The Dry Run

POV: Viv

The Merrick Bay Sugar Exchange kept its safe behind a pane of glass, which was, in Viv's professional opinion, the stupidest thing she had ever heard of, and the best news she'd had all week.

"It's a vanity," Dex had explained, two nights earlier. "They want the brokers to see the money. A man trusts a bank he can look into."

"A man trusts a bank he can rob," said Viv.

"Quite."

Now she crouched in the dark of a third-floor counting room with her gloved palm flat against that glass, and the glass was cold and faintly humming, and on the other side of it, five feet away and four inches thick, sat a green steel door with a brass wheel like a ship's. In the window, her own reflection looked back, pale and hooded. Behind it, as in a dim aquarium, the vault's interior: shelves, boxes, a candle-flame of a lamp.

Here, she thought. Right here.

The practice job was a small one. A bronze seal, the size of a fist, from a drawer on the second shelf. Dex wanted it for no reason he had given. "It's a test," he'd said, "of whether six people can steal a paperweight without killing each other." She had liked him for that. It was the first honest thing anyone had said in the room.

"Ready," she breathed.

In her ear, through the cold brass tube that ran from the fire-escape window to the earpiece Felix had rigged, a voice crackled. "Ready," said Hollis, from the roof. Then, "Felix is calling it a comm. I'm calling it a hose."

"It's a speaking-tube system," said Felix's voice, faintly offended, from somewhere below.

"Everybody shut up," said Dex.

They shut up.

Viv closed her eyes. She did not need to. But there was a moment before a step, always, like the moment before a dive, when the world came down to a single point of cold, and she liked to give it her whole attention. She felt the glass under her hand. She felt the reflection waiting in it, a second room behind the first, identical, hungry. She breathed once, and leaned, and the glass gave.

It was never sudden. It was like leaning on a door that had been open all along. The cold came over her wrist, her elbow, her shoulder. A crawling in the teeth, a sick sweet drop like missing a stair. The light bent. And then she was through, standing on the other side, in the vault, with the dust of a hundred years of paper in her nose and her heart going quick and bright.

One.

She didn't allow herself to look back at what she'd left. She went to the drawer.

…

Everything held for ninety seconds.

Josiah was already at the street door, with a coil of fine wire and a face as flat as a tabletop. She had watched him do it from the street: a man in dark wool going quietly up a fire escape, never fast, never slow, every motion with its allotted time. He took the lock in eleven seconds and the night guard in nine. He did not hurt him. He folded the man into a chair with two fingers at the back of the neck and tucked a blanket round his knees. He did it so politely that she nearly laughed.

Hollis was on the roof with a rifle and a bad attitude. Felix was in the street in a delivery cart, supposed to be producing a cloud of harmless white fog on cue.

Dex was on the stairs.

That was the part he'd chosen to test. She could feel him doing it, across forty feet of dark corridor: the quiet thump, the dragging step, the care. Sixty steps, from the street to the third floor. Dex had calculated them by the flight, and a minute and a half at his pace. He had added forty seconds to be safe.

He was behind by a minute and ten.

"Dex," said Josiah, in the tube. His voice was level as a plumb line. "Pace."

"I know."

"If you cannot manage the flight—"

"I said I know. Go on."

She heard something in the voice, rough at the edge. She moved faster.

The seal was exactly where he'd said, bronze and green with age, in the second drawer under a stack of deeds. She slipped it into her bag. She turned. And through the glass she saw, in the dim hall, Roz, standing in the open stairwell with her hand pressed flat to the wall, her head tilted, listening to something that nobody else could hear.

Something's wrong, Viv thought.

"Roz," she breathed. "What is it?"

"There's a man on the second floor," said Roz.

It was quiet and flat. "He was asleep in the stock room. He's woken. He's coming up."

"A guard?"

"A clerk. Old. He's got a heart that's—" She stopped. The tube hissed. "He's choking. He's on the stairs and he can't breathe. Something's caught."

"Leave it," said Dex.

"He's an old man."

