Page 12 of Chaos

Just stands there, his cheeks birthing a sweaty sheen, as he unleashes a vile torrent of disgusting words into the air, calling mefilthy, disgusting, whore,and pumps himself to a sputtering release, squirting it haphazardly in my direction over the floor of my cell.

“Soon,” he promises.

And I say it back. “Yes. Soon.”

I watch him climb the stairs.

Heart disease killed my dad.

Cancer killed my mom.

Australian flu killed Jimmy.

You can’t hate a disease. You can’t get vengeance against a disease.

But Ben and Scraggle … they’re just men.

You can get vengeance against a man.

And I will.

I wrap my fingers around the bottom stair, put every muscle I have into pulling.

I’ll get it free. I’ll hide in wait, and one bright day when one of them comes down, I’ll smash it into their face, stealtheir gun and their shoes and their coat, and I will get out of here.

That night, as the pigeons coo, my stair board moves. Not all the way, but a full millimeter gap has formed at the bottom.

Croo croooo cuckroooo.

3|A baddun, baby

FRANKIE

Two days ago

I’VE KNOWN YORKEfor about a year, though it feels much longer.

We stayed on the doorstep-slash-fridge for nearly that entire time.

Two weeks, that’s about all we had from the moment we decided to stop waiting. And then Ben took me and I ended up here.

And yet somehow, those two weeks cemented something powerful. His voice is my ear telling me to look for anopening, a path for escape, and his memory is adding strength to my muscles as I yank on the bottom stair.

The door opening at the top of the stairs stops me.

I back away.

“I come in peace,” Renata says, and of all people, she’s holding Charlotte Rose in her arms, a huge enough deviation from pattern to have me wary. Why bring a child into this hellhole?

A shadow at the top of the stairs behind her, most likely Sebi, lets me know not to attempt an escape … yet.

Charlotte Rose is tiny, two I think, wearing a pink fleece jacket covered in purple bears. The sight of her sends a pang of longing for Auden through me.

Renata sets her down on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and she immediately stuffs her thumb into her mouth.

I haven’t seen Renata since that first day, and the thought of learning news has desperation clawing at me. I’m hungry for any scrap of information on Yorke, on Thornewood, on Auden.

“I’m trusting you.” After a long, loaded look, Renata collects my buckets and climbs back up the stairs, revealing a gun sitting in a holster on her right hip.

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