The Lost & Damned 1 Read online

  Alice doesn’t have anyone else, and as long as Silver’s in the same boat, they will have each other. Quite selfishly, Alice was flooded with relief when Silver’s final banishment appeal was rejected by the Banishment and Enforcement Council.

  In total, three appeals.

  Three rejections.

  Six long years.

  Yet, the Hunter Division’s magnetic draw still has its hold on Silver. Enrolled in the Academy when she was just five years old, it represents almost a quarter century of her life and she genuinely doesn’t know how to be anything else.

  Alice picks at a loose thread on the blanket. “We’ve never really talked about your banishment.”

  Time for more vodka. “Is there a reason why we should?”

  Alice should let the subject drop, but she has little patience for the emotional boundaries Silver continually tries to set between them. “You punish yourself for it every day. You think I don’t notice, but I do.”

  Self-consciously, Silver tugs at her sleeve, hooking her thumb through a frayed hole near the cuff. “I’m innocent. That’s all you need to know.”

  “So you keep saying, but I think I have a right to know what kind of person I’m shacked up with.”

  Silver sighs, the vodka dulling her anger. “It’s been six years, Al. If you don’t trust me, why the hell do you let me fuck you?”

  “I do trust you, I just—”

  “Then it doesn’t matter,” Silver cuts her off. “Nothing else matters.” She finishes the last of the vodka. “The worst thing I’m guilty of is defending my right to choose who I spread my legs for. That’s it. Everything else was a lie.”

  Silver’s stomach performs a mini somersault at the mere thought of her former lover.

  Alice scrunches her face up into a frown. “You were ratted out?”

  “At first.” Silver tosses the empty bottle of vodka over the side of the balcony. “Then they accused me of treason.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Circumstances Beyond Our Control

  As the sun rolls higher into the sky, erasing all traces of the horrors of the night, Deputy Commissioner Sterling Carter heads through the metal detectors in the busy foyer of the Omega Dual Division Headquarters—the DDH.

  He makes his way into a restricted area of the building with a thick file of papers in his hand, fresh crime scene photos among them. As he passes through a security barrier, a machine scans his left wrist.

  Every person living within Amaranthe is tagged with a small microchip inserted beneath the delicate skin of the inner left wrist, and the color of your tag depends upon your residential or occupational status.

  Blue is for the Sentinel District, black is for those banished to the Fringe District, and platinum is for Omega employees only. The platinum tags have GPS trackers, and give the bearer the ability to cross the boundary from one District to the other, whenever they so please.

  On the computer screen in front of a bored security guard, the results of Carter’s scan are immediately displayed. In a split second, all of his personal information is available. The highlights being: picture, date of birth, address, and security clearance.

  Entering the office he shares with Maydevine, he discovers he wasn’t the first one to clock in. Maydevine, his second mug of coffee in hand, is standing looking at a wall covered with crime scene pictures, pinned to a map of the city.

  Maydevine is much older than Carter—old enough to be his father. His hair, mostly gray, retains flecks of black: a fading reminder of youth, spent long ago. Carter is fresher, younger and eager. Perhaps too young for the emotional burdens of this job, he tries to hide his inexperience behind an ill-fitting suit.

  Carter tosses the file down onto Maydevine’s desk, but gets no response from his boss, who doesn’t even have the courtesy to take his eyes off the wall. A Hunter Division veteran, Maydevine seldom finds a challenge in the Police Division. A lifetime of military service has taken its toll on his emotions, and unlike Carter, it’ll take much more than a string of murders to rattle him now.

  Carter nods to the wall. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  Maydevine barely acknowledges him, and steadily finishes the last of his coffee. He was the Hunter General for over fifteen years, and in truth, he’s witnessed far worse than this. A fourteen-year reclamation war has left its mark on his ability to be shocked by death and violence, and it’s not the ferocity of these crimes that troubles him now. He’s concerned by the fact that this is the first killing spree ever to be recorded in the Sentinel District, and the killer is successfully evading capture.

  Maydevine hates being outfoxed, but he grits his teeth and doesn’t let his frustration show. “I’m quite familiar with death,” he grumbles, and sets aside his empty coffee cup.

  Incapable of hiding his own frustration, Carter pins his hands on his hips and strikes a defensive stance. “Well? What’s the protocol?”

  Maydevine hesitates before finally peeling his eyes away from the images of death surrounding him. He seems thoughtful and calm when he turns to Carter, his expression an intricate combination of many things, including a barely concealed touch of disdain for his young colleague. “There is no protocol for something like this.”

  Silence seeps into the room and Maydevine reaches for his coat.

  “Then … what?” Carter’s voice oozes irritation.

