Page 4 of Rogue’s Mark

"Alice." I keep my voice flat. "Is my father alive? Yes or no."

She just looks at me.

"Please."

She holds my eyes. The scar on her cheek is an old one, long healed, white against the rest of her skin. I've never asked her about it and she's never offered. There's a version of this woman I will never know and I’m okay with that being the case. She deserves the little privacy the Rot affords her.

"What I know," she says slowly, "is that a man who spent years quietly building a case against the most powerful people in this city, who watched every ally abandon him one by one, who knew what was coming before it arrived, had options you and I haven't considered. He had time. He had documents. He had the one thing none of the people coming for him had."

"What? What do you mean?"

"He had knowledge. He knew they were coming," she says. "They thought they were surprising him. They weren't."

The corridor is quiet. Somewhere deeper in the Rot something mechanical ticks. Maybe a generator cycling or a pipe contracting in the damp chill.

"Find the people above Fischer," Alice says. "The ones who ran the operation, the ones who walked away clean when Rothwell went under. Whatever your father knew, wherever he may be, the path runs through them." She straightens up. She's done. I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she's already angling slightly toward the passage she came from. "That's what I have for you."

"Alice, please," I say.

"It's all I know."

And she's gone. Back into the passage, around a corner, swallowed by the dark.

I stand at the junction alone. The light from the crack above me throws a pale stripe across the concrete floor. I stuff my hands in my blue jean pockets to steady them. It works, but the rest of me is shaking like the mess that I am.

I push off the wall and start walking back. I have no interest in standing in a service corridor with this information by myself. Mara is fifty feet away and she heard the same word I heard, and she's the only other person in this building right now who I trust with any of this.

3

VI

She’s where I left her.

Mara’s sitting on the edge of the table, arms crossed, the documents still in front of her. She looks up when I come through the door and reads my face before I say a word. She's always been able to do that, figure out what’s going on in my head. Twenty years of practice will do that.

"Well?" she says.

I close the door behind me and take the chair across from her. I don't know how to begin so I just start babbling.

"I talked to Alice a moment ago. She wasn't surprised," I say. "I told her what Fischer said and she wasn't surprised. At all."

My heart’s pounding.

Her eyes narrow. "What does that mean?"

"I… I’m not really sure. She was careful about what she said, almost like she was holding back. She said Dad was smarter than all of them, that he knew what was coming before it came. She said he had options that nobody considered, whatever the hell that means." I pause. "She said I should follow Fischer's people. The ones above him. Although I’m not sure how I’d find them. I mean, didn’t they all take off or something? Flee the city?"

Mara frowns. "I thought they did. This is crazy."

"I know, right?"

We sit with that for a second, a far-off generator humming somewhere below us. The Rot makes its usual noises—distant, structural, the sounds of a building that's been settling for years and may never stop grunting and groaning under the weight of the people who now inhabit it.

Then I say it. I don't plan to, not really. It just comes out, the way things do when you've been stuffing them down and they won’t stay down a moment longer.

"What if he's not dead, Mara?” My voice cracks.

I say it fast. Like if I get the words out quickly enough, I won’t have time to really think about them. Like they won’t sound as outrageous as they are. Like no one can tell me I’ve lost my mind. Like they won’t bring me closer to the hysteria already circling me.