"We've got ninety seconds. Roz—"

"His heart is going to stop."

There was a pause. Viv, standing in the dim vault with the green wheel at her back, felt the plan hang in the air, for the first time, like a ledger being held to the light.

"You said no killing," said Roz, "and you didn't say let die."

"Leave it," said Josiah. "That is an order, and the order is correct. He's one man—"

But she'd gone.

They heard her running down the stairs. They heard a body hit the landing. They heard her voice, low, steady and furious, saying There, there, breathe, look at me. In. In. Good. And then, quite clearly, something that sounded like a cough, and a long, ragged, enormous gasp, and an old man's quavering voice saying, "Lord, lord, miss, I thought I was dead."

"You are not dead," said Roz. "Don't argue with me."

Viv sat down on a sugar crate in the vault and put her face in her hands. She did not know if she was laughing.

…

By the time they reached the alley, the Watch whistles had begun.

It was a cheerful, tinny sound, rising from three directions, and the street was filling with the white fog Felix had been told to make at ten forty-five and had, in a fit of enthusiasm, made at ten forty. It rolled down the avenue in a fat cold wave. It swallowed the gaslights. It got into Viv's hair. Somewhere in it, Felix was shouting, "It's non-toxic!"

"It's too much!" Hollis roared back, from the roof. "I can't see the street! I can't see you!"

"That's the point of fog!"

"Not when I'm shooting through it, you walking beaker—"

"You were told to wait for the signal—"

"The signal was ten forty-five—"

"Bicker later," said Dex, hoarsely. He had arrived at the mouth of the alley, white as paper, his coat open, one hand pressed hard to his left thigh. "The coal cart. Move."

They moved. There was a flat black cart at the end of the alley, loaded to the sideboards, with a tarpaulin and a driver who had been paid to be deaf. They went in the back one after another, Josiah first, with a hand out for Roz, who ignored it, and Felix, and Hollis swinging down from the fire escape with the rifle, and finally Dex, who stopped at the tailgate and looked at it, and took a breath. Josiah put out his hand. Dex looked at it.

"I can manage."

"I did not say you couldn't."

"I'd rather—"

"Mr. Hallam," said Josiah. "Take the hand."

He took it.

The cart lurched. The coal rattled. Under the tarp, in the stinking black, Viv found herself wedged between Hollis's elbow and a sack of anthracite with her bag clutched in both arms, and the smell of the fog still in her nose, and somewhere to her left a man's ragged breathing. She did not look at it. She put the seal in her lap, and reached into her pocket for the thing she always reached for, after.

The red book.

…

She had not meant to take it out. She knew he'd see.

But the Cost had come on her as she crossed the glass, the way it always did, a small cold drop in the pit of the stomach, a feeling like a stair that wasn't there. And as soon as the cart cleared the Exchange and the whistles fell behind, she opened the Loss Book on her knee and took out the stub of pencil and wrote the date. Then the line beneath it. Her hand was not quite steady.

Mirrorstep. Sugar Exchange. Cost:

She stopped.

Cost: what? She felt for it, as one feels for a tooth that has been pulled, with the tongue. A name. She had been thinking of a name.

It had been a woman in a gray dress, in a bare room above a tailor's shop, with a stick that she tapped on the floor. A pianist from Warsaw, thin as a heron, who had taught eleven-year-old Viv Marchetti to waltz in a borrowed parlor for twenty-five cents a lesson. One, two, three. One, two, three. Chin up, child. The floor is not your enemy. She had had a name. A long one, with too many consonants. Viv had said it a thousand times.

It was gone.

The woman was still there: the gray dress, the cane, the cold hands that smelled of lavender water. The count. One, two, three. But the name was a smooth place in her mind, where one's thumb finds nothing to catch on.

First dance teacher, she wrote.

Her pencil stopped. She looked at the words.

Hollis, beside her, had gone quiet. He was looking at the book with an expression she couldn't read. And on the other side, in the dark, she felt someone looking, too.

"What did it cost?" said Dex.

