by J. Elle
He looks between us, confused.
“But there’s no artist names, like you thought.”
I swear, common sense ain’t common. “Girl, take them out.” I reach inside the plastic cover and pull out a picture of a tribal tattoo he got done on his biceps. “Turn them around.” I flip over the picture and, sure enough, scribbled there is the tattoo artist’s name. “See!”
“No, but foreal, what are you doing?” Julius asks.
Do I tell him? Or rather, how much do I tell him?
I tug my sleeves down for good measure. “So, I saw a tattoo on these two dudes getting away with some foul shit. I think it’s weird they have the same exact tattoo in the same spot, so I wanted to find out who did them. It’s super detailed, looks real top-notch, so I figured your old pieces could point me in the direction of an artist’s name.”
“Show me the ink.”
Tasha hands him her phone with a picture of bus stop guy, and Julius squints. He stretches his fingers, swipes a few times, and leans in again. “You’re sure this is the tattoo?”
“Yeah.”
“How sure?” He looks at me and everything that’s warm in his eyes grows cold.
I sit up straight. “Very sure.”
“That’s Litto’s crew, Rue.”
“Who?”
He snatches up Ms. Leola’s TV remote from a side table and turns on the TV. “Litto’s crew.” His deadpan tone sends a ripple of fear through me. He flips to a news channel. Headlines run across the screen.
Another arrest in the recent shooting of…
Double homicides in the neighborhood of East Row in broad daylight have detectives…
He flips to a different news station.
The mayor is recommending an early curfew…
Gang violence this last year is double that of the last ten years…
He flips again.
More murder.
And again.
More violence. More crime.
One thread in common—the victims are all young and Black or brown-skinned.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“Rue, Litto’s crew owns the city, all the drugs. He dominates the cartels feeding this side of the Row. No one’s packing heat or pushing weight without their say-so.”
I can’t breathe.
“I don’t know why you’re looking into them”—the fear in his eyes cuts like a blade—“but stop, please, unless you got a death wish.”
CHAPTER 16
NO, RUE!” TASHA’S VOICE is strained.
“Yes.” I slip the protection necklace over Tasha’s neck and fasten it. “This will keep you invisible and safe from the Chancellor and his General while I go figure out what Litto’s crew wants with you.”
Julius is pacing the room back and forth, hands running through his low top. He stops and looks at us, confused. If I told him about Ghizon, would he even believe me? Without seeing it, it’s unbelievable.
Tasha grabs my wrist. “You can’t just go off looking for these gang people or whoever they are.” Her lip quivers in that way I know if it doesn’t stop, tears will soon follow. “What if… what if something happens? Y-you promised you’d always be here.”
I’m a ball of confusion, somewhere between agreeing with T and the urge to do what I know I gotta do. Was this what it was like when Aasim said goodbye to Moms? I pick at a rogue thread on my shirt harder than I mean to and a hole appears. He never came back. Not that I even wanted him to, but I can’t, under any circumstance, do that to T.
But what choice do I have? Running from folks on the street catches up with you. If Litto’s dudes are after T, I need to know why. And from there we can figure out what to do. At least for now, the Chancellor’s off her tail.
“T, I have to do something. We can’t just sit here and live our lives running from everybody. What kind of life is that?”
“At least it’s life.”
I press my forehead to hers. “I’m going to be alright.”
That’s what you tell your little sister when she’s scared, even if you’re not sure it’s true. When you stepping in to protect them because ain’t nobody else around going to do it.
Julius stops pacing. “I agree with fam on this one, Rue. You can’t do this.”
It’s almost cute that he cares, but he doesn’t understand who he’s dealing with. What I could do if my magic would answer. I reach beneath my sleeve and thumb the onyx fused to my wrist.
“I agree.” Bri folds her arms. “It’s too risky. And with—”
I cut her a look and she snaps her mouth shut. I know what she’s thinking. Without magic, what am I going to do? And truth is, I don’t know.
