Page 46 of The Sound of Him

The door clicks shut again just as the printer is whirring to life. I start to reach for the energy drink I had already been working on before Kellan called before the back of my neck prickles like someone’s watching me.

I glance over my shoulder to find myself proven correctly. Travis is lurking near the door, looking as sketchy as a kid who just swiped cookies from the cookie jar. He almost startles when we make eye contact. Dread twists in my gut.What now?

“You want to change something?” I ask, trying not to sound annoyed or anxious or exhausted or anything else. He has a right to change details. It’s the whole reason we had a planning session as a team instead of just Maison and I deciding and giving hte orders. Him waiting until Maison left would have made sense. I wouldn’t have been happy about it, but it made sense.

Him waiting until Jake was gone too makes me nervous, though.

I am too anxious of a person on a good day, and barely fucking holding it together on this particular day, to be nervous on top of it.

“I wanted to ask you a favor. Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I wasn’t sure if - so here’s the thing.” He glances at the computer, then at me again. “Can you find someone on that? If I gave you some details and a name?”

“Depends on the details. Is it a full name, or just a first?”

“Just a first. He - uh.”

I fight the frown trying to pull at my lips, not wanting him to get even more self-concious about whatever this is. “It’s alright. Just talk to me, man. We’ll figure it out.”

“There’s a boy.” His eyes flutter closed for a moment. It’s the way someone looks when they suffer a loss, their world pulled out from under them, but they only have a moment to grieve. He exhales, slow and steady, before squaring his shoulders and looking back at me. Every anxiety from before is washed away, leaving nothing behind but confidence. I’ve only ever seen this version of him on video, from his time playing the part of Nathan Roarke. He sounds like him too when he says in a scary, threatening tone, “A fucking little kid.”

There’s something that happens to me when kids get involved in my job. The edges of this awful world go fuzzy and everything feels far away. I slip into a sort of auto-pilot, surviving my way through until I can turn the metaphorical page and forget about kids being trafficked altogether. It doesn’t take a fucking genius to figure out why.

Adam says it’s my brain trying to protect itself.

This time, as Travis starts speaking, my brain abandons me. He says, “He was young. Pre or very early teen, if Carter had to guess. He was in the cell with Carter and Casey. Carter thinks he was sold maybe 3 or 4 days before his own auction, but the timeline is fuzzy. He didn’t have a clock in the cell, and there was no light coming into the room they put him in at the end to punish him for fighting when they came for Elliot. Quinton isn’t supposed to be selling kids in that region, so it was likely a sidesale. Something quiet. Would have had to be with someone he could trust not to out him to the other players in the area.”

He says, “Blue eyes. Blonde. Pale.”

He says, “He wanted his mom.”

He says, “English speaking. No discernable accent.”

And my brain doesn’t protect me. My world doesn’t fade.

My name is Ace. I’m working tech for the clean-up of the Roarke Operation. I can smell the sticky sweet scent of my energy drink. I can feel the heat from my monitors. I can hear the internal fans whirring, trying to get the temperatures to come down.

I can taste bile on my tongue.

Can taste cum.

Travis asks, “You think we’ve got a shot in hell of finding him?”

There’s a little boy to find and yet… my reality is painfully in focus.

Why? Why isn't my brain fogging over? Why is it making me be here right now?

I don’t want to be here.

“Ace?” he asks, his voice quiet now, his confidence gone. “You think it’s possible? To find him?”

I curl my fingers around the arms of my chair. “No. Not impossible. Not - not with the systems I’ve built. The facial recognition software might - well, let me see what I can do.”

I turn back to my monitors, eager to feel the relief of the keys beneath my fingers.

It doesn’t work.