Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

---

In their system of codes, time was money, but other things held true.  Eating was a second element they could drop into a code- be it a text or a book from the library.  If there was a cookbook in the library code, it meant there was a possibility of danger.  When the contact had sent his ‘wrong number’, he’d mentioned feeding the kids.  Carson had suggested dinner.

In including that, the messages signaled that their person here was volatile, dangerous.  Which was true.  He carried a gun.

If danger and violence were a certainty, it’d be meat.

They were now at the point where meat was in play.

Carson drove to the cabin, avoiding roads where they were likely to be seen, and places she’d flagged as having some cameras nearby- one big box store at the edge of Camrose.  One nursing home.  The driving felt painfully slow, considering they had a problem in play, but visibility was nil and it got worse if a car came the other direction and headlights illuminated the smoke.

The road became narrower, cutting through the woods.  Her eyes scanned the trees when they weren’t watching their ex-client, aware of the signs and other landmarks that she’d put cameras by.

With some of those cameras, she made sure they weren’t being followed.

Another part of their code was disconnected.  The contact mentioned paintball- a game.  That was how the contact communicated the type of job to them.  Carson and her used hiking when communicating between one another.  Giving a client a new identity, a new life, and returning them to the contact to go somewhere she and Carson didn’t ask about.

If the client mentioned anything fantastical, like dragons or wizards, that was another type of job.  Between her and Carson, it’d be the bank.  Safety deposit boxes.  It wasn’t a job they did as often, but it paid well.  Not giving someone the freedom of a new life, but taking freedom.  Some of the same tools and resources they used, like watching their backs, tracking, secure locations, and safeguards, applied to keeping a person, or keeping a thing.

A lot of the time, it was escrow work.  Holding onto collateral, sometimes mutual, or holding onto supply, money, or other things at stake, while groups that had presences across North America had their little tête-à-tête.  Verifying things went okay, then releasing each item to the person it was meant to go to.

More complicated than it sounded.

In other cases, it was longer-term custody of a person.  Some had had more of a personal dynamic – one dad who’d let his own daughter be kidnapped, so he and his ex could both pay the ransom amount, except he’d get his money back.  It put the ex in a bad financial position for an anticipated fight over the business.

You should know I found that one distasteful.  Using a kid as a pawn?  But sometimes you have to consider what happens if you take a job, and what happens if you don’t.  That man was too set on his plan, it was important to him, to use the child against his wife.  He would’ve gone to someone else.  Someone less kind to kids.

They’d taken custody of one girlfriend, held to try to pressure someone from gunning down the gang in a self-imposed mission to behead it.  Hadn’t worked.  One elderly man who the various sons of a not-entirely-legitimate company had worried would be used as a bargaining chip in their internal war to succeed it, if one of them looked after him.  One of those sons had come back to Mia and Carson for one corporate assignment, a man, held until he’d given up his password- he’d found out he was due to be fired and had encrypted essential backend resources he’d set up before they could tell him and escort him out, so he could make demands to be rehired at a higher position in the company.

They could do it nicely – the child she’d looked after hadn’t even realized what was happening.  And they could do it in austere, prison-like conditions.

This, Mia supposed, was a third option.  Less nice.  A shorter custody.  But the man was in custody.  She’d watched as he, somewhat awkwardly, gun laid on the counter in arm’s reach, finished stuffing the holes in the door with wadded toilet paper.

Until he didn’t need to use a hand.  One hand free.

The cabin was nice.  It was important that it was nice.  When someone came to them, they’d give them the illusion of choice.  To find a place to stay that met certain criteria, with factors controlled to ensure there was really only one option.  Some numbers on the list would go to Mia, who could say there were no vacancies.

The goal was to get them here, where all factors could be controlled.

All except one.  The client, or ex-client, in this case.

It was two stories, the wood normally lacquered amber, with big windows, and trimmed bushes under the long deck that made it feel like a part of the nature around it.  Without the smoke dulling the view, it was a pretty picture.  For people in tense situations, it was meant to be a place they could relax, calm down, and get ready for the next leg of their journey.  They would wait here until things were ready.

