Page 83 of Rogue’s Mark

"After the fire, my father quit. You know that. He gave up, said the city was already gone, and instead of fighting he just... folded." My throat is tight. "And I was so angry at him for it. For years. I told myself I hated him for quitting, for just throwing in the towel."

I look at the empty lot instead of at her. "But that's not the whole truth. The whole truth is that when he left town, I let him. I didn't go after him. I didn't look. I told myself I was too angry, but the angrier I let myself stay, the less I had to admit I was wrong."

"Which was?"

"That I gave up on him." The words come out rough. "Exactly the way he gave up on this place. He quit the shop, and I quit him, and I've spent years calling it a grudge because a grudge is easier to carry than the truth, that I have a father out there somewhere, alive, and I never crossed the street to find him."

Vi’s eyes are wet.

"And then I watched you," I say. "I watched you risk everything, multiple times, for your dad. I stood there in the corner thinking, she's doing the one thing I never had the guts to do."

"Rogue—"

"I think I want to find him, Vi." It's the first time I've said it to a living soul, and saying it cracks open something that's been welded shut.

I take a deep breath. "My father. I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he'd want to see me. But I'm done pretending I don't want to know. If you'd come with me, not today but maybe someday. I did everything else alone for too long. I don't want to do that one by myself."

She steps closer, and she doesn't tell me it'll be okay or that he'll want me or any of the things people say when they don't know. She just says, "Whenever you're ready."

And that should be the whole reason I brought her here. But it isn't, not quite. There's one more thing.

I take it out of my pocket.

I've been carrying it for so long, it doesn't feel like a separate object anymore, more like a part of my hand. For years, it was a piece of scorched metal I pulled out of the wreck the day after Dad’s shop burned. I didn't even know what it was, originally. Maybe a bracket off a bike, a piece of the workbench, something like that. I just couldn't leave all of it in the ash. So I took one piece, and I've carried it ever since, from one corner of the Rot to another.

A few nights ago, I figured out why.

"I made you something," I say.

It's a ring. Plain, dark, a little rough at one edge no matter how long I filed it, because the metal's old and it's been through a fire and some things keep their scars. I made it in the Rot with my own hands, the way three generations of men in my family made things with theirs, melting down the one piece of Delaney Street I ever managed to save and turning it into something I could give her.

"It's the shop," I say, before she can speak. "What's left of it. It's the only piece I had." I turn it so she can see the inside, where I stamped the letters myself, small and uneven but permanent. Delaney Street. "I thought you might carry it too, like I did for so long."

For a long moment, Vi can't talk at all. She just looks at the ring, and then at the empty lot, and then at me, and the tears finally spill.

"You made this," she says. "From the shop."

"From the shop."

"Rogue." She presses her lips together, hard, fighting to hold it together. "This is the best thing anyone has ever given me. And you're giving it to me on the worst piece of ground in your whole life."

"No." I take her hand, and I slide my mark onto her finger.

My father’s shop, my family, and years of carrying a scrap I scavenged from a burned-out building, all of it finally where it belongs. "This used to be the worst piece of ground. That's the whole point of bringing you here." I look at the empty lot, and for the first time in years, it doesn't gut me.

"You just made it the best."

57

ROGUE

Vi and I walk back into the Rot at dusk, and for once, I'm not looking over my shoulder.

That's the thing I notice, somewhere around the hub. For years, I've never walked through a door without reading the room first, counting the ways out, bracing for the thing that might be waiting. Tonight, I just walk in beside Vi with her hand in mine and the ring I made on her finger, and the only thing I'm bracing for is the rest of my life.

Armen and Sting are in the corridor outside our rooms, because of course they are. They've been waiting up. They'd never say it, but they have.

Vi doesn't say anything. She just lifts her hand.