Page 51 of Rooster's Remorse
"WT." I go to the pages without looking, my thumb finds them on its own. "WT's on almost every page. Goes back the furthest, comes the most, and there's a note next to it I could never crack. It says comp half the time. Like it's short for something and they got lazy about writing it out."
Imani stops writing.
She goes still, pencil lifted off the page, and then she prints four letters on the legal pad and turns it so I can see.
She's writtencomp.
"That's not short for a name." She takes her glasses off. "It's an accounting word. Comped. Complimentary. It means WT doesn't pay."
Somebody's got a game on across the room. A chair drags in the kitchen. None of it reaches me.
"Everybody pays." My voice comes out too flat and I don't fix it. "That's the whole business. I heard them turn men away over money. I heard men beg on the other side of a wall and get told no."
"Everybody pays except the man who owns it." Imani sets the pencil down and folds her hands. "Or the man it's being run for. You don't comp a customer eleven years running, Mila. You comp the boss."
I look at the book.
Eight fucking months.
For eight months I carried this thing against my chest across a border and slept with it under my pillow in a spare room.
I read WT off these pages in the dark more times than I can count, and every single time I read a man who came a lot.
A regular. A face I'd have known. Never once the man who owns the place. I read it as a woman who'd been inside it. Imani read it as a book.
My face is hot and my hands have gone cold on the table and I put them in my lap where nobody can watch them.
"There's more." Imani's fully in it now, glasses back down her nose, going page by page. "This isn't a guest list. It's a billing record. Look at the figures—none of them are round. Nobody hands cash across a desk in a bunker and it comes to four hundred and eighty-five dollars even. These were invoiced. Somebody kept books."
"So?"
"So a book like this doesn't live by itself." She looks up at me over the rims. "You don't keep a billing ledger for a business that has no names in it. This is the working copy. The shorthand. The thing the man at the desk scratches in during the night. The clean set—the one with WT spelled all the way out, with a bank behind it—that's kept somewhere else."
The shorthand copy.
Eight months I hauled the wrong book across a desert and told myself it was everything I had.
"You didn't grab the wrong one." Imani's reading my face, which nobody does, only Lashes does that. "You grabbed the one that was open on the desk while a man was writing in it. That's not a mistake, that's evidence. Somebody's keeping a clean set, and wherever it is, I can guarantee it's locked away safely."
There's a heat coming up the back of my throat and a lift under my ribs like the floor of an elevator.
I know exactly what it is and I don't want it, because the last time I let it in, I was standing with my palm flat on the eighth door on the left, and it nearly got me killed.
Hope isn’t something I can afford to carry into a desert. But it's in me anyway, warm and terrible, and I sit with it and let it stay.
This book was a dead weight I dragged across a border for nothing. Now it's got a thread coming off it. And a thread runs to something.
* * *
We work until Hope wakes up.
She goes from asleep to outraged in one breath, the way she does, and Lashes has her up on a shoulder and swaying before I've turned my head all the way.
"She's hungry." Lashes is already rising. "I'll take her out, you two keep at it?—"
"Don't."
It's out of me before I decide to let it out.
