by Chloe Garner
“I don’t come in staff size,” Sarah said, and he gave her a humored smile as Tania came in with the tea set. Sarah stood, but Tania put out a hand.
“Please,” the woman murmured, and Sarah sat again.
Sarah eased back in her chair as Tania put a tea cup in front of her. The tidy woman moved down the table to serve Descartes, then disappeared back into the kitchen.
“So,” Descartes said, playin’ a spoon ‘tween his fingers. “You double-crossed me.”
“I did,” Jimmy said. Yip slumped face-first onto the table. Jimmy cast a sidelong look at his brother, but didn’t respond direct. “I don’t want to be the pawn in your game. I won’t. Pythagoras fears we’re going to topple the global economy, but not so much that he wouldn’t ride it headlong into the ground, just to beat you at this game of yours.”
Pythagoras snorted like he’d had trouble swallowin’.
“Desi told me you’d make it fun, but I had no idea. You absorbed an army back here. What’d you do with ‘em all, when you were done with ‘em? Eat ‘em?”
Sarah looked coolly across the table at him.
“Buried them,” she said. They’d burnt the bodies in a bonfire, but weren’t no point in sayin’ it. He snorted again.
Pythagoras blew air through his lips.
“You’re more of a predator than that,” he said.
“I don’t see your point,” Descartes said, ignoring Pythagoras to continue talking to Jimmy. “You double-crossed me to prove that we’re petty and competitive? You already knew that.”
“I double-crossed you to get both of you at the table with me at the same time,” Jimmy said.
“You think you’ve got cards, boy?” Pythagoras asked. “Those men may work for Desi, but they’ll answer me fast enough when I tell ‘em that I don’t care for you to be breathing anymore.”
“Gora, that’s enough,” Descartes said. Pythagoras gave him a sideways look and stood. Sarah stood with him, just a reflex. His chair toppled back onto the carpet and he pointed a finger at Sarah.
“You knew what you were doing, when you brought that much absenta into the world,” he said. “I got it wrong thinking it was Jimmy, because he’s greedy and impulsive, but you studied on the LaVelle. You knew what it would do to the world, and you did it anyway.”
Jimmy and Descartes remained seated, just watchin’ each other. Sarah tipped her head at an angle to look at Pythagoras.
“I tried to keep it quiet, but it isn’t the kind of secret you can keep. Since, we’ve just been tryin’ to survive.”
“I can fix that,” Pythagoras said. “Screw the profits, you uppity peons don’t deserve to be at the table with us talking about matters of this importance. Desi, if we leave now, do you think we could catch the train back out?”
She’d read the two men in the corners right. They were up-close killers, the kind who wanted to do it silent, use their hands. The guns were there for utility, but Yip was much more their style work.
The footsteps had been almost silent on the carpet, and the fingers under her chin were supposed to be the first she’d know he was there, the blade at her throat, already in motion, the second.
The problem was that she was Sarah Todd, and she’d been dealin’ with bandits her whole adult life. She had her hand back over her shoulder even as his knife-arm came around, pullin’ the stiletto dagger from its sheath between her shoulderblades and usin’ the back of her own neck as a stop for it. He didn’t ever see it, she reckoned, feelin’ the jolt as the point hit bone. Her forearm was blockin’ his arm as it came ‘round, and she knew from the expression on Pythagoras’ face, as well as from the blood pourin’ over her hand, that she’d hit true enough.
The fingers on her chin went lax and she pushed his knife-arm out of the way, pullin’ the stiletto clear as he slid sideways to the ground.
Was gonna be a hell of a thing to clean up.
The other man was moving, but he found Jimmy’s gun trained on him ‘fore his cleared holster.
“Hold,” Jimmy said, arm straight, dead aim.
The man looked to Pythagoras, who motioned him on.
