Chapter 12
STING
The walk to the east wing takes twelve minutes. There’s a reason this part of the Rot is no man’s land. It’s too fucking far from everything.
Armen leads. Vi behind him. Me at her left shoulder.
Rogue trailing, loose and watchful, his head on a swivel.
The corridors thin out as we move past the residential section and into the older, less maintained parts of the Rot.
There are far fewer people here because there are really no reasons to be here.
A tree is growing through a crack in the floor near the east atrium junction.
An actual tree, waist-high, its root system splitting the tile in a slow, ugly rupture.
Someone hung a jacket on one of its branches.
No one has claimed it. No one has cut the tree down, either.
It just exists, growing where it likes, tolerated because removing it would require effort no one wants to bother with.
Vi walks past it without looking.
And I watch her.
She’s trying to contain herself, her hope. I can see it in her shoulders, how her arms swing stiffly. She’s controlled, wound up tight, breathing like you do when your body wants to run but you can’t.
She thinks this meeting is going to change something. She thinks Alice is going to hand her a stack of papers and inside them will be the proof that her father was a good man. A victim. A whistle-blower who tried to do the right thing and got crushed for it.
That may happen.
Or she may find that her father was a city official during the most corrupt period in Rothwell’s history, and the odds that he walked through that without getting dirty are slim.
Really slim. I’ve seen what that era produced.
The contracts that moved money in directions that didn’t make sense.
The development deals that enriched a few and fucked over the rest of us.
The silent agreements that turned a functional city into the wreckage we’re currently living with. Those of us who remain, anyway.
Every official I’ve ever looked into from that period was complicit. Every single one. Some more than others. Some with better excuses. But complicit.
Fuck them.
Vi’s father was the mayor. Not a clerk. Not a mid-level functionary. Mayor Renner. The man at the top of a machine that ate this city alive. The idea that he sat in his chair and somehow kept his hands clean is the kind of story people tell themselves when they can’t accept what their family did.
We pass through a service corridor. The floor changes from tile to bare concrete where someone pulled up the original surface for some other project.
A mannequin torso sits propped against the wall at the far end, shirtless, one arm missing, the other posed between her legs like she’s playing with herself.
The younger Rotters, those with too much time on their hands, love doing shit like this.
They crack themselves up putting the mannequins in all sorts of vulgar poses.
Hey, if that’s how those bozos want to express themselves, fine by me. I guess they have to entertain themselves somehow. It’s not like we have fucking Netflix here.
Vi’s pace picks up the closer we get. It’s barely perceptible. But I’m watching her and I catch it, the acceleration of someone close to something they’ve been waiting for.
It bothers me.
Not the hope itself. Hope is human. Irrational, but human. What bothers me is that she’s building weight on a foundation I’m almost certain won’t hold. She’s investing belief filtered through grief and need and the desperate wish that at least one thing in her life before the Rot was real.
I know what that does to people. I’ve watched it happen. They chase the proof, they find something that looks close to the belief they’re banking on, and they weld themselves to it. And when it crumbles, which it always does, they lose the version of themselves that needed it to be true.
I don’t want that for her. I don’t want to see her hurt.
But what I want is irrelevant. What matters is the operational reality.
We go to the meeting. We assess the source.
We examine whatever Alice produces. And when the documents turn out to be incomplete, or circumstantial, or the desperate preservation of a man trying to rewrite his own history before the walls closed in, I’ll be ready.
I’m already composing my response. Calm.
Measured. Factual. I’ll acknowledge what the documents show without overstating what they prove.
I’ll point out the gaps. I’ll note the absence of the one thing that would actually matter, the evidence that someone else was responsible for the decisions her father is blamed for.
I’ll be fair and precise and she’ll hate me for it. May never forgive me.
She’ll hit the wall. She’ll grieve. And she’ll move on, the only thing that keeps people alive in the Rot.
I’m doing her a favor, expecting the worst while she expects the best. She just doesn’t know it. I tell myself that as we reach the east wing stairwell, as Vi takes the first step up, her hand finding the railing, her body leaning forward with an urgency she can’t hide.
I’m doing her a favor. I follow her up the stairs and almost believe it.