by Joe Ollinger
“Where did you get this?” she demands. “I’ve never spoken to anyone named Frank Soto.”
“SCAPE. You saying they fabricated them? Because if that’s the case you can just get copies from your phone carrier, and these calls won’t be on them.”
“I guess I’ll have to, Taryn,” she replies, defensive. “Because I never talked to anyone—” She stops herself. “Wait,” she says staring intently at the document in front of her. “Wait, no, I think I do remember these now. They were wrong numbers.”
Brady steps forward, finally getting involved. “Wrong numbers.”
“Someone called looking for someone. I can’t remember the name. They chatted longer than you’d normally expect, which I thought was a little bit strange at the time. That’s why some of these calls are almost a minute.”
I cross my arms, not sure I buy it. “Things are making less and less sense here, Myra.”
She glares at Brady, cornered and angry. “Can I speak with you alone for a second, Taryn?” she asks.
I glance to Brady, who’s not hiding his accusatory mood. I nod slightly, indicating to him that I want to grant Myra’s request, and he hesitates for a second, but then steps away, wandering through the bustle to the other side of the room, the ambient scrapes and voices of Dispatch washing away the sound of his footsteps on the dusty floor.
Myra leans across her desk, keeping her voice quiet. “I’m worried, Taryn.”
“So am I.”
“That’s not what I mean. I think you’re being led down a road by that auditor. A bad road.”
“Like the one that leads me to being attacked and blown up?”
Understanding my allusion to the information she gave me that almost led to my death, she pouts a bit. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think right now.”
“I could have killed you yesterday.”
“You both have had opportunities to kill me, or at least take a decent crack at it. Something must have changed.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know. Yet.”
“So, what? You going to report me to the Captain?” she challenges. “If you don’t, I think I’ll have to go to him myself about this.”
I haven’t thought that far ahead. Truth is, I don’t fully trust the Captain, either. His efforts to keep me away from the case might be altruistic, or they might be something else. He might be the source of the leak. “I’m going to give it a couple of days,” I tell Myra, “give you a chance to get there first if you want to.”
She nods, sitting back into her chair as that sinks in. “By the way,” she says, still hurt and indignant, “I ran that list of names you gave me.”
“And?”
“And none of the clients Chan added after he paid Troy Sales have any contact info.” She speaks slowly, emphasizing. “No rap sheets. Nothing.”
I pause briefly as I process what this could mean. “What are you saying?”
“Look.”
Myra turns the monitor so that I can see it, and sure enough, the official records for each of the last twenty or so names show up blank. Names, ID numbers, and dates of birth only, no addresses, no phone numbers, no employment chains, no arrest histories. These look doctored or faked, but that would be difficult to do.
“Thanks, Myra. No hard feelings, yeah?”
“Yeah.” She attempts a smile, but I can tell that she’s still upset or at least shaken up.
I walk away from her desk to Brady, who waits quietly, leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed. “What’s your judgment?” he asks.
What is my judgment? “Myra ran the names of Dr. Chan’s patients,” I tell him.
“And?”
“And they’re suspiciously blank.”
“Hmm.” He frowns, thinking. “What does that mean?”
“Can’t say yet.” Those names could be dummy clients Chan used to launder the money he was making on black market calcium, or they could have been put there for some other less obvious reason.
“So what now?”
“I want everything you can get me on them. You’re a Commerce Board auditor, make yourself useful.”
He looks past me, across the floor at Myra, who’s gone back to work and is taking a call. “You think she’s misleading us?”
“She said the exact same thing about you.”
“Of course she did.” An awkward silence passes for a minute as Brady avoids eye contact, unsure what to do.
“Go get that info, Brady. I’m going to get my ride and—”
“Taryn!” A female voice pierces through the background noise.
Suddenly alert, I turn to see Myra standing at her desk, waving.
“Taryn!” she calls again.
Dodging the dispersing team of heavies, I trot over to her. “What? What is it?”
“I thought you’d want to know,” she says, “Jessi Rodgers was just reported missing.”
