Red Glove (Curse Workers 2)

“Who are you looking at?” Lila asks me, craning her neck.

“See that woman by the window?” I say, trying to shove my way sideways through the crowd. “Ponytail. She hired the hit on Janssen.”

“I know her. She used to work for him,” Lila says, following me.

“What?” I stop so suddenly that the man behind me slams into my back. He grunts.

“Sorry,” I tell him, but he just gives me a dirty look.

Daneca and Sam are ahead of us in the crowd. I want to call out to them to slow down, but there’s no way they’d hear.

The woman is walking away from the march. As slowly as I’m moving, I am never going to get to her.

“I thought she was his girlfriend,” I tell Lila.

“Maybe, but she was also his underling,” she says. “She lines up buyers. High rollers. People who can afford to buy regular doses of ecstatic emotion—the kind of blissed-out happiness that’ll send you spiraling into depression if you stop. Or they buy luck from half a dozen curse workers at a time. Use enough luck at once and it can change big things.”

“Did she know Philip?” I ask.

“You said she ordered the hit.”

Janssen’s mistress disappears into the throng. We’re not moving fast enough to follow. Daneca and Sam are gone too—somewhere ahead of us on Broad Street, I’m sure, but I can’t spot them anymore.

I mop my brow with the tail of my white shirt. “This sucks.”

Lila laughs and gestures to the large sign flapping in the wind above us. It’s covered in glitter and reads BARE HANDS; PURE HEARTS. “Before Wallingford, I’d never met many people who weren’t workers—I never know what to make of them.”

“Just me,” I say. “I was the nonworker you knew.”

She gives me a quick look, and I realize, of course, that she left out the most critical thing when she summarized my past in the car.

Back then I was beneath her.

Even if she never said it to me, even if she didn’t act like what she could do mattered, everyone else said it enough that there was no chance I’d forget. She was a worker; I was part of the world of marks who existed to be manipulated.

I see another sign in the crowd, POWER CORRUPTS EVERYONE.

“Lila—,” I start.

Then a girl walking just ahead of us takes off her gloves. She holds up her hands. They look pale and wrinkled from being inside leather in this heat.

I blink. In my life I haven’t seen many bare female hands. It’s hard not to stare.

“Bare hands, pure heart!” the girl yells.

Beside her I see a few other people pulling off gloves with wicked smiles. One throws a pair up into the sky.

My fingers itch for release. I imagine what it would be like to feel the breeze against my palms.

The combination of heat and rebellion spreads like a ripple through the crowd, and suddenly bare fingers are waving in the air. We are stepping over discarded gloves.

“Cassel!” someone calls, and I see Sam. He’s managed to wedge himself and Daneca between two parked cars and out of foot traffic. He’s red-faced from the heat. She’s gloveless and beckoning us over.

Her hands are pale, with long fingers.

We push our way through the crowd to them. We’re almost there when we hear the sound of a bullhorn from somewhere in front of us.

“Everyone must cover their hands immediately,” a tinny voice booms. A siren wails. “This is the police. Cover your hands immediately.”

Daneca looks as horrified as if they were talking personally to her.

There is technically nothing illegal about bare hands. Just like there is technically nothing illegal about a sharp kitchen knife. But when you wave one around, the police don’t like it. And when you point it at something, that’s when the cuffs really come out.

“Lift me up,” Lila says.

“What?”

All around us people are jeering. But there is another sound, farther away, a roar of engines and cries that no longer contain words.

A news helicopter buzzes overhead.

“Up,” she says with a smile, pointing in the air. “I want to see what’s happening.”

I put my arms around her waist and lift her. She’s light. Her skin is soft against me, and she smells like sweat and crushed grass.

I set her down on the hood of the car, next to where Sam’s standing.

“There’s a bunch of cops,” she says, hopping down. “Riot gear. We’ve got to get out of here.”

I nod once. Criminals like us are good at running.

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Daneca says, but she doesn’t sound sure. Around us the crowd feels it too. They aren’t moving in the same direction anymore. They’re scattering.

“Inside,” I say. “If we can get to one of the buildings, we can wait out whatever happens.”

But as we move toward the doorway nearest to us, cops start streaming across the sidewalk, their faces covered by helmets.

“Get down on the ground!” comes the command. They spread out, shoving protestors if they hesitate. One girl tries to argue, and a cop swings a baton at her leg. Another girl gets sprayed in the face with some chemical. She falls to the ground, clawing at her skin.

Lila and I drop down onto the asphalt immediately.

“What’s going on?” Sam says, kneeling down too. Daneca squats beside him.

“Under the car,” Lila says, crawling forward on her elbows.

It’s a pretty good plan. We still get arrested, but at least it takes a little longer.

The last time I was in a prison was to visit Mom. Prisons are places where people live. They’re dehumanizing, but they have things like tables and cafeterias and exercise rooms.

This is different. This is a jail.

They take our wallets, cell phones, and bags. They don’t even bother fingerprinting us. They just ask us our names and march us down to a holding cell. Girls in one, guys in the one next door. And so on, down a long noisy hallway.

There’s a couple of benches, a sink, and a single disgusting toilet. All occupied.

Daneca tries to tell them that we’re underage, but the cops don’t pay any attention to her. They just lock us up.

Sam is standing near me, his head leaning against the bars and his eyes closed. Daneca found a spot on one of the benches and is sitting, her face streaked with tears. They made her cover her hands before they hauled us into their armored van—and when she couldn’t find one of her gloves, they taped a bag all the way to her elbow. It’s cradled against her body now.

Lila paces back and forth.

“Lila,” I say, and she whirls, teeth bared, hand striking at me through the bars.

“Hey,” I say, catching her wrist.

She looks so surprised that I wonder if, for a moment, she forgot she was human.

“We’re going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to get out of here.”

She nods, embarrassed now, but her breaths are still coming too fast. “What time do you think it is?”

We got to the protest at about four thirty and we never even made it to the park. “Maybe around seven,” I say.

“Still early. God, I am such a mess.” She pulls away from me, rubbing her gloved hand through her hair.

“You’re fine,” I say.

She snorts.

I look around the room at all the desperate faces. I bet none of them have ever seen the inside of a jail before. I bet none of them have family who’ve been in prison.

“Ever think about the future?” I ask, trying to distract her.

“Like, the future in which we’re not locked up?”

“After graduation. After Wallingford.” It is much in my thoughts lately.

She shrugs, leaning her face against a metal bar. “I don’t know. Dad took me to Vieques this past summer. We’d just lie on the beach or swim. Everything’s brighter and bluer there, you know? I’d like to go back. Soak it all up. I’m tired of being shut in dark places.”

I think of her trapped in that horrible wire cage by Barron for months at a time. During one of my bleaker moments the past summer, I looked up the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners. Depression, despair, crippling anxiety, hallucinations.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in a cage again.

“Never been out of the country,” I say. Who am I kidding? I’ve never even been on an airplane.

“You could come,” she says.

“If you still want me with you after we graduate, I’m yours,” I say, trying to make my vow sound a little more casual. “So that’s it? You’re just going to lie around on a beach.”

“Until Dad needs me,” she says. Her breaths are more even now, her eyes less wide and wild. “I’ve always known what I was going to be when I grew up.”

“The family business,” I say. “You ever think of doing something else?”

“No,” she says, but there’s something in her voice that makes me wonder. “It’s all I’m good at. Besides, I’m a Zacharov.”

I think about the things I’m good at. And I think about Ms. Vanderveer, my guidance counselor. The future’s going to be here sooner than you think.

We’re in the cells for what I estimate to be another hour before a cop walks in, one we haven’t seen before. He’s got a clipboard.

Everyone starts shouting at once. Demands to see lawyers. Protestations of innocence. Threats of lawsuits.

The policeman waits for the furor to die down, then speaks. “I need the following people to come to the front of your cell and press your hands together in front of you with your fingers laced. Samuel Yu, Daneca Wasserman, and Lila Zacharov.”

The cells again erupt in shouts. Daneca gets up off the bench. Sam follows her to the front of the cell, turning back toward me and widening his eyes in an expression of bafflement. After a few moments, the shouting dies down.

I wait for him to call me next, but there appear to be no more names on the clipboard.

Lila steps forward, then hesitates.

“Go,” I tell her.

“We have a friend with us,” Lila tells the officer, looking back in my direction.

“Cassel Sharpe,” Sam supplies. “That’s his name. Maybe you missed it?”

“This is all my fault—,” Daneca starts.

“Be quiet, look straight ahead, hands clasped in front,” the cop yells. “Everyone else take three steps away from the door. Now!”

They’re cuffed and marched away, all of them turning their heads back toward me as I try to come up with explanations for why they’re gone and I’m not. Maybe their parents were called and mine couldn’t be reached. Maybe it was just random groups of three that were being taken for fingerprinting. I’m still trying to convince myself when Agent Jones saunters up to the cell door.

“Oh,” I say.

“Cassel Sharpe.” A small smile lifts a corner of his mouth. “Please step to the front of the cell, hands clasped together in front of you.”

I do.

Jones leads me grimly into another hallway, one he has to swipe a card to enter. One without cells, just white walls and windowless doors. “We put an alert on your name, Cassel. Imagine my surprise when it turned up that you were in custody in Newark.”

I swallow nervously. My throat feels dry.

“You got that information for me yet?” His breath smells like sour coffee and cigarettes.

“Not quite yet,” I say.

“Have a good march?” he asks. “Get lots of exercise running from the law? Growing boy has got to get his exercise.”

“Ha, ha,” I say.

He grins like we really did just share a joke. “Let me tell you how this is going to go. I’m going to give you two choices, and you’re going to make the right one.”

I nod my head to show I’m listening, although I’m sure I’m not going to like what comes next.

“A couple doors down I’ve got Lila Zacharov and the other two you were brought in with. You and I can go there, and I’ll explain that any friend of Cassel’s is free to go. Then I’ll let them out. Maybe I’ll even apologize.”

My shoulders tense. “They’ll think I’m working for you.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Definitely.”

“If Lila thinks I’m working for the Feds and tells her father, I’m not going to be able to find out anything for you. I’ll be useless.” I’m talking too fast. He can tell he’s getting to me. If the rumor gets around that I’m working for the Feds, my own mother won’t want to be seen with me.

“Maybe I don’t consider you all that useful anymore.” Jones shrugs. “Maybe if we’re all the friends you’ve got, you’ll see things a little differently.”

I take a deep breath. “What’s my second choice?”

“Tell me that by the end of next week you’ll have that lead for me. You’re going to find out something on this mysterious assassin. Something I can use. No more excuses.”

I nod. “I will.”

He claps my shoulder heavily with his gloved hand. “I told you you’d make the right choice.”

Then he lets me into the room with the others.

Daneca scrambles up from where she’s sitting on the floor and hugs me. She smells like patchouli. Her eyes look bloodshot.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You must be so mad at me. But we’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We would never—”

“Nobody’s mad,” I say, then look over at Sam and Lila to see if they can explain the rest of what she was saying.

>

“Who are you looking at?” Lila asks me, craning her neck.

“See that woman by the window?” I say, trying to shove my way sideways through the crowd. “Ponytail. She hired the hit on Janssen.”

“I know her. She used to work for him,” Lila says, following me.

“What?” I stop so suddenly that the man behind me slams into my back. He grunts.

“Sorry,” I tell him, but he just gives me a dirty look.

Daneca and Sam are ahead of us in the crowd. I want to call out to them to slow down, but there’s no way they’d hear.

The woman is walking away from the march. As slowly as I’m moving, I am never going to get to her.

“I thought she was his girlfriend,” I tell Lila.

“Maybe, but she was also his underling,” she says. “She lines up buyers. High rollers. People who can afford to buy regular doses of ecstatic emotion—the kind of blissed-out happiness that’ll send you spiraling into depression if you stop. Or they buy luck from half a dozen curse workers at a time. Use enough luck at once and it can change big things.”

“Did she know Philip?” I ask.

“You said she ordered the hit.”

Janssen’s mistress disappears into the throng. We’re not moving fast enough to follow. Daneca and Sam are gone too—somewhere ahead of us on Broad Street, I’m sure, but I can’t spot them anymore.

I mop my brow with the tail of my white shirt. “This sucks.”

Lila laughs and gestures to the large sign flapping in the wind above us. It’s covered in glitter and reads BARE HANDS; PURE HEARTS. “Before Wallingford, I’d never met many people who weren’t workers—I never know what to make of them.”

“Just me,” I say. “I was the nonworker you knew.”

She gives me a quick look, and I realize, of course, that she left out the most critical thing when she summarized my past in the car.

Back then I was beneath her.

Even if she never said it to me, even if she didn’t act like what she could do mattered, everyone else said it enough that there was no chance I’d forget. She was a worker; I was part of the world of marks who existed to be manipulated.

I see another sign in the crowd, POWER CORRUPTS EVERYONE.

“Lila—,” I start.

Then a girl walking just ahead of us takes off her gloves. She holds up her hands. They look pale and wrinkled from being inside leather in this heat.

I blink. In my life I haven’t seen many bare female hands. It’s hard not to stare.

“Bare hands, pure heart!” the girl yells.

Beside her I see a few other people pulling off gloves with wicked smiles. One throws a pair up into the sky.

My fingers itch for release. I imagine what it would be like to feel the breeze against my palms.

The combination of heat and rebellion spreads like a ripple through the crowd, and suddenly bare fingers are waving in the air. We are stepping over discarded gloves.

“Cassel!” someone calls, and I see Sam. He’s managed to wedge himself and Daneca between two parked cars and out of foot traffic. He’s red-faced from the heat. She’s gloveless and beckoning us over.

Her hands are pale, with long fingers.

We push our way through the crowd to them. We’re almost there when we hear the sound of a bullhorn from somewhere in front of us.

“Everyone must cover their hands immediately,” a tinny voice booms. A siren wails. “This is the police. Cover your hands immediately.”

Daneca looks as horrified as if they were talking personally to her.

There is technically nothing illegal about bare hands. Just like there is technically nothing illegal about a sharp kitchen knife. But when you wave one around, the police don’t like it. And when you point it at something, that’s when the cuffs really come out.

“Lift me up,” Lila says.

“What?”

All around us people are jeering. But there is another sound, farther away, a roar of engines and cries that no longer contain words.

A news helicopter buzzes overhead.

“Up,” she says with a smile, pointing in the air. “I want to see what’s happening.”

I put my arms around her waist and lift her. She’s light. Her skin is soft against me, and she smells like sweat and crushed grass.

I set her down on the hood of the car, next to where Sam’s standing.

“There’s a bunch of cops,” she says, hopping down. “Riot gear. We’ve got to get out of here.”

I nod once. Criminals like us are good at running.

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Daneca says, but she doesn’t sound sure. Around us the crowd feels it too. They aren’t moving in the same direction anymore. They’re scattering.

“Inside,” I say. “If we can get to one of the buildings, we can wait out whatever happens.”

But as we move toward the doorway nearest to us, cops start streaming across the sidewalk, their faces covered by helmets.

“Get down on the ground!” comes the command. They spread out, shoving protestors if they hesitate. One girl tries to argue, and a cop swings a baton at her leg. Another girl gets sprayed in the face with some chemical. She falls to the ground, clawing at her skin.

Lila and I drop down onto the asphalt immediately.

“What’s going on?” Sam says, kneeling down too. Daneca squats beside him.

“Under the car,” Lila says, crawling forward on her elbows.

It’s a pretty good plan. We still get arrested, but at least it takes a little longer.

The last time I was in a prison was to visit Mom. Prisons are places where people live. They’re dehumanizing, but they have things like tables and cafeterias and exercise rooms.

This is different. This is a jail.

They take our wallets, cell phones, and bags. They don’t even bother fingerprinting us. They just ask us our names and march us down to a holding cell. Girls in one, guys in the one next door. And so on, down a long noisy hallway.

There’s a couple of benches, a sink, and a single disgusting toilet. All occupied.

Daneca tries to tell them that we’re underage, but the cops don’t pay any attention to her. They just lock us up.

Sam is standing near me, his head leaning against the bars and his eyes closed. Daneca found a spot on one of the benches and is sitting, her face streaked with tears. They made her cover her hands before they hauled us into their armored van—and when she couldn’t find one of her gloves, they taped a bag all the way to her elbow. It’s cradled against her body now.

Lila paces back and forth.

“Lila,” I say, and she whirls, teeth bared, hand striking at me through the bars.

“Hey,” I say, catching her wrist.

She looks so surprised that I wonder if, for a moment, she forgot she was human.

“We’re going to be okay,” I say. “We’re going to get out of here.”

She nods, embarrassed now, but her breaths are still coming too fast. “What time do you think it is?”

We got to the protest at about four thirty and we never even made it to the park. “Maybe around seven,” I say.

“Still early. God, I am such a mess.” She pulls away from me, rubbing her gloved hand through her hair.

“You’re fine,” I say.

She snorts.

I look around the room at all the desperate faces. I bet none of them have ever seen the inside of a jail before. I bet none of them have family who’ve been in prison.

“Ever think about the future?” I ask, trying to distract her.

“Like, the future in which we’re not locked up?”

“After graduation. After Wallingford.” It is much in my thoughts lately.

She shrugs, leaning her face against a metal bar. “I don’t know. Dad took me to Vieques this past summer. We’d just lie on the beach or swim. Everything’s brighter and bluer there, you know? I’d like to go back. Soak it all up. I’m tired of being shut in dark places.”

I think of her trapped in that horrible wire cage by Barron for months at a time. During one of my bleaker moments the past summer, I looked up the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners. Depression, despair, crippling anxiety, hallucinations.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in a cage again.

“Never been out of the country,” I say. Who am I kidding? I’ve never even been on an airplane.

“You could come,” she says.

“If you still want me with you after we graduate, I’m yours,” I say, trying to make my vow sound a little more casual. “So that’s it? You’re just going to lie around on a beach.”

“Until Dad needs me,” she says. Her breaths are more even now, her eyes less wide and wild. “I’ve always known what I was going to be when I grew up.”

“The family business,” I say. “You ever think of doing something else?”

“No,” she says, but there’s something in her voice that makes me wonder. “It’s all I’m good at. Besides, I’m a Zacharov.”

I think about the things I’m good at. And I think about Ms. Vanderveer, my guidance counselor. The future’s going to be here sooner than you think.

We’re in the cells for what I estimate to be another hour before a cop walks in, one we haven’t seen before. He’s got a clipboard.

Everyone starts shouting at once. Demands to see lawyers. Protestations of innocence. Threats of lawsuits.

The policeman waits for the furor to die down, then speaks. “I need the following people to come to the front of your cell and press your hands together in front of you with your fingers laced. Samuel Yu, Daneca Wasserman, and Lila Zacharov.”

The cells again erupt in shouts. Daneca gets up off the bench. Sam follows her to the front of the cell, turning back toward me and widening his eyes in an expression of bafflement. After a few moments, the shouting dies down.

I wait for him to call me next, but there appear to be no more names on the clipboard.

Lila steps forward, then hesitates.

“Go,” I tell her.

“We have a friend with us,” Lila tells the officer, looking back in my direction.

“Cassel Sharpe,” Sam supplies. “That’s his name. Maybe you missed it?”

“This is all my fault—,” Daneca starts.

“Be quiet, look straight ahead, hands clasped in front,” the cop yells. “Everyone else take three steps away from the door. Now!”

They’re cuffed and marched away, all of them turning their heads back toward me as I try to come up with explanations for why they’re gone and I’m not. Maybe their parents were called and mine couldn’t be reached. Maybe it was just random groups of three that were being taken for fingerprinting. I’m still trying to convince myself when Agent Jones saunters up to the cell door.

“Oh,” I say.

“Cassel Sharpe.” A small smile lifts a corner of his mouth. “Please step to the front of the cell, hands clasped together in front of you.”

I do.

Jones leads me grimly into another hallway, one he has to swipe a card to enter. One without cells, just white walls and windowless doors. “We put an alert on your name, Cassel. Imagine my surprise when it turned up that you were in custody in Newark.”

I swallow nervously. My throat feels dry.

“You got that information for me yet?” His breath smells like sour coffee and cigarettes.

“Not quite yet,” I say.

“Have a good march?” he asks. “Get lots of exercise running from the law? Growing boy has got to get his exercise.”

“Ha, ha,” I say.

He grins like we really did just share a joke. “Let me tell you how this is going to go. I’m going to give you two choices, and you’re going to make the right one.”

I nod my head to show I’m listening, although I’m sure I’m not going to like what comes next.

“A couple doors down I’ve got Lila Zacharov and the other two you were brought in with. You and I can go there, and I’ll explain that any friend of Cassel’s is free to go. Then I’ll let them out. Maybe I’ll even apologize.”

My shoulders tense. “They’ll think I’m working for you.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Definitely.”

“If Lila thinks I’m working for the Feds and tells her father, I’m not going to be able to find out anything for you. I’ll be useless.” I’m talking too fast. He can tell he’s getting to me. If the rumor gets around that I’m working for the Feds, my own mother won’t want to be seen with me.

“Maybe I don’t consider you all that useful anymore.” Jones shrugs. “Maybe if we’re all the friends you’ve got, you’ll see things a little differently.”

I take a deep breath. “What’s my second choice?”

“Tell me that by the end of next week you’ll have that lead for me. You’re going to find out something on this mysterious assassin. Something I can use. No more excuses.”

I nod. “I will.”

He claps my shoulder heavily with his gloved hand. “I told you you’d make the right choice.”

Then he lets me into the room with the others.

Daneca scrambles up from where she’s sitting on the floor and hugs me. She smells like patchouli. Her eyes look bloodshot.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You must be so mad at me. But we’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We would never—”

“Nobody’s mad,” I say, then look over at Sam and Lila to see if they can explain the rest of what she was saying.