Disreputable Allies (Fates of the Bound Book 1)

by Wren Weston

  “So that was you in the compound? You tranqed my men?”

  “The idiots deserved it. They were shouting privileged information about your testing protocol. I nearly got away from your men by bluffing with the information. They need retraining. Restraint techniques, emergency crisis—”

  “Okay, okay. I get the point. One’s a rookie, and the other has never been promoted for a reason.”

  “What’s Sergeant Holguín’s excuse, then? The man has violent tendencies. He needs anger management courses.”

  “What else did you see last night?”

  “I saw the flyers, if that’s what you’re asking. What do you have so far?”

  Shaw crossed his arms and considered her. “You had nothing to do with it, then?”

  “I had nothing to do with it. I can’t believe you’d even ask me that.”

  “And you do not know who planted it or why?”

  “I couldn’t imagine what sort of idiot would plant a bomb, especially so near Bullstow.”

  Shaw’s eyes narrowed. “It’s never a simple yes or no with you, is it?”

  “Oracle’s light, chief, my little brother lives here!”

  The reminder did the trick. “I’m sorry,” he grumbled. “You were my only lead. We’ve been at it all day, and we have nothing. The prime minister won’t approve my request for citywide sweeps with CR detectors. Says it’d be too costly, and they’d ding too often.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Nitro.”

  “Nitroglycerin?” Lila asked, wide-eyed. She hadn’t given Tristan as much credit as he deserved. “My father’s right. Randolph General would light up like a star, as would most pharmacies, their staffs, and most patients with a heart condition. If you’re going to violate everyone’s rights, you better be sure it will be worth it.”

  She thought back to the explosion, remembering the mushroom haze and flames. “Are you sure that’s what it was, chief? I saw smoke and fire. Nitroglycerin is used in demolitions. It doesn’t give off smoke. Just dust when the building falls.”

  “They added gasoline and a few other chemicals to the mix. It was a precise explosion, professional, but it was designed to look far worse and far cruder.”

  “If it was made to look far worse, then they could have made the explosion worse if they’d wanted to. Did you trace the source of the nitroglycerin?”

  “That’s about all we’ve been able to do. We tracked it to Weberly Demolitions. The family had a break-in several months ago. They don’t have any leads. The thieves were in and out just like with the bombing. We’re taking another look.”

  “What about your security cameras around Bullstow?”

  “The footage is all gone. A virus wiped out the recordings. We requested the security footage from the lowborn businesses around the compound, but every single one went down the night before the blast. Someone paid a group of children to knock the cameras out, but the kids couldn’t say who had given them the money. The man just walked up to them out of the blue with instructions written on a piece of paper and gave them half the money up front. They hit the cameras and came back for the other half. Then he simply walked away.”

  “Identifiers?”

  “None. He wore a hood over his face, black trousers, plain gray coat, black boots. He never spoke, so they wouldn’t even recognize the sound of his voice. There was absolutely nothing interesting or out of place that they could identify. We caught him on a camera a block away, but he ducked inside a building and never came out again. Search turned up nothing. He just disappeared.”

  Lila didn’t believe for a second that the man had simply disappeared. He’d likely escaped by climbing onto the roof.

  Dixon enjoyed making such escapes.

  “Tech is looking at the virus. Perhaps you’d give it a look too. See what you see?”

  “Sure,” Lila said. “That’s why you thought I had something to do with it, then? Because of the virus?”

  “I know that you’re not the only hacker in Saxony, chief. I’ll admit that I was grasping when I realized you’d been there, but I have nothing. My men are out in the city right now, asking slaves to turn on an organization whose sole purpose is to free them, asking servants to do the same. A third of the workborn have a family member serving a slave’s term. I’m not numb to the futility of it, especially when they do not understand why we are asking, but I have to do what I can. These fanatical types never stop at one. They might not have hurt anyone this time, but they’ll grow bolder and bolder until they do. It’ll be my head when that happens for keeping it from the press.”

  Lila couldn’t help but wonder if Shaw was correct. What if Tristan did strike again somewhere else in the city?

  If she turned him into Shaw later, would Tristan flip on her? Would he tell the chief that she’d sat in his office and pretended not to know who had been behind the bomb? Would he smirk at her again, just like he’d smirked at her outside the Plum Luck Dragon?

  Perhaps it didn’t matter what he wanted to say or what he didn’t. As soon as Shaw used the truth serum, Tristan would talk. He wouldn’t have a choice. Once the drug hit his system, he’d feel like a drunk wanting to confide in his best friend, only the pull would feel a thousand times stronger. He’d spill everything; everyone did under the serum.

  But so far, Shaw had nothing. Zilch. That one fact might be enough to delay her father, perhaps even convince him to overlook Tristan’s transgression.

  Lila looked Shaw in the eye. “What else can you do? If you talk to the press before you know more, it will only cause a panic.”

  “All I can do is hope for a lead. Someone, somewhere knows who these AAS people are. There are rats in every organization. We just have to offer up enough cheese.”

