by Jessie Kwak
She pulls up another screen and Jaantzen leans in, deciphering the list of names. “Death records,” he says, and Toshiyo nods. She’s highlighted four, each of them one day after the date of a deposit into Mahr’s account. Each of them listing the cause of death as “Unknown.” They are the only four records to do that in an otherwise well-documented list.
Something else about the four gives Jaantzen pause. All are juveniles.
“Inmates who die at Redrock Prison are cremated,” Toshiyo says. “But these four are missing cremation records. And” — she swipes at the screen with a flourish, her excitement bubbling over — “I checked into the prison undertaker’s bank account.”
Four dates are highlighted. Four transfers of one thousand marks each.
“Who’s buying these kids?” Jaantzen asks.
“Working on it, boss.”
Jaantzen nods. “Is there anything else?” Toshiyo and Manu both shake their heads, glancing at each other for confirmation. “Good work. Figure out how we use this thing with Mahr, and keep at the social worker. She seems useful, but I want to make sure we’re solid before we approach her.”
Jaantzen stands, buttons his coat. He’ll go for a walk, try to make sense of all this. Something here is tickling the back of his brain, and if he can just clear his head he’ll understand it.
“Boss, what about Ximena Nayar?” Manu asks.
“Find me more options,” Jaantzen says, and he sees the flash of frustration in Manu’s face.
He doesn’t care. He will not be negotiating with Blackheart’s sister.
Chapter 7
Starla wakes in the morning and does squats, ten of them before she sits with a gravity-heavy thud back on the cot. Only two full push-ups before her arms give out.
She tries to remember all the resistance exercises her mother tried to get her to do back on Silk Station, and comes up with tricep dips off the edge of the cot. She manages three.
Jumping jacks: fifteen.
Sit-ups: six.
Starla collapses panting on the cot until she’s caught her breath, then does the whole routine again.
She’s been picked up and slammed back down, shoved into restraints, marched down hallways at will, and she’s done with it.
After today, she’s never going to be weak again.
She’s made it five rounds and her muscles are shaking with the effort when she finally slumps back on the cot.
Starla knows that Hali believes her. She’s not sure what Mahr, that pinch-faced dirt-kisser, thinks, but she’s certain that if the Alliance allowed fifteen-year-old girls to be tried as enemy combatants automatically, Mahr wouldn’t be bothering with any of this.
She’s starting to feel safe. It’s time to push her boundaries.
It’s time to try for a weapon.
She has no possible weapon but the afternoon cleaning bot. It shocked her, last time she tried to capture it, but today she has a plan. She’s been running scenarios in her mind all night, riffing on things Deyva taught her about electronics, about dirty fighting. About making weapons with whatever was at hand.
Deyva.
She hopes he made it out of the station alive.
He was the only one who would teach her anything, at first. She’d been ten years old, swarming the hallways of Silk Station with the rest of her cousins, that day he yelled into the melee that he needed a volunteer.
It was standard that passing mechanics would pluck a kid or two from their games whenever they needed someone small enough to squirm inside the ventilation ducts and smart enough to thread the right color wire. Starla’s hand always went up first, even though her lipreading as a child was abominable and she often had no idea what would be required of her. She only knew she could do it.
And Deyva, the first mechanic who, finally, picked her, soon learned it.
Deyva was stocky — he hadn’t been born on-station — with deep bronze skin and eyes shining like the brightest stars.
“You,” he said, finger pointed at the top of her head, past the others. “What’s your name?”
“Starla,” Starla said, and was annoyed when she saw Mona repeat it for him.
He said something else, face turned so she couldn’t see his lips, and Mona answered, speaking and signing both so Starla could see. “She can’t hear you, but I can interpret.”
Deyva shrugged, pointed his index fingers at both girls, and jerked his thumbs for them to follow.
