“If any of the other thugs give you trouble, let me know. I’ll set them straight,” Skirm said.
“Are there any of the thugs I should be worried about?” I asked.
Skirm smiled. It was a wolfish kind of expression, but it intimidated me even less than Kohinoor.
“Alyx is scary, but not evil. Griffin is a master of disguises, Cabochon is a professional liar but neither are things to worry about. I can’t speak for Addie, since I just met him in the hallway,” Skirm said, sidling up to the stopped cab to once again open the door for the princess and me.
“What about you? Can I trust you?” I asked, before stepping into the cab. The thin-voiced man merely grinned wider.
“I’m a hurricane, Miss Dunn.” I wanted to scowl at him for being so vague and demand a more specific description, but I couldn’t get past his eyes. A strange sort of washed-out hazel that bordered on yellow. Like the rest of him, hardly attractive, but even then, they held a taut sort of power. Like the string on a bow, something I really didn’t want to be on the receiving end of. I realized I didn’t need him to elaborate any further.
I bid the disquieting man a farewell and settled into my seat of the cab. Ariadne didn’t look at me as I ordered the cabbie to the cheapest hotel.
“What?” I finally asked the princess.
“Is it really a good idea to work with a whole bunch of completely strange thugs we don’t even know?” Ariadne said, a concerned look on her face.
“I’m sure they’re not dangerous. Kohinoor wouldn’t have picked them for us if they were,” I commented, wishing I had a needle to sew the card for Aristotle into the pocket where I had kept the I.O.U.
“Would he have? I don’t even know the man! And who gives their child who was undoubtedly a very large baby boy a girly name like Kohinoor?!” Ariadne threw her hands into the air dramatically. I sat by, letting her stew for a moment.
“Are you done yet?” I asked neutrally. The princess sighed and nodded. “Do you have any spare credits?”
“Why?” She gave me a suspicious side-eye.
“I figured you’d want a new pair of jeans. Those are getting ripe.”
• • •
It was exactly midday when Ariadne and I strode into the train station. It wasn’t difficult to spot the gaggle of thugs that were waiting on us, even as crowded as the place was. Alyx, Skirm, Cabochon, and Griffin were all accounted for.
“Where’s Addie?” I asked. Skirm shrugged twig-like shoulders.
“Late. Some sort of family business. He said he’d be back within an hour, hoping we’d be inclined to wait,” Cabochon snorted with some measure of disapproval.
“Alright,” I said, trying not to scratch my freshly-bandaged nose. “We’ll wait here for a bit, but if he doesn’t catch up within an hour I’m just going to leave him a ticket with the station master.”
We waited nearly two whole hours, me deciding to be all too generous with the thug. By the time we were well into the afternoon, I finally called waiting quits and left a nice ticket with the thug’s name on it with the station master. I chided myself the entire trip to Olds II for taking so long to wait for Addie, but I was still confident that the thugs we had with us would be enough to help the princess and me take down Set and Ottoman.
We arrived at Olds II just as dark was setting in. I considered going straight to the hotel we were staying at, but the first of the Lees’ favorite motels, called Criley’s Motel and Spa, was only a short cab ride away. This could be easy, I’d almost begun to convince myself, perhaps the twins/clones were at the motel and we’d be heading back toward Dinium within two days.
Of course, as with most of the things I assume or dream up, this easy way out never came to fruition.
Ariadne swore as we stepped into the main office at Criley’s. The place was an absolute disaster with deep gouges in the wood walls, upset pictures, smashed tile floors, and two beaten proprietors picking up shards of glass.
“I swear we have no idea where they are!” the woman with a severe black eye held up her hands. “Please don’t finish the job like your friends said you would.”
“Who is they? What friends?” I asked, feeling a little panicked but determined not to make this couple’s day even worse.
“The red-headed fellow from the Manners,” the man with missing teeth and a swollen tongue said thickly. “He said you’d be by to ask us where those Lee fellows are and if we still didn’t know, you’d burn our motel down.”