  He slid a packet across his desk. Inside she found the rest of her things, things she had been forced to surrender as soon as she entered the Bullstow holding area.

  “At least the bomb covered up your activities, else we would be having a very different conversation. Why are you dressed like that, anyway?”

  “Meeting with spies.” She grinned innocently. “As unseemly as it is, it’s perfectly legal.”

  “Fake plates aren’t. See that it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “You should probably ditch the bike in East New Bristol, anyway. Half the highborn in the city own one, as well as the richer lowborn. It marks you as one of them the moment you ride up on it.”

  “No, it marks me as a damn good thief.”

  An hour later, Shaw cleared her to leave, the virus saved on a fresh star drive in her pocket. She dodged a few men and boys wandering the grounds in impeccably tailored coats and breeches and stepped across the street toward her waiting cab.

  Her taxi driver barreled back toward the Plum Luck Dragon and her Firefly. Shaw had apologized that Sergeant Holguín had failed to make arrangements for it. They both knew the neighborhood. Lila didn’t have much hope that it would still be there.

  When her taxi rounded the corner, she wasn’t surprised that her Firefly and her helmet had disappeared.

  Chapter 8

  Lila’s stomach woke her several hours before her alarm. She stuffed her head under her pillow, doggedly unwilling to venture out from her warm bed to feed it.

  Her belly insisted again only a few moments later, growling. She’d barely had breakfast or lunch the day before, and she’d been too angry about Tristan, her near-arrest, and her stolen Firefly to remember dinner.

  As four o’clock in the morning was too early for Chef to have anything prepared, she sat at her computer and worked her way through a packet of stale cookies, reviewing the output of several searches she had left running overnight.

  She’d made no progress on Zephyr.

  Lila clicked on a blinking red tab in her snoop program. Someone had stumbled upon a piece of her Prolix identity during t
he night, some dusty part of the net she had some measure of control over, but not enough. She had received the alert around two o’clock, and her programs had taken note of the user.

  Lila pushed her cookies away. It could have been anyone, but she knew the timing didn’t bode well. Zephyr had slipped through the outermost layer of her fake identity while she slept.

  It was the first chink in Prolix’s armor.

  No one had ever gone beyond the first few.

  Lila hopped up and paced. There were only eleven more layers of protection between Prolix and Zephyr. Once the snoop burrowed through them, Zephyr would possess enough information to figure out her identity.

  Lila pulled out her still-ashy Colt from a drawer and disassembled the gun, spreading the pieces out upon her desk, a task that always calmed her. For the next hour, she cleaned and lubricated each piece until the weapon looked brand new. Sliding fresh darts into the chambers, she carefully aligned the sensors. She didn’t trust the old ones. It was the sensor that ejected the proper dose of sedative into each target through the needle, stopping its work based on the target’s heartbeat, estimated weight, imbalance, and lurching steps. If the chip was damaged before it struck or gummed up by ash, the dart might inject too much sedative or not enough.

  She needed her targets to go down swiftly. She couldn’t handle a fair fight. She couldn’t even handle an unfair one.

  After she’d cleaned and prepped her gun, Lila dressed in black workout pants and a gray tank with the words Randolph Militia scrawled across her breasts. She buttoned her blackcoat atop it, then stuffed her Colt and short sword into a gym bag.

  Padding out into the hallway and down the grand staircase, she cocked an ear. Only Ms. O’Malley shuffled around the first floor of the great house, making her morning tea and fetching the breakfast linens and china. The half-deaf, half-blind woman was easy to avoid.

  Sergeant Galen was as well. The man posted before the great house was far too chatty and cheerful so early in the morning, and Lila usually hopped the fence that enclosed the house just to avoid him. She then darted down Villanueva Lane, which ran from the great house, past the security office, and out through the southern gate of the compound.

  The dark sky loomed above Lila while she traveled, shivering in the cold, damp air. The wind shook the trees that lined the streets. Golden leaves rained down, brushing her cheeks and lodging in her hair.

  Up ahead, a pair of blackcoats stopped in the dim light of a street lamp, out of curiosity rather than suspicion. There was only one blackcoat who traveled from the great house to the Randolph security office, and she rarely left before seven unless there was a reason.

  Lila brushed past the patrols, offering a curt nod, and climbed the stairs to the security office. Rising twelve stories, the building housed the estate’s security offices, their training facilities, as well as the barracks and private apartments of the Randolph militia. The coat of arms, two wolves straining and howling in opposite directions, had been sculpted into the front door, welded seamlessly into the steel.

  The white tiles in the lobby had been scrubbed and polished during the night. Steel arches hung askew at all angles around the large space like a bird’s nest rising in the center of the hollow building. A spiral staircase snaked around the center, climbing up the first ten floors. Four glass elevators traveled up and down the building, positioned to the north, east, west, and south of the lobby. They carried travelers to the top of the structure, upon which a bright dome strained toward the sky, like a child’s bubble longing to break free.

  The elevators only went to the top two floors if you had the proper key. Lila slid hers into the slot and rode to the eleventh floor, peeking through the glass walls of each office as she climbed higher and higher.

