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“Ow, it hurts,” Addi mewled.

“It’ll suck more if we don’t get you sorted now.  Can you stay still enough that I can get this looking neat?”

“It cut my eyelid.”

“Nicked it, you’ve got a little separation going on the lower lid.  Going to get to that in a second.  Let’s do the other parts first.  Get less rusty in my suturing technique before I do the hard part.”

“It stings.  The blood, I think.”

“Blood and tears.  At least it didn’t slice the eye itself, as far as I can tell.  Don’t let up the pressure.”

“It’s sticking, then it pulls.”

“You know what makes it pull less?  Pushing.  Push down.  Both towels.”

“It hurts when I push down.”

“Then by all means, ease up on the fucking pressure and you’ll get some great pain relief when you pass out from blood loss.”

“I’m already feeling not great.”

“Is this going to scar?”

“Probably.  But-”

There was a pause.  Highland swore under his breath.

Addi was crying.

“But if you stop wriggling, I can make it clean enough you can cover it with some makeup, maybe.  And if you’re going to cry, soak it up with the towels.”

“I’m not trying to wriggle.  Or cry.”

The suturing job continued.

“Was that Gio?”

“Who?”

“The girl who cut me.  I saw a glimpse, after the fabric of the hood separated.  Gio!?”

Highland twisted around and looked back. Valentina was there, close enough to overhear, but not quite in view.

“Gio, you don’t understand!”

“Your shouting is making you wriggle.  Ease up,” he said, gruff.

“Your dad asked me to.  A few people at school were already talking about the Cavalcantis as an organized crime group.  It came up at this big meeting with the family.  Nicholas, Davie, Andre, the Butcher, my dad, the others from out of town, one old guy from overseas.  My dad asked if Nicole and I could massage things.  Then later, when it was a smaller group your dad asked me.  I didn’t feel like I could say no.”

Highland twisted around and leaned to the side, to get a look at Valentina.  Addi was a bit further back, sitting, and at the wrong angle, still.

Addi continued, “He talked about how your brother was too soft, growing up like he did.  And you were following right behind.  He sounded dangerous, when he told me.  Like if you didn’t toughen up, it’d be me.  He said I’d be clear of any consequences.  Your uncle sounded annoyed, but he agreed.  We talked about how to handle it, then my dad and I left.  My dad said to do it.  In a serious way.”

“How to handle it?” Valentina asked.  Resentment burned in her chest.  She was getting angry again.

“It is you.”

Highland twisted around to look at Valentina again.

“This hurts so much, I’m so freaking scared,” Addi said.  “My face is ruined.”

She started to cry.

“Good,” Valentina said.

The word seemed to interrupt the crying, as if a moment’s shock cut past it all.  Then the crying resumed, harder than before.

Highland finished the sutures, then muttered about holding eyelashes and stitching the eyelids.  Addi whimpered.

Valentina couldn’t bring herself to feel bad- or feel much of anything.  She could hold her hand out and her fingers trembled.  But it felt in a way like the storm that had dogged her for a while had quieted.

She thought, inexplicably, of the man whose neck had broken.  He’d been a soldier.  Had probably been brought into the gang at a pretty young age, eased into things.  Valentina figured a lot of the youngest members got their start with a kind of family sanctioned shittiness.  Shoplifting, skipping school, thrashing some people.

She’d known the family was shady, but hadn’t realized how badly until the cyberbullying had started.

She’d killed him, she was pretty sure.  He’d been dead before Highland had pretended to finish him off.   Who was he, even?  Because he wasn’t just that.  He wasn’t just a kid who’d gotten into trouble, maybe been picked out of the group to run errands, and gradually elevated up to a certain role.  He’d been a person, with a family.  He’d worn diapers, had reached for his parents, had cried for trivial reasons, had potty trained, learned his ABCs, had maybe been nervous about going to school, had splashed in puddles and played with sand.  He’d made friends and dealt with teasing, he’d probably fallen in love.

And he’d lived events that made him a more unique person.  Someone who’d been willing to put a gun in a delivery boy’s face and tied him up.  Someone who’d had porn as his phone wallpaper.  Did that mean he’d been shitty to women?  Or was it ironic?  Or was it normal?  She didn’t know enough guys and hadn’t seen enough guys’ phones to know for absolute sure.

He’d died paralyzed, hurting, probably scared.  What had he thought about, as his breathing got harder?

Tears came to her eyes.

She was glad she could cry over it.  Because when it came to Addi, she couldn’t.

Highland finished, then started with the bandaging.

“Keep talking about how it happened,” Valentina said.

“Is this going to calm things down or is it going to rile you up?” Highland asked.

“I don’t know.  But I need to hear.”

Highland was silent as he resumed the bandaging.

A good few seconds passed.

Highland sighed, then said, “We should figure out-”

“Hold on,” Valentina said.  “Sorry.”

“Fucking… this isn’t what I signed on for.”

“Please,” she said.  “Addi, you ruined my life.  I had nobody.  At home or at school.  I couldn’t do group work unless teachers paired people up with me, and then they ignored me.  My entire way of thinking and feeling got warped.”

Silence.

“I feel really normal, a lot of the time.  But I don’t feel anything about how I cut you,” Valentina said, voice quiet.  “A little shaky, from adrenaline, and I think I could cry if I hurt someone else.  I feel really bad for this guy here, you know?  Who’s doing the stitches?  But I feel almost nothing for how you’re hurting.”

Silence.

“I think even if you said really awful stuff, it’s better than you saying nothing, because the whole rest of it, everything that happened because of you… it’s so big I can barely see you.  Talk, so I can see you.  What you did, why.  Or you’re so nothing I could do it again.”

It felt like someone else saying the words.  But they were reasonable words, when she wasn’t feeling very reasonable.

“The fuck is that?” Addi asked.

Apparently fucking Addi was too dumb to put the words together.

Highland spoke up.  “You hurt her, she hurt you, you’re chained to a toilet and a sink, she’s not.  I can try to keep you safe, but I’ll be honest, this isn’t what I signed up for, and I’ve got other things to do.  I can drive her to another city and stick her in an apartment, she could probably find her way back here, and I might not be around when she does.  My recommendation?  Tell her what she wants to hear.”

“Tell me the truth,” Valentina said.

“Sorry,” Highland said.  “You cut someone, you have them chained up.  You don’t get the truth.  She’ll give you what she thinks you want.  Or she’ll say nothing and maybe you cut her again.  I fucking- fuck this.”

He stormed to his feet.  He picked up his things, taking all needles and things out of Addi’s reach.

“Don’t leave,” Addi said.

He made it a few strides, then tossed them to the side of the door.  Valentina scrambled to get into his way.

“Wait,” Valentina said.

“Please,” Addi said, behind him.

He huffed, breathing hard, an expression of rage flashing across his face.  It spooked Valentina, but she didn’t budge.

It felt like if he left, he might leave for good.

“I pissed myself when she cut me,” Addi said, voice cracking, as the words came out.

Valentina felt a small, inexplicable surge of… triumph? on hearing that.

“I noticed,” he said, his back to her, glaring at Valentina.  “Plan was, I’d pass on responsibility.  Go to each prisoner, have someone who wasn’t a grown man keep watch and manage inventory while each of you showered, changed.  But I can’t do that now, can I?  I’m still on watch.  Still having to compromise.  Still having to figure out how to be goddamn decent, keeping a prisoner.”

“Bolden’s coming,” Valentina whispered.

“That’s not the issue,” he growled.  “The fucking issue is this is not what I signed up for!  I thought you were hers.  But you’re his.  Cavalcanti’s.”

He’d said the ‘not what I signed up for’ part loud enough for Addi to hear, before dropping his voice.

“I’m hers,” Valentina said, feeling alien in her skin as she admitted it.  “She rescued me.”

He shook his head a bit, like he didn’t believe her.  His breaths came in hot, hard, and even though a few feet separated her, she could feel the faint heat of them.  It struck her that he had to weigh almost twice as much as she did.  That he could overpower her.  Her power here was minimal.

Valentina stepped closer, then closed the door behind Highland, for good measure.

“Please!” Addi’s voice raised, shouting from the inside of the closed room.  “Don’t leave!”

Valentina swallowed.  “I didn’t expect to hate her this much.  For this to be a problem.  I think we can help her.  Your voice on the phone.”

“And her man.  Her husband?”

“Yeah.”

“Mister!” Addi shouted.  The chains rattled, and she banged- maybe kicking the side of the shower.

“Yeah.  I think you’re fibbing.  Because I don’t think anyone could know how to help them, or how they’re doing.”

“I don’t know.  Except I know my- I know Davie.  I don’t think he would.”

Highland stared at her.

“I’ll talk!” Addi shouted.

“This information helps,” Valentina told Highland.

Addi had stopped crying, and started talking, seemingly removed from her own emotions.  It puts her on a weirdly similar page to me, Valentina thought.

She leaned past him, then pushed the door open.

He had clearance to walk without having to shove past her.  He didn’t take it, standing there, angry.

Valentina worried he’d leave if she said or did the wrong thing, so she stayed there, by the door, out of Addi’s view.

“Talk,” Valentina said, quiet.

Addi’s voice had become a little disconnected from her emotions, that pleading and intensity before.  It seemed eerily similar to how Valentina felt, and how she was approaching this.

“They paid me.  I said I could do it alone without risking it getting out of control.  They gave me money to pay others.  It was mostly people at school talking about it, so I steered the conversation, paid others who could steer it too.  There was a guy who said no, so I told my dad, and then the guy changed schools a few days later.”

Valentina, sitting so her face and body were out of Addi’s view, stared at the ground.

“I steered things.  Told people how to be anonymous so it wouldn’t come back at them.  It didn’t really matter, because your dad wasn’t going to do anything anyway.  I kept people enraged and engaged, paid some of the students people paid the most attention to, to keep the idea alive enough.  Most of the work was shaping the narrative, so attention was on an old story of your dad hurting someone and getting away with it, and not that your uncles were also in it.  It was all contained within the school, and most of the info flowed from me and like, five other people, or we could at least sound like authorities if another school nearby picked up on it.  I was pretty good at it.”

“Were you?” Valentina asked, voice going cold.

“I-I did what was necessary to sell it to your dad that I was doing the work.  He kept paying me.  Sometimes he asked me how you were reacting, what you were doing.  I kept it general.”

It felt like Addi was belatedly changing her tone and softening her role in things, realizing she’d overstepped.  Which made Valentina angrier.

“You did only what you had to?” Valentina asked.  “You kept it ‘general’?  I saw you.  You enjoyed it.”

There was only silence.

“Addi,” Valentina said, even angrier now.  She stepped forward, and Highland got in her way.

“I don’t know what to say.  I’m worried you’ll cut me again.”

“I’m more likely to do something if you aren’t honest.”

“I- I enjoyed it.  You have to understand, it’s… when I was nine, I didn’t want to go to this party where Nicole and a bunch of other girls would sneer down at me, even though my dad made good money.  I didn’t understand.  My dad started to break it down for me.  How things were structured, how we- my dad and I, we supported your family.  We thrived when you guys thrived.  I was lesser, I was weaker, I wasn’t really part of the family.  That got better as we got older and the social circle got smaller.  But it never felt good.”

“Hurting me felt good?”

“It felt like I had a place.  A reason.  I could push you a few rungs down the ladder, climb a rung.”

Valentina looked aside.

Addi continued, “I spent, I dunno, spent ages twelve to sixteen thinking about how I could marry a decent-enough Cavalcanti boy, I’d be in.  That last year, year and a half, I felt like the world opened up to me.  If it carried on like that, I could marry anyone I wanted and still be a part of things, without losing- without losing what was good about it.  It was at your expense, but… I think you know how suffocating that entire environment and family can be.  It’s- it’s a fucked up dynamic, and it fucks up everyone who comes close to it.  You.  Me.”

“Yeah?” Valentina asked.  She paused, shaking her head.  That was a transparent attempt on Addi’s part, at the end there.

It kinda worked though.

Like the world made a bit more sense.

She thought of the thrill she’d felt, momentary, when Addi had talked about pissing herself.  Of the guy she’d delivered the package to, who’d been an asshole, and how much she’d wanted to bring him down.  Even paying Mia’s contacts to do it.

It was similar.

The Cavalcantis had infected her.  Her dad had contrived to… to train her, or push her, and it had worked on a level.

“Okay,” Valentina said.

“Please don’t cut me again.”

“I have ideas,” Valentina told Highland.

“Do you?” he asked.  He was still angry.

“Do you want to watch me while I watch her?” she asked.  “Is that decent enough?”

“Addi,” Highland raised his voice.  “How do we feel about that?  I watch this one, while she watches you?  You shower, dress?”

“I’d rather it was you.”

“It’s not going to be,” he said.  “So what do we think?”

“Okay.”

It took a bit.  The water heater was crap in this building, but at least the water hadn’t been shut off altogether.  She remarked on it, and Highland said Mia worked magic sometimes.

Well, he didn’t use her name.

Ten minutes for each of the girls to shower, dry off, and change into the very basic clothes provided- Mia had sent whoever had brought the last replacement car to do some shopping beforehand.  She’d arranged it from her desk while talking to Gio and compiling information.

They were nearly done when Bolden came, along with the woman called the Angel of Death- she didn’t want to use her actual name.  The woman helped Bolden up the stairs, then took over watching Sara as she got sorted.  Highland talked her through making sure that everything that went into the bathroom came out, and the two points of contact with the chains.

Nicole, Sara, Addi, and the delivery guy got a couple books from a recent bestseller list to help them pass the time.

After that, there was a quiet discussion between Highland and the Angel of Death.  They weren’t trying to keep their conversation hush-hush, so Valentina caught fragments while getting up, away from the intense little guy who looked like he’d been slathered in ashtray water and dried in the same kind of machine that made beef jerky, and got some of the food.  Kid’s lunch things and camp food.  There was a darting movement in the corner of her eye that might’ve been a mouse sniffing out the potential meal.  Or it might have been fatigue.

She stayed awake, though.  She got some paper, then began making notes, scrolling through her phone, trying to put information down so that when she tried to explain it, she wouldn’t be spending half her time scrolling and poking at the screen to get to the right pages, reminding her tired brain what was where.  She ended up eating three of the food packs that were probably aimed at feeding grade schoolers during lunch.

In the meantime, the same food selections were offered to each of the prisoners.  They took them, then ate.

Bolden watched two upstairs, while Highland positioned himself to watch the other two on the ground floor, while still being part of the imminent conversation.

“I think we ask Addi how she sent stuff out to her network,” Valentina said.  “We want to hurt them?  If they care about shaping a narrative, let’s ruin that.”

“Okay,” Highland said.  “Seems like a kick to the shins.”

“Maybe more than that.  But yeah,” Valentina said.  “It’s a really nice school.  The kids of pretty much everyone important go there.  Stuff filters up, I guess?  But I think that’s an extension of who Davie Cavalcanti is.  When he went after M- after the voice on the phone, he confronted her.  I was hiding nearby.  She said he wanted control.  My uncle, Nicholas Cavalcanti, is running the family.  Davie is expanding its influence into different areas.”

“Different spheres,” the Angel of Death said.

“Yeah.  And it suits him.  He’s a control freak.  He-”

The images of the torsos in the basement and the sounds they made flashed through her head.

Destroying her momentum.

“He’s a control freak,” Highland said, gentler than he’d been before.  Helping her get on track.

“He’s going for control over local politics.  Law.  They’re going to be like this unofficial enforcer arm for the government.  If the Kitchen is running ninety-five percent of what happens around here, and they start acting like they’re offended by the protests against the local government, or the federal government, they can suppress the protests while government… decides what they want to look like.  Maybe if they pretend to stop the Kitchen from hurting protesters, it shifts how things look?”

“We could speculate forever,” Highland said.  “It gives him a lot of influence.”

“And vice-versa.  If the government starts going easy on the Kitchen, if they start helping it, in exchange?”

“Yeah.”

“There was something about satellites,” Valentina remembered.

“Yeah.  Our voice’s right hand man said something about that.  We’ve been doing our best to avoid giving any eyes in the sky a clear sense of where we’re going, but even that doesn’t feel good enough,” Highland said.

The Angel of Death, sitting by the window as she kept half an eye in that direction, nodded her agreement.

“So let’s take that from them.  Let’s… tear it down.  He wants control over the school and messaging?  We use Addi’s communication network, give up info.  He wants control over the gang landscape, let’s call in all their old enemies.  He wants the Kitchen to ally with the local government?  Let’s… make them the opposite of that.”

Highland turned.  “Hey, Angel, I don’t mean to be rude, but…”

“I’ll check on the prisoners.  Second set of eyes.”

“Thank you.”

The very ordinary looking woman got up, fixed the collar of her jean jacket where it had flattened against one shoulder, then walked away.  Her shoes had raised heels that clicked as she walked.

Valentina looked at Highland. “Nothing lingering, like you hate.  We make one good stab at working this out.”

“And how do we get the voice on the phone out?” Highland asked.  “Or did you forget about-”

“No,” Valentina cut him off.  “No, I… I was thinking about them.  I really was.  But it’s tricky.  I think we have to do like you said.  Deflect.  We give them me.”

“You,” Highland said, gruff.

“Yeah.  They’re being attacked all of a sudden, things are going wrong.  Kidnappings.  I take the blame, it eases the pressure on the voice on the phone, and her right hand man.  Have they called the soldier they had outside the house, yet?”

“I’ve had the phone turned off.”

“What time is it?”

“Early afternoon.”

School’s going to be out.  Josie.

Would there be retaliation?

“We have to get started, then,” Valentina said.  She fidgeted with the water bottle she held.  “Fast.  Get to where we can make or answer that call.”

“Do we?” Highland asked.  “Because you know how this goes, with your plan?  They expect those other two to handle it, handle us as a problem.  Then when they fail, they get executed.”

“That’s okay, it buys time.”

“It’s not okay.  It’s a start,” he said.  “I don’t think we break the Cavalcanti’s back, doing this.  I don’t think we rescue who we want to rescue.  That’s how we start.  How we end is… we give them an opening.”

“The voice on the phone and her right hand man?” Valentina asked.

“It was a lot easier when we were face to face, and I didn’t need a name for him,” Highland said.  “I don’t want him to be ‘her right hand man’, that’s a mouthful.”

“To me, my new life, he’s my uncle,” she said.

Was that giving up too much information?

Who knew?

She was tired.

“That won’t get confusing with your uncle Nicholas and Andre-?”

“No.  They’re not family anymore.”

“Okay.  I can live with that.  The voice and the uncle.  How well do you know them?”

“On a scale of, of zero being nothing at all, and ten being… like they were in the living room, acting like they read each other’s minds, so their lies coordinated?  I don’t think they planned out everything in advance, but they matched up in what they gave Davie.”

“Secret signals?”

“I think they’ve worked together really well for a long time.  And C- Uncle is very good at adapting to new situations.”

“He is,” Highland said, sighing heavily.  “Fuck me.  Okay.  Because I’d want to give them an opening to get away.  How do we get them out?  Do we find them, and make a frontal attack, knowing they escape the rear?  Smoke things out, inside wherever they’re being held?  Knowing they can manage in the chaos?”

“It’s more likely to be… systems.  She had what they called landmines.  Stuff where if someone went looking in the wrong place, it’d give her a warning.”

“There were other codes.”

“Yeah.  But I’m not sure how well any of those work, if they have people watching over their shoulder.”

Highland sighed.  “Yeah.  If it was that easy, I guess they could’ve sent us a message in a free moment.”

“Highland,” Valentina said.  “You’re doing this for her, right?  The voice?”

“Yes.”

“I’m telling you this with one hundred percent honesty,” she said, leaning forward.  “We have to act now.  We have to give them a reason to think it’s not the voice or my uncle who’re responsible for the dead Cavalcanti soldier.  Before three-forty-five.”

“That’s school getting out, isn’t it?  I saw pictures of kids.  They weren’t nieces and nephews?”

She shook her head.

“Okay.  Then we need to broadcast our intentions before then.  Get their focus off the house.”

⯁

The phone suggested a set of rules.  Assume every cell call could be traced.  Most cell calls could be triangulated in seconds.  In dense areas, that could pinpoint a location around the time someone picked it up.

In rural areas, it was less precise, but the routes to get around were far worse.  And even in rural areas, there were more and more towers, that made it easier to triangulate.

If they were watching a phone, then they’d be right on top of things.

Taking that a step further, Mia was on the other end of things.  Mia would be looking to prove herself.  Not too hard, but enough she was worthwhile.

Would she have access to the live satellite stuff right away?  Did Valentina think Davie would give Mia access?  No.  He wouldn’t.  How sure was she?  Ninety percent.

That number would change if there was pressure on him or if he had a target in the crosshairs he really wanted removed.

Maybe giving him a reason to give Mia access could help things, in a roundabout way.

They just had to be ready to deal with the fact they were being tracked from above.

They walked fast through a downtown area.  Things were a little chaotic, with a dangerous protest about a ten minute drive away, but people had their shopping to do.  Normalcy to cling to.

Highland nudged her.  He’d spotted a girl, much younger than Valentina, but heavyset and roughly the same height, who was wearing a sun hat.

She wasn’t sure, but he seemed to think it was the best they’d get, and they were running out of time.

The density of the crowd on the sidewalk made navigating hard.  They got close to that pair.

Her heart thumped.  She felt exposed, being out here.  She wasn’t good at being around people.  It was part of why running away had scared her.  Part of why she’d felt it was necessary.  She’d thrust herself out into the world, force herself to interact with strangers, or die.

So long as she got away.

Highland nudged her again.

He was calling?

It was too early.

They passed the dad and his daughter in the sunhat.  She glanced back, using the corner of her eye, pretending to look at displays.  The dad had stepped aside to dial his phone, and looked around.

Highland had decided it was better to call early and have a less-smooth exit, than the alternative.  This gave them cover.

“Can I ask who’s answering?” Highland asked.

In the background, the dad was trying to find his wife in the milling crowds around the sidewalk.  Asking about store names.  Valentina knew the store- she and her friends would sometimes drive out here to shop, for a change of pace, and more distance from the parental units.

The phone Mia had sent to Valentina had had a little bit of advice.  That what Valentina saw and reacted to was less important than her enemies.  Every movement had to be calculated as if they were being watched.  Which they were.

“You’ll want to put Davie Cavalcanti on the phone.  Okay.  Okay, alright, that’s fine.  I’m going to ask you to remember what I say very, very carefully.  We want restitution.”

Watch your gait and pace.  Don’t move in a predictable way.

Valentina stopped to look in a shop window, glancing out of the corner of her eye.  So they didn’t get too far ahead.  They kept a couple paces ahead of the man and the sunhat-wearing daughter.

There was a pause.  Valentina resisted the urge to look at Highland.  She was sweating.  Walking differently, back straighter, playing with her balance, putting on a idle kind of show with how she moved to sort of be… cute, like she’d seen girls from school do.  She was wearing layers, which compounded it.

“Davie,” Highland said, after the pause.  “And your man said you weren’t there.  You screwed up, Davie.  We were on your ass the moment you took him.  All the way to that cabin.  Some of these guys are pissed.  They got a new life, and then one of the people who was supporting them and keeping it all nice and smooth, the last link to their old lives, butchered?  You have no idea what you’ve unleashed.  We’re closer to you than you can imagine, even now.”

Pause, as Davie said something.

Valentina’s skin crawled, heart plummeting into her stomach.  There was no trigger, no phrase, it was only the idea of dealing with her dad.

“Money, yeah.  For Timoteo, and for the hassle you’re causing us, removing the guy who was managing background shit for us.  But if you lowball us once, we hang up, we’ll hurt you, we’ll show you how much we’ve figured out, and then we’ll come back, expecting a better offer, accounting for interest.”

They’re watching.  They have to have triangulated the phone call.  People will be heading to our location.  But traffic sucks.  Watching by satellite, they’ll be trying to figure out which person Highland is.

“I’m not giving you a price to start.  Figure it out.  What Timoteo’s life is worth.  Either the amount’s good enough to satisfy the members of our group who’re more pissed off, or they get a chance to draw some blood.”

Pause.

“Right now.  Make your offer.”

Pause.

“That amounts to less than a hundred thousand for each of us.  Talk to you later.”

Highland steered her away.

They walked faster now- almost running.

They’d made the call earlier, which meant they had to cover more ground.

Down a block, weaving past groups of people who were window shopping, standing in the sidewalk, meandering, or waiting for their rides.

There.  It felt weird, putting herself in the crosshairs, but there was a Shotgun coffee, and she knew for a fact that Mia was capable of breaking into those free wi-fi places.

Valentina let herself get caught on camera, pulling Highland’s arm a little.  In the lead.  Looking serious.

Her heart, sitting in her stomach, stewed in acid.

That’s it.  I’m a traitor to the Cavalcantis.  We can nail this in later.  But it’s a plausible explanation.  Bolden as the woodsman, the hunter, who found me when I was running away.  That’s the story we sell.

After the Shotgun coffee camera shot, her face pointed in the right direction, Highland being more covert, they had to hit another destination- the transit hub.  It wasn’t far off from the middle of downtown.  People gathered there in a crowd, buses came and went.

Valentina and Highland entered that crowd, passed into the station area, with damaged plexiglass suspended between thick pipes painted in bold blue paint.

Her phone beeped.  She checked it.

It was Moses.  One of the people they’d brought back in.  Saying trouble was incoming.  They’d been pursued this far, this fast.

“Hurry,” she said, sweating still.  She shucked off her jacket, and tied her hair up in a ponytail.

Highland took off his baseball cap, tore off the two thick strips of rust-colored tape he’d stuck to the back of his head- awful looking in person, but it worked for cameras, and shucked off his sweatshirt, tossing it onto a bench seat.

They took the first bus out, mixing with the crowd inside.

Too hard to track, like this.

Now they’d have to do it again.  And again.

⯁

“Do I need to worry?” Highland asked.

She looked at him.

They’d shrugged out of their next layer of upper body clothing, gotten off the bus, and gotten onto another, in a neighborhood with trees that weren’t doing well, but still provided cover.  Now they were out, away, and alone.  Valentina pulled off her shirt, and it stuck to her with the sweat from running around, wearing multiple layers.  Highland tugged on the back of it, helping her.

The top beneath felt insufficient.

Weird, that that was her concern, when Highland had a gun.

“Worry?” she asked.

“Will you carve Addi up again?  Or scare me by doing something else, like that?”

“Her explaining it helped,” Valentina said.  “It’s like… I’m in a box, but after she explained, I can see the walls of the box.  Where the floor is.  Where the way out might be.

“In this box, before, you couldn’t tell, and when you reached for a wall and found floor instead-”

“It’s not a very good metaphor.”

“-surprise, you cut a hostage’s face open so bad she needed thirty-five stitches.”

“That many?  Wow.”

“I might’ve lost count.  The fucking eyelid kept slipping out of my grip, or she’d pull away.”

She still didn’t feel bad.  It was a weird concept.

“Point is, you’re telling me about some box-”

“I was in a dark place, basically.”

“And you didn’t know which way was up, and so you cut her.”

“Yeah.  I guess.  Like I said, it’s not a great metaphor.”

“Okay.”

“But I figured out where the walls are.  Which way is up.  I think.  I think I need- the voice on the phone.  My uncle.  I can’t do this alone.  I need to not be my dad, and I realized what I did to her, it was…”

She couldn’t find the words.  She’d been okay, before.  Even thinking them.  But saying them was making them real and that came with feelings she wasn’t sure how to handle.

“Like your dad?” Highland asked.

She recoiled at that.  “You don’t know how bad he is.  Really.”

“I have a sense.  I heard about Timoteo.  The fact he’d pay people money to torment you?”

She thought of her brother.

“It’s all of him.”

“Okay.”

“She said it felt good.  It felt good, making her piss herself.  Hurting her.  I think I’m not a good person.  Like if things had happened another way, maybe I would’ve done it to her, and I would’ve enjoyed it too.”

“And you would’ve gotten your face carved up, maybe?” Highland asked.

“I dunno.”

The emotions were building up in her chest, and she started to feel nauseous.

The reality of it.

She also wouldn’t be a good person if the only thing that made it real and made her upset with it was the idea of it happening to her.  Or the violence against her brother.

“I’m starting to hate myself.  Does this keep going?”

“Tough question.  I think the thing I’ve realized is… and maybe this is why I understand the voice on the phone, and why your uncle things she and I are similar.  That people aren’t good.  People are shit.  We’re not as far progressed from being monkeys, banging rocks against rocks, or thinking the sun is something divine.  We’re more easily influenced than we think we are.  And most of us, we’ll fuck everything up.  They are fucking it up.  And we wade into it, using the tools we have.”

The nausea wasn’t going away, but it wasn’t welling up, at least.

“You’re looking green.”

“Distract me.”

“Okay.  In the interest of fucking things up in the right direction… who are we deploying?”

“Let’s start the information campaign,” Valentina said, gripping Highland’s sleeve for support, still leaning forward in case she suddenly retched.  “Addi’s thing.  At the same time, we start gentle?  Based on what you said before.”

“Yeah.  Let’s focus on the voice on the phone, give her a window.  Two groups?”

“Yeah.  The Ledbetters?”

“You said they were shitty.  Horrible people.  They got the voice’s help because of a deal.”

“Yeah.”

“Save ’em for later.  When it’s more dangerous, our enemy more on guard.  Morally not right, but we can offer them hazard pay.”

“Sounds good.  Um.  In terms of people we’re willing to work with, who we want safe… there’s a man who built a bomb.  Never used it.  But he put it together, he was going to blow up a political think tank he blamed for a lot of what went wrong in the last twenty years.”

“Was he right?”

“M-the voice on the phone seemed to think so.”

Highland sighed.  “I know her name, I saw it on mail in the house, so if you want to use that…”

“I don’t.  She’d hate that.”

“Alright.”

They walked a minute.

“Would I be sympathetic to him?  This bomber?”

“Maybe.”

“Is he good with bombs?  Or was it a fluke?  Or a failure?”

“Yeah.  He’s good.  It was serious.  He’s a chemical engineer.”

“Alright.  Let’s go to our next location, make the call.  Sound him out.  Think of a good pitch, if he’s morality-driven.  I’ll lead the other team, maybe take a shot at someone important.”

“I’ve got some documents on my phone with faces, schedules.”

“Good.  We’ll stop, eat, hydrate, get more layers on, maybe a wig for one of us.  Then we deploy, fuck things up in the right direction.  With eyes open.  Keep the good ones alive.”

“The voice on the phone is one of the good ones?”

“I haven’t seen any reason to believe otherwise.  She rescued you.  She rescued me.  Bolden.  The Angel of Death.  Moses.  Others.  She’s got kids waiting for her… we’re keeping a quiet eye on the house, using her tech, we’ve got them thinking about you, instead.  She built a life for herself, then she kept going, kept giving second chances.  I might object to who got those, but… I like the idea.  I’d rather live in a world where that’s possible, no matter how deep you are in the shit.  I’ll protect her and those she cares about.  Which apparently includes you.”

Valentina nodded.

Anxiety welled up in her.

There was no time.  That was the thing.  They were being watched.  Stalked.  Every phone call, every movement, it was a chance to make a mistake.  They were going to set up a bomb.  Somewhere associated with people she’d eaten and had parties with.

No time, before Josie started freaking out at her absence and called someone.  An absolute no– few things would make Mia feel like Valentina had failed her, than if it came to that.  Did that mean she was supposed to go get them?

No time before she crumbled, or compromised something that’d change her.  More than carving her cousin’s best friend’s face open.

She knelt in front of one. He had an intact eye, a little bloodshot and watery, and looked straight at her.

She leaned into him, and hugged him. He made a sighing sound. His chin thunked into her shoulder, and rested there.

The memory slapped her in the face, and brought that nausea back.  It wasn’t nausea because of the condition that man had been in.  The feelings over Addi and the torso man weren’t the feelings she felt like she should have.

Highland had said it.  She was her father’s daughter.  She didn’t want to find out how much.

---

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‘Highland’ was a big guy, fit, and not dressed like she’d expected.  Loose fitting jeans, belt, and a t-shirt, smoke mask.  No gun that she could see.  He came to the back door, not the front, one hand held out to his left, like she’d asked him to do in her exchange with him.

He came in the back door, saw the delivery guy with the curtain from the back window draped over him, and looked around.

“Blood?” Highland asked.

The delivery guy jumped visibly at the sound of a new voice.

“Not much.”

“And the guy?”

“I’m afraid to check.”

“Show me.”

She led him through the house to the attached garage.

He bent down, touching finger to neck.  Then he shifted his grip, pressing the bottom half of his hand down into the side of the neck.  There was a faint grinding sound, and another pop like cracked knuckle.

He pulled his hand away.  “What’d you hit him with?”

“Trap.”

Highland paused, then looked around the garage, eyes going to the door, the tracks the door slid along… “Seen one of those.”

“There’s a few.  I remembered one.  By the front door.  Baited him outside.”

“Good thinking,” the man said.  “Listen.  He’s alive.  He’s not doing great.  Maybe he’ll die in the future, maybe he’d survive with care, but I’m not going to take him to the hospital.  It doesn’t make sense.”

She turned her eyes to the guy.  She wasn’t sure if his chest was rising and falling from shallow breaths or if her eyes played tricks on her, with how much her heart was hammering, nervousness changing her focus- literally skewing what her eyes gave her.

“There’s blood on his pants leg, shoe, and some on the floor,” she said.

“Okay.  That’s not what I’m talking about right this second, though.  You hear me?  I can take care of the blood.  I’m also going to finish him off, now.”

Valentina frowned.

“You should go.”

“I’m responsible-”

“No.  Go look after the other prisoner.  See if he wants water, before we get him in the car.  No need for you to see this.”

“I knew he might die or get hurt if I used the trap,” Valentina said.  “I want to see this through.  I’m staying.”

Highland sighed.

He propped the guy up to a partial sitting position, then, securing one arm around shoulders, manipulated the head to face one side- and hauled it to the other, snapping it.

Valentina winced.

Watching, she studied the man in the wake of that.  Looking for a final exhalation, or some physical reaction.

“Blood on the pants leg, you said?” Highland asked.

“Yeah.”

She felt numb, which did less to free up her thoughts to handle what was going on than she thought it would.  She couldn’t bring herself to believe that the man had died with the neck snapping.  It had been before.  She’d done the killing.  Highland had engaged in a brief charade to try to spare her feelings.

As horrible as the mental image and the knowledge was, she was glad she’d stayed, because it told her things about who Highland was.  That numbness sat weirdly in her chest, shoulders, and upper arms.  Like a cloud encompassing heart, lungs, breathing, blood, and everything related.

She kept grabbing for metaphors or ways to frame the situation.  It reminded her of playing a game with one of her nephews, in one of those situations there had been a family gathering and she’d been stuck with the kids.  In the game, he’d been building a bridge, and the goal had been to make a bridge that held up while spending as little money as possible.

Valentina, trying to find metaphors and ways of understanding people, was trying to build bridges here.  But she didn’t have enough ‘money’ and she was trying to stretch too far.  So much of this was outside her experience.

The wire had cut into the dead man’s leg, and that had led to some of the bleeding she’d pointed out.  Highland went to the kitchen, ransacking cabinets, and had to enlist Valentina’s help to open a child safe lock, which she thought was pretty funny.  With baking soda and bleach, he cleaned up the blood- or got enough of it that it wasn’t easily recognizable as blood.  He went outside to get more.

Valentina did as he’d suggested, and got water, providing it for the delivery guy.

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Still figuring that out,” Valentina said, quiet.  “Sorry, this isn’t about you.”

“I figured that out.”

No messages from Josie, nothing else from anyone else.  No messages on the phone.

She browsed it while she waited for Highland.  ‘Dragons’?

Steven Long was a high level manager of a chemical company, sent to prison for embezzlement and a fraud scheme aimed at ousting then-CEO Jeff Utter and getting Steven’s cousin into the role of interim manager.  Between them, the two would re-appropriate company funds and sell corporate information.  The connection between the two was discovered by chance and the scheme unraveled before it was fully underway.

While in prison, Steven became a target, possibly a ruse of its own, because he was quickly provided protection by the Aryans.  Once he was out, they pressured him to return the favor, involving themselves heavily in his life, and had him work for them.  After a year of odd work for which he had little courage and capability, he settled into a role guarding and taking care of three of the students from Yellow Bus 11-12.

Yellow Bus 11-12 had been in the news a few years back.  It was part of why schools like Josie’s had drills for armed, organized assaults against the school, which were very different from lone shooter and small group shooter drills.  A whole school bus had been waylaid, its occupants taken by a group that was, if she remembered right, tied to the Civil Warriors.  The entire thing was a mess, made messier by how people had been convinced, even after some of the first culprits had been caught, that it was Middle Easterners who’d done it, a lack of police response, and the fact that the kids had been split up, taken to different places.

One of those things that had happened when she was younger, where she’d heard a lot of little details but hadn’t connected the dots for it until way later.  Mostly, she’d heard the name ‘Yellow Bus 11-12’ a lot, news had been turned off when she was in the room, and her field trips with school had started to have a guy with a gun at the front of the bus.  Someone had said they were lucky, and other schools didn’t have field trips at all, anymore.

And here, in front of her face, in black and white text, a passing mention of three of those kids.

She found herself skimming the rest, looking for more details about the kids, more than anything.  Barely anything.  Steven had waited until he was alone, took the kids back and dropped them off at their old school after dark, then been referred to Mia by someone else from prison.

New identity, disappeared, now he was far away.

Dragons number two and three were linked.

Lor and Michelle Ledbetter are sisters, ex-members of the Thornton Pack, a gang absorbed into the Kitchen, previously led by Charlie Pullen.

Valentina knew of Charlie Pullen.  Mia had asked her last night if she could pick out some faces as familiar.  Charlie Pullen would’ve been one she could pull out.  But she was pretty sure he was already in Mia’s pile of gathered information.

Other members of the gang (including the men of the Ledbetter family) would raid neighborhoods of rival gangs, Kitchen included, indiscriminately targeting people living there, maiming, wounding, and terrorizing them, looting the place and offering to leave people alone if there was anything easy to resell or cash on hand.  Intent was to stir locals of the area against the gangs that were meant to have control and be offering protection.  Certain people were given to Lor and Michelle Ledbetter.  Lor kept them prisoner and put them to work cutting drugs, while Michelle organized ransoms.

When the Thornton Pack folded into the Kitchen, there was too much animosity against the Ledbetters.  Lor, Michelle, and their youngest brother (see Shawnie Ledbetter) were held long enough to detox, then given new identities, as a favor to our contact.  Lor and Shawnie were released first, and after Lor covertly notified Michelle she had reached her destination safely, Michelle provided information he wanted and was allowed to follow.

‘Dragons’ were apparently Mia and Carson’s term for people who kept other people prisoner.

Making Mia and Carson ‘dragons’ by their terminology.

Valentina and Highland too, Valentina supposed.  They’d watched over Addi, Nicole, and Sara.

Highland had said he wasn’t able to watch them for that long.  The Ledbetters were marked down as dangerous, low loyalty, unpredictable, and cheap.

Not worth it.  Even if Addi deserved it.

Highland came back inside.

“I’m not good at this,” Highland said.

“Better at it than I am.”

“Watching prisoners, cleaning up evidence.”

“What do you normally do?” Valentina asked.

“She didn’t tell you?”

She’d looked him up, she’d seen how they thought he was loyal.  That they trusted him.  She’d read a bit of the story.  But… “I got some information.  They respect you.  But I don’t know what it means when they say someone’s a soldier and a problem solver.”

“I carried a gun, sometimes I was there to look tough, sometimes it was to aim and shoot… or snap a neck, like you just saw.  I handle problems… but I prefer to handle them in a way that means I don’t have to worry about them later.  This entire thing, none of it’s like that.”

“Taking people prisoner, cleaning up a scene, finding a way to get back to equilibrium.”

“Can we?”

“I guess we’re going to find out.  I was thinking about it.  We need to sell a narrative.  They’re going to know their guy is gone.  And our man over there has the other half of the story.”

“M- they told Davie Cavalcanti that a bunch of the contact’s people are out there, trying to get revenge for the contact’s death.  Dead man’s switch.”

“Then that’s the story we try to sell.  Okay.  Then I came here to target your mom and dad.  Found a soldier and delivery guy here.  Let’s make sure we’re not here when they follow up, and no trails outright stop here.”

As he said that, Highland looked over at the delivery guy.

He crossed half of the house, before barking out, “Hey, Boxgo guy.”

Valentina followed behind, arms folded.

“I don’t even remember where this is, I don’t know what happened.  Let me go, I’ll… give my boss an excuse, finish my shift, go home, forget this happened.  I won’t even remember where this is.  All the streets look the same.”

“Thank you, good of you.  That makes things simpler.  But for right now, I want to know, are those restraints too tight?  Is the circulation in your hands okay?”

“I’m okay.  I’d prefer to not be here, but I’m okay.”

Highland walked over.  “Make a fist?”

The guy did.

“Spread your fingers out?”

The guy did.

Highland seized his hand, then reached over to where the Cavalcanti soldier had put the guy’s phone, halfway down the table.  He pressed the guy’s thumb to the base of the phone.

It dinged, and opened up.

“Didn’t have to twist my fingers back,” the guy said, a bit whiny.  “I would’ve cooperated.”

“If you hadn’t, this would have taken five times as long.”

“We’ll figure this out,” Valentina said.

“Don’t judge me for the shit on my phone, okay?”

“The other guy had porn as a lock screen wallpaper.  That’s hard to top,” Valentina said.

“Oh.  Ha,” the guy said.  He took a partial breath, then awkwardly sputtered, “-Had?”

“Boxgo uses an app to track date and time of deliveries,” Highland said, voice low.  Just for Valentina.  “Last one was this house.  Kid fibbed.  He’s saying he’d drop this and forget, but there’s a clear record.  How do you forget what’s there in hard black and white?”

“So what do we do?”

“We don’t let the trail end here.  That makes things too complicated,” Highland told her.  “Can you drive?  And do you have a dark green polo shirt?”

“A dark green-?”

Highland bent down, grabbing the visor off the guy’s head, one hand holding the curtain in place, and then put it down on top of Valentina’s head.  “He’s parked across the street.  Wear a mask, watch for doorbell cameras.  Do a few deliveries.  I’ll sort out things on this end and pick you up.”

⯁

I’m getting an education.

She’d gone to private school.  Six out of ten meals had been cooked by staff at the house.  Her dad had cooked another three out of ten.  The last was a toss up between takeout, which her dad always resented, or her stepmother cooking.  With Mia and Carson, she’d had her first explanations on what went into meal prep.

Maybe if she’d asked her dad, before, he would have taught her.  But that was a big maybe.  It was always maybe with her dad.  She was pretty sure he reveled in it- in people not knowing whether to expect a hug or strictness, then being grateful when it was a hug.  Like it made it somehow more meaningful.

She’d never learned laundry.  She’d never worked.  The closest had been school functions in middle school.

Carson had taught her about laundry.  Easier in some ways than she expected – soap in, turn the dial to the right setting, press the button.  Harder in others.  An endless list of things not to do.  Things that could go wrong.

Being a ‘dragon’, in Mia’s terminology, which mostly meant keeping an eye on prisoners while eating bunker food and watching movies.

Then a quantum leap forward, into taking care of two kids.  Babysitting on steroids.  Being a mom, kind of.

Now a job as a delivery driver.

Leading into taking over for Mia.

