Chapter 4: His Side of the Cot

At dawn the wolf was gone and Brand was on the porch in his jeans, barefoot, drinking something black out of a tin cup.

I sat down beside him.

"Fifty-one minutes," I said.

He didn't look at me. "What?"

"You held it fifty-one minutes. I stopped counting when you shifted back."

"You should've been sleeping."

"Your clock says three."

"My clock says what the Registry says."

"Your clock is a lie, Brand."

He drank his coffee.

"Everybody out here knows that," he said finally. "Doesn't matter. Their number's the one on the cage."

"It matters if we can prove it."

"We?"

"Your sister builds rigs. Can she build a stability reader?"

"She stole one." He jerked his chin at the next container over. "Ask her yourself. Bring coffee or she bites."

Sable's workshop was a container stuffed to the roof with wire, engine parts and dead screens.

She was asleep on a bench with a soldering iron still in her hand.

I put the cup by her ear.

She opened one eye. "The princess makes coffee?"

"Your brother made it. I'm just the courier."

She sat up and drank half of it.

The rig was a Registry clock reader, the same model the Gate used, with its casing cracked and half its board rewired.

I picked it up. I'd tuned forty of these at the Institute.

"Your gain's wrong," I said. "That's why it keeps redlining."

"It's not wrong. Every beast I put on it redlines."

"Every beast?"

"Every one worth anything." She shrugged. "I figured it was broken."

I opened the casing, moved two wires and recalibrated it against her bench battery.

Sable watched me the whole time without blinking.

"Okay," she said. "You're not useless."

"Get your brother."

Brand sat on an oil drum with the leads taped to his chest, under his shirt, over the scales.

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