But not knowing how to fix something isn’t an excuse not to try.
Can’t they see, if we don’t do something, who will?
“I—just,” Bri stutters, tapping her foot like she’s had twelve cups of caffeine. She does that when she’s really worked up. “The odds don’t look good, is all I was going to say.”
“We don’t even know what these people want,” Tasha says.
“They want you dead,” Julius adds. “And they wouldn’t flinch at snatching Rue’s ass too.”
“But whyyy?” Hearing my sister’s voice crack wedges a knot deep in my chest.
“Look, I appreciate the concern,” I interrupt. “I feel what you’re saying and I’m not stupid. I’m not trying to walk up in there and demand answers, but I can check out the spot they hang at. Try to figure out what the hell they’re after, why they’re looking for my sister and me, specifically. Pick up some intel.”
Bri sighs, foot tapping a million miles a minute. “Is there a Patrol here? Or someone you can talk to and tell them what’s going on?”
Julius laughs under his breath.
I get it. She’s trying to help. Bri looks between us and the pained expression she wears says everything her words do not: If she stays with me in case I need magic, and ends up using it, Patrol will be here in a heartbeat and have all our asses hemmed up. If I go find these people on my own and end up in danger, I won’t be able to protect myself.
Patrol cannot find out our location. So her using magic, even if it’s dire, is out! Then all this would be for nothing. She needs to get back to Ghizon and do what we agreed on. That’s best-case scenario at this point.
“I’m just going to collect info. I’ll be fine. And you should get going, Bri. See about that thing we talked about.” I flash her an expression I hope isn’t too obvious. Before the commotion started about me going to scope out Litto’s crew, I had pulled her aside. She’d said before she came to Ms. Leola’s that she looked me up in the Ghizon mainframe and there it was, plain as day: Rue Jelani Akintola… deceased.
“The listing is really clever because it automatically deactivates your onyx, like powering down your magic. There were lots of cases of corpse robbing decades ago, so they added in that coding.”
“So that’s it?” I had gestured to my wrist. “My magic is dead? This is basically some kind of weird wrist jewelry at this point?”
“Pretty much.”
Not the answer I had hoped for.
The best thing she could try to do, she’d said, was hack the mainframe and change the listing to alive. “There has to be an incidental procedure in case some dude spills Juva Juice on a key map or enters it in wrong. Me trying to hack the system is probably our best bet.”
I’d agreed.
But now she’s looking at me crazy, like I was just gonna sit back here and play hopscotch while she’s gone.
“But…,” she says.
“There are no buts.” I face her. “That’s not how things work, Bri. Not here.” No one’s coming to fix this for us.
“Rue, I know odds and these aren’t good. I’m telling you…”
She knows everything, I swear. But life here ain’t like it is back there. Can’t she see that?
“Get going, Bri, please. We talked about this.”
“I
mean, if the cops had a handle on Litto’s crew,” Julius chimes in, “they wouldn’t be all over the damn news. I’m not saying do this, Rue. But I get it. If you go, I’m going too.”
Ride or die. Universal code ’round here.
“Then it’s settled,” I say, meeting Bri’s eyes. She nods, barely.
Tasha weeps into her hands. Cupcake purrs, pushing up against her ankles. I scoop him up, holding in the urge to vomit, and place him in her arms. I kiss her forehead and hold it there, savoring the moment, in case it’s the last one I ever give her.
Bri’s right. This is risky. But so is doing nothing.
“Moms raised a diamond,” Tasha says sticking out her pinky. She doesn’t like it, but she knows this is for her, for us. I twist mine around hers and a single tear threatens to fall.
I let it. “And diamonds don’t crack.”
CHAPTER 17
THE CUFF IS WEIGHTY in my hands, like it’s made of solid gold. Its warmth is entrancing. Muffled whispers swim in my ear every time I touch it, no clearer than before. Julius clicks his seat belt as his car rumbles into motion. He can’t hear them. Bri couldn’t hear them. No one could.
