She makes her case with no explanation, stating facts, laying them out like no further discussion is needed. She’s efficient, avoiding unnecessary words. This is how she tells us she’s going to meet with Alice whether we want to join, or not.
“I’m coming with you, Vi.”
She looks my way, expecting resistance, clearly braced for some kind of argument, ready with a list of reasons why meetingwith Alice is too dangerous, stupid, or futile. Her ammunition is all stacked up behind her expression, ready to deploy.
She wasn’t expecting agreement from me.
“All three of us are coming,” Armen adds.
“Alice said I could come alone or with you guys,” Vi says, holding her hands up. “She didn’t say I had to bring all three.”
“She didn’t say a lot of things,” I reply. “That’s one of the problems.”
Vi opens her mouth, then closes it, smart enough to know that the fastest way to lose this is to debate the details.
“Fine. All three. Let’s make it a party,” she says with a forced laugh.
Rogue tips his chair back and reaches for another cracker. “Third floor east wing is dicey territory. Who runs that section now?”
“No one, officially,” Armen says. “Which is why people use it for things they don’t want seen.”
“Great,” Rogue says with a smile. “Love a field trip.”
I don’t respond to that. I’m already thinking about the route we’ll take and what that part of the Rot is like. I’ve not spent much time there but I do know the third floor east wing is a dead section of trashed storefronts with busted-out gates and ceiling tiles sagging where water damage has made its mark. Both times I’ve been through it were for reasons I didn’t enjoy.
But mostly I’m thinking about Alice.
I don’t trust people who come to us. I trust people we go to, people we’ve vetted, people whose motivations I’ve had time to take apart and examine. Alice is none of those things. She’s a woman who approached Vi in a work hub, offered information about a dead man, and set a meeting in a part of the Rot where witnesses are scarce. Every piece of that arrangement was designed by her. Location, timing, terms.
I don’t like operating inside someone else’s design. But I like the idea of Vi going alone even less. So we go.
“Second shift change,” I say to Armen. “We leave five minutes before. Standard formation.” He nods. Conversation over.
Vi is looking at me with an expression I can’t quite place. Not gratitude. Something closer to surprise. As if she expected a fight and got approval instead, and she’s not sure what to make of it.
I hold her gaze for a moment, then reach for a cracker. “Eat,” I tell her. “You’re going to need it.”
12
STING
The walkto the east wing takes twelve minutes. There’s a reason this part of the Rot is no man’s land. It’s too fucking far from everything.
Armen leads. Vi behind him. Me at her left shoulder. Rogue trailing, loose and watchful, his head on a swivel. The corridors thin out as we move past the residential section and into the older, less maintained parts of the Rot. There are far fewer people here because there are really no reasons to be here.
A tree is growing through a crack in the floor near the east atrium junction. An actual tree, waist-high, its root system splitting the tile in a slow, ugly rupture. Someone hung a jacket on one of its branches. No one has claimed it. No one has cut the tree down, either. It just exists, growing where it likes, tolerated because removing it would require effort no one wants to bother with.
Vi walks past it without looking.
And I watch her.
She’s trying to contain herself, her hope. I can see it in her shoulders, how her arms swing stiffly. She’s controlled, wound up tight, breathing like you do when your body wants to run but you can’t.
She thinks this meeting is going to change something. She thinks Alice is going to hand her a stack of papers and inside them will be the proof that her father was a good man. A victim. A whistle-blower who tried to do the right thing and got crushed for it.
That may happen.
Or she may find that her father was a city official during the most corrupt period in Rothwell’s history, and the odds that he walked through that without getting dirty are slim. Really slim. I’ve seen what that era produced. The contracts that moved money in directions that didn’t make sense. The development deals that enriched a few and fucked over the rest of us. The silent agreements that turned a functional city into the wreckage we’re currently living with. Those of us who remain, anyway.
