“Suit yourself.” Alden handed him a crank-light. “You won’t have to go far when you change your mind.”
After twenty minutes in bed, Nate chose to rewire the alarm system.
It’s thefourthtime, not the fifth.
It took two days.
After that, he started putting together the battery packs Reed and the gang needed to keep their system running at night. He paid too much attention to every pang of hurt and exhaustion that meant he was running out of time, but it didn’t drown out the sounds of distant explosions and the lingering smell of smoke. The world wasn’t going to stop when he was gone. He had to do something to keep them safe, no matter where they hid.
Alden rolled cigarettes on the table next to Nate’s mess of wires and circuits. “What is this for?”
“The gang.”
“It seems I can’t be rid of your Reed, even when he’s gotten rid of you.”
Nate fumbled and pinched his finger with his pliers. A small bead of blood welled up. “Alden! Do you have to do that right there?”
“I can do this right here as much as I please, because this is my shop. And my home. You are my ungrateful, messy guest,” Alden said without venom. “And you should watch your tongue.”
There were plenty of other surfaces for Alden to work on, but he lingered near Nate all day long. Probably to keep a running tally of every bit of tech Nate managed to rummage from dusty drawers and cabinets.
Nate sucked on his finger, grimacing at the taste of blood. “Fine.”
“Do you plan on dropping that tech on their doorstep like the winter witch leaving presents for little boys and girls?”
“I’ll pay a Courier.”
Alden slapped his hand down on the table, startling both of them. He stared at the scattered cigarettes and Nate’s dropped pliers.
“I told you,” Alden said, careful and slow, like he was fighting to make every word sound even. “You can’t go talking to strangers. To customers. To Couriers. To anyone. Gods, Nate. You never listen to me.”
He stalked away to the basement, leaving Nate with a half-finished battery and heavy knot of hurt in his chest.
Unable to focus on the battery after that, Nate found a ladder and went up in the crawlspace to repair the ticker cables for Fran. She kept a ticker by the bed in the back room where she spent most of her days, and lately, the signal had gone patchy. Her room had the nicest furniture in the house—a real bed on a frame and plush, musty carpeting. The season lingered in the mildness between winter and spring, allowing Fran to keep her back window open instead of boarded up.
The sounds of the alleyway—sex and laughing and fighting—filled her room that afternoon as Nate sat on the floor beside her bed, fingers as tangled in the wires of the ticker as hers were in her knitting.
“What’s that?” he asked, waving his pliers toward the mess in her lap. The yarn was orange and slightly shiny, something synthetic that must have been hand-spun from recycled plastic and old cloth.
“A scarf for Alden,” she said, looking over the edge of the bed to study Nate as if watching a cat play with scraps of thread. She wore reading glasses with mismatched lenses. “It will be cold again before it gets warm.”
“How do you know?”
“When you come to be my age, your bones remember. Frontward, backward. You’ll see,” Fran said.
Nate smiled. “You’re good to him.”
“The Old Gods will take me soon,” Fran said with calm certainty. “He’ll need to keep warm.”
“You can’t know that.” Nate turned his attention back to the wires under his fingertips. A shiver ran down his arms, making the fine hairs stand on end. “You’re as strong as a girl half your age.”
Fran chuckled and continued knitting, the needles clicking together with an even, calming rhythm. “Flattering bird, tweeting away at me. Come back to nest, have you?”
“I’m short a few eggs,” Nate said, wincing when his sore finger caught on a sharp edge in the guts of the ticker. “Did you know many GEMs?”
“Not many. Alden’s mother—Gods keep my dear girl—worked at the gates. She said she saw them now and then in motorcars. They wore gray.” Fran paused her knitting and fluttered her knotty fingers at her throat. “And collars, here. Like animals. But she was a fanciful girl, always telling stories.”
“They always died before they were grown?”