Mia was capable of having paperwork done the night of, but there were other factors they watched out for.  Addictions and withdrawal.  Some people got cold feet and wanted to go back to their old lives.  Some did call out, but most who did learned their lesson fast.  This guy had done it in a way that suggested he couldn’t cut ties, and he couldn’t go back to his old life.

“Thoughts?” Carson asked, as they parked outside.

“You have the emergency medical kit?”

“In the back.”

“Here,” she said.  She brought up a paint program.  Her laptop let her touch the screen to drag out some lines.  She painted the ground floor of the cabin, in rough strokes.  The bathroom took up one corner.  Between the bathroom and the kitchen was a pantry and some appliances.

She put on her mask.  The standard was a filter for smoke, and eyes had to suffer, but there were full-face ones.  They had a way of fogging up, but the eyes would at least be okay.  While she got ready, she explained, “Wall between kitchen and bathroom?  That’s logs.  They support the upper floor.”

“That gun he has isn’t big enough to shoot through a tree.”

“It’d have to go through the logs and the shelving, or the fridge.  So we keep that wall between us,” she said.  “Mask on?”

“Mask’s on.”

She opened the door, stepping outside.  Her build was big enough getting out of a car always felt a bit awkward.  Carson got out on the other side.

She opened the trunk, and Carson reached for one bag, pulling it partially out before dragging it so it sat on top of the others.  Following through on her earlier thought.  Medical.  Enough to do an emergency blood transfusion, amputation, patch up a bullet wound.

She pulled out a coil of medical tubing.  There was a saline bag attached.  She brought that too.  She dug for and found a syringe.  “Microphone?”

“Microphone or microphone stand?”

“Hmmm.  Think it’s in this bag.  Framing, restraints, and setup.  We done with this bag?  If you’re rigging something, tape?”

“Yes.  Or zip ties.”

He got the tape out of the medical bag, zipped up, then pulled out another bag.  There was a microphone stand.

“I’m curious what you’re going to do with that.”

The visibility was so bad she could barely see the front of the car.  Her and Carson, in an intimate space, the rest of the world out there, past the smoke, hazy.  Her head hurt -it always hurt- but it was secondary, background, with her heart pounding, a crisis right in front of them.

She checked what their ex-client was doing, first.  He’d stuffed the holes in the door, and with hands and arms free, pulled out drawers from the cabinet beside him, and opened the cabinet beneath the sink.  More toilet paper, some cleaning things, a plunger, a toilet brush.  He was going through the things in the drawers- not a lot there, by design.

She motioned to Carson, passing him the keys with one key held out.

He used it to unlock the door.

Even being quiet, they couldn’t be silent.  The door shut behind them, to keep the smoke out.

Inside, in contrast to the dull smoke, it was bright.  Sparkling, even, with lots of lights overhead, filling the open-air living room and kitchen space, reflected in the many windows.  It smelled like the meal their ex-client had cooked before he’d come in.  And like smoke, but that might have been what was clinging to her.

In terms of sound, there wasn’t even the plop of a droplet of water from the tap.

Quietly, she set her laptop aside, opening it.

He’d resumed his prior position, waiting, gun barrel near the door, entire body tense.

This was the closest she’d gotten to a client in a long time.  She liked her insulation.  Carson would do the occasional contact, mask on, putting himself at risk, if they agreed to it, and if the client took the necessary steps.  She tended to stay further back.

But this fell into her areas of expertise.  She’d set up this space.  She’d set up the trap.  She knew what was at play.

She extended the microphone stand out to its full length.

The man in the room moved, arm swinging sideways.  He fired into the wall, three quick shots, and it was loud enough Mia almost went to her knees.

Her ears rang in the aftermath, playing into her background headache.  Her heart pounded so hard she felt like it was affecting her grip on the microphone stand.

It had to be worse in that enclosed bathroom.

