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Even though the man is scrawny and at the weak end of middle age, Starkey finds himself intimidated by his unflinching gaze.
“So that’s it? You’re done with me? You’re just going to cast me out into the street?”
Dandrich laughs at the suggestion, and his expression softens again. “No, of course not. We would never abandon someone as valuable as you. You can still serve our cause.”
“To hell with your cause! What about my cause?”
“A wise general knows when his campaign has run its course.” Then he raises his hands in broad sweeping gestures as he speaks. “Look at what you’ve done! Be satisfied that y
ou made yourself the legend that you always dreamed you could be. That you freed hundreds of Unwinds. That you saved so many storks and struck a blow for what you believe.”
Maybe he’s right, but Starkey can’t stand the thought that he was cast out, and now is being denied the right of vengeance. He slams his fist on the table. “They need to pay for what they’ve done!”
Dandrich never loses his cool. “They will. In time.”
Starkey calms himself down. Patience was his strongest asset at the Graveyard. When did he lose it? He takes a deep breath, then another. If he can belay his thirst for revenge, it will be all the more satisfying and devastating when it comes. The betrayal has not undone his good work. He has to remember that. And in this strange organization that espouses the virtues of chaos and mayhem, he will find his place. Here, too, he will find ways of setting gears into motion, just as he did at the Graveyard.
“You’ve been the subject of much discussion,” Dandrich says, “and we’ve decided that your greatest potential lies in our fund-raising division.”
“Fund-raising?”
“There are people who would like to get to know you on a close, personal level,” he says. “Important people. Some very wealthy, some very powerful.”
“So . . . you’re going to introduce me to these people?”
“Not personally, but I assure you, you will be in good hands.” He opens the door, where two more beefy men in suits await. “My associates here will escort you to your new assignment.” Then he shakes Starkey’s hand. “Thank you for all you’ve done. I’m glad that our paths crossed, and that, for a time, our objectives complemented each other. Take care, Mason.” And then he leaves Starkey with the two burly men, who lead him back to the elevator.
“Where am I going, if you don’t mind me asking?” he asks the more intelligent-looking of the two guards as the elevator rises toward the rooftop heliport.
“Uh . . . from what I understand, you’re going lots of places.”
Which is fine with Starkey. He could get used to traveling in style.
31 • Grace
There are simply too many envelopes to mail for this to be a single postal excursion. Grace decides to make three trips—and not all to the same place. She plans multiple trips to multiple zip codes and finds an oversize unmarked shopping bag to carry them in—big enough and sturdy enough to get it done in three trips.
“Less suspicious this way,” she tells Sonia. “So’s if the postmaster general or something gets it into his head to trace all these letters back to a single place, they won’t know where to look ’cept Akron in general, and Akron in general is big—not New York big, but big enough.”
Sonia waves her hand. “Just get it done and don’t talk my ear off.” Which is fine with Grace, who likes being left to her own devices, as long as those devices don’t have too much electronics, like that organ printer. She knows it will take her all day, but that’s okay. It’s something to do, something important, and it gets her out of the basement for a whole day.
Her first two sets of drops go off without a hitch. It’s Sunday, so post offices are closed, but that hasn’t stopped her from paying visits to various mailboxes in strategically random locations. By dusk, she’s hit twelve mailboxes in three different zip codes.
It’s while on her way back to empty out the trunk and mail the last batch of letters that things take a turn. It’s already dusk, closer to the night side than the day, and she begins to think that the third batch will have to wait until tomorrow. The streetlights come on, making the dusk plunge into night—and there beneath a streetlight at the corner, just a few doors away from Sonia’s shop, stands someone who looks familiar. Very familiar. She can see only his profile, but it’s enough.
“Argie?” she says, before she can stop herself. “Argie, is that you?”
At first she’s excited, but then she remembers how things were when she last saw her brother. He won’t have forgiven her. Argent is not the forgiving type. As she gets closer, she can sense that there’s something off about him. Something different in the way he carries himself, like it’s not Argent at all . . . and yet clearly it’s him. She only has to look at his face to know. . . .
Then he turns to her and smiles. “Hello, Grace.”
And she begins to scream. Not because of what she sees but because of what she doesn’t. She doesn’t even feel the tranq dart hit her, because she’s so committed to the scream. She’s still screaming as her legs buckle beneath her and she hits the pavement. Still screaming as her peripheral vision fades. Still screaming as the tranqs drag her down into unconsciousness.
Because when he turned to look at her, Grace didn’t see the other half of Argent’s face. That other half was someone else entirely.
32 • Sonia
She’s absorbed with her favorite playlist of prewar rock, and doesn’t hear Grace’s screams from just twenty yards down the street.
