Page 21 of South of Justice

Nothing. Yet.

She leaned back in the hard chair and stretched her sore shoulders. Her legs still ached from the climb. She hesitated, then opened the final tool: a cloaked identity packet meant as bait. Just a username, tied to an innocuous-looking account buried in a low-traffic data pool. She’d never used it for anything real, but the breadcrumbs linked it, indirectly to the last known alias she’d used in México City.

If someone was digging for her, they’d find this.

She clicked “Deploy.”

It was like sending a flare into the dark. Anyone watching the sky would see it. But only someone who knew what they were looking for would chase it.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe she should’ve kept hiding. Waited them out.

But that was the thing about shadows. They didn’t always pass. Sometimes, you had to step into the light and see what came running.

She encrypted the net, logged the ping trail, then closed the laptop.

The trap was set.

She pumped water from the rusted pipe outside the cabin and filled a battered kettle. The water was brownish at first, then cleared. She boiled it on the stove, poured half into a tin cup, and sat outside on the cabin step as dusk rolled in like smoke.

Night fell fast, all at once, as it did in the mountains. The horizon went from gold to indigo in minutes, and with it came the sounds. Insects hummed. Something with claws scrambled across the tin roof. In the trees beyond, something howled, high-pitched and wild. A coyote, maybe. Or a fox. But there were jaguars in these parts, too. The forest whispered all around her: crickets and creaking branches and something larger, slower, crashing through the brush in the distance. Maybe a boar. Maybe a big cat. Maybe nothing.

She wasn’t good with fear. Not the primal kind. Out here, it wasn’t the cartel that scared her the most. It was nature.

She drank, cradling the cup between her hands, and looked out over the trees. The scent of smoke from her wood stove drifted through the air. Then she got up and locked the doorbehind her. She stared at the darkened window for a moment, then shoved a wooden bench against the door, just in case.

She turned off the light and waited for the world to notice she was back.

FIFTEEN

NINE YEARS AGO

Lucía leanedagainst the low concrete wall, her blouse sticking to her back in the heat. The air tasted like sun-warmed asphalt and smog, but at least up here it was quiet.

She hadn’t meant to come here. She’d just kept climbing stairs, past the top floor, through an unlocked maintenance door, until she’d found the sky.

Her badge hung around her neck, twisted and caught in the neckline of her shirt. Her head still buzzed with numbers, shell corporations, and off-shore trusts, like the code had crawled in behind her eyes and refused to leave.

She heard the door open behind her and didn’t turn.

“You’re not going to jump, are you?” came Mateo’s voice. “Because if you are, I call dibs on your monitor.”

Lucía let out a breath that was half a laugh, half exhaustion.

“Is this where you follow all the interns?”

“Only the ones who correct the trainers mid-presentation,” he said, joining her at the ledge. “That was savage, by the way. You made Calderón visibly sweat.”

“He was wrong.”

“Absolutely. But most of us just pretend not to notice.”

Lucía didn’t smile. “Pretending isn’t one of my skillsets.”

Mateo studied her, then pulled a pack of mints from his pocket and offered one. She took it.

He leaned forward, elbows on the ledge. “You know, I was sure you were going to laugh in my face when I tried talking to you in the waiting room.”

“You didn’t try,” she said. “You did.”