by Lumen Reese
“Have you got any new girls? In the past week or two?”
“No.”
I looked to James. He nodded, trying to look reassuring.
Corso shifted his arm pressed into the man’s throat. I could only see the edge of his face, his jaw tight and a vein straining on his neck. He hissed in a low voice, “What are they on? Do you keep ‘em locked up, or are they free-range?”
Again, Doug answered, “Depends on the girl.”
“I’d stop pissing me off, if I were you. How do you find your girls?”
“They find me. I give them good stuff, I treat them fine. Nobody’s here against their will.”
“I don’t believe you,” Corso hissed.
“Hey!” I called, afraid he’d pull the trigger. I took a single step and his eyes shifted to me, and they were cold.
“Just stay back, Stella.”
“Stella?” Doug let the name linger a moment, looking around Corso to me. “That’s funny. I was just thinking how you could be the Blanche to my Stanley.”
Corso cracked him over the head with the butt of the gun, and then the two shifted from Corso pinning him down to holding him up. While Doug was gathering his feet back under him, Corso forced the tip of the gun into his mouth. “Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger just because this is a new shirt.”
I was a little surprised he knew the reference. My skin crawled. Doug squirmed against Corso’s arm, which was pressed into his windpipe, now.
“What do you want?” he asked, going red in the face.
Corso pushed him back into the room, then took a step and gave him a second shove to move him away from me. Keeping his gun leveled, then, he said, “Take us through all the rooms. Show us all the girls.”
We went into the hall again, and into the first room on the left. The girl looked up when we entered. She was perfectly aware, a Latina woman in her thirties dressed only in a bra and panties.
“What the Hell is this?” she grumbled.
Corso had his gun leveled between both hands, and it looked steadier than I had ever felt in my life. But when our eyes met, he nodded for me to go ahead, and I stepped forward to meet the woman’s question with one of my own.
“You’re here of your own free will?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’ve got no place else to go.” She sounded like she was from New York; like she could even be from my neighborhood.
“Has a group of girls been through here? With men either looking to sell them or keep them here?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
We went to the room on the right. The girl there did not rise to meet us, and Doug started to take a step but Corso snagged him by the shirt collar and yanked him back. I crouched by the girl and gave her a gentle shake. She woke. She wore a shirt, baggy enough to act as a nightgown. Her eyes were deeply circled with dark rings and her bones showed in her arms and legs. She was obviously on something and she was very young.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
She wasn’t. Even if she was, looking at her, small and dazed, I realized just how young eighteen or sixteen was. “Have any girls come through here? Or men looking to sell girls?”
“I don’t know business. I just do the guys who come in here.”
We went through eight other rooms and eight other girls. Most appeared to be on something, one was passed out and couldn’t answer our questions. But all agreed, they were there of their own free will and no new girls had come in, or any men looking to sell.
Corso let Doug go and he scurried back up the stairs as James led the way outside.
I took deep breaths out in the fresh air. The smell of sex and other foul things seemed to linger, making me feel queasy. The smell and the tiny rooms with the dim lights brought back memories of feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.
“Another dead end,” Corso said. He had leveled out spectacularly, with not a trace of emotion left in his voice or on his face.
James said, “I only learned about this place yesterday when I started looking into things for you. I’ll put in a call and have it shut down tomorrow. And we can try again tomorrow night, there’s a place we can look, but it’s a bit of a ride. I’ll have horses for us, come to the castle.”
Corso nodded, and clapped a hand on his shoulder. I gave James a nod and said, “Thank you.”
“Alright. Get back safe.”
“I’ll see to it,” Corso said, and we gave James a final wave as he turned back toward the center of town.
Chapter Fifteen
Corso saw me back to the inn, and I went slinking through the empty dining room, creeping up the stairs and trying to go lightly over the creaking spot on the floor when I slid into my room. Nothing stirred in Henry’s room, from what I could hear, and so I laid down and shut my eyes and slept deeply, after wondering for only a moment where Corso would spend the night. Would James have a place he could safely hide at the castle? Would it be the first bed he had crashed in for days, a week?
In the morning Henry woke me, and I wanted more sleep but I trudged down to breakfast.
“The agenda for today?” I asked, unable to remember even one of the places we had picked out to search in the vast second quarter. I had a bowl of porridge in front of me. “We’re going further inland, right?”
“Jericho sent me a message this morning, that Spicer finished up in the third quarter and got dropped east of here. He’s going to cover that place up in the mountains and the abandoned town, and I guess we’ll meet in the middle, tomorrow or the next day.”
“Great,” I grumbled, poking at my food. Not only did I not like Spicer being brought in to do the same job as me, I didn’t want him around with Corso nearby. “So what will we do?”
“We can head into Wraith and ask the locals if they know of any places. Their maps might be better than the company’s.”
“How could that be? The company built everything, they would know exact measurements, population, all of it.”
