The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

For six years, Brookhollow said the bricklayer's son ran away to dig holes in the desert.

Today he came home owning the desert, and found men breaking his father's arm.

Tannery Row was the last street standing in the old quarter. Everything around it had already fallen to Hatherley Developments: the chapel, the corner bakery and the narrow houses where tannery workers had raised their children for a hundred years. Billboards along the river showed what was coming next, a district of glass towers called Riverglass, with smiling couples on balconies where washing lines used to hang. Hatherley had bought out every family on the row or frightened them into leaving, every family except one.

Ivan Whelan had laid every brick of number nine with his own hands, thirty-one years ago, while his wife passed him mortar with their first child on the way. He refused to sign in spring. He refused again in summer, when the polite letters became men at the door. This afternoon, the men had stopped knocking.

Zane heard the scream from the corner. He knew the voice before he understood it, and his walk became something faster. At the gate he set down his bag, a scuffed canvas thing nobody would look at twice.

Four men in grey jackets filled his father's yard, HATHERLEY SITE SECURITY printed across their backs. Two of them knelt on Ivan, pressing his face into the soil where he had grown beans for thirty years. A third held his right arm flat along the ground. The fourth, broad and shaven-headed, lifted his boot and stamped down on the forearm.

The crack was a sound Zane knew. He had heard it a mile underground, every time a timber gave way.

Rosa Whelan stood in the doorway with a dish towel twisted in her hands, screaming at them to stop. Then she saw him over their heads, and her lips began to shape his name.

The first man never turned around. Zane took him by the collar and belt and threw him into the fence. The second rose halfway and met an elbow that folded him over Ivan's legs. The third swung wild, so Zane caught his wrist, turned it until his knees hit the dirt and drove his face into the bean poles. The shaven-headed one had time to raise his fists, but not to use them. Zane hit him twice, once under the ribs and once below the ear, and he dropped beside the others with blood running from his nose.

By the time Rosa finished saying his name, the yard was silent.

The leader rolled onto his side, spitting red. He dragged a phone from his jacket with shaking fingers. "You're finished," he said thickly. "I'm calling Halberd. You have no idea whose men you just put on the ground."

Zane plucked the phone out of his hand. He dialed a long number that began with the code for Kessara and lifted it to his ear. One of the men laughed through a split lip.

"It's me," Zane said when the line opened. "There's a firm in Brookhollow called Halberd Security. I want it bought within the hour. Pay what they ask." He listened for a moment. "No, keep my name out of it."

The call lasted less than a minute. He dropped the phone back into the leader's palm.

"Wait for it to ring," he said.

Then he turned his back on all four of them and knelt by his father. Ivan's face was grey with pain and dirt, and he stared up at his son as if he didn't trust his own eyes. Zane laid a hand flat on his chest. "Don't move, Dad," he said quietly. "Not yet."

Behind him, the leader tried his boss twice and got no answer. The others stayed where they were, too proud to leave and too hurt to try again. Rosa came down the step and knelt in the dirt beside her husband, holding his good hand. Somewhere beyond the empty houses, a crane groaned on its cable.

Eight minutes later, the phone rang.

The leader answered, and his boss was shouting loud enough for the whole yard to hear. Halberd Security had just been sold to a buyer nobody had heard of. The new owner's first instruction had been to fire the four men on Tannery Row. His second had been a question. Why were they still standing in his yard?

The leader lowered the phone slowly and looked at Zane's back. Whatever he had been about to say died in his throat.

They left at a run. One of them limped, and another left his cap behind in the beans.

Zane fetched the broom from the porch and snapped the head off across his knee. He unbuckled his belt and pulled it free. "This will hurt," he told his father. It did, but Ivan only hissed through his teeth while Zane set the arm straight along the handle and bound it tight, quick and sure. He had learned to do it in the Kessari pits, where the nearest doctor was a day's drive away and a man's arm was all he had to sell.

Rosa reached for him then. She took his face between her palms and held it firmly, as though he might vanish again if she loosened her grip. Her fingertips were rough in a way he didn't remember, pricked and hardened at the ends. Her eyes searched him, the beard, the scar through his eyebrow, the sun burned into his skin.

"We thought you'd forgotten us," she said.

The words caught on something inside him. He had never forgotten them for a single day, but he put that aside for later because her hands were shaking.

"Never, Mum," he said.

They helped Ivan inside between them. The kitchen was smaller than Zane remembered, and colder. An old sewing machine sat on the table among piles of other people's clothes, trousers to hem and a wedding dress pinned at the waist. Beside the machine lay a plain white envelope, thick with cash.

Zane picked it up. There was no name on it, no note.

"From the helmet girl," Rosa said. "She comes every month, and she never takes it off."

Across the river, on the top floor of Hatherley House, Rowland Hatherley listened to his site manager explain how four men had been beaten, fired and chased off Tannery Row inside a quarter of an hour. When the call ended, he crossed to his father's desk, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a card with a single number written on it in his father's hand. It was the number for emergencies, and Rowland had never dialed it himself.

It was answered on the first ring, but no one spoke.

"The runaway's back," Rowland said.

"Good," said the voice the Hatherleys knew only as the Assayer. It was calm, almost pleased. "Then the arm did its job. Tell Mortlake to take the Larch Tower file out of his drawer."

The line went dead.