South Village (Ash McKenna) by Rob Hart

to answer me, concisely and honestly. You will not lie to me. You feel me?”
    I try to speak but can’t, my lungs screaming.
    “No one knows you’re here, and you wouldn’t be found for a very long time. I ask again, do you feel me?”
    I nod my head and he lets go. I lean forward, take deep, greedy breaths of air. He returns to his chair and calmly sits, like none of that choking business happened.
    “Now… name?”
    I tell him the first name that comes to mind. “Dana. Dana Cameron.”
    He raises an eyebrow. “A bit on the feminine side.”
    Fuck, even my alias is a girl’s name.
    “I’m the modern day boy named Sue,” I tell him, glad my favorite comeback still applies. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t laugh, doesn’t seem to get the Johnny Cash reference. So it’s a sure bet he can’t be trusted.
    He presses a thick finger to the paper. “Tell me about this.”
    “It’s a scrap of paper.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “Dude, it’s a scrap of paper,” I tell him, trying my best to sound sincere. “I found it on the ground and I shoved it in my pocket so that I could throw it away. Before I could pass a trash can you and your Stormtroopers came in and yanked us out.”
    “You think I don’t know a book cipher when I see one?”
    That’s interesting.
    “I do not know what a book cipher is,” I tell him, truthfully.
    “What’s the key?”
    “I told you, I don’t know what that is.”
    “Tell me about the Soldiers of Gaia.”
    “I also do not know what that is. Are they a band? They sound like a band.”
    He stares at me for a second, his eyes gliding over my face. He taps the paper. “You’re telling me you don’t know what the key is.”
    “I’m telling you I don’t know why you’re so hot on a piece of trash I found on the ground. As a representative of the federal government, shouldn’t you be glad my first instinct was to ensure it was properly recycled? You are FBI, right?”
    He looks up at the ceiling. “You remind me of someone I went to school with.”
    He says this like we’re suddenly friends catching up over drinks. I don’t even know how to respond to that, so I wait, to see where the fuck he’s going with it.
    “Guy was from New York, too,” he says. “We called him Yorkie. He hated it. But we kept on doing it anyway. Do you know why we did that?”
    “Because you’re such a friendly guy?”
    “Because he thought he was a hard motherfucker because he grew up in a town with a rep,” the guy says. “But the truth is this motherfucker grew up on the Upper West Side and went to a private school. He would play like a Rottweiler but really he was this yipping little bullshit dog, no bigger than a cat. You get what I mean?”
    “I stopped listening.”
    “It means I know you think you’re a hard motherfucker. In this room, you are not. I can tell you’ve never heard of the Soldiers of Gaia. That I will give you. I also know you’re not telling the whole truth about this paper, but that you also don’t know it’s a cipher. Do you know how I know that?”
    “Are you a wizard?”
    He smiles. “I saw it on your face. Faces give away crazy shit. Micro expressions. The way the skin moves around the mouth and the nose and the eyes. Tell you everything you need to know about a person from those little ticks. Figure out how micro expressions work and you’re like a human lie detector.”
    I am suddenly very conscious of my face. My skin feels hot. I wonder what it’s saying to him. I try to keep my skin soft and serene but he probably notices the effort. “Why not tell me what all this blabbering is about?”
    He points at the wall. “There are people out there, right now, planning some bad shit. If there’s anything you can tell me, anything you can share, anything you can say about activities at your funny little camp, I can make sure of two things. One, nothing touches you. Two, I don’t spend the rest of my life trying to ruin yours. I need you to be honest