onto the fire escape. The metal clanks and I have visions of the Blues coming after me. Just as I’m about to book it, Aven’s face peeks out of the window, her long braid dangling.
“So . . . I know you’re not going to be careful and all,” she mumbles awkwardly. “And that’s fine. But . . . could you try not to die? You see, I was sort of hoping . . . I was sort of hoping you might come around to it, being my best friend, that is. It’d be nice, don’t you think?”
I can’t quite believe her—is that how people do it? Is that how people get to be friends? I’d sort of avoided the whole shebang. Not worth it when they get adopted and want nothing to do with you anymore, or when they die and you want nothing to do with them.
She sees me hesitate. “It’s not like it hurts. What are you so afraid of?”
The challenge in her voice, it’s enough to make me reconsider. Maybe she’s right. It might be nice. To try.
Arching my neck to face her, I whisper, “Yeah, why not? We could be friends. I’ll be sure to stay alive.”
“Yeah? Really?” she asks, disbelieving. The fool grin is back, and she squeals “thank you” about a half dozen times. “Great, ’cause I like you. It’s going to be fun, Renny. Promise.”
Renny?
Aven disappears through the window and just as I turn away, start the climb down, she pops her head out again.
I pause on the ladder, waiting.
“Good skill!” she calls down in a breathy voice.
Now I’m the one cocking my head. “Skill?”
“It’s the opposite of luck!” With that, she throws me an excited wave, and tosses me a penny, before disappearing again into the dorm.
I like that, I think, rolling the penny along my fingers.
Good skill.
Atop the roof of the Empire Clock, right where my mechanic told me to meet him before the races, I jump from drainage pipe to drainage pipe. Up here it’s a tangled knot of them, built when the United Metro Islets was part of a state, and the state was part of a country, and everyone was paying money to someone else, and no one liked it.
A heavy wind sucker punches me to the left—I stumble onto the copper-plated rainwater collection panels. Glad no one’s watching, I think, kicking my boots against the puke-green metal and looking out at the skyline. Most of the buildings are pretty ugly. But standing tall, like a steel seven-layer cake—the Chrysler.
She’d be fun to race on, for sure.
To pass the time, I try and imagine what the Ward was like pre–Wash Out, before ocean levels rose and contaminated underground fresh. Asphalt roads instead of canals, and none of our boardwalks or suspension bridges mazing through the city. People driving cars. On land, not water. Even traveling underground.
I can’t begin to picture it, though. Everything is too different.
Where is he?
It’s just me and the wind, and the boxy, concrete buildings rising up from the canals. I’m not nervous being up here alone, but I don’t much like waiting around. Ain’t like I’m about to leave, though; it took me nearly six months to hunt this guy down. Benson “Benny” Gates, the only outsider to win at the races. He don’t live in the Ward—a West Isler, born and bred—but he owns a garage on Mad Ave where he hardly works.
No one, not even the Blues, wants to come to the Ward since the Blight got bad.
I look across the Hudson Strait, beyond the Ward to the West Isle, and I scowl. That’s his home, in all its perfect, electric glory. I try not to think less of him for it. Shiny skyscrapers touch the sky, built after the Wash Out for wealthy refugees. Some are even brimming over with light . . . at this hour.
Makes me want to eat my fist. I hate them for it. Who are they to have everything? They can afford black market bottles of Upstate fresh for the price of a kidney. Don’t even have the cancer virus over there. No need to funnel rainwater off their rooftops.
And all they did was get born on the right side of the Strait.
Why do we get the short end of the stick?
It ain’t fair.
The clock gongs straight to my brain—I bang my hands against my ears and wait for the eleventh chime, after which Benny Gates will officially be late.