Page 31 of Born for Starlight

"I've got references." I didn't tell him who. I never would. "And your guys are satisfied. That's why Code called me instead of arguing with you for an hour."

On the line, Code made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

"Fine," Jase said. He didn't sound happy. "Fine. But you tell me everything. Every step."

"I'll tell you what you need to know."

"That's not⁠—"

"That's the deal, Jase. It's the only one on the table." I stopped walking, bending down at the waist, then standing back up, admiring the view. "You want somebody who reports every move to the family? Send a Boy Scout. You want somebody who brings her home? That's me. You don't get both."

The quiet stretched.

"Bring her home," Jase said, quiet now.

"That's the plan."

We hung up. I stood on the hill for a minute, letting my heart come back down, and then I started back to the LeeHy Motel.

After my shower, I dug through my duffel and found clothes to throw on, then opened my laptop on the wobbling desk.

Angelica's people had sent an itinerary through Onyx, which meant Code had it, which meant I had it. Two destinations. Two orphanages she meant to visit, tour, and hand a great deal of money to.

The first one I liked before I finished reading the file.

Casa Semente. A children's shelter outside São Luís, run by a Catholic order with sixty years of clean history and an NGO partner that published real audits. I read the audits. I read the board. I read the names of the nuns who'd been there for decades and the volunteers who kept coming back. I ran every one of them the way I ran everyone, and they came back exactly as clean as they looked, which almost never happened.

Casa Semente was the real thing. Underfunded, overworked, doing the actual work with too little of everything. The first half of Angelica’s quarter million would change lives there. Her name on it would pull in ten times that from people who followed her. She could stand in that courtyard and do genuine good, be photographed doing it, and go home whole.

I sat with that for a moment. If I could get her to Casa Semente, let her fall for the place, let her pour herself into it, maybe I could make it be enough. Maybe the second site could become a line item she funded from a distance. Or who knows, maybe the next place was just as clean.

Maybe.

Then I opened the second file, and the room got colder.

Instituto Aurora. The name was clean. The paperwork was clean. It was state-run, chartered under one of the northern states, folded into the child-welfare apparatus that decided which orphaned and abandoned children went where. It was legitimate on every form. Which was exactly the problem. The rot in a place like Casa Semente, if there'd been any, would have shown up in the audits. Instituto Aurora didn't get audited by anyone it didn't own.

I'd been hearing about places like Aurora, for three years. Specifically, reformers inside the Brazilian system had been trying to pull threads on Aurora. Prosecutors, a couple of federal police who wouldn't take the money, a journalist or two. Some of them had stopped because of dead ends and some of them had stopped because they were dead. The rot went up. Past the institute, past the state guardianship council, up into offices with flags in them. You couldn't raid it, because the people who'd sign the warrant were on the payroll.

I read between the lines.

Aurora had too much turnover. Too much illness. Too many accidents, too many transfers. They were trafficking children. I knew the process too well. The lucky ones would go to a foreign couple, but that would be the young ones. The ones who’d photograph well. The ones who smiled. Or the babies.

Then there were the older ones. They’d go to Asia, Europe and the Gulf, but from Brazil, it was mostly the Gulf and Europe. Wherever the money was and there weren’t any questions. Girls and boys. Mostly girls. And Aurora was not just an orphanage, it was a girl’s academy. So it was girls. They’d go out through falsified abandonment papers to buyers who paid a great deal and Aurora asked nothing.

I sat in the dead quiet of that room for a while, and I thought about a two-year-old carried half-starved out of a building thirty years ago, in this same country, out of the exact kind of pipeline that fed institutes like Aurora before Aurora had a name. Angelica thought she was going down there to honor that. She had no idea she was walking toward the grown-up version of the room she'd been born into.

She was going to insist on Aurora. I knew it the way I knew the last mile of a run. She hadn't seen the file, hadn't heard the name, and she was still going to insist, because a woman who flew back into her own worst memory to stand in it was not a woman who'd let me hand her the safe one and call it done.

The obvious move was to find another safe orphanage to visit. Get Aurora off her itinerary. But with Angelica, that wouldn’t work. She’d want to know why. She’d demand it. And she’d know. And she’d demand to be taken to Aurora. Insist that was exactly why her presence was mandatory.

Dammit!

Then she’d want to know how I knew so much about Aurora. She’d start chipping away at my background. Chipping away at me. Demanding. Relentless. My one play was to let her go, and not tell her, not let her see the seedy underbelly of Aurora.

But at the same time, maybe this would be an opportunity for me to follow some breadcrumbs and find out who was operating behind Aurora. What was the scope. If I couldn’t talk her out of this, maybe this was the opportunity I needed.

So I couldn't scare her off with what I knew. I could only follow her in. It was time to call a lifeline.