Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(23)

Yes. She could die after that. She could die whenever she wanted to. They had taken so much from her, but no one could take that.

Several days and nights passed like this. Men came with food and water and buckets like before, but different men—white men, their skin the color of cassava paste. Two of them were bigger than the Thai men, their bodies thicker with muscle. The third was stringier. All of them had shaved heads and tattoos up and down their arms. She didn’t like the way they looked at the people in the box. Skull Face and his men had felt like cats who would enjoy hurting the children, tormenting them—as eventually they had. But these men felt worse. When they looked at Livia, she felt they saw nothing but an animal, or not even an animal, just a thing. They could feed her, or clean her, or beat her, or kill her, and none of it would make them feel anything at all, neither enjoyment nor regret.

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.