“Not really. He told me Mercer kidnapped you as leverage because your father was one of Mercer’s business rivals,” I explained.
“Oh yeah, big-time rival in weapons smuggling. Like, nemesis-level rival.” Priyanka pulled her legs up onto the seat and wrapped her arms around them. “Have you ever heard of Parth Acharya?”
“That rings a bell….”
She picked up the burner phone and switched over to the browser. The New York Times article was already pulled up. The image of a handsome, gray-haired Indian man filled the screen below the headline ACHARYA ESCAPES INDICTMENT.
She gave a faint laugh. “I can’t help myself sometimes. I search his name at least once a week. I tell myself it’s because I want to know if he’s still alive, but I think it’s just a different kind of morbid curiosity. When I was a little younger, I used to pretend that he was trying to secretly communicate with me through photos in the newspaper and online, to send me signals. He was such a big figure in my mind—like an emperor—I assumed there had to be a reason why he was always getting busted and tried for this crime or that. Turns out, it was just Mercer constantly leaking information about him to the government. No one could ever pin anything serious on him, though. Seems like they still can’t.”
“And your father…he just…let Mercer keep you?”
“Not exactly.” Priyanka let out a soft breath. “I wasn’t born here. My mother—her name was Chandni. She and I lived in Delhi for the first seven years of my life. My father had gone to America to establish himself there—one day he was a driver, the next, some crime boss’s driver, and the next, the new crime boss himself. It didn’t happen quite that fast, but it was only a year before he sent a private plane back for us. It was a whole thing, because commercial flights to and from the States had been stopped owing to IAAN and how they thought it could spread.
“A few days before it was set to arrive,” Priyanka continued, “my mom was killed by a car as she was crossing our street. So, I went alone. I lived in his massive, echoing marble mansion in Jersey and watched the constant stream of henchmen and overheard a thousand whispered conversations, and that became my new baseline for normal. If he was ever scared of me catching IAAN, my father never showed it. And then about a year after I arrived, a day before Christmas—because, yes, he’s that asshole—Mercer sent someone to kidnap me. He offered a choice to my father: get out of the guns business, or he’d send me back to him in pieces.”
“Jesus,” I breathed out.
“Oh wait, it gets better.” Priyanka shifted in her seat. “The deadline fell on the same day my father was due in court for racketeering charges. Instead of responding to the message, or trying to renegotiate those terms, Mercer and I both watched on the news as my father walked up the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan in head-to-toe white. When one of the reporters asked him why, he explained that his beloved daughter Priyanka had died from IAAN the night before and he was in mourning.”
It actually took me a moment to remember how to speak. “What?”
“Oh yes. That’s how strong his sense of pride is. He refused to admit that Mercer had kidnapped his daughter, that Mercer had won and put him in a position of weakness, so he chalked me up as a loss and moved on. I was a problem to him, which meant I no longer had value. For him, I wasn’t enough.”
“That is disgusting,” I said.
“At the time, the bigger issue was what Mercer would do to me. I remember it so clearly—Mercer looked down at me and said, ‘Well, how are you going to be useful to me now?’ So I asked to join the other kids.”
I gasped. “Priya…”
She shrugged, clearing her throat. “Mercer is a sick son of a bitch, but my father is a coldhearted bastard. That’s the difference between them in the end. Lana isn’t wrong. Mercer did take care of us, in a way. When he turned his attention on you, it was like warm honey. It wasn’t until I was older that I saw how manipulative he is.”
“God,” I breathed out. “What about your mom’s family? Could you go back to them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I keep up my Hindi so I’ll be able to communicate with them to some degree one day, but it’s not like I’ve really tried to get in touch with them, even after we left Blue Star. Every time I think about it, something stops me. I tell myself that it’s because I don’t want Mercer to go after them, to use them to hurt me, but it’s more than that. I’m not even sure how to explain it….”
“Just try,” I said.
“One of the worst things about all of this is that I feel this strange disconnect with my wider family and culture. I still have my faith, my deep passion for malpua, and all these golden memories of living in Delhi with my mom, but…it feels like I got plucked out of my real life midstream. Does that make sense?”
“It does.” She’d put into words a feeling I’d never been able to articulate myself. When we’d gone to the camps, it wasn’t just our lives that had been interrupted, but our sense of self. It changed the trajectory of our worlds. For so long, our focus had to be on survival, and survival alone.
But that wasn’t living.
“I think that about sums it up,” Priyanka said. “I feel lucky in some ways, because Lana and Roman are more family to me than my father ever was. I never would have met them otherwise.”
Still…
She turned her wrist up, pushing the sleeve of her blouse back until it revealed the blue star tattooed on it. “I don’t know why I kept this. Roman burned his off a few nights after we escaped, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Roman said he hated feeling like he’d been marked as someone’s possession, but I never saw it that way—to me, it was always more of a unifying symbol. A sign that we were family. Now it’s a reminder that nothing is all good or all bad.”
My heart was exhausted. It just couldn’t handle any more. I pressed my hand to my eyes.
“Don’t start crying,” Priyanka said. “Otherwise I’ll start and won’t be able to stop.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. Sometimes it just feels like it’s too much, you know? I always thought the world would feel easier as I got older, but I’ve only gotten more practice at pretending it is.”
