Chapter 48
VI
Finding Alice is never a matter of looking. You don't find Alice. Alice lets you find her.
Or doesn't.
Rogue and I work our way down into the older part of the Rot, past the hub, past the corridors people actually use, into the dim back passages where the air goes cold and the lights struggle to illuminate anything.
I've only been down here once, never able to retrace the route after.
Rogue moves like he knows it cold, because he does.
She's waiting at a junction where two passages cross, like she's been standing there all day.
Maybe she has. Shaved head, the scar down her cheek, drab gray clothes that turn her into part of the wall.
If you passed her on the street, you'd never look twice, and that, I'm starting to understand, is the entire point.
"You found him," she says. Not a question.
I stop. "How do you—"
"It's all over you." Her eyes move across my face, unhurried. "You walk different than you did a week ago. So. He's alive."
"He's alive." Saying it out loud to her, of all people, puts a lump in my throat I wasn't expecting. "We found him. He's safe, for now. Alice, he, he asked about you. He said he knew he could count on you to hold the line."
For one second, just one, the famous flat calm slips.
Something crosses Alice's face that I've never seen there before. It’s not surprise, she's too controlled for surprise, but something older and more tired lets go all at once.
Her eyes go bright. She looks at the ceiling, breathes, and brings herself back.
"Good," she says, her voice rough. "That's good. I wasn't sure. All these years, I told myself he made it, but I wasn't sure. How could anyone know?" She clears her throat, and the wall goes back up, but gentler now. "All right. You didn't come down here to make an old woman cry. What do you need?"
So I tell her. The suitcase, the firm, everything. How my father got all the way up to the firm and ran out of time before he could see who it was protecting.
Alice nods slowly the whole way through, like none of it surprises her. Guess none of it does.
"The firm's the wall he couldn't get over," she says.
"I told you that. Follow the firm." She tips her head.
"And now you can actually do it. So here's what I've got, and it's more than I've given you before, because you've earned it and because your dad’s alive.
That changes what's worth the risk." She pauses.
"The firm doesn't operate out of Rothwell anymore.
They pulled up stakes about the time everything fell apart.
Smart. A dead city's no place to run a business. "
"Do you know where they went?"
"I know where they went." And she names a city.
A real one, a living one, a couple hours from here, the kind of place that still has working courts and newspapers and people who'd be very interested in a respectable firm's dirty laundry.
"A firm leaves tracks, Vi. It has to. It's a business, it needs an address, a sign, lawyers who show up to work.
That's the thing about the firm, it can't fully disappear, not the way the people behind it did.
The people at the top, the ones it protects?
Those, you'll never trace. But the firm? The firm has a front door."
"That's the way in," I say.
"That's the way in." She reaches into her faded gray jacket and comes out with a scrap of paper, scribbling on it with a pen she pulls from another pocket.
"Here’s a name of someone who worked there, near the top, until they decided they didn't need her anymore and cut her loose.
People who get cut loose remember things.
Especially the ones who thought they were family right up until the locks changed. "
She presses the paper into my hand. "She might talk to you. She might not. But she's the loosest brick in that wall, and if anybody can pull it, it's the woman who just walked in here different than she walked out last time."
I close my hand around the paper like it's worth more than anything in my father's whole suitcase. Maybe it is.
"Alice." I look at her, really look. "Why do you live like this? Down here. Looking like—" I stop, not wanting it to come out wrong.
"Like a woman nobody would recognize?" The corner of her mouth moves.
"Because that's what I am." She runs a hand over her bare scalp, almost fond.
"I had hair down to here once. Nice clothes.
Designer shoes. A city ID with my real name on it and a desk two doors down from your father's.
I knew everything he knew, and then some, and when they came for him, I understood it was only a matter of time before they came for me too.
" She shrugs. "So I made sure there was nobody left to come for. That woman, the old me, doesn’t exist anymore.
I shaved her off. Wore her out of style.
Disappeared into a dead mall where nobody looks twice at one more hard-luck face. "
Her eyes find mine. "Your father vanished his way.
Fischer vanished his way. Everybody who knew the truth had to become somebody else to keep breathing.
That's what these people do, Vi. It's not enough that they take everything you have. To survive them, you have to stop being yourself. You have to give up your name, your life, until it’s all gone.”
Somewhere far off, a generator hums.
"We're going to make them stop," I say.
"I believe you might." She steps back toward the dark she came out of, already folding herself away. "Be careful in that city. It's their ground, not yours. The minute you start digging, somebody's going to feel it, and these are not people who feel a tug and let it go."
A last look, steady as ever. "Tell your father, when you can, that Alice said it's about damn time."
Then she's gone, the way she always goes, swallowed by a passage I couldn't find again if my life depended on it.
I stand there a second with a city in my head and a name in my fist.
The door's right there. Now we go knock it down.