The Drowned King Returns

Chapter Four: Who Else Is Coming Back

Captain Harker didn't bother with fingerprints or a booking photo. He walked Nash straight past the front desk, down a flight of concrete stairs to the last holding cell in the basement, and shoved him inside.

"In you go," Harker said, peeling off the cuffs. "You've got company."

The cell door clanged shut behind him. Nash rubbed his wrists and looked around.

Four men sat on the benches along the walls. None of them wore the gray jumpsuits of the precinct's real prisoners, and none of them had the dazed, sour look of a drunk sleeping off a bad night. They were wide awake, sitting with their elbows on their knees, and one of them was winding a long strip of torn bedsheet around his fist. It was knotted at one end into a neat loop.

Nash understood. By morning, the thief who drowned would be found hanging in his cell, another sad ending to a sad story, and nobody in Kingsreach would ask a single question.

"Don't take it hard," said the man with the bedsheet. "We're just the cleaning crew."

The fourth man hadn't spoken. He sat in the shadows at the far end of the cell, and now he stood and stepped forward into the light of the single caged bulb. He was lean and pale, with a shaved head and a scar where his left ear should have been. On the inside of his wrist, faded but unmistakable, was a tattoo of a small black coin.

Neither man moved.

Nash knew that coin. Every enforcer the wardens had ever employed on Black Toll wore one. And he knew this face. He had last seen it on the night of the uprising, running for the supply boat while the towers burned, one of only a handful who had escaped.

"Fitch," Nash said quietly.

Fitch's mouth fell open. For two years he must have told himself he'd left that island behind for good. Now the nightmare stood in a Kingsreach holding cell, looking at him.

"Drowned King," Fitch whispered.

The other three didn't understand. They glanced at Fitch, then at each other, and the man with the bedsheet shrugged and came forward anyway, swinging the loop toward Nash's neck. The other two came in from either side.

Nash finished them in the space of a breath.

He caught the bedsheet in one hand and pulled, bringing its owner face first into his rising knee. The second man got close enough to throw a punch, and Nash broke his elbow on the way past. The third pulled a cosh from his waistband, but before he could raise it, Nash's hand was on his throat and his skull was meeting the concrete wall. There was no wasted motion and no flourish, only the brutal economy the pits had taught him, where any fight that lasted more than three seconds was a fight you might lose.

Three men lay on the floor. Nash turned toward Fitch.

Fitch didn't raise his hands. He didn't even try. He threw himself at the cell door and hammered on the bars, screaming. "Get me out! Guard! Get me out of here, now!"

Boots pounded down the corridor. A guard with a soft face and frightened eyes appeared, fumbling with his keys. He had clearly been paid to stay away tonight. He hauled the door open a few inches, and Fitch squeezed through the gap. The door slammed again before Nash could reach it.

Fitch didn't look back. He sprinted down the corridor and through the fire door at the end, and Nash heard it bang open onto the alley outside.

Nash stood at the bars and listened to the running footsteps fade. Of all the people in Kingsreach, the elite, the police, the woman who had signed him away, only one man knew what he had become on Black Toll. That man was now loose in the city, and Nash had just let him go.

He sat down on the bench among the groaning bodies and waited for dawn.

It came gray and thin through the small window near the ceiling. At a quarter past six, Harker came down the stairs with a coffee in his hand, clearly expecting to find a corpse. He found three of his hired men tied together with their own bedsheet and the thief sitting calmly on the bench, eyes closed.

Before Harker could find his voice, the desk sergeant called down the stairs. "Captain? Redfern's lawyer is here."

"His what?"

The woman who came down the stairs wore a gray suit and carried a leather briefcase. Her dark hair was pulled back tight, and a burn scar ran along the left side of her jaw, smooth and pale, all the way down to her collar.

Harker took one look at her, and the coffee slipped from his fingers. It burst across the concrete at his feet.

"Hello, Mick," she said. "You signed my death certificate. The least you can do is look happy to see me."

Nine years ago, Rhona Lane had been the most feared prosecutor in Kingsreach, the one the founding families couldn't bribe or frighten. Days before she was due to indict three of them, her car went off the coast road and burned. The accident report called it a tragedy. Captain Mick Harker had signed it personally.

She hadn't died in that car. She had woken up in a crate on Black Toll.

Now she stood in his precinct, alive, opening her briefcase. She took out a thin file and held it up so he could see the first page. His own name was printed across the top.

"My client is being held without charge, without booking and without counsel," she said pleasantly. "You can release him now, or we can discuss what's in here. Your choice."

Harker's lips moved, but nothing came out.

Nash walked out of the precinct ten minutes later.

The morning air was cold and clean after the cell. Rhona fell into step beside him on the pavement. She waited until they were half a block from the station before she spoke.

"Bringing back the dead this early," she said. "Are you sure that's wise? The moment anyone sees me, they'll know someone has started opening coffins."

"That's the point." Nash kept his eyes on the street ahead. "I spent two years searching for the Ninth Account and found nothing but a number. It doesn't make mistakes, and it doesn't come out of hiding. So I'm done looking for it. I'm going to make it come to me."

Rhona glanced at him. "And how exactly do you plan to do that?"

"Frightened men make phone calls," he said.

Behind them, in a small office on the precinct's second floor, Mick Harker stood with his back pressed against the closed door, his trousers still stained with coffee. His hands were shaking so badly it took him three tries to dial the number.

"If she's alive," he muttered, listening to it ring, "who else is coming back?"