Chapter 19: Crowns And Pitchforks

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The crowned pitchfork was sprayed across the sidewalk in flat black paint, crude and unmistakable. Apricot stood over it, heart hammering. The pitchfork’s tail pointed up the block toward a sagging auto shop. Grease Monkey’s blinked above its rust-stained garage door in dead halogen tubes, only one still sputtering a weak orange pulse.

She followed it.

For the next three hours she followed every mark she could find, tracing the crowned symbols through narrowing backstreets as dusk collapsed into full dark. She tried bars first. A place called The Piston, where the bartender’s hand drifted beneath the counter the moment she asked her question and stayed there until she left. A noodle den on Harker Street where an old woman listened to her request, said nothing, and closed the door while Apricot was still mid-sentence. A pawnshop where the clerk let her finish, then picked up his phone and dialed without breaking eye contact.

She left that one quickly.

After that, a man outside a tattoo parlor listened to her stumbling pitch about wanting protection and told her she was in the wrong part of town. His tone was helpful. His eyes said something else. When she glanced back half a block later, he was still watching from the doorway, phone pressed to his ear.

By the time she circled back to the auto shop, the city had gone dark and her courage had thinned to a wire. She kicked a shard of loose pavement. “This is impossible.” The black market did not open for outsiders. Maybe it never had.

She was seconds from giving up when a sharp psst cut through the quiet.

Across the street, a man in a drab coat and low-tilted cap lingered at the mouth of an alley. He jerked his chin once.

“Over here, miss.” He scanned the street as he spoke. “Heard you been looking for something. Got what you need, but not out here.”

He thumbed toward the dark behind him.

Every instinct in her body fired at once. But she had been turned away five times tonight, and the thing in Jasper’s room would not wait for her to find a better option.

She crossed the street and stepped into the alley.

It narrowed fast. Brick walls, trash bags, the sour reek of standing water. The distant streetlamp barely reached. The man’s hand settled between her shoulder blades, guiding her deeper with a pressure that made her skin crawl.

“You’re looking for the wrong thing, kid,” he said over his shoulder.

Apricot opened her mouth to ask what he meant.

A side door banged open. Bodies spilled out. She counted bats, a metal pipe, a length of chain. They fanned around her in a tightening ring, and three more blocked the alley’s mouth behind her.

Her stomach dropped through the pavement.

The man who had lured her in stepped aside and struck a lighter. The flame caught his cigarette and died. In the brief flare, she saw his face: hard-cut, patient, no older than forty. He exhaled smoke and looked at her the way someone looks at a problem they’ve already solved.

“No way out now,” he said.

Apricot’s back found the wall. Cold brick through her jacket. Her hands came up, palms open. “I don’t want any trouble.”

He spat near her shoe. “One of my boys says some girl’s been stumbling around all night asking to buy a gun. Brown hair. No clue what she’s doing.” He tilted his head. “That you?”

Her throat locked. The gang pressed closer. Behind her, someone tapped a bat against brick in a slow, deliberate rhythm. The alley smelled of garbage and motor oil and the sharp chemical bite of spray paint. The walls seemed to lean inward.

Student found dead in alley. No witnesses. No leads.

“Yes,” she whispered. “That’s me.”

The boss snorted. “Figured. You don’t look like you know shit.” He jerked his chin toward the entrance. “But you found us. Nobody finds us by accident, and the ones who find us on purpose are usually wearing a wire.” His eyes narrowed. “Who told you about the marks?”

“No one. I figured it out on my own.”

He closed his eyes. Pinched the bridge of his nose like she was a headache he hadn’t budgeted for. When he opened them, the patience was gone. “See, that’s my problem. You cracked our code in one night. First-time buyer, no connections, no crew. That doesn’t happen unless a cop’s whispering in your ear.”

“No one sent me.” Apricot’s voice cracked. “I swear.”

“Sure.” He leaned in. The cigarette’s ember carved angles across his jaw. “You want a gun that bad?”

“I just want to buy one. Please. I’m not working for anyone.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Then his gaze slid to a wiry kid in a red hoodie who stood clutching a black baton, knuckles white around the grip.

