Chapter 16
VI
I find Alice at the work hub the next morning. Same station, same position, hands sorting, eyes down. I slide in beside her and match her rhythm.
“Is that everything?” I ask.
Alice’s hands don’t stop moving. “Yes. You read them?”
“I read them twice. And I’m asking you if that’s everything.”
She doesn’t say anything for five, six seconds. Sorting. Not looking at me.
“No,” she says.
My fingers go still on the bin.
“Your father gave me more. Before he disappeared. But I couldn’t keep it all in one place. Too risky. If someone found the bag, I’d lose everything. So I split it up.”
“Where’s the rest?”
“No Man’s Land. Deeper than where we met. Past the service corridors, in the old anchor store that got sealed off after the second-floor collapse.” She pauses. “It’s not friendly territory.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, the men you’re with don’t run that section.
Nobody does, officially, but the people who drift through there aren’t the kind who step aside when they see your guys coming.
It’s unstable and contested. I hid the papers there because nobody would think to look, but I’ve never been able to go back for them on my own. ”
She finally looks at me with tired eyes. “I couldn’t do it alone. And until you came along, I didn’t know who to trust.”
I nod, my brain already churning. Getting those papers means going into a part of the Rot where Armen, Sting, and Rogue have no authority.
It means asking them not just to tolerate my search for Dad’s truth but to actively participate in it, to put themselves at risk for a cause they don’t stand behind.
I don’t need their tolerance, I need their buy-in, and buy-in requires the one thing I don’t have from them right now.
Trust.
Or at least doubt about their own conclusions. And there’s one whose conclusions I need to crack first.