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this time.” My hands had curled into fists, nails digging into my palms. I’d meant to go find him and put him down after the last one. I’d forgotten.
    “Don’t know yet,” said Arthur. “You in?”
    “Yeah, of course. Let me gear up.”
    Ten minutes later we were speeding down the freeway in Arthur’s SUV. The thing was built like a tank—he’d probably splurged after his last few cars had gotten blown up or shot at.
    Most of those had been my fault.
    A set of headlights poked at my consciousness from one of the side mirrors, a driving pattern that wasn’t taking advantage of the traffic properly. I frowned.
    “What is it?” Arthur asked.
    “Are we being followed?”
    He slowed and changed lanes, as if about to take an exit. The car sped past.
    What the hell was wrong with me? At least that time it had been something quantifiable, but the driver had probably just been drunk or something. I shook myself. “Give me the lowdown. What do you know?”
    “Not much. Just a location. Heard Pourdry’s trying to replace his shipment from last night.”
    His shipment of people. Children. Teenagers.
    Arthur was clearly thinking along the same lines. “No one wants to admit we still got slavery going on in this country.”
    “The strong will always prey on the weak,” I said. “That’s human nature.”
    “So—what? We gotta accept they got the power?”
    “No. We make them weak.” I started going through my spare magazines to make sure they were all topped off.
    Arthur made a noise that didn’t quite sound like agreement.
    We pulled over a block out. Arthur’s location was a multi-arch bridge that spanned the river and freeway as well as a few city blocks, raising the city into three dimensions. Side streets ran parallel, ramping up onto the raised highway level or slanting down off it. The local roads below became a jungle of concrete in the darkness, a no-man’s land of pillar and tunnel and shadow.
    We kept our footfalls quiet as we jogged forward and ducked under the darkness of the bridge. We both had handguns out—me my trusty Colt, Arthur a Glock .45. I’d ragged on him for carrying a Glock for years, but he continued to insist it had never given him a hiccup of trouble in the field.
    I also had an HK416 carbine looped around me on a sling. Best to be prepared.
    Arthur held up a hand.
    “What?” I whispered.
    “Hear something.”
    He sidestepped farther into the shadows, his gun steady. I followed.
    The sound rose and fell, tickling the edges of my hearing. A jagged, bleeding sound. The sound of a kid crying.
    Ahead of me, Arthur moved steadily toward it.
    “Wait,” I said.
    He froze.
    Up and down. Up and down. Sob, breathe, sob.
    “Russell?” Arthur’s voice bowed with tension, tight as a guitar string.
    Sob, breathe, sob. The same frequencies, as clear as if it were graphed out on an oscilloscope. Periodic.
    “It’s looping,” I said.
    He didn’t try listening for it—he probably couldn’t have discerned it anyway; the cries weren’t distinctive enough from each other for the loop to be obvious to anyone else. But Arthur trusted me. “A recording?”
    I half-turned to cover our six. “Where did you get this intel?”
    “Info on crime lords, ’s not like I’m talking to folks with tons of vetting. Think it’s a trap?”
    “Well,” I said. “Yeah.”
    “Back the way we came?”
    I considered. If I were setting a trap here and I had an infinite number of goons at my disposal, the first thing I would do was close off escape.
    “We cut sideways,” I said. Not back to where they’d be closing the gap, not forward where they’d be expecting us.
    Arthur rotated on the spot and slid into following me as I took point. I headed deeper under the bridge, the alley we were on becoming a tunnel. The air reeked of stale sewage and human urine.
    “We keep going this way, we hit the freeway,” Arthur murmured.
    “That’s what I’m counting on,” I answered. Arthur thought the