The stand whisking out to its full length and hitting its limit must have sounded like racking a gun barrel or cocking a shotgun.

“Hey!” their ex-client shouted, through the tube in the door.

Now that he wasn’t holding his breath, he was wheezing a bit.  Breathing hard.

She peeked around the corner, and saw the door, with little bits of fragmented wood lying across the living room, where the bullets had punched through.  She eyeballed the distance, then went to the pantry.

“I know you’re there!”

Broom.  She undid the broom head, then slid the end of the broom into the niche the microphone was meant to sit into.  Carson held it, and she got the tape.  It made its ripping sound as she wound it around.

Tonight was such a waste.  The amount of repair work that they’d need to do.  Each bullet, the hole, and the damage would have to be accounted for.  This place had to be pristine.  They’d lose money for tonight’s job.

With the handle of the broom providing the necessary extra length, she set up the IV tubing.  She gave it lots of extra play at the end, so it dangled, but wound it around the broom, taping it in places.  Then around the length of the microphone stand.

He banged on the wall with the gun handle, shouting as he banged, “Hey!”

The ringing in her ears was messing with her.  It was one of the things she was weak against.  Being sick, ringing in the ears, loud noises, headaches that compounded the headache she always had.

“I’ve got one more drone!  Kept one back, in case!  I can pay more!”

That makes it more necessary to deal with you, not less.  More loose ends.

Maybe sensing that, Carson gave her shoulder a rub.  He took over for a minute, finishing the coiling of the tubing around the microphone, while she rubbed at her neck and shoulder, and got some water.

“Bag?” he whispered.

Glass of water still in one hand, she took it, and lifted down a pan from a hook on the wall.  She put the bag there instead.

“I don’t know what we’re doing,” Carson asked, quiet.

She kept an eye on the screen and their ex-client, while going back to the kitchen sink.

Agitated by the voices, apparently not seeing any point in calling out, their ex-client turned his focus elsewhere.  Still breathing through the tube, covering it with his hand when he needed to pull his face away, so it wouldn’t be contaminated.  He got the plunger.

He took a breath from the tube.

She went for the space under the sink, and got drain cleaner.

Breath taken, their client shot, again.

Still as sense-rattling.  Still painfully loud.

The sound of the ringing in her ears was about the level of the sound of the man’s wheezing.

What had he done?  Carson was watching the screen intently.  He didn’t seem to like the sound either, but he was managing better.  His hand settled on her back as she went to stand by him, looking.

The shot had been aimed at the end of the plunger, laid across the end of the sink.

The bottom of the bathroom cabinet had been made hardy, and had been caulked and sealed so gas wouldn’t flow down and out through it, but with a wedge made from the plunger handle, and damage from the bullet, he was able to pry up a section near where the sink drained out.

There was more of an opening below.

The gas was heavier than air, and a hole in the floor meant it’d flow down and out.  That didn’t stop the container in the vent above from producing more gas, but… she mentally adjusted.  The gas would be less effective, the time the room was dangerous would be shorter.

On a hunch, she looked.  At some point she hadn’t been looking, it looked like he’d managed to tear the bag beneath the door.  So that would be leaking out too.

Based on how he was moving his head and feeling around, he was probably realizing there wasn’t a way out through the floor.

She put her rigging to work.  Keeping one end on the floor, she reached the extended pole, made of broom handle and microphone stand, extending it around the corner, toward the door.

She rested it on the doorknob.

The rattling of the knob made their ex-client snatch up his gun.  He fired through the door.

She took time to reel from the noise of it, wincing.  Next time she got anywhere near a gun, she intended to bring ear protection.

With careful rotation and adjustment of the pole, she got the trailing length of tube to slide into that cardboard tube.

He reacted, pulling back.  He’d felt something.

She rotated it, retreating the medical tubing, before he could try peering through the hole.  Except he didn’t.  After a few seconds, he went back for another breath.

“Hold it,” she whispered to Carson.

He nodded.

“If he tries to check it, or does anything, make sure he doesn’t see.”

Another nod.

