Willie
A trafficker taken alive at the ruins, who gave up everything he knew and died in the cage he gave it up in
Willie is not his name. He never gave one out, and Willie is what the company settled on.
He came at Koa with a dagger at the ruins outside Haudh-Gwenn, missed him twice, and then Mikhail put him to sleep where he stood. Searching him turned up a second blade he had kept back: a small punching dagger tucked into his clothes, the sort that makes a fist into a lethal weapon. Aldo gagged him with a sweat-soaked sock, and the sock stayed a feature of his captivity and then of the company’s vocabulary.
The gag nearly finished him. He vomited with it still in his mouth and began to choke, and Mikhail got his airway clear in time. Then Aldo ran a con on the two prisoners, an invented criminal enterprise with one place open on the crew and the loser of the interview to be sold as product, and Willie came apart and gave up everything he had. The jobs came down through Gargoth. There was a beautiful red-haired woman wearing the same lash on her forearm, holding a small estate in Haudh-Gwenn and living between that one and another. She was Ashtara Walnut, and she was the best lead anybody had. Casper, nominally his senior, was contemptuous of how cheaply it had come: far less had been needed to pry it out of Willie, he said, than to get anything at all out of him.
Put back in the cage, he asked whether his information had helped, and nobody was listening. He said he had a little brother named Jezebel, which Aldo thought sounded as invented as everything else about him. Given a neighbor in the next cage he kicked Messy through the bars until Aldo threatened him with the sock. He was far enough gone by then that Mikhail would not use it on him again: Messy could be threatened with the sock, and Willie could not, because Willie was too traumatized for it.
He stayed in that cage. When Koa went back to the ruins days afterward the door stood open and there was blood across the floor, and Willie and Messy were dead in the cage, stabbed, with Casper buried under the rubble in the same room, stabbed and barely alive. The sock was lying outside the bars where the company had left it.