VI

To hear the locals brag about it, Odette had dragged itself out of the silt of the Mississippi to become a bustling metropolis. Once a railroad terminus, the wartime boom of the 40s had brought with it industry and culture, swelling its boundaries from town to city, cementing it as a permanent lodestone of the state's economy. Its sense of self-importance only grew when the interstate project of the 50s connected it to the rest of the country via the matte asphalt which cut a swathe through backcountry and bayou.

Close enough to military bases for the enlisted to escape to on a weekend pass, Odette was a hodgepodge of locals and transplants, its economy buoyed by both regional and far-flung interests. The tech boom was making its claim to the city in the present, server farms and regional field offices for every one-word corporation you could think of were stamping down concrete pads and drawing in workers with the promise of cheap housing and a city they could mold to their own specs.

Hector hated every square mile of it.

It hadn't been his choice to move there, to pack up his life into whatever fit in the cargo space of his Yamaha bike, to put 1300 miles between himself and family and a support network built up over 35 years. He'd shrugged and answered "work" to his bewildered loved ones when pressed for an answer, and it was the closest to the truth he was allowed to say.

There had been a glimmer of hope that things wouldn't work out, but it had been disappointingly easy to register with the Louisiana state bar, even if he'd been almost a decade out of law school by that point. A failure would have allowed him the excuse to wash his hands of the whole damned affair, to slink back north without a story to tell.

But the siren's song of Odette would not release him so easily once it had drawn him to its shores. He'd lucked into an apartment at below market rate, the landlord desperate to fill the space left by a tenant who'd vanished into the night at the worst time of year for vacancies. The courthouse was backlogged and desperate for a public defender to pare down the caseload, to work amicably with the local prosecutor to rubber stamp the bulk of the files. It was scut work and brought with it long hours, but sleep had left Hector once he'd become an adult and the pay was just enough to offset the cost of living.

He wasn't in Odette for the love of the legal profession, anyway. An unseen force had tugged at his resolve, turned his attention further and further south until he had pinpointed its source on a map. Along with the vague sense of duty were dark whispers and rumors, the clandestine network to which he was privy had long buzzed with news from the city of disappearances, of a hand which directed the unseen mechanisms at play, of backroom dealings and money flowing that was the real beating heart of the city.

Hector himself moved through those channels, a beam of light which cut through the unseemly darkness. Or that was the role he was supposed to play, at any rate. After almost two decades, his soul was tarnished, his blade a dull symbol against a war he now sensed stretched on towards infinity. A war he'd had no say in joining and one which had wrapped around him, forcing him into cold isolation.