“Okay?” She gave a short laugh. “Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?”
The rain grew heavier around them, cool enough to prickle his skin. Her shirt clung to her chest, and he looked again to the black-and-brown bruise that had to be from Tersley’s shot.
Was she doing this because she was mad about what had happened? He couldn’t blame her if that was the case, but still, this was his friend’s life they were talking about. This was Adam.
“Where is he?” Ross asked.
Her brown eyes held his, steadier than anyone he’d ever faced before. She wasn’t afraid of him. He got the sense she wasn’t afraid of much.
“I need some money first,” she said.
Whatever part of him had thought this might be a terrible plank dried up and blew away.
“You’re serious,” he said.
“As a fist to the face.”
His chin lifted. “You want money in exchange for information.”
She tapped the side of her head. “Now he’s getting it.”
She was trying to scam him, and even though he knew it, he had to let it happen. Without her, he had no idea where Adam might be.
“How much?” he asked.
Her gaze flicked to the side. Her hands and forearms were covered with small scars, he noticed—thin pink marks shades lighter than her skin.
“A hundred thousand credits,” she said.
He choked.
Her cheeks darkened.
When they’d hidden together last night, he’d thought she was different from the other Shorelings. She’d taken a beating for him, pulled a knife in his defense. But now he could see she was the same as those maniacs who’d dragged Adam from the car.
“Let me check my pockets,” he said, turning them out slowly to reveal their emptiness. “I guess I left my solid gold bars at home today.”
“Make jokes, terreno,” she said, using a word he’d never heard before. “But I know where they took your friend.”
“Who took him?” He stepped closer. She moved into the shadow of the building, away from him, where the rain was lighter. He followed, giving her space, but checking over his shoulder to see if anyone watched them.
“Who took Adam?” he pressed.
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “You help me, I help you.”
“You could be lying.”
“I could be,” she said. And then she smiled, and it was equal parts dazzling and terrifying because of what she might be holding back.
“This isn’t funny,” he said.
“You’re the one making jokes.”
His thumbs drummed against his thighs.
“Is he all right?”
She held out an open hand. He swore and looked away.
“I don’t have access to one hundred thousand credits,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much that is?”
“I’m poor,” she said. “Not stupid.”
He wanted to yell. Kick something. Release some of the frustration trapped inside him.
“If you come with me to my house, I can get what you want,” he said.
“If by what you want, you mean shot again, then I’m sure you can.” She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked a hip. “Nice try, but I don’t think so.”
He pressed his thumbs to his temples. He could get a couple thousand transferred through his comm without question, but he needed her comm to complete the transaction. To get actual, old-fashioned cash—which he assumed she wanted if she didn’t want to get caught blackmailing him—he’d need to go to a bank, and there was no way to do that without alerting his family and security team.
He had to be smart. His father negotiated with dangerous people every day. This wasn’t that different.
He took a deep breath.
“Take me to Adam, and I’ll double the amount.”
She scoffed.
He held his ground, and held her gaze, remembering a time that Tersley had taught him to play poker, and how to bluff when he didn’t have a good hand.
“Thought you didn’t have access to that kind of money.”
“I lied,” he said. “I’ll get it for you if you take me to Adam.”
Now she balked, but she was considering it. He could tell in the way she tapped her teeth together.
“I don’t have a tracker on him,” she said. “I just know where they said they were going.”
“So take me there.”
“And if you don’t find your friend?”
“I’ll make sure you’re compensated anyway,” he said before he’d thought about it. “Half to get there, the rest if we find him. You win either way.”
There were too many questions—who and where and how exactly she knew this information. Part of him was convinced it was all a lie. But he couldn’t chance it.
She’d been with Adam last night. She’d seen him.
He needed her help.
“No patrol,” she said. “No guards.”
“Just me.”
“What’s to stop your friend from shooting me, soon as we get back?”
He cringed, the words washing back the memory of when he thought she’d been killed.
“That won’t happen again,” he said.
The arch of her brow said she wasn’t convinced.
“Half to take me, the rest when we find him. Nobody knows I’ll be with you. No one is going to follow us.”
His father had been that bold with the leader of the Oil Nation. Hopefully that same boldness would pay off now.
After a moment, she nodded and thrust out a hand.
“You got yourself a deal, terreno.”
He took her hand, but she didn’t shake. She pulled him closer and whispered, “You don’t make good on this, I’m telling everyone below the cliffline your friend shot me, unarmed, and left me for dead. You won’t be able to buy yourself out of that.”
Then she released his grip, and with a smile, told him they’d need a car.
* * *
Five minutes later, Ross sat beside the girl in the back seat of a taxi, heading toward Lower Noram. The rain grew heavier the closer they came to the cliffline, and Ross kept close to the window, keeping to his side of the seat.
She knew where Adam was.
She wanted money.
She’d threatened to tell everyone Tersley had shot her if he didn’t deliver his end of the bargain.