Rage and paranoia well up in my torso, pushing the breath out of me. My anger spins like a broken compass, lacking a sure target to fix upon. “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?” I demand.
“It just showed up,” Myra answers. “Just came up on the ticker.”
Is this a trap? Is she trying to get me to dash out to the warehouse district so that someone can off me? “Get me a contact number.”
“I would need a—”
“Just do it.”
She gives up on arguing and clicks around on her monitor. I pull out my phone and extend the screen, and sure enough, a contact pops up. I dial it and put it to my ear, trying to calm myself down so that I don’t immediately start screaming at whoever answers.
But no one does. It rings until it goes to a mailbox.
I resist the urge to hurl my phone to the ground and instead close it and pocket it. Jessi Rodgers is not my problem, and my inability to explain to myself why she matters to me only aggravates my confusion. I hate the little girl for making me care, I hate myself for caring, and I hate this miserable city for all its problems, for doing this to us.
As I reel, trying to focus my thoughts, Brady wanders up, looking lost. “Taryn,” he says, “what’s going on?”
Myra bristles, jealous. “He’s calling you Taryn now?”
“Get me that damn data, Brady,” I snap, deciding on a whim, probably foolishly, to take the bait. “I’ve got something to look into.”
As I speed across town, darting through traffic in the dusty haze of late afternoon, paranoia continues to creep at the edges of my mind. Every single car in my rearview is a potential attacker, every single overpass a potential shooter’s perch. I swapped the trace signal on my ride back at the Collections Office, but that won’t help me if someone inside the Agency is hunting me, or if someone saw me drive out of the lot, or if I’ve been baited into an ambush.
Things are dead in the warehouse district. I park outside of the hydro farm owned by Jessi Rodgers’s aunt and uncle, wary of my surroundings. The street is quiet and empty except for the hums and whirs of machinery emanating from factories, a man guiding drones to load up a freight truck at one of the neighboring storage depots, and a maintenance crew working on an open utilities panel on the sidewalk. The sun has sunk behind the skyline, leaving sheets of light slicing between the tall buildings of downtown and Rumville, striping the low, blocky buildings and wide, single-level streets with intermittent zones of shadow and bright red daylight. It’s getting cooler out, but the heat of the afternoon lingers, drifting off the pavement, and after a few seconds sitting alone with my thoughts on my parked ride, it occurs to me that I am tired.
I climb off, and the auto-lock issues a metallic click. My boots feel unusually heavy as I slowly walk the few meters to the front door of the hydro farm, dreading the answers I might get here but too resigned to turn away and leave. I ring the bell, and while I wait, I pull from my pocket
all the remaining cash I took out of my account at the SCAPE Bank—only a shade less than three thousand units, a heavy handful of stacked, interlocking chips.
The door slides open, and Enna Rodgers faces me. It takes a second before the surprise shows on her weathered, tired face. “Agent, uh . . . ” She can’t even remember my name.
“Dare.”
“What’s this about?”
I shove my fist forward and open it, offering the stacks of thick tabs. “A loan,” I say, forcing myself to keep my hostility in check. “To help with Jessi’s surgery.”
Enna stares at the money for a long few seconds, confused and intimidated. I know that Jessi isn’t around to have the surgery she needs, and Enna Rodgers’s nervous demeanor tells me that she knows that I know that. “How . . . ” She struggles with the words. “How nice of you. You really didn’t have to do that.”
I want her to admit that Jessi’s gone, or to at least play along with this stupid little charade and take the cash. Either way it will justify my rage, even though I don’t know what the next step will be. “I want to,” I tell her coldly. “Take it.”
She can’t hold eye contact. “Agent Dare,” she says, her voice shaking, “Jessi went missing.”
“You think I don’t know what that means?”
“What?”
I slip the cash back into my pocket and give Enna Rodgers a shove, stepping through the door and into the hydro farm after her as she stumbles back. “She’s dead. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Stop,” Rodgers pleads, “we reported her missing.”