“Yeah, but the company didn’t just build this place. They gave it life. There’s always going to be human error, and maybe the Duke of Wraith can help us with that.”
I’m sure I didn’t blanch, just nodded and stuffed my fears down.
We headed up the path that led into the larger town, about two miles away from Dire, and I was pretending I hadn’t walked the road just the night before. I worried as we entered the huge castle in the center that James would spoil the ruse, but when he crossed through the empty throne room to meet us, there was no recognition on his face.
“Hello, I’m James. You must be Henry.” They shook. “And you must be Stella. Good to meet you both. I was told to expect you. I’ll help any way I can.”
“Good.” The two were friendly to each other. I tried to face him without being too nervous, but could feel my face warming as we shook hands.
Henry noticed. “Something wrong?”
The duke cut in, saving me from stuttering a lie. “We’ve met.”
“How?”
“I used to work with her father, back at the NYPD.”
I exhaled, and a smile grew on my face. “I wasn’t sure if you’d remember me.”
“How could I forget Paul’s daughter? Now. What can I do to help you in your quest?”
Henry looked amused, and I realized I had been letting him do a lot of talking and decision making, all morning. I answered, “We’re looking for anywhere a few dozen people could hide. Abandoned parts of the world or just somewhere unoccupied. We’re especially interested in anything you can think of that the company might not be aware of.”
James nodded, and without saying anything he turned and began to lead the way further into the castle. The walls were gray stone, lined with intricate tapestries and glimmering silver weapons, studded with jewels. He took us into a more subdued room, with a window looking out over rooftops of the town to one side. Maps were rolled up into scrolls and filed according to location in cubbyholes
along the walls.
“There’s a whole town a few miles northeast of here that was built that they don’t know about.”
I exchanged a glance with Henry. He said what we were both thinking. “If there’s a town that the company doesn’t know about, that would be the perfect place to hide a bunch of prisoners.”
James looked at me and said deliberately, “You should go there. There’s some bad stuff in that area, though, so you should be careful.”
I knew that he meant that there were underground places around that town… the kind Corso would want to check out. “How do we get there?”
He motioned us over. The two of us crowded around a table and he followed a path on the map. “This road will take you all the way there. The town is called Tweed, it’s very small. You can make it by noon if you go by horseback.”
“We don’t-.”
“I can give you horses.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
He led us out to the stables, and gave us two fast horses. Mine was a black mare, and Henry’s was a brown stallion.
“I’ve never ridden a horse before,” I admitted.
James was helping me with the saddle and bridle while a stable boy helped Henry with his. “It’s very simple. Just dig your heals in to spur it forward, and use the reins to steer it in the right direction Pull back to slow her up. She’s a good girl, she’ll take care of you.” While Henry pulled himself up and started forward, James whispered to me, “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Thank you.”
I tucked a foot into one stirrup, gave a great heave and managed to swing my other leg over the horse’s back. It seemed much larger once I sat astride it, and she shuffled but didn’t seem nervous.
I clumsily started my horse walking, then encouraged her to speed up, and my knuckles were white on the reigns. The ground rolled by at incredible speeds as we followed the road northeast of the city.
*
We reached the tiny village of Tweed when the sun was highest in the sky. There were stables where we left our horses to be fed and watered, and then we walked through the streets on foot. It was even smaller than Dire, and the people watched with suspicious eyes as the two of us walked by. Little huts lined the dirt road. Clothes were strung out to dry, one man was roasting part of a deer on a large spit in his yard. All the yards were fenced in to protect gardens.
Henry stopped to ask one man, “Sir? Have any large groups come through here lately? Maybe just a few men with a lot of cargo?”
“Not that I know of.” He hurried away.
Every person that we asked gave the same answer, one stopping to say that there was a way-house for travelers at the edge of town. We thanked him and I felt my hope deflate.
“Now what?”
“We should check out the woods, the lake. Maps show a few miles. We’ll see how late it is afterward, and go from there.”
And so once again Henry and I headed into the woods, though these woods were an ostentatious bunch of red and brown trees against the flat plains all around, and instead of snow, the ground was blanketed in their leaves.
“There’s no cave system in here, is there?” I asked.
He had the map in his bag, but didn’t need to look at it. “No. We should just check around the lake.”
We walked for a minute, and maybe it was something he’d wanted to say for some time, or maybe it was the empty silence of the trees that made him ask, “How are you holding up?”
I looked at him hard. “Who wants to know?”
He knew that I meant I was wary of him reporting back to headquarters about me, and held up both hands defensively. “Just me. Your friend.”
I’m not sure if I would have shared my growing, tumultuous anxiety about not being good enough to do the job, or if I would have shared Corso’s identity with him even if I didn’t feel Jericho lingering between us like a heavy, black cloud. “I’m fine,” I heard myself say, and more and more I was feeling like the person I had created to do the things which the old Stella could not do was taking over my body. Maybe I should tell Henry that, to convince him of my honesty, like giving a pigeon a crumb to keep it nearby. But the only words I could force to the surface from that complex idea were, “It’s still surreal.”
