Whenever the men came, she tried to ask them about Nason. Of course they didn’t answer. Probably they didn’t even understand. She thought about banging on the side of the box, the way she had before. But Skull Face and his men had been prepared for that, and probably the pasty white men would be, too. Probably trying it again would only get her whipped.
She thought constantly about running. But there was always at least one man guarding the door. She did manage to look outside whenever they were in the box. She was amazed by what she saw-hills to one side; broad, grassy fields to the other. This was a river, wider than any she’d ever seen in the forest. They weren’t on the ocean anymore. And this was a different boat-much smaller than the first one.
At least the new men didn’t try to take her outside the box. At least there was that.
The box got stiflingly hot during the day, much hotter than the previous one. And it got colder at night. The men had given them each a blanket, but by the time the sun came up and gray light began to creep into the box, Livia was always shivering.
One evening, a little while after they’d been fed, about half the people began to groan and clutch their stomachs. Soon they were vomiting into the buckets. Something must have been wrong with the food. Livia knew herbs that might have helped-but that was the forest, and the forest had never been farther away.
The next morning, three of the sick people were dead-the scarf woman and the two children. Livia had seen dead bodies before-mostly old people from her village. She wasn’t afraid. She was disappointed. If she had eaten the bad food, maybe she would be dead now. The thought produced a pang of guilt-what if Nason needed her?-but she couldn’t help looking enviously at the three bodies. Their faces seemed so peaceful.
The other ones who had been sick were weak, but otherwise seemed okay. The rest of the people moved the bodies next to a wall and covered them with a blanket.
When the men came with food, they checked under the blankets. They saw the people were dead, but left them there. They fed everyone and changed the buckets as always and then left, ignoring anyone who tried to talk to them. Livia didn’t understand. She knew the bodies would start to smell soon. They had to be burnt or buried.
Another day passed. Livia’s anxiety about Nason gnawed at her constantly. It was as though someone had cut something away from her-an arm, a leg, a part of her heart-and now whatever was gone had been replaced by a raw, throbbing ache. She tried to make herself go away the way Nason had done, but it didn’t work. The most she could manage was a kind of half-awake, half-asleep state. She would curl up on the floor, facing one of the walls, not thinking, not feeling, not connected to anything, just an object passing through time.
That’s what she was doing when the shooting began.
15-NOW
The cell phone metadata Livia had harvested at Billy Barnett’s funeral was an absolute who’s who of Hammerhead-not just the numbers of the phones themselves, but also the numbers the phones were used to call, as well as when and where the calls were placed. She knew it would be a boon to the G-unit, though probably they had come up with reasons to collect their own. But while she was always happy to help the G guys, she was looking for something special-a lever long enough to dislodge Weed Tyler. And after a frustrating few days of analyzing the data, she was pretty sure she had found it.
She hadn’t managed to turn up anything interesting about any of the regular cell phones, the ones gangbangers used for their personal lives. So she turned her attention to the burners that were relatively easy to associate with the regular cell phones because their owners were too lazy not to carry around both at the same time. But even that offered nothing she could use.
The final step was the ghost numbers-the ones she couldn’t immediately place alongside those of specific personal phones. She knew the ghost phones belonged to Hammerheads because the units had been at the cemetery when Barnett was buried. But figuring out which ghost phone went with which gang member was laborious.
One burner, though, stood out. It had been purchased five years earlier. That in itself was interesting-five years was far longer than even the most operationally lazy gangbanger would hold on to a phone he’d purchased for purposes of anonymity. But the phone was interesting, too, because it was used only in connection with one other number-another burner, naturally. Livia focused on the movements of the two numbers. One of them changed position only late at night, typically between the hours of one and five o’clock. The other rarely budged. A classic booty call pattern, except these booty calls were happening regularly, and went back a long time. Whatever was going on, it was a safe bet the participants were trying to keep it quiet. Which would explain why they each had a burner they used for nothing but each other.
The first phone spent most of its time in a Shoreline apartment rented by Michael “Mech” Masnick. She knew Masnick from her days with the G-unit. He was one of the up-and-comers, a popular guy with a lumberjack’s beard and the stature of an NBA forward. Despite his size, he was considered to be one of the saner Hammerheads, though not someone to be fucked with, either. The “Mech” was short for “Mechanic,” a nickname Masnick had earned for his facility with motorcycle repairs.
The second phone, the one that rarely moved, was associated with a house in nearby Bothell, owned by a woman named Jenny Jardin.
Who just happened to be Weed Tyler’s wife.
16-THEN
Livia scrambled to her feet, confused and frightened. Outside the box she heard shouting, explosions like the fireworks they used in village celebrations. Her first thought was, Nason?
But Nason wasn’t there. For a moment, without Nason to protect, Livia was paralyzed. There was another series of loud bangs. Something-a rock? A metal stick?-hit the outside of the box and made it ring like a huge bell. Livia backed up against the far wall. If something came through the door, she wanted to be as far from it as possible.
There was more shouting, more loud fireworks. Several moments of ominous silence. And then there was a huge bang just outside the door, and the door was yanked back and the box filled with brilliant sunlight, and then the sunlight was gone, replaced by fog, but the fog stung Livia’s eyes and her throat and made her cough and drool and gag. She stumbled for the door, choking and blinded. People smacked into her from both sides, but she kept moving, desperate to get away from the choking, stinging fog.
She tripped on something and fell to her hands and knees, retching. She scrubbed her eyes with the back of a hand, and for a moment her vision cleared. She was amazed to see that she’d made it out of the box. It was sunny, the fog was gone, and the boat wasn’t moving-it was stopped, on the side of the river, next to a platform with machines and buildings on it. There were men swarming everywhere, wearing plastic masks and black uniforms. They all had guns-long guns, machine guns or rifles like the ones she had seen on the fuzzy village television. Were they trying to take her?
Even choking and half-blinded, she realized she would never have a better chance to escape. She started crawling in the direction of the platform. Maybe if she stayed low, no one would see her.
But something slammed into her back and drove her to the ground, knocking the breath out of her. She craned her neck and saw one of the men in black clothes, a big man, standing over her with his foot on her back. She struggled and squirmed, but she couldn’t move. The man turned his masked face this way and that, occasionally glancing at her as his head swept left and right, the long gun he was carrying pointing wherever he looked.
There was noise everywhere-shooting and shouting and a weird, rippling wailing sound, like an animal shrieking but louder and unnatural.