Page 119 of Played By Design

There.

I pull the drive free.

Back at the desk, I connect it to Kain’s offline workstation and wait for the drive to mount.

Folders populate the screen.

I know the basic timeframe for when Orien’s job happened, so I narrow the search.

Date: January

Source: Lev

Agent: Orien

Type: Trafficking

The right folder pops to the top of the list. I click it open. Five female Omega victims, ages thirteen to sixteen. Recovered January 20th and returned home or put into hiding, depending on how they were sold.

Nasty business.

I draw my laptop over.

The forum transaction was posted on January 18th.

Two days earlier.

Five obsidian shards.

Five Omega girls.

My pulse kicks. “No fucking way.”

But one matching number and one matching date aren’t enough. Luckily, I know what to test. I pull another hard drive, this one from last summer, and search Saint and Brickwell.

Omegas were being trafficked through the West Dock District. The Rockford family job that brought a billionaire playboy to our doorstep in search of help.

This one takes time. Saint generates a lot of results because Saint solves a lot of problems.

I narrow it by date, Brickwell, and West Dock.

One folder remains.

I open the job summary, return to the forum archive, and search the same date range for obsidian shards.

Three results.

The first shows a different seller. The second is from the wrong week. But the third stops every thought in my head.

user_ember_district_runner_22 >> Sourcing obsidian shards. 12,000 gold per stack. Waterfront depot.

I’ve seen this one before. It was one of the first transactions I flagged when I realized something was wrong with the archive. Twelve thousand gold for a material worth nowhere near that much, traded at a location nonexistent in Dusk Protocol.

At the time, all I knew was that ‘waterfront depot’ referenced an IRL location.

The job summary on Kain’s other monitor lists the location.

West Dock District.