Page 115 of Rattle the Cage

But it was Tess who gasped first as the screenshot appeared on the screens. “Holy shit.”

Leaning forward, I tilted my head. “No fucking way.”

There in an ultra-modern podcast studio, sat in a plush velour chair, was Rubin — The Messenger — speaking into a microphone and proselytizing on this guy’s podcast.

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TESS

My jaw dropped at the sight of his pixelated face.

What the fuck was Rubin doing with a guy like this?

They were from two different planets. Rubin was committed to his yeoman farmer cosplay, while a podcaster in his snapback and leather racing jacket looked like my sleep paralysis fuckboy.

A shiver ran down my spine. “How did they even meet?”

“Good question. No answer yet,” Tracer leaned back in her chair, gaze swivelling between the four of us. “What I do know is that episode went up a few days ago — posthumously. Which either means that Jeremy Zoric’s team doesn’t realize he’s dead, or they’re trying to keep that information covered up until they find out who did it.”

“50/50 odds on either option,” Nash tilted her head. “Wouldn’t be surprised if the asshole made a habit of disappearing every once in a while.”

“No use speculating until there’s more to go on,” Cyrus frowned. “What else’ve you got?”

Tracer turned back to her screen, clicking through a couple of pages to illustrate her points. “Jeremy Zoric’s from around the Hudson Valley. Went to college a couple of towns over, works a few betting market sponsorships… biggest ticket item as far as your bird friends would be concerned is that he had charges for sex trafficking overseas. I’d bet they nabbed him once he stepped back into the States.”

“Then they brought him to us.” Cyrus nodded, dark eyes drinking in every pixel of information on the screens.

There was a long moment of silence as everyone tried to puzzle the pieces together: even Blade was transfixed, leaning against the back of Tracer’s chair as her eyes flitted across the screens.

Tracer waited patiently for us to catch up with nearly a week’s worth of her work until Nash finally broke the silence. “Have you scrubbed the podcast episode with Rubin? Are there any highlights?”

“Oh, there’s some real gems in there,” she groaned, opening up a folder of downloaded clips. “I’ll send this all home with you on a flashdrive, but here’s a real winner.”

She clicked into a file labelled ASSHOLES_CLIP3_COLLEGE, prompting a video to swallow the screen. Rubin and Jeremy sat comfortably in plush leather chairs, big black microphones hovering in front of their faces.

“Campuses are of utmost importance for our mission,” Rubin nodded solemnly. “Hotbeds of corruption and liberal ideology. Once, we learned useful skills, trades. Our education system was built around apprenticeship with each sex taking on the sphere that best fit our natural talents. Men in the world, and women in the home.

“But you start to mess with the natural order, you start devaluing natural femininity and driving women into masculine roles that reject their inherent need to care for others, and the balance is gone. God’s vision is perverted.”

Jeremy took a sip of his hard seltzer. “You don’t gotta tell me about perverted. It’s like the colleges are pumping hormones into the fucking water. Back at Radford, I swear to god the girls were hornier than the guys were. I don’t know if it was the water or the fucking sports raising their testosterone, but these girls, I mean. They were fucking anything that moved. I was scared to walk across campus without them flying at me, pussy first.”

Rubin smirked, though he quickly tried to hide the expression behind a heavy nod. “We tell them to act as men in the job force and expect those repercussions to be contained to one sphere. But humans are not so simple. The messaging we give our youth has consequences that affect the rest of their lives. Do you know how many young women have come to my flock with regrets about abandoning their celibacy? The rate of infertility in this country alone speaks volumes.”

“It’s crazy,” Jeremy shook his head. “I mean, you can barely breathe on campus without a girl coming to you for child support or abortion money. What kind of fucked up choice is that? And god forbid you won’t pay for her birth control, the rape allegations will come flying at you so fast. Did you hear about that poor frat brother over at Atwood a couple of years ago who⁠—”

His mouth hung open dumbly as Tracer paused the clip. “I think you get the gist.”

Blood pulsed hot through my eardrums. Looking at the screen, all I could see was red. If I hadn’t already killed the fucker, the Freaks would have a hard time holding me back from stealing Cyrus’ Aston Martin and hunting the fucker down myself.

I struggled to get air in against the tightening of my chest.

He didn’t suffer enough. I’ll make sure the next one does.

While my rage was silent and deadly, the Freaks were much more outspoken about their indignation.

“What a fucking asshat,” Blade snarled, pushing off of Tracer’s seat.

Nash’s lip curled, showing a lethal flash of teeth. “I could think of a few ways to fix his little birth control issue. The rape allegations too.”