“Yeah,” the boss muttered. “She’ll need protection, all right.”

He nodded.

The kid lunged. Apricot jerked backward and hit something solid. Massive arms clamped around her from behind and lifted her clean off the ground. She screamed. Her legs kicked at nothing. The man holding her was enormous, bald, and he squeezed until the air left her lungs in a thin wheeze. Laughter bounced off the walls.

She clawed at his forearms. His grip did not give.

The kid in the hoodie closed in with the baton raised.

“Ji Li!”

The shout cracked through the noise. Everything froze.

“Ji Li, this isn’t right.”

A figure stepped out from the ring of bodies. Traditional red shirt, high collar, wide sleeves. His voice was steady and clear.

The boss rounded on him. “You gonna vouch for her?”

Silence. Apricot’s ragged breathing filled the alley.

“Just let her go.” The man’s voice didn’t waver. “She’s not one of us. She hasn’t done anything.”

Ji Li fixed him with a long stare. “She’s on you, then. You vouch, you pay. Understand?”

“I’ll vouch for her.”

“Please,” Apricot choked out.

The kid in the hoodie drove the baton into her stomach.

The impact folded her in half. The bald man dropped her and she hit the pavement on her knees, curling around the pain. A retch tore through her. Everything she’d eaten came back up in a hot, violent surge, splattering the concrete and the kid’s shoes. She heard him swear and stumble back, but the sound was distant, muffled, as if her ears had been packed with cotton.

Ji Li’s voice cut through. “The hell was that? I didn’t tell you to hit her.” Cold. Not loud. The kind of quiet that was worse than shouting. The kid shrank back, wiping his shoes on the pavement.

Ji Li looked at Apricot. Then at the man in the red shirt. His expression had the flat finality of a man closing a ledger.

“Get her out of here.”

He turned and walked deeper into the alley without looking back. The rest of the gang followed, peeling away into doorways and side passages until the alley held nothing but Apricot, the man in the red shirt, and the sound of her own breathing.

Then it was quiet.

Apricot stayed on her hands and knees, bile burning her throat. The man in the red shirt crouched beside her. He held out a rag.

“Wipe your face.”

She took it. Pressed it to her mouth. When she tried to stand, her knees buckled and he caught her arm. Not rough. Not gentle. Functional.

“Can you walk?”

She nodded. A lie, but she made her legs move.

He led her out of the alley and through side streets in silence, block after block, until they were far enough from Ji Li’s territory that the air itself seemed to loosen. Under the yellow wash of a streetlamp, he stopped and turned to face her.

Now she saw him clearly. Young, close to her age. Lean and sharp-featured, with short mint-green hair that marked him as Uchellan. The red shirt with its wide ceremonial sleeves looked more suited to a shrine than a street corner. Nationalist gangs wore that style. The kind who clung to old customs and older grudges.

“What were you thinking?” he said. No warmth. No softness. “Walking into gang turf asking for illegal hardware. You know what happens to people Ji Li doesn’t trust?”

“I didn’t have a choice.” Her voice came out thin and wrecked. “I need a gun.”

He stared at her. “You need to go home.”

“I can’t.” She straightened despite the pain radiating through her abdomen. “I wasn’t lying in there. I need a weapon. This isn’t an impulse.”

His jaw tightened. He studied her for a long beat, and she could feel him weighing something. “The only reason I stepped in,” he said, “is because you’re obviously not working for the police. They’d never send someone that clueless.”

Apricot caught the phrasing. They’d never send someone. Not anyone would have stepped in. Not it was the right thing to do. He’d said it like someone who knew how undercover operations worked. Like someone who’d seen them from the inside.

She didn’t push it. Not yet.

“Thank you,” she said. “For what you did.”

He shrugged it off. “Answer one thing. Why does a girl your age need a gun this badly?”

Apricot drew a breath. She’d rehearsed nothing for this moment because she’d never imagined reaching it.

“Something broke into my home,” she said quietly. “Two nights ago. It went after my little brother.”