“That might be a good thing,” he said.
“Maybe. I’m sure if I fail it will all become painfully real. Probably only if we actually pull it off, it will still be like some weird dream, forever.”
“I know that you can do it,” Henry said, “But you should know that no one is expecting you to. It’s not what you were brought on for. And even if you can’t, you’ll get paid for your time, and compensated for your arm, and your family will be fine.”
“For this year, maybe. But I want this to be the last time we worry about any of it. If I lost that chance to make the rest of their lives easier, I couldn’t forgive myself. And besides, there are bad things happening to those kidnapped girls right now. So I want it all.”
He gave me a nod. “We’re not giving up. Fourth Quarter is the best bet anyway, it’s got the highest population, the most nooks and crannies. We’ll find them, and the fugitive, too.”
The lake in the woods was tranquil and quiet. The only disruption of its crystalline surface was the occasional leaf coasting down to ripple the water, if only for a moment. We checked the surrounding area for any signs of life and found nothing. Probably the area was not secluded enough, if the village was only a few miles away. Another dead end went down pretty rough as we started the hike back, and my thighs were more sore than they had ever been, but I pushed on. Henry lead the way out of the tree line and started across the empty field before the fenced in edge of Tweed, and I felt a surge of warmth for him.
Little by little, he was building me up by believing in my ideas and providing his own when I ran out. If it took turning over every stone in the Fourth Quarter, I believed we could do it.
The sun had begun to descend and we had skipped lunch.
Henry slowed up to walk beside me and said exactly what was on my mind, “Find some food and figure out our next-?”
He was cut out by a loud pop-pop-pop of gunfire which made us whip our gazes up to the tight clusters of huts. Henry’s hand snagged my arm the same second that another, quieter round exploded a nd I was hit on the head by a force that whipped me to one side. B lood spra yed into the open air at the corner of my vision. The pure shock I felt didn’t leave me as my body was knocked back and the ground hit me and Henry hit me, too, landing crouched over and still watching the village where the first screams started and ended all in one long second.
Then silence fell.
A faint clicking came as a dark figure rolled once, twice, a third time and then dropped off the roof of one of the buildings in the last line. He hit the ground with a thump and then there was more of the absolute silence.
I felt cold, and Henry had one of my hands pinned so I brought up the other to check if I still had a face. The pain ringing out over my entire skull seemed to contradict it, but there was my cheek, my nose, and Henry glanced down at me and absently slapped my hand away as I was feeling up toward my temple.
“Don’t touch it.”
I realized he was pressed against me and my entire body contracted, and I went scrambling away into the open even as the pain and dizziness made my head sag back and scrape the ground.
“Stella,” Henry called, crawling after me on hands and knees, “You’re okay, we just need to get out of the open, I’m gonna pick you up-.”
“No,” I said, “It’s okay, he’s dead. He was the one on the roof, the other guy shot first, he shot him-.”
Henry reached out and cupped my face in both of his big, warm hands, refusing to let go even when I tried to pull away. “Stop moving. Are you alright?”
“I got shot,” I said, and tried to look at the body again but he held my face still.
“We need to get inside, can you walk or do you want me to carry you?”
He took that as a good sign and shoved himself to his feet with a mighty grunt, then offered his hand and pulled me up, steadying me when my legs almost sent me crumbling against him.
We moved fast up to the first house and the door opened before Henry could knock on it, and a frightened woman ushered us inside and shut the door behind us.
Henry snapped, “Go find the doctor, she’s been shot.”
“There isn’t any doctor in this town.”
He tugged out a chair for me at the woman’s kitchen table and sat me down. “A first aide kit?”
He looked at me again in the natural light coming in from the west facing window. “I don’t think it’s that bad.”
My head was spinning, but I was aware enough to worry that Henry had seen Corso. “What did you see?”
“A man with a gun,” Henry answered. “You’re so lucky. It just grazed you. If he hadn’t been there, and been watching…. The company doesn’t just have men with guns wandering the quarters…” Realization struck him, exactly what I ‘d been afraid of. “The fugitive? He saved you before.”
The woman whose house we were in brought a bowl of water with a cloth, and a roll of bandages. Her hands trembled as she set them down.
“What’s your name?” Henry asked.
“Minera.”
He rolled his eyes. “Your real name.”
“Kim.”
“Is there a phone in this town, Kim?”
“No.”
“Shit,” he hissed. “This is why the company controls everything! This is why they build the expansions, not you!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, backing away.
“Stop.” I looked between them. “Kim, who’s in charge of this town?”
“The sheriff’s name is Emanuel.”
“Would you get him, please?”
“Go outside?” Kim stammered.
“Kim,” I said, in the firmest voice I could manage, “It’s okay, the man who shot me is dead. Go get the sheriff.”
She hurried out as Henry wiped blood off my cheek. I winced, pulling away.