The Rise of Ferryn

by Gadziala, Jessica

  As I walked into my room, though, I felt an old, yet familiar, itching in my fingers. Not just to play. I played music all the time. But never my own. Always someone else's thoughts and ideas and feelings. I stopped writing my own music ages ago. But right then, my fingers were itching to get on my guitar, to grab a notebook and start writing things down.

  I was choosing not to think too hard on why, for the first time in many, many years, words and music were finally coming back to me.

  Because I was pretty sure I would find the common denominator if I did the math.

  And that the answer was one that would complicate the fuck out of everything.

  Seven

  Ferryn - Present Day

  I didn't intend to leave.

  I mean, at least not so soon after getting back to Navesink Bank, not before I at least made contact with my parents and siblings.

  The nature of my job was that when you got the call, you had to pounce.

  Lifelong criminals get to be lifelong criminals because they are good at what they do. Because they are smart.

  Stupid criminals end up behind bars or in shallow graves.

  So if you were a smart criminal, you knew that keeping the same home base for any length of time was a surefire way to have shit trace back to you. What does your fellow neighborhood criminal do to prevent getting traced? They moved. They moved frequently.

  If your plan was to try to get to one of these types of criminals, you had to be flexible with your time. You had to pounce when you finally got a pin in them. Because, chances were, if you missed the opportunity, you would never be able to find them again.

  I had to go.

  It was that simple.

  This was an operation I had on my radar for over a year, had been turning over every rock to try to find their slimy asses. With no luck. Not even a trail of breadcrumbs.

  And, well, when this mission was all that your life was based around, you didn't just shrug it off and keep on sitting in some old apartment trying not to overthink the way your girlhood crush still managed to get a rise out of you when no one else was capable of such a feat.

  You had to go.

  You had to do what you do.

  In my case, that meant I had to drive across two states, throw on a baggy shirt, slap a hat on my head, and once again impersonate some guy looking for a 'good time.'

  I couldn't even think that phrase without grimacing. I wasn't sure how it wasn't a dead giveaway that I wasn't an actual, real client when they opened the doors to me.

  But, well, scumbags tended to think all other men are scumbags, didn't they? That because they had sick, sadistic fantasies, that all men were like them.

  I couldn't even be too mad about it because it worked in my favor.

  I took a deep breath as I walked down the wood-paneled walls, breathing in smoke and pot and cheap beer, things so familiar that I barely registered them anymore.

  It was a slow night.

  I liked slow nights.

  Especially now.

  Especially because I was completely on my own.

  It wasn't unheard of. Holden knew this was my path in life. And I understood that it wasn't his. We still did big jobs together when we came across them, but most of the smaller ones were just me on my own.

  I simply had to hope that the nights I got there were slow. Because no matter how good I got, no matter how sharp a weapon I had made myself become, there were some odds that were not only not in your favor, but impossible to accomplish.

  I'd been outnumbered a few times.

  I'd been outnumbered in a nearly fatal way twice.

  Once, I only lived because I'd been saved.

  And the second time because I had needed to do the unthinkable.

  I jumped ship.

  Literally threw myself out a second-story window and ran like fucking hell because I knew what would happen to me if I got caught.

  I'd called the police anonymously.

  Those women did get saved.

  But the men had cleared out.

  I'd never gotten a trace on them again.

  Even just thinking of that night put a sour taste in my mouth.

  I'd always been competitive. I always liked winning. I wasn't the best loser. These were traits I always allowed in myself because I thought they served me. Now more so than ever.

  I wasn't entirely sure I would ever rest easy until I finally tracked down those bastards and put them down like the animals they are.

  "You lucked out, buddy. We just got a new boat in this weekend."

  As a whole, you found American women being trafficked on American soil. It was too hard to get girls in from other countries, unlike other parts of the world where women and girls were just driven over country borders in the backs of trucks like chattel.

  But there was a subset of American men who had a fetish for young, petite, quiet, doll-like Asian women. Massage parlors were still very much a thing in modern culture, stocked with women dragged from their home continent, or swept up when their work visas expired and they had nowhere to turn to.

  Tonight, I was Austen who had a thing for Asian women.

  Austen also liked groups of girls.

  Austen was all-too-happy to pay for them.

  Which was why the night was slow. Because I was a big spender who was going to occupy a lot of the girls' time.

  I hadn't come across a set-up like this one in a while. A place where girls were being held and you could rape them on premises. It had been a lot of catching guys trying to ship out American girls for the past year or two. I had spent a lot of time in coastal towns just waiting. You never had to wait too long.

  This, though, this was a case I had been tracking for a while. Just because the guys who ran it were so ballsy. It was a hard as fuck time to get anyone without papers into the country. The fact that these guys were doing it said they were really friggen smart. Or they had important people in their pockets.