“That will be quite enough,” Descartes said. “I have no intention of returning to the train without either of my bodyguards. We came without true force because I couldn’t imagine what would drive Jimmy Lawson to double-cross me. He is neither greedy nor impulsive, but rather quite well-considered, or else I would have never agreed to do business with him.” He sipped his tea as the remaining gun returned to the corner. “I will say that I trust you aren’t stupid enough to kill or attempt to otherwise physically threaten or manipulate either of us, for the storm of violence that would come down on you from all sides.”
“I know your contacts well enough,” Jimmy said. “If we’re done with the theatrics.”
Descartes gave Jimmy a dry smile.
“I highly doubt it, but we should move on, anyway.”
“I intend to corner the absenta market,” Jimmy said. “You won’t catch the train today, and Lise Lawson is, as we speak, on her way back to her family in Intec with a draft of regulations that will force all absenta mined anywhere in the world to come here for quality certification.”
“You think you can do that without us squashing you?” Pythagoras asked, movin’ over to the next chair and sittin’.
“Not at all,” Jimmy said. “I intend to do it with your express blessing. It will allow me, and only me, to govern how much absenta reaches the outside world. I will buy every ounce of it as it comes in - everyone will be relieved to part with it and move into cash - and I will sell it at a very modest markup, at auction. Limited lots.”
“Limited lots mean willingness to bid high,” Pythagoras said. “You’ll just skin ‘em like you did your claim auction, and then have to sell more to cover your upfront costs.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“I will certainly drive up the price, but you’re right: I have to have the cash to buy all of the absenta coming out of the mountains. I can’t do that and keep my margins low enough to kill the black market unless the price stays modest. There is wisdom to how you see the economic balance. The world isn’t so much different from Lawrence. You pour too much of a valuable resource into it, all of the industry becomes lopsided and distorted, and it takes time to work through that. In the meantime, people starve. We’re seeing that, now. In a town the size of Lawrence, I can manipulate it externally with generous application of cash, but if it happened to the whole world? That much wealth isn’t worth anything if everyone who made fun things to buy has starved to death.”
Pythagoras pursed his lips, fishlike.
“I’m listening,” he said. Jimmy dipped his head.
“For this to work, I will be making moves that are exposed,” Jimmy said. “Ones that mean that, if either of you are my enemy, they will fail, and this attempt to corner the market will fail. I need both of you on my side, and to do it I’m willing to offer both of you considerable incentive.”
The brothers looked at each other, and Sarah took a moment to mark Yip’s breathing. His head hadn’t come up off the table, and his mass seemed to be slippin’ off to the side a bit.
“You have our attention,” Descartes said.
“You were talking expansion, when we met,” Pythagoras said.
“And I still intend to do it,” Jimmy said. “Piece by piece as we prove that we can predict claims. More absenta.”
“Why?” Pythagoras asked. “If you’re going to keep the lots small?”
“Because the world demand for absenta will grow,” Jimmy said. “I’ll drive the price down gradually with supply, and the world will find ways to absorb it. Industries that could use it but could never afford it will jump in. With Sarah helping to navigate, the world demand will always stay one step ahead of what I’m willing to sell, but I’ll keep selling more and more, taking a cut at every step.”
“Doesn’t wash,” Pythagoras said. “You’ll run out of capital.”
> “Not with a bank,” Descartes said. “The one you just got approval for. He takes the money from them and puts it right back into his own pockets. With the deposit ratio you personally advocated, he could run for decades on just the money I handed him for my claim.”
“Not decades,” Jimmy said. “My eyes are too big for us to grow that slowly. But my math says I have access to the capital to run for six years at today’s absenta consumption rates.”
The two brothers sat, quiet, for a moment. Descartes gave Jimmy a stern, contemplative look, but Pythagoras only lasted that moment before shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to sit here and let you dictate terms. You are a bug, and you asked me to come all the way out here to watch my brother squash you. If he isn’t going to do it, I will.”
Sarah sighed.
