“No.” He stowed his weapon and nodded to the opposite side of the table. “Want to sit?”
“Thank you.” She slid onto the rough stone bench, set her cup in front of her, and wrapped both hands around it. “I came to offer a truce.”
Her voice was light and easy. The firelight gilded half of her face and left the rest in shadow, turning her expression enigmatic. She was hard to read anyway. Sharp where he expected softness. Amused where he expected anger. “What kind of truce?”
“The kind where we stop poking at each other all the time.” She laughed a little. “The kind where I can stop coming up with creative ways to talk about murdering you because I know you’re eavesdropping.”
Knox didn’t want to like her. Liking her would make all this a hell of a lot worse. But he couldn’t help his grudging smile. “Fair’s fair. We had it coming. But old habits are hard to break. My men are alive because I’m meticulous.”
“I don’t doubt it. And yes, you had it coming.” She hesitated. “But it’s exhausting, all the same.”
“Can’t argue with that.” He lifted one hand from his mug to offer her a handshake before remembering she didn’t like to touch strangers. He dropped it awkwardly to the table instead. “A truce would be good. I think you’ve already wooed Conall to your side, anyway. I’ve never seen rations like those potatoes you made. Tasted like real food.”
“It is real food,” she corrected. “We have machines at home that freeze it, then remove the moisture. After that, it can keep for decades. So people from the community bring us things to preserve, and we keep a small part of it in return. A woman in my building grew those potatoes on our roof.”
He thought back to the bar, to the way people had moved around Nina and her crew. The way they’d watched them. He’d marked it up to the rational fear anyone with brains showed for a dominant predator, but that hadn’t quite fit, because no one had actually seemed afraid of them.
Maybe Nina was something even more dangerous than a predator.
Maybe she was a leader.
Knox cleared his throat. “Did you mean it? That I can just … ask you what I want to know?”
“Yes.” She held up a hand. “But only about myself, not my crew. Their stories aren’t mine to tell.”
“Of course.” He gripped his mug and considered his approach. Directly to the question he most wanted to ask, or a circuitous route? He bought time by building on the current topic. “I admit, I was wondering what you did with all the money from the Crypt score. But tech like that couldn’t have come cheap.”
Nina sipped her drink—not coffee, like his, but a fragrant herbal tea. “We work hard, and the investment was worth it. If people can’t grow and preserve food, they have to buy it from TechCorps suppliers. Not only is that stuff heavily processed, it’s expensive. And it tastes like shit. This way, everyone wins.” She smiled slowly. “Well, everyone except the TechCorps.”
Losing wasn’t something the TechCorps did often, and food had always been one of the main levers of force they used to keep the population under control. Most people either bought food directly from a company grocer or paid for access to a cafeteria. Some clever folks always tried to cut out the middleman and grow their own food, but the very reasonably priced seeds the TechCorps sold were deliberately modified to offer subpar yields. And farmers who saved seed from the harvested fruits and vegetables to sow the next year discovered they wouldn’t grow.
The TechCorps had elevated plausibly deniable scientific sabotage to an exquisite art form.
Nina wouldn’t reward those machinations. She and her neighbors undoubtedly sourced their seeds from the smugglers who brought in illegal heirloom varieties. Unlike the modified hybrids the TechCorps pushed, the heirloom seeds could be harvested, saved, and used again the next season. A sustainable solution.
Hell, Nina probably shouldered the risk of obtaining the seeds herself. It seemed like the sort of thing she’d do. The TechCorps couldn’t know about it, or about her food preservation collective, or they already would have come after her. When people started trusting each other and working together at the community level, areas stabilized. And stable families didn’t strike devil’s bargains with the TechCorps.
Knox had the destruction of more than one would-be organizer on what was left of