Brianna Barksdale knew the Bronx wasn't about feeling. It was about columns.
In the cramped, wallpapered front room of their Hunts Point apartment—which served as the early tally room—Brianna, in her mid-twenties, ran a red pen down a pad of yellow legal paper. The apartment smelled of cheap ammonia and Avon's restless energy. Her younger brother, Avon (6), was in the corner, trying to pop-lock with the beat of a distant DJ set, occasionally scuffing the floor.
She ignored him. Her focus was on the columns. Her cousin, Stringer Bell (7), stood nervously by the table.
"Two thousand, one hundred and fifty units moved since the twenty-eighth of January," Brianna stated, her voice flat, emotionless. She ran her nail along the line item. "That's a forty-percent increase over last month's rate. Your father taught you better than to cook the books, Stringer."
Stringer tightened his jaw. He was eager to be taken seriously. "The books are clean, Brianna. We paid out what Nicky told us to pay out. The velocity is up because the intel is up."
Brianna looked up, her gaze cutting through Stringer's ambition. "The intel being a two-year-old toddler named Eli?"
Stringer hated talking about Eli. "He's got eyes, Brianna. He saw that punk try to flip me on the first run. The shorty sees things."
Brianna returned to the ledger. She wasn't dealing with superstition; she was dealing with numbers. She went back two months, noting the unusual pattern. Eli hadn't increased the overall demand; he had perfectly predicted the vulnerability in the supply chain. He'd somehow known when to push and when to pull back.
It was too clean to be luck.
"The flow is inconsistent," Brianna murmured, noting the sharp spikes. "A human cannot predict this volatility. A human gets greedy, or they get scared. This… this is a machine that knows the timing."
She saw another anomaly: a $1,500 loss logged against Stringer's personal stake, hidden as a 'miscellaneous asset.' Stringer looked away.
"That's the Apple stock," he muttered. "The shorty told me to invest in a company named 'Apple.' Said they were the future. I bought fifty shares. It's down thirty percent, Brianna. He ain't perfect."
Brianna smiled, a cold, thin expression of contempt. "A toddler telling you to buy a failing tech company. Now that sounds like business." The failure made her feel better. The genius had limits.
She finally ran her pen down the bottom line. Stringer's net commission was significant—$2,500 for the period. He'd earned it.
"The ledger is accurate," she concluded, pushing a stack of cash towards him. "You get your cut. That five thousand dollars you saved on the first tip, plus the commission, equals the two-five."
Stringer snatched the money, his victory sealed. "See? I told you. He's good."
"He is a liability with a cash value," Brianna corrected, leaning in. Her voice dropped, now addressing him as a sister, not a financier. "You keep that shorty on a tight leash, Stringer. If he knows enough to make you rich, he knows enough to make you dead. And if Robert Lucci is looking at Barnes, he's looking at us. Understand?"
Stringer nodded sharply, eager to get back to the streets and his ambition.
As Stringer left, Brianna picked up the paper where the Apple shares were logged. She crumpled the corner, her fingers tight. The shorty was a genius, yes, but he was also a ticking clock of knowledge they could not control. She felt the weight of the organization settle on her shoulders. Her brother, Avon, finally paused his breakdancing, sensing the tension.
"Brianna," Avon asked, his young voice echoing slightly. "Is the money safe?"
Brianna looked at the crumpled paper—the 2,500 commission justified by a toddler's strategy. "For now, Avon," she said. "The money is never safe. It's just waiting to be taken."