Chapter 306: Bagins’ Collection.
Men came out of the car and joined the long-chinned man, and they were surprisingly ordinary.
That was the first thing that struck me. No masks. No uniform. No attempt at looking like anything at all. Six of them, most of them young, faces lit orange by their own headlights, the kind of boys you’d walk past outside a shop without a second thought. One had ink climbing both arms and across his neck in dark, dense patterns. Another kept shifting his weight from foot to foot as if the asphalt itself were uncomfortable.
That made them worse, not better. Men who bother with masks are still pretending they might go back to being someone afterward. These ones had already decided there was nothing left to go back to.
"I told you people always use this street," Trapper said. The long chin moved above me. His voice was calm, almost conversational, the tone of a man discussing weather.
"It’s one." One of them came round the front of the car and looked down at me. The headlight caught the side of his face and left the other half in shadow. "The other one’s just a girl."
"A girl." Trapper widened his palm and the mesh eased a fraction across my chest—enough to feel the difference, not enough to use. "Girls don’t walk at night. Girls are behind doors with the furniture stacked against them. Anyone out here is strong enough to be out here, and your professor wants both of them."
The professor.
I lay still under the net and let it assemble.
Bagins. A day ago I watched a blade go through his throat and now he has every speaker in the capital and boys collecting people for him. The arithmetic of it sat cold and clean behind my eyes.
A reunion is the last thing either of us needs tonight.
"He said no more fucking females." The boy hadn’t moved. His boots were scuffed. The rifle on his shoulder hung loose, almost forgotten. "The mad bitch he’s already got has been screaming at him since this afternoon. We can’t roll back in with two girls and one man for a whole hunting hour."
"He’s right, Trapper." A second one stepped forward—the one with the ink up both arms and across his neck—and the way the others shifted around him told me who he was. "Last crew came back with ten. Ten, and not one girl in it. We’ve got ten minutes left on the hour."
"Wait." Trapper’s voice changed. The calm thinned. "Now I’m hearing men working their way round to not paying me."
Nobody answered that. The headlights hummed. Somewhere far off the chanting continued, thinner now, worn by distance.
"I don’t give a shit what your professor wants. I’ve caught you three people tonight. Three. That’s a bronze coin and it was a bronze coin when we shook on it."
My eyes kept moving—boots, hands, the angles of the rifles, the distance to the open car doors.
He isn’t one of them.
That mattered. Trapper wasn’t Bagins’ man, he was a contractor. Somebody who’d found the one thing he was good at and started selling it by the head twelve hours into a collapse. Which meant there was a seam between him and the boys, and seams are where things come apart.
"You’ve caught one." The tattooed boy started walking toward Venna. His boots made soft, deliberate sounds on the asphalt.
She was still on her side in the mesh and her eyes hadn’t left me since she went down. Waiting. Certain I was about to do something. Her hair was tangled in the weave. The street light laid a hard yellow stripe across her cheek.
Not yet. Six of them, a car, and my arm’s pinned across my own chest.
"Let me put her down." He pulled a stake from his belt—short, dark wood, the end sharpened to a crude point. "Then you’ve caught two, and two is what you’re getting paid for."
He raised it. The shadow of the stake climbed Venna’s face.
"She’s an ability user."
He stopped with his arm still up. The stake hung in the air between them.
"What?"
"I said she’s an ability user." I kept it level, almost bored. The words left my mouth against the mesh and came out clean. "Put a stake in her and then go explain to your professor why you threw away an ability holder."
He lowered it and crouched beside her instead. The leather of his boots creased. Up close the ink on his neck resolved into something dense and personal—names, or dates, or the kind of marks people put on themselves when they want the world to know they’ve already decided who they are.
"Are you an ability user?"
"Yes," Venna said. The single word was steady. No hesitation. No embellishment.
He looked at her a moment longer. The headlight threw the side of his face into hard relief. Then he stood. The stake went back into his belt with a soft, final sound.
"We’re taking her."
"Now give me my fucking bronze," Trapper said. The long chin had gone tight.
"You’ll get it."
"Now."
"Relax." The boy didn’t turn round. His eyes stayed on Venna for another second, then moved to the car. "You get paid. First get your nets off them and help us put them in the car."
"Don’t fuck with me."
"Nobody’s fucking with you." He finally looked over his shoulder. The ink on his neck shifted with the movement. "You’re fucking with yourself."
Trapper stood there for a second. The headlights threw his shadow long across both of us. The decision moved through him visibly—calculation, pride, the particular arithmetic of a man who had already been paid in promises once tonight and was deciding how much more of it he could swallow.
"Fine."
He opened both palms and the mesh came off us in one motion, retracting across the road and into his hands like something being inhaled, and dissolving between his fingers. The weave left faint red lines across my wrists and the back of my neck where it had bitten.
Manifestor. That’s why there was no throw. He grew them on top of us.
I had my hands free for about two seconds before they were behind my back and bound. Coarse rope. Tight. The knot was practiced. My shoulders pulled.
They walked us to the rear of the car. The tattooed boy already had the boot standing open. The interior light threw a weak yellow rectangle across the asphalt. The air that came out of it smelled of rubber, old oil, and something sourer underneath.
I went in first.
Somebody was already in there.
The girl from King’s crew. Wrists and ankles tied, mask pulled down around her throat, and I knew her from the clothes before I saw her face—the same dark fabric, the same scuffed boots. Linn. Her eyes found mine in the dim light and held for a second, furious and exhausted and completely without surprise.
"You lot are fucking idiots," she said as they started folding Venna in beside her. The words were tight with the effort of speaking through a dry mouth. "Have you even checked these people? You’ll put me in here with a zombie and find out at sunrise."
"Shut the fuck up," Trapper said, shoving Venna’s legs clear of the latch. The motion was rough. Venna’s shoulder pressed against Linn’s. Her hair fell across both of them in the weak light.
"That’s exactly why I hate girls," one of the boys said from behind him. The voice was almost cheerful.
The three of us went in, the two of them squeezed along one side and me across from them with my shoulder against the wheel arch. The metal was cold. The space was smaller than it had any right to be. My bound wrists pressed into the small of my back. The ceiling of the boot was close enough that the air itself felt compressed.
"My bronze," Trapper said. The words came from above us, outside the frame of the open boot.
"I’ve got you," the tattooed boy said.
And he swung the stake into the side of his face before the smile had finished forming.
The sound was short and wet and final. Trapper dropped where he stood. Not dead. I could hear him breathing from where I lay, wet and uneven through a broken nose, one leg still twitching against the road.
Two of them got him under the arms and folded him into the boot next to me. The weight of him settled against my side. The smell of him came in with him—sweat and blood and whatever he’d been drinking to get through the night. His head lolled against the wheel arch. The twitching in his leg continued for another few seconds and then slowed.
"There." The tattooed boy looked down at the four of us packed in. The headlight behind him turned his face into a silhouette edged in orange. "Now we’ve got four for our hour."
One of the others laughed. The sound was short and pleased.
"Fuck." Linn twisted her head away from Trapper’s shoulder. The motion was sharp, disgusted. "Now I’m packed in here with a smelly unconscious guy."
The boot came down.
The lock went across with a solid, final thunk.
Darkness took the four of us whole. The engine note rose. The car pulled out into the road, and the last thing I felt before the motion settled was the heat of Venna’s knee against mine in the compressed black, and the wet sound of Trapper’s breathing continuing somewhere near my left shoulder.