It wouldn’t work out, of course, not unless the Bakers coughed up the credits. His mom and dad certainly weren’t going to agree to pay some random Shoreling girl that much to bring Adam home.
Maybe his father could take care of it, make this go away like he’d said he would last night. The thought made him a little sick to his stomach—he didn’t even know what that would entail—but what other choice did Ross have? He needed to make sure his father was protected from his failures so that he could lead a country.
He’d worry about the details later. For now, he just needed to find Adam.
“Where is he?” Ross asked again. “Who took him?”
“You really have no idea?” She cocked a brow, and he was struck again by her voice. It was warm, and a little gritty, like sand blowing across the ground.
He shook his head.
“La limpieza,” she said. “Your patrol.”
That didn’t relieve him as much as it might have two days ago. Now when he thought of the patrol, he didn’t just think of Marcus Pruitt’s mother in her shiny uniform at one of his father’s events. He thought of soldiers in riot gear, crushing them with shields and sticks.
“They arrested him?”
“They took him.”
He didn’t understand the difference. “What’s that mean?”
“It means he’s not going to the jail,” she said.
He looked her way, seeing how the rain tamed her dark hair and made it shine, and drip down her thin neck. She pulled at the ends, absently covering up the small tattoo beneath her ear—the “86” he’d looked up earlier.
“He came
back to the shop after you ran off—la limpieza must have followed him. They rounded him up with the other rioters and threw him in a car. One of them mentioned a one-way ticket out to sea.”
That didn’t make sense. The suspicion that this was a setup, that she was lying to get paid, twisted his gut. The only boats he knew of that went to sea were the freighter ships that delivered food and supplies up and down the coastline. He’d never heard of a patrol boat.
“They wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Someone will figure out who he is and bring him home.”
“If they had, don’t you think they would have already done it?”
She fished Adam’s comm out of her pocket again and showed a series of messages from his mom and dad.
Where are you?
Did you stay at Ross’s?
You’re in trouble.
Just talked to the principal. Not like you to ditch school. Come home.
Worried. Call your mom.
Bile turned in his stomach. He tried to think of where at sea the patrol would take prisoners, but came up blank. The Armament covered the Pacific. Their base was in Old San Francisco, across the bay, but the military would have recognized the vice president’s son, and anyway, the jail and courts were on the mainland.
He and Adam had watched the riot footage most nights, but no one mentioned where the prisoners had been taken. Inland, he’d assumed, to the federal detention centers that were always petitioning his father for more funds. He’d never heard of a jail out at sea, not even a whisper of one from his father, or his father’s cabinet.
He looked out his window, unable to gain his bearings surrounded by all these decrepit stone buildings and their neon signs. Groups of people gathered on the corners, looking up as they passed in mild curiosity. Automatically, he reached for the lock on the door, pressing the button and then wiping his damp palms on his wet pant legs. His heart was pounding. He wanted this over with as soon as possible.
On the seat behind the driver, a screen played images from the relocation center in the docks. Shorelings were lined up, smiling, holding their paperwork.
He turned it off.
“You know where this place is?” he asked.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been out that way,” she said, a little quieter.
It didn’t exactly make him feel better about the whole thing.
“I didn’t know that would happen,” he said, realizing that if they were going to do this, he needed to clear some things up. “That Tersley would shoot you, I mean. He’s my bodyguard. He was just trying to protect me. It’s his job.”
“Great job.”
He scowled, and as she grew quiet, he wished he could tell what she was thinking, and that he could somehow tell her how Tersley had taught him to fight, and once even to drive a car. That for the last two years he’d been with Ross more than his parents, more than his teachers, even more than Adam.
But Tersley had shot her, and not just in defense. There were other reasons he’d done it that Ross didn’t care to admit—that he didn’t even have to, because as he looked at the girl, it was clear she already knew.
His gaze fell below her neck, to the wet, rust-colored shirt that clung to her like a second skin. He’d been so sure that a bullet had pierced her heart, but there was only a dark purple bruise below her collarbone. I just stunned her, Tersley had said. Ross had been so reluctant to believe anything the man said after what had happened.
“Donner Cove, you said?” called the driver from the front seat, as he took the winding road down into Lower Noram. Cars were stopped in a line trying to get above the cliffline, but those going down could pass right through.
“That’s right,” said the girl.
“You sure?” he asked. “There’s no electric down there.”
He thought the man might be talking about the erosion, but the girl only tapped the seat and said, “I know.”
They took a road around the outside of the slums, leading toward the water. Even in the rain, the docks looked different. In the dark it was hard to see how the buildings had been falling apart. The jagged cracks that split the stucco siding, the metal and stone debris that littered the road. A path had been cleared for cars, but it was thin, and the driver kept slowing in order not to scrape the side of the taxi. It was like the giant quake that had split the city had happened only yesterday.
“Here we are,” announced the driver.
