Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Kira walked three blocks before she understood the shape of her new problem. The buyers had paid for her route and gotten nothing. They wanted their money back or her body to show for it. A price on a courier spread fast in this city. Every street ear would be listening for her name by morning. She needed to know how much they were offering, and she needed to kill the tip line before it filled. She found the corner she wanted. A wooden bench sat under a dim streetlight, initials cut deep into the slats from years of waiting men. Two runners leaned against the armrest, trading whispers for coins. Above the bench, bolted to the wall, hung a concrete plate with red letters and a black sprayed face. A fresh strip of tape ran across the bottom with a number written in marker. Her number. She read the figure and felt her stomach drop. It was three times what the fixer had promised for the whole job. Anyone who saw her tonight would sell her before breakfast. She crossed the street with her head low and stopped at a brick building with frosted glass panels along the front. A bathhouse. The kind of place where a woman could pay at the door, hand over her coat, and vanish for a night into steam and shared benches. No cameras inside. No names asked. She counted what was left in her jacket. Enough for two nights if she ate nothing. She pushed through the door, paid the woman at the counter, and took a towel. In the back room she scrubbed the district off her skin and sat against the tile until her hands stopped shaking. She was off the street. The bounty could not reach her through the walls tonight. But sitting in the steam, she did the math she had been avoiding. The bounty meant the buyers would not stop. Every job she took in this city from now on would carry her face on that wall. The work she used to feed her family had just become the thing that would get her killed in front of them. She had bought one night of quiet with the last coins meant for a deposit on a room outside the district. The safe house money was already gone. Now the hiding money was going too. When she walked out of the bathhouse in the morning, she would have to find a buyer of her own — someone willing to pay for what she knew about Voss, and about the fixer who sent her after him. She had spent her career refusing to sell information. That rule ended tonight.