  It would surprise exactly no one to know some of the worst criminals are those we, the public, have given power to. Because power makes people ugly. And it makes them think they can get away with anything they want to because they so often do.

  It was easy, after all, for men in power to say they were hitting another country for political reasons when, in fact, they were going to places to indulge in their sick need to force themselves on women and girls.

  Men like that, well, they tended to help make it easier for other men to traffick women.

  So it was hard to get women on our soil from other places to exploit, but it wasn't exactly impossible.

  These assholes were proof of that.

  The guy who led me down the hall was tall and lean, Chinese in heritage, but American-raised judging by his accent.

  "And they're not drugged," he added, carefree about the implications of his words, the hell these women had likely already been through in such a short period of time. "I know you said you like them more... reactive."

  I had told them that I liked a fight.

  Because they loved hearing that.

  Because they were the fucking scum of the Earth walking around in the flesh of men.

  "Perfect," I agreed, using as few words as possible. Despite trying for years, Holden informed me that even my man-voice sounded too soft to be believable. So I used as few words as possible. Just to get me in the door. Just to get me into the space.

  Each step was a cannonshot in my head, each sleazy comment from the trafficker making my rage bubble up to a rolling boil.

  By the time the key was in the lock, my hand was around the handle on my blade. A sizzle accompanied the touch every single time. Like the wood and metal and I were connected, like we recognized the rightness when we were in contact.

  It was over in the span of one breath.

  Before the door could push open, making an audience of the women, increasing the chances of screams that would make this harder than it needed to be, I closed the distance between us, grabbin
g his hair, and yanking back and to the side, elongating his neck, exposing the weak spot, then slicing hard and deep and ruthless, catching the body so it didn't crash to the ground.

  I re-closed the door, knowing the only people to be found inside were the girls I was supposedly coming here to brutalize, then slowly made my way through the rest of the space.

  Two guards.

  One client.

  Clients don't get any mercy either, Holden had told me in those early days when I was still working out the fine print of the mission. If it weren't for them, there would be no trafficking because there would be no demand for it.

  Your old ideas of morality had to go out the window when you were going to make a life out of taking lives.

  Yes, these men likely had lives and wives and children and grandchildren.

  But that didn't make them any less guilty.

  It didn't make them deserving of mercy.

  I had precious little mercy to offer anyway after all these years, seeing the things I had seen, barely able to keep food down at times because I knew the terrible shit that was going on and knowing I couldn't stop it all.

  I tucked away the blade, bringing the one girl who had been with a 'client' back to the room where my group of girls were situated, putting them together, standing there feeling lost.

  It was harder with girls and women from other countries, ones who didn't speak the language, who didn't know where to go or how to get help even if they did get free.

  With nothing else to do, I plugged what I had to say into a translation app, hoping it would get the basics across to them.

  You're free.

  You need to run.

  Go to the police or Chinese Consulate in New York.

  In the end, as it always seemed to go, many women froze up or broke down, but one always managed to keep herself together, take control, try to organize everyone else.

  I gave them the phone.

  I gave them numbers and addresses.

  I made sure that once they were dressed, I walked them to a safe space where they wouldn't be found by any other traffickers in the organization.

  And then I jumped back on my bike.

  Normally, I would get a room after a job. Clean up. Get rid of any evidence that wouldn't come clean enough. Watch the local news to make sure my description wasn't too accurate if they got one at all.

  But I couldn't seem to make myself wait.

  I didn't want to stay another night in another cheap hotel.

  I wanted to go back home.

  And since my family was not currently there, the only real conclusion one could come to about that desire was that I wanted to see Vance again.

  I didn't know what that meant on a technical level, how a shrink would sort that out. Was it just because he was a familiar face? Was it because he was the connection I currently had to my family? Was it because there was still some long-buried feelings attached to him? More than friendly feelings? I had no idea.

  The latter seemed the most unlikely, though.

  I didn't have feelings for men.

  My brain wasn't wired like that. Not anymore. I think my brain stopped being wired like that after that first trip out on my eighteenth birthday, when I had been forced to face the reality that had sent me on this path in the first place.

  I knew as I sat in that dingy room of mine that Holden was right. That if I continued on this path, the likelihood of having a man use his power against me got higher.

  That very weekend, I walked into a local bar/restaurant place, went up to the first halfway decent looking man I could find, and lost my virginity in the backseat of his car.

  Romantic or pleasant, it was not.

  But there had been a sense of power in it.

  A choice was made.

  It was followed through.

  I owned that part of me.

  No one could take it.

  Sex had become a catharsis for me. Maybe someone with a degree would argue that it became about power to me. That it was just another sort of weapon I yielded. That I removed any possibility of a man having power over me by controlling the sexual narrative completely.

