The Debt Collector (Season Two)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  And this time, Ishtar won’t be there to bring them back.

  Somehow this feels right to me. Not the killing—I know there’s never anything right about that—but the fact that I’m the one doing it. Like I should take on this burden, rather than Wyatt. I pull down the last ebbing drops of Moloch’s life energy until he reaches that nothingness state that Seth had when he died. It’s dark, like the abyss, but it’s not filled with horror and dread. It’s just… empty.

  Whatever awaits Seth and Moloch in the afterlife, they’re meeting it now.

  The irony of me outliving them strikes hard as I stand up. I’m unsteady, drunk on the massive life energy transfer. The literal lives of Moloch and Seth are swimming inside me.

  No, I remind myself, not their lives. The lives they’ve stolen.

  Lives that I can hold onto for the moment, without guilt. Without torment. Because I know I’m just a giant life energy battery, holding onto these lives until I can pay them out to someone who will put them to good use. I will make sure that what Gehenna stole will be used for good in the world. Lirium was both right and wrong—I am who I am born, because I was born a debt collector, born to do this. But I’m also what I choose to become. And I choose to be the kind of person who will stop the Moloch’s and Seth’s and Ishtar’s of the world. Even if I have to carry the burden of killing them.

  Wyatt’s hand is on my elbow, steadying me. “Are you all right?” His soft concern makes my heart swell even more than the tidal wave of life energy washing through it.

  “Yes. Although… I need to check on Ishtar.”

  He frowns, and I’m not sure he knows what I mean: that I need to make sure she’s actually dead. That I’m the one who needs to cut the tether. That I need to be sure.

  I cross the black flooring in slow, teetering steps. When I reach her, I almost don’t have to touch her to know: her perfect face is wrenched open in surprise. Her blood covers the floor. The hole in her dress is too suffused with a darkened wet stain for her to have survived. I bend down anyway and touch her cheek.

  There’s not a drop of life energy left in her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I truly mean it. Not so much sorry I killed her but sorry that she forced me into it. She could have walked away. She could have turned away from the Gehenna life at any moment. I have a nagging sense that she wanted to, somewhere deep inside. She kept reaching for me, trying to talk me into joining, long past the time Moloch had given up on me.

  Eternity is a long time to spend with just one person.

  She said those words, but I don’t believe she meant them. I think she wanted exactly that. Only she wanted someone worth spending an eternity with. But Moloch had dragged her in too deep, and she was too enamored of the eternal life he promised.

  A life that now lies in a pool on the floor.

  I stand up. They’re all gone now, but the things they’ve set in motion haven’t died with them. I turn to find Wyatt already by my side, concern etched in deep lines on his face.

  “It’s time to hear Scott’s idea,” I say.

  Two hours and over a hundred miles later, we’re headed to the one place I would never expect to go, not if I actually wanted to stop debt collections: the office of Senator William Lacket, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Collection, and bitter enemy of Lifetime, my father, and everything I’ve ever stood for.

  But he’s the one person who could make Scott Garner’s plan work. And we’re running out of time: reviews are already being triggered. Stopping those reviews from turning into collections will require the full force of the California state government... but only if we can convince them to do so.

  Wyatt gets us waived through security at the capitol building. In fact, he’s been on the phone constantly for the last two hours, setting this up—it’s the only thing that gives us any chance of pulling it off. Zachariel spent the two hour cab ride doing slash work on my palm screen and slowly recovering from his wound. Now he lumbers alongside us to the elevator, almost keeping pace with Wyatt, Scott, and me. I shouldn’t say his recovery was slow… it’s nothing short of miraculous. The life energy that’s brimming inside his body has truly done amazing things. I can feel it myself, with all the life energy I pulled from Moloch—the high has settled, but I feel stronger than I’ve ever been in my life. I haven’t chanced a look in the mirror, but by the looks Wyatt keeps sneaking at me in between phone calls, I’m sure it shows there as well. I consider it part of the burden I have to carry, the external sign of all those lives I have inside—not a perk, the way Ishtar did.

  Zachariel, Wyatt, Scott, and I are the only people in the lobby of the capitol, as well as in the elevator on the way to Lacket’s office on the fourth floor. It’s the end of the day, and the building is emptying out. Wyatt’s scored us an appointment with the Senator on the pretense of being big shots from Collecting for Humanity interested in donating to his re-election fund—a ruse that will last two seconds after he sees us. Which is about how much time I will have to convince him to help stop this collections horror from happening.

  We reach the Senator’s office, and his secretary holds us at bay. Apparently he’s still in another meeting, and we will have to wait. The agitation is making me insane, and I can tell Wyatt’s not much better, with how much he’s focused on his palm screen and keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs. We’ve cleaned up a little—we had to make a stop for new clothes for Zachariel that weren’t covered in blood—and we’re reasonably dressed for capitol hill in our corporate attire. But the tension we’re all carrying makes the receptionist give us a series of frowns that get progressively more dire.

