anything in you that wasn't already trying to get out."

I should have pulled the trigger just for that answer. It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even close to one. But some part of me, the part that still remembered what it felt like to be curious instead of just careful, wanted to know more before I decided what to do with him.

"Why follow me tonight," I said. "Why not just walk up and say all this in daylight."

"Because I wasn't sure it was really you until I saw you check that body's wrists instead of just walking away from it." Something shifted in his face, careful, like a man choosing his next words the way you choose which board to step on in a floor you don't trust. "Most people don't check the knots on a dead man. You did. That's how I knew."

"Knew what."

"That you're still in there. Under whatever that thing turned you into." He said it quiet, almost gentle, and it landed harder than the gun ever could have. "I've been checking every hunter who's come through this city for months, waiting to see if any of them moved like you used to."

Months.

Not since last week. Not since he heard a rumor about a new masked hunter working contracts. Months, which meant he had been watching for me long before I ever walked through the gate, long before I even chose the name Lawl for myself in the dark on the edge of the pit.

"You've been looking for me since before I woke up," I said slowly, testing the shape of it out loud, because saying it made it real in a way thinking it hadn't.

He didn't answer right away, and that silence told me more than any words could have.

"You knew I was going to come back," I said. "Before I did."

"I hoped," he said, too carefully, and I heard the lie folded inside the honest word the way you hear a crack under new ice.

The revolver was still at his throat. My hand had gone very still, the kind of still that isn't calm, the kind that happens right before something breaks.

"What's your name," I said, because I needed something solid to hold onto that wasn't the question underneath the question, the one I wasn't ready to ask yet.

"Weston," he said. "And you're not Lawl. Not really. That's just the name you picked because you needed one fast, standing over your own grave with dirt still in your mouth."

I opened my mouth to correct him, to give him the lie I'd been handing everyone since the gate, and nothing came out.

"Your name is Laura Roal," he said, quiet, certain, like a man reading something he'd known by heart for a long time before tonight. "I watched them bury you. I watched them fill in the dirt over your face and walk away like it was nothing. I have known your name since before you had a reason to hide it."

The gun stayed where it was. My hand did not.

For the first time since I clawed my way out of the ground, I could not find a lie fast enough to cover the truth standing right in front of me, and the wraith under my ribs went utterly, dangerously quiet, waiting to see what I would do now that someone finally knew exactly who I used to be.