“Red-head?” I demanded. “What was his name? Did he give you his name?”
“I-I-” the man stuttered. He began whimpering just a little.
“It’s okay,” Ariadne said calmly, stepping toward the couple just a little. Her voice was magnificently soothing. I wondered if she could teach me to do that. “We’re not part of whoever it was that beat you up. We’re skiptraces simply looking for the Lees.”
The woman glanced from one of us to the other with terrified paranoia. I supposed it was difficult to have a civil conversation when outnumbered. I made a gesture to the thugs to wait outside, and they complied without protest.
“Now,” Ariadne said, righting a few chairs. Her voice was still soothing. “We need to know everything that happened.”
The woman, sitting down in one of the chairs, nodded slightly. She still seemed suspicious, but that seemed to be giving way to tiredness. She almost aged two decades just sitting in a chair.
“The red-haired man came in a few hours ago and demanded we tell him if a pair of our regulars had shown up,” the man said, his voice steadying.
“Did the red-haired man give you his name?” I asked, and both proprietors shook their heads.
“No. Just that the Manners would come and get us if we refused to give him the information,” the woman held my gaze intently.
“What are the Manners?” Ariadne asked.
“A massive up-and-coming gang,” I said. I’d never actually met a member of the Manners in person, but they already had a reputation of being merciless and fully prepared to ruin anyone’s day.
I could hear the princess swallowing.
Yeah, if the Lees weren’t enough, we now had the opportunity to tangle with a particularly malicious gang.
“We don’t know where they are,” the toothless man asserted. “They used to come here regularly, but they haven’t been around in years.”
I nodded. It was reasonable that the twins/clones wouldn’t return to places they had once been. With their supposed line of work, they would need to bounce from place to place to keep the police and skiptraces off their tails. But, of course, it was human nature to stick to a pattern. Unlike those lovely Centauri-built number machines, humans weren’t random no matter how hard they tried. So, if I could track their movements, I might be able to figure out where they’d be next.
Of course, if the Manners were after these guys too, that’d be a bigger problem. Thankfully it looked like Addie had already shown his stripes as a member and hopefully my in-depth knowledge of Ottoman and Set would give us the advantage.
“We need to be going,” I finally said, standing. “Do you need anything?”
“No, thank you,” the woman said, and I led Ariadne out the door.
My neutral expression turned to a great and dark scowl the moment my feet hit the sidewalk.
“Marcie—” Ariadne started. I held up a hand as the thugs joined us.
“Do you guys care if we do a little night work?” I asked, barely waiting for the thugs to catch up before I hailed a cab.
“You’re the boss,” Alyx said. I nodded, pulling out the piece of paper that I had with all the places the Lees had been to on it. The next place was a hotel called Maribel, about a fifteen-minute cab ride away from here.
We set out to Maribel Hotel, where the Lees had been spotted six months ago, only to face the same story. The Manners had beat us to it a few hours before, beating up the proprietors and trashing the place, claiming the next wave of gang members
was on the way. These particular owners were less forgiving than the first ones and chased us off the property with a nasty-looking crossbow. So we made it to the Lees’ favorite diner, once again trashed. Thankfully the Manners didn’t seem intent on actually killing anyone, though they’d sent more than one person to the hospital.
I resisted the urge to yell out in frustration as we entered a small grocer with a bloodied owner.
“They just came out of nowhere, demanding we tell them the location of some ruffians I’d never seen before!” the bespectacled man held his slashed arm.
“Was there a red-head leading the group?” I asked wearily. The man nodded enthusiastically.
“I think one of them called him Addie or something,” the owner said, finally confirming what I had begun to suspect each time we encountered another known location of Set and Ottoman ransacked by a red-headed gang leader long before we reached there.
“Alright, that’s all we need to know,” I said, turning to leave.
“Uh, wait!” the owner said. “I’ve seen those two, er, whoever they are.”
“The Lees?” I filled in the gap.
