The Girl in the City Read Online Free PDF Page B

let out the breath she’d been holding. She picked up her pace.
    Farther down the street, there was a narrow alley that led to the back of her house. It was barely wide enough for a cat to saunter down, but Leah was thin, and she often used it when she was returning home with salvage.
    After checking that no one was watching, Leah slipped between the two houses and ran to the gate leading to the garden behind their house.
    The garden was tiny, just a rectangular patch of grass and a bench her father had built from scrap metal one weekend. There was no sign of Transport. Leah unlatched the iron gate and swung it open. It screeched, the noise painfully loud. Leah cringed and ran across the scrubby grass to the house, leaving the gate open rather than risk making so much noise again.
    Leah pressed herself flat against the wall next to the kitchen window. She could hear voices inside. They were muffled and indistinct, but the underlying anger was clear.
    Her heart thundering in her chest, Leah put down the bag of food and poked her head up to the window. Her father was sitting at the kitchen table. He was talking animatedly, his hands waving around in front of him as they always did when he got excited. There was a woman standing on the other side of the table. She was old, not much taller than Leah and gray-haired like someone’s grandmother. She had her back to the window but Leah recognized the uniform—another Transport Authority officer, the badge on her shoulder marking her as someone higher up the pecking order than the others outside. A man stood behind Leah’s father. He was also wearing a dark-blue uniform, but without the officer trappings.
    The voices from the kitchen became louder, clear enough for Leah to hear.
    “Andrew, we know you’re with TRACE. We know you have the data. It would be better for everyone concerned if you gave it to us now.”
    Her father shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    There was a pause, the silence ominous, and Leah found herself holding her breath again. The woman gave a curt nod towards the man behind Leah’s father. The male officer stepped forward and wrapped his arm around her father’s neck, dragging him up and away from the table. The chair he’d been sitting on clattered to the floor. Leah gasped. Her father barely responded. He just let the man drag him upright without offering any kind of resistance. Leah could see him struggling to breathe.
    The woman walked over to Leah’s father and grabbed his chin. Her fingers dug into his flesh. He clenched his jaw and swallowed.
    “This is your last chance, Andrew,” said the woman.
    “Please…” whispered Leah, praying her father would tell the officers whatever it was they wanted to hear.
    There was another pause, and for a moment, Leah thought he was going to do just that.
    But her father pulled his jaw free of the woman’s grip and stared into her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    The woman whirled away. Leah gasped as the woman’s gaze flicked across the window, but if she saw Leah, she didn’t acknowledge her.
    “Take him to Central,” said the woman.
    Leah’s father struggled for a few seconds, but the man holding him tightened his grip. Her father’s face turned red, and he stopped fighting back and let the man guide him out of the room. The Transport officer watched them leave, then followed them out.
    Leah turned away from the window and leaned against the wall. Keeping half an eye on the back door in case someone from Transport decided to come outside, she tried to piece together what was going on. Transport wanted the circuit board she’d found, that much was clear. It might even have been Transport that shot the man in the alley, if they wanted it badly enough. But what was it? Why did Transport want it so much?
    Leah puzzled over the question for a few minutes, then realized it wasn’t important. All that mattered was that her father was in trouble,