Max sits beside me and lays a hand on my wrist. ‘I wouldn’t ask you,’ he says, ‘except that… I can’t let East take the box.’
His fingernails are square and clean. My hand is like a child’s beneath his, my knuckles raw from the cold, my cuticles shredded. My fingernails are edged in red from the wax, as if they’re bleeding. I pull them into a fist.
It’s hard to refuse the money; it’s hard to refuse the fantasy of the Saturn Club, though I’ve done it once before. It’s impossible to refuse if that refusal means helping East.
Max always knows what to say. He would be a great card reader.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll do it.’
It will be easy, he promises, and begins to explain: the upstairs room, the locked hatch, the wooden crate no bigger than a shoebox. He and East placed it under the floor last
