Eliasz was headed for the tributaries, which held wares whose contracts were often barely legal. He knew this part of Vegas better than he knew himself.
If Frankie’s information was correct, and Jack’s companion was an AU boy with numbers for a name, there were only one or two places where the kid might have been sold. Eliasz ambled through the bazaar, affecting the casual walk of a shopper, pausing to peer into the interior of the Wynn building. All the indentured on the auction block lived for weeks or months in the city’s millions of market rooms, with their minimal beds and tiny bathrooms, meeting client after client until a contract was negotiated. Here the rooms were shabby, but elsewhere on the Strip they could be as posh as the homes and businesses where the indentured would serve out their contracts. Where Eliasz was headed, though, there were no rooms at all.
Wynn Lane narrowed into a pedestrian walkway lined thickly with booths and big boxes. Inside, people stood listlessly on leashes or slept. Many had crude, mass-produced prosthetics—they came from military or maybe machinist jobs, too damaged to finish out their original contracts. A lot of the sales reps here specialized in buying up these kinds of contracts at a reduced rate and flipping them quickly.
Eventually Eliasz reached an unnamed alley whose curved, tinted roof arched only a few meters above his head when he ducked inside. Narrow and dark, the alley was a covert rivulet of wealth, the air sweet and purified. Nondescript cargo containers hung with thick drapes gleamed in tidy rows on either side for roughly a kilometer before the alley terminated in a dead end. Some of these containers held property more valuable and coveted than anything you could get on the Strip. Others were packed with expendable refuse that was still young and fresh enough to fetch a decent price.
You weren’t supposed to indenture kids in the Free Trade Zone, but it was done all the time. Sometimes covertly, sometimes accidentally, and always cruelly. This was the neighborhood where Eliasz had started his career in property law enforcement, rooting out the scum who sold under-sixteens. It was a tricky business. You couldn’t always tell the kids from the adults. Some of the children on offer had been doped with Vive when they were young—or they’d doped themselves—to look forever like vulnerable schoolboys and Lolitas. Twenty-year-olds who appeared to be thirteen were legal commodities. Eliasz believed that anyone willing to sell a fake kid would have no problem selling a real one, but the city wouldn’t let him go after anybody but the flagrant violators, the guys who imported goods from the economic coalitions where indenture schools and vague age-of-consent laws made it easy to buy ten-year-old roof cleaners and fourteen-year-old fetish objects.
On this alley, there were few such extreme criminals. More common were the operations that managed to stay in the barely legal zone, the ones he’d been told to watch but not prioritize.
He’d reached his first destination. The place looked exactly the same as when he’d seen it two years ago. A small red-and-gold sign over the door read “QUALITY IMPORTS.” Whether this was the shop’s name or an advertisement for its contents, Eliasz had never been sure. Inside, the air was cooled by an additional set of purifiers, one of which was aimed directly at the upper body of a man hidden behind a hazy projection that hovered over his desk.
“Good to see you’re still here, Calvin,” Eliasz announced.
The projection evaporated, revealing a small man with tidy gray hair sitting in front of a cabinet full of servers. To his right was a door that led into the showroom that took up most of the space in the container.
“I can’t say the feeling is mutual,” the man replied crisply. “Back to hassling legitimate businesses with your child slavery scaremongering? Or are you just visiting?”
“I’m looking for a kid named Threezed. Sounds like one of yours.” Eliasz beamed an authenticated ID to Calvin’s projector. “I’m not working for Vegas anymore—this is official IPC business. So look in those detailed records of yours and tell me if you sold a kid named Threezed to somebody who might have been working in the Arctic.”
“Hey, hey, cool down. I keep my records open to all law enforcement during working hours, you know that. I’m clean.”
“Lay off the bullshit and give me access.”
The man twitched, then made a series of quick gestures over the table. A flat database page popped up and Calvin’s fingers jerked out a search for the string “30” under “DESIGNATION.” There was no field for “NAME.” Dozens of results piled in the air, going back fifteen years.
Eliasz pulled them down to his mobile for safekeeping, then flicked through the list hovering in front of Calvin’s face. He guessed Threezed had been sold fairly recently—probably in the last year or two. Seventy-five percent of runaway crimes happened in the first year of indenture. That narrowed the list considerably. Six files remained: strips of text pinned to thumbnail headshots of AU and Federation boys, their expressions deliberately neutral. Nobody bought contracts for the indentured who looked too emotional.
All of Calvin’s search results looked like they were under sixteen, but their records claimed otherwise.
“Who bought these contracts?” Eliasz asked, jabbing his finger at the thumbnails. Calvin opened full files on each, spreading them out in the air with the palms of his hands.
“These two went to a farm up north,” he muttered, scrolling through the data. “This one I sold just recently, to a molecular foundry.”
Eliasz pointed at the “BUYER” field on the fourth result and spoke sharply. “You sold 45030 to somebody named Pseudo Nym who has no employment?”
Calvin peered at the entry and narrowed his eyes. “The buyer was between jobs, and his ID and credit were good. Not every contract has to go to a specific job. People buy general assistants all the time. Plus, I was lucky to sell his contract at all. He was a snotty little shit.”
Eliasz’ hand tightened on his perimeter control. “What do you mean by that?”
“He was one of those indenture schoolers from the AU—thought he was smarter than everybody else. Kept saying he was a star on Memeland and that he needed to be placed somewhere with good net access. Where do these boys get that kind of entitlement? As far as I’m concerned, they’re lucky that somebody wants to pay to feed them for the next ten years.”
Eliasz numbed his rage before it could control him. He needed more information, especially because this kid fit the profile perfectly. Somebody with a dubious employment background, buying from a guy like Calvin, might easily be crossing paths with smugglers. He snapped his fingers to open a window on his mobile, and started several searches running across Memeland: Threezed, indenture, slave, AU, Arctic, Jack, Jack Chen, Judith Chen, pirate, drugs, Bilious Pills. For good measure, he added: Quality Imports, Vegas. If this kid was writing about his life, at least some of those terms would surface in proximity to each other. Eliasz’ search, projected perpendicular to his waist, looked like a glowing white puddle hovering in the air under Calvin’s projection.
“What made you think this Pseudo Nym was going to feed 45030 here?” He gestured at the thumbnail, which showed a brown-skinned boy, prettier than most, a fluffy thatch of black hair obscuring his forehead. His previous contract had been with an engine design shop in the AU.
“I’m not doing anything wrong here, buddy. You checked my records—these are all legal sales, alright? This guy signed a contract agreeing to support this shit kid.”
“What else do you remember about this buyer? Have you sold to him before?”