by Wren Weston
“No.”
“If this is about last night, Tristan, put it away. We have more important things—”
“It’s not about last night. We can’t make plans if you don’t clue us in, and for the love of the gods, sit down! You’re making me nervous.”
Dixon grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the couch, putting far too much pressure on her injured shoulder.
“Oracle’s light!”
Dixon threw his hands in the air and backed away, his mouth in a little O of surprise.
“What happened to your shoulder?”
“A lamppost hit me.” She pouted, rubbing the bone. Dixon retrieved a bag of peas from the freezer and sat beside her on the couch, holding the bag in place. “Give me your palm, Tristan. I’ll explain as I work.”
Tristan finally slid the device across the coffee table while she dug the spare from her satchel. He reclined in the oversized chair, sitting as far away from her as possible.
“We were idiots to think Natalie didn’t have something bigger up her sleeve. Oskar wasn’t the point of her last deal at all. He was bait for a much bigger prize.” Lila connected both palms with a cable and scrolled through screen after screen as she talked.
“What prize?”
“The tracer system. That’s why we found tracers in her blood and the blood of her guards. She used her people and herself as vessels. There’s no telling how many palms she brought to that meet, hoping to hack into and download the tracer program. She knew exactly what to steal.”
“The game is the tracer program?”
“Yes.”
Tristan and Dixon stared at one another. “The broken game?”
“It’s not broken.”
“Didn’t you say that was bad?” He pointed to his palm as she downloaded the game onto his device.
“For fuck’s sake, Tristan, don’t you trust my judgment by now?”
Tristan raised his hands. “Okay, this is obviously not the afternoon to question your authority.”
Lila narrowed her eyes.
“Okay, it’s not the afternoon to engage in sarcasm, either.”
Dixon poked a finger at his notepad. How would she fence it?
“Any family would drool at the chance to study the tracers, even if they only had a day and a half. I suspect she already had a buyer lined up. Two guesses who knew about that deal?”
“Teresa Bailey.”
“Natalie would have made a great deal of money if she’d gotten to the buyer. More than enough to escape her charges, flee to Burgundy, and set herself up for life, that’s for damn sure.”
“How do you know she didn’t get to the buyer?”
“If I had just concluded the deal of a lifetime, I certainly wouldn’t go back to my hideout and eat breakfast, knowing full well my enemies could locate me. I’d keep moving. That’s what made her stupid. She shouldn’t have ingested any of it, but I suppose she didn’t trust her people. Perhaps she worried they’d hold it hostage for a bigger cut once they got back to the hideout.”
“Perhaps she planned on selling Oskar, regardless of whether or not he served as bait. He was worth a great deal of money.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you think the mercs knew her plan?”
“No,” Lila said. “Natalie wasn’t tortured. They just needed her dead so she couldn’t say anything about them under the serum. Following her back to her hideout meant they could take Oskar for free, destroy her electronics, and tie up their loose ends. They probably would have looked a little harder if they’d known the empire’s crown jewels were hidden in the room.”
Lila disconnected Tristan’s palm and dug into Dixon’s trouser pocket, snatching up his palm and connecting it to the spare. “I also found out last night that Ms. Royce was killed in a car wreck two nights ago. The same FPS employee who liked selling the Thomases their precious loose-leaf tea. That’s not a coincidence. It’s how they found Rebecca. They spent time on that house, setting up surveillance, all so they could make a clean getaway with the girl. They couldn’t let anyone find out German mercs had landed inside the country.”
How does the game work?
Lila began the download. “The score indicates distance. The tail indicates direction. If the screen fades to translucence, the tracer is below you. If it becomes opaque, then it’s above.”
“How’d you—”
“The game led me straight to the tracer samples.”
How do the tracers work?
“My lab director took a closer look at the sample,” she said carefully. “Turns out, the tracers are just micro receivers encased in some sort of waterproof coating. ”
“Waterproof coating?”
Though Lila didn’t want to admit just how much her people had learned about the tracers, she couldn’t help but grin as she recalled the director cracking one open. “They’re small, though. You’d think it was just a bit of sediment in your tea or wine, but they’re large enough to feel gritty when you swallow. You might cough a great deal as your body tried to get rid of them on your throat. I don’t know how the empire did it, to be honest. Our smallest receivers are a few millimeters in length. You can still recognize them for what they are, even without a microscope.”
Dixon and Tristan shot one another an amused look. “You’re like a child at Winter Solstice. I’ve never seen you so excited over anything.”
It’s cute.
“Do you understand what this could mean for palms if we figure out how they did it? For everything?”
It’s not as cute when you yell.
“What are these receivers even receiving?”
“It’s just like GPS,” she said as she checked the progress of Dixon’s download.
But when she looked up once more, she only saw confused expressions. “GPS works by receiving signals from satellites all around the globe, though you only need three to calculate your exact position. Snoop programs intercept this communication between the satellites and the receiver. That’s how some of my own snoop programs work when I search for GPS trackers with my palm.”