“It’s hard for people like us,” Priyanka said, leaning over the console to rest her head on my shoulder. I let mine fall against hers. “We feel everything.”
Outside, Roman appeared along the road again, his dark hair damp and shining in the sun.
“I’m sorry about Lana,” I told her. “It must be unbearable to see her like this.”
“It’ll only be unbearable when I give up hope of ever getting her back,” she said. “And I won’t. Not ever. My heart is a wheel. It breaks all the damn time, but, most days, it just rolls on.”
I UNFOLDED THE MAP AND smoothed it across the steering wheel again, looking between the X Roman had marked on it and the building across the street. We’d used the burner’s limited GPS capabilities to search for the Baton Rouge address, but there must have been some glitch in the satellite feed, or he’d made a mistake in transferring the information over onto the paper. This couldn’t be it.
“I think this is right,” Roman said, shielding his eyes from the glare of sunlight to get a better look at the building. “Unfortunately.”
“It’s like I can hear the screams of ghost children from here,” Priyanka said, shuddering. “Tell me Ruby loves roller-skating so much she’d drive across multiple state lines and risk capture by the government for a fun day out.”
Riverside Rink was just outside of Baton Rouge proper, on a street yet to be touched by that magic reinvigoration we’d seen in other places. The flow of money and government-sponsored work had apparently stopped at the city’s center.
We parked across the street, behind a shuttered McDonald’s, and ate our lunch of vending-machine food on a faded rainbow play set. Roman insisted on keeping watch to see if anyone was coming or going. So far, nothing. No one.
“I don’t think she’s
here,” I said, tossing the M&M’s wrapper into the restaurant’s overflowing trash can. A swarm of flies immediately descended on it. “I don’t think anyone’s been here in a good decade.”
Half the letters on the rink’s fluorescent sign were missing, plundered by neglect or thieves, I wasn’t sure. Its parking lot was empty, all of its lines faded. The windows, like all the other buildings’ in the neighborhood, were boarded up and spray-painted with warnings against trespassers.
“Well, we’re here. At least we’ll see what she found so intriguing about this place,” Priyanka said. “You good?”
Roman checked that there was a bullet in the chamber of his gun, then nodded.
The roller rink was completely locked down, and the front door had been chained for good measure. It made finding the back door open that much stranger.
“Stating for the record that I don’t like this,” Priyanka said.
“There is no record,” Roman whispered.
She gave him a look. He gave her one right back.
“Should I go first?” I suggested.
We kept our backs to the brick wall, facing the mountain of trash piled high in the nearby dumpsters. The smell was bad enough that I lifted the collar of my shirt over my nose and mouth.
Roman led us inside, sweeping his gun back and forth as he searched what once had been the rink’s kitchen. There was still a grill, but all the other machines had been taken, leaving behind only a congealed bit of orange cheese on the tile floor as a relic. The light filtering in from outside faded the farther we moved into the building. I pulled the flashlight out of my back pocket and switched it on.
Roman had stepped into the main rink area, only to whirl toward us again, the back of his hand pressed hard to his mouth.
“Don’t—” he started to say as I passed him.
Too late. I smelled it, too. The sickly sweet stench of rotting food had blended with the unmistakable reek of human waste and…something else. Something like death.
The flashlight’s thin beam illuminated the skating rink in slices of horror. Cubbies of roller skates, left untouched. Garbage and buckets were scattered haphazardly across the rink.
A body.
The girl was curled on her side, facing away from us, hugging her knees to her chest. A long dark braid stretched out on the floor behind her, the end buried beneath a stray wrapper. Her plaid shirt was a deep red, shot through with black. She wasn’t moving.
She wasn’t breathing.
My feet slowed.
Stopped.
Ruby.
The flashlight slipped out of my fingers, cracking against the hard ground. Blood roared in my ears until I thought it would tear me apart.
Two hands landed on my shoulders. Priyanka turned me toward her, saying something I couldn’t hear. I pulled back, watching as a grim-faced Roman circled the girl and crouched down in front of her.
Priyanka’s hands dug into my skin painfully, but she couldn’t look away from him either, not until he glanced up and shook his head.
I didn’t believe him. I tore myself out of Priyanka’s grip, my breath burning where it was caught inside my chest. I only needed a single look at what remained of her face.
Not her.
She was too young. Her hands and feet, bound by zip ties, were too small. From a distance, it had been an easy mistake to make, but up close…
I forced myself not to turn away. To look at the girl, alone in this dark place.
“God, she can’t be more than twelve, thirteen,” Priyanka said, her voice strained. “What was she doing here?”
Roman stood slowly, picking up the flashlight from where it had rolled to a stop beside the girl’s legs. The light passed over the rink again, this time sweeping over sticky footprints in the grime and dust. I followed one trail of small footprints until it intersected with another one, and another, and another.
There weren’t just a few tracks. There were dozens and dozens of them. Some smaller than the length of my hand.
“Whatever it was,” Roman said, “she wasn’t alone. And she didn’t come here by choice.”
