The Beast Tamers Hidden System

CHAPTER 5: THE ASSAY LENS

Adrian ran the last two blocks with the inhaler in one fist and the poster still burning behind his eyes.

He’d torn it off the lamppost without thinking. Now it was crumpled in his coat pocket, and the sound of crisp cloth against his ribs seemed loud enough to carry. At the corner of Cutler Row he slowed, because someone had parked a black-and-crimson wagon outside the tailor’s shop.

Two men stood on the pavement. A third was knocking on the door of the building next to his.

They’re going door to door.

Mina was upstairs with Nyx, and the building had one staircase.

He didn’t run. Running would look like a reason. He walked past the wagon at a pace he hoped was bored, nodded at the nearest hunter, and slipped through the shop’s side entrance and up the stairs two at a time the moment he was out of sight.

[ Warning: Hostile scan detected nearby. ]

The System’s pane flickered to life in the corner of his vision, faint and blue, and under it the bond hummed with sharp, wary attention. Nyx had felt it too.

Mina’s door was open. She was already sitting up in bed with her book in her lap, and Nyx sat beside her, ears flat, tail twitching.

“There’s a man at the Hendersons’,” Mina said. Her voice was thin and very calm. “I heard him say ‘assay lens.’”

“I know. Listen to me.”

“I know what you’re going to say.” She pulled back the blanket. “I’m sick. I’m in bed. The room’s got damping plaster. They can’t read through it.”

He stared at her.

“Dr. Okafor put it in when I was seven,” she said. “The aether makes me cough. It dulls everything. Nothing works properly in here. The nurse said even her compass spins.” She looked at him as though he were being slow. “That’s why I’m in here and you sleep in the kitchen.”

He had lived in this apartment for five years and had never once thought of the plaster as anything but a medical bill.

“Mina”

“Get under the blanket,” she said to Nyx.

Nyx looked at her with an expression of the deepest disdain. Then it climbed under the blanket, turned around twice against the wall where the plaster was thickest, and went still.

Mina pulled the covers up to her chest, took a breath that rattled, and picked up her book.

Below them, someone knocked on the street door.

Captain Ruvane Kessel was not what Adrian had expected.

He’d imagined someone large, with a scar. Kessel was lean and clean-shaven, in his forties, with a neat gray coat and a brass lens on a strap around his neck, no bigger than a pocket watch. He took off his hat when he came into the kitchen, wiped his boots on the mat, and asked politely whether he might sit.

“We’re checking every household on the Row,” he said. “Routine. A creature escaped from a private collection. Small, dark, dangerous when frightened. I’d hate for a child to find it.”

“We don’t have any pets,” Adrian said.

“No. I’m sure.” Kessel’s eyes drifted to the bandage on Adrian’s hand. “That looks painful.”

“Bread knife.”

“Those are the worst.” He said it kindly, and he didn’t look away. “Would you mind if I looked around?”

Adrian could have said no. He didn’t. A boy with nothing to hide said yes, so he said yes, and watched the captain walk down the hallway and stop at Mina’s door.

“Hello,” Kessel said.

“Hello,” said Mina.

“I’m told you’re unwell.”

“Aether lung. I’m not contagious.” She turned a page. “You can come in, but the doctor says not to open the window.”

The captain stepped inside. He lifted the lens, and Adrian felt the bond jerk in his chest like a hooked line.

[ Companion essence reading: disrupted. ]

[ Hostile scan obscured by ambient dampening. ]

Kessel moved the lens slowly across the room. Over the bed, the shelves, the window. The glass flickered, going cloudy and then clear and then cloudy again, like a coin spinning on a table.

“That’s quite a lot of plaster,” he said mildly.

“It’s for her lungs,” Adrian said.

“Of course.” The captain lowered the lens and looked at Mina properly for the first time. “What are you reading?”

“Field Anatomy of Minor Beasts.”

“Ah.” A faint smile. “A serious one. Are you training to be a tamer?”

“I’d like to be a vet,” Mina said. “For the ones nobody picks.”

Something moved across Kessel’s face too quickly to read. Then he nodded and turned away.