  It was only ever about an itch being scratched, about needs being met.

  The second they were, I was dressed and out the door.

  I didn't want connections. I wasn't even entirely sure I was capable of them. I barely got to know names; I damn sure had no interest in learning what your favorite color was, what songs set your soul on fire, what books made an impact in your formative years.

  I guess the difference here and now was that I already knew the answers to those questions.

  Vance loved hunter green.

  His favorite songs list was a hundred titles long.

  He loved all things E.E. Cummings and Charles Bukowski and the poetry books of Jim Morrison.

  I knew that his most embarrassing moment was his first performance when his mind went blank and he forgot the music he had written.

  I knew the thought of any kind of meat coming from a can made him look green in the face.

  There was no way to feign disconnect when the connection had always been there.

  So many things I thought long-buried clawed their way back to the surface. Long conversations we had. The fact that I had once made suggestions to a song he'd written, and he'd implemented the changes. The way his body looked when he'd gotten out of the pool. The lazy, sexy smile he'd beamed in all women's direction. Except for me. And how I so dearly hoped that once I was old enough, I would be the recipient of one as well.

  I'd been sappy and girlish, sitting there picturing him making a move, realizing I was the one girl he wanted to get serious about, getting engaged, getting married.

  I had spent untold hours both with him and fantasizing about him.

  And while I had buried that under the years of hard work and self-denial and devotion to my cause, it was still there, still a part of me.

  Being around him, it was making me feel things, things I didn't know I could feel anymore. The scary thing was that this was just the beginning.

  If Vance could bring this old stuff up, what about Iggy and my parents and my siblings and my aunts and uncles and my cousins?

  I had grossly underestimated how big a deal this would be, how much of an impact it could have. Which would therefore alter everything. Meaning my plans for the future.

  As I turned my bike back down the road that would lead me to my temporary home, I promised myself to keep the visit as short as possible, to minimize the potential for too many changes, for too much emotion.

  I could visit, make some amends, then head out with the promise of stopping by for big events.

  I could handle that.

  A night or two here or there.

  Then get back out again before I started feeling too much, before it broke down the shields I had built up.

  Because I needed them.

  If I didn't have them, everything would fall apart.

  I would fall apart.

  And then I wouldn't have what it took to do my job anymore. No one would be there to save those women and girls and the occasional boys. They would be stuck in hell with no hope of getting away. More and more traffickers would pop up because they had nothing to be afraid of.

  Now... now they knew my name.

  They knew my signature in their comrade's blood on the walls.

  They knew I was looking for them, coming for them.

  Every shithead should have someone on this Earth that they were afraid of, someone who kept them awake at night, someone who made them look over their shoulder when they were walking alone.

  That was who I was.

  That was what I did.

  I didn't get to just give that up. It was too important.

  Important things required sacrifices. Those sacrifices were mine.

  It had been wrong, I was coming to see, to force my family to sacrifice so much as well. Especially because my job had a high rate of a short
lifespan. They would never recover if I got killed on a job before they got a chance to spend time with me again. So, I would give them time. Just enough. Enough to make their lives feel like something wasn't missing anymore. But not so much that it softened me too much, it made my shields start to disintegrate.

  "I've got some bleach if you are out," Finch's voice called, once again smoking out front his apartment.

  I wore black.

  The blood that was on me wasn't visible. I wouldn't have gotten back across two states if I was covered in red on a bike, plain for all to see.

  I figured it said a lot about Finch that he knew when no one else had looked at me twice. Maybe he smelled it. I swear I could smell blood from twenty yards after all of these years getting so acquainted with it.

  "Good to know," I agreed, not wanting to say too much, always aware of the possibility of being found out by the wrong kind of person.

  "Supposed to pour tonight," he added, looking casually up at the sky, though it was clear his words had more meaning than they did at surface level. "If someone just happened to, you know, accidentally spill some soap on their vehicle, it would be cleaned like magic."

  That wasn't exactly a bad idea since I wasn't supposed to hit the car wash and even standing out in the open hosing down the bike might be a bad idea in a town where dozens of people knew who I was and would report back if they happened to see me.

  "You're just a fountain of weird information, aren't you?" I shot back, giving away nothing, still having no idea who this Finch guy was.

  "That I am, babe, that I am," he agreed, and I got this gut drop sensation that made my step falter, having the absurd thought that maybe he knew who I was. When my gaze slipped over, though, he was back inside his apartment, his cigarette smoke dancing up through the air.

  There would be time to research Finch later. Right now, I had to clean up.

  Without a washer in his unit, I filled up the tub, washing, rinsing, rewashing, rinsing, over and over until the stains were gone, until I felt satisfied that every crevice on all the clothes was thoroughly washed, then wringing and hanging them to dry as I got in the shower.