The Brokenhearted (26 page)

By the time they’re aware of me, one of them is on the ground and I’m tying his hands to his ankles behind his back. The other one—his identical twin, it turns out—charges at me, but thanks to the left hook combination Ford taught me, it takes me less than thirty seconds to land enough blows so that he’s flat out on the ground, curled up, grunting, “Enough, enough!”

I tie him to his brother and leave the duffel bag like a gift right next to them, knowing that the sweep is coming again in less than a minute.

“Where is she?” I ask.

“Who?” they ask simultaneously.

“Rose Thorne.”

“Why should we tell you?” one says.

“Because if you don’t, I’ll put your brother in the hospital.” To make him think I mean it, I grab his brother by the collar of his coat and lift, raising both of them, tied together as they are, a foot off the ground.

The one I’m holding up whimpers, his eyes saucers full of fear. I’ve already given him a bloody nose and a fat lip tonight.

“There’s a place called Double X. Off Bergamot,” he says.

Just then the searchlight starts to travel back toward us. I drop them both to the ground and take off, and in an instant, I’m back in Serge’s car, dialing the 999-TIPS. I pull my list from my pocket and grab a pen from Serge’s dashboard to cross off two more names.

Maximillian Luz

Augustus Luz

We get to the Double X in fifteen minutes. It’s an almost pitch-black bar filled with Syndicate women. I don’t see any men the entire hour and a half I’m there nursing a Sparkle cola.

I keep my eyes trained on the door, but Rosie never makes an appearance.

I’m about to leave when I spot the tall, thin woman with the long purple hair. Jessa Scorpio. She stands near a curtain in the back of the room, wearing five-inch platform boots, a skirt the size of a napkin, and a black lace tank top with an exaggerated collar. On her head is a velvet top hat. A crowd of women quickly gathers around her, and she passes out small neon-pink glass vials of powder to them all. They each hand her a wad of bills and move away, unscrewing their vials and rubbing the pink powder on their gums.

Then she ducks back behind the curtain.

I slide off my barstool and walk across the barroom, my stomach fizzing with the fight I know is coming.

I lift the curtain to find a dark hallway. At the end of it, I spot her using a key card to get into a back office. She’s way down the hall, but I’m there in a heartbeat. Silently, I follow her into the office and close the door behind us.

“Hello, Jessa.” She turns around. When she sees me, she snorts, incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I look around the room, noting several stacks of hundreds stacked up on the shelves above a big safe. Jessa lunges across the messy desk and reaches into a pile of papers, but I get there first.

Beneath the papers, my fingers wrap the handle of a switchblade.

I unfold it and point it at her chest, and for a moment I’m thinking what it would feel like to push the blade into her.

I get control of myself and carefully fold it up. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I say to her. “Just tell me where Rosie is.”

She snorts in response. “I wasn’t worried. You’re so
pure
.”

I take a second to notice the walls. Lined with pictures of girls, women, starting from about age thirteen and going up to around age forty. Then I notice a metal pole off to one side, attached to the ceiling and floor in a corner of the room. “What is this place?”

“Are you that thick?” she says. Then she points to a binder open on the desk. It’s full of pictures of girls in sparkly, skimpy clothes. “Those girls out there are all companions,” she says.

I look at her blankly.

“The kind you pay by the hour?”

Oh. I swallow, feeling naïve.

“Where is Rosie?” I ask again, shutting the binder as if this can make the fact of what Jessa does for money go away.

“How am I supposed to know? Honey, just forget her. Forget him too,” she says. “You know, you’d make a great companion.” Her long fingers wind around a lock of my hair.

I think of all the young girls on the wall forced to sell their bodies for money. Static fills my ears, and I shove her hard in the direction of the metal pole. She hits the wall, and I don’t think about it before I slam both hands into the pole and push in her direction. Hoping to . . . I don’t know what. Surely I don’t think I can actually bend the pole?

But the metal yields immediately, as if it’s liquid.