"Nothing."

"Viv."

"It's not important." She closed the book. "It was a name. It's the sort of thing I'd have lost anyway."

"Rule four."

"You said we say the price. You didn't say we explain it."

"No." His voice, in the dark, was very quiet. "I didn't. I'd like to hear the price, though. Out loud."

The cart rocked. The coal whispered. Nobody said a word, and she realized, with a flush of anger, that they were all of them listening: Roz with her head cocked, Josiah with his eyes shut, Felix in the far corner holding his breath. She opened her mouth to say no. To say none of your business. To say, in the cool dry voice she used for landlords, that she had been paying her own prices since she was twelve.

"A woman's name," she said instead.

It came out smaller than she meant.

"She taught me to waltz. A Polish lady. I don't remember what she was called."

Nobody moved.

Then, in the dark, she heard a sound like a page turning. A scratch of a nib on paper. She could not see him, but she could picture it exactly: the black ledger on his knee, the thin ink-stained hand, the cramped writing. Marchetti, V. Cost: the name of her first dance teacher. It took him nine seconds.

"I'll keep it," Dex said.

"What?"

"I'll hold it. If you ever want it back." He did not seem to know that he'd said anything remarkable. "It isn't gone if somebody has it written down."

She said nothing at all. She turned her face to the dark and looked, very hard, at the shifting black wall of coal, and the smell of it made her eyes burn.

…

They held the debrief on a roof.

It was a flat tar-paper rooftop above the Tallow Exchange, with a view of nothing but chimney pots and the long dull glow of the Docks, and a wind that smelled of the tide. Ma Tilly had sent up a pot of tea and a plate of cold sausage. Nobody ate. They sat on the parapet in a ragged row like crows, and Dex stood in front of them with his cane planted, and told them how they had failed.

He did it without heat. That made it worse.

"The Watch was on us in six minutes. The plan was four. Josiah, you were perfect, and you'll be perfect on the night, which is why I'm not worried about you. Hollis, Felix: the fog was early and you shouted. In a ballroom, with five hundred people and a quintet's worth of instruments, you cannot shout." He did not look at either of them. "Roz."

Roz lifted her chin.

"I told you to leave it."

"I know."

"If it had been the Hush Stair, and the clerk had been a Watchman, and you'd gone back for him—"

"I'd have gone back for him."

"Yes," said Dex. "I know." And then, after a moment, in a different tone: "That's why I'm saying it. I wouldn't have the rule if I didn't want you to be the kind of person who breaks it. I'd like you to do it with your eyes open. That's all."

Roz looked at him for a very long time. Viv saw her look at Josiah, then, once, as if by accident, and look away.

"And me," said Dex.

Nobody answered.

"I was forty seconds behind. I will be forty seconds behind on the Hush Stair, and the stair is two hundred and twelve steps." He said it flatly, as one reads off a bill. "If we go in as we are, we'll die at the ninetieth. I'd put money on it. So we'll either find a way to cut it, or I'll go in a chair." His mouth twisted. "I would like to find a way."

"A chair," said Hollis.

"A chair."

"You'd look splendid in a chair."

"Thank you."

"I wouldn't mention it—"

"Ninetieth step," said Josiah suddenly, from the end of the row. He had been silent so long that they all turned. He was sitting very straight, his hands loose between his knees, looking at the Docks. "There's a place at the ninetieth step where the stair widens. A niche, meant for a statue. We could rest there. A count of thirty. It would not be seen from above."

"You didn't tell me."

"I didn't know it would matter." The long grim face did not alter. "It matters."

"Then we use it," said Dex.

Viv watched Josiah's mouth. It had shifted by a hair. She realized that he was looking at Dex's leg, and that what was in his face was not pity, or contempt, but something more complicated and less comfortable: the look of a man who had been taught all his life that the weak were a risk, and was finding out he'd been given a faulty ruler.