With the syringe, she put drain cleaner into the tube.  Opening the bag up, squeezing it, she could force the water forward, pushing the dark blue of the drain cleaner along the length.  It traveled its coiled path along the microphone stand, down the broom, and a droplet hit the floor.

She gave it an experimental squeeze.  It sprayed.  A bit of a feeble spray, but… it worked.

Before there was no drain cleaner left in the tubing, she moved it, threading it through the cardboard tube, aiming it… and gave it that squeeze.

A spray of drain cleaner into their ex-client’s open mouth.

Corrosive, caustic.  He was already wheezing.  He pulled away with a strangled, sputtering noise, grabbed the cardboard tube, and crushed it in his hand, pulling.

The broom handle clattered against the door, hitting the floor, but with her awkward leverage, she couldn’t really pull it away before he got more of a grip on the medical tubing and hauled back on it.

It didn’t really matter, though.

She waited, watching to see what he did next.

He moved his head into the bathroom cabinet, beneath the sink, and used cupped hands, apparently, to try and breathe only the air from below.

Which wouldn’t be perfect.  The gas was heavy.  He was lying in a pool of it.

He wasn’t dying, though.  He was wheezing, coughing, retching.  That drain cleaner had to have hit the back of his throat. But he wasn’t dying.  He stayed where he was, on his belly, lying awkwardly across the floor and broken bottom of the cabinet, hand with the gun beneath him, aimed in the direction of the door.

She didn’t feel like it was right to talk, so, aside from general questions and answers typed out on the laptop, she and Carson waited in silence.

After about an hour and a half, she typed:

One of us should go home.

Carson pointed at her.

She considered, but with the ringing in her ears, the headache, and the fact this was still her mess, her job, she didn’t feel right being the one to go back.

Tell them I had to handle something at the hospital.

Carson paused, then nodded.

Pick you up in the morning?

She nodded.  Then typed out: 10.

Carson ctrl-A’ed, then deleted the text, stood, stretching, and looked over at the wall that separated them from their ex-client.

She motioned for him to take the microphone stand, and he did, untaping it, putting the broom handle aside, then left.

Leaving her there.

A place she had the advantage in everything except time.

She took the time to go into the pantry, found the water shutoff, and, after refilling her glass, cranked off the water.

That done, she settled down, stirring only when he started making more retching sounds, and again, when he took a moment to wipe his ass.  He tried to toss the wadded paper into the toilet, and missed.

A full hour passed, and he stirred again, gun gripped with renewed strength.  She sat up.

He was breathing the air.  He kept his shirt up around his mouth, and then set to work, prying up parts of the bathroom cabinet.

Trying to pry up floorboards.

When that didn’t work, he worked on the door.  He tried to remove the top of the toilet tank, and found it bolted on.  He used a piece of the broken cabinet instead, slamming it into where bullet holes had made the door weak.

The exertion made him cough, and when he coughed, he retched.  The stuff he retched out was clear with shocks of dark through it.  The video quality wasn’t good enough to tell her more.

Cameras could be discreet and cameras could be high quality, and they could be both, but if she got both, she’d have less.  She’d decided she’d rather have more eyes.

Every decision you make has a price.

Including calling someone when you’re not supposed to.

He managed to do enough damage to the door that he could grab a part and haul on it.  He wedged the now-tapered end of the plunger into the gap, and worked on it, pulling at the section of door, pushing the plunger into the widened gap, then repeating the process.

Eventually it cracked and came free.

He’d be finding that the door was hollow, and inside that hollow was rebar.  Not a lot, but enough that it would be impossible to squeeze himself through.  Another thing she’d had to make decisions about.  If she’d used a lot of metal, the door would have been heavier, which could have set off alarm bells.

Pulling off his shirt, he went to wet it in the sink, and found the tap didn’t work.  He wet it in the toilet, instead, and tied it around two separate lengths of rebar.  He used the plunger, twisting, using the wet cloth and torque to bend the bars, widening the gap.

