He held out a small box to me. “And take one of these today, and one in three months.”
I took the sealed box from him and read the label. “Liquid vitamin D?” I asked.
Shade sniffed, his hands falling to his hips again. He looked off into the distance. “You’ve finally got some sunlight. Might as well stick some calcium to your bones.”
“That’s…” Incredibly nice. I didn’t think he wanted to hear that, though. He was scowling. “Thanks,” I said again, pressure growing beneath my ribs.
“How many are you?” He looked at me again. “The whole crew?”
“Five,” I answered. No one but Jax had come to the door, so Shade hadn’t seen any of the others yet.
Shade nodded. “There’s enough for everyone.”
He’d thought of the others? That was even better. “Wow. Okay. Great. I’ll pay you back for this.”
He shook his head.
“I insist.”
“No.” He barked the word as if he were angry or something. Again.
Surprise and gratitude and confusion all jumped inside me like solar flares, heating me up. Shyness had been burned out of me in the first few weeks of incarceration with the help of Hourglass Mile’s communal showers and vermin-killing soap, but Shade Ganavan was one-man proof that I could still get embarrassed.
I took a step back. Then another. I climbed on board the ship, having let down the stairs for once. It had been more practical for carrying coffee.
“All right. Thanks,” I said from the doorway.
I turned and moved deeper into the Endeavor, hoping the shadow of the hat’s brim had hidden the bright flush across my face.
* * *
I gathered a small selection of books while Shade got to work filing down the rough edges of the hull where he’d eventually attach the reinforced plates. I said goodbye to the people inside the ship and then to the person outside. Just before I stepped into the elevator tube to head toward Flipping Pages, Shade called out, “Keep your head down, Tess.”
I nodded, figuring he was serious about that, since he hadn’t called me buttercup or some other crap.
There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t think Shade Ganavan knew his way around his city and most of what was going on in it. And he’d seen how I’d reacted to that Dark Watch goon in his shop, since playing it cool hadn’t really cropped up. I doubted I’d hidden a single moment of my panic, fear, and flight from Shade, and if he was telling me to keep my head down, he probably meant that Windrow was a district that soldiers patrolled—maybe more than others. It made me extra glad to have his hat. With it, I could look around but still have a shadow on my face.
With five of the rare books in my bag, vitamin D in my body for the first time in years, and sunlight on my bare arms at least, I wound my way out of the docks—noticing plenty of spare platforms on towers other than the Squirrel Tree as I went.
Damn swindlers. Shade had been right.
Ground level was busy—busier than on the previous day. But it was also earlier. The pedestrian lanes were clean and wide, especially the farther I got from the docking towers, and there were even some small trees and shrubs planted here and there to break up the endless monotony of man-made constructions.
The city teemed with people, machines, vehicles of all kinds, some robots, and, weirdly, a whole lot of cats. I’d seen cats before, but only in live-stream videos. The felines were usually stalking birds, running from dogs, or doing what looked like death-defying acrobatics. These cats weren’t doing much of anything, though. They were just walking around or sitting there in the sunshine, watching this world go by.
Making it to Windrow wasn’t the same thing as finding the bookseller I needed, so I typed Baxton and Lorn into one of the interactive Albion City assistance stands on a busy street corner. A grid pattern instantly popped up on the screen in front of me, mapping out the best route to get there. I turned and walked on, learning the neighborhood as I went.
Flipping Pages already looked special from the outside with the Vivica Vot quotes decorating the storefront, but once I opened the door, it was pure magic. A window into something else. My heart hung suspended for a moment, waiting for the rest of me to catch up.