Chapter 45
VI
I wake up in my own room in the Rot, and for once, I don't have to figure out where I am.
Just a few months ago, I got up every morning with my heart pounding, and spent the first minutes of wakefulness taking inventory of the dark.
What's that sound, where's the door, am I safe?
This morning, I open my eyes to the same water-stained ceiling I've memorized and the same generator hum two floors down, and my body doesn't so much as twitch.
The Rot hasn't changed. Not one cracked tile of it. I'm the thing that's different.
It's a strange feeling, walking into a place you used to be afraid of and realizing it's become the place that makes you feel safe. I never saw that coming.
My father's suitcase is open on the floor where I left it when I could no longer keep my eyes open. Scattered around it are his papers in some wacky system that’s all mine, that no one else could hope to figure out.
And somewhere across the city, my dad’s in a room above a print shop I'm not allowed to visit, for his safety and mine. I let myself feel that for just a moment, the wrongness of finally having him back and but also not having him back. Then I suck it up because I’ve got shit to do.
I’ve been through most of the suitcase by now. I know what we've got and what we don't.
By the time the guys gather in the ops room, I've got everything laid out in my head.
"So here's where we are," I say, jumping in.
I don't wait to be invited to speak up, which a few months ago would have been unthinkable.
"My father's papers are the whole machine.
Every shell company, every transfer, every property they bought and bled and walked away from.
Voss. Fischer. The money trail, start to almost-finish.
" I tap the folder I brought with me. "It's enough to prove what happened to this city.
Enough to clear my father's name ten times over. "
"But…" Armen says.
"But it stops at a law firm." I slide a page out, the one with my father's careful handwriting in the margin, a name circled three times with a question mark beside it each time.
"Everything runs up into this firm and then it goes dark.
They're the ones who kept whoever's at the very top clean.
My father got this far and ran out of time before he could put a face to them.
" I look around the room. "Which means we still don't know who the ceiling actually is.
We know everything they did. We just don't know their name. Or names."
Rogue leans against the wall, arms crossed. "Alice said it, to follow the firm. The firm's the thread your father was pulling on when he went into hiding."
"She did," I say. "And she was right. The firm is the last door.
It's also the way in." I've spent half the night seeing it, the shape finally clicking into place.
"Remember how we figured out who Fischer really was in the first place, with his signature on those property transfers Alice gave us?
I went back through all of them. The transfers he signed route through three shell companies, and those same three shells tie straight up into the firm.
Fischer put his name on the paper that connects the bottom of this thing to the top.
That's the seam. We pull on his signature, and the firm starts to come apart, and the people they've been hiding come with it. "
Sting speaks from the corner, flat as ever. "And then what? Say we get a name. Say we get all of them. There's no city left to take it to. No court. No paper. Not anything credible, anyway. You hand the most damning file in the world to a dead town, and nobody sees it."
That’s the exact thing that's been turning over in my mind, and it's the part I'm proudest of figuring out. I let myself enjoy it for a second.
"You're right," I say. "There's nothing left here in Rothwell to expose them to. But that's the thing, Sting. They're not here either."
He waits.
"Think about it. They didn't go down with Rothwell. They never do. They stripped this place to the studs and they left with the money, with the connections, with their good names still unblemished. Wherever they are now, they’re not in some dead mall. They’re someplace that has lights that don’t need generators, and courts and newspapers and people who'd be very interested to learn where their respectable new neighbor got his money.
" I look around at the guys. "We've been thinking about this backward.
We keep asking how you expose someone in a city with nothing left.
Wrong question. The ceiling fled to the places that still work.
So that's where we hit them. Not here. Out there, where it still costs something to be caught. "
The room is quiet.
"The thing that kept them safe," I say, "is the exact thing that makes them reachable. They walked away clean. Now they've got everything to lose. More than anybody else, actually."
Rogue's mouth curves, slow. "Burn them in their own front yard."
"Yeah. Burn them in their own front yard," I repeat.
Armen studies me across the table, and I make myself hold still under it, because I know that look. It's the one he gets when someone surprises him, when they turn out to be more than he had them pegged for.
"That's the plan," he says. Not really a question either.
"That's the start of one." I tap the circled name again. "We crack the firm. The firm gives us the ceiling. And then we don't bury the ceiling here. We bring it to their new life, all wrapped up in a shiny bow."
Nobody argues. Nobody tells me to sit down and let the grown-ups handle it.
Nobody reminds me I've been here only a few months and they've been here years.
They just look at me, and then they look at each other, and something changes the air in the room that I can feel even if I couldn't name it a few months ago.
They're not humoring me. They're following me.
I came into this place a Runt with nothing but a dead father and a dream. Now I'm standing in the ops room with a plan and the most dangerous men in the Rot waiting to hear the next part.
I think about my father in his room above the print shop, who did all of this alone and lost everything for it. I think about how I'm not going to.
"Okay," I say. "Let's talk about how we get into that firm."