Deyva didn’t need to talk much, Starla learned over the years. He preferred machines to chatter, and he had a concise way of explaining things that didn’t require half the words other people seemed to need. He never tried to learn USL, just developed his own system of nonsense signs that always made the same perfect, economical sense as his explanations.
It was to his bench in the engineering station that she’d disappear whenever she was fighting with her parents, or shirking her lessons with TUTOR, or just bored. Her parents must’ve suspected where she went — for all she knew, Deyva probably told them — but they never came looking for her there.
She and Deyva hadn’t talked much about his past, but she knew it had been quite different from life on Silk Station; he always seemed bemused by the gaggles of cousins and the complete lack of supervision. He had grown up on New Sarjun, she knew, in the capital city of Bulari, and she got the impression that he’d grown up on the streets, like in the entertainment vids she and Mona watched sometimes about the city’s crime bosses and gangsters. He had snake tattoos on the backs of his wrists, and a wicked-looking scar on his cheek. When she asked about it once, Deyva just laughed, as he always did. “Kids do stupid things sometimes,” he said.
She’d asked her father about it, too, but he provided no more insight. “Deyva’s story is his own to tell,” her father had said. “But you aren’t going to find many out here in the black who like talking about the past.”
Starla doesn’t think Deyva was just fond of snakes. He has — had? — an OIC tattoo, too. Her parents might not have wanted to talk about him, but as usual Mona was a fount of snooped information, gossiping, during their frequent sleepovers, long after either of their parents had gone to bed. He was in the OIC. Mona’d signed the last letters in her lap, low and secret. On the run from the Alliance.
The official sign for the Alliance is two clasped hands, but between them the girls had used their own sign, cast harshly down to the side with disdain, like a rotted piece of fruit.
Starla reminds herself not to use that one in front of Hali.
NOW STARLA’S watching the cleaning bot’s hatch, afraid she’ll miss it if she doesn’t keep her eyes peeled.
She has no idea what time it is, but she hasn’t seen it yet today, and so she tells herself it must be coming soon. She has her blanket clenched in her fists — she doesn’t know why they bothered to give her a blanket when it’s so horribly hot here — and she hopes that the insulation from it will keep the cleaning bot from shocking her too badly. She has the flimsy water bottle, which no one seemed to care if she kept. She’s not sure what she’ll do with that, but it seemed wasteful to pass up the opportunity to try something.
After what seems like ages, the little door slides open and the cleaning bot scurries out.
Starla knows from watching it for the last few days that it will make a sweep of the floor clockwise before scuttling up to do a quick swipe of the toilet seat and hopping down to disappear back into the wall. It hasn’t seemed to be programmed to notice her movements, as though its makers assumed its electric shock would be enough protection.
And maybe it will be. Starla will find out.
She tenses, launches herself with squat-tired thighs across the room as it scurries onto the seat of the toilet, her blanket folded in front of her like a shield.
Her plan works — she knocks the miniature robot into the bowl, where she expects it to short-circuit in the shallow water. It’s not ideal, but she’d rather have the metal parts than the electronics.
It doesn’t short-circuit.
The cleaning bot explodes beneath her hands, throwing her back against the wall with a force that seems completely impossible for such a tiny little machine. She thinks she must have screamed.
The synthetic blanket ignites with a rush of heat that she can feel on her cheeks. She flings it away from her; smoke roils off it to pool on the ceiling.
The cleaning bot scurries out of the toilet and escapes through its hatch, trailing sparks.
Smoke chokes the room, and Starla’s lungs are burning. Where are the fire-suppressant foams? There’s water in the little plastic bottle, still, and Starla flings it in a spray at the blanket, sending up clouds of steam with the black, toxic smoke. She turns away to pound at the door, shielding her stinging eyes.
The door slides open and Starla falls through, retching, into the arms of her two guards. They immediately wrench her singed hands behind her and into cuffs.
Busted.
Chapter 8
“It seems you have a problem with directions,” Jaantzen says. “And I’m not sure how to make this point to you any more clearly.”
