The Bet I Won’t Make

POV: Hollis

The moon over Ash Docks was a thin bright paring, like a fingernail, and Hollis Quade lay on his back on the roof of St. Cinder's with a rifle across his chest and worked out how to kill a man.

It wasn't hard. That was the trouble. He had done the sums on every roof in the district. There was a gable on Customs Row with a clear line to the Hall steps, and a chimney on Crown Hill, three hundred and ten yards from the Chairman's carriage door, where a man with a good rifle and a dead hand could lie down at dawn and be gone by seven. A single round. No bend in it. Straight through the silver head, from a long way off, and the old man would fall without ever knowing who.

He turned it over and over, as he'd once turned the knife on its silk thread. It had the old shine on it.

"I could do it," he said.

Beside him, in the dark, Felix didn't move.

They had been up here since sundown. The slates still held a little of the day's cold light, and the air was damp, and the whole sprawl of the Docks lay out below them like a dark sea with a few drowned lamps. Felix lay on his side with his back to the bell-tower and his knees drawn up, wrapped in two blankets and Hollis's coat. His spectacles lay on the slate beside him. Without them, his face looked naked and young. He had not slept. Hollis knew, because he had not either.

"I'm not saying I will," said Hollis. "I'm saying I could. A clean shot. He'd never feel it."

"No."

"You don't want to hear it."

"I don't," said Felix, "but you can say it. I'd rather you said it than didn't." His voice was hoarse, and quite calm. "It's all right, Hollis. I've thought about it. I thought about it all night."

"And?"

"I want to. That's the dreadful thing." He rolled onto his back and looked up at the thin moon. "I lay here and I pictured it. His face. The look he'd have, if you did. I thought, good. I thought, he'd deserve it. And then I thought of the boy on the pier with the round face." A long breath. "I'd have to be someone I don't want to be, to want it. I've found out I can be. I've found out that anyone can. And I'd rather not."

"He'd have killed you."

"Yes."

"He'd have killed all of us."

"Yes. He gave the order. I heard it." Felix turned his head. His eyes were reddened and steady. "That doesn't change what I'd be."

Hollis said nothing.

"So no," said Felix. "Not that. Not a bullet from a rooftop."

"Then what?"

"We beat him. Properly."

"How?"

"I don't know yet." He gave a thin, crooked smile. "Rule three, Hollis. No one dies unless he's the one pointing the gun. I made that rule up, you know. Not Dex. I told him in the attic, in my head, and then I made him say it. And I'm going to keep it." His smile wavered. "If I can't keep it for him, I'll keep it for the boy."

Hollis lay and looked at him.

It was an odd thing. He had met a good many men in a good many places who had talked about honor. He had been one, once, in the way of a boy with a gun. He had seen what it did when the money ran out. And here lay a skinny, short-sighted, half-drowned chemist, with salt in his hair and a father who had ordered his death, who had just turned down the clean shot on the rooftop.

It was the bravest thing he'd ever seen a man refuse.

"All right," said Hollis, softly.

"All right?"

"All right. We'll do it properly." He laid the rifle down on the slates. "I don't know how. But I've got a feeling I'm going to find out."

Felix reached over, in the dark, and found his hand, and held it.

…

He found Dex at the bottom of the harbor steps.

It took an hour. He had gone down through the nave, past the cold stove, past Ma Tilly, who sat by the door with her chin on her chest, awake, and nodded him by. He had asked at the Exchange. He had asked at the Dispensary, and been told by a pale thin girl in the doorway that nobody had come. At last, drawn by some instinct, he'd walked down to the waterfront, past the burned stump of Pier Nine, still reeking and black, and along the sea wall to the old stone stair at the foot of Cinder Street, where the tide came in.

The steps went down into the water. They were green with weed. A single lamp burned on a post at the top. And on the lowest dry step, with his back against the wall and his bad leg stretched out in front of him and the cane lying across his knees, sat a thin dark figure, quite still, looking at his hand.

He had something in it.

It glinted. Hollis came down the steps slowly, so as not to startle him. The sound of the water covered his boots. He stopped three steps up, and said, "Boss."

Dex did not look round.

"Mr. Quade."

"It's late."

"Yes."

