But no one does. It rings until it goes to a mailbox.
I resist the urge to hurl my phone to the ground and instead close it and pocket it. Jessi Rodgers is not my problem, and my inability to explain to myself why she matters to me only aggravates my confusion. I hate the little girl for making me care, I hate myself for caring, and I hate this miserable city for all its problems, for doing this to us.
As I reel, trying to focus my thoughts, Brady wanders up, looking lost. “Taryn,” he says, “what’s going on?”
Myra bristles, jealous. “He’s calling you Taryn now?”
“Get me that damn data, Brady,” I snap, deciding on a whim, probably foolishly, to take the bait. “I’ve got something to look into.”
As I speed across town, darting through traffic in the dusty haze of late afternoon, paranoia continues to creep at the edges of my mind. Every single car in my rearview is a potential attacker, every single overpass a potential shooter’s perch. I swapped the trace signal on my ride back at the Collections Office, but that won’t help me if someone inside the Agency is hunting me, or if someone saw me drive out of the lot, or if I’ve been baited into an ambush.
Things are dead in the warehouse district. I park outside of the hydro farm owned by Jessi Rodgers’s aunt and uncle, wary of my surroundings. The street is quiet and empty except for the hums and whirs of machinery emanating from factories, a man guiding drones to load up a freight truck at one of the neighboring storage depots, and a maintenance crew working on an open utilities panel on the sidewalk. The sun has sunk behind the skyline, leaving sheets of light slicing between the tall buildings of downtown and Rumville, striping the low, blocky buildings and wide, single-level streets with intermittent zones of shadow and bright red daylight. It’s getting cooler out, but the heat of the afternoon lingers, drifting off the pavement, and after a few seconds sitting alone with my thoughts on my parked ride, it occurs to me that I am tired.
I climb off, and the auto-lock issues a metallic click. My boots feel unusually heavy as I slowly walk the few meters to the front door of the hydro farm, dreading the answers I might get here but too resigned to turn away and leave. I ring the bell, and while I wait, I pull from my pocket all the remaining cash I took out of my account at the SCAPE Bank—only a shade less than three thousand units, a heavy handful of stacked, interlocking chips.
The door slides open, and Enna Rodgers faces me. It takes a second before the surprise shows on her weathered, tired face. “Agent, uh… ” She can’t even remember my name.
“Dare.”
“What’s this about?”
I shove my fist forward and open it, offering the stacks of thick tabs. “A loan,” I say, forcing myself to keep my hostility in check. “To help with Jessi’s surgery.”
Enna stares at the money for a long few seconds, confused and intimidated. I know that Jessi isn’t around to have the surgery she needs, and Enna Rodgers’s nervous demeanor tells me that she knows that I know that. “How… ” She struggles with the words. “How nice of you. You really didn’t have to do that.”
I want her to admit that Jessi’s gone, or to at least play along with this stupid little charade and take the cash. Either way it will justify my rage, even though I don’t know what the next step will be. “I want to,” I tell her coldly. “Take it.”
She can’t hold eye contact. “Agent Dare,” she says, her voice shaking, “Jessi went missing.”
“You think I don’t know what that means?”
“What?”
I slip the cash back into my pocket and give Enna Rodgers a shove, stepping through the door and into the hydro farm after her as she stumbles back. “She’s dead. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Stop,” Rodgers pleads, “we reported her missing.”
As if I’ll believe that. I’ve worked in Collections too long, taken down too many black market processors, seen too many corpses get “lost.” My mother reported my own father “missing.”
“You rat. You piece of garbage.” I shove her again, harder this time, and she stumbles into a rack of strawberry plants, bracing herself on some tubing. “All I want to know is, did you kill her or just sell her corpse after she died of hypocalcemia?”
Finally pushed too far, she steps forward and shoves me back, getting in my face. “We did everything we could for her!” she screams, exploding with rage and misery. “We weren’t expecting to get burdened with her. What did you expect us to do?”
Dammit, why do I care about this? It’s over and done with. I know I should walk away. I’ll find no satisfaction here, and it’s time to cut my losses and leave. But I can’t. I want to hear this woman say it, to feel the sting I feel each time I say it. “She’s dead.”
Her eyes well with tears. “I done nothing wrong.”
My control breaks, and I’m swinging my fist at her, sudden and hard and vicious, cracking my knuckles into her jaw. The shock rattles through my hand as the farmer reels, falling back into the plants.
She clutches her face, half-crouched and looking up at me with fear.
“Just admit it!” I shriek. “I want you to admit it!”
“I swear, I didn’t do anything wrong!”
I fall on her and swing my clenched, tightened fists over and over, wild and imprecise, beating on her face and chest as she sobs and cowers and tries to shield herself with her arms. “Tell me!” I demand again, “Tell me how it happened!”
“Please,” she begs. “Please stop!”
I grab her by her cheap, worn-down cotton shirt and pull her close, the fear in her eyes and the limpness of her torso confessing her defeat. There’s no fight left in her. “I want to know.”
“All right,” she answers, her face bruised and bloodied, her thin hair a tangled mess. “Just stop. Just please stop.”
I shove her to the floor and rise to my feet, standing over her. I wait as she doubles over in pain, breathing hard, and spits blood onto the floor. She wipes her mouth and nose, leaving her face and the back of her hand smeared with red.
“I found her in her bed,” she admits, resigned. “Not breathing. Didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to do.” She looks up at me, no longer avoiding eye contact. “Please,” she says. “Please. I did everything I could but she died and I needed money so I sold the body. It wasn’t my fault.”
I stare at her coldly, feeling that familiar emptiness well up inside me, the darkness filling the space behind my eyes. I did not expect Enna Rodgers’s story to satisfy me, and it has not. There was no absolution to be found here, but now I know for sure that the little girl I rescued from that mine is dead and gone. She’s rogue currency now. Powder in the pockets of strangers.
“Is that what you wanted to hear?” the beaten woman asks.
I truly do not know the answer. I don’t know what I wanted, and I don’t know what I want. Not any longer. Without saying another word, I turn around to exit the building. The door shuts behind me, leaving me alone under the wide, cloudless, gray-blue sky, the dry air rolling dusty over the pavement in the heat of a reluctantly dying late afternoon. It’s quiet, the ambient noise of the construction crew and the lifter drones like an afterthought in the background. My legs wobbly underneath me, my stomach twisted in a knot, I drop down to a knee on the dirty, cracked pavement. I draw a deep breath, trying to be the person I’m used to being, callous and uncaring and efficient and focused. Collections Agent Taryn Dare.
I could have saved Jessi Rodgers. I could have paid for that surgery.
How many people have died for my journey off Brink? How much collateral damage, how many lives could I have changed but didn’t? This world is a jagged trap, pulling us all back into it, I’ve always known that, but for the first time, the idea dawns on me that in some way, it’s my fault. Me and everyone like me, the strong ones who refuse to care, we’re the ones to blame.