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Maria opened the shop door in a rush, breathing hard. She frantically searched for them, her head turning this way and that, like she’d been scared that she’d been lied to and wouldn’t be allowed to go. She’d pulled her hair into a ponytail and fidgeted in the boots she’d been given to wear. They seemed too large for her feet as she ran toward the group, and the coat swallowed her small frame.
Shirley threw her wrench into her toolbox with a sharp ping and marched toward the group. “I don’t like this. She’s too young for this nonsense.”
“I wasn’t much older than her once,” Tristan replied. “Or don’t you remember?”
“That was different.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, it was. You’d already been a punk for years.”
“Oh gods, you knew him?” Lila interrupted. “You knew him and Dixon from before—”
Shirley frowned at Lila, silencing her question, then clasped Maria’s wrist. The old woman roughly dragged her to a corner of the shop. She unbelted the sheath at her hip and put it around the girl, then motioned for her to practice drawing the knife. Its curve seemed overdramatic for her small hands, the blade too sharp, the handle overlong.
“Keep hold of that while you’re out,” Shirley said, clasping Maria’s chin with what fingers she had left. “You do whatever Fry says, you hear me? Someone might recognize your face, even with the new hair. If he tells you to hide, you hide. If he tells you to run, you run. You leave him behind, you hear me? Even if there’s an entire militia patrol on your ass. The big fella can take care of himself.” Shirley grabbed one of the spare palms on her workbench and typed in her number then shoved it in Maria’s coat pocket. “You call me if you get separated or lost. I’ll come and find you. Wherever you are. I’ll find you.”
Maria nodded, her eyes a little red. Perhaps no one but her father had ever fretted over her before.
Shirley patted her cheek, then shuffled back to her workbench.
Fry removed his scarf and wound it around Maria’s neck to hide her scar. “We should probably go.”
He led Maria and Dixon to one of the newly painted Cruz trucks, and they pulled into traffic a few minutes later. Lila and Tristan left in another, heading in the opposite direction.
Lila slipped off her hood and kept her palm in her lap, raptly watching the screen as Tristan drove toward their segment of the city, the same part of New Bristol where Natalie had been murdered.
“My people checked out your list last night,” Tristan said. The pair drove past a street of workborn dwellings, well loved and well maintained, a new paint of coat atop cracked walls and crooked shutters. “It was difficult for them to walk away when they found the children.”
“How many brothels did they find?”
“Eight. We’re not sure how many children are inside each one. It isn’t just kids, either.” He cleared his throat, squeezing the steering wheel tightly as he turned down another street. “I called Shaw this morning. I threatened to go public against both of you if he didn’t have a beer with me at El Dorado.”
Tristan watched her from the corner of his eye.
“I told him I’d planned a raid with some likeminded friends, but now that Natalie was dead, I was worried that the brothels might move before I could get them all. I said I didn’t have the people to take them all at once and that I’d give him the list if I could come along.”
“What did he say?”
“No, but he believed my story. He was left with the distinct impression he owed me one. I even threw something.”
“What?”
“His beer bottle. I hadn’t finished with mine. Luckily, Dice’s sister didn’t scream at me to clean it up until after he left.”
“You have the manpower to take the brothels, don’t you?”
“Yes. A few weeks ago, I might not have thought twice about it, but I can’t save those kids and keep my people a secret. Besides, I don’t have the resources to help them afterwards. They’ll need medical attention and psychologists and fifty other things I wouldn’t even know about. Bullstow can help them far better than I can.”
“You’re using your people now to save fewer children.”
“This is different. This is war. I won’t stand by while Germans invade our city and kidnap our children. Besides, what will Bullstow do to fix this situation? Sure, they’ll send the girls back to the oracles, but what about Oskar? He’s a slave. No one else gives a damn about him or his future. He’s going to die, one way or another, and Maria will be lost. She’s not strong enough to lose her father and her brother. It’ll only be a matter of time.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? You believe this is an act of war.”
“Why don’t you?”
Lila bit her tongue, unsure.