She used the app to find the address, then drove up, parking with a hard jerk.  She knew how to drive, but she’d never driven anything with this kind of weight.  She hopped out, blinking hard against the smoke, and took an approach to the house that kept her out of view of any doorbell cameras, before tossing the package onto the front steps.

She was halfway back when the door opened.  A heavyset guy with messy hair shouted, “You’re late!”

She ignored him.

“I’m going to report this!”

Damn.  A bit of a trail, still.

She wasn’t sure what to do, though.  She could understand Highland’s frustrations, that so much of this was stuff that wasn’t tying off neatly.  Things that required more work.

She considered, then turned around.  “Please don’t.”

“How are you going to make it up to me?”

Her skin crawled at the question.  She knew what he was really asking.  How many movies had he watched where people used lines like that and it led straight into a fifteen minute video?  Enough that he thought it was worth trying?

Or maybe the world was actually like that… which made her skin want to crawl in other directions.

“Money,” she said.  “What will it take?”

“Three hundred.”

She could do three hundred, but felt like that could cause more problems.  “Forty?  It really wasn’t my fault, I don’t want to lose this job.”

“Seventy-five.”

“That’s more than a day of work,” she said.  She had no idea if it was.  “Fifty?”

“Yeah.  Okay.  Fifty,” he said, in a tone that made her feel like he’d send the report anyway.

“Give me your email.”

He did.  It was a boomer email, from some site nobody used anymore.  She used her phone to send the money, selecting one of the functions beneath the balance display in the thing Mia had set up.

It quickly moved between several pages, before asking for the amount, then zipped through a few more, before bringing her to the app.

“Check your email?” she asked him.

It took him a full minute.  She felt anxious.  Exposed.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry,” she told him.

“Fucked up my workday,” he groused, but he turned his back to her, moving with a kind of enthusiasm.

The encounter sat oddly with her as she drove around the corner, parked, and messaged Highland to get a meeting place.  It made her think of Addi.  She’d spent so much of her life ducking her head down, making nice, not making waves in her friend group, doing as she was told… so fucking much of which was useless and pointless, now that she was out here, trying to survive.  What did the piano lessons get her?  What did it get her, that she’d made nice with certain people, enough to be acquaintances and be able to approach them.  A politician’s daughter.

Fuck.  She should have mentioned that to Mia.

Now Mia might be dead or dismembered.

Her thoughts kept going to dark places like that.  Worries, fears about how each mistake could end her, or end Ripley, Tyr, Carson, and Mia.  But also thoughts about this guy.

That all it would take was a relatively small amount of money, and she could send someone to hurt him.  It might even be the sensible thing to do.  Technically.

Instead, she’d chosen the path where the asshole won.

How much is this fucking me up?

Highland was parked under a bridge.  She pulled up, parked, and pulled off the slightly oversized polo shirt.  Carson’s.  She shook the visor out, then tossed it back into the vehicle.

“Problems?”

“One guy came out and saw me.  Last stop.”

“We need time and distance from this.  We got some of that.  Come on.  I could use your help in looking after these people.”

They left the delivery truck parked beneath the bridge, and she climbed into the passenger seat, glad to have someone else in the driver’s seat for now.

“I’m going to lose my job,” the delivery guy said.  He was blindfolded, now, hands secured behind his back, held in place by a seatbelt that was zip-tied secure, so a simple button press wouldn’t get him free.

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Valentina said.  “I don’t want this to ruin your life.  I’ll make you a deal.”

“I’m- I’m open to deals.”

“Put up with this.  We secure you for a… day, maybe a few days.  Food, water, basic needs met.  A bit scary, a bit weird, I know, but… put up with this.  Then we let you go.  If this doesn’t come back on us, if we go looking to double check and it’s clear you didn’t release our details, if everything’s okay, then I’ll give you money.  Money every month.  Enough this is worthwhile.”

He was silent.

Highland took the on-ramp onto a bridge.

“Is it weird?” the delivery guy asked.  “That if it was a choice between that and being let go now, I’d want to be let go?  I don’t even want to betray you or say anything, I swear.  I just want… to be safe.”

“Me too,” she said.  She was so tired it was painful.  Her head rested sideways on the armrest, her body facing Highland, eyes studying him, as she talked to the delivery guy.  “We’re not bad or evil people.  All we want is to be safe.  And you’re a threat to that, right now.  So there’s no situation where you get to go anytime soon.  I wish I could… could beam how true and sincere that is, from my heart to yours, so you get it and stop asking.”

“Make your peace with it, guy,” Highland said.  “Surrender that fight.  Accept it as fact.  Put your energy elsewhere.  Think about what you’re going to do when you’re home.  How you’ll explain the van being parked in the middle of nowhere.  Taking any medication that could make you act funny?”

The delivery guy sighed.  “No.”

“Too bad,” Highland said.

Valentina shifted her seat to more of a reclining position, which made the delivery guy jump at the sound.  “Sorry.”

“So it’s a choice between what?  Taking that deal…”

“And making things harder,” Valentina said.  “Talking after the fact.  Get a chance of getting us, but getting no money.”

“I’ll take the deal.”

“Sensible,” Highland said.

“I don’t want to sabotage myself, or say something and have it taken the wrong way…”

“Then don’t?” Highland suggested.

“Go ahead,” Valentina said.

“This is purely food for thought.  I heard about prisons in… might’ve been Norway, or somewhere out there, and if someone tries to escape, they don’t punish them or extend their sentences.  Because the desire for freedom is fundamentally human.”

“I like that,” Valentina said.

“Yeah?”

“Doesn’t change our plan or our deal.  This isn’t Norway or somewhere out there,” Highland said.  “This is America.  For the next little while, at least.”

“You think they’re going to win?” the delivery guy asked.

“I don’t think they’re losing or going away.  As long as that holds true, it’s a matter of time.  After that, I don’t think it’s going to be about the kind of right to freedom you’re talking about.”

“Yeah.  I think I know what you mean.”

Valentina shut her eyes, uneasy even in rest.

⯁

“Do you think Kelson’s gay?” Nance asked.

“Huh?” Gio asked.  “Are we really doing this again?”

“Have we had this discussion?”

“We’ve seriously talked about Lupita, Kelson, Austin, Kev, Shelby and Callahan all being gay.  Everyone in that friend group.”

“Because vibes,” Tania said.

“Because two years are going to pass and then a few of them are going to come out and everyone’s going to be so shocked,” Nance said.

“A bunch of them are from conservative families, right?” Tania asked.

“Yeah,” Gio said.

“Newsworthy,” Tania said.

Esme mused aloud, “It’s schroedinger’s sexuality.  All of them are gay and not gay until confirmed otherwise.  I get what Gucci girl’s saying. It’s a bit boring.  And last-decade.”

“I’m not saying it’s boring, but it’s weird that a bunch of people we’re kinda-sorta friends with are, you know, this default discussion we keep having.  Some people talk about the weather, we talk about who’s into who, and most of that’s those six people,” Gio said.

“They’re popular, connected people,” Tania said, with a note of defensiveness.

“What if we quit it for… a week?” Esme suggested.

“I’m going to set my phone,” Tania said.

“Really?” Nance asked.

“There.  I’ll let us know when we’re clear.”

Nance rolled her eyes.  Gio rolled her own, miming Nance.

They walked down a whole half-length of hallway, past other students in their blue blazers, blue dress shirts, with blue-and-gold plaid skirts for girls, slacks for the boys.  The lockers were dark blue to match the uniforms.

Gio wrinkled her nose at the smell of paint.  Someone was drawing up a mural, with roughed-out images of students standing in front of a coat of arms.  The coat of arms was getting filled out first.

“They took down the memorials?” Esme asked.

“They’re fixing it because a lot of the flowers and things left against the wall left stains, apparently,” Tania said.

“Is it bad to say good?” Nance asked, quietly.  “I’m glad it’s gone?  Those guys died way before we even got here.”

As their group walked out to the grass outside, where various students sat in the shade of trees, there was a growing, silent communication between them.

They sat on the grass.  Gio felt overly conscious of how disproportionately large her thighs were, and how insufficient the dress seemed.  She sat with her back to a tree and fixed her bag under her knees and by her butt, so it pinned the back of her skirt to her legs, and protected her against anyone seeing.  Once settled, she took in the shifting expressions, the look of agony on Tania’s face, the growing awkwardness on Nance’s.  Nothing to do with her, even if that little nugget of self-doubt in her immediately started insisting it was, but instead about the conversation.  Or lack thereof.

“See?” Gio asked.

“We don’t talk about them that much, do we?  Why is this so awkward?”

“It’s like when you say ‘don’t think about a blue elephant’.  It becomes all you can think about.”

“It’s seriously not,” Gio replied.

“I legitimately ship Callahan, though,” Tania said.  “So that makes it okay.”

“The one week rule is still in effect,” Gio warned her.  “There should be some punishment.”

“Like a swear jar.”

“Like a dare.”

Nance snickered.  “Tania, you’re such a… what’s it called?  A fushi- fuu…”

“That’s so racist,” Tania protested.  “I’m Japanese and you’re sticking me with that term?”

“Fujoshi.  Boy-love fanatic,” Nance said, looking up form her phone.  “Is it racist?  What if I say BL fanatic or something.?”

“That sounds sketch,” Gio said.

Tania took up an air of self importance, back straight, eyes shut, facing the sky.  “I believe in them and I root for them and it’s pure and wholesome…”

“That sounds sketchier,” Esme threw in.

Nance pushed Tania lightly.  With the slope, Tania tipped over and sprawled.

“…and I’m not allowed to date until I graduate so I gotta have something to cling to,” Tania said, lying there.

“I think I might be on the same wavelength as Gio,” Esme said.  “Why don’t we focus on our own love lives, and-”

“Because it’s sad.  And boring.  And hopeless,” Nance cut in.

“-And stop obsessing over others that might not even be a thing?” Esme finished.

“Why?  Because they’re cuter,” Tania said.

“You gotta stop,” Gio said.  She offered Tania a hand in righting herself and getting back to a sitting position.

“Okay.  One week, then we figure it out,” Tania said.  “But I want it known, I was going to throw a get together, and now, because you called me names, Nance-”

“Me?”

“-and because you keep interrupting me, I don’t know if you know you do that, I’m thinking about not inviting you.”

“What kind of get together?” Gio asked.

“Couple nights at my place, minimal supervision.  Movies.”

“A sleepover?” Nance asked.

“We’re not seven.  A get-together.”

“Overnight.  A sleepover.”

“Do you want to keep arguing, or do you want to be invited?”

“That sounds cool,” Gio said.  She looked over at Adele.  The quiet one.  “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Conversation did go in other directions, thankfully.  Mercifully.  Gio switched to lying down in the grass, still with her bag in place.  She got a text and checked it.

Esme.  Thanking her for the backup.  She took a bit before glancing Esme’s direction, caught the little smile.

Thanks for not leaving me arguing by my lonesome, she texted back.

Esme was, in her own words, not sure what she was, but had confessed in private to Gio the constant speculation about those other people in a related social circle had been gnawing at her.  Gio had offered to try to handle it.  It had been harder than she’d thought, but… good.

“We should coordinate, before lunch is over,” Nance said.  “When are we hanging out.”

Gio switched her phone over to calendar mode.

“I’ve got violin tomorrow,” Gio said.  “Piano the day after.”

“Nothing tomorrow, gymnastics the day after,” Tania said.

“Okay, so tomorrow’s probably out, I’m busy,” Nance said.  “Day after everyone’s busy.  Day after that… my dad’s helping with a big event.”

“I’m coming to that,” Gio said.

“Me too,” Esme said.

“Awesome, that’s great, I won’t be bored to tears.  Want to meet up before, figure out what we’re wearing?”

“My place?” Gio offered.

“Sure,” Nance said.  Esme nodded.

“Please tell me everyone’s free on Saturday,” Tania said.  “And over the weekend?”

“Mostly free.  I might have to duck out…”

⯁

The flurry of messages came in so fast she thought it was spam, while she was in the middle of getting ready for the day.

Then it was a frantic few minutes of getting online, trying to find the source.  The root of it.

She went to text her friends in the group chat, and the group chat was gone.

She texted them individually instead- Esme, because her name was most recent on the contact list.  Then Nance.  Nance’s GFY account was linked in the contact icon, so she clicked that.

Brief messages to each.  What’s going on?

Nance’s Go Foto Yourself profile… taken down?

Tania’s too?

Esme…

The only one still up.

Red alerts popped down at the top of her screen.  She touched them each in turn.

Message failed to send.

Message failed to send.

Her texts to Nance and Esme sat there on the message app, bold red and pink.  They’d blocked her.  On GFY too.

She checked Esme’s page, and went to the direct message option.

Only to get the ‘page not found’ screen.  Blocked.

Maybe Tania hadn’t blocked her in messages?

She sent a quick message.  What’s going on?

It sat there, the little ‘sending’ icon circling around and around.

It was crowded out as other messages came in.  Someone had given out her cell number.

how do you live with yourself?

Seriously fucked to consider this normal

Gucci GANG

Did you know?

gucci gang member

Several copies of the same image, a crime scene, with images taken from her own GFY account, cut out and placed over them, so it looked like she was smiling over bodies covered in sheets.

Like someone had posted it somewhere and a bunch of others had raced to send it to her to get a reaction.

Gucchi gang gucchi gang

the way to handle this is to get out in front of it and CONFESS
what part did you play??

Psycho dad psycho daughter

More of the images.  Others.  She went to her GFY account, fingers fumbling and hitting the wrong tiny word on her way to deleting her account.  Warning: 419 photos will be deleted.

Yes.

She hit it again.  Yes.

Yes.

It didn’t budge.

A tear had dripped from her eye to the screen, and the blot made it not register the touch.  She smudged it, then hit the button.

The messages kept rolling in.

Did you know?????

Yes.  She’d had an inkling it wasn’t all legitimate.  Now the world knew.

Her school was a good school.  Strict.  If anyone went after someone weaker, disabled, different, the rest of the students would go after them.  For the most part, the shittiest student behaviors were relegated to the margins, dark corners, out of sight.  Nothing like the old movies.

But there was a flip side.  Students today weren’t any less ruthless than the guys who’d openly punch people or smash them into lockers, or the girls who’d cut those they saw as lesser down with words.  It took a different focus.

In this, when her family’s money came from the places it did, when they thought there was good excuse and good reason… they descended.

She watched the messages roll in.  It kept going for over an hour.  She had the distinct impression that even though her GFY account was closed, her photos had been saved and shared out, because they kept making new images and new memes that used them.  From vacations.  From happy moments.

She wanted her mom.  She wanted her friends.

“Giovanna Cavalcanti!”

Her grandfather’s nurse, who was sometimes her caretaker too, stormed into her room.

“I’m not feeling well.”

“You’re fine, and you should already be ready and on your way to school.”

“I’m not-”

The nurse, an iron grip on Gio’s upper arm, steered her into the room where her father was.  It was kind of a conference room, but not really.

Dissolving into tears, she put her phone, gripped in the hand furthest from the nurse, on the table, and pushed it closer.

Her dad picked it up and browsed the messages.

“I can’t go to school.”

“Moments like this, you must,” he told her.  “Own it.  Be strong, be brave.  Give them nothing.  Most of all, you cannot cry.”

Her next breath came out as a singular cough-sob.

“Everything you are, everything you have, it comes from this.  It was earned.  Fought for.  With blood, with intelligence, with hard work over generations.  We’re powerful and we’re stronger every day.  That’s in you.”

The tears kept rolling down her cheeks.

“Everything we have, you have too.  Except you have more.  Opportunity, education.  Your grandfather and I, your uncles, your oldest cousins?  They didn’t have that.  Your brother will one day be a key piece of this family.  He’ll need you.  Crying like this, it’s not moving in the right direction.”

She sniffed, nose runny.

She didn’t want this… pep talk.  She wanted her mom and her friends.  She wanted yesterday back.

She reached out for him, and he took hold of her wrist.

“Stop, Gio.  Now.  You’re not a child.”

She couldn’t.  The phone kept buzzing as the new texts rolled in, light flashing in the upper corner.  There wouldn’t be one word of support in that.

“Giovanna.”

The word was different in tone.  It made her pause, interrupted whirling thoughts, emotion, cutting past it all.

She blinked until her eyes were clear.  She’d stopped crying, in the sense her eyes no longer welled up with tears, but the moisture that had already welled up was still there.  A tear found an avenue down and raced its way down her cheek.

He was smiling at her, his eyes locked to hers, unblinking.  The grip on her wrist tight.

She swallowed.

“Go get ready for school.  You’ll go for lunch.  Give them nothing, bury the tears, make no apologies, and do not flinch, do not retreat.”

That vague animal fear that gripped her, as he locked his vision to hers, it was the only place to go that didn’t have her crying again.  It made it hard to think.

“Yes?” he asked.

She nodded.

The phone buzzed.  New messages continually popping up.

“Is it true?  How bad is it?” she asked.

The smile dropped away.  He gave her a look, like he was disappointed in her.

“Go to school.  That should be your focus right now.”

He said that, but the grip on her wrist was so tight she could feel the blood pounding in her hand, as blood flowed in but didn’t flow out.

She pulled away, and he let her go unscathed.

⯁

For months now, every group activity was painful.  Every place she was expected to be social was like walking over hot coals.  Here or at home, with public-facing family events.

She had her lunch in her bag, prepared and boxed by the chef.  She navigated the outdoor tables and benches where a solid share of the school sat.  Others sat on the grass, still, though the weather was cooling.  Some had even put out picnic blankets.

She smiled tightly at Nicole, her cousin, before sitting down at the same table.  Addi was a few seats down.

The volume of ongoing conversation dwindled.  She was aware it dwindled.  She avoided making eye contact.

Sitting here awkwardly was better than not having any place to go.

Nicole was texting someone.  She felt like it was about her.  All conversation had stopped.

Her own phone buzzed.

Nicole:
What the hell are you doing?

“You could just ask me in person, instead of this charade.”

Nicole got to her feet.  A grip on Gio’s arm pulled her to a standing position.

Her cousin was older, by a couple years.  She wasn’t really able to stop from being marched over to the nearest spot where nobody would really hear.

When Nicole leaned in close, there was fear in her eyes.

“They think your dad’s the psycho in the family, and there’s only debate and questions about whether it’s my dad.  Why the fuck would you help make up their minds?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“When you figure it out?  Don’t do it at my lunch table.”

Nicole let go of her arm and pushed it away in the same motion, with enough force that Gio had to step back to catch herself.

The weird thing was, she barely blamed Nicole.

She’d probably do the same thing if the situation were reversed.

Addi had twisted around, watching this entire thing, a light smile on her face.

Gio walked back to the table, only to get her lunch, and then walked out to the field, sitting in a patch of sunlight, her back to everyone else.  That smile stuck in her mind.

⯁

“Esme.”

Esme glanced back, pausing mid-stride, then resumed walking.

“Please?”

Esme kept walking.

“I thought we were better friends than that.”

“You didn’t tell me anything.”

“I didn’t know anything!  I mean, I only knew some, I- please.”

Esme turned around.  “You know they dropped me?”

“I know.”

“So you think you can come back, I’m so far up shit creek, I might as well row along with you?”

“We could be alone together.”

“It’s like you don’t even realize.  The money, the things you bought and showed off, the parties… it’s all tainted.  Your family butchered people.”

“There were some legitimate businesses too.”

“Gio,” Esme said, face screwed up a bit.

“I didn’t choose it.  I barely had any idea.”

“What do you think happens?” Esme asked.  “We hang out?  We tough it out together?  If we’re together, it’s a little bit easier?”

“It can’t be any harder than this.”

“It would be.  It doesn’t make it easier, it means two people are the focus, instead.  I shouldn’t even be talking to you now.”

“We could meet in secret?  Or something?  Code?  Like when we were kids?”

“I don’t want to,” Esme said.

Just like that.

Gio nodded, shrugging, wanting to say something, but the lump in her throat blocked it.  She shrugged again.  She’d already shrugged, hadn’t she?

“I love you.  As a friend.  You were my best friend,” Gio managed.  “I don’t know if I managed to convey that right, but I wanted to say that much.  I get it.  I forgive you.  I think you’re awesome.  I’m rooting for you, even now.  You’re smart, you’re funnier than you think.  There were so many good moments.  I- I- all the good things.”

“Okay.”

Esme stood there for a second, arms folded, then walked away.

Gio’s phone was in the pocket of her uniform sweater vest.  She held the button down.  It sprung to life, a bright and merry jingle that didn’t match how she felt at all.

It took a minute before the texts started rolling in.  It had never let up.  Never stopped.

She spent a while reading it.  Hoping for a message from Esme.  Or someone else.

The school had decided she was the bad guy.  Outright lies, interwoven into things, with kernels of truth, had fed that narrative.  Associating with her was borderline dangerous.

That was it.  That was the story, and how simple the calculus of high school sociology went.  It made fundamental sense.  But she kept reading, all the vitriol and the memes, because as bad as it felt, there was that hope she could make sense of it, find some answer, some key to turn or some thread to pull that would let her understand.

⯁

She walked between classes, head down.  A fresh memorial was sitting in front of the finished mural, and the pile of flowers and notes narrowed the stream of students.

Her arm and shoulder brushed past someone.

The contact was startling.  She made eye contact with the guy, and there was no recognition, no negativity in that glance.

She reached her next class, settled in at her desk, and reached over to her arm and shoulder.

She stopped short of actually touching that spot, hand hovering.  Her mind tried to recapture the sensation.  Had it been warm?

For the first half of class, her thoughts were a storm, caught up in a stupid, singular moment, in fantasy, in- what if tomorrow, there was another moment.  A longer interaction?

The other half of that storm was unease and realization that it was stupid fantasy, that there was no point, and that she was scared by how easy it was to get this caught up in something so trivial, and to want it this badly.

⯁

“Hey,” she said, a bit shy.

Her brother smiled.  He took more time than necessary to get his shoes off and come up the short length of stairs to where she was.

She approached him, for a bit of a hug.

“No,” he said.  “My ribs are fucked.”

“Oh.  Sorry.”

“And I’m a mess,” he said.  He turned, to hang his coat up.  She could see spots of blood on his ear.  “Let me shower first.  We’ll catch up.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve lost weight,” he said.

“Not enough.”

“Enough a dumbass like me noticed.  You okay?”

“Not really.”

“Health or-?”

“Nah.  Other stuff.”

“Still the same?”

She nodded.

He licked his lips, winced.  “Yeah.  I’m not doing so hot either, I guess.  Let me shower, pop some pills, and patch myself up.  We’ll talk.”

“Okay.”

She went to one of the living rooms, putting on a show, and got out her homework.  Outside the big glass windows, ash was falling, mingling with snow.  The television interrupted her show with a report on organized groups burning the national parks.

It meant her show reached a climax, everything at peak chaos, and that was it.  News report, then next show.

Her brother took forty minutes.  Then he emerged, wearing a tee and pyjama shorts.

They sat on opposite ends of the couch, curled up, each with a blanket.  In the background, staff were clearing the dining room table and cleaning the kitchen.  Some were close enough to hear.

So they didn’t talk.  Even if they’d been able to, she wasn’t sure what she’d say.

Her brother fell asleep, probably helped by whatever meds he’d taken.

In another situation, where staff wouldn’t come walking by and see, and potentially report to her father, she would’ve wanted to act like a little kid, go to him, and curl up beside him.

But she didn’t live in that situation, so she didn’t.

⯁

The soldier was outside the glass doors.  A cherry tree was shedding pink petals, lit by a spotlight on the ground.  The man was smoking, and the little dot of orange was the easiest thing to see.

She eased the door open, then stepped outside.

“Hi,” he said.  “Scaring you now so I don’t scare you later.”

“Not scared,” she said.  She walked around him, until she could stand with her back to the exterior wall of the house, instead of a window.  Past the cherry tree was a short wall, then a view of the city below.  It looked so normal.  She pointed at the cigarette.  “Can I have one?”

“No you can’t.”

“Damn,” she muttered.

“I’ve been around your family a while.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smoke.”

“I don’t, really.  But it’s a good way to, I don’t know.  Find common ground.  Chat.”

“You’re not lying,” he said.  “Good view.”

“It really is.”

“Don’t do this shit.  It stinks.”

“Lemme sniff?” she asked.  She reached for his hand.  He let her have it.  She gave it a whiff.  “Not too bad.”

“Bad enough, Gio.  Anyone else fall for that, give you one?”

“Some,” she said.

Still holding his wrist and hand, she moved his hand toward her chest.

He realized what she was doing, and pulled away like he’d touched a hot stove.

Backed away from her.  Like kids at school.

Emotions bubbled up, warred, spat.  If her heart was a building, it had been felled by the storm of conflicted emotions and a complete lack of… of anything to go by, to know which way was up or which way was down, so even the smallest bits of damage could start to be recovered, rebuilt from the ground up.  She wanted to hurt him.

“First off, you’re too young.”

“I’m old enough.”

“You’re too young, and, second of all, even if you weren’t, your dad would fucking decapitate me.  If I was lucky.”

She was breathing hard, emotions fighting their way to the surface.  A part of her wanted to lash out at the rejection, hurt him back.  Convey why she needed this, by taking something from him, somehow.

He turned to leave, opening the glass door.

Door open, glass between them, he paused, asking, “Did anyone else fall for that, say yes?”

“Some.”

“Fuck you, putting me in this position,” he said, before slamming the door behind him.

⯁

“Carlos told me what happened,” her brother said.  “Is he telling me the truth?”

She averted her eyes.

“We’re lucky he told me and not Dad.  Because Dad would’ve hurt you.  What the hell are you doing, Gio?”

She shrugged, staring at a point on the wall.

“You gotta get out of here.  And that’s not the way.”

“I need something to look forward to.”

“And that’s it?  Sleeping with Dad’s soldiers?”

“I fibbed about that,” she muttered, eyes still averted, cringing a bit.

“Abortions are banned and we’re Catholic enough literally nobody we associate with is going to help you find a way if you get pregnant.”

“I’m not,” she said, more emphatic, cringing more.  “I’d use protection if I did.”

“You, I kind of trust.  Them?  The ones who’d go for it?  Not at fucking all.  Gio.  What the hell?  Hey!”

He grabbed her arm, trying to steer her so his face was in front of her face, when she kept looking away.

“I’m not,” she said, more firmly.  “I’m too chicken to push for it.”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fuck.  Okay.  I’m going to go into school.  They let past students walk in.  Arrange something there.  They can pull you out of class. I know someone, they didn’t want to work for our family, they needed a way to talk their way through things, they did something like that.  Talk to them.  Get it figured out.”

She shrugged.

“You gotta make it until you’re seventeen and can go to school.  Get far away enough.  But if you’re doing this bad?  You need help to make it that long.  Right?”

She swallowed and nodded.  She did need help.  She just wished it came from someone who loved her.

Maybe this was the best her brother could do.

“Yeah.”

⯁

Her brother had so much blood in his mouth that she couldn’t tell what teeth were still there and which were gone.  His face had puffed up like someone in a movie she’d seen, where they’d been stung by a swarm of bees, and were allergic, a bruised shade covering them.  Hair was missing, and from the shiny patches on him, he might’ve been burned.

She watched the video of him trying to sit on the patio chair, in that cabin she’d run away from.  Mia had caught it on a trail camera.  He took three tries to lower himself down, then finally let himself fall the distance he couldn’t bring his body to move.  He landed awkwardly, then coughed, his entire body convulsing in pain.

A chair away, her fath- Davie Cavalcanti lounged in a matching seat, phone to his ear.

Valentina put the phone away.

She closed her eyes, trying to center herself, like the guidance counselor had told her.

It was all so paltry.

⯁

The stairs were concrete, and set deep enough into the ground that they were cold even beneath her socks.

Some sections were wood paneled, but the house was large enough ten staff lived on the premises full time, on top of herself, her brother, her stepmom, little sister, and dad.  There was a lot of space below the house.

Music played.  She followed the sound.

The woman she’d just seen had been so scared.

Past a plastic sheet.

Roughly beneath her dad’s bedroom, there were people.  She saw them, filtered through another plastic sheet, and she was mostly invisible to them, standing in gloom, while they were illuminated.

Some moaned. Others rocked, as best as they could.  Some were missing one to three limbs, others four.  Most were blind.  Many were thin.  Tubes with I.V.s ran to necks, catheters ran out of lower orifices.  They were bundled together, and ran to a hole in the ground, from which a machine hummed.

It was horrifying.  Her skin crawled.  The sound of the machine and the movement of fluids made her want to retch.

She knelt in front of one.  He had an intact eye, a little bloodshot and watery, and looked straight at her.

She leaned into him, and hugged him.  He made a sighing sound.  His chin thunked into her shoulder, and rested there.

Horrifying because she could see a scenario, far away, but still there, where the idea of someone who wouldn’t run away or reject her was more appealing than the rest of it was horrific.

Far away, well beyond her reach, but the horror at the possibility outweighed the horror of this scene, and this scene was plenty horrible.

Voices made her pull back.

Three blurry shapes, on the far side of the plastic sheeting.  Doctors.  Keeping these people alive.

She fled before they could see her, bare feet on cold concrete, heart cold, her emotions a storm again, dashing the hard work of her guidance counselor to pieces.

More than ever, she understood what her brother meant.  She needed out.  She needed to go.

⯁

Addi, sitting with Nicole, was on her phone.

Off on her own, Gio watched Addi type.  She watched her hit ‘send’.

The message popped up a second later.  An anonymous text.

Why are you still here?

Addi glanced over her shoulder, at Gio, to see the reaction, then looked away, when she realized she’d been caught looking.

Laughed, at a joke someone else made.

When the warning bell sounded, Gio didn’t immediately move.  Just a couple weeks into this whole thing, she’d found it sapping her drive.  So she procrastinated.

Gio’s cousin Nicole ran ahead, to meet Sara.  Leaving Addi a bit behind.

Addi took a route that brought her closer.

“You going to report me?”

“Already did.”  Nothing had come of it.  Her dad said there had to be real proof before he upset his relationship with his partner.  That was more important than Gio was.

“Figured,” Addi said.  Then she flashed a smile.

If there was an iota of a chance that she could’ve gotten away with it, Gio might’ve sank her teeth into Addi, biting as hard as she could.  She hated her that much, in that moment.

Because that was the smile that sealed it.  That confirmed, without confirming it, that Addi had been the one that took her friends.  Her self respect.  Her hopes and fucking dreams- she hadn’t had big dreams, she’d wanted her friends, she’d wanted to maybe stay in contact with them, going forward, go to the same school.  The fact the bar was set so low made it all the more bitter that she’d lost it.  She’d lost everything she’d looked forward to.  Reasons to smile.  Her brother’s respect.  Her ability to casually brush past people.

She’d lost her dad, because Addi’s actions had turned him from someone who might be bad into someone who was absolutely bad.  The illusion had crumbled.

It was Addi.

⯁

The knife cut through fabric.  Past fabric.

It was just the box cutter she’d used to cut the delivery guy’s zip ties, shoved into a pocket.  It wasn’t cutting boxes or zip ties now.

Addi threw her head this way, that, her scream occupying a level and a volume that was… it was like it was outside the storm of emotions.  Conviction, anger, and countless other feelings warred with one another.

Forehead, eye- the knife skipped past eye socket.  Cheekbone, cheek, chin.  A bit of the center of the throat, near the Adam’s apple.

Then a hand grabbed Valentina, and disarmed her of the box cutter, which was slick from tip to base, now.

She’d barely even decided to do this.  Addi was here, and she couldn’t make peace with Addi going back unscathed.  Not after…

She was pulled away.  It felt like that happened a lot.  Away from the bloodcurdling screams.  She was pushed so she stumbled a few steps.  Highland, holding towels, slammed the toilet seat and toilet cover down, put the towels down, and moved Addi so her face pressed down into it.  “Hold your head there!”

Nervousness quavered in Valentina’s chest.  Had she just done that?

It barely felt like her.  Like she was outside of her body.

Highland turned on her, all fury and bewilderment.  Which weren’t feelings she didn’t relate to.

“I might be done,” she said.  She felt like whatever had possessed her was gone.  It was like her fruitless advances on the soldiers.  A need.  A welling shame after.  “But in case I’m not done… I probably shouldn’t look after her.”

“You fucking think?” he asked, voice raised.

“Bit of a history,” she said, her voice smaller.

“I believe you.  Go the fuck downstairs.  Do I need to worry about you cutting the other ones up?”

“Not nearly as much.”

“Not-  fuck!  Good!  I’m going to stitch this one back together, if I can.  You alright with that?”

He didn’t wait for a response before storming back toward Addi, to do some emergency care.

Valentina washed up.  Then she sat in the living room, where the delivery guy was tied up, hood over his head.

Addi’s scream was ragged, and constant.  It agitated the rest of the house, including Nicole and Sara.  The delivery guy was uneasy.  Highland’s boots stomped this way and that, and old pipes thumped as water ran.

Sitting on a sofa with a sheet thrown over it, she got the phone out.

She wanted her mom.  She needed Mia and Carson.

She’d run it by Highland and the others that were already on their way, before she took any action, but she had a sense of what they needed to do, now.

This couldn’t be a guerilla operation, Highland and this Bolden guy picking away at her family one by one, until they screwed up and got killed or caught.  Mia and Carson were too valuable to her dad.  To Davie Cavalcanti.  He liked keeping people.  The closest thing she might’ve ever had to a connection to him was that moment in the basement, hugging the one.

They needed more reason, something that could shake his tight hold on things.

They’d need to resurrect as many old enemies of the Cavalcantis as they could manage.

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“Tyr, please stay in your chair and eat.  He’s got to eat, right?”

“He’s not an eternal warrior of Ai, so yeah,” Ripley said.  “You said you’d help me with picking out clothes?”

“I’m kinda- Tyr, please.”

“I’m going to get dressed!” Tyr declared.

“Tyr, come on. Sit.”

“I’ll be fast!”

It didn’t help that she hadn’t slept.  She’d rattled her nerves too much last night to also be on her last nerve now.

“Tyr!  Challenge!” Ripley called out.

He stopped in his tracks.

“Don’t delay him.”

“Dressed fast, eat fast, then get your school things!  We’ll put it on the board!”

He sprinted off.

“It helps to think of him as a boulder rolling downhill when he gets like this,” Ripley said.  “Nudge him to change directions when you have to, but don’t try to stop it.”

Valentina winced.  She wasn’t sure that was good.  “Is that how your parents do it?”

“Only sometimes.  When he was little they’d say things like ‘it’s okay so long as he’s eating something’.  Sometimes you gotta focus on getting to tomorrow.”

“Is that an old man type wisdom?” Valentina asked.

Ripley smiled, hugged Valentina as she passed by, then headed to her room.

It was hard to shake a general sick feeling.  She wanted to peek out the window, but what if she did and one of her father’s people was there?

She followed Ripley, checked on Tyr, who nearly barreled into her on his way to go finish breakfast, and checked out Ripley’s closet.  They settled on a pair of black denim overalls with wide straps, and a short-sleeved shirt.  She did her best to pull Ripley’s hair back into a low ponytail -so much easier than Valentina’s own hair- while Ripley got socks on.

“Are you timing me!?” Tyr hollered.

“Yes!  It’s on the microwave!” Ripley called back.  The volume of her voice made Valentina’s vision rattle.

It’s like I’m a single mom all of a sudden, on top of having dad’s organization coming after me.  I have zero kid experience.

I don’t know when or if this ever ends.  What if they never come back?  Or if they come back too hurt to handle their own kids?  Do I leave?  Can I?

“Low ponytail, classic look, works for guys and girls,” Valentina said.  “Clothes are good for now, we’ll shop later.”

“Thank you,” Ripley said.  She looked at Valentina in the mirror by her door, rather than twist around.  She tugged her other sock on.

“I need you to sign things!” Tyr shouted.

“Volume down, Tyr,” Valentina told him.

“I need you to sign things,” Tyr said, at the door.

“I’m not sure I can.  I’ll write a note.”

“What about shoes?” Ripley asked.

“I- those are good,” she said, as Ripley pulled out a pair from her closet.  “One second.”

“Pleasssse,” Tyr begged, holding up a paper.  He danced on the spot like he needed to pee.

“Go use the washroom before the day starts.  I’m- give me a second.”

Tyr entered the bathroom, hurling the door shut- a washcloth on the floor meant it didn’t close, so he was just going to go with the door open.  Too young to really care.

“These?” Ripley asked.

Valentina closed the bathroom door before Tyr was indecent.  “Sure.  You have your school stuff?”

“All set, I handle stuff the night before.  You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Organized like your mom, huh?  Okay, give me a second.”

“We should go before too long.”

“I know, figuring that out.  Just let me-”

Tyr came out of the bathroom.  A clear dribble of moisture dotted the outside of one pants leg.

“Wash your hands, change your pants.  I don’t want to get in trouble if you smell like pee right after going to school,” Valentina said.

“This counts against your record, by the way,” Ripley said.

“No!” he protested.  “That’s not part of it!”

Not helpful.

“Go, get-”

“No!” he protested, louder.

“Just- go,” she said, raising her voice a little.  “And give me a second.  I’ll sign your paper, okay?  Deal?”

He made a whining sound.

Valentina entered Mia’s office, closed the door, and locked it.  Tyr was being loud in the background, complaining to Ripley now.

“Don’t touch me before you wash your hands!” Ripley cried out, down the hall, voice rising.

Back to the door, Valentina shut her eyes.  Her hands held the paper, and trembled.  They might have even trembled if she didn’t have the kids as a focus.  Or if she didn’t have to worry about her dad strolling into the house again.

But the two together…

She could have spent five minutes there, door shut, eyes closed, trying to ignore the rest of the world.  She could have spent thirty.

Hell, she could go to her room, close the door, pull the covers over her head, and sleep until it was dark.

She made herself move.  Desk.  Pen.

She read over the paper.  Permission for a field trip.  She considered the note.

I am the temporary guardian and cousin of Tyr Hurst.  Mia and Carson didn’t have a chance to sign this before they had some urgent family business, but I was there for the meal where it was discussed and permission was verbally given.  If you can’t reach her to confirm, you can contact me…

She added a phone number and email.

It felt like every move was the wrong one.  Staying and waiting for the package with all the information and tools she needed, or trying to run with the kids in tow.  Letting Tyr go on the field trip and keeping things normal, Tyr happy, as opposed to refusing, keeping him close, disrupting everything.  Was she supposed to check what was happening outside and risk being seen, or keep her head down?

Even getting the kids to school felt like… getting the family minivan to the moon.  The distance, navigating there, the dangers?

She tried to center herself.

What was it Mia had said?  That there was a dead man’s switch for the babysitter?  In case both she and Carson were unable to get home in time, for some reason?

Was there a chance she’d been aiming that at Valentina?  Knowing she was overheard?

Please.

She stepped back out into the hallway.  Tyr wore different pants but was now not wearing socks, for some reason.  Ripley was looking more stressed, now.  Maybe because of timetable.

“Okay, hold on.  Where’s the babysitter’s number?  Josie, was it?”

“By the phone.”

Valentina went to the phone, then called.

“Hello?”

“Hi.  I’m at the Hurst house-”

“Oh god, yes.  Shit, shit.  Is there a problem?”

“I’m here, I’ve been here, things are okay-”

“I’ll come.  Two minutes.”

Josie hung up.

Okay.

The ‘shit, shit’ did not do a lot to ease Valentina’s worries.

“Socks and shoes,” Valentina told Tyr.  To Ripley, she said, “Patience.”

Then she was busy trying to wrangle that.

Josie, true to her word, was two minutes.  And forty seconds, but Valentina gave her a little slack.  Valentina opened the door without showing herself.

Josie was about her age, with light brown skin, a textured wave to her hair, a white sweatshirt, jeans, and boots.  It was a weird contrast, that Valentina’s first thought was that her friends from three years ago might have made comments about Josie’s slightly rumpled appearance or hair, or the fact she worked as a babysitter.  They’d all put way too much stock in their own family’s money, their school being a nice private one, and all that.  But at the same time, Josie was athletic, reasonably pretty, compared to Valentina, who felt misshapen, hips too wide, thighs thick despite everything.  Josie seemed to have it together, rumpled or not.

Josie gave Valentina a wary look.  “Issues?”

“Depends what you mean,” Valentina said, wary as well.

“Where’s Mia?  Or Carson?”

“Mia’s sick. Incapacitated, more like.  Carson’s gone.”

“Okay.  And you are…?”

“Family.”

“Right.  The cousin I’ve heard whispers about?”

“Tyr mentioned it, not me,” Ripley said.

“He did.  I’m sorry, though,” Josie said.  “I got the emergency message, and I didn’t see it fast enough.  Timing of my morning was all off.  Don’t get me into trouble with the boss, I really, really want to stay in her good books right now.”

Oh.  She was worried because she’d dropped the ball on responding to the emergency like she was meant to.

“It’s okay.  Just… help.”

“It’s an emergency?”

“Basically.”

“Okay,” Josie said.  She stepped away from Valentina, went to the kitchen, and pulled down two binders, snagging a dry erase marker from the outside of the fridge while she was there.  She then pulled down a third binder.  “I’m guessing this is you.”

“Is it?”

Before Valentina could get hers to see, Josie had two laminated sheets out from the others.  Josie explained, “Binders have all kid-relevant information.  Doctors and everything.  She didn’t explain?”

“She might’ve,” Valentina admitted.  “But it was information overload the past bit, and I had other stuff on my mind.”

“Sure.  Checklist.  We’re in emergency mission mode, Tyr.  Can you handle it?”

“Yeah!  Can it be superhero style?”

“Sure.  Superhero clothes on?  Geared up?”

“Yeah!  Oh, I can change my shirt to-”

“Stay on task, my guy.  Secret identity.  Bag check, did you remember all your homework and things?”

Tyr brought his bag.  Valentina moved the kids’s lunches to the kitchen island.

“Rip, you too.”

“I’m organized, though.”

“Let me see.”

Ripley might’ve been pretty organized, but she wasn’t perfect.  She’d forgotten a book.  Tyr had a worksheet.

Josie used the sheet as a guide.  Food- Tyr hadn’t eaten enough, by her judgment.  Cheese stick and fruit to supplement.  Lunches- Valentina had tried.  Josie deemed it sufficient.  Clothes, hair, shoes, weather appropriate clothes.  Both kids were clean.

“Good.  We’re behind schedule, do you know if Mia needs her car?”

“She- no.”

“I’m on the insurance as a just-in-case, for emergencies.  If you’re sure she won’t need it today, I’ll drive the kids, bring the car back at lunch.  Maybe pick up fast food on the way.  Maybe with a friend.”

“Is that okay?”

“Yeah.  Using the car buys us time.  They don’t mind as long as the kids are looked after, there’s communication, and the car’s reasonably clean.  Are you coming?  You new to school?”

“I’m- between schools.  Between a lot of things.  Me being here is kinda meant to be confidential.  While stuff’s up in the air.”

“They alluded to that.  Right.”

“Especially if anyone comes looking.”

Josie gave Valentina a second look, studying her.

Was that saying too much?

It would be saying too little if she didn’t and someone did come asking.

“Yeah.  Really got dumped into this, huh?”

“Kind of.”

“Come.  With me in the car.  You can take it back, if you’re on the insurance, or walk back?”

Coming back from the moon, in that case.  “I might be on the insurance, but I might stay.”

