Detan followed.
Three heights of a man up the side of the Smokestack Ripka disappeared over a ledge. He dragged himself onward, and nearly lost his hold when her arm reached over the side, hand open wide to grab his. He took it, hoping she couldn’t feel the tremble in his limbs, and allowed himself to be hauled up onto the narrow ledge.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Didn’t expect the help.” He brushed filth from his hands. “Startled me, was all.”
“We’re partners in this.” Even as she spoke she turned her back to him, examining the next leg of their climb. Partners, indeed.
“Used to doing things my own self,” he muttered.
Ripka glanced over her shoulder at him, brows raised. “Don’t you usually work with Tibal?”
“Sure, but Tibs has usually got his own end to handle, you understand.”
In the dark the whites of her eyes flashed as she rolled them and he smirked, pleased with himself. It was one thing getting the goat of Tibs, quite another to rustle the calm of an honest-to-sky woman of the law.
The doppel parading as Ripka had given him a false sense of familiarity with her. He found himself wanting to make remarks she wouldn’t get. Point out things that probably didn’t matter a whit to her. Make cracks about ropes and chairs and rather nice bags. It was difficult, come to think of it, to separate out what was the original article from the interpretation.
As they rested, easing out the soreness in their fingers from the climb, he decided to bridge this gap of knowledge. “You never did tell me why you donned the blues.”
She hesitated, glancing back to judge his expression, and said, “Don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“Thratia finds me rollicking about with you and I’m a dead man, so I think I at least got a right to know a bit about you. At the very least you owe me just why in the pits Galtro’s death matters so much to you.”
“What makes you think his death is rankling me any more than any other good man’s death would? I got a job to do in this city, Honding, something I’m aware you’re not particularly familiar with but, try to understand, it’s my duty.”
“Easy, captain. You don’t know spit from salt when it comes to me and my own sense of duty, but I’m sure I’ve got my eye in when it comes to yours. Big city like this one has gotta have men of all sort, good and bad, getting murdered on the regular and I don’t see you getting yourself all dressed up like a damned shadow to steal evidence over those. May not have been you in the flesh telling me Galtro was your man for warden, but I know your actress played it true, eh? He mattered to you, whether you care to admit it or not. Wouldn’t be out here risking your sun-slapped ass with me if you didn’t. Your better half said he’d been a mentor, that true?”
She stood with her arms folded, though her hands ended in gnarled fists. “True enough. He got me hired as a watcher. Satisfied?”
“Seems I never am, but that will do for an answer.”
“Oh wonderful. Now maybe we can move on? Sun’s only been down two marks but I’d like to make quick work of this if at all possible. Unless you fancy getting stuck out on the Black Wash come the day?”
“After you, captain.”
By the time they dragged themselves onto the comfortably flattened plateau which housed the Hub, Detan was breathing through his mouth and nose all at once to hide his panting. Ripka crept ahead of him, her chest heaving at an annoyingly calm rate and not but a few strands of hair flown loose from her braid. He was beginning to hate her.
They eased out onto a ledge of rock just behind the squat structure, and side by side they scorpion-crawled to the edge to see over. Below, the Hub was shrouded in night. The feeder pipelines connecting to the central containment chamber lay limp and dormant, lacking the familiar hum of an active selium mine. A few shadowed figures moved in clockwork circles around the building, and though their features were obscured by the dark there was no need to guess at their purpose.
“Not much of a guard,” he said.
Ripka shrugged. “What’d you expect? She’s confident, and she’s got the ferry shut down. Who would bother crossing the sands out here for nothing, anyway? There’s no work to be done. Look at the lines, they’re flat as man’s chest.”
“Never seen a man gifted in the bosom?”
She cast him a sideways smile. “I’ve endeavored not to make that particular moment part of my daily vernacular.”
“Wise.” He gave her the sagest nod he could muster.
“Indeed. You see a way in?”
“There are only two guards.”
He heard her inhale, harsh and through the teeth. “I’d rather not harm anyone, even Thratia’s brutes.”
“Well good, because my proposed means of ingress is entirely peaceable. I can’t imagine what you were thinking my intentions were, but I assure you that in pointing out the paucity of guards I only meant to illustrate that it would be simpler for us to gain entry unnoticed.”
“Will you get on with it?”
“Fine.” He sighed. “Follow me.”
The way down the small ridge was treacherous, but they made it without any misstep too loud or too injurious. Twice Ripka needled him for information regarding his knowledge of the working of a standard Hub layout, and twice he brushed it aside as knowledge most ex-sel workers were slow in forgetting. He was beginning to grow weary of having to lie to her, which was a first.
Alongside the limp arm of one of the feeder pipelines, he halted her with an extended hand and crouched to indicate she should follow suit. Hunkered down beside the deflated sheath of leather, he watched the second guardsman wander by little more than one flying leap away.
Detan grinned like an idiot at his own good luck and solid memory. When the guard moved out of sight, he grabbed her wrist and dragged her after him as he dashed for a portal so well shrouded in the curve of the building that he couldn’t even see it until he was upon it, though he knew what to look for.
He shoved his hand in the handle cubby and felt for the four depressions in which his fingers would fit. Saying a little prayer to the skies and the pits, he pressed down the clockworked buttons in the pattern that would have gained him admittance to the same door at a different Hub back home. The cubby shivered as the mechanism released, and with a gentle nudge the door swung inward. They rushed after it and closed it tight behind. Detan lay for a moment with his back against the door, blessing the Valathean Empire for exchanging security for ease of production.
“How’d you know the code?” she demanded.
“Easy, that. The empire makes all Hubs everywhere the same. Cheapens production, and they don’t worry about security too much because the kind of person who would have the tapcode for one Hub shouldn’t have any reason to be denied the tapcode for another. Simple.”
She pressed her lips together and placed her hands on her hips. “How’d you come to know it?”
“You already forgetting I worked the line once?”
Even in the faint light of stars filtering into the hallway, he could make out the flush on her cheeks. “I heard you went to the line when your skills as a diviner failed, and then again you shirked the line when your sel-sense dried up altogether.”
“I didn’t shirk a damned thing.”
He turned from her before he could see her face and stared straight down the hall, into the heart of the Hub. The cloth of her shirt rustled as she shifted, and her long hair hissed over the smooth material. The sound made him grind his teeth and revise his earlier opinion of her competence as a footpad. Didn’t she know smooth material had a sheen that stood out? Didn’t she know leather creaked and hair got in your eyes right when you didn’t want it to?