Chapter 51
ROGUE
He's waiting for us when we come out of the coffee shop.
Not hiding. Standing across the street with his hands in his pockets, easy as you please, watching us. And now that he's letting me see him straight on, in daylight, the thing that's been scratching at the back of my skull since the Rot finally stops scratching and stands all the way up.
I know him.
Not from the Rot. I mean, yeah, I know him from the Rot but also from before the Rot.
Before all of it. From a block six streets over from my house, back when we were both kids with nothing and too much time.
Same cracked sidewalks. Same hard luck. We weren't friends, but you know the faces you grow up next to, the ones who came up in the same dirt you did. You don't forget how they stand.
And you don't forget a spy from the Rot.
"Oren," I say when he approaches me.
Something moves across his face. Almost a smile. "Took you long enough," he chuckles as if we’re friends.
"Tell the others to give us a minute," I say to Armen, not looking away from Oren. Armen doesn't love it, but he reads the situation and pulls Vi and Sting a couple doors down, close enough to step in if necessary but far enough away to let me have a moment.
And in that moment, I finally put together the part I should've caught the second I placed his face.
Oren's the spy, the one who walked into the Rot, the one who traded Fischer for a dead mayor who wasn't dead.
And the spy never worked for himself. He always answered to whoever sat at the top of this whole thing.
Ten minutes ago, in the coffee shop behind me, we learned who that is.
So, Oren isn't just a ghost from my old block. He belongs to Lydia Vance.
Oren nods and pats me on the shoulder like a man with all the time in the world. Up close, he's the same but different. Older, harder, dressed better than anybody from our block has any business dressing. The expensive look of a man well paid.
"You sold us out, didn't you?" I say.
"I got paid," he says, like those are the same thing, like there was never a difference. "You want to do the speech? The one where you're the good one and I'm the sellout? Go ahead. I've heard it."
He shrugs. "We came up in the same gutter, you and me. Difference is, somebody offered me a way out of it and I took it. You're telling me you wouldn't have?"
"Somebody offered you a way out," I say. "And the price was everybody else still stuck in it. Your own people. You took money from the woman who burned the block we grew up on."
"I took money from the only person who ever offered me any.
" His jaw tightens, the first real reaction I've seen in him.
"Don't stand there with your shithole dead mall and tell me about loyalty, Rogue.
Loyalty's a thing you can afford when you've got something.
We had nothing. I made sure that stopped being my problem. "
And there it is. The whole difference between us, laid out on a clean sidewalk in a city built on our hometown's bones.
"You're right," I tell him. "We came up the same.
Had the same nothing. The same nobody-coming-to-save-us.
" I take a step closer. "I didn't fix it by selling the next guy down.
That's the only part that matters, and it's the part you'll never get back.
Money buys the coat. It doesn't buy back the person you were before you put it on. "
He doesn't have anything for that. For just a second, under the good coat, I see the kid from six streets over who knew better, before he taught himself otherwise.
Then it's gone, and he's the messenger again.
"She knows you're here," Oren says. "Has since the day you arrived. The firm, the woman in the coffee shop, all of it, she let you have it. You think you cracked something? She opened the door for you."
He smiles, and it's an ugly thing. "My boss wants to meet the people who came all this way. Says to tell you the address. Says come on up. She's not afraid of you. People like her are never afraid of people like us. That's the part you don't understand."
"Maybe," I say.
Then Sting is there, and Oren's good coat is up against the brick before he finishes turning, with Sting's forearm across his chest, quiet as a closed door.
"He's done talking," Sting says. To me, not to Oren.
We aren't going to kill him. That's not what the Rot is, whatever men like Oren tell themselves about people like us.
We take his phone, we take the little gun he's carrying, and we leave him against a brick wall in the clean city he sold his soul to live in, with nothing to report that Lydia Vance doesn't already know.
He's out of it. No longer useful. For now.
I don't look back at him. There's nothing back there for me. The kid from the neighborhood has been gone a long time, and the man against the wall made his choices, and I made mine. Somewhere in the difference is the whole reason I can live with myself and he can't.
By the time we regroup, Vi's already moving.
Phones work here. That's the thing about a living city.
Shit works. Back home, a phone's a paperweight.
Here, Armen put cheap burner phones in our hands the day we landed, because Vi's whole plan depended on reaching the rest of the world the second we had our last piece of evidence.
She'd spent the last two days turning her father's case into something you could easily send at the press of a button.
All the evidence was scanned, sorted, and ready to fly.
So while Oren was busy being the last word in Lydia Vance's arrogance, Vi was on hers, and what she set in motion can't be called back.
Everything, including her father's case, the firm, the inside woman's road map, all of it, packaged and timed and sent as soon as the woman in the coffee shop gave us the last piece.
Not to one newspaper that Lydia could buy by morning.
To everywhere at once. To outlets in multiple major cities.
To agencies that still answer their mail.
To people who've been waiting years for this.
"It's out," Vi says. Her voice is steady but her eyes are bright. "It's out and it's everywhere and there's no putting it back in the box."
So now there's only one thing left to do.
Lydia Vance opened her door and invited us up, certain we're walking into her house to be handled.
She doesn't know her whole life went public ninety seconds ago.
"Let's go see her," Vi says with a smile.
And God help me, I've never wanted anything the way I want to be in the room for this.