As if I’ll believe that. I’ve worked in Collections too long, taken down too many black market processors, seen too many corpses get “lost.” My mother reported my own father “missing.”
“You rat. You piece of garbage.” I shove her again, harder this time, and she stumbles into a rack of strawberry plants, bracing herself on some tubing. “All I want to know is, did you kill her or just sell her corpse after she died of hypocalcemia?”
Finally pushed too far, she steps forward and shoves me back, getting in my face. “We did everything we could for her!” she screams, exploding with rage and misery. “We weren’t expecting to get burdened with her. What did you expect us to do?”
Dammit, why do I care about this? It’s over and done with. I know I should walk away. I’ll find no satisfaction here, and it’s time to cut my losses and leave. But I can’t. I want to hear this woman say it, to feel the sting I feel each time I say it. “She’s dead.”
Her eyes well with tears. “I done nothing wrong.”
My control breaks, and I’m swinging my fist at her, sudden and hard and vicious, cracking my knuckles into her jaw. The shock rattles through my hand as the farmer reels, falling back into the plants.
She clutches her face, half-crouched and looking up at me with fear.
“Just admit it!” I shriek. “I want you to admit it!”
“I swear, I didn’t do anything wrong!”
I fall on her and swing my clenched, tightened fists over and over, wild and imprecise, beating on her face and chest as she sobs and cowers and tries to shield herself with her arms. “Tell me!” I demand again, “Tell me how it happened!”
“Please,” she begs. “Please stop!”
I grab her by her cheap, worn-down cotton shirt and pull her close, the fear in her eyes and the limpness of her torso confessing her defeat. There’s no fight left in her. “I want to know.”
“All right,” she answers, her face bruised and bloodied, her thin hair a tangled mess. “Just stop. Just please stop.”
I shove her to the floor and rise to my feet, standing over her. I wait as she doubles over in pain, breathing hard, and spits blood onto the floor. She wipes her mouth and nose, leaving her face and the back of her hand smeared with red.
“I found her in her bed,” she admits, resigned. “Not breathing. Didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to do.” She looks up at me, no longer avoiding eye contact. “Please,” she says. “Please. I did everything I could but she died and I needed money so I sold the body. It wasn’t my fault.”
I stare at her coldly, feeling that familiar emptiness well up inside me, the darkness filling the space behind my eyes. I did not expect Enna Rodgers’s story to satisfy me, and it has not. There was no absolution to be found here, but now I know for sure that the little girl I rescued from that mine is dead and gone. She’s rogue currency now. Powder in the pockets of strangers.
“Is that what you wanted to hear?” the beaten woman asks.
I truly do not know the answer. I don’t know what I wanted, and I don’t know what I want. Not any longer. Without saying another word, I turn around to exit the building. The door shuts behind me, leaving me alone under the wide, cloudless, gray-blue sky, the dry air rolling dusty over the pavement in the heat of a reluctantly dying late afternoon. It’s quiet, the ambient noise of the construction crew and the lifter drones like an afterthought in the background. My legs wobbly underneath me, my stomach twisted in a knot, I drop down to a knee on the dirty, cracked pavement. I draw a deep breath, trying to be the person I’m used to being, callous and uncaring and efficient and focused. Collections Agent Taryn Dare.
I could have saved Jessi Rodgers. I could have paid for that surgery.
How many people have died for my journey off Brink? How much collateral damage, how many lives could I have changed but didn’t? This world is a jagged trap, pulling us all back into it, I’ve always known that, but for the first time, the idea dawns on me that in some way, it’s my fault. Me and everyone like me, the strong ones who refuse to care, we’re the ones to blame.
No, I tell myself with a feeble inner voice, don’t be stupid. The problems here cut too deep. One day things may change, but not because of the efforts of a single Collections Agent. Every minute I spend worrying about someone I could have saved is a minute wasted. And minutes are money.