  Maydevine slips on his coat and digs out a cigarette from the inside pocket, still eye-of-the-storm calm.

  “It’s time to call in the cavalry.”

  *************************

  Across the city, buried in the outskirts of the Fringe District slums, Silver completes an arms deal with a hooded Hunter, eager to conceal his identity. As she walks away with her new HK USP .45 and a small hold-all full of ammunition, a black car with darkened windows and Omega emblems pulls up at the end of the street in front of her.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me?” She shakes her head, internally answering her own rhetorical questions. “Fishers? This early in the morning?”

  An armed Police Division Agent gets out of the vehicle and aims an MGP 15 sub-machine gun in her direction. “Put down the bag!”

  She stays silent and flips him her middle finger before turning and beginning to walk away. Behind her, the car revs its engine and soon appears beside her, keeping pace with her for a while—taunting her—before it passes her, swinging round and screeching to a halt in front of her, cutting her off.

  She’s forced to stop.

  “It’ll take more than that to reel me in,” she calls out, her hand resting on her gun. “I’m not your average fish.”

  The Agent gets out of the car and stares her down. “I know who you are.” He opens the back door. “Get in the fucking car.”

  Silver pouts, wholly unimpressed. “What’s the magic word, asshole?”

  “Get in the fucking car, please. He wants to see you.”

  *************************

  Ten minutes later, Silver is on a North Town rooftop that overlooks the Sentinel District in the distance—and her hands are cuffed tightly behind her back.

  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. Behind him, Carter stands at the edge of the roof and looks out over the city, deliberately keeping his distance from the proceedings.

  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 ja
ngles 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 Fringer, letting his emotions write their truth all over his face, Carter’s silent protest goes unnoticed. Unconcerned, Maydevine invites Silver to sit across from him at the table.

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

  Maydevine ignores her attempt at humor, his brow furrowed with poorly concealed worry. “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 already know they were seeing each other socially, he does now.

  Maydevine offers Silver a cigarette, but she declines.

  “Good girl,” he mumbles, lighting 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 halfhearted 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. He won’t give Carter the satisfaction of seeing his heartache at the reference to her banishment for treason, which was all expertly contrived around her supposed theft of a rocket launcher from the Omega Armory two decades ago.

  “That’s a comforting thought,” he comments absently, focusing 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 to deliberately 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 that thought. “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, he 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.” He mulls on that for a few seconds. “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.

  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 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.”

  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 microchip, and Carter watches carefully from a distance, his wariness growing.

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

  The Sentinel District.

  Repatriation.

  Alex.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Reckless Misfits

  Silver’s eyes flick from Maydevine to Carter, then back to Maydevine, carefully weighing up the gravity of the situation. “Are you being completely serious right now?”

  “I know what that tag means to you, so don’t even try to pretend otherwise.” Maydevine lights up another cigarette. “And you should know what it means to me, too.”

  She does.

  He continues, “This might
be the last chance we’re ever going to get.”

  His choice of words propels Carter’s anger into orbit, both of his fists clenched behind his back. Unaware of the effect his words are having, Maydevine breaks into a grin.

  “Phaeden hates me for this, by the way. So that’s a small bonus we can both enjoy.” A puff. “I’m finally in a position to offer you freedom, and your old bedroom back. And in the meantime, I can offer you full reinstatement of your Division privileges until you deliver the goods.”

  Silver remains silent, but Carter reaches breaking point.

  He steps up to the table and leans into Maydevine, spewing through gritted teeth, “This is a mistake.”

  Silver’s glare returns to him with a vengeance. “Bite me.”

  “Where?” He matches her attitude, and slides a hand over his gun in warning.

  Maydevine holds up his hand to Carter and signals for him to back off. “I wouldn’t. You don’t know where she’s been.” He turns his attention back to Silver. “You read the paper?”

  “They don’t deliver in my neighborhood.”

  Maydevine tosses the local rag across the table. It headlines a murder in the very heart of the Sentinel District—an article penned by the Editor in Chief, Celia Rankin.

  “There was an incident yesterday, and five more before that. All within the last two weeks. People are panicking, and it’s causing quite a stir.”

  “So strip him. We all know your people aren’t shy about that.”

  Maydevine’s eyebrow twitches. ‘Your’ people? Omega? Police Division? Or simply the Sentinel District elite? It makes him uneasy when Silver emphasizes the separation between this world and the one she used to inhabit.

  Pushing that aside, “I’d love nothing more, but I can’t.” Maydevine locks eyes with her. “He’s not tagged.”

  Silver’s brow wrinkles with confusion. “That’s impossible.”

  “So you would think.”

  Maydevine gets up and walks over to the ledge of the roof to look out over the city while Silver keeps a close eye on him, silently studying his resolve.