He didn’t react. Didn’t blink.

“It wasn’t a person.” She heard how it sounded the moment she said it. Unhinged. The kind of thing that got you flagged for psychiatric hold. But she’d started, and stopping now would be worse than finishing. “It looked like a wolf. Made of shadow, or something like shadow. I killed it with a baseball bat and there was nothing left afterward. No body. No blood. Nothing.”

She waited for the dismissal. The uncomfortable laugh. The backing away.

He did none of those things. He stood very still, the way people go still when they’re deciding how much of themselves to reveal.

“You’re talking about the attacks,” he said carefully. “The ones on the news.”

“I’m talking about what’s actually behind them. The official explanations are garbage and you know it. Terrorist attacks don’t vanish without forensic evidence. Biological agents don’t leave claw marks.”

She was rambling. She knew she was rambling. She stopped herself, drew a breath, and waited.

The silence between them stretched. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance, fading. His gaze dropped to the pavement, then came back to her. Something had shifted in his expression. Not belief, exactly. Recognition.

“Suppose I know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Hypothetically. What’s your plan? Buy a gun and go hunting?”

“I don’t have a plan. I have a brother who sleeps in the next room.”

He looked away. A long breath lifted his shoulders and let them drop. When he turned back, something had settled behind his eyes. Not sympathy. Calculation. The look of a man running numbers on a decision he already knew was bad.

His hand went to the inside of his shirt, hesitated there for a full three seconds, then withdrew. He was holding a compact handgun, butt-first. Dark finish. No markings on the slide where the serial number should have been. The sight of it sent a jolt through her chest so sharp it hurt.

He held it out to her but did not let go.

“Forty-five caliber. Loud. Serials removed. Trackers disabled.” His voice was flat, reciting facts, not offering a gift. “If you get caught with this, it’s a capital offense. Not prison. Death. You understand that.”

“How much?” Apricot asked.

“Five hundred.”

She almost flinched. It was double what the legal shop had quoted her for a registered pistol with a background check and a week-long wait. But a week was a luxury she didn’t have, and the background check had already shown her the door. She dug through her bag with her free hand, pulled out a stack of jade-green cash cards, and held them out.

He took them without counting and pocketed them in one motion.

Apricot wrapped her fingers around the grip. The metal was cold and heavier than she expected. Heavier than the one at Bullseye’s. This one had not been designed to feel friendly in a shop display.

“It’ll fire in jammed zones,” he said. “Off the grid as it gets.”

He still hadn’t let go. His eyes held hers, and she understood he was giving her one more chance to walk away from this. To hand it back and go home and be a college student who’d had a very bad night but nothing worse.

She didn’t hand it back.

He released the gun.

For a moment neither of them spoke. He looked at the weapon in her hand the way someone looks at a mistake they’ve decided to make anyway.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he muttered.

Apricot slid the gun into her bag and zipped it shut. The weight settled against her hip, foreign and absolute.

“Thank you,” she said.

He gave a single nod. Then he turned and walked back the way they’d come, his silhouette thinning against the lamplight until it disappeared around a corner.

Apricot stood alone on the empty street.

The bag hung heavy on her shoulder. Inside it, the gun pressed against her side like a second heartbeat, dense and cold and real. She thought about what it meant. Not the weapon itself but what carrying it made her. Not a journalist. Not a student. A girl with an unregistered firearm in a city that executed people for less. She had crossed a line tonight that she could not step back over. No explanation would matter. No context would save her. If they found it, she was dead. The system she’d been taught to trust would kill her with the same paperwork it used to process parking fines.

She started walking. Her stomach still ached where the baton had struck. Her hands had not stopped trembling. The streets were empty, the neon signs of the commercial district replaced by the flat orange of residential lamps. Somewhere a dog barked once and stopped.

An hour from now she would be standing at the gates of Eastway Park with the gun in her bag and a magazine article in her head, looking for something she hoped she wouldn’t find.

But that was later. Right now she walked, and the city pressed in around her, and the weight on her shoulder did not feel like safety.

It felt like evidence.