The Celestial Engineer

Chapter 5: Lower Deck

The elevator took Alex down through six floors of polished granite and soft lighting, the kind of building where even the air smelled expensive. He held the BMW key fob loosely, turning it over in his fingers, and watched the floor numbers count down.

He should have felt something. A man had died on the gravel in front of him twenty minutes ago and was now breathing on his own upstairs. Alex kept waiting for the weight of that to hit him, the way it should, and instead he just felt tired. Tired in a normal way, the way he used to feel after a ten-hour shift, except his back didn't ache and his hands weren't cramped around the joysticks anymore. His body had stopped complaining. His mind hadn't caught up to that yet.

The doors opened on the parking level. Rows of cars gleamed under fluorescent tubes, most of them worth more than his house. He found the BMW near the ramp, exactly where Howard had left it, and slid into the driver's seat. The leather smelled like money. He thought about the plastic bag Brenda had told him to use and didn't bother.

He drove down toward the lower deck slowly, in no hurry, because for the first time all day nobody was telling him where to be. Somewhere below the third level, the ramp curved past a security booth, and Alex's eyes drifted toward it out of habit rather than intent.

The wall behind the booth peeled away in his vision, the same way the truck's chassis had on the beach. He hadn't meant to look. It happened whenever his attention caught on something long enough, like his focus had a mind of its own now. Behind the drywall he saw a tangle of cable and, mounted above the booth, a small black box he recognized from job sites. A camera housing.

He kept driving, but something in him turned that image over a few times. There would be cameras in the hospital hallway too. In the VIP wing. Above Patterson Sterling's door, most likely, mounted somewhere Alex hadn't thought to check because he'd been too busy watching a man's lungs fill with poison.

He hadn't been careful. He'd been fast, and dark helped, but fast and dark weren't the same as invisible.

Alex pulled into an empty space in the far corner of the lower deck, the way Brenda had told him to, and killed the engine. He sat there for a minute with his hands on the wheel, running the last hour back through his head the way he used to check a foundation pour, looking for the c***k before it became a problem.

Nobody had seen him move. He was fairly sure of that. But sure wasn't the same as certain, and he didn't actually know what his own limits were yet, so he had no way to judge what a camera might catch that his own eyes couldn't. He'd found out three hours ago that he could see through steel. He had no idea if steel could still see him.

He got out of the car and studied his hands for a second under the parking garage lights, the same way he had at the truck window. No gold in his skin. No glow. Just calluses and old scars from a decade of tools. Whatever he'd become, it didn't announce itself. That was something, at least.

His phone buzzed. A text from Jackson.

You good? Radio's saying they found meteor debris scattered near the marina. Whole crew's talking about it. You still at the lake when it came down?

Alex stared at the message for a long time before he answered.

Yeah. Saw it come in. Wasn't as close as they're saying.

It was a lie, and it came easily, which surprised him more than the lie itself. Twelve hours ago he wouldn't have known how to keep something like this from anyone. Now it felt natural, the same way holding still while a syringe fell out of a stranger's hand had felt natural, like some instinct in him had been rewired at the same time as his eyes.

He thought about Patterson Sterling lying in that suite, breathing easy now, everyone crediting a doctor who'd done nothing. He thought about the three days he'd read off the old man's body before the real problem came back, worse. Somebody should tell Arthur Sterling that his father wasn't fixed, only postponed. Alex almost laughed at himself for even considering it. He could picture exactly how that conversation would go. A construction worker walking up to the CEO of the Sterling Group to explain a medical condition he had no training to diagnose, using knowledge he couldn't explain having.

They'd have him committed before they believed him.

So he'd have to come back. Quietly, the way he'd gone in the first time, and deal with it himself before the fourth day arrived. He didn't like the idea of doing the same trick twice in one week in the same hospital, not with a camera behind every wall he hadn't thought to check, but he didn't see another option. Nobody else knew what was wrong with Patterson Sterling. Nobody else could see it.

He was still working through how to manage that when Brenda's message came through, three texts in a row, each one shorter and angrier than the last. Where's the car. Did you leave already. Answer your phone.

Alex looked at his reflection in the BMW's tinted window. Same face as this morning, jaw a little sharper, eyes a little stranger. He didn't feel like a man who could stop a heart from failing with two fingers. He felt like a man sitting alone in someone else's car in a parking garage, hiding from his wife and a security camera at the same time, and he supposed that was closer to the truth of what he actually was right now than anything else that had happened today.

He texted back one word. Coming.

Then he sat for one more minute, running his eyes slowly across the ceiling of the garage, mapping every camera housing he could find before he started the engine.