No one but me.
The warmth creeps into my chest and I feel light, like I’m floating. It crawls around inside me in a wave of motion, swelling in my rib cage, swishing from side to side. Like it’s searching for something in my very bones.
“You listening?” Julius’s voice slips through the haze of thoughts and I stick the cuff in my pocket.
“Yeah, sorry.” I angle the vents, AC blasting a different way. “What you say?”
“I was asking if you heard about Kid and his folks?”
Kid was this little boy who used to live across the complex. His momma is a known crack head, his daddy too. They would just disappear for days sometimes. Their house didn’t have running water, I guess, because at night you’d find him filling up water jugs from Moms’s spigot. She knew he was doing it. The whole block did. But nobody ever said nothing. Moms would say kids that are hurting don’t need judgment, they need lots of love and kindness.
Kid would come by during the day sometimes, offering to help do some chores around the house. Ms. Leola always gave him a task and put a little change in his pocket and food in his hand. Ms. Aretha on the back side of the Row always made sure he had fresh clothes when school started. Kid didn’t have parents around all the time that he could rely on, but he had the block and we take care of our own.
“Nah. Haven’t had my ear to the street in a while.”
“Somebody called the people. CPS picked him up.”
“Damn. Foreal?” I mean, that’s good for him I guess, but I don’t know how to feel. “I just hope he’s with people that’s gon’ do right by him.”
“What you mean?”
“Just that all that glitters ain’t gold. Being snatched up from home ain’t guaranteed sunshine and rainbows.”
“Kid gon’ be aight,” he says, shifting the car. “He’s bred from ’round here.”
Diamonds. “You right.”
We zoom past several more complexes and down past the older houses in the neighborhood; every other block there’s one boarded up with overgrown grass. Litto runs his stuff through Dezignz, according to Julius, so that’s where we are going. We pass Ole Jesse pushing his grocery cart of soda cans. He walks back and forth across these streets all day and I’m pretty sure he sleeps in one of those abandoned houses. Three or four clear trash bags spill over the cart’s edge as he rolls down the side of the street. I’d tell him to get on the sidewalk, but there isn’t one. His cart’s real full; he must be about to turn them in, put some change in his pocket. He tilts his chin as we roll past, saying what’s up. We say what’s up back.
People spill out of LuLu’s Corner Store up ahead as we roll up to a red light and stop.
“So, tell me about Litto, everything you know,” I say. The crowd piles into an unmarked SUV with windows so tinted it looks painted black.
“What’s there to say? His boys are everywhere.”
“What do you know about Litto himself?”
“To be honest, nothing. Just heard the name. When I was working at Dezignz…”
“Uh-huh.” I smirk and he does too.
“When that was my spot, I never saw him. But the guy who owns the shop made it seem like he worked directly under him. Rue, I gotta say this, even though I know your stubborn ass ain’t gon’ listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“You a badass, and I know you aren’t going to let anybody come for you or your family, but this is out of your league. Trust me on that.” He cares, still. It’s sweet.
“How you know I don’t have some tricks up my sleeve?” Literally.
“Unless you hiding some Feds special ops type shit under your sleeve, you out of your league.”
We laugh. A gust of wind from his cracked window flutters the du-rag hanging down his neck.
“I’m just getting information. I know how to lay low. You act like these streets ain’t raise me too. I’m not stupid.”
“I know.”
“Aight then.”
Silence hangs in the air for several moments as we zip past more older houses, and they get newer and nicer the farther we go. Every few blocks is a cluster of brick two-story houses with columns and half-circle drives. Something about the outside of the houses looks old but the insides are brand new—not just the walls and floors, but the people too. We roll past the gentrified area. Dezignz is on the edge of the East Side and a solid half hour away if we catch the lights right.