“Okay.  We’ll talk later, maybe, if Mia isn’t feeling better.  Come on, guys.  Car.”

Valentina followed Josie and the kids through to the attached garage, bringing the binder, hugging it against her chest.

It was like the bunker, in a way.  Valentina stood out of the way, watching as Josie used the panel by the door.  It was a lot like the bunker, with a camera view of the outside.  Josie had been trained or convinced to check when using the car.

Coast was clear, it seemed.

Josie knew that, but hadn’t opened the garage yet.

“What’s up?” Valentina asked.

“Can you come?  Seriously?”

“It’s important?”

“I’m not sure.”

Valentina experimentally checked, and pressing the button rotated through some cameras around the property, and one further from the property- with a decent view of the sky.  No drones.  The visibility was crap, the sky a haze.

Valentina had seen those camera feeds earlier in the week- and had been watching them for the past few days.  It felt weird seeing it in the garage, with a stranger using it casually.

All Valentina had to go on was the information Mia had mentioned in passing, Carson’s mention about getting some package of data, to take over things, and the brief mention of the babysitter.  Was she meant to lean more on Josie?  Was this supposed to be their lead?  It could be Josie had information or something and she didn’t know what to do with it, and Valentina was supposed to pick up on it.

The car windows were tinted.  Realizing she’d be obscured was the turning point.

“Okay.  I’ll come.”

“Hop in,” Josie said.  She climbed into the car, rolled down the window, and leaned into the door hard to reach the panel.  Going back to the first image.

This was dangerous.  Maybe it was stupid.  But she needed information.

The kids did a lot of talking from the back seat, Tyr still on the subject of superheroes, with Josie engaging.  Valentina sat in the passenger seat, binder in her lap.

First page was a checklist- not laminated like the kids, but more of a final set of things to do.  T.P.R. – termination of parental rights.  Get any I.D. from mom.  Clothes shopping.

Basic stuff.

Pages of records.  Academic records.  Past doctor’s appointments, dentist checkups.  Family records.

The back few pages had more things.  Sign-ins for family streaming account, personal password for the internet.

It couldn’t be that easy to get the information she needed about the criminal stuff.  It wouldn’t be.  Someone else could find this binder and get at it that way.  Mia wouldn’t leave a big weak point.

She kept an eye on the rearview mirror, and the side mirror- fiddling with the toggle switches until it flicked up at an angle.  No drone following, that she could see.

Would she be a clenched fist of anxiety by the time this was done?

Josie found a parking spot.  The kids, masks on, left for school, with Josie making sure they had their bags.  Valentina said goodbye, but kept her door shut and window rolled up, one hand holding a mask to her lower face until a bit after the door had been slammed shut.

The conditions outside meant only kids with proper full-face masks were being allowed on the playground.  Others were being ushered inside- some went in, despite having the full masks.

Tyr wasn’t one of them.  He immediately went to the highest point on the kindergarten play structure.  His roar of triumph was audible even inside the car, half a playground and half a parking lot away.

“He’s such a character,” Josie said, with obvious fondness.

Her eyes took note of every face in the crowd, where visibility was slightly limited.  No Cavalcanti soldiers she recognized, but by the sounds of things, Davie Cavalcanti had expanded a lot.

Josie sighing made her pause.

“Assembly coming up this morning,” Josie said.

“Yeah?”

“About the unstable political situation, risks at school, what services and things are going to be suspended, no more clubs, no more teams, no more school dance.  They’re going to spend a while setting expectations and dispelling rumors.  There’s going to be this awful question and answer section, too.  I bet there’ll be one stupid joke from some dork trying to impress their friends.  But the whole ideas is to get all the kids on the same page.  Break the news to them about awful the rest of this school year is going to be.”

“Makes sense.  I remember something like that at my school a while back.”

“Nobody was saying, but if there was a shooting drill this afternoon, it’d fit.  We’re overdue for an ‘organized movement against the school’ scenario, we had a lone shooter one a month ago.”

“Huh.”

“How much would you judge me if I skipped today?”

“Not at all.  I wouldn’t.”

“I helped a friend organize some of the stuff for the projector system, saw the cliff notes.  If my homeroom teacher asks, I’ll say I was doing more of that.  If the committee people ask, I was in homeroom.  If Mia asks…”

“You were helping me with emergency stuff.”

“Yeah.  Yeah?”  That second one was a question aimed at Valentina.

“Yeah, sure.”

Josie leaned her seat back a bit, sighing, and rubbed at her eyes.  They were red from the trace smoke exposure.  “I look like shit anyway.  Total panic mode this morning- I was debating skipping, slow-walking my way to that decision, changed up my routine, missed the emergency message.”

“Mia’s not going to ask, by the way.”

“Huh?” Josie asked.

“She’s not sick.  She’s out of town.  So is Carson.  It’s complicated- family stuff.  My family, my birth mom.  I don’t know why I fibbed about that.”

Valentina felt a weird sort of shame at making her birth mom a scapegoat here, when it was a completely fictional person she was accusing.

Josie seemed to take it in stride, saying, “Carson mentioned it might happen.  Asked me to keep things running if she had to duck out for something like that.  He said it might be because of Mia’s mom, but it’s your mom, instead?”

Valentina shrugged.

“I could sleep over, if that’s okay?  I can get the kids to bed, get them up, show you the ropes.”

“That’d be a huge help.”

“Cool.  She did me a huge solid, got me tickets to Est Tru.  I looked it up and they’re stupidly expensive.  I’m worried someone’s going to pull the rug out from under me.  I think m parents are itching for an excuse.  Which probably means I shouldn’t skip, but I fucking hate it when the mood at school is like this.”

“I hear you.  One question, though?”

“Shoot.”

“Who or what is Est Tru?” Valentina asked.

Josie looked confused, then looked more confused.  She straightened up and turned to stare at Valentina.

Valentina offered an awkward smile.  “Sorry.  It was a joke with my friends.  There’s a bunch of celebrities and if someone not in our group mentioned one of them, we’d coordinate.  Pretend we don’t know who Est Tru is, pretend there was a huge scandal with Sky Bird, ummm, or saying Gillum Barrera was in a relationship with Doll Mom from the learning channel.  There were a few others.  Then we’d see if we could get that person to believe it.  We’d let them know after, of course.”

“Okay,” Josie said, relaxing and smiling a bit.  “That could be funny.”

“It’s automatic at this point.  Sorry.”

“Nah, you’re alright.”

“Fuck me, I miss my friends,” Valentina said.  “I miss a lot of things.”

“Sorry.  Sounds tough.”

It was a limp answer but Valentina wasn’t sure she could do better in Josie’s place.

Was it a problem she’d mentioned something her friends did?  Was that a piece of connective tissue that someone could use to find her?  Would Mia be mad?

So much of her thinking was focused around Mia, because Mia had that intensity, but she missed Carson in a way too.  Because he made things feel easier, and he’d explained stuff, Mia included.  Letting Valentina know what to prioritize.

It felt so weird to be out here, in this parking lot, surrounded by people.  The tinted windows helped hide her, the smoke in the air didn’t hurt either, but…

“Can we go?  Back to the house?  Anywhere?”

“I was waiting.  There’s a reason I wanted you to come.”

“Yeah?”

Message?  Meeting?

“Looking for someone.”

I’m afraid someone’s looking for me.  Someone who already has Mia and Carson.

“See that guy?”

He wasn’t tall, and looked boyish, though with a bit of a heavy chin, with light brown skin and green eyes that stood out even from a distance.  He wore skinny jeans and a short sleeved button-up shirt that complimented that color, with repeating symbols that looked like half of a yin-yang, but jade and a green that matched his eyes, against a darker, kaleidoscopic background.  Hard for a lot of people to pull off, but with his eyes and skin tone, it popped.

It was hard to imagine him working for her father.  For Davie Cavalcanti.

“I see him,” Valentina confirmed, her heart sinking.  This wasn’t the package.  It wasn’t her getting information she needed.

“He was taking pictures yesterday.  Of me, I think?  But it might’ve also been Ripley and Tyr.”

“Just you?  Or others too?”

“Some others.  But mostly us.  I was going to mention it to someone, but I thought Mia might get fussy about that kind of thing.  Then I was going to just go straight to telling Mia, except she wasn’t feeling well.”

Ripley was still outside, talking to her friends.  Tyr was in the playground.  Valentina felt a kind of responsibility to watch over them, but this wasn’t why she’d thought Josie would be calling her out.  She’d hoped to get something she could use to take action.

Valentina watched as he got his phone out, then, after a second, held it to his ear.  His finger tapped nervously on the back.  He took a weird route as he paced.

“Can you see the phone screen?”  Valentina asked.

“Barely.  Visibility’s crappy.”

“Is he on a call?”

“Oh.  Oh.”

“You can see?”

“He’s taking creepshots while pretending to be on a call.  You can double tap the back of some phones to take a picture.”

Valentina saw him pace and turn, and quickly shielded her face.  The window tint helped, but it wasn’t perfect, and- no.  It was too risky.

He wasn’t watching the phone, and he was averting his eyes, so he didn’t notice.

“I hope that phone doesn’t upload to the cloud,” Josie said.

“Huh?”

“If it does, we might already be on some online site.”

“Yeah, right,” Valentina said.  “Two girls, fully clothed, behind a tinted window, sitting there like dopes.  Prime material.”

“I figure there’ll be girl number eleven-thirty-two and girl eleven-thirty-three and then some creep with a thing for earwax takes interest and gets our location, then comes after us.”

“Josie, I know we just met, I don’t mean any big offense over this, but you’re not attractive enough to be girl eleven-thirty-two.”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m definitely not attractive enough, don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not- I’m not trying to be a bitch.  I’m being realistic.”

“Fuck off a little less, then.  First off, you’re fine.  Second, I figure what you look like doesn’t matter much.  It’s the age they’re into.”

“I’m sure looks matter some,” Valentina said.  I’ve seen girls who get pulled into this crap.  That one who went into the basement?

It made her sick to think about, because that thought was right next door to some thoughts about what was in that basement, that her dad had been showing the girl.  The people.  The noises they made, when they didn’t have tongues.

She clenched her fists, fighting uneasy nausea.

“I’m going to call him out,” Josie said.  “I have to, right?”

“No.  Because that traces back to us, he could come for revenge.  Call the school,” Valentina said.

“Hm.  That’s a good idea, but I’ll do you one better,” Josie said.  She got her phone out, and scrolled through the contact list.  She hit a button and brought her phone to her ear.  Legitimately, this time.

The guy paced, turning the other way.

Taking pictures of Tyr?

“Hi, Mrs. Scott, it’s Josie, from down the block.  I babysat for you?  I think there’s a guy being a creep outside the school playground.  I’m- yeah.  He’s got a phone to his ear, he’s pacing.  Shirt with the weird green and black pattern, short black hair.  I’m-”

Valentina winced.  That wasn’t ‘one better’.  Because now it wasn’t anonymous.  There were reasons besides the weird guy coming after them, that she didn’t want the phone tip to have a traceable origin.

A woman by the playground had her phone to her ear.  She turned, looking, and saw him.

“That’s him.  I’m too chickenshit to call him out mys- yes.  Horrible word.  He’s taking pictures, I think.”

This felt like the wrong thing to get involved in, even peripherally.  Valentina didn’t want questions.  She didn’t want people asking about Carson or Mia.

The mom quick-walked over to one of the playground attendants, presumably a teacher.

It was only a few moments of coordination later that the teacher, two men, and Mrs. Scott approached the man with the green eyes.

Josie had hung up.  “My heart’s racing.  You think he’s dangerous?”

“It’s been a crazy week.  I don’t know what to think about anything.”

“Has the rest of your week been as crazy as this?”

Valentina wasn’t sure how to respond.  She glanced over at Josie, saw the girl looking at her, reading her expression.

“No shit?”

“Complicated,” Valentina muttered.  She shouldn’t be giving this much away.  But it was nice to have someone listening to her.  She watched as the adults escorted the man inside.  One had his phone.  A woman went in with him.

“Oh, that’s Natalie Teale.”

“Who?”

“Her kid got stolen in broad daylight.  She did this big campaign, kept bringing attention to her kid, spent a lot of money, wanted to keep it afloat by drawing attention to other missing kids.  Making her baby the face of America’s missing.”

“When was this?”

“When we were little.  I only know because some of the parents were talking about it.  The whole thing died before it started, after one of the moms of a missing kid she was drawing attention to accused her of trying to milk her kid’s tragedy for her own sake, and they found out the organization wasn’t being good with the money donated, only, like, twenty percent of the money went to missing kids, and fifteen percent went to Natalie.  She just moved here.”

Valentina closed her eyes.  Shit.

It would have been better to ignore him.  To pretend nothing was amiss.  Anxiety and sadness warred in her gut, and overall, she felt a wave of exhaustion.  The sort that made her want to curl up and cry it out.

This wasn’t her.  It wasn’t who she wanted to be.

“Can we go?”

“Sure.”

They pulled out of the parking lot, and onto the road.

Was this a thing?  Was this Natalie person tied to Carson and Mia?  Was the man?  Had she just thrown a big wrench into things, if this guy had his phone searched, and there was increased attention on Ripley and Tyr?  Questions?  What could she do to get things back on track?

Should she get things back on track?

Either Tyr or Ripley were Natalie’s missing kid, or Natalie, through knowing about missing kids, was looking into it.

Would it be better to help them?

She felt sick.

She really, really didn’t want to have a panic attack in this car, with the most normal person she’d talked to in… two weeks.

Except not wanting it made her afraid of having one, which was fear, which was feeding into it, making it more likely, bringing her to the edge.

She gripped the part of the car door that stuck out as a handle.

The phone ringing elicited a small alarmed sound from her.

“Answer?” Josie asked.  “I’m driving.”

She wasn’t positive she could, but she did.

“Hello?”

“I’m answering Josie’s phone, because she’s driving.  Hi.”

“This is Melly Scott, Josie called about a man.  Did you see him too?”

“Yeah.  We both saw him.”

“I wanted to let you know, he’s being let go.  He had a reason for doing what he’s doing, someone else vouched for him.  They’re barring him from school grounds for alarming people and not being forthright, but he’s not dangerous.  Still, you should tell Josie she did a good job.  If you see something, say something.”

Shit.

“Tell Josie to call me back as soon as possible?  It’s important.”

“Okay.”

“Take care of yourselves, girls.  Have a good day at school.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Scott.”

Valentina hung up.

“What’s the story?” Josie asked.

“They let him go.  You did good calling.”

“Your idea.  Partially.”

“Mmm.  Not really.  And you’re supposed to call back.”

“Maybe she wants to ask about Rip and Tyr?  If he was actually taking pictures of them?”

Valentina gripped the door handle tighter.

They were back in their neighborhood.  The moisture in Valentina’s eyes stung, and had a weird almost taste, like smoke.  Or maybe she associated the stinging with smoke enough that she thought she smelled it.

They reached the house.

A car was parked across the street.  A Chevron Midas, black.

“Keep driving?”

“Why?”

“Keep driving.”

“I’m legit a little freaked out.”

“My mom’s going through stuff.”

“Tyr said.  Ripley sorta clarified.  She said not to say she did.”

“And I’m trying to lie low.  Because if people go by official channels, I’ll probably get stuck in foster care for a while before I can be placed with relatives.  Mia’s trying to handle that stuff and get it so I can go straight to them, first.  But family might be at the house already.”

“You can’t call Mia and Carson?”

“No.  Maybe I’m wrong and it’s a regular car.”

Mia had provided a lot of general information to Valentina, to the point it made her head spin.  She said she had a head injury and she’d struggled a lot, but Valentina had the impression that Mia could memorize and keep track of a lot of small details.  Maybe because of that, she seems to expect it from Valentina, Rip, and Tyr.

So she’d given Valentina a lot.  Some of it, Valentina felt, was stuff like the binder.  It felt like something that had come up at a time Valentina was barely functional, tired and taking in a whole new environment.  Surviving.

But Valentina had focused on those details that helped her survive.  One was the cameras.  For day one, every car that had come down the street was a potential threat.  She’d learned which cars the neighbors drove.  That nobody really had people drop in- some kids came by after school, and parents picked those kids up, and one guy had couriers come, but not a Chevron Midas.

No drones she could see.  The visibility was bad.

She had a sense of the cameras and where they were.  She flipped up her hood, lower face covered by a mask.

“If you’re staying over, go get your stuff?  Let me check there’s no family drama?”

“Maybe Mia and Carson are back.”

If they are, I think they’ve had a few pieces of them cut off, and it’s a message.

She’d spent a week in that house, looking out for trouble.  She avoided the parked car, and avoided the best vantage points.

She got to the house, got out her key, and went to the back door.  Same key for the front and back.

She could see movement- it was hard, with how bright it was outside, even with the smoke, and how dark it was inside.  The play of light and shadow made the reflections work against her.  But movement, still.

Valentina had to work to make sense of what she was seeing, as she crouched by the door, in the shadow of the barbecue.

Someone was sitting down.  Tied up?

She unlocked the door and eased it open.

A guy, maybe eighteen years old, pimples at his hairline and sideburns, sat tied with arms behind his head, attached to a section of the dining room table.

“Shhh,” she whispered.  “I’m friendly.”

“Fuck, shit, you scared me,” he said.

He was a delivery guy.  Not food, but the visor and polo shirt were for packages.

Her package?  At this point she was worried it was going to be more bait.

They had to have come right in after Josie took the kids, when the house was empty.

“How many?”

“One.  I think.  Upstairs.”

He was craning his head around, trying to get a good look at her.  The way he was tied to the table, it wasn’t really doable, and she wasn’t helping.

She could hear commotion upstairs.  He wasn’t loud, but she had the impression the guy upstairs was really ransacking the place.

I shouldn’t have showed myself to the delivery guy.

No, wait, it doesn’t matter either way.  Because they’re fucking with Mia and Carson.  They’re going to leave this guy here.  Or let him go, so he can report back about the location.  Drawing attention here.

Or something.

But leaving this alone, letting it play out, it wasn’t going to work.

Getting involved wasn’t going to work either.  Valentina had spent too many years being driven around by people like this.  Seeing them with her father.  Seeing them play basketball in the court behind the house.

Taller than her.  Stronger.  Better at fighting.  Better armed.

She stopped to text Josie, telling her not to come.  She could at least make this situation not get any worse.

What did she have?

“Did you deliver a package?” she murmured.

“I think- yeah.  Female name.  I went to the door, some guy came up behind me, held me up.  Broke in, told me to go inside, tied me up.  I don’t get it.”

“Be absolutely quiet,” she told him.

Ducking low, she crossed the house.  It was dark- curtains drawn for her own benefit, a lot of the surfaces textured, decorative bars protecting a lot of windows close to the ground.

She had one thing to her advantage.  This was more her house than theirs.

Another thing that she’d paid more attention to, in the information dump about this place, about living here, and taking advantage of what Carson and Mia were providing her… defense of the house.

She’d been scared.  She was scared.  She’d been willing to reach for and cling to anything that helped her protect herself in this scary situation.  Anything that would save her if her dad came storming in.

It hadn’t.  He’d come in, Mia hadn’t used the same options she’d described to Valentina.

But those options were there.

She glanced over her shoulder to check, then got a quarter from the change thing by the front door.  One screw by the light switch was extra accommodating.  She gave it a quarter turn, and it popped out enough to move out of the way.

A second switch like the ones from the lights was recessed in there.

She flicked it, then replaced the cover, holding it down while turning the key.

She returned to the captive, taking a route around the ground floor that kept her out of his direct view.  She whispered the words, “Can you lift your end of the table?”

“Barely.  Why?  Cut me free.”

“Lift on three,” she told him.  “Circle around.  So you’re in the corner.”

“Cut me free,” he hissed.

“Trust me.”

He did oblige.  Things almost wobbled- she could hold one end, he was holding one corner.  The corner that wasn’t supported almost came down hard enough that it rapped against the floor, which would give them away.

But, waddling, the delivery guy moved to the corner.  She partially covered him with the curtain.  She grabbed a knife from the kitchen as she passed through it.

The guy upstairs was still audible, searching.  Digging around.

She unlocked the front door, then hurled it open, with enough force it banged against the wall.

Then ducked into the living room.  Behind a chair, kitchen knife ready.

The noise got the attention of the guy upstairs.  He came down the stairs fast.

Captive delivery guy gone.  Door open?

He dashed outside to see if he could catch up to the kid.  Had to.  She had a glimpse of him, from her vantage point behind the chair.  His arms were full.

Valentina heard the crash as he dropped what he was carrying.

Heart hammering, her mouth dry, eyes stinging from tears and smoke both, she stepped out from behind the chair, crossed the living room, and moved carefully, in case he’d hit ground and decided to stay there, gun in hand.

He hadn’t.  He lay there, nothing in his hands, position awkward.

As she got closer, there was a faint whisking sound.  Like a fork dragged across a frying pan.  Moving her foot closer to the top stair of the porch, it recurred.  Moving it back, it receded.  She’d mentally termed it the porch poacher’s wire.  A tripwire, that ran up notches running up the center of the main posts on either side of the top step.  It’d trip someone at the ankle or lower shin, as they approached the top stair.  If they were coming in, they’d fall right at the front door.  More effectively, if they were on their way out, they’d fall like this.  The railings on either side of the stairs were too steep, Mia had said, to let someone effectively catch themselves if they found themselves doing a header off the top step.

This guy hadn’t caught himself.

The coast was clear.  Nobody was out there.  Visibility was crap enough only the two houses across the street would have any view.  Nobody was expressing alarm, running outside, or reacting.

She’d been prepared to go after him.  Let him fall, then jump on top of him with the knife, if she had to.  To finish the job.  It didn’t seem necessary now.

She had to move fast.

She opened the garage door.  Double checking things were clear, she made sure to step over the tripwire before going down to where he was.  It would be horrible to fall for the same trap.

She dragged him.  It wasn’t easy.  He was unconscious, or dying.  His hand had a tremor to it, signaling there was some life in there.

She’d heard you weren’t meant to move someone with a possible spinal injury.  She moved him a lot.

Breathing hard, now, coughing from smoke that she was inhaling, despite the mask, she fought to get him inside.  Grass was easier than pavement.  Once she reached driveway, the increased traction meant the only good way was to roll him, grabbing shoulder and hip and flipping him.

His neck clicked like cracked fingers when his head lolled.

A lone car came tearing down the road.  Smoke and emotion choked her as she watched it roar by.  Not Cavalcanti, she was pretty sure.  And if she couldn’t make out the make of the car in this smoke, she doubted they’d identify that the dark lump at the front of her garage was an unconscious or dying man.

She checked the skies, but with the smoke being what it was… drones didn’t make a ton of sense.  They’d have to be close enough for her to hear them.

It was very quiet in the suburb.

She got him inside enough, then hit the button for the garage.  It came down, then immediately started going up again, not cooperating.  A bit of him was in the way of the sensor.  She physically held him out of the way of the sensor until the door was shut.

She locked the garage door shut, so Josie wouldn’t pop it open, then searched him.

The gun was outside- she’d have to get that fast.  Wallet.  Keys.

Two phones in one pocket.

One was his.  The wallpaper was porn.

The other had the default background, and a blank space where the name display should be.

She removed her mask and held it up until the green rectangle fixated on her face.

1/3.  Face verified.

This is the package?  Not a laptop, not a suitcase packed with files and information?  A single phone?

She had other priorities.  She checked the guy wasn’t moving, then disabled the trap, returning to the place he’d fallen.  She picked up the fallen laptop- it looked and had a weight to it like one Mia had cannibalized it for parts.  Like it was hollow.  And the gun.

Back inside.  Doors shut.

She sat in the garage, door between garage and house locked, because the outside world was feeling scary, with problems piled onto problems.

She had a phone.  She verified her face again.  The ‘1/3’ popped up.

“Phone.  Please work for me.”

Voice.

2/3.  Voice verified.

Thumbprint?  It would have registered already.

She tried again, giving it time, this time.

3/3.  Thumbprint and body-

The message disappeared as the phone unlocked.  Giving her a very basic cell phone.

Bare bones contents, except for what Mia had put on it.

One app.  A list of features.

Contacts.  Codes.  Locations.  I.D..  Cameras.  Tracking.  Resources.

She selected contacts.

They were broken into lists.  A list of names.  A list of roles.

She wanted names.  She’d investigate roles later.  Highland.

“Finally, I’ve been expecting relief for ages now,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.  “And I expected code, not a call.  It’s not often I hear your voice.”

She wasn’t sure what to say.

“It’s you, isn’t it?  Or did some bullshit telemarketer-“

“It’s not her,” Valentina said.  “They got her.  And…”

She shouldn’t use Carson’s name.

“They got both of them,” she said.

This time it was Highland’s turn to be silent.

“I’m pretty scared,” she said.  “It’s all fucked up.  But she left me the tools to do what I have to.  I guess this is part of what she was working on, when she spent all those nights up late.”

“Guess so,” was the response, rougher than before.  “You’re the girl who was watching the cells?”

“Yeah.”

“Our friend kept us from crossing paths, but I could see what movies you were watching.  Didn’t scream ‘grizzled soldier’.”

The man who’d fallen off the stairs had been unconscious for a while now.  More and more, it seemed like he wasn’t going to wake up from it.  Like his breaths deflated him a little more than they inflated him, his chest sinking into itself.  Which wasn’t really what was happening, but there was that sense of him diminishing.

“When were they taken?” Highland asked.

“Crack of dawn.  Five-something in the morning.  I hid.  A delivery person came, they took him and broke in.  I… acted.  Used one of her traps.”

“Fucking christ.  She can be scary, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Almost randomly, Valentina was sorting through the phone.  ‘Resources’ had things like evidence – with options for analyzing it, apparently- she wasn’t sure what that was about.  And for hiding it.  Codes was a list of the various codes Mia used with Carson.  Valentina wasn’t sure what to do with all that.

Looking at contacts, she checked the roles there.  Cleaner.  That was someone who dealt with bodies.  She knew that more from movies than anything her dad had taught her.  Soldiers.  Information.  Doctors.  Just two of those.  Dragon?  Street knowledge.

“Hello?”

“I’m here.  Thinking.”

“So am I.”

Some names popped up in multiple categories.

When she highlighted one, picking a cleaner, it brought up more information.

There were two cleaners.  Each had a loyalty rating.  Mia and Carson both had given them ratings- how much they expected betrayal.

The first guy had a one star rating from Mia and a two star rating from Carson.  The second wasn’t much better- two and three.

Cost.  How much it would take to hire them.

Then notes, background.  Old name, current name.

Both cleaners were assholes.  Dangerous.  Gang affiliated- with one of the gangs that had been folded into the Kitchen.  Yeah.  One or two stars.

Thinking about cost, Valentina found the icon for a bank on the phone’s main page.

$711,490.50

Every ask for help a gamble.  Costing money from a limited pool.

Highland had five stars from Mia.  Four from Carson.

“I’ve got a body to deal with.  And…”

The guy in the dining room.

“…another captive, I guess.  I’m not sure how to do this.  I don’t think there’s a way to handle it that doesn’t… doesn’t just put a bigger target on us.  On her.”

“Who is she to you?”

“The closest thing I have to family.”

“Alright.  Then I’m deciding to trust you.”

“Same.  In a big way.”

“You’re where she lives?  The voice on the phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “She’s going to hate that I’m asking this, but I’m going to need you to tell me where that is.  Where you, this body, and the captive are.”

She did.

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Gio had moved some plants aside on the short bookshelf that ran beneath a window, sat herself there, and watched over Mia’s shoulder as she worked.  There was a layer to it where it looked like common sense, like browsing Go Foto Yourself and MyFace pages, but there were other parts where she seemed to pull things together in a way that was almost magic.  She’d add a line to code in a window she kept as a narrow column on one screen, then run it, and the neighboring window would immediately go to a post.  A picture would get dragged into a document, joining a bunch of others.  She’d bring up another window, type something, check anywhere from one to twenty boxes.  Bam, new face from the family tree.

“I think that’s my aunt,” Gio said.  “Or aunt once removed?  I don’t know how that stuff works.”

“Is it?” Mia asked.  She used one of the windows from before, typing in a name.  All the big windows switched- each one to a different social media page.  A lot of the same pictures repeated on different pages.

Veneranda Pierucci?  One image was opened up large.  Mia looked over her shoulder at Gio.

“Oh,” Gio said, feeling heat on her face.  “No.  Sorry.  They look similar.”

“It’s fine,” Mia said.  She switched the windows back to where she had them before.  Then she paused, running fingers through her hair.  It was like she’d found her stride before and now she’d stopped, and she remembered that her head hurt and everything else.

Gio felt awkward.  She’d wanted to help and she’d hurt instead.  She’d been given some games and access to streaming services, with permission to rent whatever she wanted.  School had been hard, before Gio had gone into the basement and everything had fallen apart, and for weeks and weeks, she’d wished she could get a break, catch up on, like, everything.  Except it piled up, and her friends were talking about plans to go on a trip together, organizing who paid what, and assuming Gio would join in.

All she’d really wanted was a chance to laze around, sleep in, catch up on movies and shows, sunbathe by the pool.

Now she could do most of those things, and she was so restless she could barely sleep.

Mia had asked her to come in and answer some questions, and she’d ended up staying.  The longer she stayed, the more awkward it felt to leave abruptly, and interrupt everything.

Should she leave now?

“Do you know if Davie Cavalcanti interacted much with any politicians?  Military?”

“Um.  I think a few of the guys he’d usually have around as, like bodyguards, had some experience with that?”

Mia switched windows, then highlighted a handful.  She made the images big- three images in a line across the screen.

“Yeah,” Gio confirmed.  “Them.”

“I’m thinking about important men.  They might have been older.”

“I remember once my dad interrupted me while we were shopping, and told me to shake the hand of this man.  He said it might be the most important man I ever met in my life.  It was weird, him saying that in front of the guy.  Mostly I was annoyed because I was watching a cheesy movie on TV, and I missed something important.  And I never got the name of the movie, so I couldn’t look for it later.”

“Can you clarify, when you say ‘my dad’…”

“Oh,” Gio said.  “Davie Cavalcanti, I mean.”

The disapproval radiated off of Mia, even though Mia didn’t say or do anything.

“How long ago?” Mia asked.

“Three years, I guess?”

“Would you recognize him again if you saw him?”

“I… probably not?”

“If I gave you pictures to look at, could you try?”

“Yeah.”

Mia got a tablet, loaded up some pages, and showed Gio what to look through.  Gio ended up taking it to Ripley’s reading nook, moving some of Ripley’s things out of the nook, and settling in there.  The closest place that was comfortable.

Senators, governors, mayor, councilmen.  Layers of government she hadn’t even known existed, and she’d gone to a good school.

Then the various possible people in the military who could be involved here:  She scrolled to the middle of the list, hoping it would even out, but even then, there were Command Sergeant Majors, Gunnery Sergeants, Command Chief Master Sergeants, Sergeant Majors, First Sergeants, Senior Master Sergeants, Master Sergeants.  Enough to make her head spin.

For here, home, everything around, and everything that oversaw it.

Men with suits and ties, posing for a camera.  Men with decorated military jackets, doing the same.  All around the same age, with similar styles, because they were all well-trimmed, without major visible tattoos, for the most part.  The occasional photo of a man with a dog, a woman, or someone with a scar broke up the almost hypnotic monotony of it all.

⯁

She startled awake- someone had put a blanket over her, and moved the tablet to a nearby shelf.  She’d fallen asleep, tablet in hand.

She got up, and paused in the doorway.  Mia was there, sweating from a recent workout- she hadn’t used the machine in the corner of her office, but the beads of sweat reflected the blue-white glow of the screens.

“Sorry.  Passed out.”

“It’s fine.  Really.”

It was really hard to deal with Mia, because Mia was so tense, constantly, that it found its way into everything else about her, like how terse her words could be.  It left Gio feeling like Mia was a… a huge fist, clenched so tight it trembled, waiting for something to strike out at.  But it didn’t.

The thing Gio was trying to figure out was… was there a line?  And if there was, should she push it?  Because knowing would help her decide… all of this.  It was a strange house with everything in strange places.  The individual family members were mismatched, the food they ate and the way they handled mealtimes felt alien, the way they approached routines, the things they treated as automatic and the things they didn’t, the meshing of normal and crime stuff, and how casually Gio was included in the crime stuff…

It made her feel like she could burst into tears.

It made her feel like it would be a relief if she said the wrong thing and Mia just snapped, and started hitting her with clenched fists, not stopping until someone got in the way, it would be a relief.  It would decide this, and Gio could know she had to escape this like she escaped her dad.

She looked at Mia, and those glowing screens.

Escape it somehow.

“Do you still need me to try and find the face?”

“If you could, I would be very interested.  Davie Cavalcanti knows about the place where we have our three guests.  He keeps surprising us with how many resources he has.”

Scary.  “Okay.  I’ll look.”

“Give me the tablet?”

Gio had to go get it.  She brought it to Mia.

“I pulled up some other faces, of men who were in the news in the last decade. Wealthy, connected, capable, dangerous, controversial.  Take a look.”

“I’m kind of interested to see how many I can recognize.”

“Let me know,” Mia said, with a small smile.  “Even if it’s not the person Davie Cavalcanti introduced to you as very important, if you think you saw them around the house, at parties, anything like that…”

“What if I’m not one hundred percent sure?”

“Let me know if you’re not.”

Gio retreated to the nook.

She was there another thirty or forty minutes, when Mia emerged from her room, stretching.  She went into the washroom.  Cranking on the shower.

It might have woken the kids up, because Tyr, underdressed, hair plastered into whorls around his head, came across the hall, passing by Gio and the reading nook, into Ripley’s room.

Ripley emerged, hand tugged by Tyr, who led her down the hall toward the bathroom.  Ripley looked like she was half asleep, rolling her eyes in a huge way.

“Is it-” Gio started.

Her voice seemed to startle Ripley, and really startled Tyr.  Tyr turned, and even with his hand loosely gripping Ripley’s, fell, eyes wide.

For a second, Gio thought he’d burst into tears.  Then a wicked smile spread across his face, the expressions of a mischievous cartoon imp and snarling dog merging at the intersection of five year old, before he flipped over onto hands and knees, threw himself to his feet, and ran the rest of the way to the bathroom, banging on the door as soon as he was there.

“Volume, people are sleeping,” Mia called out, through the door.

“I think everyone’s awake, unless dad’s sleeping somewhere weird,” Ripley said, peeking into the parent’s bedroom.  “Dad’s out, right?”

“Yeah,” Gio said, around the same time Mia said something she couldn’t make out, that sounded affirmative.

Mia gave the okay, and Tyr let himself into the bathroom.  Another one of those alien things, to Gio.  It felt weird to her to go to the bathroom in the same part of the house another family member was in, let alone take a whiz while a parent was on the other side of a shower curtain.

“Is he so afraid of the dark he needs his big sister, or not?” Gio asked.  “He got over it fast.”

“Who knows?” Ripley asked.  “Maybe he does it to be a pain in my skinny butt.”

“Maybe he wants the company.”

“Well, I want sleep, so he should wait ’til morning, if that’s what he wants,” Ripley grumbled.  Ripley had her hair in braids, though it was so short it was barely necessary or possible, and wore what she’d affectionately termed ‘old man’ pyjamas, with the folded collar.  It looked a bit warm to Gio for the hot weather but a lot of Ripley’s preferred clothing did.

“I was going to say, is it okay if I’m using your reading nook?”

“I’ll allow it,” Ripley said, with an air of authority.  “It’s fine.  You couldn’t sleep?  It’s… getting closer to morning.”

“Yeah.  I dunno.  I’ll sleep during the day, I guess.”

Ripley ventured closer, then, hesitant, put her arms out.

Gio leaned forward a bit, and, feeling awkward, hugged Ripley.

“I’m glad you’re here.  It’s cool having a big cousin.”

“We’ll do more shopping for your clothes later, okay?”

“Cool.”

Tyr emerged from the washroom.

“Wash your hands,” Ripley told him.

He reversed direction, went to wash his hands, and then returned to his room.  Ripley went to shut the bathroom door he’d left open, rolling her eyes in an exaggerated way, and then returned to her room.

“Try to get some sleep,” Ripley said, before starting to close the door.

“You really are an old man at heart huh?”

Ripley flashed a smile before the door shut.

Mia wasn’t long in the shower.  She came out, went to her room to change into more comfortable t-shirt and pyjama pants, then returned to her office.

Gio spent a while browsing.  Just as it had been hard to find an excuse to leave the room earlier, she wanted to find something to bring before she could enter.  She looked through the figures from the news, the military people, the government people, and settled on a handful.

She knocked lightly at the door.

“Found one?”

“Found some maybes.  Two definites.  And one close.”

“Show me.”

Gio walked around the desk and handed over the tablet.  “This military guy.  Sergeant.  Or someone who looked a lot like him.”

“Not surprising.  He’s a relative of yours.”

“Oh.  This guy.  And this one.  I remember him and my- Davie Cavalcanti sitting in the living room, or he’d come to the door late at night.”

“Ex-police chief.”

Gio indicated another few pictures.

“Gang lieutenants that became lieutenants of the Kitchen.  Good to verify.”

“And this guy might look like the guy I was introduced to.  But I really wasn’t paying attention, and memories are funny.  Now I’m thinking, did I think of off-duty Santa without the beard?  Or was it a movie I watched, or something else?”

Mia brought up a series of pictures, and highlighted one.

It was him.  He looked like Santa Claus had gotten fired, shaved off his beard, leaving thick sideburns, still, had dressed in darker colors, and drank a lot, his nose covered in broken veins.

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“Who is he?”

“Government.  Unabashedly connected to the Civil Warriors, but he gets seats at the table.  He talks to politicians, helps them run campaigns.  He talks to people like Davie Cavalcanti.  Which you’d think would mean Davie is trying to tie his gang to the group…”

“That’s hard to imagine.”

“Yeah.  This might be a puzzle that’s bigger than what I can tackle tonight.  I’m going to focus on getting Carson through things.  We’re moving our guests.  It’s going to be tricky.  If you want to help, we’d welcome it.”

“I want to help.”

“On that topic, if you could nail down a fashion and style that’s distinct from your old self… I’d like you to wear that style, and get used to it, so you look natural in it when you’re out in public, down the line.”

“I’ve got some things.  It’s on my phone.”

“Can I look?”

Gio browsed to the right set of images, then handed it over.

Mia looked for a moment, then turned to her computer.  She brought up Gio’s Go Foto Yourself gallery, typed in some code on a side window, and highlighted an image.

Similar looks.

“It’s scary how fast you can do that,” Gio said.

“It’s scarier if that summer day stuck in the memory of the man who escorted you and your friends on that shopping trip, and helps him connect your old self to Valentina Hurst.”

Valentina Hurst.

It was so weird to imagine.

“It’s so weird to like… spend all this time trying to hash out who I am, what I like, how I want to come across, and now I’m nuking all of that, throwing it away.   You could even say I’m running the opposite direction.  What if I never feel comfortable in my own skin?”

“Things can smooth out as you turn eighteen, nineteen, twenty.  Styles will shift.  This is doable, and it’s important, trust me.”

“I know.  But it’s hard.  It’s weird.  A lot of this is weird.”

She felt like she was badly understating how alien a lot of this felt.

“Yeah,” Mia said.  Her eyes remained on the screen.  Carson was out there, dealing with stuff, Gio supposed.  Mia ventured, “I’ve never been a mom to a teenager before.  I wish I could do more for you.  You being safe is the number one priority.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“This is what I do, Valentina.  I’m good at looking at all of this, seeing how the picture comes together.  I bring a picture together for my clients, I don’t just want to give them a name, a location, and say ‘good luck’.  I give them a life.  A second chance.  That’s what you have here.  You’re not running from Davie Cavalcanti and starting from zero.  You have a family here.  Security.  A safety net.  If you want to go to Edinburgh and study there, or go backpacking through Europe in your twenties, you can.  You might have an annoying expectation from mom, that you call once in a while… but that’s not so bad, is it?”

Gio thought of her mom.  That tearful conversation before they’d broken contact.

She’d been offered a deal by a woman who’d comforted her during a panic attack, in a campground bathroom in the middle of the night.  Was this worse than going on the run herself, going from bus station to bus station to cross the country, in hopes she could put enough distance between herself and her father?  Eventually getting caught when a camera caught her face and her father got notified by his extended network?  Where she’d eventually get taken home, taken to that basement, and gradually turned into a torso, blind, deaf, mute, and immobile?

“No.”

She hadn’t asked to be Mia’s daughter.  They’d never negotiated that point.  If she referred to her mom as her mom and rejected Mia, she’d be rejecting this deal.  It was one of the surefire ways she could imagine Mia getting angry.

“Are Ripley and Tyr yours?”

Maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase that.  But it was four in the morning, and her brain might have been trying so hard to fight against saying one dumb thing it had steered into another.

“Of course,” Mia said, looking bewildered.  Then, with more emotion, “What kind of question is that?”

She leaned forward a bit, and Gio had to make herself stay put, because Mia was more a trembling clenched fist in that small movement than anytime tonight.  In the dimly lit room, Mia’s eyes had images of the computer screens reflected on them, dancing as her eyes searched Gio’s face.

“I meant are they- I know they’re yours.  I’m not saying they aren’t.  Are they yours, originally?”

“Honey, yes.  Absolutely.”

Maybe there was doubt on Gio’s face, because Mia reached forward.  Her hand grabbed Gio’s wrist.

Lines traced the divots between muscle groups in Mia’s muscular arm, moving as Mia changed her grip, so she was holding Gio’s hand, instead.  It turned Mia’s arm wrist up, so the lines weren’t as pronounced, the shape of her arm softer in the lighting.

“From birth to now.  With birth certificates, doctor’s appointments, school records, social security numbers and more.  You too.  There’s things to be finalized, before your fictional parents divest themselves of you, but that’s a formality that’s been slightly delayed by everything else going on.  You, Valentina Marie Hurst, are my daughter.  You’re family.  The paperwork confirms that it’s always been the case.  From birth to now.”

There was an intensity in the words, a conviction, that came through with enough force that Valentina, Gio, almost doubted herself and her reality.

“Come here,” Mia said.

Gio hesitated, but she wasn’t willing to go against that intensity and conviction.

She let Mia pull her into a hug.  One that was alien.

Except a lot of things didn’t fit about this new life, this new house, these kids she was treating as family, and how it was all put together.  She’d been feeling a kind of strain, like she was some stunt actress in a movie, each hand gripping the side view mirror of a different truck, feet dangling above highway, struggling to hold on, straining, as they barreled forward at top speeds, feeling moments of terror and having to do so much extra work every time one slightly pulled further to the side than the other, or lagged behind by a foot.  Mutilation or death waiting for her, if she slipped.

Every bit of weirdness was that truck pulling to one side, requiring that extra work, accommodation, adjustment from her.

Mia being a trembling clenched fist was one thing, and it was so hard to shake the feeling that fist would swing into her face, if she failed to adjust.

The hug was a kind of answer to all of those questions and worries.  Mia was a mom.  She’d said it in their first meeting.  She wanted to protect Gio.  She meant that.  It was release, a break from days of being suspended.  It came at four fifty in the morning, going by the computer clock, when she hadn’t been sleeping that well in the other hours, when she was tired, from it all.

She cried, and let the hug be a hug.  Mia was big enough that somehow, Valentina felt like she was very small again, half her actual age, which tore down her defenses further.

