Page 8 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"I've got it. Now tell me what it is, because the brochure said overpriced paperweight, and it's sitting on my table sweating and humming like a fridge."

A pause. In my line of work, the pauses are where the truth lives.

"Leave Prague tonight," he says. "Don't take the route we discussed. Switch everything. Deliver on schedule and you'll never have to think about any of this again."

"What are you hiding from me?"

His breath rattles down the line. "Things got — bigger than I was told. I didn't know. You understand me?"

And there it is. Bastian Graves, who sold himself as the man with every answer, suddenly admitting he was handed only half the script.

"Who's the client?"

The line goes dead. Not hung up. Dead. I set the burner down and stare down at the black thing some more.

Old things gave themselves away if you listened long enough, my father used to say, hunched over some auction-house reject he'd dragged home to fix. He'd let me worry at the seams of a music box for hours before offering one maddening hint. Patience was the whole lesson. Patience, and the stubborn belief that anything made by human hands had a logic hiding somewhere inside it.

I turn it under the light, slow, the way he taught me. Not searching for anything, just looking until the shape gives itself away. And it does.

The markings still look like what my father sketched, years back. Lines doubling back. Repeated symbols. Tiny breaks pretending to be mistakes. Something pulls behind my sternum that isn't fear and isn't grief and is somehow both. Because the logic feels familiar, and I can't say why.

I follow the notches. Press where my intuition takes me, lining the rhythm up like a chord. On the fourth, I drag the reopened scrape on my thumb across a sharp lip of carved stone and hiss — a thin smear of blood, still warm, pushed into the groove.

The relic answers. Not light, not at first. Sound — a low grind, ancient and mechanical, the noise of a thing that hasn't moved in a very long time deciding to move. Seams I never saw split open. Panels the size of fingernails sink and turn. A sliver of pale glow bleeds up from somewhere deep in it, cold as the rest of it, and across the newly opened face crawls a pattern: broken lines, fragments of symbols, numbers that almost make sense and then don't. A route, severed at both ends. Half a map. Maybe less.

This wasn't decoration. This was engineering. Somebody built this to open for blood and patience, which is a horrible design choice and exactly my kind of problem. A thief can sell a stolen object. A thief cannot sell a riddle that just woke up under her hand and started drawing her a road.

The work light dies. Not a flicker — gone, the whole room dropped into rain-gray dark, and half a second later the burner's screen goes black too, jammed. I'm already moving, power and signal don't fail together by accident.

Downstairs, the shop's front lock turns over. Clean. No crowbar, no glass. Picked — fast, better than I could.

Then boots. More than one set, soft-soled, spreading. One pair toward the back stairs, one toward the iron ladder to the roof hatch. Coming at me from two directions at once, quiet as a held breath. Not police. Police announce themselves. These make no sound they don't mean to make.

I sweep the relic into the go-bag, grab my boots, and tip the table across the stairwell door, wedging a chair under the handle.

A voice drifts up through the floor. Low. A language I half-know and can't place — then one clipped word in English, for whoever doesn't speak the first.

"The relic first."

Right. Glad we're all clear on priorities.

I rip the lamp cord from the wall, strip a hand's length of wire with my teeth and a pick, and string it across the top of the back stairs at ankle height. Cheap, ugly, effective. Then I throw a fistful of decades-old book dust of the stairwell — fine paper rot that hangs in the air, ruins night vision, makes strong men cough. Someone on the stairs catches my wire and goes down hard with a grunt and a curse in that same unplaceable tongue.

I go for the floor, it has a hatch under the rug I clocked the first night — an old dumbwaiter shaft that drops straight to the storeroom, because I never sleep anywhere with only one way out. I drop into it.

Halfway down, through a gap in the shelving, I catch her. Not one of the men with guns. A woman, short black hair, pale eyes that find me where the light fades and holds, calm as a Sunday. Nothing pointed at me. She's watching a doorway the gunmen haven't even noticed — counting like I do, as though she's tracking something they don't know is coming. Hunting the hunters. She tips her head half an inch, almost courtesy, and lets me keep falling.

I hit the storeroom floor, roll, and come up running through the dead shop. For one stupid heartbeat my thumb hovers over the burner before I remember it's a brick now — and even if it worked, who would I call? There's no number in there for help.

I miss my father so much my ribs ache worse than the bruise. I bury the thought and get through the storeroom window into the alley, rain swallowing me whole.

There's a backup name sewn into the bag lining and a car two blocks east that isn't mine yet. The night train south runs at 5:40, and I know which carriage door won't latch. By dawn I'll be watching Prague shrink in a smeared window — bruised, furious, carrying a sweating stone that draws maps and just painted a target on me visible to people who pick locks.

Every smart instinct I own says the same thing: cross the river, drop it off the bridge, let the current carry the whole mess down to wherever cursed things go. I tighten the strap across my chest instead.

Bastian's delivery is a trap — has to be. A man that frightened doesn't get to keep his word. Selling it is suicide. Which leaves the only move I've got left, the one my father would've made, the one I hate myself for choosing.

Find out what this thing is before anyone else does. South, then. Toward Vienna. Toward whatever's waiting there.