  Just as I think she’s going to kick us out, a troupe of Chinese businessmen file out of Lacket’s office, and the receptionist finally grants us admittance. I stride in, crossing Senator Lacket’s blue carpet with the state flag and trying to reach his desk before he looks up from his screen. I don’t quite make it, but he’s so dumb-founded to find me in his office that it gives me an extra second of time to launch into my spiel.

  “Senator Lacket,” I say brightly. “I have an urgent matter to discuss with you.”

  It doesn’t take long for him to recover. He bolts up from his chair and taps something quickly into his hand-held. He holds my gaze, not speaking, while he waits for whoever he’s calling to answer.

  “Lives are going to be lost, Senator. Please give me a moment—”

  “Tricia,” he says into his phone. “Please call security to my office.”

  “Senator, please. Just hear me out.”

  Lacket eyes the three men behind me. By prior agreement, they’re holding back. If the Senator needs extra persuasion in the form of a life energy drain, I will have Zachariel step forward for that, so I don’t have to out myself as a debt collector. But even that would be a last desperate measure. I hope to get what we need the old fashioned way: threats and intimidation and giving Lacket the one thing he really wants.

  The demise of Lifetime.

  Lacket must have decided that the presence of Zachariel, Wyatt, and Garner isn’t any real threat. He eases back into his tightly upholstered leather chair and temples his fingers.

  “You have the approximate thirty seconds it will take security to get here, Ms. Sterling,” he says. “Next time I suggest you don’t try to lie your way into my office. A simple phone call will suffice.”

  “Not for something like this,” I say. “I’m about to give a press conference, Lacket, and you’re going to wish you had heard it from me first.”

  He frowns, but I’m not sure if he’s totally biting yet. “Your last performance in the subcommittee was… intriguing, shall we say. Do you have more sudden changes of heart regarding debt collection you plan to announce to the world?”

  He must think I’m slightly unhinged. Daughter of a famous anti-collection activist goes rogue, kills anti-debt-collecting legislation, and causes havoc in her father’s company? If he’s paying attention at all to the news, he might have put
it together. But crazy doesn’t work for what I need him to do.

  I give him a dead serious look. “You need to call the Governor and have him declare a state of emergency stopping all debt collection. And you need to do it tonight.”

  A loud laugh erupts from him, and I think he’s truly amused. “Ms. Sterling, you certainly are entertaining if nothing else.”

  “If you don’t, I’m going to announce that a terrorist plot has targeted tens of thousands of citizens and shifted their debt records into the collection zone. And Senator William Lacket knew about this… and did nothing to stop it.”

  His jaw drops, and he bolts back out of his seat. “What the hell—” He stops when the door to his office slides open and two security officers rush in. Three hundred pounds of muscle and hands on holstered weapons—if they try to take us physically, we could still handle them. If they pull the guns, we’re finished. We couldn’t bring any weapons besides our hands into the capitol building.

  There’s a tense moment, while the officers size us up and wait for direction from Lacket.

  He is weighing us as well, finally giving all four of us a thorough look-over. “I’m sorry, officers, false alarm,” he says, finally. “We’ve had a misunderstanding, but there’s no cause for concern.”

  “Are you sure, Senator?” The lead officer looks like he wants to pull his weapon on us anyway.

  “Yes, quite. I apologize.” Lacket slowly takes a seat again, showing with his body language his supreme lack of concern for the situation.

  The officer squints at us, not entirely buying this. “All right, then. We’ll be right outside your door, Senator. In case you change your mind.”

  “Thank you.” Lacket waits until the door slides closed behind them, then he’s up out of his chair again, bracing his hands on his desk. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing here, Sterling—”

  “This is not a game.” I meet his furious look with one of my own. “Tens of thousands of debt records have been shifted into the red in a coordinated attack just this afternoon. The reviews are already triggered. The collections will start tomorrow. I’m going to announce all of it in a press conference in about…” I check my palm screen. “… one hour. That’s how long you have to contact the Governor and get him on board with the emergency shut-down.”

  “I’m not going to just call up the Governor based on you bursting into my office—”

  “Fine,” I cut him off. “I’ll be sure to hand out your office’s contact information, so the citizens of California will know precisely who in their government doesn’t give a shit if they’re targeted for an unfair debt collection.”

  He shakes his head. “You’re not even making sense here, Sterling. Why would you bring something like this to me? Why not the police or the FBI?”

  “Let’s just say, we’ve tried that route.”

  “So they dismissed you as a crack pot, and now you’ve landed in my office.” His gaze flicks to the door, and I think he’s about to call security back in.

  “You haven’t asked the one question you should, Senator Lacket.”

  “Oh? What’s that?” He’s getting pissed now. He thinks I’m just a crank wasting his time.

  “You should be asking how I know all this.”

  “All right, Ms. Sterling, I’ll bite.” But his eyes are narrowing, and his hand-held is back in his palm. “How do you know there’s a terrorist attack on the debt collection records in the Department of Life and Health. Records, I’ll have you know, that I’ve personally ensured have the highest level of security, greater even than the Pentagon’s own data records.”

  “I know it because the attack was coordinated by someone within Lifetime.”