The tears became sobs, her whole body jerking, hands gripping t-shirt for traction, clumping fabric between fingers.

A whole lot of rationale, half-formed, running through her head, about the time, the suspension in an alien house, the accumulated stress, to try to desperately justify to herself why she was accepting a mom hug like this, betraying the woman who lived overseas, in hiding from Davie Cavalcanti, if that woman had even survived Gio’s last reaching out.

Which made her sob harder, groaning her pain through it all, because even while letting it all out, there was still too much there, inside her, for tears and sobs to vent.  Mia’s hand rubbed her back throughout.

Valentina.  That was the price.  Taking that name.

⯁

She dreamed of what Mia had mentioned.  A backpacking trip through Europe.  Stumbling through labyrinthine, dangerous streets with a heavy bag that made it hard to keep her balance- always feeling like she was tilting and on the verge of falling over hard.

When she was shaken awake, she stirred.  Her eyes went to the clock.  She’d only been asleep an hour or an hour and a half, passing out after emotionally venting, and she’d dreamed in that short period of time.

“Hands in plain view,” Davie Cavalcanti said.

Valentina’s blood ran cold.

“Yes,” Mia said, removing her foot from the bed.  “I have to disable something.”

She was on her phone, phone held at arm’s length, one hand held up in view, empty.

“Peeking through the windows to figure out if you should leave enough traps active to wipe out me and my men, so you can make a run for it?  With little Ripley and Tyr in tow?”

“Why would I?” Mia asked.  She was ignoring Valentina.

Davie didn’t know.  Valentina propped herself up, alert.

“Because you’re careful.  Because you’ve spent years covering contingencies.  You don’t merely lock your trunk.  You trap it.  Now, I’ve accounted for that.  I’m going to send someone to and through your door.  You’re going to nicely let them in.  You’re going to sit there on the couch while the rest of us come in.  Hands in view.”

“Or you attack the house.”

“I really don’t want to,” he said.  “But given how things have been going, I’d have to assume you’re under attack in some form.  We’d strain to keep you and those children alive, of course.”

“Of course.  Please.  Thank you.”

“Would you let us in?”

“I can.”

The hand that held the phone had two fingers free.  Mia flicked them.

Valentina got up, moving carefully and slowly to the door.

Mia stopped.  “Don’t hurt my kids.”

“I would never,” Davie said, his voice coming over speaker.  As he talked, Mia raised a foot, pointing her toe.

Valentina crept closer, wary of creaking floorboards and the nearby window with open curtains, leaned her chest into the bench seat, and reached out a hand.  Mia’s foot changed angle, guiding Valentina’s hand to a decorative dragon statuette sitting between two plants.  One of several spaced out around the window.

“Turn around?  I don’t like you being so still for so long.”

Valentina almost fell, scrambling to move, the hand closest to the bench holding the statuette.  She opened the door to Ripley’s room, slipped through, and eased it shut.

Don’t wake up.  Don’t react.  Don’t ask me anything.

Kids slept hard, though, and Ripley was still a kid.  The light coming from the hallway, landing across her face, didn’t even faze her.

“Just making sure,” Davie’s voice came through.

Valentina hadn’t imagined he’d sound so calm through everything.  Did he sound that calm and reasonable when he was having people’s arms and legs cut off?

Neither he nor Mia had said anything.

Ripley’s room was neat, old fashioned, with no clothes on the floor.  There were some toys from yesteryear along one wall, including an old fashioned dollhouse that came up to her bellybutton, currently with a stack of folded blankets on its roof.  The bookshelf overflowed- maybe the reason for the new bookshelf in the hall.  Stacks of books were at the foot of the bookshelf.  Valentina crossed the room with caution, so she wouldn’t kick something that would cause a racket, or topple a stack of books.

She reached the curtain just in time to see the door opening.  Light flooded the room.

He’s telling her to do something with writing.  In case anyone’s listening.

Valentina stepped between the curtain and the sheers, moving slowly so anyone outside wouldn’t see, and put the curtain around herself, and slid a stack of books carefully across the floor, so it might hide her feet sticking out the bottom.

Mia held her phone out with arm cocked, other hand extended straight, so the hand was in the shot.  Scanning the room.  A single light that indicated ‘recording’ shone out like  a really weak flashlight. Beneath the bed.  To the closet.  Mia opened that.

She approached the curtains, and pushed one aside.  Slight pause, then, camera light shining into the gap between the curtains and reflecting off the glass and into Valentina’s eyes, filtered by the sheers, Mia had to check the other.  Where Valentina was.  She kept the phone close to the first curtain as she moved to the other side of it, and ‘investigated’ it again, holding the phone at an angle.

Was he fooled?  The sheers would help obscure the surrounding window shape.

“The boy’s room now.  For your safety.”

“Mm.”

Ripley stirred a bit, face scrunched up.

Valentina followed Mia to the door, and ended up staying in the room for a second,  while Mia filmed herself closing it.  The camera was still watching in ‘front’ of Mia, instead of keeping her face on screen.

Mia paused at Tyr’s door, and cocked her leg, standing on the one foot, knee touching the bookshelf.

Valentina was only a few paces behind, ducking low in case things switched back to face cam, and keeping out of view of the windows She touched the spot Mia had indicated.  Then she touched the statuette there.  There was a pull.

Magnet?

She found the positioning that was strongest.  The bookshelf opened.

Nothing inside.  Which meant… she was meant to go inside.

She stepped within, and closed it quietly.  A space, about two feet by three feet, tall enough to stand in.  If she crouched, she found, she could see through a slight gap between the backboard of the bookshelf and the shelf.  A faint fan hummed.

Just her?

Was she meant to get the others?  How would that work?

She watched, mouth dry, afraid to even swallow wrong, or shuffle her feet.

Mia finished scouting Tyr’s room.

“Let’s check the other rooms up here, then we can go downstairs.  You can turn off any traps, let my guy in.  He can help sweep the place.”

“Mm.”

“You’re not very talkative.  Not a morning person?  Don’t worry, I cook a mean breakfast.”

“Sick.  Ongoing issue,” Mia said.

“Is that so?  That’s fantastic.  Well, obviously not fantastic, but I was so curious if your record of absences from work was legitimate or if you were very busy.”

“Mix.”

The voices got harder to make out as they got further from the secret door.

Mia went downstairs with the phone, and Valentina took a chance, opening the door.

While in the space, she wasn’t in a position to investigate it very well.  With the door open, she could check- no secret gun locker.  No radio or phone.

But, extending from knee height, going sideways, there was a narrow space that extended behind the bench seat in the window.  Light shone through it.  She crawled forward, awkwardly, because it wasn’t a space really big enough for her to do more than squeeze by.

At the base of that space was a plaid blanket, a pillow, a refillable container of water, and some fantasy novels, along with a little book reading light.  Halfway across that space was a vent with a fan.

This was Ripley’s space.

Valentina settled, sitting, legs in that space, feet on either side of the vent, back to the side of the secret compartment, and pulled the door closed, carefully.

She could hear Mia downstairs.  The vent looked down into the front hall, but she could hear some faint activity from the direction of the kitchen.  More in the living room.

Men came in.  Davie sent in some people before he entered himself.

Dad.

“Do you think I could borrow your kitchen?  I’ve been up all night, fretting.  Trying to figure things out.”

“Make yourself-” pause.  “Make yourself at home.”

“It’s been a week, hasn’t it?  Sabotage, kidnappings, mischief.  And here you are.”

“Some work for you, some for others, my health hasn’t been good.  I overworked.”

“I see, yes.  I don’t want to sound like I’m accusing you of anything, but there’s only a few people who could do what my enemies have been doing.  I thought I should have a conversation with you, see if you couldn’t help me narrow down this problem.”

“Timoteo Alt- Altamirano.”

“Hm?”

“It’s him.”

“There’s a very big issue with that reasoning.”

“Dead man’s switch,” Mia said.  “He act- actv- activated people, friends.  Some are clients of ours.  Some not.”

“Ahh, that’s a theory.”

“I think… fact.”

“Very curious.  Interesting.  On the one hand, I do really like that theory.  Things make sense.  On the other… if you knew that, why not tell me?”

“Complicated,” Mia said, getting the pronunciation slightly wrong.

Had she regressed in the last hour, because of stress, or was she playing it up now?

It would be risky to play it up with Dad- with Davie.  He could see through that kind of thing.

“Complicated to not let me know those things, haha!” Davie said, with enough force and volume in his cheer it sounded a bit threatening.

“Quiet, please.  The kids.”

“If I believed you,” Davie said, his voice still level, calm.  “I’d feel very insulted, that you didn’t share.”

Valentina hated that voice.  It made her want to shrink into herself.

“They’re clients.  We promise new life, nonnt-” Mia paused, took a breath.  “Non-interference.  You don’t get prefr- preferential treatment as a client.”

“I’ve given you a lot of money.  Promised more for future projects.”

“Principles.”

Davie chuckled lightly.  “Speaking of.  I had the hardest time finding pictures of your kids online.  Finally found some of them at other children’s birthday parties, and one event at school.  Mention of principals made me think of that.”

“Told them no.”

“The school?  It’s a bastard, isn’t it?  Keeping kids safe?  You haven’t heard anything about my girl?”

“No.”

“Are you positive your children are still safe in their beds?  Maybe it’s a good idea to have my men go and check.  Make sure.  Woah-ho.  If looks could kill.”

“No need,” Mia said.

“I disagree.  For your safety.  Primo?  Cam?  The two rooms at the end of the hall upstairs.  No need to wake them up.  Keep an eye out.  I do want a better look at your space, Mia.  That setup.  Can I call you Mia?”

“If you want.”

The conversation moved out of earshot.

Valentina could peer between the back of the bookshelf and the shelf to see the two people come upstairs.

One immediately rested some weight on the bench seat, which made some faint traces of sawdust come down, illuminated by the light that made it through the vent.  If Valentina had been lying down, it would have been right in her face.

He was opening the window.

She could hear the flicking of a lighter.  The cigarette smoke.

She could also see the vague movements of light and shadow.  At least seven people downstairs, plus Mia and Davie.

Cool air came in from the window, finding its way into the uninsulated space.  She was glad for it, in a way, but really, she was sweating, feeling stifled, and now had goosebumps and slight shivers instead.  Like her body had the worst of both worlds.

There were enough people that the house was busy.  Another soldier came upstairs, had a conversation in low voices with the other two.  All seriousness.

She couldn’t make out full sentences, but people had died tonight, apparently.  People they knew.  So they were tense, unhappy.

There was so little information that she would’ve fallen asleep, if her nerves weren’t so on edge.  That feeling that had caught her when she was trying to sleep was catching her again.  Restlessness, to the point she felt like she’d lose her mind if she stayed still.  A suicidal impulse to move that would reveal her location, entirely in her mind.

She forced her thoughts toward that dream of Europe.  The mazelike streets.  Mind over body.

The streets were shaped like letters.  Each letter touched.  Her name.  Valentina.  Two diagonal streets, one touching on a side road, what would the A be?  Tall buildings on either side, a plot in the middle.  A garden?  A fountain?  She tried to visualize it.  The ‘l’ of Valentina could be a straight road.

The labyrinth could be deciphered.  She had to trace each shape in her mind, give it dimension, detail.

Once she was done with Valentina, she thought of Ripley.  Lots of side roads and detours.  What would a ‘Ripley’ neighborhood have in it?  A workshop.  Bookstore.

Tyr?  Short, it had to be dramatic.  What were the wildest things she could find in a short side street in the Hurst neighborhood?  The cigarette smoke of the man sitting on the bench seat at the window filled her space.  She made it a part of the mental tapestry.  Lots of smoking in some parts of Paris.  Everything needed French names.

“Good morning, honey.”

Davie was in the living room.  Mia sat across from him, her back to the wall that separated living room and front hall.

“How was your night?  Would you like coffee? Breakfast?”

“Is everyone safe?” Carson asked.  He’d come in.

“Yes,” Mia said.

“Stay where you are, please,” Valentina’s fath- Davie said.  “No cues or hints.  Forgive me for being paranoid, I do want to have a good business relationship, but as they say, you should trust but verify.”

“I don’t object,” Carson said.

“Where were you?”

“Working with a client.  A small one, because my wife is feeling under the weather, I didn’t want to lean on her too much.”

“Name?”

“We don’t share.  We’d give you the same courtesy.”

“She said the same thing.”

“Policy.”

“Policies and principles,” Davie said.  “I do like you two.  But some people hurt the Cavalcanti family, recently, and it traces back to you, in a way that seems very unprincipled.  Bad policy.”

“How?” Mia asked.

“Well, for one thing, they’re using a bunker that you set up.  Want to know how I know?”

“Satellites,” Mia said.

“Yeah.  Wow, you’re on the ball, even when not at your best.  I went looking, used satellites and AI, some stuff I didn’t even understand, but my acquaintances do.  Bam, twenty-two bunkers set up in the last twenty years.  Took barely a minute to pull up the images of the spaces being prepared and dug out.  With the state of things, it makes a lot of sense.”

“It does,” Carson said.

He’d settled into a chair, Valentina was pretty sure.  Casual.

“Even got a shot of you two outside, last year.  Renovating?”

“Extending.”

“And the girls were there.”

“I know,” Carson said.  “I checked in before I came home.  A group of people tied to the contact- Timoteo, we think they might have gone rogue.  Some of them saw the bunker.”

“You didn’t change the locks?”

“Codes?  No.”

“What time did you show up there?”

“Not sure.  I parked on a side road, cut through the woods, found the location burned.  There was a car.  I poked around.”

“We sent some people to investigate, too.  Cameras, dogs with the scent of the three kidnapped girls, drones to sweep the area.  Soldiers.  It didn’t go well.”

“We can give you some names and information.  Because it was our bunker they used,” Carson said.  “Men we call Bolden, Highland.”

“Killers.”

“Among their varied skills.”

“And you are innocent, I suppose.  If I brought those bloodhounds in and they smelled the girls on you, it’d be because you poked around?  Handled things?”

“Could be,” Carson said.

Davie chuckled, low and long.

“He’s in a good mood, considering the situation,” Carson told Mia.

“Mmm.”

“This isn’t a world where having excuses helps,” Davie said.  “Reasonable doubt doesn’t win you a way out like it does in a courtroom.  Instinct matters.  Power matters.”

“Yeah,” Carson said.

“Do you know where Gio is?”

“Nope,” Carson said.

“No,” Mia said.

“Do you know why I’m doing what I’m doing?  The assets I’m accumulating?  My objective?”

“You’re allying with local government,” Mia said.  “Military is being deployed against ins- insurgent Americans, but it’s not enough and it’s polt- politically complicated.  It stirs up shit at the same time it cleans up messes.”

Mia was struggling as she finished saying that, like she couldn’t coordinate speaking and breathing at the same time.  Carson added, “I’m not as filled in, but I assume they give you resources, permission.  A cut.  You become their answer to the Civil Warrior issue, and the leftist pro-democracy riots.  Your gang can distract things, target revolutionaries, derail protests, shape the narrative.”

“More or less.”

“You already wanted complete and total control,” Mia said, measuring out words, halting through some for difficult strings.   “They want control.  If you can get it, there’s polt-political power int- in it.  Others will want in.  Want same.”

“Drones, satellites, soldiers… brought in a lot of extended family, friends, some retired gangsters.  Losing as many as we have tonight, it hurt.  But we’re still the dominant power.”

“You want us,” Carson said.

“I think I’m a savvy man,” Davie said.  “My brother, he’d handle this.  Your answers are good, but ‘good’ isn’t enough.  So he’d bring your kids downstairs, and kill them.  Or tell you how your daughter will be put to work as soon as she’s old enough.  Maybe your son too.  Nicholas would make you confess your sins that way, then hurt you to drive the point home, for anyone in a position to tell tales about how the Cavalcanti family handles problems.”

“Of course,” Carson said.  “And you?”

“I want security.  I’d like to hire you on.  But before we get that far… I stepped down, recently.  Took a break, at my brother’s insistence.  He wanted to see if things kept moving after I sat back and stopped giving people orders.  They did.  It didn’t take much to convince him.  He trusts me.  He wants what I’m working to build as much as I do.  Knows about it.  Now, I trust you, I want a good business relationship here, but…”

“Trust but verify,” Mia said.

“It’s only fair if you get benched for a while too.  We’ll leave your kids out of it.  If they’re a bit bewildered and confused that mommy and daddy are away, well, that seems to be happening more and more, isn’t it?  The three kidnapping victims would have felt the same.”

“Might raise problems,” Carson said.

“Child services?  They’re a bit overtaxed, but you’re right.  I’m sure you can recover, once you’ve won over my trust, helped us with this situation, and done some Cavalcanti exclusive work for us.  Then you can come back, come up with some excuse about why you left two children at home alone.  Or fudge paperwork.  Consider that whole situation, your kids in limbo, a motivating factor.”

“No,” Mia said.  Her voice was darker.  “There are contig- contingencies.  In case Carson is hurt and I’m too sick to act, or accident.  The babysitter will be texted.  People will be made aware.”

“You and Timoteo, so similar.  Dead man’s switches rigged.”

“We were friends.  Never met face to face.  But friends.  Shared notes.”

“Friend enough that you’re mad, too?  Organizing kidnappings?”

“No.  We don’t get involved.  That interferes with the business.”

“Then it’s settled,” Davie said.  He gave no indication he believed them.  It was like the lies and things they’d done to hurt the Cavalcanti family didn’t matter, because he was taking them with him.  He’d twist their arms to get them to help.

Valentina watched and listened- insofar as there was more than the occasional half sentence to listen to, as they went through the house.  Into Mia’s office.  Got computers, books, devices.

“Fourth bedroom?” Davie asked.

“Mine,” Mia said, at the same time Carson said, “Hers.”

“I don’t sleep well when I’m sick,” Mia said.  “Migraines.  I need a fully dark room, no tossing and turning.”

“I see.  We’ll see what we can arrange at your destination, just in case.”

Mia also wanted to look in on the kids, and Davie didn’t let her.

There wasn’t a moment that Mia looked at Valentina, the bookshelf, moved a finger, or anything.  Carson either.

They collected things, then they left.  Valentina could faintly hear the car door slamming.

Taken to become Cavalcanti assets.  It wasn’t out of the question that her fath- that Davie would smile and make nice, acting like there was a plan, only to dismember them the moment he had them secure, removed from the traps around the house.

Valentina emerged.  She was crying at the sense of loss, and the impending feeling of being overwhelmed.

As if to taunt or fuck with Carson and Mia, they’d left the front door open.  Valentina closed it.

She got some water, and tended to her hair, which had been plastered to her head, neck, and shoulders with sweat – she patted it with paper towels, then combed it.  Goosebumps prickled her skin throughout, cold air from the open door.

She could smell them.  The soldiers.  The gunpowder and gun oil.  Aftershaves.  Cigarette smells- they hadn’t smoked inside, as far as she could tell, aside from the one guy leaning out an open window while keeping watch.

Was she meant to leave?  Take the kids somewhere safe?  How or where?

Trust them to get out of this?  Or save them?

Was she supposed to babysit her two ‘cousins’?

What about the three prisoners?  Carson had moved them?  Was she meant to help with that?  Relieve whoever was handling it right now?  Communicate with them?

Every passing minute on the clock made her more anxious.

The clock hit seven.

The kids were woken up by their alarms.  The deadline had been reached.

“Mom’s not up?” Ripley asked.  A sleepy Tyr followed behind her.

“Mia and Carson had to go help my mom,” Valentina lied.  “She hasn’t been doing well with… stuff.  There was an issue.  So they both left.  It’s up to me, you guys, and your babysitter to muddle through.”

“Oh,” Ripley said.

“Chance to get to know each other.”

Ripley smiled, faltering, then closed the distance.  She hugged Valentina.  “I’m sorry about your mom.”

Valentina had needed that hug.  She was reeling, still, convinced that whatever she did, it was the wrong decision.

No, maybe there was one clue.  Carson had said, when showing her the ropes at the bunker.  That she should expect resources.  A ‘dead man’s switch’, they’d called it.  Information and tools.

She had to wait it out, until that switch flipped and she had what she needed.  Then she’d see what she could do.

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He crawled out from under the car.  His ears were ringing from the noise, but he could hear the muffled voices.

Carson’s hand pressed to his rib and, as he reacted to the pain, came away with crimson covering it from fingertip to the base of the palm.  He tried to take in a deep breath, and found a tightness there.  He had no idea if it was damage, if something vital had been punctured, lung-wise, or if his body was reacting to the pain and blood loss by tightening everything up there, to the point it limited his breathing.  If that was a thing.

It was the first time Carson had been shot.  He wasn’t exactly sure what to do, except to keep his head down, aware he was hurt but that the pain would soon come.

The contents of the garage had done more to protect him than the uninsulated walls, which were basically as thick as a two-by-four.  A lawnmower, mounted against the wall, another by the ground.  A metal toolbox, loaded to the gills with rust.

He shifted position, lying low by Highland’s car’s bumper, in an awkward position that leaned hard on his elbow, to use gravity to help him keep pressure on the wound, leaning chest into hand.  His senses felt like he’d been hollowed out and had bag of hot trash dumped through him.  Smoke, foul smells, a ringing and rattling in his ears, sense of touch fucked, vision unfocused.  Even a taste in his mouth.

Palm pressed to wound, his fingers moved a bit, exploring-

It had gone in far enough to the side that it wasn’t a guarantee that it’d have gone through a lung, but it might have clipped a rib.  It had gone in and out, meaning he was only staunching half the wound.  He’d been behind cover- mostly.  It seemed unfair to be this hurt.

He shifted position, a vertigo-like tilt leaving him momentarily feeling like he’d adjusted too far and was about to fall on his face-

The sudden movement of his other arm to compensate made his entire chest hurt, waking up that latent pain.

-But it was only vertigo.

He adjusted so his palm pressed to one end of the wound, the car bumper pressing against the other, and peeled his ears.  People would be coming.  Where was his gun?

Evidence.  This blood getting everywhere was a problem.  Mia would be upset.

Satellites, she’d said.

The problem with his current position was that it put so much onto his elbow.  It made that same nerve that was tied into the ‘funny bone’ start to throb, aching more with each pulse, at the same time his chest was hurting more.

They were still out there.  Still coming.

Gun.

He saw it and picked it up.  There were voices outside.  Easier to hear with the holes in the walls, he mused.  His ears still rang.  Some flashlights shone through gaps in the boards that made up the exterior.

It helped that it was dry inside, helped by the recent lack of rain, and the bullets had kicked up enough dust and grit to help obscure him, and some of that dust and grit was layering his hair, skin, and clothes.

He focused on remaining very still, even as his elbow pulsed with the dull nerve pain, a countdown without numbers before he wouldn’t be able to hold himself up.

There was a sound at the garage door.

Ah, yeah.

The door opened, sliding up along its rollers.  Flashlights shone into the space, but the cloud was still there.

There was no ticking.  It counted down from ten, silent.

Then the garage door springs snapped down, and they pulled the trap down with them- a thin line of cable, each end anchored to a setup on the rollers that kept the door on track, above the parked car, whenever the door was raised.

It banged, with a gunshot-level force.  The mechanism clipped the back end of the car Carson was at the front end of, and jostled it enough he grunted, falling.

He made himself move.

A guillotine of cable that would move at a curved diagonal, from the rollers to the base of the door, with the force of a garage door spring.  Mia had said a garage door spring could carry hundreds of pounds of force.  They only set this trap when they had guests in the bunker downstairs.

Two men cut in half.  A third with the cable halfway into abdomen, halfway into pelvis- it looked like he’d had his gun out in a position that caught part of the force.  He’d hooked on it in a way that left him dangling by his midsection, blood and innards flowing down his back and arms and the back of his legs.

A fourth, maybe one who’d been behind the third, then pushed back when the cable had driven him back a few paces, had fallen to the ground, staring at the gory scene.

Carson was ready with his gun before the man saw him, recognized the danger, and found his own fallen weapon.  Carson didn’t try so much for accurate aim as he pointed in the right direction and unloaded four shots.  Or five.  The man dropped.

He had to shoot left handed with his side hurting like this.  Even shooting with his left hand made his injury at the side hurt.

All four wore body armor, though it didn’t match.  Three had assault rifles.  Three had longer hair that was slicked back.  The one at the rear of the group that Carson had shot didn’t have an assault rifle, but he had a full pack.

Yeah, soldiers from the Kitchen.

He was pretty sure nobody else was close enough to have seen what happened.  Anyone close enough to act or know what was going on would have reacted when he opened fire, coming around one of the corners of the building to shoot at him, at which point he would’ve retreated back inside again.

Carson watched the surroundings as he eased forward, climbed past the cable, and toed a gun further out of reach of the suspended man’s dangling hand.  He grunted as he bent down, then quickly checked.  No wallets.  Some more ammunition.  Keys for a vehicle.

It took work, especially one-handed, but he relieved one man of his vest, keeping one eye out, and an ear out for more trouble.  .  He shrugged into it, cut off a man’s sleeve at the shoulder, pulling it off, then wedged it in between vest and wound, before cinching the straps at the side painfully tight, so the vest held it tight to the wound.

Highland was still drawing most of the attention.

His instincts told him he had a responsibility here.  To support Highland, to get out there.  Some of those, he suspected, were because of movies and television.  That sense of shared brotherhood in a bad situation.

He tried to stay patient, getting his bearings, while the pain was mounting in his side.  Guns put aside.  A resource for later.  The one with the pack… he checked, then pulled out a heavy duty piece of technology, more of a cylinder than a box to be held in the hands.

He aimed it at the trees on the far side, past transformer towers, taller grass, and path.

It took a second to turn on.  It provided night vision, in a staticky-green-and-dark-gray, and, distant, things flared white, with a halo off the side of it, that danced around it as he moved the camera around.  Pieces of the transformer tower that were still reflective.

He could see a drone above the trees, with another white spot and flare toward the base.

Stalking Highland.  It didn’t look like a gun drone, he figured, but he didn’t know what a gun drone looked like.

The heavy and durable construction, the dark green exterior, and the general idea of it- a long-distance viewing device that could see distant lenses and pieces of metal?  It felt military-issue.

Not the most surprising thing ever.

They probably had a few.  They knew that Mia liked her cameras, so they’d checked out possible locations, maybe with these devices first.  Then dogs.  The contact or someone the contact had worked with might’ve known through word of mouth that they used a bunker, and Davie knew what the contact had.

Carson considered his options.  If he went out to where Highland was, he wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to help, especially with this injury, and he could get shot, if Highland shot first and checked who the person that was moving around was.

Better to handle other things.

He went to the hatch, uncovering the keypad, and typed in the code.

Down the ladder, avoiding use of one arm as much as he could, to favor his side, and then down the hall.  Camera checked.

When the camera turned off, he could see his own face.  He wasn’t okay.

He could check the text message from Mia.  It said a lot that it wasn’t coded, nothing fancy done.  She’d sent a text, which might as well have broadcast ‘they know your location already, so I might as well not bother’.

Mia had identified two other rural properties, one bought on the cheap, the other left abandoned by someone who’d gone to fight in Washington and never returned.  Both had bunkers, though only one of those was even partially maintained.  Both had cameras.  Both of those bunkers had seen visitors this afternoon.  Mia had, through that, or by something else, deduced the satellites were in play.

What did that mean?

He sent another coded message to her, then went to the bathroom, trying to see how much blood was still leaking out.  He rinsed his face, again using one hand.  After washing and cleaning his hands, he gingerly relieved the pressure, then moved to the kitchen to try to rinse and clean the wound, because he’d just put dirty cloth against it.  He swayed a bit, moving between the kitchen and main room, to keep an eye on the cameras.

A message came back from Mia.

A map, with a red X, showing a place further down the path.

With one word in the coded message.  ‘Enemy’.

He couldn’t get five minutes to rest and repair.

Armed with an assault rifle and the tube camera, he went back up.

No dogs.  He was thankful for that.  No soldiers.

A background of only silence, punctuated by lone gunshots.

That would have to be Highland.

It was clear Highland was on the move, cutting through woods.  Carson lifted the tube camera, aiming it, and saw a dark blot against the sky.

No flare?  No camera?

He moved further ahead, then tried again.  Two shots in rapid succession.  On the second, there was a bright spot and the circular lens-flare effect around it.

Carson gave it a wide berth, jogging through the trees with just one or two trees between himself and the open area, as he drew closer to the spot on the map.

There.  A parked car, tucked away in a little spot where the treeline wasn’t a straight line.  It wasn’t Drone Man, but it would be a bit surprising if it was, considering the state of the guy.  A slightly overweight woman with light brown skin had a game controller in hand, and was watching a laptop, which she’d placed on her trunk.  A Cavalcanti soldier stood by.

Carson took aim, crouching so he could use one leg for the extra stability, gun braced by one arm to the side, one leg, stock braced against the good side of his chest.

He fired.  It was an automatic three shot burst.

Burst, adjust, burst-

She and her guard scrambled to get clear.  Taking cover by the car.  The laptop fell.

He aimed for it, but considering the distance, it was a long shot.

He did pop a car tire, though.

He measured out the shots, trying to keep her tied up in taking cover and protecting herself so she couldn’t go after Highland.

He reloaded, shifting locations, and pulled out the camera, because it was so dark, without light or streetlight, that he couldn’t see much, and she wasn’t bathed in the light of her laptop screen, anymore.

He saw her, and the soldier- who might’ve been hurt, or maybe she was hurt and the soldier was tending to her.

And there was something to the left.

Highland, with a rifle, lying on his belly, aiming at Carson.

Carson pulled off his smoke mask, hand raised, and shook his head.  The angle wasn’t right for anyone else to see.  Maybe the drone, but the drone didn’t seem to be on target right now.

He raised the camera, and saw Highland moving.

Three flashes total.  The woman with the drones, the soldier, and someone else?

It was a full minute before Highland crossed no man’s land- beneath the wire-less transformer towers, across a field of tall grass and weeds, with dirt paths cutting through it.  A full minute felt like a long time when Carson’s heart was beating as fast as it was.

When Highland came, so did the drone.  Carson pulled his smoke mask back on.

The man turned, raised his rifle, and aimed-

And the drone moved, swerving.

Highland kept the gun held up, pointed, and the drone kept moving erratically, still focusing on him.

He seemed to lose it as he got into the trees.

“Almost shot you.”

“That was the worry.  But I got sent a map with this place as a destination.”

“Our voice on the phone figured out they were here?”

“Seems so.”

“Helped,” Highland said.  He put a hand on the cylinder.  “Well now.”

“You know what it is?”

“Yeah, laser camera.  Range finding, selective imaging to bypass smoke, fog, and other reflectives,” Highland said, lifting the camera up to his eye to see.

“Or catch reflectives.  I think it’s set to spot lenses and cameras.”

“I think you might be right.  This is classified.”

“So, I think, were the gun drones that got stolen.”

“Davie Cavalcanti keeps surprising us.  Think you can draw it away a bit?”

“I’d rather not get caught on camera, if I can avoid it.”

“Take my coat.  Put your hood up.  Keep the mask on.”

Carson nodded.  He winced as he got his arm through the sleeve.

“We’ll get that taken care of soon,” Highland said, noting the injury.

Carson went.  It was so quiet, that as soon as he was out of the trees, he could hear that near-silent drone.  His own huffs for breath, chest tight, and the ringing in his ears from the earlier gunfire almost drowned the damn thing out.  He couldn’t run very fast with a hole in his chest.

A part of him was still suspicious.  He wondered if this could be a long, crazy ploy, with Highland being the real leak, shooting him in the back.  Then he could win Mia over, win Davie’s favor, even give Mia to Davie, in a roundabout way.

Highland would have had other opportunities before now.

But if Highland was waiting, this was the sort of one he’d be waiting for.

I’m wearing a vest, at least.

Carson ducked his head down, and zig-zagged more than necessary.

The gunshot came.

And the drone fell, crashing to the grass behind Carson.

Carson kept moving.  He left it to Highland to pick the thing up, going straight to the bunker.  Rather than have the torturous process of them both going through the hatch at different times, various doors locking until one was closed- Carson had run into that with Mia when they’d been preparing cell three together, he waited outside.  His side in quiet agony, he dragged the bisected and partial bodies into the garage, off to one side.

“This was you?” Highland asked, when he caught up.

“This was me.  Our friend on the phone, technically.”

“This one’s still alive.”

Carson looked.

The cable stretched across the garage door, taut, and the man with the wire partway into his abdomen and pelvis hung there.  Sure enough, he was managing faint breaths, eyes moving.

“Why the fuck can I have a hole in my chest I could plug with a finger, and I’m worried I could bleed out and die, then I see this asshole like this, and he’s alive?” Carson asked.

“Humans are odd like that,” Highland said.  He grunted as he hauled the guy free of the cable, dropping him to the floor.

It looked like the lights went out pretty fast after that.

“Take a punch wrong, fall and hit your head on a hard floor?  Could die right there.  Dead.  Could fall out of a plane, tumble through the air, hit hard ground, and live to tell the tale, because the wind hit you right,” Highland continued.  “What do we do about this cable?”

“Don’t take bolt cutters to it, or you might join one of these guys,” Carson said.  “Give me a minute?  Tidy up here?  And keep your distance.”

“Yeah.”

Carson had to find a screwdriver, go up to the rollers, and unscrew the addition Mia had made, that attached the ends of the wire there.  The moment the screw was released enough, the cable released with a wicked, sharp sound, going slack.  Carson undid the other and tugged the cable free.

“What’s the plan?” Highland asked.

“You got all of them?”

“Pretty sure.”

“The narrative we’re going with, since Bolden put a crossbow bolt through the one target’s head, is that this is purely a revenge thing on the part of our contact’s old friends.  Which is funny because a few of you aren’t and weren’t his friends.  A lot of you are the least likely to be among the names the contact gave to Cavalcanti.”

“Yeah.  That’s still the story, okay.”

“Key thing, we extract our guests, and we torch this.  If you’re caught, Highland…”

“If I’m caught then I’m not walking away, and there’s little to nothing I could say that’s going to save me.  Best way to hurt them is to shut the fuck up, because it gives you and our voice on the phone a chance to get back at them.”

They’d been over this, prior to Bolden invading the Cavalcanti house.

“Like I said before, I owe our voice on the phone a lot.  I’m not betraying her.”

“Good,” Carson said.  “We burn this, burns the evidence and hides details.  The story is, dead man’s switch from the contact got in touch with you all.  Some of you knew about our bunkers.”

“Thin.”

“Well, we’ve got to do what we can do.  The pisser is going to be our captives here.  We don’t have a great place to take them that Calvalcanti doesn’t know about.”

“We’ll have to worry about drones, too.”

Carson grimaced.  Possibly not just drones.  It was an ugly thought.

Carson accessed the hatch, waited for Highland to close and seal it behind them, then they went into the main area.  From there, into the side area with the bathroom, already open first aid kit, and kitchen.

“Let me see,” Highland said.

Carson, having just put fresh bandages in place, was reluctant, but agreed.

Maybe it was a good thing, after all.  There was a lot of blood already.  Enough he felt he shouldn’t be as okay as he was.  Then, sitting down with shirt raised for Highland to work, he realized how infirm he really was.

Highland put a knife on the heating element in the kitchen, then set to work.  Carson grimaced, turning his full focus to the cameras.  The three prisoners were up, agitated by the recent noise from above.  One was shouting, but nothing was reaching them in the main room, or aboveground.  The cameras showing feeds of outside showed nothing.

“M-” he started to say, before shifting to, “Mmm.  She’s replied.”

“Our friend on the phone?”

“Yeah.  Bring it here?”

Nobody was at the house.  Nobody was going after Mia, Valentina, Ripley, or Tyr.  This was all focused on this.  In this, here, they were compromised.

“They say it takes three people to keep control of one struggling individual,” Carson said.

“Thinking about our prisoners?”

“We’ve got to get them out.  Our voice on the phone has an idea about where.  This is going to be a mess.  And slow.”

Highland nodded.

Mia already had an idea.  Carson checked.  Definitely an idea born of a moment of desperation, not brilliance.  An abandoned house in the city, in an area with a lot of abandoned houses, with relatively little foot traffic.

There were a hundred things that could go wrong, there.

Carson loaded up.  Gloves on.  Chains, locks, food, water.

Cell phone jammer.  He grabbed two.

Fuck, he still felt weak.  Swinging the bag around to his shoulder, he found himself unable to get it in place the first time around.  He had to put the bag onto the counter, put his arms through, belt it, and then step away, and it wasn’t that heavy.

Typing a command into the computer, he had a computerized voice announce: “Nicole Cavalcanti.  Stand with your back to the door, arms straight out in front of you.”

“Are we going home?” she asked, her voice coming through the speaker, in response.

He typed, then got up to resume sorting things out while the voice recited: “You are not.  We’re relocating.  You can cooperate and come with, or you can stay, and we will burn this place behind us.  If you do not cooperate, you will be shot dead and left behind.”

“Can I ask where things stand?  Ransom payments?  Were they shooting at you?”

“Stand up with your back to the door.  Arms in front.  I will not ask again.”

She paused, then she stood.

“A bag will be placed over your head.  You will then turn and present your hands for cuffing.”

“I understand.”

Highland handled that.  Nicole was brought through and handcuffed to the back of the couch.  He quickly frisked her.

Moving on…

“Addi Arcuri.  You heard our exchange with Nicole,” the digitized voice recorded.

“I heard the gunfire too!” Addi said.  “I’m not convinced they aren’t coming to rescue us.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Nicole said.

Carson typed, then waited.  “Repeat, Nicole.”

This time he held down the intercom button.

“Don’t be an idiot, Addi!” Nicole said, voice muffled faintly by the bag.

“I think you’re being the idiot, going along with this!”

Addi wasn’t cooperating.  Messy.  He moved on.  “Sara Barese, stand with your back to the door, arms out front and visible.”

Sara did as she was asked.

“Please don’t leave Addi.  Don’t burn her,” Nicole said.

What would Valentina think, after hearing they burned Addi?  It was one thing to hate someone, another to know they’d burned alive.

Sara obeyed the steps and the instructions.  Highland put a bag over her head, and as they’d done with Nicole, put a lock through it so there was just enough slack it wouldn’t choke or obstruct oxygen, but it wouldn’t come past her chin, either.

Laptop, hard drives.  The books.  This place had been meant to be a sanctuary so secure that it would be a fallback if other sanctuaries were breached.  As such, it had their fingerprints in it, in more ways than one.    There were things they’d bought that could be traced back to them.

Even burning this place, and bringing the house down on top of it, it couldn’t be left alone like that.  They’d either have to abandon their old lives, or they’d have to come back and painstakingly re-secure it.

There were three great destroyers of evidence.  Bleach, flood, and fire.  If prompted, Mia would say the best remedy was to not have someone looking in the first place, but that while none of the three was perfect, one was better than none.

Burning made it too hard to fully excavate and explore in an efficient timeframe.  Maybe if they distracted Cavalcanti and any other authorities too…

“Please,” Nicole said.  “She’s my friend.”

He didn’t want to use his voice, or give anything away in the way of accents, so he remained silent.

Hard drives and spare laptop all got removed went into a case.  He had to stick a knife into the laptop that was built into a coffee table to pry it open.  He pulled the hard drive out of it.  Guns had serial numbers.  A lot of them were guns they’d confiscated from clients.

This was such a fucking mess.  Layers of security and obfuscation melting down because of some serious bullshit.

Carson poured the kerosene across the bookshelves.

“Addi, they’re pouring kerosene!  I smell it!”

Awkwardly late, really.  The computers were off.  The only thing with power now was the lights and the cameras and consoles built into the walls of the bunker.  He couldn’t produce a voice without getting his phone out, and his hands were full.

Two would be easier than one.  And one burned alive would leave a message.

Maybe the wrong kind of message.  It’d make the Cavalcantis even less likely to relent.  More driven to investigate, find every answer associated with the burning of one of their daughters.

Almost snarling, Carson stopped what he was doing, cuffed Nicole to himself, then walked, with her stumbling behind, blind and panicked.  Two doors separated them from the cells.  He typed in the code at the one.

Highland, standing by with various bags and pieces of kit, gave Carson a quizzical look.

Carson typed a message onto his phone: “Nicole comes back to the cells.”

“Don’t lock me down here too.  I’m trying to get her to cooperate!”

“Convince her.”

The door opened.  He walked through, Nicole stumbling behind.  He shut it, then went to the next.

Until they were in the cells.

With his foot, he opened the slot for the food.

“Addi?”

“Nicole!”

“Can you smell it?  The kerosene?  They are not kidding!”

“Fuck.  Fuck!”

“They will burn you alive!”

He really didn’t want to, honestly, but managing three prisoners was a nightmare too.

He hated this.  Nicole tried to take a step, jerked, and he could feel his chest seize in pain at being moved a way it didn’t want to move.

“Sorry,” Nicole said, sounding genuine.

“I’ll come!” Addi said.  “Don’t hurt her.”

He used his phone.  The voice was different, tinny.  “Back to the door, arms out front.”

“Like a zombie, Addi,” Nicole urged, from the other room.

Was that a code?  It was a weird call-out.  Maybe she was being goofy in her panic.

“Please,” Nicole said.

He typed, then waited.  “Do not move.”

He opened the door,

Bag over Addi’s head.  He cuffed her to Nicole.

Mia had a set of rules about managing prisoners.  Once they’d secured the three in the van and knocked them so they could handle the fact Nicole had come armed, it had always been a relay.  Always multiple points of confinement.  The layers of cell doors and doors between the cells and the exit worked here.  But while prisoners were in motion, it couldn’t be just the one thing.  So Carson used the hood, and he bound their wrists.  Then, as another layer, once he had them in the same place, he bound them to each other with short lengths of chain.

Once they were in the hallway, he sent Highland ahead.

Highland came back, and motioned.  Ten?  Then a direction, his arm fully extended, finger pointing.  Then a motion, pinky and thumb extended, held to the side of his face.  Phone?

Cavalcanti reinforcements were here, apparently.  Communicating.  They’d gotten here but didn’t have coordination or directions.  They’d gone to where the woman with the drones had been parked, a short distance away, and were now getting told where to go next.

Carson had bound hands in front so they could climb the ladder, and used enough length that they could climb up, one after the other.  Once they were up, though, he attached them to a metal shelving unit, and changed to have them cuffed, hands behind them, shorter connections between each.

Highland, stepping outside, did a check with the camera, then did a walk around the perimeter of the house, pouring out the rest of the kerosene on flammable things and the various bodies or pieces of bodies before tossing the can aside.

Doesn’t help if they have up-to-date satellite tracking.

What a nightmare.  Carson was finding that he could usually take these things in good spirits, remaining light and what he termed effectively detached even when things were bad.  But it was a rarity that he ever actually got hurt.  Especially hurt enough he could have bled out.

It made it harder to be detached, and it badly affected his mood.

He used the library code to send a message to Mia.  They weren’t so tacky as to have Fahrenheit 451 on there.

The sprinkler system would spray flammable fluids.  A timed charge would ignite it.

Highland’s car was riddled with bullets.  Before Cavalcantis could catch up, they quick-marched through the woods.  The girls stumbled over roots and shied away from scratching branches, but Carson and Highland were able to keep them upright and clear.

It wasn’t a short walk, and it was longer with the three girls, which brought its own problems.  The delays were stacking up, and that meant a chance that soldiers could catch up with them.

