What is that, fifteen, twenty feet? she thought. There’s no way. I’ll be lucky if I only break my legs.
The sound of splintering wood spun her around. A third frenzied punch tore the door open halfway up the frame, knocking out a rectangular panel and sending it to the bathroom floor, shattered down the middle like a board in a karate school. Rime forced an arm through the door. His stolen skin ripped on a jagged splinter while he fumbled for the knob and the lock.
Nell’s eyes shot toward the clutter on the bathroom sink. A can of deodorant spray stood tall above the mess like a gleaming silver bullet. She snatched up the can, aimed for the broken panel, and blasted Rime in the face. The assassin fell back with a strangled-cat yowl, clawing at his eyes. Nell dropped the can and raced back to the window. She dug deep, strength fueled by a rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline that felt like the dive of a roller coaster, and shoved the window as hard as she could. It jolted upward then caught in the frame at an angle and froze there, jammed up tight. Hot wind gusted in from the alley. The gap was a good three feet, wide enough for Nell to squeeze through to the other side. She slung one of her legs over the windowsill. Then she tossed the binder out the window, its plastic-sheathed pages fluttering, rippling as it fell.
Her gaze followed it down. Then she wished she hadn’t looked. Black asphalt and stray trash below, nothing to break her fall but the battered plastic lid of a dumpster a couple of feet left of the drop. If she grabbed hold of the sill, lowering herself as much as she could, then carefully swung herself toward the trash bin—
The bathroom door blew open under a brutal kick, its knob torn and dangling from the ravaged wood as the door leaned on a twisted hinge. Rime stood in the doorway. He’d collected a new knife from the professor’s kitchen, seven inches of stainless steel, eager to carve. He lunged for her and Nell shoved herself through the window and then she was falling free. The wind whistled in her ears and her stomach dove for half a second before she hit the weathered dumpster lid on her shoulder. The thick plastic buckled beneath her. She bounced, rolled, and the asphalt rushed up to greet her for the last few feet of the drop.
Nell landed hard on the alley floor, one sleeve of her blouse torn open, her forearms skinned raw. She felt blood welling up, and her hip was on fire as she forced herself to her knees and then to her feet. Rime loomed in the window. He glared down at her like a lion who had just been denied its lunch.
She scooped up the fallen binder and hugged it to her chest, tight in her trembling arms. Her treasure. Her future.
“I’m still alive,” she called up to him. “And I’m still standing. What else have you got?”
The Hessian turned and vanished from the window. Nell looked to the alley mouth, the busy street beyond, and forced her aching body to run.
55.
“May I speak to Julio, please?”
“He’s on his lunch break, should be back in twenty.”
It was Tyler’s decision to warn the Culpers about the empty statue they were guarding, but Seelie ended up carrying out the plan. It came down to research: either of them could pore over the public records, hunting for the gravesite, but Seelie was in a better position to sift through the Culper network’s historical archives. She’d had her own brush with the past, up close and personal, and might spot something only she would recognize. The morning found her in Harlem, hustling up from a subway platform with the straight razor in her back pocket and the mission on her mind.
It didn’t take long for that mission to go sour. It started with a creepy-crawly feeling along the back of her neck, skin prickling, telling her the street was wrong. She didn’t see anyone in the crowd looking her way, but she felt it. She ducked out of the flow of traffic, inside an outcropping of sand-yellow brick, and checked her reflection in the plate-glass window of a fried chicken joint. Pretended to, anyway, while she scanned the ghosts in the blurry glass to see if anyone sketchy was rolling up behind her.