Page 10 of Chaos

I’m not proud of myself.

I don’t swipe his legs out from under him—there’s someone at the top of the stairs anyway.

I don’t spit in his face or say something brave.

I cower into the floor, shaking, remembering Ben’s hands on me yesterday, terrified that this is it and I’ll never see Yorke or Auden again.

Never.

Forever gone, like my dad and my mom, like Jee and Jimmy.

Somehow, with Yorke, it feels unbearable, like the pit in my stomach has grown the size of the universe, a blackhole or a waterfall, sucking away everything good in the world.

I want to see him again more than anything.

And the first step toward that is getting these cuffs off. So I lie still, though my skin crawls as he approaches.

There’s a tug at my wrists, the snick of a key, the cuffs fall away, and he leaves.

AFTER SWALLOWING HALF THE WATERin the bucket, I use as much as I dare to clean the bloody gashes on my knees and elbows, stretch my cramped arms and get to my unsteady feet.

I’m not dying here.

I won’t.

My clothes are in tatters, but I pull them on. The ass is missing from my jeans. The buttons are ripped on my shirt. After a night shivering, naked with my hands tied back, it feels good to have anything covering me, though the memory of how easily they can be stripped away has my hands shaking as I begin exploring every single inch of the cell.

Old brick walls with crumbling mortar, a poured concrete floor, a ceiling low enough for me to touch. The crossbeams creak when people walk above me. No windows. No air vents. One electrical line runs to a bulbless circuit in the center.

I rip it out, test it between my hands.

Maybe I could strangle someone with the cord?

When Ben comes the next day, I have it behind my back, between my fists. He sets two buckets down at the bottom of the stairs, takes a single long look at the missing cord, and without turning his back on me, shouts for backup.

His whole posse comes running.

I count them out, commit them each to memory, as they file down the stairs, weapons drawn. There are seven of them. Ben, Renata, Sebi, and Ephie, plus the bald meat-neck man and one with a scraggly beard. Well, and Charlotte Rose. She’s here somewhere. I hear her babbling through the floors from time to time.

Ephie backs me up against a wall, while the man with a scraggly beard pries the cord from my fists, her shoulder pressing into mine, her breath wafting against my skin, her hair touching my arm through the rip in my shirt.

My first impulse is to kick and scratch as the others search my cell, checking for loose bricks or pilfered screws, but her voice stops me as soon as the scraggly beard has moved away.

“Hide this in your fucking ass if you have to.” She presses something into my hands.

It’s soft, plasticky. Not a knife. Not a gun.

I clutch it as she lets me go. “You don’t have to be like this,” I manage to whisper. “You can still change your mind. Be a better person.”

She shoves me back against the wall. “Shut up.”

I tuck my fist, with the item in my hand behind my back, as they take away the cord and head back up the stairs.

The man with the scraggly beard lingers on the bottom step, last to retreat, staring at my breasts in my ripped up shirt.

“No touching,” he says in a gnarled voice, like he rarely uses it. “Yet.”

He leaves, but the awfulness of that word lingers.

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