She could smell the filth.  He hadn’t flushed, and if he had, the bowl wouldn’t have refilled.

He kept working, but that work got slower and clumsier over time.  There were more coughs, and more often, the coughs were followed by vomiting.

In tearing apart the door, he found the rigging that was meant to deploy the bag.  He hammered at it and eventually tore it off, to see if he could squeeze beneath.

Lying there on his belly, careful to keep the gun in arm’s reach, he had three different vomiting fits before he found the strength to try to squeeze beneath.  He failed, and then had another vomiting fit.  More dark liquid.

To while away the time, she played solitaire, the window set to occupy half the screen, the video occupying the other half.

“I got them.”

She looked away from the screen.  The voice was strangled, weak.

“Wanted to save Kadie.  Get away.  Some money.  Stay… place here.  Let heat-“

He cough-retched.

Mia remained silent.

“-die.  Explain later.  Find people who-”  His throat might’ve been too dry or damaged to get the word out.  She heard the gasping attempts.  “-Listen.”

His tone changed.  Plaintive.

“They were hurting so many people.  Hurting us.  Selling weapons-“

He paused, heaving for breath.  He coughed, but managed to avoid vomiting again.  Or he couldn’t.

She put the laptop aside, giving him her full attention.

“-factions,” he continued.  “Told people.  They made me-“

More heaving, wheezing breaths.

“-I’m the bad guy?” he asked.

It seemed to take him a while to gather the strength to keep talking.

“No cons- consequences anymore.”

She waited.  A part of her really wanted him to stop already.  Every word sounded painful to get out, and he barely seemed to know what he was saying.

“Got’m though,” he mumbled, barely audible now.  He said a word she couldn’t make out, but could guess.  Consequences.

“You got them, Nathaniel.  People saw, people noticed,” she said, breaking the silence.

No response.  No surprise on his end.

She watched on the feed.  He was still moving.

“Nathaniel?” she called out.  She moved her clear, full-face mask out of the way so her voice wouldn’t be muffled.

Silence.

“If you have a spare bullet, would you use it on yourself?  I can see on camera, so don’t be clever.  Don’t put yourself through this.”

He didn’t.

After a while, she moved her laptop back into her lap.  She played some games of solitaire, then started making notes about what she’d need to do here, organizing.

It took him two more hours to die, lying there.  The wheezing didn’t get worse, it only got quieter, until there wasn’t anything anymore.

She gave it another thirty minutes before putting the laptop aside.

There was a hundred-pack of single-use latex gloves under the sink.  She put some on.

She’d seen him on video, but seeing him in reality was different.  His face was fatter.  His eyes were bloodshot, the irises paler than they should’ve been.  The gas.  He had blood between tooth and gum.  It looked like his tongue had burned and swelled a little.  The weight of his head pressing down like it was, combined with the pool of bloody vomit, it created the illusion that the side of his face was sinking into the floor.

It all smelled very bad, even with her mask filtering it.

Belatedly, she realized that the reason he hadn’t responded to her in that final conversation was that he’d probably deafened himself with the gunshots in an enclosed space with lots of hard surfaces.

“I would have liked to give you that second chance,” she told the body.

She undressed, putting her clothes aside, and got an electric carving knife and some trash bags from the kitchen.  She stood over the body, naked, except for the mask she wore.

It wasn’t her interest to be perverse, but she didn’t want to get bodily fluids on her clothes, and if anyone walked in and saw her, the fact she was naked would be the least of her concerns.

Might as well do it here.  There’s already a mess.

When you’re disposing of a body, be aware of the cracks and crevices in the environment, and on your own body.  Fingernails, baseboards, tiles.  Know what retains DNA and what doesn’t, and don’t send stray hairs flying by cutting across a tract of the body with body hair.

A thorough cleaning with bleach will cover any blood, if we do a thorough enough clean, which we will.  Let’s minimize spatter, though.  All the usual principles apply here.  Don’t give them a reason to start looking, but if they do notice, don’t give them anything.  Make every road a hard one.