My thoughts are interrupted by the vibration of my phone against my shoulder. I left it on, even though someone might use it to track me. My gun has a tracker in it, too, and I need that on me. I pull the phone out of my shoulder pocket and extend the screen, revealing that it’s Brady calling.
“Brady,” I answer, “what is it?”
“You’re alive,” he says, sounding surprised but slightly pleased. “I’m calling because I pulled the finances on those names.”
I rise to my feet, the anguish and angst falling back down below the surface of my consciousness. “And?”
“Couple interesting things,” he muses. “All five of them are Commerce Board employees. All five have accounts with SCAPE Bank.”
That second part is not a surprise. SCAPE Finance and Credit has a near-monopoly on this world. “Anything interesting in the deposits or withdrawals?”
“Uhh,” he says as though he didn’t think to check that far and is just now looking. “Large direct deposits. Large withdrawals. Cash. All from the main branch.”
This is getting interesting. “Cash withdrawals?”
“All cash. Every one of them.”
Concerned that someone might be listening to this call, I tell him, “Meet me at your place in an hour. I want to see that data.”
Jessi Rodgers is gone, but this case won’t seem to die.
I slip my goggles on, hop on my ride, and drive away from the hydro strawberry farm, through the dismal utilitarian gray of the warehouse district. A few freight vehicles crawl through the streets and alleys, loading and unloading, and the industrial noise of the factories drones low, but otherwise the roads are desolate. Traffic thickens as I cross into a busier part of a town called the Brass and Glass, a commercial district filled with tall business complexes, office structures arranged among tiered outdoor platforms for air shipping and transit. The streets are stacked here, in the way that’s supposedly common on Earth and Ryland. Onramps and offramps lead up and down, maximizing the use of space with four
levels of road. As I take a ramp onto an over-route two levels above ground, I notice a vehicle following me.
It’s a black two-seater, a Vict Model X, discreet but quick, sticking suspiciously close as I climb up to the third level and veer off. The car’s got a more powerful engine than my ride by far, and it’s almost as maneuverable. The window is heavily UV-tinted, like most are on Brink, so I can’t make out the face of the driver.
I switch lanes, testing him. He waits a bit, trailing further behind, then follows. Traffic is probably too thick here for him to take a shot at me, so maybe he’s waiting for me to get home, or to Brady’s. I gun my engine, revving my ride forward. Switching lanes, then back again, I weave around a couple of cars, putting some space between us. The Model X doesn’t seem to respond, maybe because there’s not enough room for it to get around the truck in front of it, or maybe because the driver doesn’t want to be too obvious. Trying to take advantage, I speed ahead, weaving between a city bus and a quickbike, smelling the ozone-dry exhaust as I slip behind the bus. My pursuer cruises into a gap in the traffic, shoots closer, and changes lanes, forcing the quickbike to brake as it cuts in right behind me. It’s clear that he’s following me now; he’s made that obvious.
“Phone,” I say loudly, for the sake of the little mic in my goggles, “license grab. Behind me.” My goggles don’t have speakers in them to verify, so I can only hope that the command registered successfully.
Traffic thins, and I fly at a dangerous speed along the third-level road. I flip the control that manually adjusts the axle width, bringing the wheels in close. Wobbling a bit as I adjust to the narrower size of my M 130, I feint taking the ramp down to the second level but swerve back. The Model X matches my maneuvers, staying with me. Brakes screech as the cars behind avoid hitting it. It’s the tail end of rush hour, but traffic is not thick enough for me to slip free. Switching back to the far-left lane, I put the accelerator all the way to the floor, swerving on and then off of the left shoulder, slipping by a slow-moving sedan. My pursuer fails to get around it, and I decide it’s time to take a chance.
Coming up on the ramp to the top level, a narrow window opens diagonally in the traffic to my right. Do or die time. Holding my breath, terrified, I swerve hard and brake, slicing through it. Horns sound and brakes screech, but I barely slip through to open pavement, just in time to careen onto the ramp and up. At the top, I veer hard into the turn-off for the midlevel parking floor of a big business complex and screech to a stop.