A broken contract fractu.., p.6
A Broken Contract: Fractured Conclave - Book 2, page 6
The only territory that might defy a judge’s order, Paradise, only took in human refugees, and Hallie hadn’t been fully human for a long time.
There was no question that the Magravine would order a hunt for Hallie. Even though she had been removed from the blood family, there was no possible way that the Magravine would overlook such open disobedience as a runaway. Even if Hallie did manage to get the papers, and get out of the city, she would spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. It would only be a matter of time before someone caught up to her.
So she couldn’t run. Which left her with the bad option of trying to work out a way of raising the money to pay her mother, or the worse option of accepting her fate and resigning herself to a life as an unwanted but still useful member of the Talbot vine. She’d had more than ten years of fighting against that idea, and she wasn’t ready to give up. She had just under three days to work out an alternative plan. Perhaps Aunt Gin would give her the day off to let her think about it a bit more. Gin wasn’t known for being generous, but Hallie was owed a considerable number of days off. Time off work was one of the many things she’d sacrificed in order to keep earning, and keep building towards the huge total her mother had set for her.
She reached Gin’s office to find a compact, rugged-looking vehicle parked outside. It was a little higher off the road than a normal car, thanks to heavy tyres, its body made of dull green panels with a few dents and scratches marking it as a well-used vehicle. There was a passenger cabin which would seat two and an open back that was currently empty. It looked like one of the vehicles that adventurers might use in a television drama, something that would be more at home in open terrain rather than city streets. Outside of a television screen, she had seen a few vehicles like it, usually operated by low city gang members as they were a little narrower than a standard car and could slip down more side streets. But this didn’t look like a gang vehicle. There were no painted tags on it, for one thing. And it was too clean, for another. Wondering just what kind of business its driver had with Aunt Gin, Hallie went into the office.
She stopped abruptly just inside the door, blinking in surprise. Her aunt did have a visitor, but it wasn’t someone Hallie had expected to see again, and certainly not here.
Special Investigator Girard Abbot was standing, apparently at his ease, across the desk from Gin. Hallie was surprised by how pleased she was to see him again. They had met under bad circumstances, when he had thought she was a killer, and although he had changed his mind on that front, she hadn’t realised how much she had missed him until now. He was hochlen, after all, and they had nothing in common. He was dressed in what she assumed was his idea of a working uniform, in heavy-soled leather boots, dull brown tactical trousers and a t-shirt and leather jacket. It was the sort of casual but practical outfit that a lot of skip tracers wore, but no one would mistake Girard Abbot for a lowly skip tracer. Everything he wore was far superior quality to anything Hallie had ever owned, and he carried the subtle, polished air that all hochlen had. He was almost ordinary-looking for one of the hochlen, with short, sandy coloured hair that never seemed to sit neatly around his head, pale skin and deep blue eyes.
He tilted his head at Hallie by way of greeting, the hint of a smile on his face.
“Well, here she is now, so you can ask her yourself,” Gin said, sounding even more surly than usual, breaking Hallie’s momentary distraction at Girard’s presence. Her aunt was dressed in her normal, casual clothing. Tough work trousers and a long-sleeved, flannel shirt. Although Gin spent most of her time in the office these days, she still liked to present an image of a working skip tracer. Gin was a slender woman of average height, with short hair that was currently a steely grey colour, which meant she’d been to the hairdresser since Hallie had last seen her. The ever-changing hair colour was perhaps Gin’s only indulgence. She preferred short hair styles, which emphasised the strong bones of her face including the straight brow and dark eyes that were Talbot family traits. “That Findo Trask character hasn’t been found yet,” she told Hallie, ignoring their visitor for the moment, which made Hallie wonder just what they’d been talking about. Gin was in a foul mood. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get called up again.”
“Well, it will need to be in the next couple of days,” Hallie said.
“Yeah. Wilona called me. She was not happy,” Gin said, directing a ferocious scowl at her niece. “Couldn't keep your mouth shut, could you?”
Hallie stayed silent. She really wanted to point out that Peter had been the one in the wrong, stealing from her, but there was no point in talking to Gin when she was in this bad a mood. A short temper and stubborn nature were traits that Gin and Wilona shared. Instead, she turned to Girard.
“Inspector Abbot. What brings you to this part of the city?” she asked, trying to keep her voice pleasant.
“I was looking for you, actually,” Girard said. He glanced at Gin, a hint of wariness in his face, as if he didn’t want to provoke her temper any further. Smart man. He looked back at Hallie. “I have a case I’d like your help with.”
Hallie’s brows shot up. Of all things, she had not expected that. She opened her mouth to tell him no. She’d been about to ask Gin for time off. The last thing she needed was the distraction of a case when she had the impossible task of paying off her mother.
“I told him you’ll help,” Gin said, sounding as if the words were being pulled from her. She’d agreed to help one of the hochlen. No wonder she was in a temper. Gin was a fraction more open-minded than Wilona. But not by much. “He’ll pay me the standard rate, of course.”
“Of course,” Girard said, without hesitation.
“There is no standard rate,” Hallie told him. “How much did she say she would charge you?” she asked.
