Chapter 5: Dawn on the Dock

I remember that night in pieces.

The first piece is the lamp.

One of the guards swung it at Emeric's face, and the blue-white light caught his forearm instead.

His sleeve burned away in a hiss, and his skin blistered black from wrist to elbow.

He didn't scream.

He took the lamp out of the man's hands by the barrel, snapped it over his knee, and threw the guard through the front window.

"Back door," he told me, through his teeth. "The carriage house."

The second piece is the carriage house.

There was a dusty black motorcycle under a canvas sheet.

He kicked it to life with his good arm.

"Get on," he said, and I got on.

We went out through the garden gate in a spray of gravel.

Two of the black cars were behind us before we hit Meeting Street.

The third piece is the church.

We ditched the bike in an alley.

I ran with his burned arm slung across my shoulders and the smell of cooked meat in my nose.

We went through a side door of a church, then through its cellar, then through a low brick passage that came out three blocks away.

"How do you know this way?" I panted.

"I've been running from them for six years," he said. "I've learned the tunnels."

He was getting slower.

I could feel him leaning on me, and the heat in his arm, and the way he kept looking at the sky.

By five, my phone had four missed calls from Winnie and a text that said WHERE ARE YOU, GIRL.

I called her from behind a trash bin and told her to bring the van to the end of the Gadsden pier.

"Is it the man?" she said.

"He's hurt, Winnie."

"Does he bite?"

"Only if I ask," I said, and she laughed, a little wildly, and hung up.

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