The graft gave a hard, sour throb behind my ribs.
He was not accusing me of anything. He had no idea what he was holding, and that made it worse. Javier wrote everything down, and he would keep writing it down. In a week, a man with a shield on his lapel would ask to see his notebooks, and Javier would hand them over with both hands and a proud red face, and somewhere in the back would sit a page with Naomi's name and Misato's name and a column of numbers that pointed at me.
"Hey," I said. "Do me a favor and stop writing that down."
He looked up. His pen stopped moving on the page.
"Why?" he asked.
"It's their stuff, man." I kept my voice easy, the voice I used on bouncers and professors and Vale. "Naomi doesn't love people tracking her numbers, and the Captain would murder you with a clipboard. Just let it go."
Javier looked at me for a long moment across the lamp glow.
