Read Online Two Serpents Rise by Max Gladstone - Free Book Online Page B

pendant dangled around her neck, but it did not glow. She cocked her head to one side like a bird either curious or about to strike. Her eyes were wide, her eyebrows raised.
    “If it isn’t the policeman,” she said.
    “I’m no Warden. I’m not trying to arrest you.”
    “Then why are you here? You’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find me.”
    “I need to talk to you. For your own safety.”
    “You do know how to make a girl feel safe,” she said, and: “A week from tonight, on top of the Rakesblight Center, at ten. Come. Race. If you catch me, then we’ll talk.”
    “I’ll catch you.”
    “Let’s see.” She touched the back of his right hand with her fingertip, cool and smooth and hard-polished from gripping rock. He closed his eyes, consciousness slipping; when he opened them again, she was gone.
    He fell, right arm wheeling and left jutting at an odd angle from the socket: an angel with one wing broken. He struck something heavy and round and human, and thick arms set him gently on the broken ground. Caleb looked up into Balam’s blunt face. Other cliff runners peered down, astonished and confused. They crowded him with warmth.
    “You still want to catch her?” Balam asked as Caleb struggled against his body’s weight to rise.
    “Yes.”
    The trainer didn’t reply.
    Caleb closed his eyes, and thought about Mal, and about this strange massive man, old in middle age, and about Shannon and her scar. Who was Mal, to have this hobby?
    He levered himself into a sitting position, and the pain from his arm almost made him vomit.
    “You love the ground too much,” Balam said. “Or it loves you.”
    “Where’s the nearest hospital?”
    All told, once he escaped the god-shattered wasteland, once he staggered into a hospital waiting room, once the doctor looked down over the gold rims of her glasses and reached through his skin to set his shoulder from the inside, once he woke from the swoon of pain and soul-loss, he judged the evening a success.
    Seven days. More than enough time to heal, and prepare.
    When Teo met him in the hospital, she looked so worried he almost didn’t tell her the story.
    “I suppose you’ll call the whole thing off now,” she said as he tested his mended shoulder’s strength. “Hand her over to the authorities.”
    “I can’t quit now.” He reached for his pants. “I’ve almost won our bet.”

 
    10
    Two days later, wounds healed and mind unsettled, he stalked Teo’s office.
    “What do I have to do,” she said, looking up from a pile of paperwork, “to get you out of here so I can focus?”
    “Thanks for your support. I’m in trouble.”
    “What happened to the cocky attitude? I’ve almost won, all that stuff?”
    “I have almost won.”
    “But you’re pacing.”
    “I’m so close. It’s this last little part that’s the problem.”
    “The part where you have to beat a runner at her own race.”
    “That’s the one.”
    “You know what you should do. Tell Tollan, fall on your sword and”—she waved the quill tip of her pen at the door—“walk away.”
    “Would you give up, if our situations were reversed?”
    “Of course.”
    “I think she’s innocent.”
    “You’re infatuated.”
    “I’m not. I want to help her.”
    “Because she’s pretty.”
    “Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And pretty is not even the right word. She burns. She’s a verb.”
    “You’re an idiot.”
    “You fall for people all the time.”
    “Fall is certainly the operative word in this case.” Teo returned her pen to its copper stand with an exasperated click of quill on metal. “I’ve never dated a key suspect in an ongoing investigation. As far as I recall, and feel free to correct me, I’ve never come back from a date with anything worse than a hangover. How many bones did you break last week?”
    “That’s beside the point,” he said, though it wasn’t. He studied one of the paintings on her office wall: a canvas awash with