I suggested, “I’m just a junkyard receptionist. They appeared after you got here. They followed you in.” I pushed a little, a very, very little, with my blood. “You put me in danger.”
“You think they . . .” He stopped. “They followed me,” he agreed easily, because the timeline worked. “I know some of ’em. The guy I took out at the office front airlock was Rikerd Cotter, number three in the Angels. The woman . . .” He went silent.
I watched the woman and the Vaper on camera. There was something personal, intimate, way more than friendly, between the two. Even in the dim light, he appeared to lean into her, to mirror her movements.
I opened a screen to watch Jagger’s face as he watched the couple out front while also skimming through his Morphon. He was looking at photos and documents, his expression faintly perplexed. The set of his jaw said he wasn’t going to tell me whatever he was thinking or looking for.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, agreeing with his thoughts. “I understand. There’re things an enforcer knows and never speaks about. Ever. Military Intel. Unproven intel. Gossip and lies. But . . .”—I let my voice go slow and soft—“you did bring them here.” Which left off any mention of Harlan, who arrived first, before Jagger, but still. The suggestions were enough and might even be too much if he realized he was being influenced.
Jagger said, “I have a report of a badly-scarred woman who joined the Angels as an Old Lady, six-plus years ago, riding with a newly made-man, the guy with her on-screen, moniker One-Eyed Jack.”
My heart thundered through me. The breath I took hurt. One-Eyed Jack had shot Harlan. His note said so—the note, addressed to me, which he’d written after he sealed himself into the Tesla.
Jagger said, “One-Eyed Jack bears a striking resemblance to—”
He stopped. He was flipping back and forth from picture to picture, the office camera set too far behind him for me to see his pics clearly as tears gathered in my eyes. The tattooed man with the black and white beard had killed Harlan. My friend.
Jagger studied several pics, his eyes going back and forth from his Morphon to the screen where the woman and the Vaper stood.
“Yeah . . . Yeah,” he muttered. “I have a feeling that’s a woman who died—officially that is—over seven years ago. Clarisse Warhammer.”
“You mean like, ‘Hello, Clarisse, are the lambs screaming?’” I paraphrased. “‘Pardon me as I have some liver, fava beans, and Chianti?’ From that old movie? And Warhammer? Not a real name.”
“If she’s who I think she is, the names were assigned by the military, and appear on at least one set of her official IDs. She’s real. She’s also listed as presumed dead by the military. And it appears she’s also number two in the Angels. A female made-man, listed in their contacts as CL Warhammer. But. If I’m right, she’s had a lot of nano-plaz work done to restore her features. The woman out front looks like she did before she was wounded.”
Jagger’s statements covered a lot of overlapping, contrary possibilities, things I’d think through later if we survived this. On the office camera, two junkyard cats leaped smoothly to the back of Jagger’s chair and reclined, watching everything he did. Which was weird, but not weirder than anything else that was happening.
On the office screen, the woman gestured to the office in the distance, but spoke too softly to be overheard on the property’s security sensors. One-Eyed Jack, the Vaper, put an arm around her shoulders, a companionable gesture rather than a claiming one. It was odd; women in the OMW and in the Angels tended to be viewed as possessions, not equals. There were exceptions, and the war had changed things. Little Mama and Little Girl had proven that. But we had been the rarities.
“I get that she’s a female made-man. But a woman is number two in the Angels?” I clarified.
“She took that spot two years ago. She fought her way up, taking out a line of made-men in personal combat.”
“Augmented?”
“To hell and back,” Jagger said, his eyes on his Morphon, scanning documents. “Yeah. Here it is. Augmented by the military, trained and used extensively as an assassin, under another name, in another life. When the war ended, she proved too violent and uncontrolled to follow orders, so she was tossed out on her butt, along with thousands of warriors like