“I want to leave,” Priyanka said, all humor gone from her voice. The air was like someone’s damp breath against my skin, but she rubbed her arms as if she needed to warm some feeling back into them. “Right now.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t just leave her here.”
Roman’s eyes softened as he looked to me. “We’re not going to. We’ll use the pay phone across the street to call it in to the Baton Rouge police. They need to see this—whatever this is.”
“I don’t…” Trust them to take care of her.
That single truth burned in me. I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust the FBI, or Cruz, or anyone in her orbit. I only trusted us.
“I understand,” he said. “I don’t like it either. But she deserves to be identified and returned to her family for a real burial. That’s not something we can give her.”
My throat ached.
“Right?” he said softly.
I nodded.
You must remember this, I thought. That was my responsibility now. But it wasn’t enough.
“I need the burner,” I told Priyanka.
She handed it over with a questioning look. The camera wouldn’t record this in excruciating high definition, but all that mattered was capturing this scene, this moment, and refusing to let anyone look away.
If I were going to put together a narrative from all these pieces—the drone footage, this rink, and whatever we found next—I needed to actually begin to document what was happening.
I flipped the camera view so that it was on me. My face glowed in the dark rink.
“It’s…” I began, doing the math in my head. “August seventeenth. About four o’clock in the afternoon, at Riverside Rink, just outside of Baton Rouge.” I flipped the camera view again, walking the length of the rink, sweeping it over the shadowed evidence of the people—the kids—who had been kept here. “We discovered this place while following a lead on the real culprits behind the bombing at Penn State. From what I can tell, it looks as if children, possibly Psi, were held here against their will, likely because they were being trafficked.”
I moved back over to the girl. Roman and Priyanka stepped out of the frame.
“But they left someone behind.” I knelt down beside her, bringing the camera closer to her face. “She’s been here, forgotten, waiting for someone to care enough to find her.”
I stopped recording, looking back at the others.
“I think it’s obvious who’s behind this,” Roman said, his voice pitching deeper with anger. “Mercer must be back in the trafficking business. This has his fingerprints all over it—we’re near a reopened shipping port, close enough to the compound in New Orleans. Even using an abandoned facility to hold them until transport could be arranged…”
“I really wish I could believe he’s the only one trafficking kids,” Priyanka said. “If anything, this feels messy. That’s not his way. He would have sent someone to clean up.”
“He doesn’t let rivals in on his game,” Roman said. “It’s exactly what he did before. Keep the Psi kids he wants for experimenting, sell the rest to other countries or organizations he doesn’t think will challenge him.”
I clutched the phone tighter in my hand. “If Ruby really was here, then this is what she was chasing. Maybe Mercer does have her, after all. It would have brought her right into his path.”
She’d been following the lines of a web that stretched between states, between one dark criminal element and the next. Unwinding clues and, hopefully, collecting evidence.
And now…
“Zu,” Roman said, taking my hand. He repeated my name again, and again, until I finally looked at him. “If Mercer has her, we can start looking in his various real estate holdings. It’s a place to start.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. And it didn’t stop the swelling tide of pressure as it rose up in my chest.
Overhead, the fluorescent light fixture hummed, buzzing like a trapped fly.
“And how long will that take? He could have her somewhere neither of you know about,” I said. “He could be hurting her right now.”
“There’s only one way to pinpoint her location for sure,” Priyanka said, looking to Roman. “You’re going to have to call in your favor.”
NO WAS THE ONLY WORD Roman would say as we left the rink and crossed the street back to the car. No, and no, and no.
“But—” Priyanka began, gripping the front passenger door.
“No.” The word held no anger, just finality. Roman shook his head. “I’m calling this in to the police, then we can reassess the available options as we head out.”
“You’re being an idiot,” Priyanka told him as he walked toward the pay phone at the edge of the McDonald’s parking lot. “You know I’m right! We should have done it in the first place!”
Roman’s body stiffened, but he didn’t turn back to us. “Maybe. Or maybe we’d all be dead now.”
“Argh,” Priyanka said. She climbed into the backseat and slammed the door behind her. “He’s being ridiculous. Of course it’s a risk. What isn’t a risk?”
“I’d love to sympathize, but I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” I told her as I buckled myself back into the driver’s seat.
Priyanka let her head fall back against the seat, taking a deep breath. “Did Roman tell you that four of us survived Wendall’s experiments?”
I nodded.
“I want us to go find the fourth member of our Sad Squad,” she explained. “He’s a Fisher. He can locate a person telepathically. It’s like he casts out a mental line and hooks onto an image of that person, wherever they might be.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “How is that even possible?”
“You’d have to ask Wendall,” Priyanka said. “He might have some insights, considering Max is his son.”
My mouth fell open. “How does this story manage to get worse each time you add something to it?”
“I’ve learned to break up the bad bits because it’s too soul-crushing to absorb all at once,” Priyanka said. “But you can see how an ability like that would be very useful to Mercer, right? He could find almost anyone he wanted: spies in his organization, his enemies and competitors…Mercer took Lana into his security detail, but the three of us formed our own team. Max would locate the person, I would break through their security systems, and Roman…”
The Darkest Legacy Page 31