Sketches

by Teyla Branton

  “No, but your intended address is in your enforcer file.”

  “You read my file?”

  “Just your address. I might know a guy in personnel. To be fair, though, first I called division looking for you and discovered you’d already left for the day. And they don’t have your iTeev number listed.”

  “I see.” She found herself wanting to smile despite her irritation with him. “We’ll have to remedy that.” She pulled out her iTeev to send the information to his feed. “Did you find anything on the girl?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Come on, then. You can tell me inside.” She turned and started into the building where her new apartment was located, slipping the card the manager had sent her into the reader to unlock the door.

  Jaxon nodded in approval at the lobby and the armed man behind the desk. “Nice place.”

  “Thanks. I haven’t been inside yet. I’m hoping my things arrived intact.”

  One of the perks of being an enforcer was the salary that allowed them to pay for a nice, refurbished pre-Breakdown apartment. Enforcer life wasn’t exorbitant, not by a long shot. But all businesses were required to pay fifty percent of their net profits as a gift back to CORE. These monies paid CORE leaders and enforcers, and also sustained the welfare colonies, where CORE offered the basic necessities to those who could not take care of themselves.

  “The girl?” Reese prompted as they rode up the elevator, which squeaked and groaned with a rather insulting noise that told her the apartment didn’t employ anyone familiar with the tech. She’d probably have to threaten leaving to make them get someone in to fix it.

  “Apparently, she’s a punk affiliated with El Cerebro.”

  Reese wracked her brain but came up empty. “And who is he?”

  “Head of the local black market, called the Underground. They’ll get you anything from drugs and girls to special foods and illegal tech. Oh, they have a legit business as well, cleaning office buildings, if you can believe it.”

  She snorted. “Why not? That allows them to snoop everywhere. I hope the CORE doesn’t employ any of them.” She started to nudge him just like she would have when they were ten, but stopped before touching him. Was it possible to pick up where they had left off? Well, assuming he forgave her, but even asking for forgiveness would expose her gift, and she wasn’t ready for that.

  She recovered from the almost nudge, only to look up and find him watching her with amusement. “So,” he said. “My source didn’t know where she was at the moment, but now that we know there’s a connection with El Cerebro, we can keep an eye out on their known operations and see if we can spot her.”

  The elevator came to a halt on the fourth floor and opened. “So why haven’t you shut down El Cerebro?” she asked, preceding him into the hallway.

  His expression sobered. “I ask myself the same question every day. They always seem to be one step ahead of us. We’ll get intel, but it just doesn’t pan out. Maybe with you here, we can get their more elusive members identified.”

  Great, that was exactly what she needed—another powerful group out to put her six feet under. But a sketch artist was supposed to go unnoticed, so maybe she could keep a lower profile here. She busied herself reading apartment numbers. There it was: number 413.

  She paused in front of the door. “Anything turn up with the victim’s family or at his house?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. The wife said he was acting normal, and Hammer—he’s the enforcer over the CSI unit—didn’t find anything obvious at his apartment, but he did hint at something he was tracking down that might pan out. Hammer also promised to take extra care with processing the evidence and to let me look at anything he finds before he submits it.”

  Jaxon must trust this Hammer if he’d shared his concerns with him. Reese felt a momentary worry that Jaxon was being too trusting, too vocal. Especially if he turned out to be wrong.

  Or when he turned out to be wrong, because he had to be in error about someone tampering with the evidence.

  She swiped the card through the reader on the wall next to the door, knowing it wouldn’t be set up to open to her handprint yet. “So, I’d like to talk to his wife just in case—” Reese’s voice cut off as she drew in a sharp breath.

  Jaxon’s gun was out before she’d finished the gasp. He sprang to the side, sweeping his gun across the utterly bare expanse of her apartment. “What is it?”

  “No, it’s not—put that away.” She walked to the center of the main room. “It’s just that my shipping containers were supposed to have been delivered last week. And the new furniture I picked out should have been delivered.”

  Jaxon smirked. “Well, besides being empty, it looks like a nice place.”

  So much for her hot shower. But she was too drained to work up much ire. She pulled on her iTeev, switched it on, and swiped the holo display to connect to the apartment manager. There was an error message, saying that service was temporarily delayed.

  Great. This was happening more and more lately, and if the CORE didn’t get their techs to figure out how to expand the Teev feed, there were going to be more problems than a few outages. She pushed the priority button and tried the call again. A neighbor would probably be cursing at his interrupted Teev film, but she got through.

  Jaxon walked around the apartment as she talked to the manager, gravitating from the living room and up the single wide step to the glass doors that led out onto a spacious balcony. It was the view there, shown to her over the Teev, that had sold her on this apartment.

  The manager claimed to have misunderstood the day of her arrival, though when he checked, he admitted she’d sent him the right date not once but four times. He’d have her things brought up from storage first thing in the morning. “Thanks,” Reese said icily, disconnecting.

  By the time she joined Jaxon at the glass doors, he’d opened them and stepped outside, staring into the glittering night. “Well?” he asked.