“So if you’ve ingested these tracers, you become a GPS satellite?”
“No, more like the GPS device. The tracer program behaves like a snoop and can pick up the signal. The system will locate tracers within three thousand meters.”
Dixon’s eyes suddenly widened. He jumped over the corner of Tristan’s chair and ran into his brother’s bedroom. Two boots sailed through the air, nearly pegging Tristan in the head.
“What the—”
“Don’t you get it, Tristan? Teresa Bailey just died this morning. That means the mercs might still be in New Bristol with Oskar and Rebecca. The same group that searched a city of two million souls street by street until they found Natalie.”
“So? We’ve—”
Tristan’s jaw dropped suddenly, and he scrambled from the chair. “Oh shit. We have to go. We have to go now.”
Lila yanked the cord from Dixon’s palm. “Welcome to five minutes ago.”
Chapter 27
Tristan jogged downstairs with his brother in tow, calling out orders and quickly tapping on his palm with a thunder of boots and a swish of his brown coat. Soon after, Shirley herded Maria and her people into a break room behind the shop, the little bell above the front door ringing over and over again, marking the progress of a swarm. More of Tristan’s people entered through the back alley, all approaching from various streets nearby, the back door opening and closing with little noise at all. Even more leapt from the apartments next door, entering the building through the roof. Others came from below.
It was an effort to hide their numbers from prying eyes.
Perhaps Lila had once been prying eyes, for she’d never known that Tristan had begun taking over two apartment buildings at the end of the block. For the first
time, she had a true glimpse of the size and scope of Tristan’s operation. Perhaps this was the first time a job had been worth it, or perhaps this was the first time he’d trusted her with the knowledge.
Tristan didnt just control a dozen disgruntled ex-slaves and few spies. He commanded his own militia.
Toxic swiveled her stool at Shirley’s worktable, her big brown eyes mischievous. Her thick, curly hair waved in the air, like a dandelion in a breeze. Her black skin set off her perfect white teeth like a row of pearls as she grinned, and her electric-blue coat and bright green boots belied her upbringing. “You didn’t know there were this many of us, did you?” she asked as she thrust another cable into the mountain of surrendered palms.
“Not until now,” Lila admitted, and set up another download.
“This isn’t everyone, you know. It’s just all he could pull on short notice.”
Lila said nothing and yanked a cable from a palm, adding it to the finished pile. Approximately three hundred and fifty souls served in her family’s militia on the New Bristol compound, over half of them out on patrol each day spread across three shifts. The rest were administrative staff, investigators, or officers who worked almost exclusively in the security office.
Tristan could pull an entire patrol shift on ten minutes’ notice.
What he could do with more time?
It was frightening to think about. That, and the fact that no highborn seemed to know they even existed. If the rest of the highborn knew, they might not be so dismissive of workborn needs, for if these people ever got angry enough—
But they were already getting angry, weren’t they? How else would Tristan have found so many to join his cause?
Who should she warn?
Her father? Chief Shaw? Her mother? The council?
Everyone?
No one?
Lila swiped the screen of a palm and began a fresh download, eyes washing over the people in the shop. They milled around the crush of cars and trucks, the dock door shut fast with a Closed for Lunch sign hung askew on the front door. Most of them wore servant’s clothes, their boots cracked and gritty and sun-pale. They’d buttoned up their thin fall coats against the chill and wore fraying, hand-knitted scarves loosely around their necks. Some hid scars from their slave chips. A few others hid the much deeper scar from cutting them out early.
No one hid the telltale bulges of tranq guns and knives.
Tristan maneuvered through the crush, depositing another half-dozen palms in front of Lila and Toxic. The young hacker sighed dramatically as she snatched up a new device, the effect somewhat spoiled when a cable wrapped around the tail of her bright yellow scarf.
“This is the last batch,” he assured them.
Toxic untangled her scarf, her face beautiful even when it was crinkled. “I can’t believe you guys won’t even tell me what the game does. I found it.”
“The fewer that know the better. It’s better for us all that way.”
Lila yanked a cord from a finished palm. “Toxic says this isn’t everyone in your group.”
“Not even close. Most of my people are at work on the compounds and couldn’t get away. Even yours. Scary, isn’t it?”
Lila raised a brow, wondering what he knew about the Randolphs. “Servants or slaves?”
“Servants, mostly. Slaves can’t leave their compounds or own palms, and their tracking chips make things too complicated.” He snatched up a few finished palms. “You’re riding with me, by the way.”
Lila shook her head. That wasn’t why she came. “I can ride with Dixon.”
“I need to update you about Natalie and her businesses.”
The brothels? Gods, what did he do? “So send me a message.”
“Lila, grow up. You’re riding with me.” He then picked up a few more palms and hurried away.
Toxic paused in her work and watched him go. “So you and Tristan…” She eyed Lila’s hood. “I knew it would happen eventually. Everyone did.”
“Knew what?”
“Grunting and groaning and orgasms, oh my! Have you guys done it on this table?”
