POV: Nova
I tried every way I knew.
The compound had communication channels encrypted lines, back-route messaging systems, signal-bounced calls that could not be traced. Mira had shown me the basics with the flat efficiency of someone who taught things once and expected you to keep up. I had kept up. And for two days I had used every single option available to me trying to reach one twelve-year-old boy in Slum District Seven.
Nothing went through.
The neighbor's phone rang and rang. The community message board for our block, where people left notes when they could not reach each other, had nothing from Reo. The school emergency line the one I had memorized years ago and made Reo memorize too, just in case went to a full voicemail box.
I did not sleep much. I ate because it was fuel. I answered Mira's questions about the collectors' building and the people I had seen and every detail I could remember, because that was useful and being useful was something to do. But every spare second I was back at the communication terminal trying a different route.
On the morning of the second day I was still at the terminal when Mira came in and sat down next to me.
"My team found him," she said.
I went completely still.
"He is with your neighbor. Third floor, the woman with the yellow door. He is safe physically safe." She paused in a way that told me the next part was not as clean. "Your father is not with him. The collectors picked up Dario Reyes two days ago for what their people call contract questions. When a sale gets complicated, they bring in the seller."
I thought about my father in a room with those men.
I waited for the fear to arrive. It started to, and then it ran into something else something flat and hard and cold and stopped.
He had stood in that doorway and counted the money while they put me in the van. He had not called out. Had not moved. I had looked back and he had counted the money.
The fear did not finish arriving.
"Reo does not know where I am," I said.
"No. The neighbor told him you had to go somewhere suddenly and that you were okay. He does not believe her." Mira looked at me steadily. "He has been asking everyone on the block."
I pressed my hands flat on the table and looked at the terminal screen.
"I need to get him somewhere safer," I said. "If the collectors want to find me and they know about Reo "
"Already a concern," said a voice from the doorway.
Zane.
I did not know how long he had been standing there. He came in and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, that default stillness of his settling over the room like a change in air pressure. He looked at me in that direct way.
"I can send two people to move him," he said. "Secure location, still in the district so he does not miss school. Someone with him around the clock until this settles."
I looked at him.
I had been in this compound for two days. I had not asked him for anything had been specifically careful not to, because asking meant owing and owing meant losing ground and I had no ground to lose. I had answered Mira's questions and mapped my exits and kept myself separate and useful and not in debt to anyone.
"Why would you do that?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Not the evasive kind of quiet. The kind where someone is deciding how honest to be and landing on fully honest.
"Because you went back for a girl you did not know," he said. "In a building that was on fire. You had your exit and you went back." He looked at me steadily. "You do not deserve to lose your brother for that."
The words landed somewhere I was not prepared for them.
I had built something careful over the last two days functional, operational, feeling-things-later. It had been working. Those words walked straight through it like it was not there.
I looked away from him. At the terminal screen. At the wall beside it. Anywhere that was not his face.
"Thank you," I said.
My voice came out even. I was proud of that.
I did not look back until I heard him push off the wall and walk out, and then I let myself close my eyes for three seconds and breathe and put the thing his words had done to me somewhere small and contained where I could deal with it later.
Mira was watching me.
"Do not," I said.
"I did not say anything," she said.
"You were about to."
She almost smiled. "My people will have Reo here by tonight," she said. "He will want to see you first thing. Fair warning he is apparently very loud when he is worried."
"He is loud all the time," I said. "It gets worse when he is worried."
She nodded and stood up. Stopped at the door. "He is a good man," she said, without turning around. "Complicated. Closed off in ways that took him years to build. But good." A pause. "I do not say that to many people."
She left before I could respond.
I turned back to the terminal and did not think about what she had said. I thought about Reo. About what I was going to say to him when I saw him. About how to explain where I was and why without terrifying a twelve-year-old.
He arrived at seven that evening.
He came through the compound entrance with one of Zane's people and he saw me across the main floor and he crossed it at a dead run and hit me hard enough that I stumbled backward, his arms around my waist, his face pressed into my shoulder, making the sound that kids make when they have been holding something in for too long and the holding finally gives out.
I held him. I did not say it was okay. I just held him.
When he finally pulled back his eyes were red and his jaw was set in the stubborn way that had always been more mine than his, something he had picked up from watching me, and he said: "I saw the van. I ran after it."
"I know," I said. "I saw you."
He nodded like that mattered. Like knowing I had seen him mattered.
Then his face changed. The relief went complicated.
"Nova," he said. "Dad got out. This morning. He got released and the first thing he did " He stopped.
"Tell me," I said.
"He went to a reporter. He is saying you ran away." Reo's voice cracked slightly. "He is saying you left on your own. He is saying you went with some powered crime lord and he is scared for you." He looked at me with those too-old eyes. "He is saying it on every channel. Your face is everywhere."
I stood very still.
Somewhere in the compound behind me I heard Mira's tablet alert sound once, twice, three times in quick succession.
Then Zane's voice, low and sharp, calling her name.
And I knew without turning around that whatever was on that screen had my face on it.
My father had just handed me to them again.
Different van.
Same hands.