“Is that everything?” I ask.
Alice’s hands don’t stop moving. “Yes. You read them?”
“I read them twice. And I’m asking you if that’s everything.”
She doesn’t say anything for five, six seconds. Sorting. Not looking at me.
“No,” she says.
My fingers go still on the bin.
“Your father gave me more. Before he disappeared. But I couldn’t keep it all in one place. Too risky. If someone found the bag, I’d lose everything. So I split it up.”
“Where’s the rest?”
“No Man’s Land. Deeper than where we met. Past the service corridors, in the old anchor store that got sealed off after the second-floor collapse.” She pauses. “It’s not friendly territory.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, the men you’re with don’t run that section. Nobody does, officially, but the people who drift through there aren’t the kind who step aside when they see your guys coming. It’s unstable and contested. I hid the papers there because nobody would think to look, but I’ve never been able to go back for them on my own.”
She finally looks at me with tired eyes. “I couldn’t do it alone. And until you came along, I didn’t know who to trust.”
I nod, my brain already churning. Getting those papers means going into a part of the Rot where Armen, Sting, and Rogue have no authority. It means asking them not just to tolerate my search for Dad’s truth but to actively participate in it, to put themselves at risk for a cause they don’t stand behind.
I don’t need their tolerance, I need their buy-in, and buy-in requires the one thing I don’t have from them right now.
Trust.
Or at least doubt about their own conclusions. And there’s one whose conclusions I need to crack first.
17
VI
I find Sting alonein the corridor outside the Skylight Room. He’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed, staring at nothing, lost in thought. He hears me coming, looks my way, and waits.
“We need to talk,” I say.
“About?”
“I think you know.”
He pushes off the wall to give me his full attention, complete, measured, and calibrated, as if I’m a situation to be managed rather than a person standing in front of him. Until now, I thought this was quirky. Kind of cute. But at the moment, it’s pissing me the hell off.
“There’s more than what we saw yesterday,” I tell him. “Alice has more of Dad’s documents, but they’re hidden deeper in the Rot, in contested territory, a place she called No Man’s Land. I need you guys to help me get them.”
“No Man’s Land,” he repeats, like a foregone conclusion.
“Yes, Sting.”
“You want to recover more documents that you believe will exonerate your father.”
“Yeah, I do. You know we only have part of the story and we need the rest of it. You said as much yesterday.”
I can see the refusal coming before he even opens his mouth.
Goddammit.
