Chapter 60: Inventory
BEEP. BEEP.
Somewhere off in the dark a forklift backed up, thought better of it, and died. Then it was just me and the cold and the smell.
The smell first. Somebody had unplugged a freezer full of meat a week ago, locked the door, and wandered off to live their life. That was the room I was standing in. Sweet and thick and wrong, the kind of smell that climbs into your clothes and follows you home.
I breathed through my mouth and thought hard about a beach.
It didn't help.
Here's a fun fact nobody puts in the brochure for spying: it's filing. It is so much filing. You sign up for rooftops and clever lies and a man in a good suit murmuring "well played," and what you get is a clipboard, a stack of crates, and a guy whose name I didn't know yet.
I'd started calling him Fist-Face, because his face looked like a fist that had given up around thirty.
"You count, you tag, you don't ask." He wasn't even looking at me. "Screw it up and Arslan hears your name. Trust me. You don't want Arslan hearing your name."
"Okay," I said, small and grateful. "Okay, yeah."
That's Taylor's voice. Taylor is me, down here.
I still hadn't gotten used to answering to it. Every time one of these goons said it, my whole body did a small flinch, because Taylor was a real person and I'd met her dad.
He made me tea and forgot my face twice in the same conversation. Now I was wearing his dead daughter's name to work, like a coat off the wrong hook.
It's the best cover I own. Honestly.
See, Elara Klein made the news once. One blurry headline about a corrupted hunter downtown, my name in a caption nobody reads. Roonie scrubbed at it for two nights and couldn't get it all, because you can't un-ring a bell. So I folded Elara up, put her in a drawer, and pulled Taylor on over the top.
The beautiful thing about Taylor is that she's nobody. A broke D-rank who dated the wrong porter and picked up a little too much about a certain blue powder. Nobody looks twice at nobody.
That's the whole trick down here. Be nobody.
I'm getting scary good at it.
I picked up the clipboard.
My brain has one setting, and the setting is on. So while my hands counted and tagged, my strategist brain went ahead and mapped the room, because it has never once asked my permission. Two exits, one of them blind. Six men on the floor, and only two I'd charitably call awake.
The good gear went out the loading door. Reinforced, mana-sealed, expensive. The cheap junk came in. Money moved one direction, and it wasn't toward anybody in this room.
Filed. For a bathroom I'd trust for ninety seconds, where I'd tap it into the burner in Roonie's stupid little code. A missing comma meant I was fine. A doubled letter meant come get me before somebody finds the body.
Anyway. Crates.
I got to the last stack and stopped.
These were different. Long. Coffin-long, if we're being honest, and we might as well be. Ribbed down the side with little slats, the kind you put on a box when you're shipping something you'd rather not suffocate before it arrives.
The manifest called them stock.
Livestock, I told myself, nice and firm. Bait animals for the illegal gates. A perfectly normal thing to warehouse at two in the morning.
I kept telling myself that right up until the slat in front of my face fogged.
Fogged from the inside.
From breath.
I didn't scream. My body suggested eleven louder options, and I stood there and kept my hand flat, because that's the only trick that matters down here. You keep your hand flat while the floor falls out from under you.
I leaned in like I was squinting at a tag.
Through the slat, a sliver of a face. A guy. Young. His eyes were open and not tracking me, not tracking anything, just floating in that soft chemical middle distance I've gotten good at recognizing. I hate that I can recognize it now.
He was dosed stupid and folded into a box the length of a coffin.
Tagged. Shelved. Breathing.
Stock.
Oh, I thought. Oh, you absolute animals.
We'd had it wrong the whole way in. Me, Gloria, every clever person in that tower, all of us saying recruitment ring, recruitment ring, like Arslan was building himself an army out of the desperate.
He wasn't recruiting anybody. You don't recruit inventory. You don't onboard a can of beans.
He was shopping.
And the shelves ran back into the dark further than I could see. Crate after crate after ribbed little crate.
Every one of them breathing.
I wrote the number on the tag. My hand did it on its own, small and neat, because Fist-Face was watching now, and a girl who freezes over a crate is a girl with a reason to freeze. I hung the tag and moved on like a good little nobody.
The next crate had a name.
Most of them were just numbers. Stock codes. This one had a paper slip zip-tied to the handle, water-stained and half peeled, a routing note from back before the person inside got downgraded to a code.
I knew the name.
I'd read it three weeks ago, off a dead man's cash ledger, in a slum apartment that smelled like dust and old soup, while a sweet wrecked old man asked me twice if I wanted tea. One of Francis's quiet monthly debts. A person he'd been paying, month after month, for reasons that died with him.
I'd crossed that name off in my head. Filed it under the enormous heap of people this city misplaces like umbrellas.
Except here they were. On a shelf. In the dark. Breathing through a slat.
"You done daydreaming?" Fist-Face called.
"Almost," I said. Small, grateful, ten out of ten, no notes.
I hung the last tag, and my hand did not shake. I stood in the cold and the smell and did the one thing I'm actually good at. The ugly, quiet math. The party trick that has never once made me happy.
Thirty crates in this room. Four rooms. Shelves past the light.
They were shopping.
And I'd just been handed the receipt.