whatever i am, i am something

“Hey Sully!” A bubbly squeal crackles sharp over the screen. “Or… Mr. Sullivan, potential employer.” 

The voice lets out a knowing, nervous chuckle— but the colored bars of a VHS test pattern overlay its owner. 

“Yeah, let’s do that. ‘Mr. Sullivan’. I’m very professional.”

But whoever it is, they’re clearly not, because it takes all of one, two, three poignant smacks before the neon bars fade and are replaced by the grainy pixels of a small girl standing in a bright, poster-clustered room. The camera captures more nostril than face. 

“Oh, this fucking thing—”

One last smack for posterity. The screen shakes. The colors warble. And by the time the camera’s tripod has stilled, the voice’s owner has moved to a more flattering distance. The voice’s owner is a She.

And She smiles with a lot of teeth. A bright yellow shirt clings anxiously to her skin and only makes the flustered red of her cheeks pop harder.

“Okay— HEY, SULLY! So, I hope you got my tape. It’s kinda an old reel, so I’ll be attaching my full dialect vocabulary and an additional performance below. I can do Southern, Russian, Queens, New Jersey, British RP, Cockney, Transatlantic, and, um, I’m still working on my Irish, but I’m a decently quick learner.” She changes her mind with a self-conscious grin. “Regularly quick learner.”

“I’m willing to relocate for the position as long as it’s paid for. I’m not exactly—” But she cuts the rest off with a pursed lip, shrugging as if too obvious to explain. “But I’ve always wanted to travel, so I will make a passionate, energetic, and proactive treasure-hunting adversary. I am knowledgeable in Greek mythos, Roman, Egyptian, Christian, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, Norse, Hindu, but I’m of course always learning more because I… just think it’s really cool. I’m also conversational in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese... ‘Vaffanculo’.”

She salutes winkingly. 

“I have experience in self-defense, but consider myself well-armed, to boot.” Her arm abruptly flies into frame, proudly raising a bright pink tube of pepper spray from her pocket, before toggling it with a fairy-like clinking sound against its carabiner. “And as a long-term survivor of high-functioning Agoraphobia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, anxiety, depression, and being four foot eleven and a half, I know what it’s like to be resilient. I believe I sent you my college essay about it along with my headshot and resume. No babylonian possession curses getting inside this skull.”

Her knuckles rap hollow against her temple with a cheery, if somewhat overcompensating chuckle. They fall just as fast. 

She stops laughing. 

“A-anyway, I’m sure you’ve already made your pick by now, but I just wanted to reiterate my interest in the position. I’m willing to learn and do whatever it takes to be a productive member of your team. I’ve always been… fascinated— fuck-I-suck-I-wish-I-could-think-of-a-better-synonym-right-now— by what you do and would love nothing more than to be a part of something so important. Magical. Greater than… this. I hope there’s a place for me in there.” She changes her mind. “I know. I know there’s a place for me in there.”

An uneven breath prefaces an abrupt tuck of loose hair behind her ear and a loud clasp of her hands in front of her. She shrinks under the glaring ring light and the bright clothes and the too many posters, crumbled nail polish she picks at before forcing her palms into fists with a ravenous, apprehensive inhale. Trying. Failing. But then—

Shay smiles. 

And Shay succeeds.

“And now, I will be performing ‘Out, Damned Spot’ from the seminal classic Macbeth. In case you decide to follow through with that mission in Stratford-upon-Avon. And by ‘in case’, I mean ‘when’. Again, for today, my name is Shay Valentine. Thanks for your considera—-”

Victor snorts, smoke wafting from his beak like a settling dragon, La-Z-Boy beneath like a pile of gold… and firmly hits the eject button.

⋆⋆⋆

She only falls behind because she accidentally trips over another eviscerated limb. Easy mistake.

The metallic churn of whirling helicopter blades follows close like heel-barking dogs. Barking dogs like Dictator Hawn’s howling german shepherd snouts she can taste at her toes, the airy puff she imagines at her ankles, teeth tearing into flesh. A bullet passed and a ripping hole through a head. She runs faster. 

