SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) (24 page)

The beta blocker has finally kicked in. There’s not even the faintest hint of a tremor in her arm and her expression is blank, except for a single tear rolling down her cheek.

Re-holstering his weapon, Maydevine seeks some kind of reassurance that his child is okay. “Kid?”

“The boy deserved better.”

Maydevine nods in agreeance, muttering quietly under his breath, “So did you.”

*************************

Hours later, if she closes her eyes she can still hear the echo of the gun in the sterile shell of the enforcement bay. The sudden increase in her bank balance does nothing to quiet the noise inside her head. All it does is enable her to self-medicate.

Prioritizing her responsibility to Alice, she buys meat and other groceries first. She waits until after dinner, while Alice is napping, to sneak out of the apartment and pick up the rest of her supplies—including a bottle of firewater.

Midnight has come and gone and so has half the bottle, and Silver still hasn’t returned home. Instead, she finds herself hiding out in the boathouse where she met Luka, rolling a little white pill back and forth between her fingers.

EPILOGUE

The Beginning in the End

Fringe District.

Amaranthe, 2348 CE.

– Six Years Later.

Abducted on her way to a ‘business’ meeting, Silver is handcuffed and hauled away in a Police Division truck to meet with her father, Maydevine.

Today, they meet on a North Town rooftop, overlooking the Sentinel District in the distance. Large wooden posts are secured in place at all four corners of the roof, a sheet of tarpaulin pulled across and fixed between them: a shelter, of sorts. It moves and twists in the strong wind, the torn edges of the tarp whipping and cracking like miniature bursts of thunder.

Underneath the limited protection of the tarp, there’s an old circular table with eight chairs around it. The remainders of an illegal poker game are strewn over the floor.

Maydevine sits on one of the chairs, his feet up on the table. His Deputy, Sterling Carter, stands at the edge of the roof and looks out over the city, deliberately keeping his distance from the proceedings. He’s much younger than Maydevine, and tries to hide his inexperience behind an ill-fitting suit.

An Omega briefcase lies open on the table facing Maydevine, his peripheral vision tracking Carter’s movements as he turns to watch Silver approach.

Escorted by the two Police Division Agents who picked her up on the street, Silver jangles her handcuffs at Maydevine.

Déjà vu.

“Is this really necessary?”

Maydevine glances from the handcuffs to his Agents, one of them already beginning to show a nice, purple bruise around his eye.

Turning back to Silver, his jaw tightens. “What did you do?”

Silver is characteristically unrepentant. “You might say that I put him in his place. He was being disrespectful.”

Maydevine prevents a smile from escaping, but Carter senses a weakness in him anyway and steps in to snap at Silver, making no attempt to disguise his contempt.

“The cuffs stay on.”

Silver returns his glare. “I’m not under arrest.”

“It’s not negotiable, traitor.” Carter snarls out the insult like an impatient Chimera waiting to take the first bite out of its prey, and with that one word, any chance there might have been for them to forge a cordial working relationship with one another is destroyed.

Traitor.

Silver hates that word.

Paying no attention to his Deputy, or to the venomous exchange of words with his daughter, Maydevine nods to one of his Agents—not the one with the black eye—and indicates that he should release Silver from her shackles, secretly enjoying how much that irks Carter.

Unable to hide his confusion and anger at such a public undermining of his authority over a common Fringer, letting his emotions write their truth all over his face, Carter’s silent protest goes unnoticed. Unconcerned, Maydevine invites Silver to sit down across from him at the table.

“Are we here to play cards?” she quips.

Maydevine ignores her attempt at humor. “How’s shit, kid?”

Silver shrugs. “Shit’s shit. It’s the same old shit it was three days ago, the last time you asked.”

Carter cocks an eyebrow. Three days ago? If he didn’t know they were seeing each other socially, he does now.

Maydevine offers Silver a cigarette, but she declines.

“Good girl,” he mumbles, and lights his own.

“Why the sudden request for company?” She eyeballs the Agents in her periphery. “Judging by the formality of this meeting, you’re not here just because it’s my turn to buy coffee.”

“Could you afford it, even if I was?”

