“With practice and greater discipline and the development of your personal will, yes.”
“Guess nothing’s easy at first, is it?”
“Nothing worthwhile.”
He huffed out a laugh. “How come I’m so hungry?”
“You just packed the output of maybe twenty minutes of exercise into about a second of effort,” I said. “Your body is trying to catch up. You draw a lot more energy from your body until your will works up to the job. Probably why wizards are generally skinny.” I nodded at a backpack in the corner. “Bunch of fruit snacks in there. Go eat some, and we’ll try it again.”
“Nice,” Fitz said with some enthusiasm and seized the pack.
I let him get a few mouthfuls in before I said, “You said you could talk to some folks on the street.”
“Sure,” he said, munching.
“About what?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Shelters giving out food. Places to stay in bad storms. Jobs for a little money. Stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Who’d you talk to about important things?”
Some of that alley cat wariness came back into his expression. “Like what?”
“Life. The future. Pain. That kind of thing.”
He stared at me for a long minute, chewing slowly, his eyes opaque. “You were in the system, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“But not the streets,” Fitz said quietly. Something haunted went through his eyes. “You mostly don’t talk about that stuff.”
Then he turned back to the food, eating like a starving animal. Like one that might bite if I got too close.
There was a knock at the range’s doorway, and Bear loomed up in it. “Dresden,” the Valkyrie said, frowning, “the police are here. They want to talk to you.”
—
Bear had let the officers into the cooler main hall rather than making them wait in the drizzle out on the sidewalk. September had come with considerable rain. The charnel-house stench had begun to fade—though I supposed that might have been all of us just getting used to it. Still. It was probably better for me to choose to believe that the rain was at least beginning to wash the city clean.
According to the news, it was also washing old toxins out of collapsed buildings and into the streets and sewers. But Chicago wasn’t built in a day. It wouldn’t be repaired in a day, either.
Three uniformed officers I didn’t recognize were in the main hall, along with Detective Lieutenant John Stallings of Special Investigations. Stallings was a tall man with greying hair, nearing retirement age. His brown suit hung on him loosely. There were dark bags under his eyes. The officers with him looked tense, though many observers probably wouldn’t have noticed. The hall was otherwise empty, though I suspected the Knights of the Bean would be hanging out in adjacent rooms.
I walked over to Stallings and shook his hand.
“Harry,” he said. “How you holding up?”
“Just trying to keep some people sheltered and fed,” I said. I looked at the uniformed officers. “You here to pick someone up?”
Stallings waved a hand. “Hell, I don’t mind people with rifles keeping things peaceful, given what’s out there. We just don’t go out with less than four these days. Policy.”
“Damn,” I said. “That bad?”
He shrugged. “Last two months, we’ve lost a hundred officers,” he said.
I grimaced. “Gangs?”
“Hell,” he said. “Gangs are keeping some order at this point. Got a lot of people just snapping. You know?”