“A thousand a day,” Girard answered, as calmly as if he was discussing the weather.
“A thousand?” Hallie’s voice rose to a squeak. If she was being paid even close to that, she would have been able to pay her mother off a long time ago.
“Hochlen can afford it,” Gin said, folding her arms across her chest and glowering at Hallie. “And I might as well get the most out of you while I can.”
Her aunt wasn’t going to back down, Hallie saw. She’d been offered an outrageous sum of money to loan out Hallie’s services, always assuming that a more lucrative skip didn’t appear in the meantime. And Hallie was hard-pressed to think of the last time Gin would have earned as much as a guaranteed thousand a day for a low city fugitive. All the police contracts were for fixed amounts, no matter how long the hunt took. Right now, Hallie was still in Gin’s employment, contracted to her, so Hallie was going to be working with Girard whether she liked it or not. With the prospect of being bound into the family vine forever looming over her, Hallie couldn’t afford to alienate one of the few members of the vine who had always treated her well. So she needed to follow Gin’s direction. For the next few days, at least. After that, she didn’t want to think what she might be doing. The most low-paid, foul job her mother could come up with, no doubt. Or worse, being part of her mother’s enforcement team, extorting money from already poor families in the vine who Wilona thought should be able to pay more in tithes.
“Fine,” Hallie snapped at Gin. “What’s the case?” she asked Girard.
“I’ll tell you about it on the way,” he said. He took his wallet out, counted off a series of paper notes, and put then on the desk in front of Gin. Hallie managed to keep her jaw from dropping at the casual way he handled an eye-watering sum of money. She’d had bundles of cash like that around her home until Peter had stolen them from her, the money of smaller values and far more well-worn than the crisp, new money Girard had provided. “That’s for the first three days, as a gesture of goodwill.”
“Goodwill, eh?” Gin asked, her temper fading a little as she looked at the money on her desk. “Should have charged more,” she said, not quite under her breath. Hallie tried not to roll her eyes. Gin was as canny a businesswoman in her own way as her sister.
“Good day to you, Miss Talbot,” Girard said. “Shall we go?” he asked, turning to Hallie.
Hallie just nodded and followed him out. She was tempted to tell him to get a receipt from Gin, but her aunt was generally honest. And she didn’t often see that amount of money in one place. She was most likely going to head to the bank to deposit it before Girard could change his mind.
Girard was opening one of the doors on the off-road vehicle as she stepped onto the pavement.
“This is yours?” she asked, startled. It seemed far too ordinary and sturdy to belong to one of the hochlen.
“It is. I had it brought from the country estate. I thought it might blend in better in Erset,” Girard explained.
“That it will. But I’d recommend not telling people it came from a country estate, or calling the place by its proper name,” Hallie told him as she got into the passenger seat. No one in low city had ever seen a country estate, let alone had a vehicle brought in from one. And none of the residents referred to their home territory by its proper name. Only the hochlen, and the most middle-class of the karlen living in midtown did that. She wasn’t sure why she had bothered to try to give him some help to blend in, as no one was going to mistake the investigator for anything other than what he was - one of the elite. Perhaps it was a point of pride. She’d been assigned to work with him, and she always tried to do her job to the best of her abilities. And it was also easier to think about the many ways the hochlen didn’t fit in than to think about her own situation.
She looked around with some interest as she fastened her seat belt. The inside of the vehicle was as basic and hard-wearing as the outside. It had everything needed to make it a legal vehicle, such as seat belts and airbags, but not much more than that. A far cry from the soft, comfortable luxury she more usually associated with hochlen.
“Good points,” Girard said. He started the engine, and if the rest of the vehicle looked rough around the edges, the engine was not. It was as quiet as any fitted to a sleek city car. “We need to head to the warehouse district. Can you guide me?” he asked.
“There are a lot of warehouses. Do you have a street address or building name?” Hallie asked.
Girard gave her an address she vaguely knew, and she pointed ahead in the direction they needed to travel.
“It’s going to take about twenty minutes to drive there,” Hallie said. “You said you’d tell me what this was about?”
“Yes,” Girard said. He was looking at the road ahead, doubtless not familiar with the pot-holed streets of low city, but Hallie didn’t think he was just concentrating on his driving. He was thinking, deciding how best to explain things to her. “We’ve had some men go missing in the past few days. Five of them. They haven’t been back to their family homes and none of their families or social circle know where they are. There’s been nothing specific to raise alarm, apart from not being able to track them down. I’ve been asked to see if I can find them.”
“Don’t their ID bracelets have locator chips?” Hallie asked, frowning. Every citizen of the city, including the elite, was required to carry ID. For the common folk, that generally meant a chip embedded under the skin of their wrist. But some quirk of hochlen physiology rejected any attempt to inject a chip, or to tattoo their skin, and so they wore metal bracelets with their ID inside. The bracelets varied in size and design, and complexity. But she was sure that most hochlen would have some kind of life sign monitor and locator beacon in their bracelets. Which meant that the families should simply have been able to turn on the tracking software and find their strays without the need for a Conclave Investigator, or a skip tracer, hunting them down.