The top of the pole disconnects with the ceiling, and with both my hands, I push the metal pole toward her, pinning her against the wall, the pole curving around her slim torso, tight enough that she can’t get out. “What in Bedlam’s balls?” She shrieks, terrified. She squirms against it, but she can’t move. The metal is too tight against her narrow waist.

Her top hat has fallen to the ground. She stares at me, speechless now. Visibly trembling. Her top hat fallen to the floor.

I shrug, regaining my composure. “You should reconsider your line of work,” I say before I leave. “It’ll make you cynical.”

I don’t like the look on her face as she’s figuring out what I am. It’s a mix of fear and pity, and I don’t want to be pitied. I leave, shutting the door behind me, and as I walk down the darkened hallway I call the tip line.

Once I’m back in the Motoko with Serge, I pull out the list and cross her off.

Jessa Scorpio.

Now all that’s left is Rosie, of course, and one more: Emmett Cask.

I wait a week after Jessa.

The newspaper articles keep coming, and I’m afraid I’ll get caught, exposed in front of the whole city. Someone could easily take my picture and sell it to the
Dilemma
. And if that happens, my life as I know it will end. My parents will lock me in the house forever. They’d probably pull me out of school and bring in tutors to finish out my senior year. I’d become a recluse or leave the city altogether. Or worse—my chimeric heart could become the source of study at a lab somewhere.

But then Serge tells me he has a lead on the yellow LandPusher. I decide we should follow it, hoping tonight will be the night I find Rosie.

I find the LandPusher on the bank of the river, just to one side of the Bridge to Nowhere, and climb up into the decorative ironwork beneath the bridge to watch what happens. A black SUV eventually pulls up next to the LandPusher, and a man wearing sunglasses steps out. My stomach drops in anticipation of Rosie, but when the door to the LandPusher opens, it’s Emmett Cask, the skinny man with limp blond hair who was my captor just before Gavin was killed.

Emmett hands a suitcase to the man in sunglasses. The man hands him a paper bag in return.

The mural Gavin painted is sixty feet from where I’m hanging in the shadows of the bridge.

The minutes tick by with Emmett talking to his contact. I focus my hearing on what they’re saying.

“Tell The Boss we need the same order next week. The club kids love the new strain.” Finally, the other guy gets into his SUV and drives away. I’m preparing to confront him when my foot slips and a piece of the old fretwork clangs to the ground.

That’s when Emmett looks straight up at the shadow of the bridge, right at me.

“Having fun, princess?” And then he starts to run toward the entrance to the bridge.

I consider my options, my heart galloping. The
slap-slap
of the Midland feels like it’s almost surrounding me. I swing out of my hiding spot and climb back onto the bridge itself, which is mostly wooden, made up of rotting boards that look like they might not hold my weight. The freezing kerosene air of the Midland hits my face as I wait for him close to the bridge’s end, not far from where it drops off into the river.

He’s got his gun out, holding it with both hands. When he’s ten feet away from me, I leap toward him, my body moving faster and farther than the laws of gravity allow. He’s too surprised to shoot, and when I land, I knock the gun from his hands. But he’s strong. He manages to push me away, sending me staggering backward toward the edge of the bridge, where the boards have rotted away and it just stops, cut off in the middle of the water.

He comes at me fast, knocking me down so that half my body is suspended over the edge of the bridge. The boards cut into my back through my coat, and then I’m almost over the edge, grasping at the air. I scream, my mind careening back to the night on the bridge with Ford.

But before I fall, he grabs me by the arms and drags me back to safety, that same creepy smile on his reptilian lips. “You’re not going to get off that easy.”

I twist away from him and spot a loose board popping up from the severed bridge. I manage to wrench it most of the way free, pulling with everything I have and scrambling back onto steady footing, squirming out of his grasp.

Everything around him goes white, and the space of seconds ticking by seems to expand. It feels like I have all the time in the world to lift my arms over my head, to turn, to aim, before I smash the board over his skull. The board breaks in half on impact, but he’s still standing, and I grab him by his jacket, throwing him hard. He flies into the air and smashes head-on into the railing of the bridge. When I reach him, he is unconscious but breathing.

