Read The Scumbag

Chapter 697: 697 | Dinners and Thigh Kicks

The bruise was definitely going to be purple.

The fire escape behind Lin’s had become another fixed point in my week. The metal was cold through my jacket, and the November air carried the Eastside smell of fryer oil with something green under it from the community garden three blocks over. Dralun sat on the platform above me with his tail curled around the railing, his bulk blocking most of the light from the streetlamp below.

He had a card in his claw.

The same card, with the same nine Branded signatures layered thick enough to read like a body count. The same 323 number Ophelia had recognized from eleven angry voicemails about her grandmother’s jade bangle.

“The calls got me nothing.”

His voice was lower than usual and rough at the edges.

“Nobody’s talking?”

“The ones who used to work the district retired or moved. The ones who replaced them don’t know me.” He turned the card over, then over again, the same motion each time, which I’d learned to read as frustration. “Six years I didn’t make these calls. Six years I could’ve been keeping up contacts, staying plugged into the network that used to run through this neighborhood like roots under concrete. Instead I filed reports. Answered phones. Let it all go.”

The card caught the streetlight. Nine colors sat layered under the surface where only I could see them.

“Kask is still operating on Rourke. The pawn shop’s still open. But nobody will tell me who buys from him or where the material goes after it leaves his hands.” His jaw worked, and I heard his teeth grind against the brick. “Whatever this is, it’s bigger than one buyer in a clinic waiting room. It’s a pipeline. It’s been running for years without anybody noticing, because the people who should’ve been watching weren’t.”

I thought about Mateo Ibarra, five years old, with bone spurs that would start shedding in a few years. I thought about the man in the navy windbreaker who’d walked through that clinic with cards in his pocket and a pitch built for parents too desperate to ask questions.

And I thought about Nexo, twelve feet tall with six horns and joints that bent the wrong way, a multi-Aspect entity of unknown origin. That was what the Eastside Cataclysm had been ten years ago, when something like it killed my parents and two other Heroes a few blocks south of where I was sitting.

The System had been quiet about the card for three weeks.

I opened the quest log.

?QUEST LOG: The Frictionless Thief (ACTIVE). Sunday Dinner (RECURRING).?

?No entry exists for the card in the dragon’s pocket.?

?NOTE: The Host has been very busy with dinners and thigh kicks and not at all busy with the matter that involves children being harvested for parts. I am not judging. I am simply noting that nothing has moved in twenty-three days and the card is still in the dragon’s pocket and the pipeline is still running.?

?Dinner was lovely, by the way. The char siu looked excellent.?

I closed it.

“What.”

Dralun’s brown eyes found mine in the dark.

“You made a face.”

“I make a lot of faces.”

“That one was specific.” His tail twitched against the railing. “That’s the face that says somebody told you something you already knew and you didn’t want to hear it again.”

“My internal management system has opinions about our progress.”

“Your what.”

“Nothing.”

Dralun kept looking at me until it got uncomfortable. Then he grunted, the sound Ophelia had translated weeks ago as suspicion mixed with grudging acceptance, and went back to the card.

“I’ve got one more call to make.”

“Who?”

“Someone I haven’t talked to in eleven years.” His claw closed around the card with a gentleness his massive hand shouldn’t have been capable of. “Woman named Senna Hayes. Ran logistics through the Eastside back when the independent transport networks were still operational. Moved product, moved people, moved information. Knew the district’s underground economy better than the Commission knew its own filing system.”

He turned the card over once, twice.

“IHC cracked down hard in ’35. Shut down forty-two independent operators across California in six months. Most went to ground. Some got licensed and neutered. Senna took the smart route. Retired, moved to Oregon, changed her number three times, and opened a bookstore in Portland where nobody who knew her face would ever walk in.”

“So how do you have her current number?”

“Her sister owns a bakery on Fifth.” Dralun’s expression didn’t shift. “Mei Hayes. Makes the best egg tarts in the district. Her commercial oven died last month. I fixed it.”

Of course he did.

“If Senna talks, I’ll know where Kask’s supply ends. If she doesn’t—” He stood, horns scraping the underside of the platform above us. His tail uncurled from the railing in a slow sweep that sent a loose bolt rattling down four stories into the alley below. “Go home, provisional. You’ve got an Invitational to get ready for. The district will still be here when you finish climbing whatever ladder the academy wants you on.”

“Dralun.”

He stopped at the window.

“The ledger.” I looked up at him, at the dragon who’d spent eleven years in this district fixing railings and filing nine-word reports nobody read. “The notebook in the filing cabinet, with the names and the little crosses. How many of those kids are still in the district?”

His jaw worked.

“Twenty-three names. Fourteen still here. Six moved when their families could afford it. Three died.” His voice dropped almost too low to hear. “Two of them in attacks the Commission filed as unidentified multi-Aspect. One from something I still don’t know.”

I didn’t answer him.

“Go home,” Dralun said again. “I’ll call you when the trail goes somewhere.”

He climbed through the window and was gone into the office, and I sat on the fire escape listening to the Eastside breathe around me.

There were twenty-three names in a ledger and nine signatures on a card, and a pipeline running through a district the ranking system had decided wasn’t worth protecting.

Somewhere at the end of that chain was a thing too much like the one that killed four Heroes ten years ago. That one was supposed to have died that day.

The quest log sat at zero percent.

The card was still in the dragon’s vest pocket.

And the children were still shedding.