“They do. But the tracking software can’t locate them. They all had vital sign monitoring, too. And there’s nothing. It’s as if someone disabled the bracelets.” Girard glanced at Hallie, a frown between his brows. “That shouldn’t be possible, but it seems that someone has found a way.”
“Alright,” Hallie said, more to let him know that she was listening. Her mind was turning over the new information. She’d never realised it was possible to disable the ID bracelets without triggering some kind of an alarm, but then she was no tech expert. She found herself smoothing down the sleeve of her jacket to more completely hide her own ID bracelet. She was quite sure that her plain steel band didn’t have any of the sophisticated software that the hochlen would expected, but the talk of bracelets had made her self-conscious.
Girard was still frowning. Possibly the inability to track the ID bracelets was bothering him, but Hallie had the sense it was more than that. “The supposed missing are a few hot-headed young men, who are known to get into trouble. I’ve got photographs in the glove compartment.” He lifted one hand from the steering wheel and pointed. Taking that as her cue, Hallie opened the compartment and pulled out a thin sheaf of papers.
“What makes you think that they are in low city, and not just hiding out in high city?” she asked him.
“The head of security for one of their families found the warehouse address we’re heading for in one of their rooms. I hoped you might help as a local guide,” Girard answered.
There was something a little off about his story. He was telling the truth, as far as he was telling her anything. Hallie’s truth sense told her as much. But he wasn’t telling her everything. Not yet. She was tempted to force the issue, but she didn’t know him particularly well, and tracking down a handful of wild hochlen youth seemed an easy enough task.
Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted too much more to think about. Even as she tried to focus on the missing hochlen, part of her mind was turning in circles on what she might be able to do to deal with her mother’s deadline. Hopefully, tracking down the missing men wouldn’t be too difficult and she’d come up with a solution for her future, too.
Chapter six
Girard had brought a large collection of printed photographs, with names noted on the backs. Hallie studied and memorised the names and faces. Carrado Galloway, Erbin Romero, Llew Kennedy, Nafiens Marsh and Oswain Dorsey. She didn’t recognise any of the family names from the Conclave membership, which was a small relief. The last thing she wanted was more Conclave members knowing who she was. It didn’t mean that the families were powerless, though. The elite held and wielded a lot of power in all manner of ways, from political to financial. The fact that a Conclave Investigator had been sent after the young men when Girard had said there was no particular cause for concern was proof of that.
The photographs were all group shots, showing the five missing men and a few others in various poses and circumstances. There were a few images that looked like they had been taken at lavish parties, with the men in formal evening wear, often with glasses in their hands, and a couple of images of the five men and others sitting in and around very sleek, very expensive-looking vehicles. The last picture was a scene in a forest, with the men standing behind a dead stag, a creature Hallie had never seen in real life, only on screens or in still images. The stag’s antlers spread wide enough to encompass all five men, its mottled brown fur blending in with their surroundings, all the men looking very pleased with themselves. It seemed to be a hochlen thing, to take photographs with the spoils of the hunt, Hallie thought, remembering seeing a similar picture in the only hochlen house she’d been into. Then again, karlen fishermen would often pose for pictures with any particularly large fish they caught, so perhaps it was more of a universal thing.
“They look popular,” Hallie said, putting the photographs back into the glove compartment. The various images had been useful in giving her different angles and lighting for the men in question, so she should be able to recognise them if she came across them.
“Well, they have a lot of friends,” Girard said. There was a little hesitation in his voice which caught Hallie’s interest.
“Ah. Not popular with everyone?” Hallie asked. “Let me guess. The older generation finds them loud and arrogant?” It seemed that young men shared some traits no matter where they came from. She remembered her brothers and their friends being loud and over-confident in their late teenage years. The elders in the family vine had shaken their heads and predicted grim outcomes from the youngsters’ antics. A few bumps and scrapes, and a broken bone or two, and some of the young men had grown up a little. She wasn’t sure Peter would ever grow up.
Girard gave a short laugh. “Indeed. They are all younger sons,” he added, glancing across at her as if making sure she got the significance of that.
She nodded, to show she’d understood. Hochlen succession passed down through the male side of any family, with the eldest son inheriting everything if he was still alive. She wasn’t sure how all hochlen families felt about their younger sons, beyond the wish to have them as back-up in case something happened to the elder son. The man that Rosalia had been involved with had been an older son, killed in what had turned out to be a futile attempt to redirect the line of succession. His father hadn’t seemed overly fond of his younger son. But then, a dislike of children wasn’t confined to the hochlen. Hallie’s own mother had disowned her when it became clear she was no longer fully human.
“So they’ve got a lot of wealth to play with and no responsibilities,” she concluded.
Girard gave another short laugh. “That’s a fair summary. For most younger sons, anyway.” Something in the way he said that told Hallie he wasn’t just talking about the missing men any longer. She had never asked about Girard’s family circumstances, but she had a strong suspicion he was also a younger son. His plain first name, for one. It was a name that would not be out of place among karlen. And the fact that he was working with the Conclave Investigators. Most elder sons were expected to learn and work in whatever the family was involved in. Older sons would be considered too valuable to be allowed to work in law enforcement, even protected with body armour and carrying a weapon.
