SEPTEMBER 30. SWARNAVILLE.
The crowd was immense, and the police control of it merely adequate. Faces of every hue—but mostly dark—stretched through the streets. The men and women in the line were carded, one at a time, by the police, and by the recruiters for Scavengers Ltd.
Promise watched the crowd, her heart thundering. Had the announcement been made early enough? Often enough? There was no telling, but there was not enough fear in the world to stop Promise from coming.
She didn’t know where Aubry, Jenna, or Bloodeagle were—or if any of them were even alive. But she had to try. She had to gamble that if any of them were alive, they would hear, and come. But so far, she had seen nothing in the throng to tell her gamble was a good one. She saw no one resembling the three of them, and a terrible heaviness engulfed her. On some core intuitive level, she knew that someone close to her heart had died.
She wanted to cry, she wanted to do anything except continue to supervise the endless rounds of interviews.
Have you had experience in construction? Would you be available for classes, in special camps where for the first two months the only wages would be food and shelter? She watched the expressions of the people as they filed past. These were the lost and lonely, more so than in even the Maze. And they looked at her now as if she were some plutocrat from afar, the head of some ethereal Areopagus, swanning down from the heavens, offering to lift them from their misery with a wave of her pen. They didn’t know. They just didn’t know.
She caught a flash of white in the monitor, and her eye focused upon it. A handkerchief, a fold of white cloth, edged in red. A man wiped his face with it. A thin, brown-skinned man. He wiped his face again. And lowered it. And five seconds later, almost like a metronome. She zoomed in on him. Her heart froze. She knew that cloth—it was of soft leather, and she had seen Jenna clean her durga blades with it a hundred times.
The man was nervous, but resolute. Again and again, in that repetitive nervous gesture, he wiped his shining brow. And she was quite sure that the sweat upon it was caused by more than heat.
Promise had four team leaders, each in charge of five men and women. The interviews were going fairly rapidly. She crooked her finger at a man named Amel and said, “Third row. Small man. Gray shirt. I want you to walk him through personally, Amel. Find out if there is anything special. Anything we should know of.”
Amel nodded. He was a trusted contact, the brother of one of her Denver crew chiefs.
She continued to pretend that she was concerned with the flow, and consulted with a few of the other chiefs, so that it wouldn’t seem that she had given undue attention to Amel. She had to assume that she was under constant surveillance—any other assumption was suicidal.
The line crept on, and finally the little man made it to the front. He didn’t look at her, but the cloth was gone now.
Strange. His clothes were not new … but they had been cleaned. Almost as if they had come from a secondhand store.
Amel came back to Promise’s side with a clipboard, and gestured widely to the crowd, and then made a small gesture to the clipboard. There, at its side, was the cleaning cloth. It was dappled with blood. At the lower left corner was a single initial, scrawled with a shaky hand.
J.
Without changing expression, Promise said, “Find a way to bring him in. With at least twenty others.”
Promise went to the bathroom and vomited. She washed her face, and stared at herself in the mirror. Some of the tense lines around her mouth had eased. New ones had appeared.
This could be the deadliest of traps. This could be salvation for the people she loved most in this world.
The thin man was the thirteenth to be admitted to see her, and as soon as the door shut, she ran him through the standard questions. He answered crisply. In badly broken English, he said that he owned a small shop in Daglia, across the border in the Central African Republic. Business was poor at present. He had, in his youth, worked as an engineering assistant.
Promise took his information with little encouraging hems and haws, then examined the completed form and nodded with satisfaction. She pressed back into her chair. “You say that business is bad in Daglia?”
“I own … small shop in Daglia,” he said apologetically. “Business … not good. Neighborhood gone bad. Not many customer. Have much time for … hobby. Chess. You play?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
His eyes grew intense. “Variation on Queen’s Indian defense. Known as durga. You know?”
Promise’s heart soared. “If you would give me the address of the shop, I would like to visit sometime.”
“I would suggest that you do so soon.”
“Very soon?”
He bit his lip. “Merchandise … spoiling.” He gave his address, stood, bowed deeply, and turned to leave.
Promise stopped him. “Why do you … seek employment here?” she asked, mystified.
“I gamble when I play chess,” he said, his eyes amused. “Lately, have lost much. Need to repay.”
“You should play on the rooftop, in the moonlight,” she said. “It is very beautiful.”
“Tonight, might be beautiful moon,” he said.
“Tonight would be fine.”