Fate's Edge

be happy, but Kaldar is on a Mirror mission, and Declan and Rose won’t jeopardize it. Besides, it’s clear across the continent. Did you see the pile of stuff on Declan’s desk? It’s not like he can just take off and leave the Southern Provinces to be overrun by criminals. Lark will tell them that Kaldar will take care of us.” George smiled. “There will be hell to pay when we get home, but they can’t send you off while you are in California. This will work.”
    “And if it doesn’t?”
    “We’ll think of something else. Now we have to go home and quietly pack. Tomorrow, we have to go to school, like normal, and be very well behaved.”
    They started down the forest path.
    George’s leather boots creaked as he walked. He needed to oil them or something, Jack reflected.
    If George came with him, they would both be in trouble.
    “You don’t have to do this,” Jack said. “I can do this by myself.”
    “You remember when you beat up Thad Mosser?”
    Thad was a mean Edger kid. He had it in for George, but it was years ago, back when they lived in the Edge. Besides, it only took one fight and some stitches to get it settled. “Yeah.”
    “We leave tomorrow evening,” George said.
    They didn’t talk any more until they got home.
     
    THE cabin was cramped. Jack stirred in his small space, squished between the wall of the cabin and the wall of wicker trunks Gaston had stuffed into the cabin. Across from him, George leaned against the cabin wall. His eyes were closed.
    They had been flying for most of the night. At first, Kaldar and Gaston talked. Something about some thieves from the Edge stealing a magic thing from West Egypt and trying to sell it to the Hand. Things didn’t go well because they broke a fountain, and one of the Hand’s people had been blown to bits. Kaldar had found something called a crack pipe, whatever the hell that might be, and taken it to the cops in the Broken. They found a fingerprint on the pipe, and it belonged to someone named Alex Callahan, who was checked into a “rehab” in the Broken’s California.
    “How much did that nugget of information cost you?” Gaston had asked.
    “A few trinkets from the Weird,” Kaldar had told him. “Turns out our boy has a rap sheet a mile long. The State of Louisiana got him for possession and burglary. He also earned a couple of warrants in Florida: theft and possession with intent to distribute. And his rickety 1990 Nissan Sentra was involved in a high-speed chase and somehow gave the cop cars the slip.”
    “That tells me nothing,” Gaston had said.
    “He outran a racehorse on a donkey.”
    “You think he went into the Edge?”
    “He had to,” Kaldar had said. “The high-speed chase netted him another heap of charges. Then he popped up in Alabama and Tennessee, theft and possession again, and right now his fingerprints show him checked into the Rose Cliff in northern California. The Rose Cliff is where you put your addict relatives when you have money.”
    “This guy seems mostly small-time,” Gaston said.
    “ ‘Seems’ is the key word here. We only know about the things he got caught on, and on each one, he was so addled, it’s a wonder he could find the ground with both feet. You and I were both Edgers once. You know how they operate.”
    “Family,” Gaston agreed. “Somewhere in the Edge, someone knows him.”
    “Exactly. And that someone suddenly got a lot of money and checked Alex into rehab. Most Edgers don’t have forty grand lying on the shelf somewhere.”
    Gaston whistled. “That’s serious money.”
    “One has to wonder how Alex’s family came by it. If I had time, I would knock on some doors in the Edge around Macon where he first blazed a trail, but we don’t have that luxury. We know where he is, so we go to him and we ask him how his crack pipe ended up in the town square in the Weird next to the bits and pieces of the Hand’s agent.”
    None of it made a lot of sense, and now everyone was quiet.
    Jack fidgeted. It would’ve been much cooler to sit up front, where he could see the sky and the clouds and the ground far below. The heat rising from the wyvern’s back and the blankets Gaston had given them kept the cabin warm, but it wasn’t exactly toasty. He fidgeted again. Bored. Bored, bored, bored. He’d slept, he’d read through the book he’d packed in his bag—it was all about the Weird’s nobles on the Old Continent fighting against the ancient raiders. The book was okay,