We Leave Together, стр. 9
“Hey,” he shouted, “You going anywhere near this box I found?” He held the box up with his one good hand. The address pointed up at the carriage driver. He averted his eyes.
The mudskipper pulled the box back into his body. He walked down to the next dogcart. The driver bit his thumb at the boy.
Normally no one cared about a little dropper. If you’re dumb enough to fall for the scam, you deserve the trash inside of it. This mudskipper was wearing a crown on his head of bent metal.
Geek asked Jona if he was interested in the contents of the box. Jona nodded. Geek went around the corner with a quick step. Jona watched until he saw Geek on the other side of the boy, poking around from an alley in front of the body.
Then Jona walked towards the boy fast. He wanted the boy to see the king’s man coming for him. The mudskipper jumped to run for it, but Geek snagged the boy by the hair below the crown and pulled.
The box fell and the boy was screaming.
Jona snatched the box.
Inside was a dead rat, half-eaten and rancid.
“That ain’t yours, king’s man!” shouted the mudskipper.
“Right, you are, Mudskipper,” said Jona, “This here rat belongs to… My goodness, Corporal, did you know that the name on this box does not exist in this city?”
“It do!” shouted the boy.
Pup pushed the boy against a wall and tied the boy’s hand to one of his ankles behind his back. The deformed hand bounced in the air.
“It do! I found the box.”
Jona rolled his eyes. “You’re dropping. That’s your grind. Don’t act like you weren’t.”
“I wasn’t dropping.”
“Nobody cares that you were dropping. Where’d you get that sharp-looking crown, kid? Someone give that to you?”
“I’m not your birdy, king’s man!” the boy spit.
Jona smacked him across the face. Geek had a good grip on him, with both hands. Jona pulled the crown off and looked hard at it.
“Lots of you runts running around with crowns,” said Geek. “You think you’re a street gang? You forming up some kind of operation?”
The boy spit again, and got hit again.
Geek hefted the boy up off the ground and over a shoulder. “I’ll run him in and question him,” said Geek. “He might not survive if you run the interrogation.”
Jona grunted assent, holding the crown.
Jona watched Geek with the boy on his shoulders. He stood in the street, alone. He stepped into an alley, and watched the street. He sat on a barrel. He pulled a flask from his jacket. He drank until it was empty. He turned the crown over and over in his hand.
He hadn’t seen Rachel for three days. He had been looking for her.
Corporal Jona Lord Joni was not the kind to swallow his own anger like a rotten fruit. His mind reached out for someone to dwell upon—someone to push.
Jona curled his fist and punched his palm. He wanted to kill someone. A name emerged from his lips, and he knew he couldn’t kill the fellow, but he could hurt him. He could hurt him, bad.
“Salvatore Fidelio,” said Jona.
There was a darkness in him and Jona recognized it. He thought of it as the black demon in his chest. He felt it there, pumping acid in his veins in darkness. It was an evil feeling. It made him want to crawl into a black corner of the basement, where his father used to stand in chains in the night, and sit in the dark alone a long time.
CHAPTER 3
Like a flock of ravens flying low to the ground—layer upon layer of fluttering black cloth—the form of a man ran in the gaps of the black clothes. Jona stood between two buildings on the dark side of the street, where the moon was blocked by a long eave. Jona peeked around the corner at the man he had followed through the night.
Jona shadowed the edge of crowds. He moved from alley to alley in the dark over sleeping men and wet rags and shit and broken crates.
Then, out of the Pens, and down into a sewer and up again and into a shadow and Jona watched Salvatore Fidelio scurry over the yards. These street alleys were walled by fences that held small gardens back from cobblestones. In the alleys here, Jona had to hunch low to stay in a shadow and he was mostly alone among strays and trash.
Salvatore didn’t try to hide anymore. He walked down the middle of the street like a resident, dressed in fine clothes for the location. Tonight he was going to a ball, uninvited, to steal the costume jewelry that crashers wore and then lost to the thieves. The thieves would sell them to the fence where the crashers would buy their own costume jewelry again. As long as none of the true guests were robbed, no one would stop him.
And a young woman was awake right now, leaning out of her window. Her red hair was a purple ribbon in the streetlamp glow. Her skin mirrored moonlight.
She and Salvatore kissed. She crept from her window in a chiffon dress. She had to hold the edges up to keep the weeds of the yard from dirtying her hem. In the street, she held his hand and skipped like a child. Salvatore tried to calm her down, and be less conspicuous.
Jona waited. He knew where they were going, and felt no need to go to Lady Sabachthani’s garden gathering of thieves and noblemen and those who aspired to both ranks uninvited. Two more lovers in fine clothes ran away from a house in the dark, smiling like fools—like Aggie had smiled. Jona waited until he couldn’t hear the soles of their boots on the cobblestone. Then, Jona listened for any new noises in the night. He heard wind. He