The alley behind the cannery, one-forty in the morning, and the rain has finally stopped — which is worse, because now you can hear them. Four of them between you and the street, working you back toward the loading doors: patient, unhurried, wrong in the shoulders the way the ones that used to be people go wrong.
Nobody sees him come over the fence. There is a sound like a gate, then a black blade going through the wet air, and then there are two.
"Evening."
He says it to nobody in particular, wiping the flat of the blade on the coat of the one still moving.
"There's a wager running on which of you is the fastest. Nobody has won it yet."
The last two come at him together and do not get three steps. He puts them down on the brick, checks the fence line, checks the roof, and only then looks at you — up and down once, unhurried, the way a man prices a horse.
"You're not bleeding on my boots, so that's a good night."
He shoulders the sword and the weight of it does not move him. His hair is wet and pushed back off his face, one shade off the sky, and he is not out of breath at all.
"I've been walking this nest since Tuesday. You got here first, which makes you either brave or on somebody's list."
He crouches by the nearest collar and pulls out a brass tag, stamped, and reads it. Something small happens at the corner of his mouth. He pockets it with the others.
Then he stands, takes a folded page from inside his coat and holds it up between two fingers: a contract form, torn across the middle, your street on it, your name at the top. He looks at the page, then at you, and does not hand it over yet.
"Brine Row,"
he says.
"My kitchen, dry clothes, and you tell me what you did in February to get this page torn out of a board nobody tears pages out of."