⬥

An I, an o, and a light scuff mark, pale green and a spot of rust against a dark green background.

Shouting.

Dread.

It wasn’t so much a recurring nightmare as a place her nightmares liked to touch on.  Nightmares came easily to her, and it was like her brain knew a way to deliver that anxiety and dread was to go back to that.

Io-

Io.

She’d dismembered Nathaniel, bagged him, cleaned, showered, washed the outside of the bags, sorted out the rest of the cabin as best as she could, and then went to rest.

Anxiety and worries chewed at her, enough she couldn’t sleep, so she’d gotten up, cleaned and showered again, giving everything a final wipe-down with bleach.

She hadn’t really slept, so much as she’d collapsed from exhaustion.

Then she’d woken up at the first sound outside- it wasn’t anyone or anything.

Her focus went to the door and the bullet holes she hadn’t been able to address last night.  Things took a new light with the illumination of dawn shining in through the windows, even if the world outside was a dingy yellow.

Carson came at nine fifty-eight, and found her ready, the door from the bathroom removed and taken apart as much as it could be with the welded rebar, and all other debris set aside.  Two coolers had the black trash bags with Nathaniel Abate in them, each folded and arranged neatly and taped.  A bag of ice had a singular black trash bag inside it.

“How was it?”

“Took a while.  I think he bled into his mouth and throat and vomited himself to death, more than the gas killed him.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Mia replied.  She smiled a bit.  She didn’t feel like a convincing smiler.

“Anything you need from me?”

“Load up?  I’m sore.  Was hunched over the body and scrubbing the floor and tub on hands and knees for a while.”

“Okay.  We’re getting older, huh?”

She smiled again.  It was maybe a bit more convincing.  She liked the idea of getting old.

“The head?” he asked, indicating the bag with ice.

“Yeah.  Washed and rinsed it, shampooed his hair, ran water through his mouth and out the neck hole.  Flushed the ear canals.”

“I’ll leave it for the contact to pick up.”

She nodded.

Whatever job you do, giving people new identities or escrow work, or any of the other jobs, accountability and professionalism are everything.  You’ve got to find a way to leave no room for doubt.  In a case like this, if someone comes to us for a second chance, to disappear and get a new life, and it doesn’t work out, there are two options.

Hide it, or own it.

She’d started out in the hospital, got a lead on some identities, and looked for a place to sell it.  Maybe the most exposed she’d ever been and hopefully would ever be.  Through that, she’d found the contact.  Someone else who did the same thing- he never gave her a name or identification, but she had ideas.  Just in case.  He associated with various gangs and groups, with some ruled out – including white nationalists, which Mia was glad about, but also a few of the predominantly black gangs.  They’d violated the contact’s boundaries, before, he said, so he refused on principle forever, now- it was why she’d known some of the stuff in the news yesterday hadn’t been a potential client.

Over the last decade, she’d taken over his role.  Before, giving people new identities and a route out of town had been a thing the contact did, but now he relayed people to her for the same.  It was better for him because she did a better and more thorough job, and it gave her a layer of insulation.

Part of that, though, was that the contact got some say in things.  And in the choice between hiding things or owning them, he wanted to own it.  Too many clients of his would follow up on people they had ties to.  She could set terms and rules, but some of it was out of her hands.

Contact’s rules.  If they didn’t see the job through, the head would be left with the money.  People would hear he tried to disappear and he fucked up.  The fact they left the money was supposed to communicate that they were being responsible about this.

She didn’t like it, that it violated her principle about not being seen or giving anyone a reason to investigate or start looking.  But it was a cost of having the access and the start she’d had.

“I wonder if we could extricate ourselves,” she murmured.

“Extricate?” Carson asked, as he got into the driver’s seat.

“From the contact.”

“Hard.  He’d see it as a problem.  Competition.”

“Meaning he starts seeing us as the problem.”

“Yeah,” Carson agreed.

She’d already gone over this in her head many times.  It was why retiring was a problem.

