Chapter Text
The kid stood in the middle of the dingy hallway of my building, looking at his hands like he couldn’t make up his mind between laughing or losing his lunch. He wasn’t so much wearing a sweater as swimming in it, and somehow the sleeves were still too short to cover his arms. His faded pants weren't having much luck with his knobby legs either, the ratty cuffs falling a little past half way down his shins. Still just a kid, obviously outgrowing any paychecks coming in. Standing in the hallway just outside the little office space I rented out on the edge of Old Town.
Crumpled in his long boney fingers was roughly 45 creds, and he was holding it out like he thought it was gonna bite him.
“I’ve got money. I can get more money, enough creds to choke a rabbit, but you’re gonna help me.”
I frowned, jutting my thumb towards the plaque on the door. “This is a private detective agency, kid, not a tutoring service, which you must need pretty bad, if you can’t read that much.”
He held the money out at me again, shuffling a step closer.
“I can read fine detective. I’m also smart enough to know that I’ve got the money, and that makes me a client.”
“You’re not a client unless I accept your job.” I narrowed my eye, one hand on the knob. This kid talked a good game, all confidence… so long as you weren’t looking at him, you'd think he knew what he was doing. The closer he got, the better I could see his face. High-bridged nose, too-bright eyes, lips chewed to a blister at one corner of his mouth, and dark bags under his eyes that would be more at home on the face of someone like me. A kid’s face shouldn’t look like that. He was exhausted. He’d been through...something.
Curiosity is a dangerous game, and I went and made it my business.
My name is Juno Steel. I’m a Private Eye.
This kid made me curious. Knowing this city, I’d probably live just long enough to regret it. I swung open the door to my little office, flicking the recycled rain out of my hair and nodding for him to come in.
“So...What’s your job, kid?”
Sol Sterling was missing. Magnum Atwater, Maggie to anyone who cared, seemed to be the only one on Mars trying to find him. He wouldn’t say anything else until after I accepted the wad of bills, damp with a mix of stale re-rain and nervous sweat, and agreed to do a real consultation for him. So I took his cash, hung up my coat and ushered him into the little waiting room, past my secretary's desk and into my office. He sat on the edge of my client chair, I settled into my desk chair with a familiar creak, and waited for him to collect himself.
My dented old coffee pot chugged and gurgled in the tense silence as Maggie and I stared each other down across my desk, and suddenly I was glad that Rita had taken the day off. Fun trick I picked up along the way; people talk when they’re uncomfortable. Nothing is quite as effective for information as an awkward silence, so I didn’t press him. He looked down at his hands again. Took a breath. Opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind, a quick flick of his head my only signal that he had a thought at all. It took ten minutes, but finally he spoke.
“Sol and I live in Old Town. The Old Town Outreach House. Some train crash or another that no one remembers anymore killed both of our folks, that’s not really important. Anyways, we share a room there right? Got two other guys too, four of us all crammed in there. Sol’s my bunkmate. Top bunk, cuz he’s so short he can sit up on there without smackin’ his head on anything. Thing is, the bunks are real old, and they shake when you climb up or down. Wakes me up every time, I can't help it.” He shrugged one shoulder in a quick jerk, glancing across the desk at me before looking back down at his hands.
“The other guys don’t really talk to us or anything, cuz they're so much younger than us, but me and Sol spent all our free time hangin’ out together. We have this plan, see-- I got a job in Uptown, and it pays real good, and he tried out for the Polaris Park acrobatics show, he’s a real bendy kid and theres no way they’d turn him away, gotta be crazy-- Anyway we’re gonna save our creds and get a ship--”
“Right, sure, but what does all this have to do with your missing friend?” Silence may be good for getting information, but sometimes there’s a little too much. Lives have so much detail that you never really think about… until something terrible happens, and all your mind will let you remember is what color the curtains were.
Maggie waved a hand at me, “I’m gettin’ there, I’m gettin’ there! So about a month ago, all four of us went to bed, nothing unusual, just crashing out after a long day. But when I wake up there’s only three of us in the room. Sol’s bed is empty, all his junk’s still there, even his shoes. And I never woke up through that whole night. I wake up every time he climbs up or down, and I didn’t lose a wink, detective. It’s like he just vanished.”
I let out the sigh that I’d been holding. Missing kid from Old Town was a song as old as Hyperion City. Most of those kids aren’t found, probably don’t want to be. I knew I had run away from home often enough. I wasn’t the only one running back then, so I wasn’t that surprised. Not by that anyway.
I also knew that Mars wasn’t the kind of place you go running around without shoes on, who knows what kind of martian gunk you’d pick up out there, not to mention all the radiation in the dust. Kids in the Outreach never had a lot, and I doubt this Sol kid had a secret second pair of shoes.
“Wait, hold on a second, you said this was a month ago that your pal vanished, why are you just coming to someone about it now? Shouldn’t you be filing a report at the HCPD?” I knew it was stupid before I finished saying it, those crooks wouldve thrown Maggie out for dripping rain water on the carpet. He scoffed a laugh, a tight unhappy noise, and scrubbed a short sleeve over his cheek to mop up the water still dripping from his hair.
“The cops? They don’t care about Old Town-- I actually tried them first, stupid hopeful me. You know what they did, detective?” he fixed those bright eyes on mine, and I was pinned to my seat with the sheer weight of the rage in them, “I told the officer Sol went missing, and she handed me a brochure for a funeral home. They weren’t even gonna try! Just wrote him off for dead, like any other orphan. Weren’t even gonna look for a body...” His voice cracked towards the end, and I saw him take a couple unsteady breaths to calm himself back down. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. Tired, with a rough undertone, and he spoke each word so carefully, like they were little glass things that might shatter if he spoke too loud.
“...I’m not stupid, Detective Steel. I know what happens to people who disappear in Old Town. I know he’s probably…” he bit his lip, not wanting to say the word. “But he’s the closest thing I’ve got to family. I at least wanna find out what… What happened to him.”
“What makes you so sure I can help, anyway? There’s loads of PI’s in this city, half of them a hell of a lot cheaper than me.”
“Word on the street is you’ve got a unique qualification for this particular job.”
I wrinkled my nose at that. People around Hyperion were a lot of things, and ‘fond of Juno Steel’ didn’t usually make that list, but again. I was curious.
“Oh yeah, like what?”
Maggie looked at me again, those big bright eyes, blue as a sunrise on Venus, peeking from under muddy red bangs, split lip quirking up at one corner in a lopsided smile that reminded me too much of Mick for a morning like this as he said,
“You’re a good person.”
I was gonna find whoever was out there spreading that nasty rumor. After I found the kid