When they reached the edge of the trees, Carson checked the coast was clear.  Highland used the camera.  Carson ventured out, then checked the car carefully, using the device they’d used to sweep the girls for bugs, checking with eyes and hands in the undercarriage and wheel wells, then he shone a light through.

Highland was nodding, as he realized what Carson was being mindful of.  He gestured while motioning at the car seat.  Like he was pressing down, elbow higher than his hand, with wrist bent, hand flat and facing the ground.  His hand made an ‘explode’ gesture, fingers going from fist to splayed out.

Carson nodded.  That was another step.

“I have to pee,” Addi said.

Highland used his phone.

“Can you hold it one hour?”

“No.”

Highland pointed at Carson, then himself.  A ‘who?’.

Carson had Highland handle it, while he checked the car, and then finally opened the car door.  Nothing under the seat.  No damage suggesting the seat had been cut open.

Really, would they risk it, knowing it might blow up hostages?  Possibly, if they didn’t think the hostages would be moved in these circumstances.

The other girls helped Addi get her pants down enough to do her business, then hiked them back up, with Highland standing off to the side, eyes slightly averted, arms folded, looking impatient.

No whispering, no tricks.

The girls were being good- and they were pretty firmly secured, so even running was a near impossibility.  They’d run into a dozen trees or fall into ditch after ditch before they got to anything approaching civilization.

This was all so much easier when clients or hired agents produced the captives, already bound, with it being a simple process of getting them into a cell, then watching them, and finally releasing and delivering them.

This was the opposite of that.  From secure custody, now compromised, to something insecure, with eyes possibly watching them.

The three girls were put in the back seat.  Highland drove with lights off.  Carson gave instructions, to drive through a farmer’s property.  Onto a rural road.  Then onto another.  In case the more traveled, expected roads had anyone stationed.

Carson typed on the phone, and prepared a coded message to Mia.  When they reached a stop light, he showed Highland.

Cut through the city.

Highland tapped his wrist where a watch would be.  He mouthed words.

Long trip.

Carson nodded.  Long was better than not.  The only issue would be if they got intercepted.

It was another five minutes before they got off the rural road and reached a T-shaped intersection, with both a stop and a yield sign.  He used that moment to communicate to Highland what they were doing, even though there was nothing to stop or yield for.

The man nodded.

The girls were talking, and Carson used the voice on the phone to instruct them to speak louder.  Because whispers were more dangerous.  Cutting from the distant outskirts of Camrose and the city to the downtown area of the city was an hour long trip, more or less.

There were some grumblings about bathroom.  He told the girls to piss in the car if they had to.  They managed not to.  But there were also asks for water – claiming dehydration, that the masks were stifling.  In response to that, Highland himself wanted to stop.  So they parked a distance down the road from a roadside gas station.

Highland said he liked to stop in situations like these, because it made it hard for a tail.

Carson conceded the point, but he also wondered if part of it was that Highland was a smoker who was running low.

If so, he didn’t want to begrudge the man.  It was a small price to pay for a delay.  Out of paranoia, he kept an eye on him.  Making sure no calls were being communicated.

Then back on the road again.  Into the city.  Toward downtown.

The destination was a tunnel.  Out of sight of the satellites.

Highland swerved, then parked at the side of the tunnel.  Car horns honked- it wasn’t that kind of space, where there was a ton of room, turning two lanes into one and a half.

The cars made a lot of noise, honking their alarm.  Highland and Carson remained where they were, tense.  Wary.

Someone, squeezing past, rolled down a window.  Carson reached for his gun.

Hot coffee, thrown onto windshield and hood.

Not a Cavalcanti soldier taking the opportunity to make a move.

Another car came and parked, bumper almost touching theirs.  Mia had coordinated with Moses Murtha, the ex-driver for the Cavalcantis, who’d provided information to support the kidnappings.

Highland and Carson ushered the three girls down that narrow space, hand at the back of necks, to make them stoop down, to get them into the new car.  Moses stood by to help block the view, where the nose of his car dipped down.

Speed was of the essence here.

They closed the door, traded keys, and drove out, merging with traffic.

Moses would drive their car out.

I think I understand you more, experiencing all of this, Carson thought.  The pain.  The worry.  The fact that none of this felt as sufficient as it could be.

When and if they could find an equilibrium again, he wanted to put more effort into the countless small steps.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have additional properties?  Additional measures prepared?  Distractions for pursuers?  Cars waiting in places, for easy trade-offs?

He wanted to embrace his wife, and whisper these things to her in the same way others would whisper sweet intimacies.

The Angel of Death waited a short distance away, and they quickly traded off on a fancy little street outside Little Italy with trees running along either side of the street, foliage knitting together overhead.

The Angel of Death seemed to have some reservations about the prisoners.  Something to talk about another time.  Carson made a point of showing care and consideration for the girls, protecting their heads as they quickly got into the next car.

It wasn’t a far drive to the location Mia had highlighted.  Carson parked.  Highland broke in, and they led the girls inside.

He prepared a coded message for Mia, using the library again, letting her know, referencing Bolden.  If Bolden was incapacitated, maybe they could keep the man useful by parking him here, as an extra set of eyes and a possible gun.

He wasn’t sure whether to read the lack of response as a problem, as Mia being under the weather, or a rejection of his idea.

The house was built to have multiple residents with their own space and one common living area.  Three tiny bedrooms, three tiny bathrooms, a downstairs living area and common kitchen, with no furniture, and an upstairs living area with a couch and armchair that nobody had cared enough to carry out.

He tried a tap and was surprised to find it had life in it- the water was a red-brown, but it ran enough for toilets to flush.

Magic from Mia, maybe?

He chained the three girls to the railing of the staircase, then separated them one by one, working with Highland to move them.  Each one to a bathroom.  Highland started to chain one around the base of the toilet, and Carson stopped him.

Toilets were fixed to the ground with wax seals.  Enough vigorous side to side motion, they could be toppled, the chain slipped free of the base.  If the chain was tighter than that, it could still be dragged or pushed with enough sustained effort.

The sink with its exposed piping below was better.  So he did the toilet and the sink.  Two chains for one captive.  One from wrist to sink.  One from neck to toilet.  The tub, though stained with age, could have some blankets and a pillow tossed in it.  The toilet worked.  Food and water was set in reach.

“I am unlocking the hood over your head for ease of breathing, eating, drinking,” he used the phone to tell Nicole.  “Do not remove it while I am here.  If we knock on the door, you put that on.  If ever you see our faces, you will not leave alive.”

“I understand.”

Upstairs were two more rooms that allowed for similar setups.  One had a shower stall only suited for standing up.  Addi had pissed him off, being uncooperative, so she got that one.

They got the same instructions.

There were a thousand things that needed accounting for, here.

“I don’t like that we can’t easily watch all three rooms.  If I’m sitting on the stairs, sure,” Highland murmured.  “But I can’t sit on a stair for hours on end.”

“For a few hours.  I’m going to go, check in, get supplies and things to make some quick modifications to the space.  How crazy will it drive you if I put bells on them?”

Highland snorted.  “I can handle bells.  Can’t say the same for Bolden if you get him in here to help keep watch.”

“Their hoods are off, so keep your mask on while moving around.”

“Yeah.”

After the bunker, this felt so inadequate.  And it was an expensive inadequate- they’ had to hire two people to do car changes.  Not knowing the full limitations of what Davie was doing to track them made it worse.

Mia was going to be in such a miserable mood.

He drove back, mind whirling, thinking through all the things they needed to do to secure a location like that.  Cameras would be ideal.

Clothes and supplies for the captives.  Tampons.  Toothbrushes, soap.  More water, in case the taps kept spitting out rust.

He needed the Angel of Death to check his side, too.  She was the closest thing they had to a back-alley doctor.

It was almost dawn.  He pulled up to the house, and let himself in.  Could or should he take a nap?

“Good morning, honey.”

A voice that wasn’t Mia’s.  Carson’s hand reached for the gun.  Then he stopped short.  A good thing too, considering more than one gun was trained on him.

Davie Cavalcanti was in their home, sitting in their living room.  Mia sat across from him on the couch.  Two soldiers stood by, backs straight, guns aimed at Carson.

“How was your night?” Davie asked, his tone lightly mocking.  “Would you like coffee?  Breakfast?”

---

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---

With everything going on, they’d decided to pull back, regrouping.  Bolden was being looked after, Highland watched the video with the prisoners, and Carson had picked up Valentina to bring back to the house.

Part of the reason for the retreat had been Mia’s health.  She’d focused on too much for too long, and her headache had won out.  Carson took over for the kids while Mia slept in a dark room, no screens, only white noise.

The kids were being pretty good.  One moment from Ripley where the volume control slipped, several from Tyr, but that was to be expected.  Carson involved all three in making dinner- burgers and fries with salad on the side.  Valentina got a walk-through on stove-grilling burgers to temperature- with a chicken breast in another pan for Mia.  Beef had a way of locking up her gut -probably tied to her anxiety- so it was a sometimes thing.

Ripley was chopping and watching some of the lesson, while helping with Tyr, who was chopping lettuce and other greens for salad with a kid safe knife.  The bonus of that was that if he helped prepare it, there was a good chance he’d eat ‘his’ salad.

Two liter bottles of soda and a tray of cinnamon rolls for dessert awaited them all at the end.

Then the lights went out.  It was overcast enough that the entire house was plunged into near-darkness, except for the areas close enough to the windows.

Carson found his phone on the counter, and checked it.

No service.

“Mission time- Ripley, brown cabinet with the christmas stuff, drawers.  There are candles.  Go.  Don’t hurt yourself in the dark.”

Ripley went.  The cabinet in question was central to the house.

“Tyr, flashlight in the bench by the stairs.”

Tyr ran off.  The way was partially lit by the window in the door.  Mia had put up a curly piece of decorative iron over it, to keep it from being a point of intrusion, and the glass there was textured, so someone outside wouldn’t have an easy view of the inside.

Both kids out of the way, Carson quickly went to the closet, and accessed the gun safe, arming himself.

“Watch the kids?  Lighter in the drawer by the knives if Ripley comes back,” he told Valentina.  “Batteries in the kid-proofed cabinet, above the liquor.  Keep them away from windows.”

“Yeah,” Valentina said, a bit breathless.  Scared.

Turnabout is fair play? Carson thought.  We attack a Cavalcanti house, put a crossbow bolt in one of them, kill two, maybe more, on our way out?  You come after us, now?

He moved between windows, trying not to hold any posture or anything that would spook the kids.  Peeking from the edges, moving fast if he had to cross any point someone might have an open shot.  His eyes scanned the outdoors.

Half the neighborhood had gone dark.  The way things were wired up, it was patchwork- a streetlight on this side of the street was lit, but houses on the other side weren’t.

Neighbors had stepped outside too, making it harder.

“Carson?”

Mia, talking to him from the darkness.  She had that look to her eyes, drawn partially closed, as if she was looking into a bright light, a weariness replacing tension in her features, even in near-total darkness.

She’d armed herself too.

“Not sure yet,” he said, to answer the question.

“Were, um-” She paused, wincing.

He waited, attention split between her and scanning the backyard.

“-can- cameras?” she asked.

“Only a bit.”

“You have to,” she said.  Alarm seemed to surge in her and push against the bars and barriers of everything else she was dealing with… not quite managing to reach the forefront.  “Carson.”

“I know.  I had my hands full with the kids.”

“Carson!”

In another situation, he’d think she was trying to warn him about something she’d seen, that he’d missed.  But she wasn’t.

It was there- her hand shaking, emotion beneath the surface, beneath headache and incapacitation and fatigue and everything else.  Alarm.

“I know,” he said, firmly.

She looked wounded, as she looked at him.  In more than one way.  Disappointed.

“Go easy,” he told her.  “Kids are getting lights.  I’m going to check outside.”

“Cay-” she started.  It seemed to take effort on her part.  “Careful.”

“Yeah.”

He finished checking out the windows, past front door, side windows.

Then he went to the back door again, and opened it.  He checked, then stepped outside, moving quickly between locations, ready to pull the gun from beneath his waistband and fire, if he had to.  It would shatter the illusion, for Ripley and Tyr, even the illusion that he and Mia had.

Even to the point that, when those elements of doubt were introduced, they’d fall apart, drift away from each other.

But it was better than the alternatives that awaited them, if it was the Cavalcantis.

Backyard clear.

Got to move in directions people won’t anticipate.

A fence encircled nine tenths of the backyard that the house didn’t- and a gate made up the other tenth.  With the way the porch was raised and the placement of the fence, Carson could step onto the fence, then go from there to the roof.

He scaled the roof, belly rubbing up against shingles, as he peeked around the side, then over the top.

Higher vantage point, easier to see people sneaking around.

Mia was in bad shape.  The way Carson interpreted her head injury, it was that one area of her brain had taken the hit hardest.  She’d ‘recovered’, not by having that part of her brain heal back to one hundred percent, or ninety percent, but by rerouting a lot of it.  Other parts of the brain took on the loads, making it easier for that smashed part of the brain to do what it had to do.

It wasn’t perfect.  That part that was damaged caused her constant pain, and impacted her in countless small ways- many of which she’d learned to hide.  When that part of her got too taxed, or if something forced its way through those channels that had been rerouted around a long time ago, then the damage reared its ugly head.

Sometimes that was minor- worse headaches.  Sometimes it was everything.  Fatigue, crushing headaches, emotional disregulation, language issues, coordination issues, balance issues.

It was part of why he nagged her to look after herself.  To rest.  Because every night she stayed up late and every meal she skipped was testing her limits, and when she failed a test, it could cripple her.

The trick being that she couldn’t bring herself to relax.  Even like this, when she needed to recover, he’d had to take away her phone to stop her from compulsively checking the doorbell cameras around the neighborhood, security cameras, and the satellite feeds they reserved for emergencies only, currently hooked up in the bedroom.

She was mad at him for not taking over the load and being vigilant enough to anticipate this, but she couldn’t articulate it in her current state.

No unusual cars on the road.  The sky was a dark grey.  Over toward the city, it took on a tint from the fires.

Then, with an almost imperceptible thud, the rest of the grid failed.  The collective hum of appliances, streetlights, and power cut out, and all the rest of the lights died.

Even in the city.

Carson slid down the slope of the roof, and landed on the porch.  He opened the door and let himself back in.

Valentina was crouched by the kitchen counter, struggling to breathe.  Mia stood by her, half-crouching, hand at her shoulder, eyes- still that wounded look, from an injury decades ago, frustrated she couldn’t say or do more to help.

“All safe, no disasters incoming.  The power grid failed all the way from Camrose to the city,” he said, making his tone gentle and confident.  He eased his way to the ground, and reached out, taking Valentina’s hand between both of his.  “All safe.”

“Is she okay?” Ripley asked.

“I’m okay, I just…”

Still trying to find herself after coming close to hyperventilating, Valentina found talking difficult.

“Scared of the dark?” Carson offered.

“Light the candles!” Tyr said, with a volume and suddenness that made Carson startle.  Mia winced.  Then winced again when Tyr turned the flashlight on her.

“Easy does it, Tyr.  Mom’s not feeling well, so remember to use our quiet voice, okay?” Carson asked.  Off to the side, Ripley was up, went to the drawer with the lighter, and started lighting the candles she’d dug out of the cabinet.  Carson found himself divided between trying to manage Tyr, pulling him into a one-armed hug, and trying to reassure Valentina.

“I’m not scared of the dark,” Valentina said.  “Scared.”

They took a bit of time in the dark and the quiet, Tyr squirming a bit before Carson quietly sent him to see what was going outside and to quietly- quietly report back.  Carson got up, checked the meat, where the pan was still warm, deemed it done enough, and then served it on buns he lightly toasted over the candles.

As he took food over to the table, Ripley intercepted him, clearly curious, but not asking any questions.

“Valentina’s been through a lot,” he told Ripley, voice very quiet.

“Like Mom with her head?”

“Different.  Mom’s head was a long time ago, a one time thing that still hurts now, Valentina’s going to be scared for a while, I think.  Be a good cousin, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Mia, do you want to eat in your room?”

“Here.”

It was a weird mood for dinner, eating in the dark by candlelight, Mia unwell and Valentina subdued.  He’d sat with a view of the backyard and out the one window.  Mia sat with a view out the front.  They hadn’t planned it- it had been intuitive on that level.

“I saw some bags in the bench,” Ripley ventured.  “I’m not sure if I was supposed to see, but…”

“Oh,” Mia said, smiling.  “Open- open them?”

“Can I go get-” Ripley asked, then, seeing her mom’s nod, didn’t waste any time.

The bags were from the store where she got her coveralls- car mechanic style, buttons down the front, folded collars, sleeves to ankle and wrist.  Mia had found the time to pick up some of Ripley’s favorite kind for warmer weather.

Ripley was thrilled.

“What’s the deal with that?” Valentina asked.  “The coveralls?  You were wanting these the other morning, and you wore them again yesterday?”

“It’s comfortable,” Ripley said.

“It’s kind of odd, though?” Valentina asked.

“Ahem,” Mia said, clearing her throat.

“Whatever Ripley wants to wear,” Carson said.  “Whatever style, we support.”

“Even if she wants to wear a, um,” Tyr cut in, voice a bit loud.

Carson stole a fry off Tyr’s plate.  It distracted him sufficiently, but Tyr, in turning to reach for it, stuck his elbow onto the lip of his plate, nearly catapulting his burger.  Carson managed it.

“Right, um.  Sorry?” Valentina responded to Mia.

“It’s fine,” Ripley said, unfazed.  “I don’t think it’s that odd, but I don’t care if it is.  I joke with my friends that my gender is ‘old man in a workshop’.  I like books, and old timey stuff, and building things, and not giving a damn what people think.  I’m weird like that.  My friends are weird.”

She said it as a point of pride.

“Right,” Valentina said.

Valentina, who’d gone to private schools with uniforms, for whom ‘weird’ might mean something very different.

Mia nodded, like this was a settled subject.

“…But what if you regret it?” Valentina asked Ripley.

Mia visibly tensed.

“I don’t care if I do,” Ripley said.  “I don’t want to be that kind of person, living with regret.”

Maybe not the best thing.  There were three things that were in play here- Mia could be protective and anxious about the kids, she couldn’t communicate very effectively right now, without stumbling over words, and her emotions ran a lot closer to the surface.

Bad combination.

“That might get harder when you’re a bit older.  I regret eating breakfast, sometimes.  Or not eating breakfast,” Valentina said.  “Or saying hi to someone in the hallway weird.  Clothes are complicated, it’s so easy to pick the wrong thing and have people be savage over it.  So I got good at it.”

“I guess there’s two ways to handle it,” Carson said.  “Master it, or ignore it.”

Valentina didn’t look like she agreed.

This was tricky to navigate.  Mia, like an increasingly dark cloud that nobody else had noticed.  Ripley, cavalier.  Valentina, who had been called ‘Gucci’ by friends in a past life, dwelling on something familiar to her.

He wasn’t sure how to redirect her without popping the swelling bubble.  And if he didn’t, would this get bad?  If Valentina looked away and to the side from the burger she was trying to hold together, as toppings slipped out the back?

Plus Tyr- Tyr was eating, but he was also trying to steal Carson’s fries now.  Carson turned it into a bit of a game, because Tyr could be a dangerously good bubble popper.

“Okay, wait, what if there’s a compromise?” Valentina asked.  “Let’s say you’re an old man at heart.  Have you seen some of the old guys who get featured on Bulle-pin boards online?  Crazy braided mustaches and beards, vests, nice shirts, pants that fit?”

“I don’t want a mustache or beard.”

“Let’s not pressure her,” Carson said, very mindful of Mia now.

“What about braids?”

“Valentina, please,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Ripley said.  “I don’t know about any of that stuff.  But I’d be okay to try.  I want to be comfortable though.”

“What if I show you?  Maybe overalls- not coveralls like you’ve been wearing, but strap-over-the-shoulder overalls, corduroy, maybe?  Nice shoes, different sort of top?  We can try a few styles?  You don’t have to wear anything you don’t want to.”

Ripley was nodding, smiling some.

Did she look relieved?

Because of common ground with this cousin she didn’t yet understand, maybe.  And maybe because she was getting to the point she wanted to try a change, but didn’t know how.

Mia was relaxing as Ripley seemed happy.  She finally moved, which drew Valentia’s eye.  And Valentina saw the tail end of that dark cloud.

“Oh, I’m sorry, you got her clothes and I’m talking about changing her style- I wasn’t badmouthing-”

“It’s fine,” Mia said.

“I was trying to understand, that’s all, it’s-”

“It’s fine.”

There was back and forth, Valentina stumbling to recover, and Mia insisting it was fine.  Ripley tried to interject.

“I think,” Carson said, picking a moment to cut in.  Both stopped.  “All we want is for Ripley is for her to be happy.”

“Yes,” Mia said.  “There- people.”

She pointed.

Carson turned around.  Maybe too fast.

There were people in the front yard.

He got up and went to the door, his gun in mind.  Mia remained where she was, a dark cloud again.

Carson checked, then opened the door.  Neighbors.  “Hello?”

“We’re checking houses to make sure everyone’s okay.”

“Were you now?” Carson asked. His eyes scanned the surroundings.  No people in cars watching them.  No drones.

“Lots of people died during the last few outages.  Services aren’t always responding, some old folk with machines they rely on, get into trouble.”

“No old folk here,” Carson said, flashing a smile.  “Eating a lukewarm dinner, that’s all.”

“Yeah, for sure.”

It was hard to get a read on those people.  It seemed like a few too many to be something tricky… but Carson wouldn’t have been the most surprised person in the world if some people had started this whole neighborhood watch thing by claiming they were checking on people in trouble, when they were scouting places to rob.

“Power and phones went out at the same time,” Carson said.  “Coordinated?”

“Looks like.  They took over the TV and radio.  Obviously TVs don’t work if you don’t have a generator, but…”

“Yeah.  Okay.”

“Sorry to take you away from your dinner.”

Carson watched as they moved on, eyes still darting around to look for Cavalcantis who might be looking in, taking advantage of this blackout the same way they’d used the protest last night.

A slice of the city had power again.

He went through the living room, grabbing a portable radio from inside a cabinet.  Cranking it on, it brought on a voice.

“…doing our best to be civil, but this is infrastructure that we built.  Working class Americans, born right, born patriots, we laid this groundwork, our fathers and forefathers built this for us.  Expect more of this, if you don’t turn over control, if you don’t stop taxing us, if you…”

He turned it off.

“Civil Warriors,” he told Mia.  “Power and phones, TV and radio.”

She looked relieved.  It wasn’t Cavalacantis.

“Looks like power is already starting to come on in places, and I think we have more serious things to worry about.”

Mia’s eyes had a lot of emotion.

“Tyr stole all my french fries while I was away from the table.”

He’d delivered the line right.  Both Ripley and Valentina laughed.  Tyr, his mouth full of fries, nearly choked, as he laughed to himself.  Carson thumped his back.  There were some lingering smiles, even though that.  Even from Mia.

Big win.

⯁

The rambling messages on the radio were still going when he started the drive, multiple men who recited their speeches, sometimes prepared, sometimes just guys taking their minutes of fame.  All signing off with the ‘we’re being civil, you wouldn’t like us if we got angry’ tagline.  So he plugged his phone in and put a playlist on.  He wasn’t good with silence, or stillness, unless it was a shared silence or stillness.

It was dark, and he’d gone to check on Valentina’s family.  To Ripley, that sounded like he was checking on her mom, who wasn’t doing very well.  But no, Highland needed a break, and the prisoners needed care.  Tyr was in bed, and the girls could look after themselves.  Mia was up and about, even if she was still not at one hundred percent.

The morning would be a better day for her, he figured.  It was more likely to be one if she didn’t spend time on the computer, brimming with stress.

He was turning onto the rural road when the phone rang.

“Phone, answer,” Carson said.

“Trouble,” Mia said.

“What kind of trouble?”

“The soldier.  Got a call.”

Highland?

Who was at the destination they were driving to?

“What kind of call?”

“An offer.  He said yes.  Lied.”

“We thought this might happen.”

“Yeah.”

She hated being like this.  Vulnerable.  Halting.

“Could it be a triple cross?”

“Mmm… Could.”

She didn’t sound very sure, but tone of voice got weird when she was this nonvocal.

“Thanks for the heads up.  I love you.”

Silence on the other end, as Carson drove past a farm, then another.

“Yeah.  Don’t jinx this.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling a bit.  “Sorry.”

“Same here.”

She said it with more meaning and emotion.  Like it wasn’t just the sorry she was saying ‘same’ to.  Jinxing things herself, implying an ‘I love you’ so close to a dangerous situation.

What were the odds that Highland could be planning something?  If he knew they were watching and listening to everything, it might make sense to do it.

They’d anticipated all of this.  That Cavalcanti, having effectively tortured the contact, might have extracted all the information he could out of the man.  All of the people the contact had relocated.  The ones he’d kept.

There was a reason they’d gone to Highland, Bolden and the Angel of Death, over some others.  They were more Mia’s than the contact’s.  The contact didn’t know about some, and others were early enough into things that Mia had more of a role or relationship.

It was amusing that she regretted interfacing as much with Highland as she had, to the point that it had shaped a lot of her personal rules going forward, but it was only because of that interaction that she could call him now, and trust him with stuff like their prisoners in the shelter.

Carson drove toward the bunker with the three prisoners, but stopped short of actually parking outside.

Routine was death, in situations like this.  Routine was something that criminals loved, whether they were house burglars, serial killers, or traitors.

Mia trusted Highland and Carson trusted Mia.  She was paranoid about everything, but she’d let Highland come this far, see this much.

So Carson broke routine.  He parked by the side of the road, then cut through trees.  It took ten minutes to make the walk.

The abandoned house was by a path that ran beneath some old transfomer towers, that had once carried a lot of power from a nearby hydroelectric plant toward the city.  The most traffic this place usually got was a farmer with a dog, going for a daily walk.

They timed things so they wouldn’t run into him.

Now there were people out there.  Carson could see a flashlight.  Across that grassy, overgrown-with-weeds patch that had the old transformer towers, by the treeline on the far side.

It coudn’t be easy, could it?  If he wanted to communicate with Mia, the way to do it would be a message sent from inside the bunker.  But he couldn’t go straight to the bunker because of that five percent chance Highland could be an issue.

Was he meant to go after them first, or deal with the Highland situation first?

One had a… seventy percent chance of being an issue.  Maybe it was teenagers.  But would it be teenagers, tonight, out of all nights?  When they’d gone years using this place without seeing anyone?

Mia had even checked on nights they weren’t keeping prisoners, to make sure everything was in line.  They’d done regular maintenance.  They’d come down to expand from the initial single cell to three- a fourth nearly done.

Five percent chance, Carson figured, that Highland was an issue.

He chose the five percent chance.  Still breaking routine, he approached the dilapidated building from behind, slipping between tree and the side of the building.  A window had broken long ago, glass lost in the dirt and overgrown weeds, and Carson climbed through- nearly making a racket because the same weather that had cracked the glass had also let water into the windowsill, rotting it.

Gun drawn, he cut through the property, toward the garage.

Movement.

Carson raised his weapon.

“I’m here,” Highland said.

Carson let eyes adjust further to the darkness.  Highland sat by his parked car, back to the bumper.  Approaching from the angle he was, Carson could see the man from the side.

“Why are you up here?”

“Because I knew you’d be wary, and I thought the best place to be here would be sitting in plain view, hands in sight.  No worrying about turning your back to me or me being around your car while you’re down in the tunnels.  You can watch me as much as you want to watch me.”

“Spooked me, man.”

“Yeah.  That’s it.  Did our friend on the phone call?”

“Yeah.”

“So you know why I’m being cautious.”

“Yeah.  There are people outside.”

“No shit?”

“Across the way.”

“Cameras were pretty much clear.”

“Pretty much?”

“Wild animals, we think?”

Carson frowned.

“Want to go and check?”

Carson studied the man.

“You can cuff me to the car, if you want.  Or anything here.”

“Why does she trust you?” Carson asked.

“Heavy question, all of a sudden.  I’ve wondered the same about you.  There’s an energy or rhythm you two have.”

“Turning the question back on me?”

“No.  Stating facts.  Putting it out there.”

Highland’s pride had stood out on first meeting, then had tempered, as each of them had settled into their roles within a working operation.  Now it felt like that pride was back up again.  The man looked very average, except for being more fit than most, dressed simply, jeans and a tee.

“I can explain, but I don’t want to delay.  If we’re in danger-?” Highland asked.  He’d made it a question.

“Solid chance.”

“You can keep a gun on me.  I’ll put mine aside.”

Carson nodded.

Max put his gun on the wheel of the car, then stepped away, going to the hatch.  Carson watched as he input the code, watched him climb down the ladder, and saw the man stand, leaning forward, hands against the wall.

Carson climbed down with one hand, two feet, and a gun trained on the man.

“I can’t peg your age,” Highland said.  “Were you paying attention when the first dominoes fell?”

“Twin dominoes?” Carson asked.

“Yeah.”

“I was a kid.  Didn’t pick up much.”

“Me either.  But my family made me watch, made me pay attention.  Towers, Pentagon, Superbowl, Actihal and Cheklem.”

“Yeah.  Kept on coming.”

“Didn’t stop, then the Mandate dropped, family had me convinced.  Went overseas, fought.”

He moved to the side so Carson could verify the cameras and check the coast was clear on the other side of the door.  Carson motioned, and he put in the numbers.

“Then the fighting kicked off at home.  They deployed military against our own citizens.  Me included.  Rumors started exploding, about government agencies creating special squads and units.  Picking out top soldiers.”

“You?” Carson asked.

“No.  Hah.  I’m not that good.  It was agencies watching other agencies.  Government creating guys to clean up messes, guys to watch those guys.  Everyone wanted a new last line of defense, covering others.  Which is how you get guys like the one who took a run at the president earlier this month, bypassing the secret service.”

“Yeah.  How do you fit into that?”

Highland sat at the couch and opened the laptop.  “When that started coming out, I lost faith.  They weren’t letting people quit, so I rebelled, got a dishonorable discharge.  Fined.  Did work on the side.  Hired gun, very careful, thorough guy who can do what you need done.  Billed myself as a private investigator for a while, but I wasn’t good at the investigation part.  Then someone thought my warning was a bluff, pushed it.  I shot him.”

Carson remained silent.

“How much of that did you already know?” Highland asked, looking over his shoulder.

“Most.”

Highland smiled.  “Losing faith, you stop caring.  I think I didn’t mind if I pushed things and took a bullet.”

“Been there.”

“I believe you.”

The laptop had finished waking up, and the feed now showed the trail cameras from above.

“Reaching for my phone,” Highland said.  “I took a note of the times.”

“Sure.  Slow.”

“We crossed paths.  Her and I.  She offered me a new life.  Asked for information, wanted to know me.  Asked me some personal questions.  I thought we had a similar way of looking at the world.  I was in a place, I was looking for an excuse, an answer.  If someone had realized I was in that place, found an in, and gave me a good enough reason and a good enough target?  I’d have given my life trying.  She realized, there was an in, and she didn’t use me to her advantage.”

“A connection?” Carson asked.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t like that.  It wasn’t the kind of answer he’d wanted.

Now he felt like he wanted Highland to give him an excuse to shoot.

“I don’t know if it was one way or not,” Highland said.  “It felt like we were similar.  We talked for longer than necessary, she helped me figure things out.  Sent me on my way.  Last thing I- second last thing I said to her, besides ‘bye’, was I owed her.  If she wanted me to stay by her side, I would.  She said no.”

“Yeah.”

“I still owe her.  I wish I knew why I wasn’t good enough.”

The time input, the video feed stopped on an image.

They were moving too fast to easily make out.  They were animals- wolves?  Dark ones?  Coyotes?

Highland, without being asked, moved through the video frame by frame.

It didn’t help to do more than give a suggestion of a shape.

“Overhead map?”

“Where’s that?”

“Directory, screens.  Anything from A to F.  Copy that and put it in a paint program.”

Highland did.

Carson put his gun away.

“You trust me now?”

“I believe you.  You were too similar.  That’s the easy answer.  Different skills, but if she needed someone who thinks like her, she’d rely on herself, instead,” Carson said.

“What’s the not-easy answer?”

“That she respects you and she didn’t respect me, and that gave me the chance to get closer.  Then she got used to me,” Carson lied.

Highland seemed to take that in, digesting it.

The man sighed, relaxing some.

Reading Highland, Carson knew there were two big possibilities, after a story like that.  That the man was jealous, and he’d be upset, more willing to act, or that something had been put to rest.

Highland was the latter, Carson decided.  The man had skills but he wasn’t subtle enough to pull off something like that.

With the paint program open and the image on the big television, Carson went from looking at the laptop screen with the security feeds, to moving his finger along the image on the television.  With a few false starts on placement, Highland drew out some triangles.

“That’s what the cameras can see,” Carson said.  And here…”

He touched a spot to the side of one triangle.  Highland drew an ‘x’.

“Was where I saw people.  Flashlight, briefly.  Dark shapes.”

“And our freeze frame…” Highland stopped, drawing out a dotted line.

Roughly right.

A group of people, on the trees, away from the trail cameras here.  Dark shapes had raced this way, then scattered, taking less direct routes back, crossing the view of the cameras.

“Dogs,” Highland said.

“He wanted access to our cameras, from the earlier job, not to watch through them in case his daughter passed, but for us to leave them up so he could study them.  He got some lead on us, found some way to know we were here, sent men out with dogs and a means of spotting the video cameras.  Even with careful placements.”

“There are tools,” Highland said.  “I’ve seen them in use.  You think the dogs spotted us?”

“No sound on those cameras.  You hear any barking when down here?”

“Nah, but you don’t hear anything from up there, when you’re down here.”

Carson’s heart rate was picking up, in a way it hadn’t, when he’d been in the house with Bolden and the target, or when he’d been close to an explosive, his hands slippery as he worked with the wire.

Maybe it was being down here.  He had a natural restlessness, and being trapped, in a bad situation, while also being underground, seemed to have an effect on his nerves.

“How the hell did he find this place?” Carson asked.

“I know one way to find out,” Highland replied.

“Yeah.”

Were the dogs here to track?  What smells were they tracking?  The three girls in the cells?

Valentina?

Carson armed himself.  Then he took over at the laptop.

Prisoners were secure.  Needs met- except for tonight’s shower.  That was Carson’s job, to schedule.  The usual plan was that he’d give them a heads up, drop the shutter in front of the camera that was safely on the side of plexiglass in the corner, and give them fifteen minutes each, one at a time.  He’d double check they were fed, that everything was secure, stay the night, and then feed them before trading shifts with Highland again.  Then he’d sleep through the rest of the morning, until noon.

Now this.

The reason he’d taken over at the laptop was that he needed to send a message to Mia.

Phone plugged in.  He loaded up a photo of a bar with a silly name, then typed up the message.  Letting her know they were compromised, that Davie was anticipating the cameras, now.

That things were bad.

Fuck.  Fuck fuck fuck.

How?

Why would Davie know about this place, but not be sending a small army to their home?

It felt like the same questions kept coming up.  First with Natalie Teale and Ben.  ‘Io’.  Then Davie.

Was the answer the same?  Could it be something stupid like maybe he or Mia were sleepwalking, going to the nearest computer, and giving people selective information.

Silly.

Could it be Valentina?

Dark thought, that.

But he put that question into the message and then let the program run.  The message was encoded into the image, hidden in pixels.  Metadata would be updated.  Mia could get it, then unpack it.

He sent it to her.

Highland left.  As he closed the door and went to the hatch, red lights went on above various doors.  Only one door could open at a time.  The override was complicated.

If Highland wanted to tie Carson up for ten minutes, he could leave the hatch open.

He didn’t.  The hatch closed.

Carson prepared himself, getting a rifle out of a locked cabinet, then stood, passing through the tunnel door, then the hatch.  He eased it shut, wary of dogs, now.

Other noise had drawn their attention.  Gunshots.

Highland was not Bolden, their survivalist who hunted people in the woods with a bow or with a crossbow.  Highland found an opening and took it, flanking the group they’d marked on the map with an ‘x’.

More gunshots- a flurry.  Dogs barked.  One howled.

Carson, setting up in the window, waited.

All the commotion drew others running.  They stopped caring as much about the trail cameras, but some took longer routes, dipping into the woods where the camera’s view was best.

They know.  They’re finding out too much.

Highland was still shooting.  He ran into a fresh group, and the gunshots took on a different tone.

Carson moved slowly, leveling the rifle with the barrel pointed out the window.

Dark woods, dark transformer towers, now without transformers or wires between them.  A dark, overcast sky, dark gray over black trees and field.

Dark shapes, moving against that backdrop.  Carson had a clear shot, but decided to wait.

Because the moment he shot, he became a target.

Highland, moving through the edge of the woods, made no mistakes that Carson could see.  Gave no clear opportunity to aim a gun at him and get lucky with the way the bullet traveled.

Carson settled in, watching through the scope as Highland worked.  The dogs ran from the violence, reached another group of Cavalcanti soldiers, and hid behind the group.  Even from a distance, Carson could see floppy ears move back and forth, wrinkled foreheads and expressions changing, heads tilting, as they struggled to make sense of what was happening.  Around them, more men converged on Highland’s point.

He doesn’t even think he’s that good?  That there are people out there so much better than him that he laughs?

Maybe it was a weird thing to focus on, when it was all crumbling around them.  Davie knew too much, and they didn’t know how he knew.

Carson waited until they were settling into their positions before he picked his first target, aimed the bolt-action rifle, and fired.

He wasn’t a sniper.  But he’d fired rifles before, and he had plenty of friends whose good time was a visit to the range.

He aimed for groups first.  Where a stray would hit someone else.

How did he get us?

We’re going to have to move the prisoners, Carson thought.  And that gets a thousand times harder when we don’t have the security of this bunker and the three rooms.  Captives are a special sort of hell to manage.

Exhale.  Squeeze.

Fire.

They were wholly focused on Max Highland, and left flanks exposed.  Carson shot, reloaded, then shot again, over and over, picking out the best targets he could.

At this distance, with his aim, in this lighting, with erratic targets and some tree cover, he didn’t hit reliably.  But three different men dropped to the ground, and unless it was coincidence, it was Carson’s bullets that had dropped them.

More than anything, it gave Highland more space to do what he did best: damage.  No fuss, no muss, no complications- one minor suspicion they’d cleared up already.  A reliable gun.

Answering fire came, in the direction of the house so Carson pulled back, taking cover behind the car.

He changed locations, then fired- one shot at the nearest target.  He didn’t even wait or stop to see if he’d hit his target.

New location again.

His phone was buzzing, and he took the moment to check it, just in case.  He caught one word before a bullet pinged off a piece of metal above him and made him flinch.

He put the phone away.

Satellites.

Theory?  Fact?  Or the only reasonable conclusion?

He’d joked about it once, he didn’t remember when, but it had come up.  She’d said that good satellite was the realm of government, military, and big corporations.  Did the possibility there was now some connection mean Davie Cavalcanti made more sense?  Or did he make less?  How high and how far was this man reaching?  How had he done this?

Carson’s thoughts on the subject were cut off by several men with assault rifles unloading on the abandoned building from multiple directions.

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The sound of gunfire had stirred the protest- Carson could see between houses to where some people had gathered at one end of the neighborhood, where there was bottled water and supplies, and where they were now backing off.  It had also drawn some Cavalcantis from a nearby house.

Having already slipped minutes ago, Carson was aware of the danger as he tilted forward into a run with a man held across his shoulders- enough that a long stride and leg power was the only thing that kept him from falling on his face with a man’s weight on top of him.

Staying, though, meant too much risk of being shot.  If they walked into that front hall and then saw their family member, saw the blood trail leading to the back door- they’d arrive there and then there was little but open backyard with only a few pieces of furniture and a slightly raised stone patio between them and Carson.

He couldn’t glance back without turning his whole body, but he could remember where some things were.  He shifted his route slightly, so that bit of stone wall might buy him a bit of cover.

They approached the treeline.

“Slow down!” Bolden barked.

Carson wasn’t sure he could.  Being so top-heavy, the ground wet from sprinklers, the grass sloping slightly toward the trees, it could just as easily go the other way.  Feet going forward, head going back.  He’d be slamming Bolden’s back onto the grass.

“Slow!” Bolden barked, as they got closer.

Couldn’t run through trees with Bolden like this.  The man wasn’t big, or even that heavy, but two injured legs sticking out at one side, head at the other, he’d hit a tree.

So he went low.  The slope meant some runoff had collected here.  The dirt at the base of the trees wasn’t far off from being mud.  Dropping to a kneeling crouch, Carson slid a bit, below low branches.  He shifted Bolden to a sitting position near a tree, then adjusted him, so the man’s back was to a tree, and there was no clear view from the house.

“That little maneuver of yours just dug a muddy trench in the dirt,” Bolden said.  “They’ll see that.”

“Right.  For right now, let’s look at your legs.”

“What good is that if we’re dead in five minutes?” the man growled.  Then, relenting, he said, “Tourniquets in my cargo pocket.  Here-”

Carson was already reaching for a pocket, but Bolden practically slapped his hand away.  He seemed to want to do it himself, but there were two legs… he let Carson take one.

They were professional tourniquets.  Bolden applied it up high, near the crotch, then grimaced as he tightened it.  Carson followed suit.  He’d helped apply an improvised tourniquet before, after an accident while tree planting, but it had been lower down, close to the wound.

Then again, he remembered the paramedics with the helicopter hadn’t been impressed.

There was a distant sound of gunshots.

Carson chanced a look around the trees.  Some Cavalcantis were in the backyard.

“That’s our soldier friend,” Carson said.

“Mmm,” Bolden grunted.  “Shooting or being shot?”

The men started running around the house, toward the front yard.

“Shooting.  To distract and pull them back.”

“Good,” Bolden grunted.  He gave his a final twist.  The tourniquets could lock into the strapping, to stay secure.  Carson started to do it, only for Bolden to do another twist.  “Until the bleeding stops.”

“Right.”

“Why were you calling for us to leave him?”

“Our friend on the phone said to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.  I’m going to need to carry you out.”

“Keep my legs lower, if you can.  You left them a nice trail to follow.  Don’t even have to be a tracker to see that.”

“Is it too obvious?”

“Hm?”

Carson reached for his bag, opened it, and got out a grenade.  “Could rig something.  But if there’s a chance police come through-”

“No.”

“No?

“Shouldn’t.  Groups like this?  They’ll want to handle it in-house.”

“I know they want to, but they won’t always get what they want.”

“Police are striking everywhere anyway.  Only real law is law you buy for yourself, if you’re rich.  Got wire?”

“Fishing line.”

“I have wire.  Keep an eye out.”

Carson was surprised a guy with two gunshot wounds was holding it together enough to work with wire without his hands trembling too much, but Bolden was that type, maybe.  The guy wiped blood off his hands and onto his shirt, then began tying the wire around the tree he was slumped against.  “Tie the other end.  Tight.”

“Tight?  We’re not tying it to the pin?”

“Tight.  And watch our backs.”

Carson moved, ducking low, and glanced out toward the yard.

Two of the men who’d come over were lingering, not going toward the gunshots.  One was not all that far away.

Close enough he saw the mud?

“Now tie this.  Those trees.”

Carson could see the logic.  He glanced back again.  “We’ve one incoming.”

Bolden snarled, making a face as he grabbed for his crossbow, reached deep into a cargo pocket- it looked like he’d cut out the interior of the pocket and was reaching through to his leg, where he’d strapped something there.  He pulled out a bolt, and locked it into place.  “Get that tied.”

