“Poor baby,” Jaw rumbled.  Bryce looked up at the man and then looked away, angry.

Heh. Yeah, I don’t like chores either, but Jaw is right to be sarcastic about this.

“Got sick, then when I get better my sister drags me to this church, same fucking thing.  Lame people, lame place, and I just know I’ll be doing more fucking chores to ‘earn my keep’.  Fuck that.  Some people came to trash the church, and I figured, hey, there’s a way out.  Have some fun.”

Yeeah, and then you didn’t tell anyone who cared about you a damn thing, not even that you were okay.

Which it does seem like you were, even if the Merchants weren’t as fun as you thought they’d be.

He cast a quick glance at the bleached blond girl next to him.

Ah, yes, that kind of fun.

Maybe he was a bit older. I remember he was described as hard to tell the age of, but I’m not sure whether we learned his actual age.

“There’s no story to tell,” Bryce glared at her.  “Our house falls down, my family moves in with my dad’s friend.  Everyone else goes to work, I’m left with two of the lamest fucking families ever.

Eesh.

So wait, was it boredom?

I was doing more chores in a matter of days than I’ve done in the rest of my life combined.”

How old was this kid again? Twelve-ish? I suppose this attitude makes some sense for a privileged kid of that age (Vista might disagree), but… look around you, dude. Do you really think doing some extra chores is your biggest problem nowadays? It’s certainly not something to go join the fucking Merchants over.

The best case scenario, I guess, is that Bryce only joined to save his own skin from the way the Merchants treat their captives.

“This your boy?” Jaw asked, as he noticed us.

“Yeah,” Lisa said, without even glancing at me.

Hehe.

“What happened, Brycie?  You join the Merchants and neglect to tell your sister, go to stay with her, and then give all the info on where she’s staying to your new friends?  You that big a scumbag?”

Oof, that would be even worse than what I thought might’ve happened (him joining at or after the church attack), which would just be that first part about joining and not telling Sierra.

Bryce scowled.  I could see him trying to look confident in front of his girlfriend.  “Not what happened.”

Ahh, that’s what she is… probably.

So what did happen, then?

“Then tell me a story, kid.  Keep in mind, what you say plays a big role in what happens in the next few minutes.”

Yeah… this could get a bit nastier. 

And then, as I meant to talk about between posts, there’s the matter of reporting this back to Sierra. If Taylor came back without Bryce and told her the truth, unless that truth is very different from how it currently looks, I don’t think Sierra would believe her at first. She’d probably get quite upset at Skitter, and then if Skitter manages to actually convince her, at Bryce and just upset in general.

Point is, this doesn’t look like it’ll end with a happy Sierra.

As we reached the side of one grouping of stalls, I spotted Jaw standing in front of Bryce.  He had one steel-toed boot planted on the same wooden bench that Bryce was seated on, his broad gut almost in the boy’s face.

Huh. Did he already save the kid?

Beside Bryce was a teenaged girl with bleached blond hair, who was almost lying across the bench in her attempt to keep back from Jaw.

Another victim, or young villain? Either way, this is a pretty reasonable reaction to Jaw.

There was nobody near enough to Bryce to be his kidnapper, nobody with a weapon, no handcuffs or chains.

Yeah, I was about to comment on that, but I couldn’t figure out how to word it so I decided to move on in case the rest of the paragraph corrected that impression.

So did Jaw already get rid of the kidnapper, or… is there not one? Did Bryce come voluntarily and join the Merchants? That would be quite a twist. Poor Sierra if that’s the case.

Shit.  I didn’t like what that suggested.

I don’t think I do either… except as a plot twist and story development. I actually think it’d be kinda neat, though unfortunate.

“We came here for an errand,” Lisa answered her, “Up to ‘locker girl’ here to decide if you can tag along.”

Good. I don’t think Taylor would appreciate if you made that decision for her.

“You can’t- you can’t leave me here,” the girl said, eyes widening.  She looked to me, pleading.

If she does come along, it becomes a question of whether they make a detour to the exit first. And even then, the exit is not actually safe for the girl, so the detour would end up with them going significantly outside the building, then coming back, which is a bit impractical and could cause them to lose track of Bryce. (Come to think of it, that’s probably what Jaw is doing, keeping track of Bryce while Brooks went to get Lisa & co.)

I guess maybe they could send the girl off to the exit with Minor (as much as she doesn’t like the girl right now, I think Taylor would object to sending her with Senegal, and Brooks is the one here who knows where Bryce is), while the rest of them go to rescue Bryce.

I sighed.  “She can come.”

“More dead weight,” Brooks frowned.

…alright, in this particular case, I’ll accept that assessment.

“Emma Barnes what?” I asked the girl, trying to bring her focus back to the conversation we’d been having.

It says a lot that Taylor is pissed off enough to continue this even with the news that Bryce has been located.

She looked from Brooks to me, and I could see how lost she was.

“Found who?”

“Nevermind,” I cut her off before she started stumbling over her words again.

Yeah, that’s fair. Anything she’d say would probably just piss you off even more.

“What’s going on?”  the girl asked.

Time to decide whether you can trust this girl with the real reason you’re here.

And more importantly, whether you actually want to.

They already found Bryce and we haven’t even found out what sort of bloodshed is being planned yet.

This won’t be a straightforward rescue, will it.