I lean closer to the boy. “Where is Ron?”
“I don’t know.”
I apply pressure to the dislocated joint.
“I don’t know!” he screams. “He moves every hour. West routes, old zoo tunnels, sometimes the zoo, and sometimes zoo’s hotel. He doesn’t tell us shit anymore.”
“Hotel?”
“Margrave. The abandoned one near the old rail.”
Arturo’s eyes sharpen.
Good information.
I release the boy, and he collapses over the hood, sobbing.
“You left him alive,” Arturo says quietly.
“I said no civilians.”
“He is not a civilian.”
“No.” I look at the unconscious and injured scattered across the depot. “He is a message.”
We burn the vehicles.
Not with bodies inside. I check. Twice.
The flames climb into the rain, orange against black sky, while Arturo’s people load captured comms into the vehicle. The depot roof pops under heat. Somewhere distant, sirens begin, too late as always.
Arturo lights a cigarette beneath the awning with hands that do not shake. “You are very good at this.”
“That is not praise.”
“No,” he says. “It is a concern.”
I look toward Halo.
Rain hides the bakery from here, but I know the direction. I imagine Evie behind the counter, eyes swollen from crying, shoulders straight because people need soup. I imagine her looking at my empty hook and deciding I chose this.
Maybe I did.
The next six hours become a sequence of doors broken, rooms cleared, men dragged from behind stolen crates, names extracted, weapons seized, routes blocked.
At a gambling room beneath a closed noodle shop, three Poison Memories are collecting debts in Ron’s name. I disarm one with a table, shatter the hand of another before he can fire toward civilians hiding behind the bar, and throw the third through a false wall into Lenrog’s men waiting behind it. A woman with blood on her lip clutches her child and whispers thank you. I cannot answer her. I do not deserve it. I only tell Arturo to put guards on the block until morning.
At a warehouse near the lower lanes, we find fuel cells stacked beside cheap explosives.
Planned firebombs.
Cleo swears so viciously even Arturo pauses.
I stare at the inventory tags. Three addresses marked in shorthand. A union office. A clinic that treated flood survivors. A bakery.
The room goes quiet when I find the last marker.
Sweet Tooth.