Carson did.

Bolden’s voice was low, quiet, and dangerous, pitched so only Carson should hear.  “And be ready.  Once he drops, they’ll notice.  I’ll hold my shot until it looks like he’ll call for help.”

Man, wire was not cooperative.  It had a shape it wanted to hold, and it was slippery.  Even finding the end he wanted to pull out without pulling it through the coil and tangling it was a pain.

Bolden shot.  The mechanism of the crossbow made a mechanical clapping sound, which echoed through the trees, with the much more muted sound of the impact a second later.

The distant protest, two broad blocks of rich suburb away, was audible in the background.

“Fuck,” Bolden grunted.  “Aim’s shit.”

Carson found the thread, got down on his belly, and used teeth to hold the now-muddy string while he worked with it.  He glanced over.

The man who’d been approaching the treeline had dropped.

Carson used his hands to grab the end of the wire, and began tying it around the little tree.  “You hit him.”

“Was aiming for the upper body.  Hit him in the lower gut.  I’m shot, best crossbowman in the world would have shaky hands, eyes not that focused,” Bolden said, words terse, almost talking through grit teeth.  He used a hand to help move one leg where he wanted it, anguish momentarily crossing his face.  He then reached into that pocket and pulled out another bolt.  “I don’t have a twenty minute standoff in me, kid.”

“Yeah.  Do you want me to?”

“Get that shit tied.”

The man who’d been shot hadn’t screamed, but he was finding his lungs.  He groaned, and the groan transitioned into a shout, then a word.  “Aaa-Elm!  Elm!”

‘Elm’ was apparently the other guy out there in the backyard.  He hadn’t approached, even after hearing the sound, but having his name called drew him closer.  He crouched, though there was no cover.

He and the wounded man talked.

It was a weird reflection of Carson and Bolden.  Two men, one crouched down, one injured, with the treeline being the ‘mirror’ that marked them.

They had traps, those guys had friends.

“Don’t let them call for help.”

“Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” Bolden growled.

But he shot.

The man crumpled, crossbow bolt in his armpit, extending into his chest.  He’d been bent over his friend, and so he fell on top of the man.

Around that same time, there were three distant gunshots.

One gunshot answered, from a distant location.

Thank you, Highland.

“Tie it and get us gone.”

His hands shook as he tried to thread the wire, which had a natural curl to it, through the very large loop of the grenade.  Nerves on the one side, with the recent exertion, the situation being fucked, and nerves on the other side, with the explosive about a foot from his face.

Nerves also from those guys out there, and the idea the situation could get worse, fast, if someone spotted them.

Carson’s eyes went out to that situation out there.  One man collapsed on top of the other, struggling to breathe, all eyes turned elsewhere- the rest of that group was in the front yard, too far away to have heard the strangled shout.

“I’m going to grab them,” Carson said.

“Thought about it,” Bolden said.  “Tricky.  If it was me?  I’d run.”

“We’ll run, but it’s better if we bait this hook.”

“Is it tied?”

“No.”

“Move me.”

Carson did, dragging a groaning Bolden over until he was lying by the setup with the grenade.

“Careful,” Bolden grunted.  “They’re not dead.”

Carson hurried forward, head ducked low, smoke mask on.

‘Elm’ being on top of the first victim limited his ability to draw his weapon, and the way he slumped into the bolt that was sticking out of his gut seemed to be causing some excruciating pain, but it didn’t stop his ability to draw.  Carson took a route that kept Elm’s body between himself and the first victim, blocking view and any easy shooting.  Stepping over, he stepped onto the man’s wrist.

Knife in hand, Carson didn’t grab for the weapon.  He bent down, kneeling on top of Elm, stabbed the man’s wrist, and then dragged the blade up wrist toward palm, driving it in and twisting until the gun dropped out of it.

Then, quickly, he stuck that same knife into the side of Elm’s neck, and thrust it into an off-center place in the first man’s.

Elm tried reaching for Carson to stop him, but he was lying on top of one arm, and the movements of the other arm were loose and awkward, without strength, limited by the bolt sticking out of his armpit.  He made wheezing sounds, and blood formed bubbles whenever there was a gap between bolt and wound.

Straight into a lung, by the looks of it.

He dragged the two men across slick grass by the backs of their shirt collars. It pulled on the arrow wound at the armpit, producing more of those frothing bubbles, and gasps.  The other fought more, but with a lack of strength to it.  One hand was blood slick, the other- every time he reached over his head to grab at Carson’s hand at his collar, he made strangled, pained sounds.  Then he’d decide he needed to plug the hole at the side of his neck.

By the time Carson had dragged them into the trees, he was fading.

He then reached into his jacket.

Carson dropped the one, and used his free hand to react, not groping for that hand, that was a full lunging step and reaching arm’s distance away, but for shoulder.

The man was already being pulled at an angle.  By gripping shoulder, he could flip him onto stomach, so he was being dragged along his front- with a crossbow bolt sticking out of his gut.

The man made a pained retching sound, and then farted.

Not a fart.  He’d shit himself.  With feeble movements, the man tried to correct himself so he wasn’t being dragged along his wound.  When he flipped over, the bolt was gone, apparently dragged out of him around the time he’d shit himself, and the wound was emptying out blood mixed with the foulest-smelling brown into his shirt and the mud around him.

Carson finished dragging him around a tree, then deposited him there.  He got the other guy.

He relived the one Cavalcanti soldier of his weapon.  The other had been drawn and dropped when the knife had impaled his hand.

His back hurting and abdomen cramping from dragging weight while bent over, he stood straight, stepped back, and surveyed the scene.

Gap in the trees with drag marks through the drying mud, a shock of crimson in that mud.  Then, a few paces down, wire between two trees, tied tight, to trip.

Someone falling would fall right across the other tripline, pulling the pin.  How long would he take to get up?

It wouldn’t, Carson estimated, be longer than it took the grenade to go off.

Two bodies left behind.  The one guy had reached into his jacket pocket, and the thing had fallen out- a slim wallet, not a weapon.

Carson grabbed it and pocketed it.

“Are you finishing me off?” Bolden asked.

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m useless to you, and you’re apparently someone okay with killing.  I’m better bait than they are.”

“Are you trying to convince me?” Carson asked, mildly surprised.

“I’m nn-” Bolden paused.  “No.  Fucking tired, unfocused.”

“You lost a lot of blood between here and there.  I’m surprised you’re this together.  But that’s why we want you.”

“Hah.”

It was the closest thing to good humor Carson had seen out of Bolden.  A single utterance, without a matching expression.

“Come on, now.  My friend on the phone would be upset, and our soldier buddy would be suspicious.  This works if we all help each other.”

“Yeah,” Bolden said.

“Come on,” Carson said.  “Before they give chase.  Help me help you.  Were you going to pull some trick and kill me if I hadn’t been convincing?”

“Nah.  Not together enough for that,” Bolden said.  He pawed at Carson to get into a good position, groaning at the pain in his legs.  The stick from the tourniquet jabbed Carson’s shoulder.

Carson grunted as he got Bolden into position across his shoulders.  “Fucking workout.  Dragging men around like this.”

“I always left ’em dead.  Leave ’em to the woods.  This shit’s harder.”

“Yeah?  Well, you did your job.  You’ve got some scarily good aim, Bolden.  Three shots with that crossbow, three hits.”

“Bolden.  Nobody calls me that.  I don’t use it.  I don’t ever see anyone.  I have to look up the spelling when I order shit to the mailbox at the end of my driveway.  All I do is shoot shit, extend my little cabin, repair shit, grow shit, shoot more shit, dry masturbate in the woods, shoot more-”

“Don’t tell me you’re a chronic masturbator when your dick’s a foot from my face, Spence Bolden,” Carson said.

The man laughed, and then laughed harder, enough it was hard to carry him.

Carson smiled.

It wasn’t easy, weaving through the trees, picking a path that didn’t smash Bolden’s face into a tree trunk.

“Gotta get you set up again, Bolden.  What did we do last time?  Bought the property, while your name was toast?  Got you your things, your favorite weapons, tools, things they’d be keeping an eye on?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you’ve learned enough to know what sort of place you want.  One with a view?  One by the water?”

“Yeah, an’ my parents sent my ol’ dog away to live with my cousin, where he lived another twenty years on a sunny farm for his ol’ bones.  Like that, right?”

“Not killing you, Bolden.  We’ll get you set up.”

“My parents told that story to my little brother.  Didn’t tell it to me.  They gave me looks.  They thought I killed the dog.  They thought I was that kind of boy, who would.  Maybe they thought it so hard they made it true.”

“You have a brother?  I know you don’t stay in touch, but-”

“Dead.  Drink.  All of them dead.  All I had was the place.”

“Then you had another.”

“It ain’t right.”

“Well, like I said, there are options, if you want to move, upgrade.”

“Shack in the woods in a place I won’t drown or freeze to death is fine, if I have tools.  Gout medicine.  Pain medicine.”

“That’s doable, but don’t you want to set the bar higher?  Woman?”

“Hah!”

“If you’ve got funds, we could arrange something.  If our friend on the phone trusts someone, I’ll trust them.  A pretty lady who’ll come say hi, once every few weeks, once a month?  Our friend on the phone can do some digging, make sure she’s not trafficked, doing it of her own free will.”

“Wouldn’t want- wouldn’t feel right,” Bolden muttered.  “My dad- he chewed tobacco.  Shit stank.  Got everywhere.  The spit, the brown stains around his mouth, teeth, tongue.”

“You smell like you smoke.”

“Yeah.  As a treat.  This was different.  Chewing it?  Different.  Made his mouth a sewer.  I feel like all of me’s that sewer.  Every inch, gross, scarred, cooked by the heat and blasted by the cold, brined in piss and cum, left unwashed for long stretches sometimes.  Stains you.  Wouldn’t- I don’t want that.  Price I’d have to pay to feel like I made dealing with me worth it… can’t afford.”

There was a sharp crack, like Carson had stepped on a branch, but behind him.

The way the echo of that crack sounded marked it as something distant and pronounced.

“You think you got one?  Or did one of the two we left on the ground see it and pull it to save the next guy?”

“Who knows?” Carson asked.

“Think they’ll catch up?”

“They might not want to try,” Carson remarked.

His back was hurting.  More from the earlier exertion than from this.  Turning sideways to carry Bolden through trees was making it worse.

“Hate this,” Bolden muttered.  “Being an invalid.  What the fuck do I do now?”

“I hear you.  But we’ll get you sorted.  What about a dog?”

“A dog?”

“While you’re out on your own.  Loyal companion?”

“Dog.  Chickens.”

“Yeah?  Chickens?”

“Hobbling around like I am, wouldn’t mind the regular food source.  Chickens.”

“That’s a good idea.  Their shit smells, though.”

“You’ve raised ’em?”

“I’ve done a lot of things.”

“The ease with which you kill, I’m not surprised.  Is that born, or learned?”

“That’s a fuzzy as hell line, and I think you know it,” Carson told Bolden.

The reply was a grunt in the affirmative.

⯁

Years Ago

Carson pulled into the parking lot, already moving at a crawl, and stopped, a bit late.  His eyes were on his destination.  It was an apartment building, six or so stories tall, and not a cheap building either.  The windows were tinted, mirrored panels, and the little Carson could see of the apartments inside made it look like they were spacious and modern.

The top floor of the building was on fire.  Lights were on.  Yet nobody evacuated.

Carson checked the address, then grabbed his bags.  Then he armed himself, sitting on the edge of his seat so most of his body was out of sight as he shrugged off his winter jacket, pulled on a holster that crossed his upper body, and then got his gun out of his glove compartment.  He checked it before holstering it and pulling the jacket on.

It was strange, seeing a fire this… dramatic, he supposed, and not hearing the blare of sirens.  Nobody did anything.  The rest of the city wasn’t responding or reacting.

The front doors were glass and swung open.  The inside was heated- not by fire, but by vents.  A marble pedestal had buttons for calling up to the people above.  It was glass walls all around, except for one broad column where the elevator went up, paneled in black, and a broad column for stairs, paneled in black… then exit doors opposite the doors Carson had come in, with a tunnel leading to a parking garage.

The buttons above the elevator were flashing red.  The stairwell-

Carson grazed the metal door with his fingers.  Welded?

He could hear screams, and crying.  Muted.

He saw the figures lying there, outside, with the thick glass of the walls of the ground floor serving to cut the sound down.  Exiting the building and circling around, he saw them more clearly – a woman lying on the ground, screaming.  Her leg had clearly been broken.  A heavyset man was crouched beside her.  Off to the side, a baby lay on the sidewalk, which still had traces of snow at the edges, swaddled, wailing.

Triangular shards on the ground reflected the light from the fire above.  They weren’t ice.  He looked up, around-

A second floor window.  Which might as well have been a third floor window, because the ground floor had a spacious lobby with such high ceilings.  They’d shattered it and jumped out.  Maybe in panic, or they’d thought the fall wasn’t that big a deal.

“Why do I break my leg?” the woman asked.  “I exercise!  You’re the fatass!”

“You’ve been pregnant five times.  Bone density.  I told you we should throw down mattresses and cushions.  But you said we needed to jump now.”

The baby screamed.

The man still wasn’t helping.

“What the hell is going on?” Carson asked.

“Fuck.  People are showing up.  Come on.”

The woman screeched as she got upright.  The man, putting her arm around his shoulder and holding her, supported her, as she limped alongside.

Walking away.

“Hello?” Carson asked.

“Fuck off!”

“You left your… baby?”

“Fuck you!”

“We could bring him,” the mom said.

“We’re not fucking bringing him.  He’s not mine.  Doesn’t look like mine.”

“He is yours, he’s so yours, really.  I swear, I promise.”

“Fuck off with that.”

“You know I love you.  I’m loyal to you.  I haven’t been with anyone else…”

Carson blinked a few times.

He watched as they walked away.  The woman didn’t slow down, struggle, or mention the baby, her focus on professing her love and loyalty, and then something about money.  The father just seemed angry, and maybe scared.

Carson bent down, picking up the child, and then looked up at the burning building.  Not that many floors, but the way the apartments were, the ceilings were high, so it looked taller.

He opened his jacket and held the baby close to warm it.  “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Yeah.”

It was a woman’s voice.  Carson looked up, searching, and saw a man standing in one of the four plots of trees that bordered the edge of the property.  Heavy jacket, hood up, sunglasses, scarf.  Gun.

No, a woman.

“Are you with them?”

“I am not,” Carson said.  He jiggled the baby a bit, moving his jacket to help cover it more.  It was cold from the sidewalk.

“Gentle movements, when you’re reaching for your coat like that.

“Right.  Sorry.”

“You are?”

“Delivery.”

“I didn’t see food.”

“Pot.”

“Show me?”

“Can I open my bag?”

The gun flicked.  Gesturing.

Carson had to work to extricate himself from his backpack, while still holding the baby.  One arm, one shrug and shake, shift, with the awkwardness of a heavy bag hanging off his elbow.

Then, sitting on his ankles, baby on his lap, he unzipped the bag with slow care.  He reached inside and retrieved the parcel.  A block of weed, wrapped in plastic.

“There’s two more.”

“You’re armed.  I see a holster.”

“It’s stupid, when it’s only pot, but this is a lot.”

“Makes sense,” she said.  “Shift position?  Get a better grip on that baby?  Don’t go anywhere or make any fast moves.  I’m not a danger to you.”

“Can I put this back in the bag?”

“Secure the baby, then yes.  Move carefully.”

He put everything back, then put his arms through the straps one by one.  He looked up at the woman.  “You said this makes sense, but… what?  Did you set the fire and weld those doors?”

“They started the fire.  I didn’t expect that.  I was waiting for someone to come.  Police.  Fire department.”

“Police are striking.  Fire departments are undermanned and doing triage.  Whatever gets them to the most locations fastest,” Carson explained.  “Place like this, where the fire won’t spread?  They won’t bother.”

“Oh.”

Windows on the upper floor broke- not because of people, but because of heat, fire, expanding metal.

The shards rained down around them.  Carson backed up a bit.

“Don’t go anywhere.  I’m leaving with that child.”

“Are you?”

“I’ll pay you for the weed, you show me your wallet, so I know who you are, and if you say anything about this, I’ll find you and kill you.”

“Not convinced.  I want to know what happened here.  It’s interesting.”

“I can give you money.  Answers… you might tell people who then come find me.  No.  You’ve already seen so much, I’m very tempted to shoot you.”

“Are you a good enough shot that you know you won’t hit this kid?” he asked.

He backed away a step.

“Stay right there.”

He smiled a bit, and backed away another step.

She fired.  Aiming high.

The baby wailed in surprise, then alarm.

“Shhh,” he reassured it.

“I’ll pay you,” she said again.

“People are going to ask questions.  This was supposed to be a huge sale.  Then it turns out the buyers are dead?”

“What will it take?” she asked.

He took a step back.

“Don’t-“

Her voice cracked with sudden emotion.

She lowered the gun, raised an empty hand, reaching with fingertips slightly curled.  Almost a ‘stop’ gesture, almost clawing at empty air.

Somehow that sound in her voice and that gesture were more compelling than any offer of money so far.

“I don’t know what I have to offer you.  I can offer services… but if I told you, that would be telling you things you could tell others.”

“I’m good at keeping secrets.”

“Not good enough for my standards,” she said, voice soft.

“Do you know him?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Huh.”

“I could kill someone for you,” she said.

“I could kill someone for me.  I don’t think I’d care all that much if I went to prison, the way I’m wired.  Besides, I don’t want anyone dead.”

“Weapons?” she offered.  “Drugs.  Something you could take back to your employer.”

“Wouldn’t that be funny?” he asked, smiling.  “I go to drop off a parcel, come back with extra?”

He couldn’t see her face, but the look in her eyes- she was doing the opposite of smiling.

“I’m not all that, but you could have me,” she said.  “Do anything you want to my body.  One night.  No permanent marks or damage, please.”

He stared at her.

Maybe emboldened by the fact he wasn’t turning her down, she said, “It’s really fine.  It’s not something that matters to me, emotionally.  In exchange, I take him, and you promise me your secrecy.  I’d need a look at your wallet, or some collateral, to know what to do, if it comes out you talked.”

“A little extreme.”

She carried on, “You’ll find out enough about this later, not all of it, but enough to satisfy your curiosity.”

“Then tell me now?”

She looked frustrated.  She turned her head a bit, then looked back to him.

“On the top two floors, they’re the kind of people who have their computers set up with homemade thermite charges.  If something goes awry, they melt the hard drives.  Fourth floor, they film.”

“Kids?” he asked.

“No.  Not usually.  Not like you’re thinking.  Killings on camera.  They found each other, they live together upstairs.  Lower floors are mostly empty, but there are some.”

The woman gestured toward the couple who’d just left.

“Lower floors what?”

“She’s had five kids.  Now she has one.  Her rent’s covered, she’s had big deposits over the years.  Heavy drug use on the mother’s part, money’s running out, the man you saw is convincing himself he’s not the father of that baby there.”

“So it’s easier to sell him upstairs?”

“They wouldn’t buy him.  They prefer adults.  The first three, they waited until each kid was eighteen.  Send them upstairs.  Tell the other kids they ran away or moved out.  Fourth, they got impatient.  Or he got suspicious.  He was sixteen.  I thought I’d trap them, weld the doors to the stairwell, bottom three floors, stop the elevator, notify authorities.”

“But no authorities.”

She shook her head.  “It’s all gone wrong.  You’ve seen me, they’ve seen me.  No sirens, no response.”

Carson turned, walking away.

“Hey!”

He took the stairs double-time, carrying the baby like a football, swaddled and inside his coat.  He drew his weapon, eyes scanning the surroundings.

“Hey!  Stop!  We were negotiating!”

The couple was still limping away, two flights of stairs down the sloped hill that led into downtown.  They were more illuminated by the fire of the building behind them all than by any streetlights or anything nearby.

“I will shoot!”

He reached them, and the man, glancing back because of the woman’s shouted threat, glanced back and saw Carson instead- not that he could do a lot about it.

Carson kicked.

Entangled like they were, the boyfriend and the girlfriend fell down the stone stairs hard.

The woman hit her head on the way down, letting out half a shriek.  The man tumbled awkwardly.

Carson checked the coast was clear- there was a dimly lit path extending in either direction from the midpoint of the extended set of stairs.  Then he pushed barrel to flesh and shot the man.

He did the same for the woman.

He paused like that, taking it in.

He expected to feel more, in moments like this.  Wasn’t he meant to care?  Feel vindicated?  Feel angry?  Sad?

His childhood had sucked, but not so much that it should break him like this, right?  It shouldn’t leave him lacking in some general human things that everyone else seemed to have?  People had been mediocre at best, some had been shitty, so he’d stopped caring about people. He only paid attention to the interesting parts.

When he turned around, he saw her at the top of the stairs.  Backed by flames and mirrored glass.

She backed up a bit as he came back up the stairs, putting his gun away.

“I need him,” she said.  “And I need to go.  In case someone heard.”

“Is the offer still open?”

Momentary confusion.  Then she met his eyes.

“Yes,” she replied.  “But we have to go.”

“I’m parked over there.  I’ll follow you,” he said.

“I’m parked further away.  I’ll need you to drop me off.  I’ll sit in the back seat.”

“Not with that gun.”

“I’ll get rid of mine if you get rid of yours?” she asked.

“I’ll put it in my glove compartment.  You can watch me.  Not easy to get at.”

She nodded.  “Don’t peel away.”

He led her to his car, put the gun away, then watched as she put her gun beneath a nearby trash can, simultaneous with him closing the door of the glove compartment and sitting back.

It really wasn’t the best policy, on her part.  If he’d decided to pop his glove compartment open and shoot- and he had demonstrated he’d shoot without flinching, then she wouldn’t be able to get at her gun nearly as fast.

Her eyes were on the baby he held.

But he didn’t go for the gun, and she didn’t pay for her bad policy there.  She climbed into the back seat, he dropped her off by her vehicle, and then she led the way.  To a pharmacy, first.  They negotiated.  He kept both sets of car keys while she carried the baby in.  She got diapers, formula, contraceptives.  Then she reluctantly gave the child back to him, in exchange for the keys.  She led him to a hotel.

Was it the sexiest thing ever, that she changed a shitty diaper and fed the baby first?  No.  But the sex wasn’t the point, really.  It made sense, taking care of the baby.  Sex didn’t drive him like it drove some- it was interesting, it felt good, but what he wanted out of this wasn’t physical.  The thing he liked about people was deciphering them.  Turning them into assets.  Leveraging that.  Maintaining that.  Could he find a comfortable life that suited his wanderlust and restlessness, by keeping plates spinning?

He wanted to decipher her.  Seeing how she prioritized and acted, thinking back to that half ‘stop’, half clawing gesture, the emotion in her voice- tying that to this?  It pulled him in.

When she took off her clothes, he wondered if he’d been conned.  She had virtually no body fat, to the point that it was unusual for a woman, and she was muscular.  If she’d wanted to tear him apart… he wasn’t positive he’d be able to stop her.

But she didn’t.  A reversal of the gun thing, when he went to her.  Where she technically had the advantage, and he let her.

A surreal moment, the baby occasionally whimpering and stirring in his sleep, lying in the center of the second bed in the hotel room.  The window at the end of the room giving them a view as the building halfway up the hills burned down and nobody saved it or the people inside.

He almost reached the point where he thought that he’d lost out in this transaction.  She was so closed off that there was no deciphering to be had, except to see her unusual physique, and more of her face.

Until she started to cry.  He stopped- and she moved to continue, shaking her head.

Walls let down.  Defenses lowered.  There was something in her eyes-

Sadness?  Loneliness?  Need?

Rekindling his interest all over again.

That was the point he started making love to her, instead.  Instead of the meat-to-meat process of doing what worked for ninety percent of encounters, he saw her, started being tender with her, while searching with lips, tongues and hands for things that she responded to, that he could put to use tomorrow.  Or further down the line.

Then, halfway through a second go, she fell asleep.  He had to suppress laughs, rolling onto his side.

In the morning, he was already awake and sitting on the other bed when she stirred.  She jerked.  “The baby.”

“Sleeping.”

“He didn’t cry?  I normally-”

“He’s been okay.  Whimpered, started to act up, I sorted things  out.  Changed him a few times.  He shits like you wouldn’t believe.  I gave him some formula, burped him, he conked right out, again.”

She still looked tense, like there had to be some step he’d missed.

“You sleep like the dead,” Carson remarked.

“It’s been a long week,” she said.  She leaned back a bit, head touching pillow.  She rubbed at her eyes.  “I haven’t slept.  I shouldn’t have- I cried, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“It really doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said.  “This.  It was fatigue.”

“Okay,” he replied.  He smiled at her.  “Soothes my ego a bit, weirdly.  You fell asleep on me.”

Her smile was a partial one.  She was tense like he was holding the baby hostage, still.

There was a long silence.  He didn’t mind it.

She watched the baby, lying beside Carson, who kept a sheet draped over himself.  Carson watched her, one hand on the kid, a tiny hand gripping his finger.

The woman in the next bed didn’t take her eyes off the baby when she said, “Someone hired me to hold her daughter for a bit, then escort her to a destination.  Acrimonious divorce.  Her husband worked construction, which the local mob was getting involved with.  She wanted out, she said.”

“Yeah?”

“Details didn’t add up.  Stepkid, but she avoided saying that… okay, not too weird.  I asked her about allergies, medical needs, schooling, and she didn’t know.  Got the age of her daughter wrong.  The facts of the divorce, her husband… the more I found out, the more I dug.  I got her emails.  She was going to sell her stepdaughter to the people upstairs- that was the destination.  To hurt her ex-husband, sheer spite.  I investigated.  Uncovered that.  Checked everyone who lived inside, watched for a bit, then picked a good time.  Or what I thought was a good time.  I was partway through jamming and spot-welding the doors when someone realized something was wrong and alerted upstairs.  I didn’t anticipate the thermite or the fire, that they’d do something that extreme without securing their escape route, first.”

Carson stroked the sleeping baby’s head.

“I’m glad he got out,” she said.  “The daughter is back with her dad.  I don’t think he wanted the mob ties.  Just a nature of how things are going, that you couldn’t do business there, without some involvement.  But I almost gave her to those people.”

Her eyes went to the window.  Carson looked too.  The building was a husk.

She continued, “I had to do something, to… compensate.  Something hard, to make myself pay more attention next time.  Except the thermite… I should have imagined they had something ready.”

“Seems like a way to drive yourself crazy.  If the mistake from the thermite pushes you to do something else that’s hard, and you make mistakes there…”

“I’m crazy like that, I guess.  The way to break the downward cycle is to never make mistakes,” she murmured.  She sat up in bed, back to the headboard, moving the sheet. “That, all of that, it’s not my skillset.”

“There’s no need to defend yourself to me,” Carson said.

She paused, looking frustrated.

He wasn’t sure how to respond to that frustration.  He was usually pretty good, even with awkward or odd people.  It didn’t feel like it was pride, on her part.

“I’d like to take him.  Make sure he’s looked after.  Can we wrap this up?” she asked.

“We could,” Carson said.  “But he’s been looked after.”

He went from the second bed to the first, to her.

She hesitated, then moved the sheet aside to let him under.  Then moved it back, to hide what came next from the baby’s eyes.  Not that it mattered, the kid was fed and dozing.

“Twenty minutes.  Then I need to check for myself, that he’s okay.  And I need to get more supplies.  Clothes.  Things.  He’s not my only responsibility.  We can part ways,” she said.

For twenty minutes, he used the little things he’d found out about her and how she responded last night, and then searched out more- for the next time, for future nights.

He wasn’t ready to part ways.

⯁

Present

He touched her cheek, then her neck.

“Our angel of death says Spence is doing well,” Mia told him.  Distracting from the real subject.  “Good tourniquet, apparently?”

“His work, not mine.  But I know for next time.”

“He should recover fine.  She’s also treating his gout.  But she says the way it breaks down, it’ll be agonizing.  She’ll help him through it.  Five to eight weeks, she thinks, for the gout and gunshot wounds.”

“Good,” Carson said. His fingers found the tension in her muscle.

The ‘angel of death’ was a back-alley doctor who’d sold services, primarily abortion and euthanasia.  A good doctor, still.  She’d harvested stem cells and organs to sell when she could, with the plan of training others, improving her tools and resources to get better harvests, and setting up something bigger, business-wise, but one of the businesses she’d sold organs to had been investigated, and then people had found her.  She’d found Mia, through friends of family of patients.

“What happened?” Carson asked.  “You asked us not to kill him.  Was it not him?”

“It was him,” Mia said.  “Still our target.”

“You know I would’ve kept him alive if it was possible.  But he came at us with an assault rifle.”

“Yeah.  No, I understand,” Mia said.  She sighed.  Her hand went up to his, squeezing it, then moving it, so she could spin in her chair.  “Davie Cavalcanti is laying low.  He has guards.”

“Not too surprising.”

“No.  It’s not.  The Kitchen is out in force, since the kidnappings.  People are upset.  They’re searching, pressuring.  Regularly checking the trail cameras.  Still asking us to work.  But when I traced that call… it went here.”

She showed him a map.  It was of the city.  Two overlapping circles put the district of Frideswide in the overlap.  “Fridgewide” to some locals.

“It’s not clicking for me.”

“It’s Nicholas Cavalcanti.  He’s the person who changed things up, gave us the new person to send away.  Communicated with us.  No drones, because he doesn’t know about those.  That’s why the job was easy.  We kidnapped the three teenagers, set the family against each other, with Davie Cavalcanti highlighted with something weird going on there.”

“Yeah.”

Mia sighed.  “I’m pretty sure that Davie volunteered to step down.  Said he’d do nothing, he’d be under watch, he’d let them take over his end of the business, go completely hands off. ”

“And… with the activity earlier tonight, multiple of Nicholas’s lieutenants and soldiers dead, it looks a lot less like Davie is behind it.”

“They’ve already let him go and resumed business.  He’s flying drones again.”

“That fast?” Carson asked.  “It’d be easy to volunteer to stand down, then have things set up to continue.  Maybe he was told to stand down.  Then when no phone calls came and business continued as usual… especially with the unusual choice of weapon?”

“Yeah,” Mia replied.  “Sounds more right than what I had in mind.  I was thinking about the timing of the protest, our convenient distraction.  It was only organized last minute.  After Davie would’ve been benched.  Could be part of their logic.  Nicholas Cavalcanti isn’t- I don’t think he’s sharp like Davie, but he runs The Kitchen.  He’s not stupid.”

“And Davie’s a control freak, so he wouldn’t have someone below him doing all this without reporting in or getting confirmations, right?” Carson asked.

“Right.  Yeah, you’re right.  Another thing they’re probably taking into account.”

“So.  By killing, we confirmed it’s not him.”

“We gave them enough reason to think so, anyway,” Mia said.  “Most eyes are going to be off him.  Back on us.”

“And Davie’s back in play, he’ll probably be thinking of us as his number one suspect, again.  If he ever wasn’t.”

---

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---

Earlier

“Right from the moment Davie Cavalcanti became a problem, early this week, I wanted to know who he is,” Mia told Carson.

Carson, standing behind her chair, rubbed her neck, looking.  “Yeah.”

“Who he is, what he does, why, how.  But he’s hard to pin down.  He’s careful, he’s smart.  I’ve showed you how I tracked other groups.  Back in my early days?  When I wanted to know who my potential clients and enemies were.”

“Yeah.”

“Davie Cavalcanti is careful, alert, has eyes in the sky.  Does he do everything I’d do in his shoes, to protect himself?  Landmines, that term you like.  Not putting anything online?  No.  But I think he might do some… so we have to anticipate them all, anyway.”

“Makes sense.  So you tried to get the shape of things around him other ways.”

“I dug into the family online.  as much as I could without touching on any potential landmines.  Surface level social media, aunties, relations, who associated with who- seeing which names popped up, and then seeing who connected to those names.  Finding the soft points.”

Carson couldn’t understand all of that, but he could see the system of organization unfold as she showed him.  Mia had tagged people and framed them with colors, moving them around an image file in a hierarchy that suggested their role in this.

“It’s harder to pin down who is under who.  That’s not a strength of mine.  Age was often a good tell.  Prison time could be, too.  Court records.  Doing ten years in prison is the kind of loyalty that gets rewarded with positions.”

“Naturally,” Carson said.

“But as I was sorting this out, I remembered something you told me, years ago.  That they’re kids.  Whoever Davie is, whatever The Kitchen is, their process, rules, the errand boys, the ‘soldiers’ with guns, the guys -and the occasional girl- on the ground?”

“Kids.  Yeah.  Start them young, mid to late teens.  Early teens, in the worst neighborhoods.  They learn, do the work, get immersed in things, so the gang’s their friends, their family, their hopes, their dreams, the world outside’s a bubble that makes them insecure, but they can’t ever admit to being afraid, because that’s death to them.”

“Okay.  Yeah,” Mia murmured.  “You said something similar before.  Except for the death thing.”

“Maybe it’s on my mind.  Okay.  So they’re kids.”

“Some groups do that, like you talk about.  The best of them get picked out to be promoted up.  They run groups of kids, control neighborhoods or areas of neighborhoods.  This is the part I understand,” Mia said.  “They want to build a machine.  One where they don’t have to put a lot of thought into things.  One where the lieutenants and kids reliably deliver their part of things.  But it’s not simple because, again, even the lieutenants and young and stupid?  That’s not how you put it, but…”

“Yeah.  I ran into a lot of them.  There’s rules on how you deal with them if you cross paths, big one being respect, and knowing the situations where they keep to their own and the situations where they might be open to new friends… but they’re simple.  A lot of these guys don’t know shit.  With money, no guidance, sometimes no family to fall back on, no dad to ask for business advice, when the business is drugs?  They’re in their twenties with a ton of money and no oversight, nobody’s taught them to budget or restrain themselves, so they fuck up.  Which can fuck up their place in the machine.”

Which was where he’d often sidle in.

Mia clicked through some windows.  “I thought that would be a weak point- if kids got sloppy or made mistakes where the older Cavalcantis don’t, but they aren’t sloppy.  Instead, I found organization.  At the risk of biasing your interpretation here, I think they recognized the problem you’re talking about.”

“Okay.  A lot of the guys- the ‘kids’ as we’re calling them, it’d be women.  Young gangsters don’t always know how to cook or clean, so they find a woman to do it for them.  Flash some money, find someone desperate for a higher standard of living.”

“There’s that,” Mia said.  “A lot of the ones I pegged as low-level lieutenants or higher, they have wives or long-term girlfriends, fiancees.”

“Show me?”

She clicked through windows.

“Higher rate than average, yeah,” he noted.

“But the big one?” she asked.

She showed him.

Elena Bruno, on Go Foto Yourself, crowing about purchasing a new home, a few months after marrying the very tattooed Jimmy Bruno.  Mimi Marino, doing the same after marrying Claud Marino.  Marco Harville, seen on social media with his friends, standing around a new pool table in a large house, surrounded by boxes.

So it went.

“I see the pattern,” Carson remarked.  “So… I get the feeling they pair you up or expect you to have a partner.  Makes it harder to back out if you’re a family,” he said, glancing at her.

“As we’ve run into,” she said.

“Worth the price.  And the houses are the same?  What’s the story here?  Gangsters in their twenties are buying houses?”

“A lot of information about housing is freely available if you go to or through the county clerk’s office.  A history of past owners and transfers is easy.  A search against taxes against the property needs an application form and a few days- maybe a few more days, since the government buildings are on fire and things were shutting down.”

“Maybe not doable.  Is it important?”

“Probably not.  Might give a better picture about what they’re doing with the ‘I’m a criminal, do I pay taxes’ question.  Court cases against a property can be searched online.  Name and judgment… then you look at names.”

“Okay.  Does it tie back?”

“Unfortunately no.  No single realtor.  No single lawyer.  But look.  If we take all the properties owned by middle-to-lower ranking members of the Cavalcanti organization, co-signers on mortgage applications…”

Carson borrowed the mouse to scroll down, finding the co-signers for each.  He shook his head.  “Not a pattern, as far as I can see.  Am I meant to recognize these names?  They’re not ones you gave people, right?”

“No.  But how many don’t have co-signers?  Or, I’ll make this easier.  Can you find one that has a co-signer on the mortgage that is even a wife of the guy signing?”

Every house had a co-signer.  Not wives.

“Made up people?”

“No,” Mia said.  “Unless they were as good as mine, I think I could spot those.”

In moments like this, her face lit by the computer screen, she looked more herself than ever.  In her element, secure, alert, even a bit proud- as much as she let herself be.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Regular people with decent incomes from tougher areas of the city, on the hook in case things go wrong.  Maybe they’re in debt to the Cavalcantis, and this is an option provided.  Maybe there’s hidden elements of… the paperwork also arrives at the co-signer’s house, so they forward that to a Cavalcanti office, to make sure the lieutenants aren’t screwing up behind the scenes.  Control, more eyes, interconnects things in a way that doesn’t paint a clear picture, legally, makes it hard to pull free- for both the co-signers and the lieutenants.”

“How do we use that?”

“Longer-term, there might be a way to exploit that.  It also raises other questions- like the banks that signed off on this- are they using one they know won’t look too deeply at the information?  But for right now?  I asked myself… if this is a gang-wide practice, did they find the co-signers from territories a given member of the organization controlled?  If I sort my spreadsheet by the given address of co-signers…”

“You’re so sexy,” Carson said.  “Sort those spreadsheets.”

She rolled her eyes at him.  “…and re-run the code that sorts the images…”

The images being snapshots from social media with the colored borders and names beneath them, sorted with the higher ranking members of the family up to the top, lower ranking members of the Cavalcantis toward the bottom.  Translucent lines drew connections between people.

“If you look at the translucent lines only, you’d think it’s the aunties on social media who are the real power,” Carson said.

“They’re the sloppiest with their information.  Still.”

The image stuttered, then went black.  It took a few seconds to load in, with elements coming in one by one, jerking and freezing for a moment before it chugged past the finish line.

Members of the Cavalcanti family, sorted by the people they’d preyed on.

Nicholas Cavalcanti, head of the family.  People working for him had heavy ties to Downtown West, Downtown East, Frideswide, Halfside, The Dunes…

Charlie ‘The Butcher’ Pullen, enforcer.  Absorbed in from another gang.  His cousin was Nicholas’ wife, now.  People associated with him were tied to Flack-Livingstone, Thornton Park, Madera Del Gremio, Albright Village…

Davie Cavalcanti, middle son.  There weren’t as many.  Burntown, Horizon, Corning Ditch, Loom West…

“Does Davie not have as much territory?”

“They’re spread out.  I don’t know.  I was surprised.”

Mia brought up a map before Carson was done scanning over it with his eyes, associating names with places.

Neighborhoods littered with dots, tinted certain colors.  They’d chopped up the city between them.

All the way down at the bottom of the big six was Andre Cavalcanti.  Toohoo Lake, Oak Quarter, South Wesleyham, and Alderside, where they’d kidnapped the Cavalcanti youths from.  It lined up.

“I’d bet Davie doesn’t like this, and it’s why he didn’t get so involved with it.  Maybe his older brother had to force him,” Carson said.

“That’s your instinct?”

“Yeah.  Still… this is good.”

The city, sprawling across the coast, now color coded, with whole tracts tinted one color or another.  Blue for Nicholas, red for The Butcher, yellow for Davie… and each section had the portraits of gang members floating over them- where they lived.  Ones who hadn’t been placed were grouped in row and column beneath the larger picture, for the person they worked directly under.

All the other major cities nearby were there too- but Mia hadn’t quite gotten that far with the grunt work behind the scenes.  People, here and there, for a splash of color, or a portrait with a circle around it, to show the likely area he was in.  Two of the four members of the gang still existed in abstract, operating elsewhere.

“We have a sense of where they operate,” Mia said.

“Time to do something surgical with them,” Carson quipped.

⯁

Now

They’d spent an hour watching things by the docks.  Spence Bolden was looking for something.  Mia had clarified how some of the companies from back when Bolden was active had changed names.  That had helped.

“I cant stick with you through all of this, I’ve got other stuff to get handled,” Carson said.

“This kind of surveillance takes weeks,” Bolden said.

“We have help, hopefully that shortens it to days.  Or hours,” Carson told him.

Bolden scoffed a bit.

“If you were doing this on your own, vendetta against the Cavalcantis- more than you have, for them stealing your setup and methods.  How would you do it?” Carson asked.

“Are they coming for me?”

“Let’s assume no.”

“Then I’d go to where they live.  Track them, wait for a patch of bad weather, visit their homes.”

“Why bad weather?”

“Pushes them out of their routines, some, means all the cameras that are everywhere won’t get a good look at me.  I’m more comfortable in cold rain and mud than they are.”

“Our employer on the other side of the phone can handle cameras, right?” Highland asked.

“Depends,” Carson said.  “I think it’s mostly that some cameras are badly set up.  She can use that.  Not all cameras are like that.”

“Hm, okay.”

“How would you handle it?” Carson asked Highland.

“Tough ask.  I don’t know that much about finding people.  Give me an address, maybe I find a good spot.  Sniper rifle.  Then I’d wait.  I’d appreciate a spotter.  It’s not like it is in the movies.  We’d be camping out for hours, taking turns, one doing general observation, one behind the gun.”

“Can you?” Carson asked Bolden.  “Spot?”

“Sure.”

Highland looked a little wary of that.  Probably because he wasn’t exactly feeling the chemistry, and spending eight hours somewhere with bugs and everything else, with a personality like Bolden?  That’d be hard.

“That can be a backup plan,” Carson said.  “Both of those plans take time.  What if it had to be tonight?”

“Weather tonight’s going to be good.  Less doable,” Bolden said.

“I could go in shooting,” Highland said, he sighed, shifting position, one foot up on the back seat of the car, shoulder against the window.  “I know my shit, I’m good at this, but-”

Carson finished the statement, saying, “But pretty much anyone you run into is likely to be armed.  Even more so than usual, for these days.  It’s fine.  That tells me you’re sane.  Okay.  Follow your instincts, be good, no violence just yet, let’s hold off on alerting them.”

He was pretty sure Bolden would listen to that.

“What other stuff are you handling?” Bolden asked.

“Working for our mutual friend.  Making someone disappear for Davie Cavalcanti.  It puts me close to him.”

“Dangerous,” Highland said.

“Yeah.  We’ll see.  You guys know the deal, right?  If this goes south, if you get spotted doing surveillance…”

“They won’t let us live.  Hurts them more if we lie.  Stick to the story.”

“Gives you more ammo, if they have any mercy in them at all,” Carson said.  “Things to negotiate with.”

“Got it,” Highland said.  He leaned forward and looked at Bolden.  “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Carson collected his things, including the drink from the coffee shop they’d stopped at.  He’d get a ride to somewhere close to Mia, then travel to a base of operations.

He was halfway down the block when he had a thought.

He called Mia.

“Hi.”

“At work?” he asked.

“Done my work for the day.  Puttering away on my computer.”

Meaning she was doing setup work.  Like the maps and things.  Slowly, steadily, and relentlessly.  She brought a separate laptop to work from when at the hospital.

“Heading your way.  Should I meet you at the house or at work?”

“Work.  I was thinking it might be better if I stayed.”

“Yeah?” he asked.  Did she mean- “Are you sure?”

“All the places we like are ruined.”