She was tired, and stating the obvious to get a sanity check from Carson helped.

In this sort of thing, you’ll find it’s easiest to keep going.  It’s when you stop or change course that problems come up.  Or when you slack off.  So many people will rob, cheat, steal, con, kill, and then because they get away with it, they get lazy, they give themselves slack.  That’s when you make mistakes.

And if they retired, only to find they needed to get back into the game, because of a sudden issue at home, or health problem, a need to move, or some indication law enforcement was focusing in on them, in a way they couldn’t handle without outside help, well, restarting was suspicious too.

Just keep going.  Taper off, if anything, keeping that same bar of quality.

“Why?” Carson asked.  He was loading the back of the truck.

“Hm?”

“Sorry.  Were you dozing?  You must be wiped out, night like that.”

“Thinking.”

“Why are you thinking about extricating ourselves from the contact again?”

She sighed.  Why was she?

“We were talking about Nathaniel there maybe being someone the contact had an attachment to.  He’s volatile, not a usual choice.  Or we’d get more warning, I guess?”

“Yeah.  I have questions.”

“I can ask.”

“Carefully, please.”

“Of course.  I’ll run the process by you before I go to drop off the head?”

“Please.”

They settled into the truck, with Carson driving.  She didn’t open her laptop.

“Are you going to be okay this weekend?  Being sore and tired?  You told Rip you’d help her with the bookshelf.”

Mia winced at the thought.

He let out a soft chuckle.  “She’ll forgive you if you say no.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Good for you.”

He reached out, hand at her neck, thumb running at the corner of her jaw.

“Dreamed about Io again.”

“Intense night, makes sense that you would.”

“Mm.”

“They suspended the elections,” he said.  “Threats of violence.”

“Mm?” she murmured, settling in at a diagonal, between seat and door.  “Oh.  Yeah.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m not.  Saw it coming, kind of.  I’m just…”

There was a note in her voice- not plaintive, but emotion poked through.  It made her wonder if she sounded like Nathaniel had, at the end.  Disjointed.

“Tired.”

“Yeah.”

“Sleep on the way back, I won’t mind.  And if you have a bad dream, I’ll wake you.”

“Thank you,” she murmured.  Her eyes tracked the trees, and the distant mountains.  The distant wildfire had moved further out to the horizon, but it had left things blasted and black in its wake.

She shut her eyes, and the patterns against the back of her eyelids were some mixture of that blasted and black landscape, the mess of Nathaniel in pieces on the bathroom floor, and bloody suds.  With that as her visual landscape to start her off, she drifted off.

⬥

“Would you rather kiss Dad, but he’s trapped in your mom’s body, or kiss your mom while she’s trapped in Dad’s body?  Hot and heavy?” Ripley asked.  She lay on her back in the space where the old bookshelf had been, looking up at some fittings.

“Where are you getting this?” Mia asked.

“My friends.  We were playing ‘would you rather’ and that was the best one.”

“I’d rather kiss dad in my mom’s body.  I don’t feel anything about her, good or bad.  I wonder if she feels anything about me anymore, good or bad.”

“That’s sad,” Ripley said, wriggling out enough she could look up at her mom.

“It is what it is.  How are the fittings?”

“Everything looks level,” Ripley said.  The tray made horrible noises as it scraped on the floor, as she slid it out of the way.  “Should we try putting the door in?”

“I think… I’m ravenous.  I didn’t eat breakfast.  What do you say about lunch, then we get back to it?”

“Sure!”

Rip was such a good natured kid.  It was a balm for Mia’s soul, which had taken a beating last night, more than even her body, with all the scrubbing and kneeling she’d done, or the sitting on hard floors.

Just the fact that they’d started cooking pulled Tyr away from the late-morning cartoons- for kids slightly older than Tyr was, but Carson was close enough to watch over things.

Ripley engaged Tyr in a fresh game of ‘would you rather’, which, with Tyr being as young as he was, meant a lot of the questions were pretty immature.  Would you rather brush your teeth with poop or drink a lot of pee?

