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“Know what?” I asked.
“How the tat worked. This Eternity thing—”
“What Eternity thing? You mean the symbol they all wear?”
She nodded and pulled a small, golden charm, just like the one I’d given Zheng, out of her shirt. It was on a necklace, but she took it off and handed it to me. “That’s it. He found it on one of their boys, after a fight. He was going to interrogate him, but somebody activated another tat the guy was wearing, and blew him up. I suppose his group realized that he’d been taken, and didn’t want him talking.”
Sounded about right. The same might have happened to the guys at Hassani’s, except that they’d all been killed, and that Jonathan had been able to use them as his little puppets. Only I still didn’t understand what that had been about.
Jonathan was obsessed with Louis-Cesare. He wanted him back under his control; he didn’t want to kill him. And even assuming that he’d turned into one of those “if I can’t have you, nobody can” types, that whole attack seemed a bit . . . excessive. As for me, I couldn’t imagine why he would care about me at all, since they already had Dorina.
Unless he was afraid that I’d come after him, which, yeah.
Should have gotten me the first time, I thought.
“Anyway, Zheng still wanted to find out more about them,” Sarah said. “But nobody knew anything, and nobody would go inside the dead zones. He kept offering more and more money, and . . . well . . .”
“And well what?”
She took the tat back and pressed it, not to her skin as I’d expected, but like a fob for a car. A grid popped out into the air, in bright red lines like a hologram. It looked like a map of some kind, although I found it hard to read as it kept moving and changing.
“Why is it doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Moving around?”
“Because we are,” Ranbir said.
Sarah nodded. “It’ll stabilize if we ever do. It needs a fixed point—”
“For what?”
She looked at me like I might be slow, for not having already figured this out. “It’s a homing beacon. We think that, because of how unstable the zones can be, Eternity has to move around a lot. So, they equipped each of their members with one of these, so they can always find their way back to base.”
I frowned at it. “But you found the base already, or narrowed it down. Zheng said—”
I stopped, finally getting a clue. As well as a sinking feeling in my stomach—a bad one. It felt like falling from a height, all over again.
“You didn’t find it,” I said.
“It was a lot of money,” Sarah told me, suddenly earnest. “The kind that could be life changing. And get us permanently out of those penny ante gigs we used to—”
“You’re telling me that you didn’t go into the zones?” I interrupted. “That you just sold Zheng a load of crap?”
“It wasn’t crap!” She had the gall to look indignant. “He got what he paid for. The homing beacon did give the location of their base. We just stretched things out, feeding him a little more info each week, so it would be believable—”
“But you fought in the ring! You were going to fight tonight!”
She nodded. “We acquired a reputation, after a while. There were only three groups in the whole city that would go into the dead zones, and we were the best known, because we never got hurt—”
“I gave myself a black eye once,” Ev said. “To be more, uh, authentic . . .” he saw my expression, and went back to drinking beer.
“—never got hurt bad,” Sarah corrected. “And people started to ask us about the fights. We couldn’t keep saying no, or it might have looked suspicious.”
“Then you do know how to kill the monsters.”
She shook her head. “We went out there to put on a show, but it was mostly theater. Tomas is a first level master vamp, and he protected us. We made it look good for a while, then the mages took over. We gave them a kickback from the purses, a decent percentage. They weren’t allowed in the ring, you see, and this way . . . everybody was . . . happy . . .”
