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“I’m not used to picking up after myself,” she said.
No. That’s not it. You were hungry. You went through everything, looking for food.
Lila tossed a sweater into her canvas bag. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The Holguíns didn’t always feed me when I became a slave. I remember what it’s like.
“I just haven’t had time to go to the store.”
Your pride will be the first thing they take.
Lila looked up. “You’d rather I become the oracle’s lackey?”
He nodded.
“Too bad,” she said, opening the dresser’s bottom drawer. “Tell me about this mole. Surely you’ve found something.”
While Lila cleaned out the drawer, Dixon scribbled his answer. We skimmed through the videos of every interrogation between the purplecoats and the Italian mercs. We dug through the bios of the oracle’s inner circle, spending quite a few weeks and a great deal of manpower following them, but we saw nothing suspicious. Toxic even reviewed the logs from ONet, the oracle’s network. She found nothing unusual in the last two months. We have no leads.
“Where will we work?”
My apartment.
“It’s not just yours, and I don’t think Tristan will approve.”
I really don’t care what Tristan will or won’t approve of. Your stomach hasn’t stopped growling since we showed up. My first concern is getting you something to eat.
It rumbled again as if in confirmation.
Lila was too hungry to say no.
Chapter 2
Lila and Dixon peeked from the alleyway in East New Bristol, eyeing a five-story brick building across the street. The windows on the top floors gaped like prayerful mouths on a cathedral. A buzzing neon sign spelled out Mechanic near a much plainer window near the entrance. Black drapes wafted in the frigid air behind the glass. Dock doors had been cut into the front of the structure, exposing a tangle of vehicles inside. Half a dozen figures bent over an engine, cursing and arguing. Outside, a woman in a derby hat sat beside the door on a wooden stool, the butt of her tranq gun visible in her pocket.
Lila hitched her canvas bag further up her shoulder, her mesh hood lifeless in her fingers. “There’s no point in wearing this now,” she said, her breath steaming in the cold air. “I’m no longer an heir or a militia chief, and I never will be again. I’m no longer anything.”
She dropped it on the gritty, cracked street, tired of hiding her face.
Dixon retrieved it, then slipped it over her head. He took her hand and led her toward the garage. Usually they would have driven straight in, but she’d left her car in a parking garage nearby. They’d taken her two bags and her satchel, carrying them to the shop on foot.
Dixon had paid the fare as well as the gas to get them back into the city.
She already owed him money.
As they padded inside the shop, an older woman looked up from her perch at a workbench. She held a screwdriver and a box with frayed wires spraying out of it. Half her fingers had been cut away, as had part of an ear. “Heya, Hood,” Shirley called out. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. You get pinched?”
Several people in the shop turned at the question, their heads cocked to the side. The whirl and drill and pop of tools stopped.
The woman at the door turned too, peeking into the building.
“Yeah,” Lila replied, modulating her voice and pushing it lower. “Some blackcoats caught me with Samantha’s father in a
Vali roadster. I pled down to indecent exposure.”
“You have a Vali roadster now?”
“No. I didn’t have one then, either. Idiots didn’t even bother to run the plates.”