“Yes! Them! I saw them enter that store over there,” the man said. I eyed the store at which the grocer was pointing with suspicion. It was a pristine store with a pudgy proprietor standing out front, scoffing so loudly and with such amusement at this grocer’s misfortune I could almost hear him. It only took me a minute to figure out what was actually going on. I reached out calmly and grabbed a handful of the owner’s shirt, upsetting his glasses slightly. Thankfully, he was short, so I could pull him nose-to-nose without craning my neck.
“Tell me something,” I whispered harshly. “And be honest, I’m having a bad day. How can you have not seen the Lees in your own store but have seen them in your biggest competitor’s store?”
The wide-eyed man gulped great swallows of air.
“I-I just wanted you and your friends to beat him up too. It’s unfair,” the unscrupulous shop owner gasped. I released his shirt after a moment and stormed out.
After that failure, I had us head back to the hotel we had reservations at. We made it in well past three in the morning, but I still spent the rest of the night pacing. I’d need to have a talk with Kohinoor about Addie when this was all over. Having a Manners spy in Ascalon was not an ideal situation for the company’s reputation. It also showed off just how capable they really were to get a guy through Ascalon’s hefty thug vetting system. The Lees must have been terribly important to the Manners if they were willing to sacrifice such a position inside one of the biggest and most well-informed skiptracing companies in the system.
Why did the Manners want Set and Ottoman in the first place? Given the Lees’ almost flippant relationship with killing, it was possible that the whole situation was a vendetta. Yes, the Manners could be out to hire the Lees for their services, but Addie’s crew was hunting the twins/clones. They were making a lot of noise, trying to scare us off their trail, and intimidating anyone who may have come in contact with the Lees. That wasn’t exactly a great recruitment tactic, especially if they knew just how undaunted the Lees really were. This had to be something more, like a vendetta.
Well, at least revenge was a language I spoke.
The bigger problem was the Manners themselves. I couldn’t have them just swipe my very important bounty right out from under me, but if I attacked them directly, or beat them to the Lees, things would get ugly quickly. Not even the Trynod would have enough thugs to take on the Manners. So that left me with scaring them. Or calling the whole thing off and demanding that Aristotle give me another bounty to work because the one he gave me turned out to be a catastrophe of massive, system-spanning proportions.
Of course, that would have meant I wasted Silene’s I.O.U., a more terrible thought than going head-to-head with the Manners.
I could always try bargaining with the Manners, but that seemed even less likely to succeed than attacking them. The only way to do this would be to scare them off. I needed something big and intimidating to get the Manners to back off. Ascalon wouldn’t be enough; they had at least one spy already embedded in the organization, so it was likely that they knew more about Silene’s operation than I did. No, the Manners needed something scarier. Something with far bigger teeth than they sported. Something that was intimidating enough to force them into a change of plans.
Something like—
“Marcie,” Ariadne appeared in the doorway, dressed in new pajamas. “How about I take over the pacing and you get some sleep?”
“Sorry,” I said glumly slumping onto the couch. I don’t know if she actually meant to fulfill her suggestion, but as soon as I was out of the way, the princess started pacing.
For a while there, it was all quiet, save the wood floor that squeaked every time Ariadne stepped near the table. The noise was high-pitched, regular, and extremely irritating. Falsebone floors rarely made that kind of noise. No wonder I’d stirred the princess.
“My question is how?” Ariadne finally said. She still looked drowsy, even though she’d probably walked the equivalent of a quarter of a mile now.
“How do we get the Manners off our quarry?” I asked.
The princess nodded.
“Also note that we just agreed to take on one of the biggest new mobs in existence,” Ariadne pointed out.
“We’re idiots,” I said, nodding ruefully.
“Well, that’s not news to me,” she said, plopping down on the couch beside me. “I assume it’s not news to you either.”
“My brother always said I had a skull thicker than a rhinoceros,” I said. The princess nodded silently.