A terrible excitement shook through him as they reached the open gateway to the pier. The rain was a little lighter than before, the black clouds farther inland, leaving a rare breath of cool before the humidity returned. Mounted at the top of the gate, the blue, green, and red stripes of the Alliance’s flag whipped in the wind, tailing east. Beyond it stretched the water, churning below a pale gray sky.
“Stop here,” said the girl.
They pulled beside the overflowing trash bins a stone’s throw away from a two-story stucco building. One side appeared condemned, and had been closed off by a chain-link fence. The other still had glass in the windows, though most of it was cracked. Light flickered in one of the rooms on the bottom floor.
“This is where they took him?” asked Ross, not even bothering to hide the disbelief.
She nodded toward the water, to the stone steps that descended to a rickety, boarded pier, where he saw a dozen or more boats. They weren’t like the small speedboats he’d ridden on at the Green Energy Initiative in Ottawa last spring, or the freight ships he’d seen in pictures that Noram no longer used on account of the storms. These were actual boats, with actual sails.
“Down there,” she said quietly.
Through the window in the boathouse, he could see shadows moving before a flickering flame. Someone was inside.
“You sure you want to get out here?” asked the driver.
Not really, Ross thought, but if these people knew where Adam was and he walked away, he’d hate himself. He knew this wasn’t his job, that this was the sort of thing for patrolmen. That he wasn’t any kind of hero and would probably end up just making things worse. But things couldn’t get much worse. Adam was missing because of him. The security team for the president and vice president was searching for him. Patrolmen and Armament alike had to have him on their radar, and yet no one had picked up a trail. If he didn’t go with her, his chance at finding Adam might disappear.
He turned on his comm just long enough to pay the driver, and then shut it off again. Brighton would track him here, but by then he’d hopefully have Adam back.
“Come on,” said the girl. As soon as they left the car, the driver sped away.
He followed her at a jog toward the iron fence that separated the lot from the pier. A thick chain, fastened by a lock the size of his fist, crisscrossed over the gate. He mirrored her crouch, still mostly hidden from the boathouse by a pile of rubble in the parking lot.
“We need to get to my boat,” she said.
He looked down at the lock, and then back at the lit window in the station behind them, thinking of how she seemed to be in quite a hurry.
“It is your boat, right?”
Her nostrils flared. “Course it’s my boat. Who else’s boat do you think it is?”
He held his hands up in surrender. “Just a question.”
“It’s mine,” she said. “They shut the gates to keep thieves out.”
“I imagine that’s true.” He swallowed down the growing sense that they were about to do something illegal.
“We’ll take my boat to where they took your friend,” she said. “Unless you changed your mind, of course.”
His hand gripped the metal gate hard enough to make his knuckles turn white. He hadn’t fully realized until now that she meant to sail him somewhere.
He thought of Adam’s hand slipping from his. Of his father’s advice to grow up, which really meant to shut up. Of a world where he ran on treadmills to nowhere, and nothing he did ever mattered, not even the potential murder of a Shoreling girl.
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Maybe she was stealing this boat, maybe not, but she wasn’t leaving without him.
“What’s your name?” He swiped the rain out of his eyes. He watched the way it drenched her hair, formed points at the bottom of the curls and dripped from her chin. Her threadbare pants, which hadn’t left much to the imagination before, now sagged on her hips and clung to her legs.
“What?” she asked.
“Your name,” he said. “I don’t know it.”
She glanced at him, brows pinched. “Marin.”
With that, she launched herself over the fence and was running, low and fast, down the concrete steps. He went after her, scrambling over the gate in an embarrassingly uncoordinated way that made him glad she wasn’t watching, and then jogged down the stairs, shoes splashing in the puddles. By the time he reached the deck, the rain was coming down in sheets. He breathed in the thick, wet air, smelling salt and wet, rotten things, and felt his lungs work harder to keep up with his thundering heart.
He wasn’t prepared for the unevenness of the dock; the way it bobbed and swayed between his steps and the waves below. The plastic planks were slippery, too, and as he skidded to the side and fell to one knee, he braced himself on his hands, like a runner at the starting gate.
She’d turned back for him, flying over the boards as if she weighed nothing.
“Let’s go!” she shouted through the rain.
He gritted his teeth and shoved up, determined. While she ran past the strange boats, some covered with tarps, others taking water at an alarming rate, he teetered after her, breath catching every time he lost his balance. The brown-gray water below was flecked with floating trash, and who knew what kinds of things were festering beneath the oil-slicked surface. He trained his eyes on each boat, a feeling of being watched raising the tiny hairs on his arms.
Near the end of the longest dock, they came to the biggest heap of junk of them all. He was surprised it still managed to float, that the metal scraps that had been pounded into the sides actually kept out water. The sails, folded down, were mostly black, and tied by ten different kinds of twine—some blue, some green, some white. Cracked red clay pots, filled with what looked like dirt, and chipped crates were strapped to the circumference of the cockpit.
It was the kind of place you brought someone to murder them.