I pull a length of rope out from the inside of my jacket, and I spend about fifteen minutes wrapping him in it, tying knot after knot until I’m satisfied. Then I wrap the rest of it around a metal girder and send him flying off the bridge so that he’s swinging, suspended from the bridge like an ornament.

After I call the tip line, I climb the scaffolding and hide in the crevasses of the bridge, watching when the police come and search him. They find the paper bag full of drug money he’d stuffed into his jacket pocket. They find his car keys. Then they shove him into a paddy wagon, and he’s gone.

When I finally climb down from the scaffolding and begin to jog back to Serge’s car, I hear people applauding. I turn to look, thinking there’s a fight going on, or a three-card monte game, but all I see are two filth-encrusted teenagers huddled by a fire blazing in a metal drum. They keep clapping, staring right at me. I wave, realizing they must have seen my fight with Emmett Cask. Then one of them crosses her fingers over her heart, standing there solemnly. The sign for The Hope.

Not knowing what to do, I make the sign back at her.
We will rise
, I think. Then I quickly turn around and start to jog away, not wanting them to see Serge’s plates. My body aches from the hits Emmett landed, from pulling the board up out of the bridge. My back is still bleeding. But somehow I feel it too—a funny tingling in my stomach that must be something like hope.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

CHAPTER 32

Serge pulls into the Fleet Tower parking garage at 2:10 in the morning. We nod a quick good-bye, and I get out of the car. I wave as he pulls away.

Inside the parking garage, the air is humid and still. I walk over the elevator bank and press the service elevator button, the slow creep of a smile spreading across my lips. I’m getting closer to Rosie Thorne. The elevator car bounces slightly when it hits the subbasement level, and then the door
ding
s open.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

My smile dissolves instantly. Will.

I step backward, my eyes locked on his smirking face. His blond curls are wild, frizzing out in all directions, his eyes so bloodshot the whites are solid red, and the skin under his eyes is swollen. He steps out of the elevator, his arms open, about to pull me toward him.

Disgusted, I dart out of his reach. “Don’t touch me,” I hiss.

“Anthem.” He looks at me sideways as if I’m an incorrigible student who’s forgotten my homework. “We both knew there’d come a time when you’d give me what you promised.”

“I’ve done everything I promised,” I breathe. “Every stupid thing. Zahra still isn’t speaking to me. I guess that makes you happy.”

He steps toward me again. I can smell the tang of his sweat, something mineral about it.

“Yes, actually,” he muses, reaching out a hand to stroke my cheek, his fingers hot. “It does. She’s such a bitch.”

“No she isn’t. You’re deranged,” I say, flinching from his touch. I make myself as tall as I can, but I’m still so much smaller than him. “Get out of here. I’ll call secu—”

“I don’t think you’ll call anyone,” he purrs. “Since that would mean waking Mum and Daddy, who might wonder why their dear daughter is in the parking garage at”—he pulls out his antique pocket watch, an affectation given to him by his father the district attorney—“2:17 in the morning.”

I press my lips together, running through my options. He has no chance against me physically, but the last thing I want is for him to get so angry he posts the video.

“Speaking of, Anthem, why are you down here at this hour? I watched you leave through the garage hours ago. Of course, you’re too fast to keep up with, so I waited here for you to come back. And now you’re back.” Will laughs. “And you have blood on your blouse.”

I hurriedly button my coat. Emmett Cask put up a good fight. A few drops of blood must have gotten on my shirt when I was tying him to the cement column under the overpass.

“Will,” I whisper. “Leave now. If you don’t want me to hurt you—”

“You’re not going to hurt me, Anthem,” Will purrs, stepping close to me again. “Your new life as a freak is too important to you. Now let’s go upstairs and lay down in your bed and do what we should have done months ag—”

Just then, the door to the service entrance door clicks open. Will and I both whirl around, and I’m overjoyed to see Serge’s stern face.

“Anthem,” Serge says in his deep basso profundo. “You should be in bed. William, I will drive you home.”