I replayed the idea I had in my head repeatedly, debating whether or not to tell Ariadne. Of course, I’d already figured out the answer to that; it wasn’t something Ariadne was going to like. It wasn’t even really something that I was going to like. Or that I thought I could pull off, but that was beside the point. It was a do-or-die kind of situation.
“You’re scowling again,” the princess said, without actually looking in my direction.
“So?” I asked.
“You’re not exactly subtle. You’ve got some ideas floating around that head and you are going to tell me about them,” she said. I glanced at her with tired eyes.
“I may have an idea or two,” I said cryptically. Ariadne pursed her lips with irritation I tried to ignore. “Look, it’s a long shot and I’m not sure I really want to go through with it just yet.”
“Stubborn goat,” the princess muttered.
“Drama llama,” I muttered back. Ariadne rolled her eyes dramatically as if to emphasize my point.
“Seriously, go sleep,” she finally said. “You’re the boss and it won’t do to have you slacking off from exhaustion.”
“Fine.” I took my turn to roll my eyes and shuffled to my bed.
It still took me an hour to finally fall asleep. I tossed and turned, trying to straighten out my brain. Now that I had a plan, what I needed was a meeting with the Manners, which in turn meant I needed some way to actually arrange it. It’s not as though I could just call them up on the telephone. They might not even have a telephone and, if they did, their number was probably not in the registry.
Skiptracing wasn’t as easy as I’d like.
On top of all my inner moping, the bed was also incredibly uncomfortable. Although I didn’t miss much about my life after my brother died, the apartment I’d stayed at immediately following his death had the best mattress. Not even the Lilstar with all her padding could quite match that old bed.
Of course, I’d had to sell the apartment to pay for expenses tracking down the skiptrace, which just added to the of holes in my life - things most people had. Family, a home, security, a job, even a social life were all things that seemed to exist just outside my grasp. Not that I was completely empty; I had Ariadne and a mission, if nothing else. With any luck, I’d always have a mission. Something to do. Something to drag me forward in t
ime. I didn’t really want to settle down anywhere, unless I was well and truly spent. For now, I needed to keep moving.
Even so, part of me still wanted to go home.
An idea shot through me like a shock from my Centauri device. I tried not to bolt out of bed and act too quickly.
I missed home. Me, a person who was never really sentimental. If I was missing home, I knew two people who were probably missing home too.
And I had the address to their home.
Eighteen
“You’re going to Carlion,” I said the next morning, as everybody met in the hotel’s lobby. Ariadne’s face lit up with more confusion and less joy than I would have liked.
“Are we giving up here?” she asked, the question echoing in the eyes of the entire party of thugs, except Alyx, of course. Her face was as cool and passive as ever.
“Not yet, but I need something from the Lilstar. Take everybody but Alyx with you; I might need her here,” I said. Apparently, my idea was not as pleasing to the princess as I had thought it would be, as she dragged me by the elbow a few paces away from the thugs.
“What are you planning?” she asked, hands on hips like a disappointed mother. To be honest, she looked more like a disappointed kitten, but that was beside the point.
“I’m not going to do anything too stupid,” I said, “I just have to contact somebody. That’s it.”
Ariadne glared at me for what felt like an eternity.
“Fine, but you have to take Cabochon with you. He’s creepy,” the princess finally relented. “What do I need to get from the Lilstar?”
“It’s in the back of the bathroom closet, a little leather case. It has biohazard warnings all over it but don’t worry, it’s not contagious,” I said easily.
“Oh, yeah, let me just go get the unknown biohazard box you smuggled onto my ship,” the princess said sarcastically, throwing her arms into the air for emphasis.
I rolled my jaw around in an I’m-so-done-with-this-conversation expression. The princess wasn’t impressed.
“It’s fake tattoos,” I finally confessed, speaking even more slowly than before. “They’re engineered on clone grafts of my own skin, that’s why they have biohazard on them, they don’t want people sharing. It’s a liability thing. Happy now?”
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