“Stop.”
“Yeah, it’s not at the right height. The stool would work better. Or did you have a go on his Amazon?” She laughed a little too loudly. “Have you done it on his bike?”
“Shut up, Toxic.”
“Not on your life. The way you two always stare at each other…”
Lila peeked at Tristan.
He peered at her from the front of the shop.
Both quickly glanced away.
Toxic snickered. “Tell me something, do you keep the hood on when you two are—”
“I have a gun.”
“You won’t shoot me. I’m important to this operation.”
“There’s always after.”
Toxic’s mirth deflated all at once. She’d been shot by a tranq recently, and the misery still loomed fresh upon her mind. “Fine. You finish. I’ll go check on communications.”
Lila smirked as the back door whacked closed. She cast her eyes to Tristan once more. A dozen of his captains, for lack of a better term, surrounded him in a semicircle, divvying up a map of the city. From time to time, they also looked back at Lila, peering at her hood suspiciously. She couldn’t blame them; she’d never met most of them, except for Fry and Frank and Dice.
Not enjoying the scrutiny, Lila finished the palms quickly and retreated, passing into the break room. Tristan had painted it a dark green the week before. A stainless steel refrigerator, microwave, sink, and counter lined one wall. In the middle stood five sturdy wine barrel tables and ten sturdier wine barrel benches. Half a dozen mechanics lay upon them, taking a welcome rest. Two had fallen asleep, snoring softly.
Shirley sat in the corner with Maria, following along as the girl read a passage aloud from a workbook.
Lila frowned. Tristan was playing with the girl’s life, having her near so many people with divided loyalties. She should have been hidden away some place much safer. He trusted his people far too much.
Then again, even Lila hadn’t known the true size of his organization.
“Hey, Hood,” Shirley said as Lila sat down across from them.
“Hey, Shirley.”
Maria kept her eyes down, worrying the corners of her reader, seemingly grateful for the interruption.
“Hello, Maria.”
“Hello, madam,” Maria whispered. Her eyes grew large, and she peered up through her hair. For the first time, it seemed as though she wanted to say something. She just couldn’t express it, either from lack of words or fear or petrifying shyness.
Shirley fixed Lila with a hard stare. “All this fuss is for something you brought in, isn’t it?”
“It’s their case,” Lila said vaguely, unsure if anyone had told Maria the reason behind it.
“Don’t you get my boys hurt now. Last time Dixon came back a little less conscious than he was before. So did Frank.”
“Reaper worked under your nose for years. You can hardly blame me for his actions.”
“Not my nose. I just fix the trucks.”
“That’s not all you do,” Lila murmured, glancing at her missing fingers.
It was another fifteen awkward minutes before Tristan pulled open the door. Shirley’s people groaned at the sudden end of their break and filtered out, boots shuffling across the cement floor, tossing bottles of soda into the wastebasket near the door with a pop pop pop.
Maria didn’t rise. She huddled in the corner, still clutching her reader.
“You stay here,” Shirley said, patting Maria’s arm. “Keep working in that book. It’s good for you. Come get me if you want something to eat from across the street, you hear?”
Maria nodded, and Shirley followed her crew out of the room.
Lila hopped up from the ben
ch as well. “I’m continually impressed at what you can pull together in a short amount of time.”
There was no reason for her not to be civil.
“You really mean that, don’t you?” Tristan asked.
Lila nodded.
“It’s nice to be appreciated. My people have already gone, by the way. We should get going too.”
Maria put down her reader at last. “I want to go,” she whispered, staring at the floor.
Lila and Tristan glanced at one another, both amazed that she’d finally said something beyond yes, no, sorry, and thank you.
Tristan’s lips twitched. “Do you even know where we’re going?”
“You’re going to find my brother. I want to go this time.”
“Why?”
“He’s my brother. I didn’t think you’d let me go the first time.” Her voice picked up more and more strength with every word.
“You sound scared. Are you?”
Maria nodded slowly.
“Good. You have more sense than most. You can come for the search, but you’ll come back to the shop right after. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tristan stuck his head out the break room door and yelled for Toxic.
“Find something for Maria to wear, will you?” he asked when she appeared. “We bought some trousers and sweaters and boots for Oskar. Try that stuff first. If none of it fits, find some of Zoe’s things.”
Toxic’s bottom lip jutted out. “You must be joking. She gets to go, but I can’t?”
“I need you here, monitoring communications.”
“Oh, come on. It’s such a bullshit job!”
Lila recalled the first and last time Toxic had gone out with them. She’d been so frightened when the Wilson militia found them that she’d almost gotten them all pinched.
Toxic didn’t want to go. She just wanted to prove her worth to Tristan. Or perhaps she needed to prove it to herself.
“It’s not a bullshit job,” Lila said. “We need someone fast and efficient to handle communications. Perhaps it’s a bit below your capabilities, but there are too many people doing too many things this afternoon. It’s not like Tristan can coordinate everyone and search too.”