  “As you probably already guessed from my side of the conversation, my things arrived while the old tenant was still here, so the manager put them into an offsite storage facility, and then relied on his sauce-laden memory to determine when I was supposed to arrive. He’ll have everything here in the morning.”

  “What will you do until then?” He turned toward her. “You can always crash at my place.”

  She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll stay with my aunt. I was going to see her tonight anyway. We haven’t spent time together since she visited me in New York a few years back.”

  “Your aunt.” His eyes had that look when someone tried to remember a thought that sat just out of grasp. “That seems familiar.”

  “She’s my great-aunt actually. My dad’s aunt, but I just call her my aunt most of the time. I lived with her before I entered the certificate program.”

  “You went to see her once, didn’t you? You brought back candy and those sketchbooks.”

  “You remember.”

  “Not everything.” He looked away. “Those were simpler times.”

  Reese rolled her eyes. “What do you mean? Living in the Coop was awful.”

  He turned back to her. “Yeah, but we were all a team, and we had some fun times. Don’t you wonder what happened to the others?”

  “All the time.” But mostly you, she wanted to admit. “And that brings up a question I have for you. Why didn’t you tell me Lyssa and Lyra were working here?”

  He rubbed his face, as if suddenly exhausted. “It just wasn’t . . . I was going to tell you, but I didn’t want to complicate things at the Fountain. We were both dealing with the surprise of seeing each other.”

  “So that’s why you were going on about coincidence?” Because she still felt he wasn’t as surprised as she had been.

  He nodded, looking around as if searching for a chair on the empty balcony. He settled for folding his arms across his chest, the movement momentarily drawing her attention to his body. He’d turned out nice, more
than nice, and for the briefest second, she remembered how those arms had felt around her at the Fountain.

  “I thought it strange enough that the Sloan twins showed up three months ago,” he continued, “but now you’re here and . . .” He looked around again before finishing, “And someone else will be here soon. Eagle.”

  “How in CORE Territories do you know that?”

  His somber expression didn’t change. “Later, I’ll explain how. But Eagle is coming.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he stepped closer, into her personal space, his voice lowering. “Reese, there’s no coincidence to explain what’s going on here. Someone is responsible for bringing us together.”

  The tension crackled between them. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know.”

  “And Eagle . . . Did you find him?”

  “I wish I were responsible. I looked for him in the database after I made enforcer.” He began pacing the length of the balcony. “I looked for all of you. But only Lyssa and Lyra had names I could find. I talked with them through the Teev, and we even got together a few times, but Lyra was married and busy with a baby, and both of them were working for the CORE in communications. We hadn’t talked in six years before they came here. I wrote it off as a coincidence, but not after today.”

  Had Jaxon known she was coming like he said he did with Eagle? “So I’m taking it you didn’t have anything to do with me being transferred,” she had to ask. “Did you?”

  “Of course not.” Frustration came through in his voice. “I didn’t even know your last name. Since when did you start using Parker?”

  “It’s my dad’s. My parents weren’t married, and I always went by my mother’s name in the Coop, but after I went to live with my aunt, I changed it to Parker. It was easier than always explaining why we had different last names.”

  He stopped pacing and faced her. “How did you even end up there? Was it a good life?”

  “I-I left after you did. I actually walked to my aunt’s. Or part of the way. I got a few rides. Took me a week.”

  “Your dad just let you go?”

  She should tell him what happened, but it was tangled up in his mother’s death, so she only nodded. “What about you? What happened after you left that day?”

  “I was taken outside the Coop to a group home for orphaned and abandoned children, but after a week, I was sent to Colony 5.” One side of his mouth twitched. “You think the Coop was bad? Well, we call that place the Sty. There was a pig farm next to our housing community, and most days the whole place reeked.”

  “Were you in another group home there?”

  His eyes suddenly avoided hers. “I was sent to foster with a couple whose birth application had been approved but who couldn’t get pregnant. Maybe because the Sty is so close to the North Desolation Zone, though others there were having multiple children. Turns out it was a good thing no baby came to that house. It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t ideal, or anything resembling normal. The husband was an angry, vindictive man.”

  The shadow in his face reminded her of the boy she’d known. That child had wanted a father for so long, and she could imagine his upset to have landed in the home of a man who beat him. “Did you run away?”

  “No, I couldn’t.” There was a story behind that, she could tell, but he didn’t elaborate. “It didn’t matter because I’d been there only seven months when he got in a fight and was killed. And remember that enforcer who took me from the Coop? Name’s Bobby Tennant. Well, he would check up on me, and he felt terrible when he learned what happened. When he offered to apply for guardianship, the foster mother I’d been put with urged me to leave the colony with him. Bobby had been transferred from the Coop division by then. I stayed that summer with him and his wife. She was a nice woman but wasn’t really up for having an active boy around, so he sent me to a special boarding school here in Amarillo City and continued to keep an eye on me. Later, he sponsored me at the academy.”

  “You took on his name.” She smiled. “And that was why I couldn’t find you in the database either.”

  “You looked for me?”