The whites of the skinny rat thug’s eyes are splashed with red — not anything Jaantzen or his enforcer, Kobe, did to him, but something he did to himself by dipping too frequently into the stash of shard he’s been peddling in the southern reaches of Jaantzen’s territory. The skinny rat thug’s eyes are bulging with fear. As they should be.
Willem Jaantzen is getting back to work. Rolling his sleeves up. Taking the bull by the horns.
It should feel good, yet crackling at the edges of everything he does is the tentative, crystalline sense of a world just on the verge of breaking.
He’s used to living in a world of sudden shifts and changes, but this feels different. Off kilter. It makes him want to move cautiously.
He can sense it in his crew: an inability to focus on priorities, a lack of decision and dexterity.
He doesn’t blame them — none of them know what they’ll be able to expect tomorrow. When he made his plans for Coeur, a period of transience had been set in motion. Now his entire crew — and he himself — are caught in that moment. Caught midway between coming and going, between living and dying.
None of them know if they can relax back into the roles they once had.
“This is the third time I’ve heard about you selling shard in my neighborhood,” Jaantzen says. He picks up one of the blister packs off the table, holds it up to the light. Inside, a waffled black tab coated with white powder: slip it under your tongue and press down, and the waffle-like razors slice through the delicate skin to wash the drug directly into your bloodstream without a physical trace. Jaantzen turns it in his hand; the powder glimmers in the light.
The thug’s gaze follows Jaantzen’s hand, hungry.
“Who are you working for?” Jaantzen asks.
Kobe cracks his knuckles, a smile creeping onto his boxer’s face as he senses a moment of action. The shard-pusher whimpers.
They’re in a warehouse south of the Port of Bulari, an area no one bothers to police these days. Honestly there’s not much need. For the last few years Jaantzen and his crew have had the area on lockdown, and the neighborhood’s improved quite a bit. Restaurants stay open later now. The city buses have stopped routing around it. Real estate values are rising, thank you very much.
He’s fended off an incursion or two from Sendera Dathúil, and he stays vigilant against scum like the pusher he’s got chained to this chair.
Scum like this have been getting bolder lately, though, and it’s only a matter of time before the bigger of the second-tier gangs start testing the seals. No rumors of Jaantzen’s vendetta against Coeur seem to have gotten out, but jackals still scent death in the air.
It’s what Julieta Yang is worried about.
“I ain’t working for no one,” the pusher says.
Jaantzen nods to Kobe, and the big man’s fist drives into the pusher’s stomach. “Where are you getting your supply?” Jaantzen asks. The man chokes on a cough in response. Kobe hits him again.
Jaantzen folds his arms, frowning. “I guarantee whoever keeps you supplied with shard isn’t paying you nearly enough for your loyalty,” he says. “Kobe — ” His comm buzzes: Toshiyo. “Please excuse me for a moment,” he says, and he turns away from the mess to answer.
Toshiyo clears her throat. “Boss, we have a problem.”
Jaantzen glances over his shoulder, motions for Kobe to continue without him. Always more problems. “Go ahead.”
“I put an alert on the lieutenant’s account,” says Toshiyo. “I wanted to make sure we were the first to know if she had any other big transfers.”
The warehouse suddenly seems very cold. “And I take it she has.”
“Yeah, boss.” He can hear her typing. “And there’s more. I finally traced the owner of the account. It’s Sendera Dathúil.”
Jaantzen takes a sharp breath. Sendera Dathúil is the second largest of the crime syndicates in Bulari, having taken over many of Blackheart’s seedier operations when she took her talents into politics. They check off many of the more mundane categories of crime — protection rackets, smuggling, drugs — but they’re also rumored to dabble in darker places, like kidnapping street kids to sell as illegal indentures to the mining corporations.
If they’re buying kids from the Alliance prison, it isn’t as a charity project.
“We have no way of knowing if the money transfer is for the Dusai girl,” Toshiyo says, breaking into his thoughts.
