Except I haven’t looked for those explanations. And the reason I haven’t looked is that I’m not sure I want to find them.
There was a name.
A city development officer. A signature on three shell company contracts. Same signature on the letter denying the independent audit. The person attached to this signature approved the money’s movement and also blocked anyone who tried to trace it. Same person, two different jobs, both conflicts of interest. Big time.
I told myself this could be bureaucratic overlap. A mid-level admin rubber-stamping paperwork without reading it, signing on both sides by mistake.
But the signature isn’t a stamp. I saw it clearly. It was handwritten and consistent. The same confident, unhurried hand on every document. A person who knew what they were signing. Both times, two important details. Two loose threads in a stack of forty pages that I dismissed as circumstantial, incomplete, and insufficient.
They won’t leave me alone.
The predated denial suggests foreknowledge. Someone on the oversight committee knew the audit request was coming before it was submitted. That means a leak. Someone in Mayor Renner’s circle, or someone with access to his communications, was feeding information to the people he was investigating.
The dual signature suggests something out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a bystander. Nor a rubber-stamper. It was an operative inside the city’s financial apparatus, facilitating the corruption and simultaneously blocking oversight. That’s deliberate, a system designed to protect itself.
And Renner was inside that system, writing memos no one answered and requesting audits that were denied before they were filed, and he was doing it alone because the people who should have supported him had already turned.
I push the thought down, but not completely. I’m past pretending I can push it away. But it goes into the compartment where I keep the things I haven’t decided about, into my holding pen between observation and conclusion. It’s getting crowded in there with dates, names, and the look on Alice’s face, a tired woman who’d already fought this fight inside her own head and come out the other side.
I press my palms against my knees, stand, and head back down the stairs.
On the way past Vi’s room, I see the door is fully closed now. There’s no gap, no voices. Either they’ve finished planning, or they heard me coming the first time and latched the door.
I don’t stop. I don’t knock.
But I think about what’s behind that door. Two women with a location and a plan and the stubborn, reckless courage that doesn’t pause to calculate the odds before walking into a part of the Rot that could swallow them both.
And I’m letting it happen.
24
VI
I findArmen after the second shift change. He’s in the Skylight Room, alone, doing something I’ve rarely seen him do—read. In his hands is an actual book, a paperback, with the cover torn off, pages soft from being passed around the Rot hundreds of times. He doesn’t look up when I enter, but I know he heard me. Armen always hears.
“I’d like to go to the club tonight,” I say.
It’s not a question or a request, but more of a statement, delivered from the doorway with my gaze on him and my voice level. It feels good. I don’t usually go around the Rot telling people what I want. Runts don’t get to do that.
He looks up, studying me for a moment. Not the quick, tactical scan I get from Sting, or the lazy, curious once-over Rogue gives. Armen looks at me with the patience of someone who thinks before he speaks. I know he’s trying to read what’s underneath my words, but there’s really nothing to analyze. My request is about as straightforward as they come. I want to go to the club with the guys and have them fuck my brains out.
“Alright,” he says, folding the corner of his page and closing his book.
He has no questions or conditions, noare you sureoris this a good ideaor any of the deliberation I’ve come to expect when one leaves the Rot. Justalright, as if he’s been waiting for me to ask and the only question was when I would.
I nod, turn, and walk out.
In my room, I change, but not into anything special. Here, I don’t have a closet full of options. My wardrobe is whatever the Rot provides, functional stuff, layered for warmth, chosen for durability rather than fashion. But I swap my oversized work shirt for something fitted and dark. I pull on a top that sits closer to my body than anything I’ve worn in weeks, run my fingers through my hair, and look at myself in the small mirror someone hung on the back of my door.
I look tired, no big surprise there. The days since Mara arrived have carved themselves into my face, in part thanks to late nights with Dad’s papers, arguments with Sting, and the grief that surfaces at random moments, pulling me under before I can brace for it. There are shadows under my eyes that weren’t there a month ago and my cheeks are thinner.
But my eyes are clear, and there’s something in my expression that I haven’t seen in a while. It’s not anger or grief, but something harder to name. I’m looking at the face of a woman who’s making some decisions about her life in a place where people like me don’t get to do that.
I know what I’m doing. I know exactly what I’m doing and I know exactly why.
The days since Mara showed up have been consumed by other people’s lives. Dad’s papers. Alice’s testimony. Mara’s doubt. Sting’s certainty. I’ve spent every waking hour chasing the story of a dead man and arguing with a living one, and somewhere in the middle of all that, I lost track of myself. Theactual, physical, present-tense me. The woman who exists inside this body right now, tonight, separate from Mayor Renner’s daughter and the best friend and the Runt and the evidence-chaser and all the other roles I’ve been filling.
I’m drowning in loss, in Dad’s handwriting, Mara’s guilt, Sting’s measured refusals, and the endless, grinding weight of trying to prove something to people who’ve already made up their minds. I need to feel something that isn’t sorrow. I need to feel something in my body that my brain didn’t put there.
