The windshield exploded in a starburst pattern where the rock struck, smaller than a golf ball but thrown with enough force to startle us both into silence. The sedan swerved around a boy in jean shorts, who stood psychopathically unmoved by the oncoming car as he bent down to grab another projectile from his pile of assorted rubble.

  Air rushed in as the driver's side window opened and Jackson stuck his head out to holler. "You trying to die, three-foot-nothin?"

  The boy's answer came in the form of another rock, thrown with all the give-a-shit of pre-adolescence. It fell yards short, skipping down the street until it caught something uneven and tumbled into a pile of debris.

  "Where are we?" I asked, finally setting the laptop aside and twisting around in my seat to watch the kid. Passing car attended to, he'd climbed back to his perch in the bed of a rusted-out truck, returning to his vigil with unsettling focus. Something about it put me off. Latchkey vandals weren't uncommon around the metroplex, you didn't have to look too far to find one, even in the before days.

  Difference was, they usually chose their locations better. Hurled artillery from the safety of high bridges over abandoned maintenance roads, targets scattered and spread out over time. Not walking directly towards a moving car and hurling debris at it, all but taunting the target to accelerate and run you down in return.

  "Still a ways off. Once we're in, we'll be skirting the nineteen-twenty DMZ from the nineteen side."

  I fought the urge to tap my fingers, to fidget. In theory, I was in a much better position now. No longer purely on defense. But with Miles going so far out of his way to monitor and pin me down, time was slipping away. And I had no real leads when it came to running down my safety net.

  It didn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe the kid was just fed up. Maybe Jackson had it right.

  Still, the dichotomy was striking enough that I forwent the laptop entirely for the moment and start paying attention to our surroundings. Probably for the best. It was exactly the type of thing I'd obsess over, if I gave myself enough leeway to do so.

  Not that I had any fucking idea what I was looking for.

  An older man on a park bench we passed had no surface-level thoughts pertaining to the galleria or its thefts. Neither did the vagrant, or the mother and daughter exiting the bodega, their eyes tracking our slow-rolling car with the wariness of prey animals.

  "We are being noticed," Jackson observed.

  "Not a lot of alternatives." I murmured, giving the mother and daughter a second look. It wasn't so long ago that I'd disregarded a similar pair hopping into the back of an SUV, and I'd lost count of the ways that particular lapse had come back to haunt me. The car approached a no-outlet, still cruising at five miles under the posted twenty-five. "Turn left, then left again."

  "Grid search?" Jackson guessed.

  "Kind of." Unfortunately, this was the best option I could think of. The Galleria's theft issue, as the Steward described it on paper, was too extensive to be the work of a single thief. From the quantities we'd discussed, and the elevated payout of the quest he'd assigned me, it almost had to be a ring. And while it was always easier to track down a group of people than to find a single individual, we were dealing with two large, hostile regions forming a substantial slice of territory to cover.

  "It'd be easier if you read me in." Jackson's words came clipped, the subtle hints he'd been dropping all morning finally giving way to direct confrontation.

  "I like you, Jackson. Hence, me trying to keep you away from my shit."

  "Respectfully, Mr. Client, I'm already in your shit."

  "Are you now?" I asked, divesting myself of the view of the painfully dismal street to eye Jackson again. Beyond his loyalty to the almighty dollar, he hadn't really done anything to invite suspicion. He'd gone over and above on the Adventurer's Guild drop, but not too far. Good instincts.

  "We've spent enough time together to fill in the blanks that you're well-connected. You have open lines of communication with multiple high-level contacts. On good enough terms with the boss that she just lets you roam around her sanctuary freely. And while I don't believe for a minute that you're 'just' a communications broker, you're clearly competent enough at it to give a dedicated cynic pause."

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Thought you liked Sera."

  He shook his head at me, frustration evident in the set of his jaw. "That's cause I do like her, misdirecting motherfucker. It's not impossible to see someone, observe that they're jaded on account of experience, and still want to take 'em out for a matinee and a bucket of popcorn." Jackson's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he attempted to return to the matter at hand. "Point being—"

  I interrupted, not wanting to go through the bother of creating a lie to explain why this was an effective method of search. "Pretty sure, from how Sera came onto you, she wasn't interested in a matinee."

  "That doesn't matter."

  "It doesn't?"

