The iron scuttle hatch set into the brick ceiling above the back kitchen chimney pipe unlatched with a sharp, metal screech.
A pair of water-soaked leather boots dangled through the square opening. It was followed by thirteen-year-old Tavi Rusk dropping eight feet to the flat stone slabs. The boy landed in a crouch, his knees absorbing the impact with the agile stretch of an experienced alley runner, his coarse wool trousers caked in green canal slime and black coal slurry. He had crawled through the four-hundred-yard drainage channel beneath the Fourth Avenue coal frame stands, slipping past two armed stationary sentries by swimming twelve feet under a frozen grease-trap. He fell forward onto his hands, coughing up a mouthful of foul, fatty canal water that splattered across the stone.
In his right hand, Tavi clutched a battered canvas satchel, weighted with six flat tin cutouts shaped like notched gear teeth, double-bars, and chevron arrows. The edges of the sheet metal were cold and sharp, clicking against one another with a dull, muffled rattle inside the canvas pocket.
He wiped a smear of rancid canal grease from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, his chest heaving like a pair of forge bellows, his dark eyes wide and blazing with wild fight-or-flight rush. His young face was scratched from rusted corrugated iron, and a thin line of dried blood marked his left temple where an iron gutter rivet had caught him in the dark.