It pulled Mia’s thoughts back to the bathroom.  Nathaniel.

In a way, being around someone who’d died like that was intimate.  It would stay with her in a way that, really, only her bond to Carson or her kids could beat.  As dark as her family was bright.

Tired as she was, her thoughts went to Io, briefly.  Then to her mom.  Then The Fall.

It was like her traitorous mind wanted to find something as negative as possible to latch onto, to bring everything to the surface.

She forced her mind onto other tracks- following along with Rip and Tyr, getting Tyr to wind it back a little.

Wondering if there was something she’d missed.

“Carson?” she asked.  “Can you take over lunch?  I want to check something?”

“About last night?”

“I can’t believe they asked you to go to work at night,” Ripley commented.

“About last night,” Mia confirmed.  “It might be nothing.”

“Hey, it’s what you’re there for.  Your attention to detail.”  He smiled at her.

Nagging worries intensified in the wake of that smile.

She went to her office, got her laptop, and began digging, though she really didn’t know where to properly begin.

Nathaniel.  Past clients.

She looked up the sponsor.  The man she was pretty sure was him- she wasn’t ruling out that he’d obfuscated, like she had when she’d positioned a former coworker to look like the person gathering identities to sell.  But she was pretty sure.

One gang in the next state over had employed a lot of front businesses, including a car shop.  When they’d been ousted, the remnants folding into another group, one man had stayed in place, running the business.  Well-connected, minimal criminal past.  He knew a lot of people, including law enforcement, and he’d served.  Army.

The general shape of all the business that they’d received through him fit with where he was and who he dealt with.

Maybe it was him, and maybe not.  But it helped her frame things in her head.  With him in mind, she looked up past clients.  People she’d given identities to.

Dan Whitely.

Max Highland and Sheila Hardy.

Steven Byrd.

Byrd.  He’d felt a lot like Nathaniel had felt.  A weird fit, too volatile and messy.  Which felt like a personal connection.

This was before she’d met Carson.  Byrd had slipped up, too, going on social media.  The contact had asked them to push it through.  No situation like Nathaniel in the bathroom.  Byrd had taken things seriously when told to follow the rules, and she’d wondered if he would.  She’d checked up, from time to time, and hadn’t found anything too problematic.  He kept to himself.  No notable thefts.

Now she checked again, more seriously.

Movement at the door made her hit the key combination to hide everything.  It was Carson, so she un-hid it.  He brought her lunch, and she ate while he looked over the screen.

She found a thread.  Byrd had abandoned his social media, but on RudeTube, he’d gone back to his old profile.  His folders of favorite videos and playlists were too important to him.  Chief among them, apparently, were very obviously fake videos of men and women going down on themselves.

“Who’s Byrd?” Carson asked.

“Who is he now, or who was he?” she asked, under her breath.

Byrd’s porn playlists were a foot in the door.  He wasn’t exclusively a RudeTube user.  She found another playlist on another site, and from there, a streaming video site, and a fetish discussion board where he had a different name but the same profile picture.  On that board, there was a general discussion area.  He’d sold Pact Cards.

Shipping from Camrose.

She sighed, heavily.

“Contact’s not going to be happy if we’re digging up past clients and asking to off them,” Carson murmured.

“That’s not the issue,” she told him.

“What’s the issue, then?”

“Nathaniel.  When he was rambling, he said he was staying here.  I don’t think he meant he was staying here until he could go somewhere else.  I think he was staying here.”

She began to search, working from memory.  She found the identities she’d given out, to date.

On a level, this was against the rules.  People who got new identities were meant to leave, free and clear.  Even her searching could be a thread someone could follow.

The fact they’d broken rules too by being this easy for her to find didn’t factor in.

Some followed the rules.  No real results.  Out of the ones who didn’t, though…

Camrose.  The city.  The city again.  A spate of others went further away.  California.  Alberta.  Alaska.  Two went overseas together.  Then back to the city.  Camrose.

“He’s been situating them here?”

---

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter