Free Those That Wake by Jesse Karp

subway.
    Brath went into a swift jog, cutting between cars like a shark headed for prey. Brath was that kind of a machine: he fixed his sights and he went. Mal followed him across the street, would always follow him, for better or worse. Brath wasn't in this for himself. He was the only person Mal knew who would get embroiled like this, no questions, simply because a friend had asked. He was the only person Mal had ever found a way to trust.
    Mal followed, stopping at the top of the subway stairs just as the person who had come from the building, a young woman, got to the bottom of the stairs.
    They caught up with her on the platform. She was slim and hard looking, carrying a messenger bag over her shoulder, stubborn around the eyes but jittery, all the more so when she saw the two of them approaching. She pretended not to look at them.
    "Hey," Brath said.
    "Yeah?" she said too quickly.
    "The package."
    "What package?" she tried, but Brath just looked right through it.
    "Open the bag," he said.
    "Who the hell are you?"
    "How come you're not in school?"
    "I'm nineteen," she said. "How come you're not in school?"
    "What's your name?"
    "I'm gonna tell you my name?"
    "Just tell me your first name," Brath said, all reason. "I can't do anything with just your first name."
    She looked him over a moment longer. Her eyes flicked to Mal.
    "Isabel." She nearly spit it out.
    "Look, Isabel. I need to see the package. You can hand it to me or we can do it a different way. Do you want that kind of trouble?"
    Her expression didn't back down, and Mal was perversely proud of her for it.
    "Why don't I go talk to the MCT about this?" she suggested.
    "Yeah, Isabel, why don't you?" Brath met her bravado with a cold gaze. His razor-blade face was still, all its focus collected around the freezing eyes. Maybe the girl had seen that kind of look in her life before and knew what she was dealing with.
    "Look, I don't know what it is," she said. "The scanners would go off if it was something dangerous. I got a job. I come pick stuff up sometimes."
    "Let's both find out," Brath said, and his hand wandered behind his back, as casually as you please. "I'm not kidding."
    She ejected a disgusted "
Pfff,
" and her hand went to the bag and started to pull the package.
    "Whoa," Brath said, his own hand moving around to the small of his back. "Just open the bag and show it to me."
    Isabel obeyed, and Brath reached in and took out a bundle about the size of a dictionary.
    "Where was this going?"
    "I'm supposed to leave it on a bench in a playground."
    "Where?"
    She supplied an address.
    Brath looked down at the package, Mal doing the same over his shoulder. Even Isabel, now that it was sitting out there, looked at the thing as if it held something bad, something wrong, something dangerous.
    "You know a kid named Tommy?" Brath said, not even looking up, showing her that the answer didn't have any real significance to him. "Around our age, dark hair, dark eyes, does the same kind of work."
    Mal was about to pull the picture out, but she was already shaking her head.
    "I don't know anyone in this, just the man in the suit who gives me the packages."
    Mal wanted to ask her about the man in the suit, about that voice he'd found somehow familiar, but he let it go by him, in fear of ruining the illusion with his uncertainty.
    Brath nodded absently at her response, his attention held by the package.
    Mal didn't want to see what it held, for fear that it would condemn Tommy to something unforgivable.
    "Open it," he said anyway.
    Isabel was watching, almost glaring at them now. There was some sense from her, as well, that finding out the contents of the package was of sudden importance, that it held the depth and breadth of her destiny, too.
    Brath's sharp fingers tore and revealed shreds of paper within. He sifted through it, letting it fall to the platform at his feet, until he was holding nothing at all.
    They looked down at the scraps of paper, shredded to such a degree