They were.  Davie Cavalcanti had asked for access to the trail cameras.  They’d given him that to foster trust.  Those same cameras were aimed at the places they liked to operate out of, and the roads leading in and out, as well as just about every key location they could manage without being suspicious.  It wouldn’t be surprising if there were some drones out there too.

Carson wondered if the guy Mia had called Drone Man would be back in action in any capacity, days after having his shins and feet blasted out by rock salt.

“It’s hard to do things on the spur of the moment.”

“True,” Mia said.

“And that’s the point, right?”

“Yeah.  Ugh.”

“What’s the least bad place that’s still accessible?”

“Let’s talk when you get here.”

He ordered a ride by app, then got off at the hospital.  The staff in Mia’s area knew him well enough that they waved him through, letting him go behind the counter and to the back offices.

She was there, at her computer, folders of paperwork beside her, color coded, with colorful tabs.  He eased the door closed behind him.

Mia didn’t have a supervisor, per se, but there were people who managed her, and gave her directions.  One of them, Jo, an older woman with white hair buzzed short, made a joke, “Don’t get up to any hanky panky with the door closed, kids!”

Carson rolled his eyes, smiling a bit.

Her setup here was similar to home- a desk positioned so that, sitting there, she had a view of the door and anyone coming in.  She didn’t change the screen or hide her personal laptop when he came around the desk.

More research.

He offered her a bag of room temperature lunch things.  Muffin, soup.  She unpacked it and pulled a spoon out of her drawer before drinking it.

“Skipped lunch?” he guessed.

“Yeah.  It’s fine.”

“I know it’s fine, but is it good?  Optimal?” he asked.  “The rule of thumb, if one need’s suffering-”

“What’s suffering?” she asked.

“Have you had any rest?” he asked.  “Let your mind cool down a bit?”

“I don’t function that way.  I’ve told you.”

“I know, but… that costs.  Have you slept?”

“You were right beside me.  You tell me.”

“Some sleep.  Some eating.  You’re taking shortcuts on yourself.  If we find ourselves in a bad situation, you might regret it.”

“Okay,” she said.  She sat back in her chair, bringing the soup with her, resting it on her upper chest.  “Noted.”

“Now I feel bad, because I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to put more on your plate.”

“Ask me,” she said.

He frowned.

“It’s important?” she asked.

“It’s an idea.”

“Okay.  Let’s negotiate.  Tell me, let me help, and I’ll… make up the lost time.  Sleep, eating.”

He took in a deep breath, then nodded.  “Okay.  Is it okay if we talk family stuff here?”

“Yeah.  No bugs.  Place is clear.”

Like the drones being overhead when he’d let Valentina into the bomb shelter, it really was one of those things where if there was a bug, if there was a drone, the situation would already be much, much worse than it was.

Asking was more to give Mia that sense of control.  A reminder that some bases were covered.  With the prompt, it came from her, her own actions, rather than him telling her things and meeting initial resistance.

“Spence likes the idea of waiting for bad weather and going inside.  Pick out people in order of the most vulnerable to least, most crucial to least, I’d guess.”

“I’d do it another way,” Mia said.  She opened a file on her laptop, typed in a password, then angled it for Carson to see.  It was the same map from last night, with hours of work added to it.  Other cities had been filled in.  She opened up a duplicate version,  changed the sorting and waited for it to load.

“Aunties?” Carson asked.

“The people who bridge the gaps,” Mia said.  “Look, this lieutenant in the oldest brother’s branch of things is tied into all of these people on Andre’s side.”

She switched between the two versions- highlighted people on one copy, then found them on the other.  On the one screen, people listed in order of most connected- most involved with others.  On the other, it was the family grouped into branches, based on the mortgage co-signing.  When Mia highlighted people, the arrows drawn between them and other branches glowed a light yellow.

“Sure beats a corkboard with red string.”

“I don’t mind the corkboard idea,” Mia said.  “But my laptop is portable, a corkboard isn’t.”

“We’ve already kicked the hornet’s nest, taking three of theirs.  Threatening the others.  So… we go after people who tie the family together?”

“What happens if we target the people who tie Nicholas and Andre’s parts together?” Mia asked.  “What happens if there’s clear attempts to sow division in the family… and people get removed in a way that suggests whoever is removing them knows the family intimately?”

“Paranoia.  We could splinter the family.  And if Davie is exempt, or hurt less than either of his brothers, it could turn eyes his way.”

Mia turned in her chair.  Carson put a leg out to stop her mid-spin, so she faced him.  Mia said, “Doing what he might have already been planning, but badly.”

“Okay.  I had a thought on the way over.  We aren’t due for the kind of bad weather Spence Bolden likes until next Tuesday.  Maybe.  What if we do something similar?”

“Similar to bad weather?”

“Yeah.  My line of thought tied back to last week, then this one.  We went from Wildfire to-”

“Protests, the city on fire,” Mia finished the sentence.  Carson moved out of the way so she could spin a quarter-circle around and get to her keyboard.  “Does that work for Spence?”

“It still means there will be distractions, excuses for any power outages, it makes it harder to single him out if there’s a camera, it pushes people out of their normal routine.”

“I like it when people have a routine,” Mia said.

“Yeah.  But he’s a hunter.  To him, humans are animals.  Flush a bear out of a cave and confront it with loud noises and strange things, it’ll be alarmed, it might run.  Creep up on a bear in its cave…”

“Get mauled,” Mia said.  “Okay.  If it works for him.”

“I can get in touch with him.  Ask if that works.”

Mia was already searching MyFace groups, where people were organizing protests.

“Sleep in the car?” he asked.  “I’ll drive, get us set up.”

“Where?”

“The least bad place,” he said.  “We’ll keep masks on the entire time.”

“Okay.  You know that can only go so far, right?  I’m five foot eleven, one hundred and ninety pounds.  My physique stands out.  He could have seen me on camera earlier and then stumbled on me walking down the street and think, that’s her.  Drone man could give a physical description.”

“I know.  Let’s take the precautions we can, then hope that what we’re doing tonight will help distract him, so he’s playing defense and looking for bogeymen.  For now, best thing you can do?”

“Run.  Leave everything.  Except it would hurt the children, we’d be starting from scratch.”

“I was going to say eat.  Sleep.  Be your best self, so we can respond faster and better when trouble comes.”

If trouble comes, he thought.  Should have said that, to at least pretend things are better than they are.  But saying it out loud would only draw more attention to the slip of his tongue.

⯁

Something was wrong.

The feeling had dogged him for a while now.  It hung over things like the drones had, hard to put a finger on, but there, fleeting, and very, very dangerous.

No tricks, no ploys.

They’d been asked to do some busy work, looking after one of Davie’s people.  They had anticipated drones spying on them.  They’d swept the old disused cabin for bugs before starting.  They’d left a camera in the car, aimed at the sky above them.  Mia had a ‘landmine’ set up, ready to go, and had routed some messages that way.  If someone was looking in on their internet connection, they’d see a specific site crop up a few times.  When they went to check, Mia would know.

All it was was some stored backups of select camera stuff, showing some cars passing through.  Easily excusable.

No prying, no spying, no tripped landmines, no last minute changes in plans- the change of who they were removing was the last adjustment, and they’d had ample warning.  No bugs in the rooms they were having conversations.  No trackers around the cars they were using.  The search for Valentina in the city had backed down in intensity, resources moved to other places..

Valentina had made tomato soup and grilled cheese, served it, and was careful in every respect.  She’d taken a long nap in the middle of the day, but that was fine.  Being in the bunker could do that.  Still, Mia had kept an eye on the ventilation reports and prisoners.

Ripley and Tyr were fine, spending time with Josie.

After wrapping up the disappearance job, they’d confirmed the incoming payment, then reunited with Bolden and Highland, communicating the plan.  They’d gone home, with Mia letting Carson out of the moving car while it passed slowly over an old wooden bridge with heavy tree cover.  No indication of drones at any point.

The most optimistic view was that the internal warfare and issues with the Cavalcantis were tying Davie up.  If that was true, they needed to drive things home before he could recover.

Carson wasn’t sure he counted himself as an optimist, though.  He found he was more accurate when he expected less out of people.

Maybe that was the people he spent time with.

Either way, Mia would go home, making sure to try and shake any tails, airborne or otherwise, then help Carson by secure and unusual channels.

The protests had reached Frideswide, a nicer area of the city.  Both Nicholas and Davie Cavalcanti lived around here.  So did some of their higher-ups.  So did the state senator.

He’d let Spence Bolden out just outside the wealthy neighborhood, where houses each occupied their own scenic little spot, with stretches of grass and modest woodland over little hills helping them to space themselves out from their neighbors.  Driveways were often arcs, so someone could drive up, come to the front of the house, and carry forward, to depart at a separate point.  Or so ten or sixteen or twenty cars could park along their length, during events.

He had also let Max Highland out too, a bit further down.

Now, as the protest surged, he got out of the car- a used piece of crap Highland had bought using money Carson had given him.

Wearing loose fitting clothes and a wig that was strapped helpfully to his head by the full-face mask he wore, Carson slouched heavily, letting his arms move more freely than usual.  He adjusted his gait.

People came.  Some were in cars.  A bunch were in the back of a pickup, holding onto the sides and each other for stability, some standing so they could grab the rails on top.  Some came on foot, having started hours ago, hyping themselves up, and confronting police, by the looks of things.

Carson had parked relatively early, too.  Bolden needed time to get where he was going, and Carson wanted to guide things a little.  Most of all, he wanted to do it passively.

There were too many protesters for just the governor’s house, and private police had been dispatched in force, lining up on the road, blocking all avenues to the property.

In the face of that, the crowd had dispersed, looking for places to go.

Carson put two 24-packs of bottled water out of his trunk, along with other supplies.  He had first aid, milk for burning eyes and skin, posterboards and markers.

There were some protesters who came over.  It was hot out, there was that trace of smoke still in the air- there still hadn’t been rain to wash things out, and the fires around the city gave it a faintly chemical nature that was worse than smoke on its own.  Water in this situation would be welcome.

“Can I leave you guys in charge of this?” he asked.  “I’ve got to check on some friends at another station.”

Getting confirmation, he left them with the stuff.  Too much to easily carry, he hoped it would draw some people over regularly enough that the people in this neighborhood would be watching out their front doors and windows.

That would be his primary, most direct role.  He’d planted a seed, dropped people and things off.  Maybe some people would cause some trouble here.  Among the regular protesters, there’d be some who just wanted to cause trouble.  A neighborhood of the most wealthy people in the city might be a target.

He caught a glimpse of Bolden, limping through the edge of the woods.

Barely any cars.

The silence, the lack of action, the way they’d been called over to do a job and then there’d been so little?

It felt like a trap.

Had Highland turned on them, behind the scenes?  Had someone else reported their intentions, leading to the Cavalcantis expecting this?

Carson drove, moving slowly through the crowd.  He had another 12-pack of water on his car seat, and opened his window.  He eased his way past the milling crowd of a few hundred that were collecting on the road, while he was behind several other cars, who were moving slowly, some enduring people slapping on windows and hoods.

Passing out water was a gesture of goodwill that ensured he wouldn’t be mistaken for an evacuating local.

He used the library method to communicate.  By the code, if he wasn’t forgetting the codes he hadn’t used a while, he messaged that he had a bad feeling.

The books updated in the app a few seconds later, a little notification saying ‘2 changes’.

The message was clear.  Leave.

She didn’t have any better of an idea than he did, or there’d be some better indication.

The people around the car could include Cavalcantis.  An attack from any direction.  He shut his eyes as smoke from a torch blew in through his window.

Someone grabbed water from his hand and seized his hand at the same time.  Carson reached for his knife, twisting-

Just a protestor, trying to awkwardly show solidarity.

He had a secondary role, which was to park somewhere nearby and provide some auditory distraction at a key moment… if that seemed necessary.  It was the equivalent of lightning signaling the incoming thunder, so Bolden could break a lock or take out someone outside.

Except it’d be a gunshot, or accelerating the car and jumping out, to produce a loud crash.

But his instincts were screaming that something was wrong, here.  He didn’t want to stop and wait.

His phone beeped.  He was moving so slowly he was practically parked, so he handed out one more water, then stopped, checking.

Two new books on the list.  And a magazine.  Magazines and graphic novels helped specify certain subjects or terms.

Stop?  And a magazine starting with S.

Stop Spence.

She did it again.  Just stop this time.  Then a message came across on the song playlist too.

Same idea.

He turned, then steered onto grass and sidewalk, doing a u-turn.

Another car was already taking that route, and they had that moment of who’s-going -which-way? before Carson steered back onto the street, weaving past people.  Some fast walked away.

No explanations?

A trap after all?

He dialed Spence with one hand.

No response.

The man wasn’t very phone-savvy, and would want things turned off anyway.

He found Highland, pulling up.  Highland jogged out of his cover by a fence.

“In.”

“You sure?”

“Our friend messaged me.  Don’t use your phone, just… come.  I’ve got to find a way to get Spence’s attention and pull him back.  Job is canceled.”

“I can try better from here.  Go.”

Carson pulled away from Highland.  He circled around a group that was walking in the road, moved to the other side of the road to avoid a lone individual that, in his alarm, he’d almost failed to spot.  A man who wore dark gray pants and a purple top against a dark grey road and a dark blue sky with red on the horizon, where part of the city was burning.

The target was only a few houses down.  A member of the Cavalcanti organization.  Like The Butcher, he’d been folded into things.  Oddly enough, the Butcher had become an acquaintance of Davie, and this younger acquaintance from the same group had become a friend of Davie’s older brother.

A friend, whose death would spark off nearly as much emotion as the kidnapping of a daughter.

Carson stopped the car, pulled the keys out, and jogged around a property, hurdling a short wall.

A dog barked.  Carson made it a few steps, then hurdled the wall again, back to the outside.

The barking continued, frenzied.  Carson made sure to keep his head down.

Even from a few houses down, he could see that the back door was open.

Even our good luck feels like bad luck.  He didn’t have to break a window, so he was able to get inside faster.  No need for a signal or diversion from me or Highland.

There was no fence at the back end of the Cavalcanti property.  Carson crossed the open field, feeling comical in how intensely his legs were moving.

His shoes slipped on manicured, closely-trimmed, recently watered grass.  He landed on his side.

He pulled himself up, hip sore, and jogged up the stone steps to the raised patio area with a fire pit and a barbecue to the side.

Through the open back door.

Grass-wet shoes squeaked, so he took them off, sliding them, grassy and wet, into his waistband, before flipping his shirt over them.

With sock feet, he padded through the house as fast as he dared.

Ground floor was clear.  Downstairs or upstairs?

Odds were better it was upstairs.

He slipped upstairs.

Carson edged forward until he saw the man.  Bolden was in a room with a view of the state senator’s house on fire.  The neighbors weren’t doing so hot either, and the streets were too clogged for fire services- though it hadn’t been so long that Carson should expect them.  Private police clashed with protestor.  Smoke billowed, catching the light from streetlights, houses, and police spotlights.

The bedroom was cast in that shifting, red-tinted light.  Bolden stood with his crossbow to the neck of their target, who faced the window.  The man was middle aged, hair slicked back, dressed casually, with a navy blue university sweatshirt and pyjama pants, but his hair looked like a thousand dollar haircut, with feathering by the ears, and everything in the room screamed quality.

Bolden turned his head and saw Carson.  He didn’t startle – which was good.  If he’d twitched, he might’ve pulled the trigger and put a crossbow bolt through the base of the man’s skull.

Bolden averted his eyes from Carson.  “See that flashing?”

Carson looked where Bolden was looking.

A light, appearing on the window.  Two quick flashes, pause.

Then another two quick flashes.  Like that.

“That’s an acquaintance, telling me no.  To send you a message and leave it at that.”

Good job, Highland.

Let him live, Carson mouthed the words, shaking his head slowly.  Gently, so as not to agitate.

Bolden sucked on his teeth, then bared the teeth on one side of his face, before moving his jaw, as if he was trying to work something out of a muscle or get something out from between teeth.

Every part of the man looked restless, except for the steady finger near the trigger of his crossbow.

“You saw my face, so I’m not tempted to let you live,” Bolden said.

So have a few hundred thousand people who watched the news a while back, Carson thought.

“I didn’t get a good look,” the man said, calm.

“Shut up!” Bolden barked.

They’d discussed plans.  Depending on what information got leaked, and how the plan went bad, they had contingency plans and stories.

Carson had to choose which.  Did they stick to the Davie-did-this story?  Spin out a lie?

Did they try to paint it as random violence?  Burn the house?

No.

Davie’s absence from this felt wrong.

Putting heels of hands together, fingertips curled, he mimed a bear trap closing.

“Do you see my friend?”

“Yeah.  Barely.  It’s dark.  He’s in foliage.  Looks like a soldier.”

“Do you see his gun?”

“I do.  Rifle.”

“Step forward.  Nose to the window.”

The man did.

“If your nose stops touching the glass, or if your hands lower, he’ll shoot.”

“I understand.”

“Two people visited me in all the time I’ve been lying low.  One’s out there with a sniper rifle.  The other was dismembered by Davie Cavalcanti.  I expect restitution.”

“Did you have something to do with the taking of the children?”

“What do you think?” Bolden asked, his words a growl.  “Idiot.”

Not the tack Carson would’ve taken, but it seemed to work okay.

Bolden backed out, weapon still aimed at the man.  The moment that lining up a shot became impossible, they moved fast.

“What happened?” Bolden hissed.

“Trap.  Something’s off.  I told our friend on the phone, then a few minutes later, she signaled strongly that we shouldn’t kill, I trust her.”

“Let’s go.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs, circled-

And there was commotion upstairs.

The man hadn’t stayed put.  He’d called the bluff, or he’d moved, thinking he could get clear before the soldier in the bushes could react.

When he appeared at the top of the stairs, Bolden and Carson were standing in the foyer, open space with no cover, and the middle-aged gang lieutenant had an assault rifle.

Carson sprinted for the nearest doorway, to take cover.  Bolden, on the other hand, fired his crossbow.

The sound of the gunfire indoors rattled Carson’s skull, and in the moment, he had the surreal impression that the blood that sprayed up and out from Bolden’s lap was the source of the gunfire he heard, firing up and at an angle.  As if he had thigh guns.

He didn’t, though.

The middle aged man tumbled over the railing, an arrow piercing the bridge of his nose and eye, extending into his brain.  He’d pulled on the trigger for a second before the arrow hit, and he’d caught Bolden.

“Fucking- I have gout already, now this!?” Bolden shouted.  “Fuck!”

The man was dead.

Carson lifted Bolden up, the man groaning and screaming, and held him across his shoulders, heading for the open back door.

People would have heard the gunshots.

The target was dead.  Mia had said, with unusual emphasis, not to kill him.

Now they were going to find out why.

---

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Carson looked around, then looked up.  No drones.

Of course, if there were drones, there wouldn’t be many options, except to consider the rest of his life without arms, legs, eyes, eardrums, or genitals.

Coast clear.

That was good.

He kicked some boards aside, opened the hatch at the corner of the dilapidated property, then opened the back of the van he’d parked in the garage.  Valentina climbed out, then quick-walked over in the direction he indicated, climbing down the ladder.  He kept watch.

She’d changed her hair, dying it lighter, and altered her fashion style.  Makeup suggested different shapes to her cheekbones, and her eyebrows had been thinned out and reshaped.  Carson wasn’t an expert, and wondered if Davie would see her past the changes, but he could also see a situation where someone who had passing knowledge of her might go ‘Oh, that’s her!  No wait…’

Only to be followed by a secondary moment of recognition, maybe.

They still weren’t putting her face out there, though.

“Ventilation is one of the biggest issues,” Carson said.  He brought a bag with him, before closing up the van and locking it.  He carefully eased down the garage door, mindful of the trap Mia had built with the garage spring, then climbed down the ladder, closing the hatch overhead.

“Ventilation?”

“In underground bomb shelters like this, you can run into issues where breathable oxygen gets displaced.  You suffocate without feeling like you’re suffocating.  If ever you open the hatch, look down, and one of us is lying at the base of the ladder, don’t rush down to help.  Lock the hatch from the outside, get whoever isn’t down there.  If you can’t, investigate the ventilation from the outside, figure it out somehow.  It’s okay if you write us off as dead.”

“Uh huh?”

“Other than that, if the fans stop spinning, get clear.  Mia spent a long time building in contingencies, keeping things quiet enough from the outside, making sure nobody should be able to see anything, even with a thermal imaging camera.  Making sure the ventilation should stay running.  The trap at the garage door.  Do not fiddle with that, by the way.”

Valentina frowned.  “Yeah.  I remember the back of the car exploding.”

“There’s three sections downstairs, and three sets of double gates,” he said.  “Here, the hatch requires a code to exit.  1-4-1-2.  One of the rungs slides left and right.  Slide it left after punching in the code.  Remember that.”

“That’s really ominous to say, after I talked about explosions.”

He flashed a smile at Valentina.  “No explosion.  But it won’t unlock.  1-4-1-2, left.  The double gating limits the options of any escapees.  If they somehow get a look at the code you punch in there, they won’t necessarily know the hatch code or method.  Their shortest route to escape is four metal doors with four different codes.  Two between the cells and the central area.  Two between the central area and the outside world.  Hatch, which you just saw, and this door.  2-7-3-4.”

“I need to memorize this?”

He pressed a button.  The intercom panel by the keypad included a screen, which gave him a view of the activity in the next room.  He pressed the wrong button first, he always did by accident, buzzing the intercom to talk to the next room, then turned on the camera.  “No.  You can skip memorizing this, but then you’re stuck down here until one of us comes to get you, and if something serious happens, like your father finding us, you may be left down here for the rest of your life, which would be shorter if the ventilation fails, water runs into an issue, or there’s an issue with your health you’d need a doctor for.”

“So… yes.  I should?”

“Depends how much you want to risk a lifetime down here.  I guess, with time and enough energy, you could eventually get through the metal doors?  But more important- you see the screen?”

“I do.”

“Check.  Because all the security in the world doesn’t matter if the human part fails.  If they’ve escaped their cells and gotten this far, and they’re waiting on the other side of the door?  The number of keypads and doors doesn’t matter and if you don’t know the code, they won’t believe you.”

“I’m going to remember the code.  I’m getting your point.”

“1-4-1-2 and rung left, for the hatch.  2-7-3-4 for the door, between hatch and central.”

“Yep.”

He let her input the code.  The door opened.  “If a door won’t respond, it’s because there can only ever be one door open in this facility at a time.  Check the door you’ve come through, verify it’s closed and locked.”

He flicked on the lights.  “The lights take a little while to come on, don’t panic.”

The lights buzzed, flickered, and then came on with a seeming reluctance.

“Central area.  This is where you lounge and watch the feeds,” he said.

The walls were steel sheets stretched between steel struts.  The floor was textured steel, with some mats thrown down over them.  Some concrete had leaked through seams.  Cushions had been thrown down onto an arrangement of more welded pipes and struts to form a couch and chair.  Bookshelves were inset into the wall, loaded with books and DVDs, and, opposite the short entry tunnel, with the ‘couch’ facing it, there were a series of screens.

“I think Mia always had it in the back of her head that if something went terribly wrong, this would be a place to retreat to.  It’s an insight into her.  What would she want and need to live down here for a while, if she was avoiding someone like your father?”

Or Io.

“She called him Davie, to me.  When asking for details.”

“Opsec.  Good to get in the habit of using the right names and phrasing.  I should be doing the same,” Carson said.  He smiled.  “We all should, actually.”

“It felt like more than that.”

“It’s Mia.  It’s more than that.  If you want insight into who she is… this is a great little window.  Books and DVDs on the right side here?  Hers.  Copies of her favorites, and some she hasn’t seen and won’t see, because she’s saving them, here.  Sometimes if she’s doing a maintenance check, she’ll update.  Put in ones she anticipates more, bring a stack back home.”

“Huh, weird.”

“She has a section for me.  Remembers movies I liked, picks ones I might like.  I won’t even know she’s thinking about me until I see something like this.  The same goes for Ripley.  And Tyr.  Things for them that reflect how she imagines they might grow up.  How she wants them to grow up.  It’s worth a look, if you’re restless and pacing around down here, but don’t want to go up.”

“Am I staying down here?”

“You can.  You can ask for a pickup.  We’d take you back to the house.  Obviously, things are limited.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll either handle the Davie situation, or we’ll run.  Until then, it’s awkward.  We’ll do our best to make you comfortable.”

“But I’m basically a prisoner, too?”

“Maybe,” he said.  He settled, hands and butt resting on the back of the couch, while he faced the spooked teenager.  “You could say it’s two walls erected by us, trying to give you some form of shelter, and then two walls of knives, erected by your dad, pushing you into that corner.  Prisoner?  Hostage of circumstance?”

“When I was imagining running, I thought I’d be homeless,” Valentina said.  “Going from place to place, trying to survive.  Trying not to give him any way to find me.  Seeing stuff on the cameras, the drones… I don’t think I would have made it.”

“You would have had a bit more of a head start.  He didn’t realize you were gone,” Carson said.

Valentina was quiet, eyes scanning the space.

He stuck out a foot, and prodded Valentina’s leg with his toe.  “Hey.  He didn’t realize you were gone.  We told him, to build trust so we could then use that trust to lead him off track.  If it was you alone, you’d have gotten further.”

“I was already really tired.  And scared.  No money.  I kept thinking about what I’d have to do to get money.  Being homeless?  I don’t know… anything.  How to do laundry, how to cook.  My idea was I’d get to Canada and fake amnesia.”

She laughed, briefly.

Carson settled down some, relaxing posture, getting more comfortable.  This was what she needed, more than information about this space.

“I was homeless once,” he said.

“You?”

“Got out of school.  Tried working, it didn’t work out.  Then I went with the flow.  Spend time around people, and you find there’s a lot of people with ideas.  Or looking for connection.  So you say yes.  Someone’s talking about wanting to go plant trees in the Rockies, they don’t want to do it alone?  Yes.”

“You did that?”

“Yeah.  Well, only for a short while.  But then I worked at a sketchy lumber mill.  Then a volunteer project where the supplied room and board.  Someone likes an apartment, they don’t want to rent it just themselves?  Offer to stay for three months, you’ll pay your way, and then they can keep you there or kick you out after finding someone else.  You’d be surprised how far you can get, giving people permission to do what they want to do.”

“You do that with Mia?”

“I do it with Ripley.  I do it with Tyr.  I’m doing it with you right now.”

“Is this-?  Oh.  I guess.”

“It’s more doable than it seems.  Scary, absolutely.”

“But you ended up homeless?”

“Yeah.  For a bit.  Some things fell through.  I disappointed some people and burned bridges.  I wasn’t able to leapfrog from person to person, and in that weird lonely, dry patch, I found out that when you don’t know anyone, it’s harder to meet new people, and when you have no property and no steady history of income, it’s hard to find work.”

“What did you do?”

“Found a woman.  She had money and a hole in her heart.  The kind of person who always has to be in a relationship.  From there, met people.  Spent a while building houses with people before a government bill passed.  It was meant to reclaim any space on a reservation without a house on it.  Things didn’t get that far though.  Government fell apart.  The first time.”

“Oh.”

He’d dropped a lot onto her, and decided to give her time to recalibrate, take in that information, and maybe imagine herself doing the same.  Maybe she could, maybe she couldn’t.

“I think the bad parts of any of that would be worse for me,” Valentina said.  “Because I’m younger, weaker.  Because I’m a woman.  I think with all of that, it wouldn’t always be some lonely man, it’d be more like a pimp, and I’d be… a girl with a mediocre body who does that.”

‘Mediocre body’.  He’d only just started to run into this with Ripley.  The big, tricky catch with it all was that it shouldn’t matter to society, and he could argue about that endlessly, but there was also the fact it did matter to her, enough she’d raised the idea.  Ripley’s insecurities mattered to her.

But it was so hard to talk about it, too.

“Please take this in the spirit it’s meant, I have eyes for only my wife.  But you’re not mediocre.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Valentina said, skeptical.

It felt a bit different from when he tried to tell Mia something.  Like she’d believe him if he told her.  But that felt weird too, because if he was the only source for that kind of validation, especially when she was in circumstances like this…

He didn’t like to live a life of regrets, but he’d fumbled his way through early relationships in a way that made him wonder how the women thought of him in retrospect.  He didn’t want to be that.

A sort of intentional element he’d forced into place, to be mindful of, when he normally went by instinct.

Valentina ventured, “I guess part of what gets to me, even now, even sleeping in the bed you guys provided me, I worry what if that ended up being my only option?”

“I think you’d surprise yourself.”

“But- okay, maybe.  But what if I didn’t?  And then how different am I from the girl my fath- Davie took into the basement, to scare into doing what he said?  Could something like that happen to me?”

Carson nodded to himself.  “Yeah.  That makes sense.  Not so nice to think about.  I’m going to think on that.  And hope that we can… put distance between you and that scenario.”

“That’d be good.”

“I’ll mention it to Mia.  We can teach you laundry, cooking, essential things.  So you’re more independent.”

“I’d like that.”

“But I’m not homeless,” Valentina said.  Was her brightness forced?  “I’m here.”

This is still the honeymoon period, he thought.  Which was ironic because he’d never had that patch with Mia.

“I can teach you this?” he offered.  “You did ask, and we came all this way.”

“Okay.  Yeah.  For sure.”

One hand on the back of the setup, he hurdled over the couch, sitting down.  The coffee table had a catch, which, when released, let him slide off a top layer.  “Mia put this on after I spilled a drink on… this.”

A laptop had been disemboweled and inset into the coffee table, which was bolted to the floor.  Wires ran from it to the inside of the coffee table.  Everything bolted and locked on, sturdy, built to last.  The lid of the laptop, when closed, was flush with the top of the coffee table.  Mia had wanted everything hardwired.

“I’ve made some dumb mistakes in the past.  Few things have got her that upset.  I could miss an anniversary and she wouldn’t blink, I don’t think, but getting this wet was an event.“

“Don’t miss anniversaries.  Even if she seems okay with it.”

“I’ve done okay,” he said, smiling.

It was different, having a sixteen year old in the household.  Having her be a part of all of this.  Up until now, the spilling of the drink had been exclusively between him and Mia.

He found himself slipping more into the ‘talking to a friend’ mode more than the parent mode.

The butchered laptop was the central console for the cameras.  He brought up the images.

“To our right is another short hallway, two more metal doors, two more security panels.  And them.”

Four cells, one of which was under construction, hidden behind steel and struts.  Three were occupied.  The computer heard what they said, if they tried calling out, and appended it to logs at the bottom of the screen.  He quickly glanced through.

“So.  Normally our setup is different.  Squat toilets, essentially holes in the floor, water from overhead serves double as flush and shower.  Each cell has a grate with tracks inset into the floor slides between a space in front of the door to a space over the toilet, so you don’t have to stand on or in the toilet to shower.  Took those out.  Or covered them up.  Mounted a regular stainless steel toilet over the hole.  No showers- covered that up too.  Televisions behind plexiglass, which gets pretty beat up.  We’d sometimes reach out to contact people to let them decide their programming for the next while.”

“What do I do?”

“The original idea with the grate system was that we’d only give them food and supplies if the grate was by the door.  There’s a slot there, we slide it in, under the grate.  They can’t grab for us or try to hurt us with the grate in the way.  That’s gone.  It’s too identifying.  So you’ll want to be careful.  Cells are to the right of this room.  There’s a separate area to the left, with bunks, a larder, a small kitchen area.  Make them lunch when the time comes.  Dinner, if you decide you want to stay here overnight.  Keep an eye out, to make sure there’s no medical emergency.”

“Suicide?”

“Or self-harm.  Or something else.  Feces smeared on walls, themselves.  We’re not nearly that far along yet, though.  It’s going to be tough.  In our experience, people without TV will get bored and restless.  Some might act out like that.  Faster than otherwise.”

“You’ve done this a lot.”

“Less than we’ve helped people disappear.”

“What’s the longest you’ve kept someone?”

“Forty-one days.”

“Did they lose it?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “I think most people would.  It was the point.  We had a tape playing a recording from a former target of his on loop.”

“Can I, uh, punish them?  Like-”

She trailed off.  He was frowning a bit at her.

“-to stop them from doing something?” she said, with less enthusiasm, wincing some.

“There’s a means of talking to them.  Type here, it’ll speak to them in a computer generated voice.  Gets pronunciation wrong, sometimes, but it’ll do.  Your best bet is to call us.”

Valentina pulled one corner of her mouth back.

“Why?  You said you had issues with Addi?”

On screen, Addi was up, pacing, checking the walls with care- where wall met ceiling- one loop.  Pushing against the panels that had been welded there, to see where there was wobble.

“When high school started, word got out that my dad was in organized crime.  It was her.  It killed my social life.  I lost friends, people joked about it.  A guy showed interest in me and it turned out he wanted to work for my dad or something?”

“That’s not how it works.  What an idiot.”

“I know.  It was her.  Never confirmed one hundred percent, but the way she lorded it over me, looked at me?  Her dad worked for my dad.  The bitch.  And I couldn’t say or do anything about it because if I outed her, I’d be confirming what she said, and my dad might actually kill her.”

“Refuge in audacity?”

“I guess?  Also, shit, sorry.  Davie, not my dad.”

“Better if you figure that out here than out in the world.  There’s a little while before a slip-up like that could cost.  You can’t punish her, Valentina.  It’d make people wonder, might help them draw a line from all of this to her.”

“You’re framing Davie Cavalcanti, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you frame it so, like, he pretended his daughter disappeared, and she was really handling the prisoners?”

“The way we do things, it’s better to not try to create a narrative like that.  If they find a hole in the story, it calls everything into question.  Our narrative is simple, we’re not even spelling it out.  Our hope is that Davie has laid enough groundwork that he tells the story, and we get them looking in that direction.”

“So no revenge?”

“Not at this point.  If it really is that much of a priority, we can talk about it.  We all have our odd bits.  But think hard.  Is it something you have to do?  Does it have to happen, even if it brings Davie Cavalcanti closer to your trail?”

She sighed.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Have you ever hated anyone?  Because I don’t even hate my- Davie.  He scares me, I don’t understand him, but I can see where someone would grow up in an intense situation like the Crazy Kitchen gang, doing wild stuff from really young, and become him.  But I hate her.  And a few of her friends.  Nothing made her this way, there was no reason to.  She saw an opening with enough… clearance.”

“Plausible deniability.”

“Yeah!  That’s it.  She saw a chance, she had power, and then she pulled some shit.  And she wasn’t ever sorry.  I suspected, from things she said, then she acted so smug.”

He stood, approaching, and offered a hug.

She took it, after a moment’s hesitation.

“Watching her twisting in the wind, wondering what’s going on and not getting answers?  That’s going to be more satisfying and more effective than any taunting you could do.  Trust me.”

“I guess.”

“I’ve got to go see to some things, and I’ve got to drive back.  Let me quickly run you through some things that might set off alarms.  If they flood a cell, you might get this alert…”

⯁

Carson cheered.  Mia was just as loud beside him.

Tyr ran with little sense of how to run, as if moving legs up and down faster would get him where he wanted to go, instead of shifting gait and widening his strides.  There were enough kids like him, though, that he wasn’t at the bottom of the pack, and it seemed he had enough of a reputation as a bruiser, accidental or otherwise, that other kids noticed when he appeared beside them, and faltered a bit.

He wasn’t a bully- he was friendly to everyone.  But his idea of friendly was similar to a big puppy in a group of very timid kittens.  No idea of the comparative power he had.  It was hilarious to see.

Parents were gathered at the outside fence, looking in, cheering for kids who did their activities.  There were some overly expensive hotdogs and other basic lunch things for those in attendance, too.  Ripley was over there eating one with a friend.  There were about fifteen volunteers from around Ripley’s age there, for a job that might’ve taken two dedicated ones, which gave them a lot of freedom to skip a bit of afternoon class, eat, and cheer for younger relatives and neighbors.

By accident and exhaustion as much as anything else, Tyr found a longer stride, and covered more ground, to a point that seemed to surprise him.  Which led to him losing that stride.  It did spook the girl in fourth place and the boy in fifth place, as they ran their race around the schoolyard.

“So funny,” Carson commented.

“Do you think you could try teaching him to run?  When things are quieter?” Mia asked.

“Yeah.  I’ll take him to the park sometime.  Look at him.  He’s going to crash so hard later, going all-out like this.  Wake up sore and cranky.”

“We’ll take it easy tonight.  Get takeout?” Mia asked.

“Sure.”

Mrs. Scalf was watching.  He didn’t make eye contact, but instead put his arm around Mia’s shoulders, squeezing.

When he’d showed up alone to school events before, like the book bonanza, Mrs. Scalf was among the women who’d blatantly hit on him.  Like vultures on a carcass, when the threat that had originally downed it had moved on.

He mentally put her in a similar bucket to the gang members.  Viewing it all as a hierarchy, where they saw themselves as prettier or better than Mia on some level.  More deserving of him.

He liked subtly screwing with them, by not getting even blatant hints, and making more public displays of affection toward Mia when they were around.

The crowd winced as Tyr took a dive, and two more kids fell, trying to avoid him or tripping over him.

Mia and Carson might’ve been the only ones not to react like the crowd did.

“Just get up,” Carson said, under his breath.  “You’ve gotten up from worse.”

Tyr did, and resumed running like nothing had happened.

One of the other kids who’d fallen walked across the track- almost in the way of the last place finisher, who might’ve collided with her if it wasn’t for the fact they were practically walking.  The girl went to where her mom was watching, crying.

“Sorry!” Carson called out.

The dad waved him off.

“I sometimes imagine who he’ll be,” Mia mused aloud.

“Six inches taller than you, capable of tearing a car tire in two with his bare hands?”

“No, seriously, though.”

“It might be good to instill some empathy.  If someone gets hurt around him-”

“Which happens a lot,” Mia muttered.

“-we, yeah, happens a lot.  It’d be good if he was gentle with those people.  I remember a guy I was drunk with getting hurt.  Giant of a guy carried the guy to where he could get help, like it was nothing.”

“I like that image for Tyr.  He might not be tall, you know?  Could be he got a headstart and that was that.”

“I can see it,” Carson said.  Because I remember his bio dad.

Maybe the mental connection to the bio dad got them thinking along the same lines, because Mia turned her head to look around the same time he did.  Natalie was cheering for little Sterling Teale.  A man was beside her, young-looking, brown-skinned, with hair styled to be intentionally messy.  It looked like the heat was getting to him.

They stayed for a bit, and then Ripley waved them over.  Mia waved back, and they started walking around.

Tyr was lying on the grass by the water station, spread eagle, chest heaving.

They were on their own for a short stretch.

“Benito Jaime.  Ben for short.  True crime investigator, journalist,” Mia murmured.

“Hmm, looks young.”

“He and another investigator found the Oral Lake sniper.  Turned out to be teenagers younger than Valentina.  They gave the information to police, police didn’t follow up.”

“Strike?”

“Around the start of the first big one.  Vigilantes went after the kids.  Then the partner got frustrated, or felt responsible.  Sold all the tapes, investigation notes, everything, to a streaming service.  Natalie’s new friend got a share, but… they parted ways.”

“And from what you said, he was upfront about wanting to do another?

“Hmmm.  Okay.  When did you realize he was that Ben?”

“When we got here and they were together,” Mia murmured.  “I’ve looked at a lot of Bens.”

“This isn’t the direction you want to look, Ben,” Carson said.  “You’ve been anticipated, you’ll run into a lot of dead ends and stumble onto landmines.”

“I wish that was true,” Mia said.

“Hey, Mi?” he asked, shortening her name.

“Yeah?”

“Proposing an idea.  Shoot it down for me, okay?”

“Okay.”

It was their method, whenever they had an idea for a safety measure.  Or if they were justifying buying a firearm, or changing plans.  Normally it was Mia with the ideas, Carson as the moderating force.

He ventured, “What if I dismembered him?  We could tie it back to Davie.  Arms, legs, eardrums, eyes?  I could conceal my identity.”

“They’d notice the tools are different.  Knife type, cut length, cut depth.  Method of getting through bone.”

“Hmm.  You can’t find out that stuff from the report?  So I can match it?”

“Not what I can access.  Could you even keep someone alive?”

“I find I surprise myself, so maybe?”

“It takes a lot.  Doctors on call.  Probably doctors doing it all in the first place.  Blood transfusions to keep them going.  Medication and careful attention to avoid them going into shock,” Mia said.  “Which might be inevitable.”

They were running out of clear fence.  Another thirty seconds of walking and they’d be in earshot of other adults.

He made her stop, and put arms around her shoulders, while she was facing him.  “That’s a no, then?”

“No.  Thank you for being willing to kill and dismember someone for me,” she said.  “But there is the fact it’s morally wrong.  I don’t think he’s a bad person.  We’re not evil people, ourselves.”

“No.  We’re not,” he agreed.  “We’re cautious people, though.”

“In the interest of being cautious… are you going to be okay later?” she asked.  “With new work?”

“Yes.”  He gave her a peck on the lips.  “Valentina wants revenge.”

“Against Davie?”

“Addie, old schoolmate.”

“That’s complicated.  And Addie’s young.  Old enough I’m not going to…”

“Yeah.”

“But I’d feel bad.  What kind of revenge?”

He still stood there, arms around her shoulders.  They didn’t have long before some other parents who were walking around the perimeter fence reached them.  “I don’t think she’s articulated it yet.  When we were talking, she said it might be a good plan to threaten one of the girls with Davie-style punishment.  Get them scared, tie it to things later.”

“A little clumsy.”

“She’s young.”

“I worry.”

“I know.”

“We’re laying it all on the line for a near-stranger.”

“We are.  But you did that for me, once.”

“Reluctantly.”

He kissed her, a peck on the lips.  He was aware of a certain someone approaching, off to the side.

“Ewww, gross.”

Ripley.

“We wanted to check in with you before we go.  I do have to work at the hospital now and again, even with family stuff going on in the background.”

“Right, family stuff,” Ripley said.  The tone and volume might’ve gotten some peopel’s attention.  Maybe they thought ‘divorce’ or something else.  But then Ripley smiled.

She was thinking of Valentina.

If Valentina decided she’d rather stay at the bunker, it’d probably crush Ripley.  She’d mentioned her cousin right at the start of this kindergarten activity afternoon thing.  She’d been good about not mentioning it in front of others, as requested.

“Come buy hotdogs!”

Maybe that was a bigger reason to have a bunch of kids manning the station, handling orders and bringing people food.  Parents seemed to feel obligated to participate, even when a basic frankfurter and coke was eight dollars.

It worked.  Carson waited in line.

“They’re looking at us,” Mia murmured.

Natalie Teale and Ben the journalist-investigator.

They were.

“Well, you said she was short tempered, and you had a tiff with her.”

“Not even a tiff,” Mia said.  “She got upset.”

“Maybe she’s the sort who holds a grudge, then.”

They got their hotdogs, which were admittedly pretty good- how could it not be?  Tyr found them, and he and Mia each gave him some of theirs.

He wasn’t quite done when a text came.

“I’ll see you.  Have a good afternoon at work, don’t dwell too much on the little things.”

“Good luck,” Mia told him.

He found himself happy, as he walked two long blocks over to the main street where a number of stores and fast food places were.  Two stores down, Max Highland had parked.

She’d said thank you.  She’d actually seemed grateful for his offer.

He knew she was grateful, for much more than that.  But it was a rarity that he didn’t need to read between the lines.

He got into the car.