"Ma says you haven't eaten."

"I'm not hungry."

Hollis came down and sat on the step beside him. It was cold, and wet, and the damp went up through his coat. They sat there for a time, side by side, looking at the black water slapping the stone. Far out beyond the mole a ship's light moved, red and slow.

What Dex held was a piece of mirror.

It was only a shard. It was a thumb-long splinter of silvered glass with a gold-painted edge, the kind that came from a lady's hand-glass, and it had a scrap of cord looped through a hole drilled in one end. He had it on his palm. The lamplight winked in it, and in it, upside down, Hollis could see a little piece of the sky.

"She dropped it," said Dex. "On the pier. It was in the planks. I found it this morning, when I went back."

"You went back?"

"Ma sent a girl. It was in a crack." He turned it over. "She wore it round her neck. Under her collar. I never knew. I saw it once, by accident, in the Mirror Room, when she bent over. She keeps a bit of every glass she's ever walked through. She says it's so she can always get home."

"Sounds like a woman who'd know."

"She'd have used it. If it were whole. She'd have got out." He closed his hand around it. "The net took her Gift. But she's got others. She's got her head. She's cleverer than any of us." A thin breath. "I told her to be careful."

"You told her to be careful."

"I did."

"I bet that went over well."

Dex laughed. It was a dry, startled little sound, almost a cough, and it turned into something else halfway, and he put the back of his wrist against his mouth. Hollis looked at the water. He did not look at the boy. It was a thing he had learned in the ring, in the Wild West show, among broken men: you let a man have the privacy of his face.

…

"I've something to say," said Hollis.

"I expected you might."

"I'll say it plain. I'm not an eloquent man." He picked a bit of weed off the step and rolled it between his dead fingers. "I thought about leaving. Tonight, on the roof. I sat there, with the Whitcomb boy, and I thought, that's enough. I thought I'd done what I came for. I've got no debt left. You bought it. I've got a horse that isn't mine and a hand that doesn't work and a boy who cries himself to sleep over a man he burned. I could walk away. Nobody'd stop me."

"No."

"I'll tell you why I'm not."

Dex waited.

"Because I've been betting my whole life," said Hollis. "Since I was nineteen. I never bet on anyone but me. And I always thought the trick was to bet when you'd lose. Because then the win would feel like something. If it was a certainty, there was no point." He turned the weed over. "That's what the Widow's Wager was. A way of making myself feel I was worth the risk. The odds were never any good. That was the point."

He lifted his eyes.

"Then I came to your cellar. And I watched you lie to me, to my face. And I thought, he's the worst bet I ever saw." A crooked grin. "And I'm still here."

"Why?"

"Because it's the first time I've wanted to see how it came out."

Dex stared at him. The lamplight lay on his face in a cold yellow wedge. For the first time Hollis noticed how bruised he was: a purple smear down the jaw, a black eye closing, a long scrape across the forehead. Boy looked as if he'd been dragged through a hedge.

"I'll follow you down any hole," said Hollis. "I'd like you to know that. I'll go in first, if you want. But you lie to me once more, and I mean once, one word, and I'll shoot that stick of yours in half. And then I'll shoot the one behind it."

"The one behind it."

"The one you've been hiding in the bell."

He had not meant to say that. It had come out like a bullet. He saw Dex's face go still. He saw the hand on the shard clench until a thin bright line of blood showed between the fingers.

"Ma Tilly isn't as quiet as she thinks," said Hollis. "And you hum."

A long silence.

"Understood," said Dex.

"Good."

"I deserve it."

"You do. That's why I said it." Hollis leaned back against the wall. His voice came out gentler than he intended. "Now tell me. What's the plan?"

…

Dex told him.

It took a quarter of an hour. He told it sitting up very straight on the wet stone, with his hands on his cane and his eyes fixed on the dark water, the way a man gives testimony. He told it in order, step by step, in a voice that grew steadier as he spoke. Hollis listened with his head back against the stone, and his dead hands loose in his lap, and let the sentences go by like a river.

The Heart was a key. It answered to a voice: Dex's voice, an Aldridge voice, singing an old lullaby. Whitcomb wanted it to sing, at the Rite on Black Noon, in front of every House on the hill. He believed that the song would put the city to sleep. He believed it would let him seal every sorrow in Merrick Bay behind a wall of glass, forever, and rule over a people who had forgotten they were afraid.