That’s true, but it doesn’t matter. “I’m not interested in learning that the hard way,” he says. He turns back to Kobe. “Finish up here, then I’ll see you back at home.” Kobe gives him a bloody thumbs-up.
“Toshiyo, please coordinate a phone call between myself and Major Nayar.”
WILLEM JAANTZEN SCHOOLS his face to business-like, eases the tension out of his shoulders and jaw. Resists the split-second urge to put a bullet through the screen.
“Major Nayar. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Jaantzen gives her a brief smile.
Ximena Nayar inclines her head, not agreeing, not disagreeing. Watching,
Jaantzen revises his estimation of her. She lacks her sister’s aggressive charisma, and if ever she does smile, it won’t be her sister’s million-mark grin. Nayar has a certain seriousness about her — a certain trustworthiness — that Coeur couldn’t mimic if she tried.
She hasn’t yet spoken, but Jaantzen is considering doing business. He reads people quickly; he’s had to, to survive for so long.
“I don’t just help out with jailbreaks,” Nayar says flatly. Another woman who despises small talk. She’s sizing him up, too, frowning slightly at what she sees.
“Yet you agreed to speak with me,” Jaantzen says.
“Curiosity,” says Nayar. She doesn’t elaborate. Jaantzen assumes this is her way of asking what he wants.
“Starla Dusai,” he says. “She’s being held at Redrock, and I need to get her out.”
Nayar reaches out to tap at another screen; her gaze flickers back and forth as she reads. “Starla Dusai,” she says. “Is this political? Business? Leverage?” She looks up. “What’s in it for you?”
“The girl’s my goddaughter,” Jaantzen says.
A subtle shift in the way she’s watching him, just for a moment, then her attention moves back to the other screen.
“She’s being held in isolation in maximum security, which means they haven’t figured out what to do with her yet,” Nayar says after a minute. She frowns. “But it doesn’t look like she’ll stay that way for long.”
“Stay what way for long?”
“In isolation.” Nayar doesn’t look pleased. “A girl that young, they shouldn’t be putting her in with the general population. Not in max.” A tiny line appears between her eyebrows as she swipes at the screen. “It looks like they’ve ID’d her as OIC. She’ll be treated as an enemy combatan
t.”
Jaantzen bites back a curse. He should have swallowed his pride faster. “Is she in max now?”
“Not yet,” says Nayar. “But the move will probably be soon.”
“What about her parents?” Jaantzen asks. “Are they in max, too?”
Nayar taps a few more buttons on her screen, and he sees it in her face before she even speaks. “Raj and Lasadi Dusai were killed during the attack on the Nanshe,” she says.
It’s officially gone, now, that clinging hope that the girl would be fine without his intervention, that Raj and Lasadi wouldn’t need him to play his part in their safety nets.
The girl has no one, now. No one but him.
Jaantzen takes a deep breath.
“There’s something else,” he says. “I have reason to believe that the officer in charge of Starla Dusai has been selling juvenile inmates to Sendera Dathúil. My people detected a large sum of money transferred into the officer’s account this morning. I worry that the girl is in immediate danger.”
Nayar’s attention shifts back to her other screen, pulling up information. “Mahr,” she says, and her tone of voice says it all. “Always thought that woman was shit.”
“I can get you evidence, in exchange for your help with the girl.”
Nayar scowls. “Said I thought Mahr was shit. I didn’t say I cared.”
“It would be quite the coup for you to take her down,” Jaantzen says.
Nayar’s full attention is back on him, coal-black eyes evaluating and serious. “I think you’re mistaken, Mr. Jaantzen,” she says. “I don’t care what Mahr does. I’m not looking for a feather in my cap. If you come out here and I help you with the girl, I name my price.”
“And what is that price?” But he knows it already, he can sense it.
“I’m fully aware of your vendetta against my sister, Mr. Jaantzen,” she says. “I want you to promise her safety.”