  Everything seemed exactly as it should.

  With a beep, the elevator’s doors opened into the reception area of the plush front office. She didn’t bother to turn on the lights; she merely strode through the right hand door, passed through her admin’s office, and flipped on the switch in hers. It would be two or three hours before Commander Sutton and the rest of her staff arrived for work.

  Her office had been decorated in much the same way as her bedroom, for the same interior designer had worked on both. Inside was an ebony desk and coffee table, a black couch with a few red throw pillows, and a comfortable black leather desk chair. The designer had used the same color scheme on her private quarters on the twelfth floor, a floor she shared with the commander. Or would have shared, had the chairwoman allowed Lila to move into the chief’s quarters.

  Instead, Lila used it infrequently to nap, to shower, and to change clothes.

  She dropped her bag in her office and returned downstairs into the brightly lit gym on the basement level. A running track circled the building. She warmed up with a few laps, then switched to the obstacle course that ran along the outside. The gym master changed the course on a weekly basis to keep her from boredom and keep her skills sharp. She hopped over foam-covered fire hydrants and park benches, jumped atop stair rails, swung across beams, scrambled atop platforms, and leapt to the next, landing in a roll, all the while keeping up her pace. Since she was lousy in a fight, her policy was to run quickly, hide often, and carry a big gun filled with lots of darts.

  Before leaving the gym, she hit the weights and stretched, smiling as her limbs loosened all the knots she’d born the day before.

  Her stomach growled as she worked, but the cafeteria wouldn’t open for another hour.

  Lila took a shower in her apartment, changed into a spare uniform, and returned to her office. Several messages from Tristan blinked on her palm. She deleted them all without reading them, then paced around the room sweeping for bugs.

  Then she inspected every cabinet looking for cookies.

  Sighing heavily when she only found an empty packet, she settled at her desk. Mornings were the best time to catch up on paperwork. She’d only just gotten through half her inbox when a knock sounded upon her door.

  “Come in,” Lila called out, checking her watch. Two hours had passed.

  Commander Sutton strode in and plopped herself in a chair across from Lila. “You were in early.”

  “Playing catch-up,” Lila said, tossing a folder down upon her desk and threading her fingers. “Although I never got to the catch-up part, so I suppose I lost the game. Any news from the other properties during yesterday morning’s holo-conference?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. It was quiet all day. Had to go home on time for once.”

  “Bet your husband liked that.”

  “The beast hollered at me for not calling ahead. It’s always something with him”

  Lila chuckled. “Did you have a chance to review the camera footage from yesterday morning?”

  “Yes. Tell the engineers that thermal never sensed you, at least not enough to trigger an alarm. Captain McKinley might have noticed it if she had more experience and if she had been looking right at the camera when you passed. As for the cameras themselves, I straightened them all yesterday. I even ordered a few more to fill out coverage. They should be here later this afternoon. I’ll boost their signals, and we’ll see if you can slip by them all next month.”

  “Good.” Her commander might not have been technical enough to work on computer security for the estate, a lack that would keep her from the chief’s office, but she was extremely gifted with audio and visual security. She could install them, modify them, and boost their signals as well as manage and alter their output. Lila trusted her judgment. “If Captain McKinley never noticed that they’d shifted out of line, she needs more training. See to it.”

  Sutton frowned. The commander had never really gotten along with Captain McKinley. Sutton did not enjoy the woman’s casual approach to the chain of command, specifically when McKinley ignored it and went over her head. “Yes, chief.”

 
“What did Sergeant Tripp and Sergeant Nolan find out at Bullstow?”

  “They didn’t have much to report, I’m afraid. Bullstow evacuated the area, then charged the family militias with holding the perimeter. They claimed it was to keep everyone safe while they cleaned up the site, said they wanted to ensure the gas leak had been contained. Sergeant Tripp and Sergeant Nolan weren’t able to get close enough to see anything. Both of them tried. Repeatedly. There were rumors of paperwork on the streets, paperwork that Bullstow was very keen on recovering.”

  “Paperwork?” Lila hoped the press ran with that scandal rather than digging deeper.

  “Yes, files, I suppose. It was a law office.”

  “They could have been protecting court documents. Legal privacy and all.”

  “Could have been. They also closed the airspace around the site and kept the press away. I haven’t seen a single photograph of the area, apart from the official press release from the governor’s office. Half the photo is nothing but smoke.”

  “Do you think something else was going on?”

  “I don’t know. The media seems to agree with the official story, but I have a weird feeling about it. Bullstow didn’t shy away from letting us get close to the train when it derailed. Why would a gas explosion be any different?”

  “Because there were dozens upon dozens of casualties who needed tending? Because we didn’t ask, we just threw ourselves in, regardless of whether or not the situation might have been dangerous?”

  Sutton grinned. “Well, when you put it like that.”

  “I suspect it was an abundance of caution on their part. Don’t stick your neck out for anything more on this case. I’ve already put some spies on it. I’ll see what I can dig up on my own.”