“As we discussed?” Highland asked.

“Please.”

Highland checked the coast was clear -it wasn’t, with some high schoolers cutting across the parking lot, in what Carson assumed was a late lunch break- then pulled out.

Part of what he’d outlined to Valentina was the number of provisions being made.  That Valentina was, as of last night, part of a chain of custody, as Mia had termed it.  That if one of them was disabled, there would be instructions and options.  Provided Valentina didn’t forget codes and lock herself down there, there was mail she could look out for and instructions she could follow.  Some of it was how to claim money, a new identity, and disappear.  How some money should go to Ripley and Tyr.

Some of it had to do with the prisoners.  How to extricate them.  Because Mia was a bit of a softie.

There were contingencies here too.  Because this plan had to move forward at this rate.  So people like Highland were now scheduled to get a message about the kidnapped girls if Carson and Mia went radio silent for a week, so he could retrieve them.  Depending, he’d carry out some stages of the plan.

Now they were bringing someone else into play.  Very different from Highland.  Highland was a professional, an ex-soldier.  Give him a job and he did it.

“Apparently this one’s dangerous?” Highland asked, as if reading Carson’s mind.

“In a way.  It’s a bit of a drive, too.”

⯁

All this while, they were operating under the assumption that the Cavalcantis were on maximum alert.  Two daughters of the family were taken.  The lawyer’s daughter gone.

Davie had asked them to disappear someone tonight.  Then he’d canceled.  Then he’d asked again, about someone else.

It was hard not to read something into that disorganization.

It felt like busywork.

He’d have to handle this, then go straight to that.  Mia would work, then get things underway.

Another person the contact had moved to the outskirts of the city.

“Spence Bolden.”

“Why does that sound familiar?”

“Because he was on the news at one point.  Government claimed eminent domain.  Bolden said his family had owned the land for forever.  He said ‘over my dead body’, and then refused to die.”

“Did they get it?”

“They got it.  But he made them pay a price.”

“I might not have been here when that happened.  You miss news while deployed.”

There was no real trail through the woods.  Not human made or human-maintained.  Some that animals had forged.

Everything looked so dirty.  The smoke from the wildfires had reached this place.  It gave it a grit, a griminess, and it cut into the green-ness of it to make it dingy in color.

Carson pulled his guns out, then laid them on the car seat.  “You too.”

Highland complied.

Carson and Highland walked for a minute.

“Captain?” Highland asked.

“Yeah?”

“Hold up?”

Carson stopped in his tracks.  Then, after a moment’s consideration, he raised his hands.

“Something’s…”

“It’s probably him,” Carson said.  “Bad feeling?”

“I guess.”

After a pause, Highland raised his hands.

We’re going to feel really goofy if fifteen minutes pass and it turns out Bolden isn’t anywhere near here.

“I’m telling you his original name because you were going to recognize him, anyway.”

“Even if I was overseas?”

“His face floats around, it appears places.  They’re still looking.  But the way he operates, he’s harder to find.”

Borden’s land had been forest.  He’d lived a spartan life, going into town two or three times a year to get essentials, like shirts and jeans that would last, replacement tools.  He forged a lot of his own tools, though.

He’d had to abandon it.  But with their help, he’d moved here.

Long minutes passed.  Carson didn’t budge, hands still raised.

“Is this worth it?” Highland asked.

“Better he finds us than we find him.  And he should find us.  Unless he’s injured, or has health conditions.  None of which was mentioned on the phone.”

“Okay.”

“He was a one-man army.  Knew his woods like the back of his hand, So, justifying it by the murders he’d committed in the early phases, they sent an army of officers after him.  One man army against forces like that?  They only need one bullet to land.”

“What ended it?”

“He did.  He backed off, let them have the land.  Took a lifetime of skills in hunting, pathfinding, tracking.  Started smuggling.  People and product.  This is right after the dog caught its own tail.”

“Ahhh.”

“Big ban on illegal entry, crackdown on migrants.  A lot went to shit.  Businesses that leaned on that, many in the south, started to run into serious problems.  High demand, Bolden had the people to fill it.  Big money.  Earned a couple hundred thou, you’d think some of that goes to living expenses, right?”

“He kept all of the earnings?”

“Went right back to the people he was working with with pretty much every dollar left unspent.  Said he wanted help.  Set them onto the people who were building on ‘his’ land.  Then he hunted the leftovers.”

“He wasn’t our first choice,” Carson said, quiet, hands still raised.

“You mention that now?  What was the problem with the first choice?”

“Happy where he was.  No money troubles, no restlessness.  He might’ve intuited it was about the Cavalcanti family, and gotten scared.  He said no.”

“Are you scared of the Cavalcanti family?” Highland asked, raising his voice to be heard.

Carson hadn’t heard the approach.  But Bolden was there, approaching them from the side and a little bit behind, holding a crossbow.  He was skinny in a way that suggested bad health- a man who lived off the land when the land didn’t always provide.  Short blond hair that was a little wispy, a bit trailing off from the center-front of his hairline, looking a lot like corn silk.  Deep-set, large eyes, the lines of his skull visible around eye, cheekbone, and cheek, skin tight and surprisingly light in tone, without a tan, but with an uncharacteristic age to it.  It was like his hair was too young and his skin was too old.  He wore light warpaint, and camouflage clothes that blended into the woods.

The overall ‘skull’-ness of the man and the attitude made Carson think of a chihuahua.  Except Chihuahuas didn’t rack up newsworthy body counts without ever firing a gun.

“You talked to my employer on the phone?” Carson asked.

“I did.  I remember you.  You covered up my tattoo.  Wasn’t that important, my face is recognizable, but it was a nice break.  I still like it.”

“I’m glad,” Carson said.

Bolden had known about them through a friend of the contact, by way of the smuggling.  It had been an odd job.  Mostly handling backend stuff like buying a property and ensuring everything was legitimate enough that Bolden wouldn’t have anyone disturbing him.  Or evicting him with claims of eminent domain and a pittance of money.

“So?” Carson asked.

“Cavalcanti family focus is elsewhere.  They’ve been using routes I set up and arranged in the first place.  I met with suppliers, put my neck on the line, and that’s gone, now.”

“Apparently.”

“The guy who sent me to you all those years ago, he took notes and sold it to them?”

The contact?  “We don’t know who stole your supply routes and suppliers.  Maybe those people found the Cavalcanti family.”

“Doesn’t matter, I guess.  The past.”

Did that make this a no after all?  Had they intruded too far into the territory of a territorial man?

“You’re paying?” Bolden asked.

“Yes.”

“I have gout.  Fatty foods, foods preserved in brine and salt, I guess.  I can’t move very fast.  I can still do the work.”

“That’s fine.”

“The job?”

“Find their drug supply, make shipments disappear.”

“Bolts nocked or put away?”

“Nocked.  But if there are bodies, I’d rather disappear them.”

“Who handles that part?”

“Us.  We do.  Up to a limit.”

“I don’t like limits,” Bolden said.  He hadn’t smiled in the time he’d walked up to them.  He might not have blinked.  The pain on his face was evident whenever he took a step.  “If I see someone and it might be complicated to let them live?  I don’t want to spend a moment wondering and get myself shot.”

Carson nodded.

He’d had only passing interactions with this man.  Mia had warned him.  They’d talked to people who had information, and people who could get things done.  Bolden was both, and in some capacities, he was information nobody else had, or a source of potential unlike others.  Mia had put it simply: that if they went this route and they convinced him to join up, the job would probably get done, even if it was a tough one, but also, as a price, people would probably die.

The trick would be making sure it was the right people.

---

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Carson immediately had a sense for why Mia liked Max Highland.  From the moment Carson approached the meeting spot, Highland had a gun ready to draw and fire, just in case.

It was a meeting in a public place, and Highland sat at a table, gun laying on its side on his knee, out of sight… but his posture gave it away.  Hand close, leg not moving much.  He would shoot, too.  There was a reason he’d needed Mia’s help to disappear in the first place.  He’d shot nine or ten years ago.

One of the others sat deeper in the same booth as Highland, head down, hat pulled forward.  Moses Murtha.

Carson, striding forward, threw up his hands, halfway between a ‘don’t shoot me’ and an offer to hug an old friend.  He flashed a smile.

Which worked.  The ex-soldier didn’t want attention drawn to himself, so the flashiness of it was as disarming as the smile was.

He walked past a woman, sitting at a table closer to the door, a little drab, makeup not done.  Stiff.  Like a smaller version of Mia.  Sheila Hardy.  His phone buzzed, he checked it.

4506-103
2nd table from door
she is your 4th

He reversed course, then, so as not to make Sheila jump, cleared his throat, seating himself at an adjacent table.

It was being disarming in a different way.  The sort of way he’d had to use with a young Ripley, back when he’d met Mia.  Bringing himself down to someone else’s level, being keenly aware of what movements looked threatening.  Moving to a sitting position was a good way, because it was very hard to go from sitting against a wall to an aggressive lunge.

In this case, an awkward chair sit, hands kept in view.

She seemed bewildered for a second.

“This works better if we’re all at the same booth,” he said, casually.  Gently.

“Oh.  I know, I-”

She stopped herself.

“Second thoughts?” he guessed.

“Not like that.”

“Come on,” he told her.  “I’ve done this before.  It’s scary, but she makes it all easy.  Our mutual friend.  Or did you go through the contact, with our mutual friend silent through the whole process?”

“We talked.  Had a conversation, even, on the phone.”

He knew that, but with the reminder, and with the reassurance, he was tipping her the way they wanted her to go.

“It will be easier than you’re imagining.  A conversation about old times.”

“You know who I am?”

“Not much,” he lied.  “From what I did hear, it sounded more like you had relevant information, informing plans, as opposed to you being the type to execute them.”

“I guess.  Are you an execution type?”

Wrong word.  It changed the tone of things.

She wasn’t flinching though.

“Yes,” he responded to that lack of flinching.  “Come on.  You came this far.”

She came with, getting up from the table.  He kept his posture and position so that he wasn’t a threat to her.  A few paces ahead, hands touching chair backs and tables as he wound his way through the setup in the mostly empty roadhouse burger place.

He let her sit, then pulled up a chair, sitting outside the booth, careful to leave her an escape route.

“Show me that phone?” Highland asked.

Carson put the phone on the table, spinning it.  Highland reached over and stopped it, looking at the message that was still on screen.  He slid it back to Carson.

Before it reached Carson’s hand, there was a new message on the screen.

“As we discussed,” it says.  “I’ve heard from our friend.  We talked over the shape of this plan, I’m meant to convey this to you.”

“You’ve done this before,” Highland said.  “Cleaning up messes?”

“On this level?  No,” he said, honestly.  “This is the first mess of this type I’m aware of.  In the past, I’ve been an errand boy when our friend needed an errand run.”

He wondered if Highland’s pride was pricked.  If Mia had been asked to make a custom order for a right hand man, Carson was pretty sure she would have asked for someone very much like this.  Unerring, reliable, followed orders, paranoid.

But someone like him wouldn’t necessarily have gotten Gio out of that gas station, past the noses of Davie Cavalcanti’s people.  Not without bloodshed and alarms being run.

“How did you reach that sort of arrangement?” Highland asked.

“Are you looking to take my job?” Carson asked, with a smile.  He reached across the table to get a little menu from behind the napkin dispenser, then absently looked at his reflection in the dispenser before setting it back down with care.  Then he lied, “I didn’t have the money.  So I’m working it off.”

“You can do that, huh?” Moses asked.  He was trying to hide in his clothes.

“I guess we’ll see.  Still working it off.”

“Wait staff,” Highland said, voice soft.

“I know,” Carson replied.  “Blonde.”

Highland frowned slightly, eyebrows drawing together.  Then he looked down at the napkin dispenser.  Carson could see the man connecting the line between Carson and the reflective surface and the waitress.

“And what can we get for you people today?  Drinks to start?” the waitress asked.

“What do you have that’s non-alcoholic?” Carson asked.  He made momentary eye contact with Highland.

“We have juice, mango, peach, blueberry, made in-house.  Soda, the Brad’s lineup of sodas, coffee, tea…”

“Mango juice.  Please.  Thank you.”

“Carbonated?”

“Sure.  That’d be great.”

“Cola,” Highland said.  “No ice.”

“Beer?” Moses asked.  “What do you have on tap?”

Highland and Carson both turned to face him in the same second, confrontational, with Carson fixing him with a disapproving look, setting chin on hand.

“Not funny,” Highland murmured.

“What?” Moses asked.

“Coffee,” Sheila interrupted the exchange.  “Black.”

“Cola,” Moses said, belatedly.

“Will be right with you.”

The waitress strode off.

“Did a message I was supposed to get not come through?” Moses asked.  “What’s this?”

“Look at our group,” Carson said.  “We’ve got someone who doesn’t want to be here, face hidden behind hat and sunglasses.  A woman in sweats with no makeup, maybe even unflattering makeup, who, consequently, looks a bit like she’s dying.  On purpose, I assume.”

“Yeah.  I wasn’t sure what else to do,” Sheila said.  “I tried to be as different from my normal self as I could.”

“And someone a bit stiff, rigid.”

“Am I?” Highland asked.

“In the way ex-soldiers can be.  I’m guessing, there.  And me, at the head of the table.  More relaxed, disarming, a bit in charge.  Not a lot.  But a bit.  Putting in the first order.  The wait staff are people who are, consciously or unconsciously, reading people all day.  What the heck are they going to make of us?  So I gave an answer.  Our ex-soldier here picked up on it.”

“Sobriety group gathering for a bite after a meeting,” Sheila said.

Carson winked at her.

“Whatever,” Moses said.

“Okay,” Highland said, and it felt like an answer to something bigger.  Like he’d accepted this.

With that, and the napkin dispenser trick, Highland had gone from seeing Carson as someone redundant -what did Mia need from Carson that Highland couldn’t provide- to someone who brought something to the table.  It also reassured Sheila.

It had pushed Moses back a bit, but that could be fixed later if Carson needed to.

“It also means the staff might give us a bit of privacy.  So.  Nobody in earshot?  Let’s talk about the Cavalcantis.”

“Fuck,” Highland muttered.

Moses didn’t look happy either.  Only Sheila seemed to know already.  Mia would’ve had to bring it up.  Sheila wasn’t hurting for money.

“The Kitchen.  Crazy Kitchen, back in your day, friend,” Carson addressed Moses.  “Crazy Cousins.”

Moses, already slumped back head down, settled further back into the bench, like he wanted to press himself in deeper, immovable, unhappy.

“Let’s lay it out.  No specifics.  You were there on the ground when things were bad.  The young lady sitting to my right was in the know, on a different level.  Not in the Kitchen, but close enough to see through the Kitchen window?”

“Yeah.  Yeah, you could say that.”

“Mistress?” Moses asked.

Sheila paused.  “Let’s go with that.  To someone not in the Kitchen, like he said.”

“Our mutual friend painted you as the brains of that operation.”

“That’s flattering, I’m- I guess.  Yes.”

Sheila Hardy had not been a mistress.  She was the daughter of Dell Olsen, one of the smaller groups that had been doing very well for itself, importing cocaine and distributing it to a market that wasn’t being enforced in the slightest.  Though she wore sweatpants and had left her hair barely combed now, she’d been a person of status, raised to play a significant part in the ongoing running of the family business.  Apparently, in her new identity, she regularly maintained a different kind of status.  Lower-profile, but she didn’t work and didn’t skimp on the expensive clothes.

When everything had gone to hell and the Kitchen had looked to take over the market, her father had bought her a ticket out.

“And the man sitting across from me, hat pulled down.  Without specifying exact role, history, or details, your group was folded into the kitchen.  You were trusted.  By the time you left, you were driving people places, you heard conversations.”

“Yeah.”

“And then you got out.  With prejudice.”

“Yeah.”

The Kitchen had grown fast and that kind of growth was hard to sustain, calling for manpower.  Moses had played the part of someone loyal while holding back some grudges, working with a few others, all planning to wait until he could put a bullet in someone key.  The idea had been that Moses would drive them out, and the others would do the deed.  Something had gone wrong, the others had been more distrusted than they’d thought and were noticed going somewhere armed.  The situation had been dire enough that Moses had made the call to report them, knowing they were probably doomed anyway, to save himself from being implicated.  He’d been asked to put bullets in the four.  They hadn’t spoken against him or revealed his role in things even when Moses had walked down the line of kneeling men, putting bullets in each.

Then, a year later, he’d left with a lot of money he shouldn’t have, an amount that would have stung.  His heart had no longer been in things.  The contact hadn’t yet been a part of the ecosystem around the Kitchen, so he’d helped Moses disappear.

Had he tried today, the outcome would have been much different.  Davie struck Carson as the type to chase down money like that.  Or betrayals.  But it had been a tumultuous time for the gang, Moses had escaped by the skin of his teeth and Mia’s very good work, and they’d forgotten about him.  Maybe they kept an eye out for his face.  But he’d been fine, working in the city, at a mid level job.  His stolen money had run out in the meantime.  According to Mia, he had never been raised to be savvy with cash, so he’d bled funds over time.

“And you?” Moses asked.

Pride was key for a man like that.  It had already been taken down a notch by the sobriety group ruse, Moses being slowest on the uptake.

“When I was talking to her a bit ago,” he indicated the woman on his right.  “I drew the line between those giving information and those using that information to execute something bigger.  I get things done.  Most of the time, I do a lot of little things very well.  But one thing I do well is get into places I shouldn’t be.  And not like you’re thinking.”

“Not a burglar, then?”

“I’ve burgled.  Like I said, I’m very good at a lot of little things.  But no.  The place I really shouldn’t be is close enough to the Cavalcantis to hurt them.  I don’t think anyone here objects to that idea?  Hurting them?”

Nobody did.

“I meant what did you do before?  To meet our ‘friend’?”

“I got stupid.  I pushed my luck too far.  I think I wanted to.  Or needed to.  But I was in the good graces of our departed friend, and I was offered a rare deal.  I like having purpose.”

Mostly a lie, except the purpose part.

“Alright.  Then that leaves him.”

“I execute,” Highland said.  “Anything I told you about my past might reveal who I was and am.”

Proud in a different way.  Moses was gangster proud, where life broke down into hierarchies.  Self-effacing about weaknesses played better there, because Carson putting himself lower and framing his priorities as someone who was handed purpose from above meant Moses was higher as a result.

The ex-soldier was more about prowess.  He didn’t like focusing on weaknesses and failures, and not because of some invisible ranking system.

Carson leaned sideways out of the way, while the waitress set the drinks down.  “Thank you.”

“Of course.  Are you guys ready to order?”

They were.

The phone buzzed with a new text, as soon as the waitress had her back turned.

Carson read it, then placed it on the table.  For the benefit of those who weren’t in a position to read it right away, he said, “On behalf of our departed acquaintance, in the interest of hurting the Cavalcantis… can you tell us about your peers?”

He looked at Sheila.

“My peers?”

“The young men and ladies of the underworld.  Were you completely in the dark, or-?”

“No.  Some, I knew of.  But my father wanted me to know something about who would be around, who to stay away from, who to ingratiate myself to.  Mostly it was a certain circle.  We went to the same schools.”

“Including the Cavalcanti family?”

“Very much the Cavalcanti family.  They were the threat.  Past tense only because they saw through those threats, and run half the Kitchen.”

“And, I assume, you drove some of them around?” he asked Moses.  “Members of that family?”

“Yeah.  Bodyguard work, I guess?”

“What clubs did they like?”

⯁

The world always seemed a bit like a joke.  The more he got to grips with it, it resembled an old wild west movie, where the building faces had nothing behind them.  School, law, social groups, security.

Mia said ninety percent of people were idiots.

Carson felt like ninety percent of the rules were bendable enough to be ignored.

He danced.  Getting into the club had been as easy as attaching himself to three of the more attractive young women in line, winning them over before they reached the door.  When the bouncer had wanted to let them in but turn Carson away, he’d suggested they go somewhere else.  They’d been willing.

The bouncer had decided it was better to let the three of them in than have the three women leave.

He’d danced with them for a while, taking his time to figure out vibes, scout the place.  Cavalcanti run.  The upstairs area was the place to be, where the celebrities of the city went and treated women to a night of free drinks.  But the back, apparently, was where business was done.

The camera system was already compromised.

The problem before them was that Davie Cavalcanti was sharp.  He was indecipherable, they couldn’t work out his plan in full, he had an army around him, and he was constantly taking steps to secure himself, whether it was getting eyes everywhere or gathering weapons.

So they couldn’t go for him.  Not directly.

In their fishing expedition, it had come down to figuring out who in Davie’s orbit was operating that way, then looking at the work they did, and how it might make Davie vulnerable.

Along similar notes, for someone who hacked facilities, the weakest link was not a vulnerability in the code or a piece of hardware- it was the most incompetent person.  In the Cavalcanti family, among the members with any power in the Kitchen, that was the youngest brother, Andre.  He was in his late twenties, now.  Mia had known what businesses he was running and through which proxies by the time they’d talked to Sheila in the burger place.  Sketching everything out, by channels open to the public, landmine free.

Sheila had fleshed out the details.  He’d been a couple years younger than her when she’d been in high school.  His eagerness to prove himself made him push himself a bit beyond his limits, apparently.  He’d been given various Kitchen-operated businesses to run, and when he succeeded, he got more.

That had been eight years ago.  He’d found his niche, settled into it, and was still ambitious.

“Would you say he’s so focused on what comes next, he’s not growing and safeguarding his current business?”

“I wouldn’t.  I don’t want to give you bad information, and he’s the brother I know the least about.  He was still in school when I left.  But if you said it, I’d believe you.  It fits.”

As a consequence of his focus on what came next, finding an equilibrium with each project he was handled, getting reliable people into positions and the keeping it all going, he hadn’t taken the step back to reconsider the details.  To Mia, that would make him one of the ninety percent.  The security system was bare bones.  His security was thin, here, in terms of manpower.

“He’s going wider than tall.  More businesses, not… deeper into the game.  Why?”

“It could be the time he fucked up.”

“Fucked up how?”

“Drunk driving.  Back in high school.  Someone got injured, nothing super major, but I gathered it was big medical bills, insurance got into it, they were going to have physio for the rest of their life or something.  That was what I picked up on, anyway.  I’m remembering things from ages ago, here.”

“It’s good.  What else?”

“It got hushed up but obviously the school rumor mill was on top of it.  Even to other schools.  He didn’t do a great job with how he handled things while talking to police, or handling the other family.  Made things harder.”

“So there’s hard feelings now.  He’s not trusted.  Long slow road to earn his way back in?”

“More like he might not be trusted to handle anything legally questionable for another decade or two.  My papa, when he was asking me to study up on this sort of thing, talked about Andre like he was written off already.  I’d bet money he’s running the businesses but the money laundering part is being handled by someone who answers to Davie, or the oldest.  If my papa wrote him off that easily, I’m sure the Cavalcantis did too.”

Andre didn’t have a small army like Davie did.  He did have some people who worked under him.  But in the course of straining to build himself tall, he’d gone wider and wider, instead.  Stretching too thin, even.

Being a Cavalcanti-run establishment, according to Moses, this was where they’d dropped off the younger members of the family, a lot of the time.  They got perks, access everywhere, including upstairs, which put them near celebrities and let them feel important.  To the families, they were safer here than elsewhere.

From there, it was a question of patience.  Which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.  The pressure was high, and Davie could be trying to zero in on a weakness of theirs, as they were trying to do something similar to him.

The whole Davie situation had unfolded Monday.  Last night had been dead, comparatively, and Thursday night had looked to be similar.  Which was fine, but they’d have to change things up a bit if it hit Friday and things weren’t moving.

They’d gotten lucky- but it was a controlled sort of luck, helped by information from Sheila, who said the kids would usually go out to socialize, every few nights.  This was a regular spot, to the point of being default, if they didn’t have somewhere they really wanted to go.  The daughter of Nicholas Cavalcanti, the oldest brother, was in attendance.  So were some of her cousins, members of the less prominent members of the family.  Some sons, but mostly daughters.

On another night, in different circumstances, in his old life, Carson would have tried to get upstairs.  A challenge to himself for the evening, to get inside, then to get upstairs.  Then to see what he could do.  What people worked, what angles?

Tonight, he waited.

“What about friends?  Friend group?”

“Cousins,” Moses said.

“What?”

Sheila explained, “It’s hard to make trusted friends, sometimes, in these circles.  You can.  But the family will be cautious.  There are limits to what you can say to them, where you can go.  It gets frustrating.  Cousins are safe.  They know.  Your family are your friends.”

It was better if they came to him, instead of the other way around.

Eye contact, posture.  He timed it as necessary to keep her interested.  All the while, messages came in from Mia.  Some texts, but mostly, she controlled the music.  She’d gotten into the wireless early Thursday, long before they’d come here, which meant she was in the cameras, computers.  The lights were randomized, but if someone was looking for it, they’d notice when the music and lighting changed at the same time.

A song with water in the title.  The dance floor went dark, lit only enough so that the material of certain short dresses, glitter in makeup, and metallic flakes all shone on the surface of skin, everything else mere suggestions of body shapes, dark purple against black.

He made himself scarce.  Not running or hiding, but playing it cautious, pulling back.

The code there was the same as the code they used for the playlist, which was similar to the library code.  Certain songs with certain topics meant certain things.

It did limit things to a rhythm as long as the songs, sometimes multiple songs in a row.  But that was fine.  They were pacing things out this evening.

Two songs played before he got the ‘go’ again.  He had to check the song title on his phone, because he wasn’t familiar with it.  A bit of an oversight.

In moments like this, or in getting him to Gio in the gas station, she elevated him.  Made him feel like a superspy.  Someone with a handler.  Already good at navigating situations, she took that to the next level, letting him thread the random cars on roads.

Or figure out how to draw the attention the niece of a mob boss at the right time.  How to step back, so the plan wouldn’t fall to pieces in other circumstances.

A song with honey in the title.  The lights flashed red.

Highland was set.  Moses would be out there.

Why was it the right time?  What had happened?  He didn’t entirely know.  But he trusted her.

Another ‘go’, not that long after the last one.

He made like he was approaching her, a light smile on his face, eye contact steady, then turned sideways, asking for a water.

The oldest of the cousins approached him.  Late twenties.  While Nicole was regularly checking in and making sure everyone was happy and that nobody wanted upstairs, this girl was the one keeping things in order, keeping things from getting unhappy.

She asked for a glass of water too.

“You’re not brave enough to approach me?” she asked, leaning close to his ear.  Grazing his arm with her chest, and not by accident.

“Definitely not brave enough,” he replied, tilting his head.  “You’re intimidating.”

“Ha.”

“Like a lioness.”

“How am I like a lioness?”

“People don’t give lionesses enough credit.  Lions with their big manes get to be kings of the jungle.  But lionesses rule.  You’re taking really good care of all those kids.”

“I try.”

“And you’re athletic.  Powerful.  Can I touch your arm?”

She nodded.

“See?  That’s earned,” he said, touching muscle.  “Swimming?”

“Volleyball.”

He clicked his tongue.  “Fuck.  Thought I had it.”

He gave the ‘fuck’ a bit of extra texture, and a moment of eye contact.

“Do you play?”

“Yeah, I play.  But I play everything.”

“Oh, you’re that type?”

Was it hard to hook someone in from across a bar, and establish a rapport?  Eyefuck them a little, then take them home that night?  No.

But there were any number of things that could pull them away, especially in a group like this.  Mia would be watching for that.  Or controlling for it.  Signaling him.

A song came on, a leading single a band with ‘dragons’ in the name.  The lights turned gold.  There were some boos from the crowd.

Had they been forced to try to do this Friday, there would have been a DJ, which would have required another system for signaling.  On a weeknight, keeping costs down, but staying open for business, especially at the back, it was a set playlist, and computer maintained lights.

This song being on would probably draw attention.  It might be written off as a prank.  Thrown on there by a stupid, young employee.  Or Mia might do something about it.

It might be overshadowed by other events.

Still, he trusted Mia.

The song killed the vibe, the lights were too bright, and apparently the other girls were talking about wanting to leave.

“Come back to my place,” she whispered in his ear.

He nodded, putting an arm around her.  She leaned into him.

“How often are they using you, how often are they using an app to call a ride?”

“Why do that when you can call family?  Plenty of guys like me, on call to be bodyguards, chauffeurs, drive product.”

“So they’d call family for another car?”

Some of the guys who’d come had girls with them, and vice versa.  Two girls were hanging off one another, but it was hard to tell if they were together and tipsy or only drunk.

“We should have called another car earlier,” a guy said.

“They were busy.”

Carson kept his date’s attention, while things played out as they naturally would.  He wondered if Mia was looking, carefully calculating how this might play out.  If she knew addresses, routes, who was how important in the family.

The friends who’d come had gone to the same high school as the other girls.  Most or all had graduated, but friendship ties remained.  Friends of higher standing, or acquaintances.  One daughter might be a daughter of the family lawyer.

The girls climbed into the car, minus a few who might’ve been siblings of the boys who hung back.

Carson was invited in.  It was a tangle of bodies, wedging themselves into even the spacious back of the Midas.  The smell of perfumes, sweat, and alcohol quickly filled the space.  His eyes stung with it.

“Drop us off at my place first?” the girl that was nearly in Carson’s lap said.

He leaned into the corner between seat and door, ankles crossed to minimize the footroom he was taking up, making her as comfortable as possible.  She leaned into him.

“You know where I live, right?”

There was no answer from the driver.

The attitude shifted.  Some didn’t pick up on it right away, but people sat up straighter, looking at one another.

Someone checked their phone, and looked alarmed, showing the girl and the girl’s date, next to her.

No service, Carson knew.

He stopped hugging the oldest cousin so tight, shifting his position too.  He made sure to look as spooked as the rest of them.

“Don’t panic, let’s do this smart,” Nicole said, quiet.  She reached for her handbag, and pulled out a gun.  Small.

“Is that a gun?” Carson asked.

“Shhh!  Jesus.”

It was why he was here.

There was a bump.  The vehicle went up a ramp, and straight into the back of a storage container.

Everything outside the vehicle went dark as the headlights were turned off.  The lights inside the vehicle turned off too.  People shrieked.  A car door slammed.

Nicole, armed, started to move, like she wanted to aim and shoot at the passing shadow outside the car- but it was too slow, and she didn’t want to show her hand, maybe.

The windows might have been bulletproof too.  Moses hadn’t known which cars were.

Cell phones still lacked service, but people used them for light.  The periodic flashes as a phone on flashlight mode caught Carson in the eyes made him squint.

The back was closed up, and they were taken away.  Nearly thirty minutes of driving.

It would be a little while before the alarm was sounded.  Longer before people were specifically looking for this truck with a storage container at the back.

Before then, they reached the city outskirts.  The vehicle stopped.

“Carla Trentino.  Out.  You’re going home.”

“They might be lying,” Nicole whispered.

“Or they’re telling the truth.  They can’t possibly want all of us.”

“Go, see if you can tell people what happened.  In as much detail as possible,” another girl said.

“Carla Trentino.”

“What if we don’t go?”

“Carla Trentino.  Third call, if you’re still in the car when we reach our destination, and you didn’t take your chance to get out, we’re knocking everyone out and leaving you in the mountains to hike back.  Your only control in this situation is whether you hike back two miles or fifteen.”

Carla hesitated, then got out.

“Phone.”

There was a pause.

“Here you go.  Have a good evening, Carla.”

“Fuck you.  What are you doing to my friends?”

“Have a good evening.”

So it went.

A few minutes of driving.  A name called.

Carson was there until near the very end.

“Anyone whose name I haven’t called?”

“Me,” Carson said.  One of the other guys who’d been brought on as a date called out too, saying, “Here!  Luis!”

“The one who said ‘me’.”

“Don’t leave us,” the older cousin said.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he told her.

Then he exited.

“Phone?”

Carson handed it to Highland, who slammed the door and locked it.

Leaning in closer, Highland whispered, “And?”

“They’re scared.  Nicole has a gun.”

“We heard, yeah.  Annoying.  But we can knock them out at the end.  Can you confirm the third girl is Addi Arcuri?  We weren’t sure, with the hair and makeup.  Details didn’t line up.”

“Yeah.  Hair extensions.”

“Okay.  Come on.”

They closed up the back.  Carson climbed into the passenger seat of the truck, where a laptop sat, plugged into the center console.  He moved the laptop to his lap, and watched through the camera, noting the four people at the back.  Nicole was keeping the gun out of sight.

“Can they hear?”

“Moses climbed in and tried it, after I dealt with the drivers.  I could make out some.  Not while we’re whispering, not while the door’s closed.  They can’t hear us at the front, here.”

“Let’s drop some details next time?  I’ll shift my voice, accent?”

“Okay.”

“You know the three girls in the back right now, the kind of ransom they’d command?” Carson asked.

Highland did not look impressed.

“I’m not saying we should do anything about it.  But the scale of what we’ve pulled.”

“I’m more worried than anything,” Highland said.  “Let’s get this done.  One more to get rid of, then we go.”

Carson watched the video for a bit, as the truck resumed motion.  He could study expressions, see the frustration and fear.  One of the girls, Addi, was crying.  The cousin Carson had lured in was consoling her.  Nicole was all business.

We’re doing you a favor, in a way.

⯁

Mia was in her office, computers around her.  She looked up at him.

“You should wash off, change.  If the kids see you…”

“I can explain it away,” he said, posing against the doorframe.  He was still dressed for the club.  “Did you watch my dancing?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you jealous?  Or with the flirting?  It was for the sake of the job.”

“I know.  I don’t get jealous,” she said.  With the lights dim, most of the illumination against her face came from the screens.

“Sad?” he asked.  He walked around the desk, and put his arms around her shoulders.

On the screens, Addi Arcuri, Nicole Cavalcanti, and Sara Barese, Nicole’s cousin, were each on two different cameras, each taking up a quarter of a screen.  Other sections were devoted to other things, other feeds.  Looking to see what the response was.

Each of the girls was in a cell.  The same sort they used for keeping custody of people for clients.

Refitted in this case, though.  Mia had been up all night, working with someone else she’d called in, from among her past clients.  She’d been a zombie at work.

“No, not especially sad either,” she said.

She still looked tired.

“You know,” he said, leaning over her shoulder to better see her face.  “The moments I was happiest, most thrilled, was when you were sending me signals.  Because those were the moments you were with me.”

She didn’t look like she believed him.

Part of the initial appeal of Mia had been like the upper floor in the club.  Could he challenge himself to access that exclusive space, with charm and careful attention to the people and angles he needed to exploit to get there?

Could he get past this woman’s paranoia, hard exterior, doubts, and reach her?

Maybe that was true.

But like a drug addict would invent reasons for why it was very reasonable to take the next hit, even after years of sobriety, he suspected that rationalization came from something else.

It wasn’t the ‘hit’ of getting to play at being a super spy, either.  Getting to operate at his best level and then some, a personality quirk feeling like a superpower, when everything worked out, because she was controlling for details and watching his back behind the scenes.

It was a need.

“I got a message,” she said.  “Coded, from the contact.  But not exactly right.”

“Davie?  Playing at being the contact?”

“Yeah.  I think we should do the job anyway.”

He exhaled heavily through his nose, shifted position, and then buried his nose and mouth against the point her neck met her shoulder.  So stiff.

Taking in a breath, he could smell her soap and shampoo.

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to argue it?”  she asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know.”

“I trust you.  But it sounds insane.”

“Let’s do the job if we can keep our distance.  They’re going to come at us hard.  Suspicious.  I’ve handled the security feeds for the club, we collected phones from each of the girls, we scrubbed from phone and cloud while we were at it.  All they have of you is witness description.  By the time to think to look at you, you won’t be fresh in anyone’s mind.”

“And no reason to think I’m suspect.”

“Minimal reason.  They might wonder if they can’t find you when they go looking.  Working for the contact, even if it’s not really the contact, keeps us busy.  If we’re busy, that’s an alibi of sorts.”

“Okay.  Let’s try, then.  One thing?”

“Please.  Tear my ideas to shreds.”

“I think you’re missing the forest for the trees.  They’re going to look at the big picture.  Not the details.”

“Okay,” she said.  “Hm.”

“There’s a plan, right?” he asked.

“There’s also a child of ours walking down the hallway right now, and you’re covered in other people’s body glitter.”

He chuckled lightly.  Then he stepped through to the adjacent bathroom, out of sight.  He glanced through the crack between open door and doorframe.

Valentina.

“Can I see?”

“See what?”

“What you’re doing.  I already saw some, a few days ago.  I know you were gone all night, last night.  Carson was gone tonight.  You were busy, had me babysitting.”

“The best thing you can do is… pay less attention to all that.  Be forgetful about our schedules.  Focus on homework and other things.”

“Mia,” Carson said, as he washed his face.  “Let her.  The idea was always that the door would be open for the kids to get involved, right?  If Ripley was this age…?”

Mia frowned.

But she might’ve gestured, because Valentina approached and Mia didn’t say or do anything about it.

“Oh my god.  Nicole?  And is that Addi?”

“They’re fine.  We’re doing them a favor,” he told Valentina.

“A favor?”

“The moves your father was making.  They say a thief dreads another thief more than anyone.  The thing that makes the most sense to us is that he wanted his family out of the way of reprisals.  He was building up forces in anticipation of a coup.  The rest of the family is… not focused on covering weaknesses.  They’re not paying attention.  not at home.  Andre Cavalcanti let security slide in a bad way.  They feel safe.  So the question is… why is your father scared?” Mia asked.  “Why reach out to us for an escape route?”

“Because I saw something?”

“Maybe.  That might have accelerated his timetable, or made him want to get family out of the way while he’s doing things that might upset you all.,” Carson said.

Mia explained, “We’re pretty sure he is or was going to pull something.  So our plan is his theoretical plan.  But doing it badly.  We anticipate what he wants to do, or the moves he might have wanted to make and dismissed, and we do that beforehand.  Leaving trails that can go back to him.  If we make correct guesses, trails will connect in a way that seals his fate.  This is the first move we made.  Besides rescuing you.”

“Your uncle Nicholas’ daughter, kidnapped under the supervision of your uncle Andre, family lawyer’s daughter.  Daughter of one cousin Davie doesn’t get along with, too,” Carson said.  “Davie’s own daughter gone under stranger circumstances, with a big show happening over it, the timing all wrong.”

“You think it’ll seem suspicious?”

“It’ll get people thinking about what’s happening inside the family, instead of outside,” Carson said.

Valentina nodded.

“Well, they’re not your uncles or cousins anymore,” Mia said.

“Uh huh?” Valentina made a quizzical sound.  She rubbed the sleep out of one eye with the heel of a hand.  “Um.  What can I do?”

“I said it before, forget details.  Trust us,” Mia said.

“If you can tell us anything about the family, who’s who, what to expect, it would round out details we got from elsewhere,” Carson said.

“Yeah.  Okay.  I want to stop him.  I’ll think.”

Carson reassured her, “those three are out of the line of fire.  And fire should start being exchanged- nobody’s going to be happy.  This is impossible to ignore, people will be looking for answers.”

“Looking at us for those answers,” Mia said.  “Which is why we take the job, grit our teeth, prove ourselves.  I’ll find someone to look after those three and that situation.  Then we use signals and codes to organize with the people we’re bringing on to help, while doing the work for him.  Same way we snuck Valentina out while doing business as usual, but easier, since we’ll have done more to prepare.”

“Um, two things,” Valentina said.  “First off… can we leave Addi where she is?  She’s kind of the biggest cunt in the universe.”

“No,” Mia said.  “It’s important they’re found on a property Davie owns, at the end.  Safe and sound, ideally.”

“Gotta organize that,” Carson said, quiet.

“Working on it.”

“Can I… do that, then?” Valentina asked.  “Not the property thing.  But taking care of them.  So you don’t have to hire someone.  That’s the second thing I wanted to ask.”

Mia looked at Carson.  He nodded.

“Maybe,” Mia said.

“There’d be rules.  You have to treat Addi fairly, anything else raises questions.  Can’t speak to them, no matter what.  Feed them, answer emergencies,” Carson explained.

“This is a lot of trust to be extending,” Mia said.

She sounded worried.

“Do you want to veto?” he asked her.  “I trust your instincts.  But I also think our new daughter is bored and that’s dangerous.  And we do need someone in place there.  You’re already calling her family.  She already knows enough to blow everything up in a bad way.”

“I’m not going to blow everything up in a bad- I’m not.”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow, Valentina,” Mia said.  “I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours and I’ll be busy later.  I know you haven’t slept well either.  But Carson’s convincing me.  Maybe.”

“Okay.”

“Carson.  Wash up?  Come to bed.”

He grinned.

“Not like that.  Not tonight.  I’m tired enough.”

“Still smiling.  Love coming to bed to find you there.  Missed you last night.”

Would she smile one day when he said something like that?  He was okay with it if not.

He stripped down, then showered, glad for the cold water after the humid, smoke-touched heat of the trip back – a bit of a walk from the drop-off site to the car they’d stowed.

He was someone who could go anywhere.  Find a place in any group, whether it was college do-nothings, gangsters, or celebrities hanging out.  Maybe some of it was natural talent, some of it genetic good looks and a face that made him easier to trust.  Some of it practiced.

But there was a downside, he’d found.  Skirting the rules with school had meant his grades had suffered.  The same restless energy that let him move from person to person, group to group, and find people who’d treat him like a best friend left him restless at work, chafing, looking for the same sorts of shortcuts and little manipulations.  Over time, that saw people lose patience with him, or they would start to see through him.  This job with Mia aside, he hadn’t worked a proper job for more than six months.  When a job even wanted him.

Family, school, work, friend groups… he could get in, but he couldn’t stay.

Except here.

Wearing a towel, he stopped at open doorways to look in on Ripley and Tyr.  They adored him.  He adored them back.

Valentina was awake, and looked at him.

“We’ll find you a place.  A role,” he said, quiet.

“Okay.”

Then to Mia.  He left the towel on the back of the door and climbed in behind her.  His amazon.  Brilliant.  Strong.  Dangerous.  Exciting.  She brought out dimensions of him.  He fought to keep up, filling gaps, help her where she needed it.

He conformed his front to her back, putting one arm under the pillow, the other around her.

“Naked?  No,” she murmured.  “Only sleep.”

“I know,” Carson said,  “Only sleep.  You said.”

He settled in.

Mia had flown a drone out, putting it in view of a camera they were sure to check, tracking the trucks on the road.  If Davie Cavalcanti’s family didn’t know about his investment in drones, to have eyes in the sky and pilots for his gun drones, they would eventually find out.

It was peaceful, the two of them together like this, while three families would be going insane with worry and grief, hearing from friends of the three captives that they’d been kidnapped.  Members and friends of the family would be angry their sons and daughters had been at risk, left to walk back into the city at night.

Mention had been made of Davie, in earshot of the four captives.  Carson had modified his voice.  Highland had done most of the talking.  Then they’d dropped off the boy and took the three daughters away.

Ripples would extend across the family.  The worst of it would, with guidance, find Davie.  To be sealed when the three captives were found on one of his properties.

They’d bring more out.  Highland was all in on this job.  Moses had driven interference, watching for pursuit, and then disposed of the bodies of the drivers Highland had replaced.  They had key information.  Valentina could provide more.

Maybe, in the end, Davie would get the same treatment he’d given others.

In somewhat mixed messages from her earlier statements, Mia moved Carson’s hand to her chest, and laid a hand over it.  To keep it there.

His place to stay.

---

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