  “You. Not the others.” She felt compelled to add, “I probably should have.”

  He shrugged. “It was all so long ago. I was lucky. Looks like we both were.”

  “Yeah.” But the word felt ripped from her throat. In a way, finding Jaxon now and seeing him all grown up, living a life that hadn’t included her, was like losing her best friend all over again—permanently. As if he had died that last day in the Coop instead of just being sent away. He’d been stolen from her, and only now did Reese realize that a part of her, all these years, had hoped to somehow get him back and recover the life they were meant to have, the life they had planned before her gift had robbed them both of their childhood.

  He was still watching her, one eyebrow arched. The tension between them seemed to increase. Why was it that she felt the urge to touch his face? To run her fingers over it to reveal . . . what?

  She didn’t know.

  Giving a quick shake of her head, she said, “I’d better get to my aunt’s. I only shoved a few articles of clothing in my weapons bag, but I left some boxes there, and she’s probably hung onto them.” Good thing clothes for work weren’t a problem.

  They closed up the apartment and headed for the elevator. Reese’s weapon bag felt heavy, and she was beginning to wish she’d left the automatic rifle at work. The silence dragged out between them.

  Outside, night had fallen in earnest, the area outside her apartment lit by a single street light. The streets themselves were deserted, and only two cars were parked on the side of the road. Reese had seen ancient photographs where cars lined both sides of the streets, but if those had been taken of actual streets, the images truly belonged to the past. Only the very wealthy could afford a vehicle, available exclusively from the CORE-owned shuttle company, but with the sky train and automated shuttles, private vehicles were an unnecessary luxury.

  “So,” Reese said finally as they headed toward the sky train. “What are we going to do about all this?”

  He understood instantly what she meant. “So far I can’t even find a trail to follow. But I’m assuming at some point it’s going to become clear why we’ve been brought here.”

  Her next step took her out of range of the circle made by the streetlight, and the next light was half a block away. “You don’t think we’re in danger, do you?”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when a dark shape sprang from the shadow of an apartment building. Hands grabbed at her, yanking her off balance. An arm slid roughly around her neck, choking her, securing her tightly against her attacker’s body. She struggled, stomping down on her opponent’s foot, only to feel pain as a knife dug into her right side. Not deeply. Just a warning.

  She wasn’t giving up. If she could get enough space between them, she could draw her gun, or even her temper laser or stunner. She grabbed the end of her weapons bag, feeling the rifle inside, and shoved it backward, hitting it into her attacker.

  A grunt in her ear was followed by more pain as the knife plunged deeper into her side. A rush of warm blood flowed down over her hip. The arm around her neck tightened, and she gasped for breath.

  “What do you want?” she tried to demand. It came out more of a groan.

  “Shut up! Stop moving!” A man’s voice. At least fifteen centimeters taller than she was by the direction of the sound and the feel of his body.

  But to stop meant capture, and she wouldn’t go easily. She could tell by the sound of blows next to her that Jaxon was either putting up a good fight or someone was using him as a punching bag.

  What could these men want? As an enforcer, the CivID embedded in her back would be valuable to sell on the black market, but only until it was canceled by the CORE. Her weapons would need code cracking to be of use to anyone, and that took a skill beyond all but the most talented criminals.

  Had Kordell Corps followed her to Dallastar? If maki
ng an example of her was so important, why didn’t they just kill her?

  Blackness patterned the edges of her vision as she continued to struggle, and agony radiated from her side, threatening to envelop her completely. If she was going to save herself, she was running out of time.

  Chapter 5

  THE ATTACK CAME exactly like his premonition had shown him a few hours ago, a premonition that was the reason Jaxon had promised Ty Bissett to set him up with Lyssa if he’d hand over Reese’s address from her private file. Jaxon had no way of telling if the premonition would happen today or a year from now, but often his premonitions came true within hours, and he’d had every intention of being with Reese when this one did. Even if that meant he became a stalker or told her the truth.

  The lighting in the street was exactly like the slice of vision he’d seen, and that was why he was ready when the attack came.

  He should have confided in Reese, but he’d already given her a lot to deal with today, and he didn’t want to alienate her further. Or to think he was crazy if nothing came of the premonition for a few months—it was bad enough that he wondered about his own sanity. Too bad his premonition hadn’t shown further into the future and couldn’t help him win this fight.

  Dodging an oncoming fist, he stepped forward and used his momentum to send a round kick that forced his opponent back a half meter. Jaxon whipped out his gun, but a knife hurtled toward him, the hilt slamming into his wrist and making him drop the weapon. Then the man was back, pounding two meaty fists into him. Jaxon slugged hard, going for the man’s eyes.

  That the men didn’t draw guns either meant they didn’t have them or they’d been ordered to take him and Reese alive. Jaxon was betting on the second. Which meant he was free to use all the dirty tactics he’d learned in the Sty without fear of being killed.

  Maybe.

  He leapt at the man, who instinctively sidestepped him. Using his forward momentum, Jaxon somersaulted, hand groping for his backup weapon. He came up firing.