They were a mess, she thought. They were sloppy, undisciplined, quarrelsome and frightened. Josiah, who had been trained for twenty years, would have called them careless. But she saw him look at Roz, who had run down the stairs for an old man's heartbeat, and at Hollis, who was already, under his breath, apologizing to Felix, and at the whole disreputable row of them in the wind, and she saw him think: They are careless. But they are alive.

"Felix," said Hollis, half under his breath, and held out a small flask. "Put the thing in the cart before you light it. Not after."

"I did put it in the cart."

"You put it in the carter."

Felix considered. "That's true," he said. "Oh, dear."

And Hollis laughed. It cracked out of him, a big surprised bark of a laugh, and Felix, scarlet, started laughing too, a helpless wheezing giggle, and there on the roof, with the wind in their hair, for the first time since they had met, six people who had nothing in common but debt were laughing at the same thing.

Even Roz's mouth moved.

…

Later, when the others had gone down, she found him in the office.

She came through the window glass in the dark, as she always did, in a cold fizzing bloom of light, and stepped onto the floor with her skirts still wet from the passage. He didn't look up. He was at the desk, with the lamp turned low and the ledger open, his cane lying across the blotter.

"I wanted to ask you something," she said.

"Ask."

"Why did you buy my contract?"

The nib stopped.

She had thought about it for two years. She had thought about it over the sink at Wick Street and on the back stair of the dancing master's house and in the glass of every bright window. A girl is sold at twelve for forty dollars to a house that owns her, and one morning a thin boy with a cane walks into the dancing master's office with a bag of coin, and she is free. He had never said why. He had said Interest. He had said it so lightly, so reasonably, with such a dry little smile, that for a long time she had believed him.

"Interest," said Dex.

"That's a lie."

"It's a fair rate."

"It's a lie." She did not raise her voice. "I've seen the rate, Dex. I did the sums. What was left of those eight years was worth a few hundred dollars at best. You paid three times that. I'm not an investment." She was surprised at how steady she sounded. "Nobody buys a thing like me for interest."

He said nothing.

She waited. She stood in the lamplight and watched his face, the narrow bones and the tired gray eyes and the mouth that held itself like a clenched hand, and waited for him to give her something. The truth, perhaps. A joke. An excuse.

He picked up the pen.

"Good night, Viv," said Dex.

She nodded. She was angry; she was very much more than angry. She stepped back into the glass of the window, and the cold came up over her, and she went.

…

She did not go far.

It was one of her tricks, the half-step, the pause in the in-between, where the glass is a thin gray fog, and the rooms on either side of it are visible like pictures in a bad stereoscope. She stopped there. She had no right to. She told herself that she was checking the window.

He had put down the pen.

He was sitting with the ledger closed and the cane across his knees, quite alone, in a small puddle of lamplight. His shoulders had come down. For the first time since she had known him, he looked like what he was: twenty years old, and exhausted, and in pain. He had one hand on the head of the cane, the one carved like a rattlesnake, and his thumb was moving over the scales, slow and absent, from the head to the tail and back.

His lips were moving.

She could not hear it. She was too far, and the glass swallowed sound. But she could see it, plain as print: a slow shaping of the mouth, a rhythm, a cadence. He wasn't humming. He was saying words, words he did not know, a few syllables at a time, as a man says a prayer in a language he never learned. His eyes were open and fixed on nothing. His thumb moved.

Tail. Head. Tail.

She watched him for what felt like a very long time.

Then she let the glass go, and fell the last gray inch into her own room on Wick Street. It was cold. The bed was made. On the sill, in its square of moonlight, lay the steamship ticket that she'd read so many times its folds had gone to cloth: SS Halcyon Star. Cabin 14. A blue sea, in her mind, half remembered, enormous, and a hand holding hers.

Nobody can sell you that.

She sat on the bed. She took out the red book. She opened it to a clean page, and wrote, in careful, small, upright letters:

Today I did not want to leave.

She looked at it.

She crossed it out. She did it hard, with one stroke, and then another, until the words were a black bar. She closed the book and lay down in her coat, and the ticket lay on the sill, and the hum was still in her head. She did not know why.