  "She's playing short, I'm playing long. You bridge that gap slow – matinees, popcorn, the kind of time that doesn't end up biblical. Show her you’re interested in more than one way to spend a Sunday. Now do you wanna keep poking at me about my personal life or do you want to get back to the things that matter?"

  "Right. You were telling me all the reasons you'll end up as a loose end that needs tending."

  For the first time since he'd started driving again, I had Jackson's full attention. His eyes burned into me from the side. "Little Miss Mega Millions had me crawling through mud, over-undering a whole county prison's worth of barbwire, doing fucking burpees. And that was the first day. That shit and worse went on for weeks. Don't even joke about clipping me after I went through all that."

  I raised my hands in surrender and leaned back in the seat. Filling Jackson in would give him a little more information and context than I was comfortable with him having, but given the current state of things, keeping a lid on it might mean losing my safety net entirely.

  I tucked my hand under my chin, keeping watch out the window, scanning the surface thoughts of a Hispanic man siphoning gas out of a derelict car into a tank at his feet. "We're looking for a group. More than five people, less than twenty. They've been using the Galleria as a low-security piggy bank, sourcing provisions along with more exotic supplies. A rat problem."

  As I'd expected, Jackson looked at me like I was the stupidest motherfucker on the face of the earth. "So... we're driving around... lookin’... for ‘em? Like a lost dog?" He scanned the road. "Any group larger than four, we'll just pull up and say, any of y'all stupid enough to steal from the Driftless? That's your plan?"

  With effort, I silenced the growl in my throat. "If I had the luxury of a couple weeks, I'd start us off with a stakeout, maybe focus the altruistic efforts of organizations in the area and sieve for information." Subconsciously, I pulled up my UI and glanced at the clock, which read a quarter after four. "Unfortunately for fucking everyone who doesn't have sticky fingers, there's less than two hours to work with, and after that it doesn't matter. It's over. May as well not even worry about it. So, yes, we're driving around looking for anyone suspicious. I'm not expecting success. If anything, we have a ten, fifteen percent shot."

  "Fifteen's a little optimistic for slack-jawed rubbernecking, but at least you're not delusional. And you sound worried about it." Jackson said, reaching the end of the region and turning around again.

  "It'd mean the loss of a safety net."

  "What are the chances you'll need it?"

  "Fifty-fifty." I chewed a nail. "It was supposed to already be secured based on past interactions, but from a brief chat, the only way they'll come through is if I deal with the problem. So, even if there's an astronomically low chance this gets us anywhere, I need to try."

  "Got you over a barrel?" Jackson observed.

  "He thinks he does." I left the ruined nail behind and chewed my lip. "People tend to remember when you take the screws to them while they're up to their necks. He knows that and he's doing this anyway. I might not be the only one dealing with internal pressures. Either that or—"

  "—the plan was never to lend a helping hand to begin with. Just make a show of it, and aw-shucks-sorry-fella when you fail." Jackson sighed.

  "Exactly. Easier than saying no. Less fallout."

  "Okay." Jackson sighed, scanning around us at a four-way stop. "There wouldn't be so much theft if there wasn't a local market for knocked-over goods. Guessing they're not moving shit through Kinsley, or you would have thought of that already. Seeing how they're moving perishables, no one goes through the effort of stealing shit just to let it spoil. So we wanna be looking around where the shops are. The ones that aren't rubble, anyway. Use the hub as a starting point, work out a proximity. No guarantee that we'll find anyone, especially within a two-hour window, but it's better than just driving aimlessly. That's part one."

  He was probably right. And to both our benefit, my surface scans hadn't been fruitless. More than a few people had been thinking about securing supplies, visiting a few brick and mortars still running towards the west side of the region. I pulled up the map and circled the area, and messaged the map to him.

  Jackson made a decidedly unhappy noise when he saw it. "Well, shit. That's where we came in."

  I thought back to the half-pint sentinel in the back of the truck, hurling rocks at traffic. How ambivalent and aloof he was, despite the immaturity of the task. Could be nothing, but it was in the right area, which made it a decent place to start.

  "What's part two?" I asked Jackson.

  "Well. They're thieves." Deftly maneuvering a U-turn with one hand, Jackson reached over my lap and stuck a small stubby key into the glove box, then opened it. Beside a few photos and the usual stack of papers was a gleaming, platinum watch with a five-pronged crown prominently featured on its face. He grabbed the watch and secured it on his wrist as he drove, juggling the steering wheel. "May as well start with a little bait."

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