“I ain’t had the easiest of days,” she said. “And I reckon I’m about done with you. Don’t know how Jimmy ever talked you into the bank in the first place, but he’s got a man with a signature on the line what ain’t worth the price of pullin’.” She turned her head to look at Jimmy. “I hear you, I can’t shoot him in the head, but I ain’t gonna sit here and listen to this all afternoon.”
“It was only worth it when I knew that taking the deal would mean Desi came down on this pitiful little town like lava and just wipe it all away,” Pythagoras said. “If he’s actually thinking about it, I’m out.”
Sarah threw up her hands and started away from the table.
“You try to slit my throat, you threaten my town, I ain’t got the patience nor the inclination. You want to fight us, you know where we are.”
“Sarah,” Jimmy said as she was halfway to the stairs.
She stopped.
That tone.
It was a request, but there wasn’t any way she would ever say no. It invoked a part of her that only he knew well, a part that wasn’t holding a cultural affectation up in front of herself. It was the way he said her name when there wasn’t anyone else there.
She turned.
Sighed.
“All right, Jimmy,” she said. Pyathagoras turned in his chair, looking back at her.
“He has tamed the beast,” he said. Sarah ignored him, ignored Jimmy.
She addressed Descartes.
“I am a weapon,” she said, simple, no accent, just words. She put her palms down on the table, out from her shoulders, and she leaned on the wood surface, turning her head to look over at Descartes. “Jimmy has never given me any illusions that I am anything else. And in this case, I am the nuclear option. If either of you declines to be a part of this attempt at corning the absenta market, now or in the future, I have a list of claims up the range, numbering near a hundred, that I will release. No strings attached, just the claim locations and the test reports from the claims I’ve already identified to lend credibility. I wouldn’t have to do it, because the truth about prospectors is that they’d jump at a hint like that, regardless, and when the first few found absenta - and they would; most of them would find the highest-quality absenta lode they’d seen in their region in a generation - every one of those claims would get snatched up immediately, and the flow of absenta out of them would be enough to ruin the global economy and your interests in it.”
She paused, looking over at Jimmy. He met her eye, personal, secret. There wasn’t anything on his face anyone else would have seen, but it was as plainly him as he had ever been, anywhere. She nodded.
“Killing me seems like an honest, reasonable choice, and if Jimmy is ever going to manage to pull this off, he needs to control the amount of absenta making it to market for the next few years, just to prove out the regulatory scheme and get everyone used to coming through him to sell. After that, it won’t matter, but for now, I need to be the only one who knows how to find the stuff. And I am. But we have a satellite uplink, and the night that I fail to find my bed, the exact method I’m using to establish claims, along with the first hundred as models, will go out to every interested party I could think of, including all of our existing claim owners.”
She lifted her head now, looking across the table at Pythagoras.
“You get half of the banking revenue,” she said. “I assume you’re good enough with numbers to see that that’s a very handsome revenue stream without any effort on your part tied into it.” She looked over at Descartes, who might have been smiling. “And you will get half of the markup revenue at auction, for your share in the auction house. He hadn’t gotten to that part yet, but I’m talking now. He was taking too much time, and I really am done with the two of you. I don’t care if you think it’s worth it or not. I may not be in a position to take out a gun and shoot you in the head tonight, but if I choose, I will take out a gun and shoot your businesses in the head, any day I find that my options are so limited. The truth of it is that I can live like that. I’ve done it for eight years in my very recent history. How well do you do, when everything crashes?”
She stood, taking a slow, even breath, and nodding.
“Now, Jimmy has contracts for you to sign. I am going to make sure that Yip is still breathing, and then take him upstairs. You may threaten Jimmy as much as you care to, but you need to see and understand that his life is nearly as dear to me as my own. In the event that he dies, I no longer have any interest in saving Lawrence or any other portion of the existing world from the destruction it deserves. Good evening.”
Jimmy stood as she pushed herself up off of the table, and she went to walk around him, but he stepped back into her way. She looked him in the eye for a moment and he nodded, putting his hand out to touch her cheekbone with his thumb, then moved back out of her way again as she went to lift Yip off the table and drag him upstairs.
