She took another deep breath. It gusted loose in an exhausted sigh.
“We’ve never had a big drug problem at my school—a little beer, a little pot, normal high school stuff, but not, like, drugs. A couple months ago, though, ink started going around. I mean, everybody’s doing it. But everybody’s getting it third-or fourth-hand, buying it off somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else. And I was thinking, if I could break a really big story for the school paper, I mean, real-world-journalism big, it’d look amazing on my college applications.”
I connected the dots. “You’ve been trying to track down the source. The dealer at the top of the food chain.”
“Exactly. If I could find the student bringing it in—or maybe it’s even a faculty member—can you imagine? It would be huge. Maybe even the ‘full-ride scholarship and job offers after I graduate’ kind of huge.”
“Okay,” I told her. “First thing, your Nancy Drew adventure is officially over. Drop the story.”
“Dan, you can’t—”
“Oh, I can. We’ve been doing some digging too. Ink isn’t just a designer drug. It’s mixed with alchemical reagents. Nasty stuff.”
Her brow scrunched up. “There’s magic in it? Why? What does it do?”
“We don’t know yet, and that’s a big problem. What we do know is the cartel pushing this stuff isn’t any ordinary gang. You do not want to land in their crosshairs. I’m sorry, I know this was a big deal to you, but you need to leave the sleuthing to me. What did you find out?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sullen, talking to her knees again. “Not much.”
“Melanie.”
Her shoulders sagged. “Okay, fine. This kid named Rob Ackerman is in my algebra class. It was his house, his party. I heard he was going to have ink, a lot of it, so I bugged him until he threw me a pity invite. I thought he might be the source.”
“Was he?”
“No. And he…he didn’t make it out.” She folded her arms, hugging herself as her lips curled. “He was the first one to, you know, lose it when the crazy hit. But I snooped around before everything went bad and found out his supplier is a guy named Todd. Todd something, I don’t even know his last name, but everybody knows him. Major burnout. He drives this van from the eighties, and I think he actually lives in it.”
“Another student?” I asked.
“No. I mean, he was. He dropped out last year, but he still hangs around campus, mostly trying to pick up freshman girls. Gross. I think he works at the Burger Barn on Lake Mead Boulevard when he’s not being Creeper McCreeperson.”
“Did he take the ink too?”
“No,” Melanie said. “He wasn’t even there. Which was weird, because Rob invited him, and Todd always shows up at parties. Like, whether he’s invited or not. He sold Rob the ink and said he’d drop by later, but he never showed up.”
It wasn’t weird, not if you saw the world like I did. The pieces clicked into place clear as the desert sky. Melanie was a good kid, too good, too much heart to see the obvious answer.
“We’ve been treating this like somebody slipped up, contaminated the ink by accident. Wrong assumption.”
She tilted her head at me. “What do you mean?”
“Todd wasn’t there because he knew what was going to happen,” I said. “The batch was tainted on purpose. This wasn’t a mistake. It was mass murder.”
5.
Melanie sat ash-faced in the passenger seat, looking like a shell-shocked soldier pulled from the trenches.
“What they did, when they took that stuff,” she said in a small voice. “What they did to each other…I barely got out. If I hadn’t been able to barricade the bathroom door when everyone went crazy then slip out the window…why? Why would anyone do that?”
Damn good question. The Network was an oiled precision machine, built for stealth. It operated in the deepest waters, and we had no idea how long it had been around. Lurking in silence, an urban legend. If the law or the media managed to swing a spotlight in their direction, they smashed it without hesitation.
Thirteen dead kids, killed in some of the worst ways imaginable thanks to a bad batch of ink, was a disaster in the making. In one night’s work they’d guaranteed more cops, more feds, more public funding to fight them tooth and nail. It was equal parts pointless and stupid, and the Network wasn’t stupid.
I tried to put myself in their shoes, work out a reason why I’d pull that move, and I came up empty. If I wanted somebody dead, I put a gun to their head and pulled the trigger; I didn’t toss a hand grenade into a crowded room and hope I hit the one person I was aiming for. Then again, maybe that was the point: to obfuscate the intended target.
Like the child of somebody they wanted to send a message to.
“Any of your classmates, the kids at the party,” I said, “do any of their parents work in law enforcement? Or work for the city, maybe?”
Melanie walked back through her memories. Aching, and I ached right with her. I knew from experience that she was picturing her friends two ways right now: before, and after.
“Jenna…her dad’s a lawyer, I think. There’s this one guy—I don’t really know him, he’s in my social studies class—his dad’s a lobbyist, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know.”
“I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “You should get to class. They’ll probably dismiss early, anyway. Considering.”
She put her hand on the door and froze.
“Something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said.
“Shoot.”
Melanie turned in her seat and looked my way. Her eyes glistened. The threat of tears brought out the red, bloodshot from loss and lack of sleep.
“Teach me.”
“Teach you?”
“Magic,” she said.
“That’s…that’s not a good idea.”
She perked up, intense, like she was asking permission to go to a rock concert and had a list of preplanned arguments.
“My mom would be okay with it! I asked her! I mean, not about you, specifically—she wants to set me up in a mentoring program with this guy she works with, ew, no thanks—but in general she’s okay—”
I cut her off with a distracted wave. “That’s not the issue. I had an apprentice, once.”
A little of her energy faded, and I saw the look in her eyes; she had her junior reporter hat back on.
“What happened?”
Then it was my turn to look back and see the before and after.
Before: thick as thieves, my arm around Desi Srivastava’s shoulders, snapping a selfie with a disposable camera in front of the dancing fountains at the Medici. I still had the photograph. I took it out sometimes, when I was drunk and felt like torturing myself.
After: sand swirled across the floor of a deserted office lobby, rising up in a whirlwind, taking on form. A drooling crocodile snout, shimmering armored hide. A custom-built trap for me and my crew, at the end of a heist we were never supposed to survive.
“I can do this, Dan!” Desi’s voice echoed off the inside of my skull. “I can do this!”
Her head hit the floor, bouncing across the blood-streaked tile, two seconds before the rest of her body did.
“It ended badly,” I told Melanie.
“That doesn’t mean this will! I’m a good student. You know I’m a good student.”
“I know you are. I’m not a good teacher.”
“I don’t believe that. And I don’t want to learn from my mom’s friends. She’s already pushing me to intern at Southern Tropics over the summer, and I…” She shook her head, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. “I don’t want to work for those people, okay? I don’t want that.”
Southern Tropics Import-Export, aka the shell company that covered the Court of Jade Tears’ operations on earth. Emma was the queen of the boardroom, handling Prince Sitri’s cash, and she expected Melanie to follow in her footsteps.
“Don’t know if you heard,” I said, “but apparently I work for ‘those people’ now.”
“That’s not the same thing. You know why Prince Sitri knighted you.”