"But there are two verses," said Dex.

"Two."

"One locks. One opens. He knows one." The thin face tightened. "He doesn't know there's another."

"And you do."

"My mother sang it. I sang it in the fever." He drew a breath. "I can open the Heart. I can send back every memory that was ever taken. Every vial in the Archive. Every Tithe from every Tithed child, in the whole city. Not just the Docks: the Terrace, the Hill, the schools. All of it. At once."

Hollis opened his eyes.

"This time," said Dex, "we don't steal an object. We steal back a city's memory."

He said it so lightly. As if he were announcing that the tide had turned. And Hollis sat on the wet stone with the water lapping at his boots and felt the full absurd size of it settle on him, like a hand laid on his head.

"How many people?" he said.

"All of Ash Docks."

"All of it."

"And the rest of the city, if it takes." Dex's voice thinned. "I can't promise. I've never done it. I've never heard it done. It may kill me. It may kill the Heart. It may do nothing, and we'll be shot on the steps of the Dome in front of five thousand people." He turned his head, finally, and looked at Hollis. His eyes in the lamplight were gray and bright and terribly young. "It's the worst bet I've ever made."

"Is it?"

"I'm a thief. I've never been this stupid in my life."

Hollis looked at him a moment.

Then he began, helplessly, to laugh.

It came up out of his chest like a spring, rough and low and rusty. He put his hand over his face. He sat there on the harbor stair with his shoulders shaking, and the tide coming in, and the thin boy beside him staring in alarm. "I'm sorry," he gasped. "I'm sorry. It's, all of Ash Docks. You're going to take on the Chartered Houses and the Lamp Order and the Chairman of the Meridian Trust, with six people, and a cane, and a song."

"Five," said Dex. "Five people."

"Five, then."

"And a few hundred friends. If I can find them."

"Oh, well, then." Hollis wiped his eyes. "That's all right. That's a sure thing."

…

When he had done laughing, he sat a while and breathed.

The moon had sunk lower. The tide had risen another step. Out on the water the red light moved in a slow arc and vanished behind the mole. He thought of a horse with a white sock. He thought of a high clear whistle, three notes, falling and rising, that he could no longer hear. He thought of a boy in a laundry attic, laughing at a gold bar.

He was twenty-four years old. He had never in his life put his money on anyone but himself.

"Put me down," said Hollis.

Dex looked at him.

"In the book. The one you keep. Whatever you've got." He held out his hand, the dead one, palm up, as he'd once held it out to the dealer in a Cheyenne back room. "If you're writing us in, I'd like to be in it."

For a moment Dex didn't move. Then, slowly, as one lifts a thing that is very fragile, he took the black ledger from inside his coat. He opened it on his knee. The pages were stiff with damp. A stub of pencil was tied to the spine. He turned to a clean leaf, and bent over it in the lamplight, and began to write.

Hollis watched the hand move. It was thin and ink-stained and steady.

Quade, H.

He wrote it in the first column. Then, in the second, after a pause, a single word, the first Hollis had ever seen him put in the middle of the page: Given.

"What's that?"

"What you've paid."

"I thought the middle was for debts."

"It was." Dex did not look up. "I've been thinking I had it backward."

He turned to a fresh page.

At the top, in his small cramped hand, he wrote a line, and underlined it twice. Hollis leaned over to read it. The letters shone wet in the lamp.

Debts owed: 5 people.

And beneath, after a long moment, in the column marked Price:

The rest of my life.

He closed the book. The water lapped. In his fist the little piece of mirror caught the lamp, and threw a spark across the stone, and went dark.

"Come on," said Hollis, getting to his feet. His knees cracked. He held down a hand. "You'll catch your death. And I'd hate to lose the only man who ever paid my debt."

Dex took it.

His grip was cold, and thin, and surprisingly strong. Hollis hauled him up, and felt him lean, and held on. For a moment they stood together on the wet green steps, in the lamplight, two thieves and a ledger and a piece of glass.

"Hollis," said Dex.

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet, boss," said Hollis. "I haven't started shooting."