Cop sirens blare in the background and my hands dig into the door handle. The cop car speeds past and I exhale. The streets are full of people walking to and from the bus stop. But something’s different. There’s more people than I remember, standing around loitering. Every bus stop bench is piled with people rolled up in blankets sleeping.
“I don’t remember it being quite like this,” I say. “Was it always so many people?”
“The crew’s stepped up the game on this side. You got people losing houses trying to make money any way they can, and trouble is as easy to find as a gas station ’round here. Litto keeps what he calls stations on damn near every corner.”
“Stations?”
“Yeah, there’s one.” He points at a white woman standing outside a weave shop tapping her phone.
“She’s white.”
“Yep. Cops ain’t bothering her.”
“What’s a station? What does she do?”
“What you think she do, Rue?” He laughs at me.
“She look like some fancy developer type, just sitting there on the phone.”
“Nah, the stations serve the area over here. They’re eyes and ears. Suppliers.”
The light turns green and we jerk into motion, but I can’t take my eyes off the lady. I crane my neck over my shoulder to see if she has a tattoo.
She meets my eyes and my stomach flutters. She doesn’t look away. No expression. Just eyes, on me. Like she knows I’m staring, like she sees through me. We roll past and she grows smaller in the distance.
“I didn’t see a tat on her neck,” I say.
“And you wouldn’t. She ain’t busting in doors, shooting up folks. She’s the silencer on the gun, the enemy you don’t hear or see.”
“So the snake tattoo?” I ask.
“I heard only Litto’s dawgs get that. His inner circle, most trusted crew. You not gon’ see them standing on corners. Shit, you not gon’ see them at all.”
But I have seen them.
Twice.
I try to swallow the lump in my throat, but it won’t go down.
Julius plants his hands at ten and two, his sleeve of tats flashing. Colorful feathers from the tail of a phoenix wrap around his forearm. His grandma’s face and name stare from his shoulder, with the year she died underneath. “Since I’m clearly not going to be able to talk you out of this, it’s my turn to ask a question.”
>
I chuckle. “Sure, what you wanna know?”
“I missed a lot of the shit y’all were talking about back at the house.”
Uh-oh.
“What was the necklace about? And, like, where the hell you been? Something happen?”
Sigh.
“You know I got you. I’m just trying to figure out what’s up with you? The truth.”
I shift in my seat. What do I say? How much? Does him knowing put him in danger too? The questions got my head spinning.
“Rue?”
“Someone’s after my sister—someone besides Litto.” That’s pretty much the whole truth.
“Who? Why?”
The General’s pallid face and thin lips swirl in my memory. “Nobody you would know,” I say.
“Uhm, okay. That ain’t a real answer though. Do you know why? What they want?”
The General’s stern complexion and dead slate eyes are frozen in my mind. The scar under his eye moved when he spoke. Get me that name, recruit.
“I felt cold all over when he looked at me.”
“When who looked at you? Rue, you not making no sense.”
Did I say that out loud? “Just this guy. He’s the boss’s right hand at this place I used to work and I broke the rules. So the boss told him I had to be…”
Get her ready for Unbinding. His words play on repeat in my head. Recruit, get me that name. Luke scrambling to slip me my watch back. That name. Tasha’s name. They’re to be killed.
Words slip from my lips in barely a whisper. “He was practically smiling when he told me my punishment.”
“What punishment? Like he fired you?”
Julius’s words fade and bile hovers at the back of my throat. She has the necklace. It’s okay. He won’t find her. My knee’s bouncing as thoughts of the General’s threats and the Chancellor’s cold stare wrap around my throat…
They’re to be killed.
Tighter.
Chancellor’s orders.
Tighter still.
I gasp, fanning myself for air. “A-air. I need…”
“Rue!” The car jerks to a halt and I roll my window down. Humid air washes over me. Inhale. Tasha is safe. I’m still public enemy number one, but at least my sister is safe. Exhale.