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When she got to her room with Jimmy, she found Rhoda and Thomas there, Ellie asleep in the crib.
She looked from one to the other, then nodded.
“Wouldn’t have picked you to for it, but wouldn’t have picked anybody else, neither,” she said.
“We were supposed to get her out of the house, if we heard shooting,” Rhoda said quietly. “And then expect you to track us down out in the mountains.”
Sarah nodded again, going to put her hat on the bed post and looking down at Ellie for a moment.
That was exactly what she would have done.
“How did it go?” Thomas asked.
“Yip’s here,” Sarah said, going to put her duster on the peg by the door and then filling the sink with water to wash her face.
“What?” Rhoda asked.
“Beat somethin’ awful,” Sarah confirmed. “Doc’s in with him now.”
Wade and Rich were angry with her, but Doc had told her they’d both be whole by week’s end. She’d done the best she could, with that, and nothing had gone wrong. Noose, even one what split when it was supposed to, could still crush or twist a vertebra bad enough to kill a man, instant, and that was just the beginning.
She couldn’t hope for better than what she’d got, there.
“How did it go?” Thomas asked again, his voice still low, but more insistent now.
“I’ve never met Yip,” Rhoda said.
“Now really ain’t much a time,” Sarah said. “Reckon he’ll be at breakfast in the morning.”
“Sarah Todd,” Thomas said.
She went to look out the window. It wasn’t even dusk yet but it felt late.
“Hobflowers’ll be out tomorrow,” she said.
“I’d forgotten,” Rhoda said. Sarah nodded.
“My brother brought two of the most powerful, dangerous men here, to our house, without warning us,” Thomas said. “You knew.”
“I knew,” Sarah said. “They’ve miniaturized some of the comm tech and he had it here waitin’ for the satellite to go up, probably weeks in advance, ‘round ‘bout the time he figured out he wanted to send up the satellite in the first place.” She paused. “You don’t let a Lawson sit about for three weeks with nothin’ to d
o, Thomas. What he does with his time might surprise you.”
“Why didn’t he warn anyone?” Rhoda asked.
“Wasn’t up for discussion,” Sarah said. “Wouldn’t even discuss it with me. I was just here when he sent the message.”
“They’re here,” Thomas said. “I’ve stopped expecting him to tell us when he does this kind of stuff. I’m just asking you to tell me how it went.”
Sarah turned around, puttin’ her palms down on the window sill to either side.
“And I’m tellin’ you,” she said. “Y’all are gettin’ married.”
--------
Somewhere in the two weeks of flying tulle between when Jimmy put Pythagoras and Descartes on the train back to Preston and Sarah standing at Rhoda and Thomas’ wedding, Kayla forgave Sarah.
It wasn’t a specific moment or event. Sarah suspected Kayla was just too busy to remember she was angry at Sarah.
Wade and Rich were even less of a challenge. They’d never liked Sarah before, and they didn’t like her any more or any less, now. Three more claims got back their analyses from Preston, and a man from the lab in Preston showed up with a train-car full of equipment, saying that he intended to set up an office and do the analysis here, where all the absenta was coming from, since it didn’t make any sense to keep running it up and down the rail line. Sarah suspected Jimmy had more’n a little to do with it, but didn’t corner him to make him tell her, and he weren’t exactly forthcoming on his own.
More and more men got off the train every time it stopped at Lawrence, but more and more of ‘em owned more than the suit of clothes they arrived in, and they had degrees and certifications and shop space assigned and waitin’ for ‘em. Chemist. Engineer. Architect. Teacher.
Teacher.
There hadn’t been a proper school in Lawrence since Sarah had graduated, and weren’t enough kids runnin’ around to keep one occupied, but the number of proposals at hobflower season had taken everyone unexpected, and the crop of women gettin’ off the train alongside the men suggested wouldn’t be but a couple of years, they’d need a full school.