He’d taken two steps toward the hall when he stopped.

The blanket had shifted. Only slightly. A thin thread of black smoke curled up from the edge of the bed and drifted toward the ceiling, and Adrian’s stomach turned to ice.

“Mina,” said the captain gently. “Is something under there?”

Mina looked up. Her face was the color of paper. And then, with the straight-backed courage of a ten-year-old who had decided exactly what she was willing to lose, she coughed.

It wasn’t a small cough. It was the deep, ugly, tearing cough that Adrian had heard on her worst nights, the one that doubled her over and left her gasping. She curled around her book and wheezed, and the sound filled the little room, and the thread of smoke blew away to nothing in the shaking air.

“Mina!” Adrian was across the room before he’d thought. He caught her shoulders and held her through it, and when she finally lifted her head, her lips had gone faintly blue.

“Water,” she managed. “Please.”

“I’ll get it.”

“No.” Kessel’s voice was quiet, and a little different than before. He stepped back. “I’m sorry. I should not have upset her. Please. Give her whatever she needs.”

He stood in the doorway for a moment longer, looking at Mina with an expression Adrian couldn’t name. Then he put his hat on.

“I’ll let myself out.”

Adrian was holding a glass of water to Mina’s lips when he heard a second set of boots on the stairs, slow and heavy and entirely familiar.

“What’s all this?” Harlan Brisk said from the landing.

The old caretaker stood in the stairwell with a mop bucket in one hand and an expression of weary grievance, as if being found here were a personal insult. He was sixty-something, broad and bent, in the gray work coat he’d worn the whole time Adrian had known him. His left hand, the one holding the mop handle, was missing its smallest finger.

“Brisk,” said Kessel. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“I wasn’t expecting to see the Crown on my boy’s landing.” Harlan set the bucket down with a bang. “He works my night shift at the Hall. He’s been up since dawn hauling chairs. Whatever you want, you ask me.”

“Your night shift.” Kessel’s voice was perfectly pleasant.

“Last night, and every night this week. We don’t take on students without a reference.” Harlan scowled. “Is that a crime now?”

“Not at all.” Kessel studied him for a moment. Then he glanced back toward the kitchen, at Adrian, standing in the hall with a glass of water in his hand and Mina’s gasps still audible behind him.

“A student reported seeing a boy slip through the fence into the Old Gate District yesterday afternoon,” he said. “He gave a name. Marcus Thorne, I believe. A good family.” His eyes returned to Harlan. “He described a pipe, and a coat, and a boy who looked very much like your night-shift student.”

Adrian’s mouth had gone dry.

Marcus. Marcus had watched him go in. He had probably laughed. And he’d gone straight to the Crown, because a Thorne would have known exactly who to tell.

“The boy was fetching a stone,” Harlan said flatly. “Thorne threw it over the fence, to be cruel. Check the Academy ledger. It’s got an entry for a replacement.”

“I will.” Kessel put his hat firmly on his head. “I’ll also read the Hall’s night book. For completeness.”

The air changed. Harlan’s expression didn’t flicker, but something in his shoulders went very still.

“You do that,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Brisk. Mr. Cross.” The captain nodded to each of them and started down the stairs, one hand resting lightly on the brass lens. His footsteps faded. The front door opened and closed. The wagon rolled away.

Adrian let out a breath he’d been holding for ten minutes.

Behind him, the blanket stirred. Nyx’s head emerged, ears flat, smoke trailing from its tail, and it looked at Mina for a long moment. Then it laid its chin on her wrist.

Mina smiled faintly. “You’re welcome,” she whispered.

Harlan hadn’t moved from the landing. When Adrian turned, the old man’s face was gray, and his hand was shaking where it gripped the mop.

“Thank you,” Adrian said. “You didn’t have to lie for me.”

“No,” said Harlan quietly. “I didn’t.”

“Will it hold?”

For a long time Harlan didn’t answer. He looked at Nyx. At Mina. At the corner of the poster visible in Adrian’s coat pocket. Then he turned back to the stairs, and when he spoke, his voice was very low.

“Boy. I haven’t kept that night book in three years.”