Preying for keeps

"The little guy?" Skater repeated.

Bry

Skater remembered the way the second bedroom had been set up, the little girl's bedclothes in the crib. He couldn't help wondering where the baby was. And how many babies there actually were.

"Larisa was pla

Mentally kicking himself for not paying better attention to all the angles being laid out on the table, Skater took a sip of his juice and listened more closely.

"Yes. She had a piece of biz working." Bry

Skater looked at Duran, and the ork returned his gaze letting him know they shared the same opinion. "Did she mention any names?"

"No. Drek, Jack, she was going crazy there at the end. trying to figure out what she was going to do. Everything was mixed up for her. There's nothing else I can tell you, because I don't know any more." Tears ran down her face as she fought against it. She wiped a sleeve across her cheeks and sniffled.

"Did Larisa ever mention a guy named Tone?"

"I don't know… I don't think so, but I can't be sure. Why, is it important?"

"Maybe," Skater said. "Maybe not." Reaching into his jacket. Skater took out a certified credstick with a few thou¬sand nuyen on it.

"I can't take this," Bry

Skater rolled it up in her fist. "Yes you can. You can't go back to your doss. And you can't access your own credstick for a few days. You're going to need something to live on. I wish I had more to give you, but I'm pretty tapped out myself at the moment,"

Her eyes widened as she realized what he was saying. "I can't go off and leave everything I own."

"You will," Duran said gruffly, "if you want to go on breathing."

"Just give me a few days," Skater said. "Everything should be back to zero-sweat by then." He spoke with more confidence than he felt.

"How will I know?"

"Call this number and let me know where you're staying." Skater wrote the number of a message drop he used under another name on a cocktail napkin and gave it to her. The message drop, set up like the one he was using with Kestrel, went through an answering service. Once a call was made and another password entered, the message dropped through a trapdoor in the system, where it waited to be retrieved by another passcode. For all intents and purposes, he couldn't be made. Even the SIN he had on file with the answering service was false. Since he could call in and pick up whatever messages were recorded, it had a built-in layer of security. "If you don't hear from me, you might want to stay lost awhile longer."

Bry

"One other thing," Skater said. 'Tell me where I can find Ridge Maddock."

17

"It's me," Skater said when Archangel answered the telecom at the safe house. "I've got a name I want to run by you. Ridge Maddock. Small-time fixer. He was co

"Maybe you should stop pushing for a little while," Archangel said. "Get some distance on things."

The comment confused Skater. He figured she was concerned he'd blow their cover arid somehow lead the people who were hunting them back to the team. Bui for a moment, it sounded like she was concerned about him, too. "I'm okay. Duran's here to make sure I don't hose up too bad."

She didn't say anything.

"Have you found out anything about the diplomatic plates?" he asked. He didn't really expect anything, but asking was a way of ending the tense silence. Skater had noticed the official vehicles when viewing the newscast around the warehouse, and it seemed worth looking into.

"No." Her voice was cool, distant, like all this had nothing to do with her. "There's a lot of IC around those Files, and cracking anything political runs the risk of getting my brain fried to a crisp."

"Be careful in there."

"Unlike you, I know when to stop, no matier how responsible I feel." The co

Puzzled and more than a little irritated over the conversation even though he didn't know why. Skater broke the co

Duran nodded, glanced quickly in the rearview mirrors, and screeched into traffic. "Something wrong?"

"Nothing I know of," Skater replied as he watched the street around them. A Lone Star cruiser passed them, going the other way fast enough that he knew the blue crew had a definite destination in mind. "We're not any deeper in drek than we were before, but Archangel sounded bent about something."

Duran handled the car easily, sweeping around the comer of Vine Street and heading north. "What'd she say?"

Skater told him.

"It's hard for her," Duran said when he finished.

"What?"

“Ties."

"Between us?"

"Between her and anybody," the ork answered. "I don't know much about Archangel, including her real name, even though I've known her longer than you. What I do know, though, is that I've never seen her with a friend, or ever mention having one."

It had been Archangel who'd brought Duran in after working with Skater off and off for three or four months. Elvis was already working with Skater, and he'd brought in Wheeler. Skater had recruited Cullen Trey from a number of possibilities when it became obvious they needed a mage with combat skills. Duran had suggested Shiva to round out the team with chromed muscle.

"Whatever happened to her along the way to getting here," Duran continued, "she doesn't let anyone next to her."

"I've noticed," Skater said.

"Right now," die ork said, "she's scared. She's let herself get closer to us than she pla

"Then why didn't you?"

"I was checking you out," Duran said. "We discussed that. Elvis had already said he wasn't turning his back on you."

"I didn't know that."

"Wheeler stuck by you last night, too, when we were talking about divvying up the files. And Trey isn't the kind of guy to leave a chummer in the lurch if there's something he can do. And Archangel, well, she stuck for her own reasons."

Skater let the ork's words spin in his head, trying to get used to them. He remembered how alone he'd felt the previous night when the team had left him in the back room of the Bloody Rosebud of Phelia.

Duran stopped at a red light. "You put together a good team," he said, studying the rearview mirrors. "That's an achievement all by itself. If this had been some private action on your part and you'd gotten your hoop in the wringer all on your own, maybe none of us would have wanted to get mixed up in it. But it wasn't. You went into this thinking it was going to be a big score for all of us, and you got hosed for it."

"We all did," Skater pointed out.

"Yeah, but it's begi

"I know."

"We run the shadows together," Duran said. "Doesn't make us bosom chummers, but we do have a responsibility to each other. A leader sets the standard on that, lack, and you've set a high one these past three years."