Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
A hand fists in my hair, yanking my head up so much the pain stars me. “We can make this easy,” he says through the mask. “Or we can make it loud.”
Make it loud, Sawyer said once about defiance. I stare at the eyes above the mask—pale, the lashes gloved with sweat. I can’t speak. But I can stare. I make my gaze ice.
He lets go with a shove. My scalp screams.
I shift my shoulders and feel the slim ridge of my palette knife under my tank, tucked into the waistband where I shoved it without thinking. God. Hope is a blade with dull teeth. I wedge my wrists against my spine, fishing for it with the tips of my numb fingers. The zip tie eats skin every time I flex. I find the knife’s handle with my pinky, but the angle is wrong; my fingers won’t close. I try to roll, to change the geometry. Someone’s boot thumps my ribs—warning, not full force, but enough to tell me they’ll escalate if I keep wriggling.
I stop. Breathe through my nose. We exit—downshift rumble, a hollow slap as tires cross a raised seam—then a left, immediate right. I try to build a map in my head. It unspools like a bad drawing, lines looping in the wrong places. Panic eats at the corners of it, nibbling. I shove it back. One line at a time.
When I close my eyes I see Sawyer in the hallway feed, calm in a storm, hands steady on a ticking thing that wanted to erase us. I imagine him now, radio crackling, eyes going to the south camera feed when Rae says the word ping in that tightly contained voice she gets. I imagine him running. It helps and hurts, both.
They talk over me like I’m a package. “Fifteen out.” “Traffic’s clear.” “The device?” “Stashed.” Words drop like pebbles into a lake, leaving ripples of meaning I can’t fully catch.
My arms burn. My jaw aches. A sob tries to elbow up my throat. I choke it down with bile and glue. My mind starts doing awful arithmetic again: what I didn’t say to Vanessa this morning because I was in a rush; the shade of blue I’ll never finish if I don’t get back; the portrait of my mother I started when I was fourteen and abandoned because the line of her mouth made me cry.
I force my brain to think of stupid things. The hum of the tires modulates like a wrong-key lullaby. The floor smells like nine hundred coffee deliveries and three broken bottles of cleaner. There’s grit pressed into my cheek. I lick it from the tape edge with the tip of my tongue; it tastes like salt and dirt and the inside of a toolbox.
Time gets liquid. It stretches, snaps back, stretches again. At some point the van slows. The brakes squeal in a way rental fleets never fix. We turn—left, I think—and roll onto gravel. The van rocks. The engine idles, then cuts.
Silence lands so hard I think I’ve gone deaf. Then a door bangs open and heat roars in where the cold had been, dry and baked. The doors slide. The world glares white. I squint.
“Out,” someone says.
Hands hook my elbows. I plant my feet and make my body the heaviest thing I can. It doesn’t matter; they’ve done this before; they swing and I stumble, knees catching, skin tearing on grit. They yank me upright again. The horizon is a smear past the rectangle of brightness. It could be anywhere—industrial yard, back road, storage facility. A white wall looms, blind and featureless.
I crane my neck, searching for the sky. It’s a hard cobalt with heat pulsing off it in waves. Somewhere a plane needles its way across, a tin speck. I want to scream up at it that I’m here, I’m still here, find me.
A hand shoves between my shoulders. I go forward into shadow—another interior, cooler, stale with the ghost of solvents and dust.
As the door clangs shut behind us, a single thought knifes cleanly through the noise.
Make it loud.
I inhale as deep as the tape allows, then slam my heel down and back with every ounce of rage in me. I don’t feel contact; I hear it—the ugly thunk of heel to shin, a grunt. A hand whips across my cheek, knocking my head sideways, bright spots popping. Pain blooms. I stagger. They shove, and I trip. The floor rises, and the world tilts.
In the flash before I hit, I picture Sawyer’s gray eyes, savage soft, the way they looked when he said after. I picture the little white line he painted on my canvas, the shield hidden under chaos, and I glue myself to that memory the way the tape glues my mouth, the way the zip tie glues my hands.