  His eyebrows lift, and his hand on the screen freezes. I think he finally believes me. Maybe. He flicks a look again at Wyatt and Zachariel and Scott. He has to recognize Wyatt as my assistant. The other two could be anyone as far as he’s concerned.

  Lacket looks back to me, eyes narrowing again. “Why would someone within your organization do something like this? They’re against collections of any kind.”

  I keep the sigh of relief inside, but it’s there—I can feel it. He’s going to help us. Even though it’s the last thing on earth he would ever want to do—with the sole exception of getting lynched in his own Senate office by a public angry over his failure to prevent this.

  “One of our members took our mission just a little too far,” I say. “Fortunately, one of our employees caught wind of it and brought it to my attention. We tried to file a report with the police and the Feds, but it just got buried. You do realize how corrupt the LA police are, don’t you? Well apparently the Feds aren’t any better.” I pause a moment, because I have a hunch Lacket knows far more about corruption the federal government than I do. In fact, I’m willing to bet money he has a hand in it.

  Sure enough, he winces a little and darts his gaze around the four of us again, probably trying to discern just how much we know.

  I nod, hoping that cements whatever fears are playing taps on his brain at the moment. “Now that the records have shifted, none of that matters anymore,” I say, giving him the out he’s looking for. “Now the only thing to do is to call an emergency stop to collections and mine the data until you can find the tampered records.”

  “That could take days,” he says. “Or weeks.”

  “I’m not saying it won’t disrupt things, Lacket, but think about it: how long will debt collection be shut down if you don’t get ahead of this thing?”

  I can see him starting to sweat. Because this truly is the kind of thing that could blow the doors right off debt collection as a whole, rocking the confidence of the public in the institutions Lacket has been carefully grooming them to trust for years. I’m almost tempted to let it blow up in his face and bring down debt collection everywhere. It just might work. If it didn’t cost tens of thousands of lives, I would do it for sure. As it stands… I’ll have to find another way to fight the system. One that doesn’t involve mass murder.

  “You can be a hero, Lacket,” I say. “Or you can get burned at the stake for this.”

  He curls up a fist and presses it into the burnished wood of his desk. But I’ve got him in a corner, and he knows it.

  “You and the Governor both can host the press conference with us.” I gesture to Scott behind me. “I’ve got my Lifetime representative with us. We’ll detail the attack, how it was made, and what the likely risks are to the records. And the citizens. And how you and the Governor are taking the safe, reasonable precaution of suspending collections for a short period of time just to ensure the integrity of the system.”

  “And what about you, Sterling? Are you trying to be the hero in this?” He glares at me with the kind of hatred I’m used to seeing from him, only for being an anti-collection activist. I wonder what he would think if he knew what I truly am… but I don’t wonder enough to tell him.

  “I’m going to dismantle Lifetime as an organization,” I say. “I’ve recently come to view debt collection in a completely different light.” So very true, but for reasons Lacket could never imagine. “Sterling Cybernetics will be taking a new approach from here on forward. We’ll be bringing promising life energy technologies in-house to examine ways in which they can be developed. The future depends on responsible use of life energy technology. Of that, I am quite certain.”

  Lacket looks askance at me. “You really are departing from your father’s work.”

  “In more ways than you know, Senator.”

  He wrinkles a frown, but I don’t want him confused. I want him determined to save his own skin.

  “What do you say, Senator? Am I doing this without you? Or will I see you and the Governor at my press conference in the lobby in an hour?”

  I wait for his agreement, but I already know he has to take this deal. I may hate Senator Lacket and disagree, fundamentally, with him on every debt collection issue ever to cross his desk, but he didn’t become chair o
f the Subcommittee on Collection by being stupid.

  “In one hour, Sterling,” he says, picking up his hand-held and tapping through it, hopefully bringing up the Governor’s private line. “And if you make a fool of me with this, I promise you, I will bury Sterling Cybernetics right next to your father in the ground.”

  His dead serious look just brings a smirk to my face.

  “Not to worry, Senator. For once, you and I are on the same side.”

  The spotlights and drone cameras of the press conference are dazzling. With the Governor on one side and Lacket on the other, I’m telling the citizens of California that a dangerous plot has been discovered—and thwarted—by the good stewards of their government, their elected officials. Scott steps up and reads the statement that Gehenna had prepared for the vid they wanted to record. It has enough specifics to be convincing, but enough vagueness to appropriately terrorize the populace. We reworded it on the drive between Silicon Valley and Sacramento to read like a confessional from an unnamed source within Lifetime. Wyatt stands at the podium with me when I announce that I’m disbanding my father’s organization.

  The whole thing feels surreal.

  Zachariel lurks off to the side, encouraging me with secret smiles but keeping out of the limelight. Because he’s an undercover agent for FBI and a debt collector for Gehenna—and showing his face on camera is not the way to stay alive.

  Although I’m not entirely clear on who would be a threat to him now. And I’m not sure if Gehenna really exists as an organization anymore. Did cutting off the head mean that it will wither and die? Or will someone else rise up in Moloch’s place? Is there another spiritual leader who could take on his maniacal quest for debt collectors to own the future?