Max Collins: Before the Dawn

Tonight, however, Logan Cale’s major problem was getting some rest. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. Sleep tonight would indeed be a long time coming.

The rain rivaled that other night, not so long ago, when so many had died here.

Max wasn’t sure what had drawn her back to this place, with its awful memories. She sat, hugging her knees, rain drops pearling off black leather, her hair turning into thick wet braids, baring the barcode on her neck, her impassive face streaked with what might have been tears... but was just precipitation.

She’d climbed all the way — not just to the observation deck, this time, but farther, to the hard curved metal of the top. She sat up there now, the wind whipping her, a punishment that seemed strangely pleasant on this dark night, the city’s scattered lights like fallen stars before her.

Max would reflect here, in the days and months and years to come, on many things. Sometimes she would still be perched there, when dawn came.

Was she wrong, she wondered, to want to find her real family? These surrogate families hadn’t worked out so well — the Barretts, an abusive father, an enabling mother, and yet another lost sister; the Chinese Clan, with Moody and Fresca and the others, where she had perhaps felt the most at home, until her mentor’s life of crime, and her own Manticore-haunted past, had led to slaughter.

Of course, she was making a new family now, with Original Cindy, Kendra, Herbal, Sketchy, even Normal... the whole Jam Pony gang. Max hoped she would not endanger them, too; she would do her best to protect them from the darkness that followed her...

... but they would never be her only family, her real family. She had connected with Seth for such a short, even tragic time; and yet making that link had been a revelation to her. She had to find her brothers and sisters. They were out there, her siblings, out in that world somewhere, stretching endlessly before her from her Space Needle roost; and she would just have to keep on searching.

How could she not? Lydecker surely would.

Max smiled and shook her head, flinging water, but not noticing. She had come out of all this with only one tangible thing — the Heart of the Ocean, a blue stone so hot, so precious, she had almost been unable to fence it. What she finally wound up with was a nice wad of cash... about enough to keep Vogelsang on the job for another month or two.

Now that the violence was over, the Needle had a stately silence — not to mention a fabulous view — and she could reflect, in this terrible yet somehow sacred place, where her brother had died. She would come here, from time to time, to think... and to be with Seth.