Page 76 of Skin Trade

“Yep. There’s a bathroom over there if you need to freshen up, water in the corner. Do you want me to get you something to eat? You must be famished. Of course, there’s a mini fridge under the television, but I think you’d rather have something more substantial than that.”

“Sure.” In truth, she wasn’t sure she could eat.

“A sandwich?”

Payton nodded. “This all feels like a dream,” she said to Nancy. “Maybe I’ll wake up in a moment.”

Nancy rubbed her arm. “Not a dream. I promise you. I’ll be back soon with something to eat. Get yourself settled.”

Chapter Forty-Two

From where Payton sat on the sofa, she could see the view from the window, or at least some of it. Looking down from this angle was impossible. But the window was big, and it looked out across the city and even farther out across the expanse of derelict land, where the world had been destroyed and now only sandy places remained.

She had seen pictures when she was growing up of the world that had been here before, the one before the wars. The one before the humans tried to wipe out the vampires by causing the sun to burn longer, brighter, just to burn the blood suckers. Everything was always green in those pictures, so full of life—a world she couldn’t imagine. But she could see the promise of it.

Folding her arms across her chest, she sidled over to the window. Everything below was almost like what she’d read about, but in a cold clinical way. The greenery was housed in glass houses, the trees covered and shaded from the sun, the grass, sparse, but perfectly placed to enable it to grow. Without the green everyone would die, the humans first and then the vampires would become the thirsty.

When she’d been out on Seth’s terrace, she’d drawn the barren lands, but she’d started to add buildings to them, houses, the kind of houses from picture books where only one family lived, but next to that house was another house and another, rows of them, all filled with families—free people. She wrapped her arms around herself and wished in some way she was back on that terrace right now. Back at Seth’s.

She didn’t understand it, but there it was. At Seth’s, she wanted to see her father, and here, she wanted to go back to Seth. It was hard to decide which pull was stronger. With Seth, there was something else, something she knew inside herself.

It didn’t matter. She was here now, and she was going to see her father. She pushed the thoughts from her mind, took herself back to the sofa and closed her eyes. She tried to let her mind drift, but it was like Skin Trade was the anchor she kept finding and being pulled by. Was Seth still sleeping? Did he feel her the way she felt him? If he did, did he know she was gone? Around and around these thoughts went in variations of themselves. She had to open her eyes because closing them was worse.

It didn’t help that the office was silent. Not silent as in that it was just quiet, but silent in a way that was deep into the building. No doors banged, no phones rang, no people chatted. When she was with her father in his office as a child, those were the sounds. Everything was always busy, buzzing with life. Machines churned out paper, phones rang and rang, and the people talked between themselves all day long.

She was sure if she were to scream, the sound would be swallowed up by the vastness of the place. Maybe that was the reason, the place was so big, the sounds just didn’t travel very far. But then Seth’s place was huge and even though the rooms managed to contain their own sounds, there was still sound, even in her room when she was alone and the windows and doors were closed, everything seemed to have some kind of life to it. Not this flat nothingness.

Maybe she could ask Nancy when she came in. It could well be that it was a building design. Some ergonomic infrastructure researched to prove people worked better in specific conditions.

She drifted off with that thought. Not a real sleep, but one where she was still conscious, but her mind was elsewhere. Day sleeping as she called it when she was with Creven, or safety sleep as some of the other girls said. She’d not realised she’d done it until her head jolted and woke her up again.

Shit. She sat herself forward to wake herself properly.

Where was Nancy? Surely, she would have been back by now.

Payton glanced to the clock above the fireplace, except there was no clock. No clock … her father always had a clock. He was obsessed with the things. He’d read a book on effective time management, and after that he’d driven her mother mad with the need for clocks everywhere, especially in his office.

But even with no clock, she was sure a long time had gone by. It felt like hours. Probably had been five minutes, but then her backside had gone numb. Maybe she could find Nancy, ask what was going on. She didn’t mind being alone in the office if she had some ideas of time and structure to her day.

Pushing herself up from the sofa, she was about to go to the door when the pictures on the wall caught her attention. Pictures hung in perfectly aligned spaces around the room. Which wasn’t unusual, but … She peered closer to the one in front of her, brows pinched together as she tried to focus on what bugged her with it. But it wasn’t the picture, that was the problem.

Sure, a couple smiled out at her from the photograph inside the frame. The woman stood at the back of the man, arms around his shoulders, hands clasped across his chest, both smiling for the camera, but under their picture it said, A4 frame – 210 x 297 millimetres.

Without thinking, she unhooked the frame from the wall, turned it over and opened the metal clasps at the back. The card came away easily and inside it was a flimsy piece of paper as a placeholder for whatever picture a person would put up to display. She put the frame on the floor, went to the next one. It was the same. A different image in the photograph, but still just a placeholder piece of paper. She went to the next and the next. All of them the same. The frames on the bookshelves, different images, but all the same. Unused photo frames, waiting for a real image to be placed inside. One of them was a cat, the other a dog. Another frame held the image of a child, but none of them were real.

Scrambling to the desk, she grabbed the frame there. Just the same. The frame on the fireplace, another one. “I don’t understand,” she said to herself. Why would her father have frames that hadn’t been filled yet? It was more like this office was ready for someone to come into, for them to breathe life into it and add their own photographs.

The computer on the desk was the same as the one Seth had in his bedroom, a laptop. At least she knew how to work it. She flipped it open, pressed the power button.

Nothing.

It had a power cord attached to it. At least she could trace that down through the hole in the desk and underneath it. She had to get down on her knees to find the other end of it, but when she pulled the cord, the plug came swinging at her with no socket to put in.

Staying on her knees, she grabbed the phone that was by the laptop, put the receiver to her ear. No dial tone. As she rose, she pulled the phone with her, pulled at the cord. It came free, and with the end of it in her hand, her stomach flipped into a heavy brick of ice that sank down in her body.

Slamming the phone onto the desk, she ran across the room to the door. Her heartbeat was a jackhammer in her chest. She launched herself at the door, fell back when she grabbed the handle, pulled it and the thing came off in her hand. She groaned when her hip hit the solid floor with a hard thump, sending pain through her body, but it didn’t keep her down.

She put the handle back to the door, swivelled it, tried to make it catch on something, but the mechanism in the door handle was gone.

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