He follows that with a wink, but it still prompts her to raise her middle finger at him, albeit in a half-hearted fashion.

“Your men interrupted me at a critical time in my day’s engagements, so if this is business, why don’t you do us both a favor and cut right to the chase?”

Maydevine shrugs. “Suit yourself, kid. I was just making conversation.”

Carter simmers at the edge of the roof, his jaw tightening at Silver’s casual confirmation that she and Maydevine do indeed share regular social engagements with one another. Silver detects his heightened animosity but opts to disregard him, keeping her attention pinned on her father.

“If this is going to be about that little incident last week with the RPG, I had nothing to do with that,” she preemptively defends. “I know I appear to have something of a track record in that department, but I’m not the only Fringer with a rocket launcher.”

Maydevine manages to keep his face expressionless. “That’s a comforting thought,” he comments absently.

He focuses on his cigarette, not really caring to hear anything incriminating for worry that he might have to lie about it at a later date.

“Look”—Silver folds her arms like a protesting child—“if you’re here to pass on another one of the Governor’s little threats, you can save your breath. Phaeden Rist can eat me.”

Maydevine winces at the visual. “I wish you’d stop doing things deliberately to piss him off. He’ll kill you, you know.”

“He’ll try. Wish him good luck in finding an Enforcer ready to pull the trigger, won’t you?”

Maydevine doesn’t even want to entertain those thoughts. “I didn’t bring you here to discuss the Governor’s latest death wish for you.”

“I bet he’d get you to pull the trigger. He’s perverse like that.”

“Does it give you any small comfort to know I wouldn’t do it?” He puffs on the cigarette, letting that thought rest on her ears for a while.

In a way that only Silver understands, he just told her the only thing that really matters: he loves her.

Before she can respond, Maydevine continues.  “Listen, I don’t care to hear the details of your ‘business’, you know that. I didn’t come here to throw accusations, or to press you for information.” Another puff. “Not even if you are in possession of a restricted military weapon.” A smile. “In any case, Phaeden wouldn’t know what to do with himself if you were enforced. He’d be at risk of actually having to do some of the dirty work himself.”

Silver can’t tell if that was supposed to be a joke or not, so she becomes instinctively defensive. “Fuck you.”

“Whatever.” He leans in closer toward her. “The truth is, I need your help. That’s why I’m here.”

“Having difficulty with the Sunday crossword again?”

Ignored.

“We have a small situation in the Sentinel District that requires immediate and serious attention.”

One of Silver’s eyebrows reaches for the sky, intrigued. “You want an unauthorized enforcement? Why didn’t you just say that in the first place? So far this has been a rather big show for some disappointingly small words.”

“Wrong tree, wrong neighborhood, wrong city, and there’s you, the proverbial barking dog. Why don’t you just let me finish a thought?” he sighs. “Kid, I’m trying to offer you a job.”

Silence, as Silver lets the information sink in.

Finally, “Bit of a contradiction, don’t you think? I’m not good enough for the Sentinel District anymore, but you’ll dish me out a platinum tag, no problem? I thought I had a lifetime service ban?”

Maydevine shakes his head, putting the brakes on her racing thoughts. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Isn’t everything?”

Maydevine flicks the butt of his cigarette over the edge of the rooftop. “It’d just be temporary, but you’d be well taken care of after the job’s done—I can promise you that.”

So far, Silver feels like her time’s been wasted. To work for Omega would be to work for Phaeden Rist—the person responsible, in one way or another, for her banishment. He was the one who signed her banishment papers and denied her appeals, and she would rather die than do him any favors.

“Get lost.” Silver gets up to leave. “I don’t wear the emblems anymore.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Maydevine warns as she starts to walk away.

“Why?” she turns back. “There’s nothing in this world you could possibly offer me to make me change my mind. I don’t work for Phaeden Rist. Not anymore.”

“Are you sure?”

Maydevine extracts a small zip-lock bag from the briefcase and slides it across the table. Inside the bag there’s a small blue micro-chip, and Carter watches carefully from a distance, his wariness growing.

Silver’s stomach flips at the sight of the blue tag.