Platinum blonde hair befalls her high-angled face, profile sharp and cut like the throwing knives she so heavily accompliced back in Central Sudan. The grass was trimmer there, the smoke: less choking. A younger her would have excuses to tell, stories for every fellow spy, every fellow huntswoman of why her beautiful face was smeared red with blood. Maybe then there would’ve been sympathy for the glaring scar sliced across her eye at the ripe age of fifteen. Too young to know what it meant to slice another man back. Slice another man open. 

But then again, she was never young. 

There was never time to be. 

Her revolver has exactly three rounds left. Or four. Or is it two? She doesn’t dabble with specifics when specifics don’t matter. When she breathes, feet sprinting over leaves and vines and fluidly over less-than-subtle landmines, it parts her panting, rosemary-red, glossed lips into grins. After ten years in the biz, she already knows she can count on another ten— even if her last draw tonight was a blank. Her hair is coiffed and voluminous. Soft and silky, as well. 

Almond-shaped nails pluck a grenade from her belt and pull the pin like she would the cap off a tube of lipstick. Voluptuous Sin-Sister: her favorite shade. But the burgundy blood of the half-dozen gunners exploding behind her is a close second. The periphery of vermillion flames behind her: less so. Doesn’t go with her skin tone. She runs faster still. 

BANG! — But the enemy’s bullet whizzes past victim-less with only an offhand twist of her neck. Her hearing: better trained than even the Dictator’s hench-mutts. She listens to the jingle of her own silver hoops tapping in heartbeats at her jaw, tinkling rings with every jump her body propels. The enemy’s breath. Her own life pulsating in her chest. It was what her government-sanctioned, professional assassin, less-than-freshly-murdered father taught her, that night on the dock when he said he was just going on a “casual Tuesday night shark tank dive”: Just believe. 

Tell the world you’ll live and the world will listen. 

But that was before the fangs tore through him on the ocean floor. 

BOOM!

And the absolute second she can pull her ravaged, thin, exquisitely-proportioned body from the detonated landmine’s rubble, her enemy’s name leaves her lips.

“Hawn.” — She spits, a bloody glob amongst the soot.

“As I recall, we’ve discussed before that I prefer Doctor Hawn.” 

She grunts in pain when she attempts to wrangle herself onto her knees— blood, sweat, and ash where life once foliaged— but it’s with an effortlessly sensual femininity. The smudges of ash perfectly highlight her heaving, sweat-kissed bosom. She blows a loose strand of hair from her elegant face on the retort. 

“And as I recall, your doctorate in dictatorship proved little admiration.”

But Dictator Dickhead remains unfazed, only a razor-toothed sneer in its place— sharpened down by the finest of evil dentists. Amelia tries not to think about the sharks. 

“Big words for such a little girl.” 

“Small words for such a big, strong man.”

Hawn sneers to combat something else. Amelia doesn’t bother with the label. Might damage his fragile ego to say the feeling aloud. But unfortunately, for her, she won’t get a chance to. Because just as she dares her foot from static shock— 

“Men, cuff her. You know how she likes to fight it first.” And with the simplest snap of his fingers, his word is law. It’s as if the very trees themselves dematerialize for bulky camo print and bulletproof vests, towering above. Herself: a butterfly pinned to a frame. “They always do.” 

She knew she should’ve packed something to blend in, too. She could’ve lied and said the green was for luck.

‘Aww, and for our tenth hate-iversary I was gonna go easy, too.” The lying part: already down pat. As for luck: a late mistress, as always. 

But for the great Amelia Danger, forever a consistent one.

“Guess neither of us will be needing this, then.” 

And without another word, her squeezed fist is lifted to the jungle’s waning light, flickering overhead fluorescent, and with it, an adjoining tangle of brass beads and brilliant gold engraved into the head of a snarling tiger tacky costume jewelry limping sadly from a single rusted chain.

“You… thief!” 

The TV sings with the whines of a fooled Doctor Hawn, speakers clipping loudly due to the restraints of the era and more-than-shoddy boom mics, and Shay gives a sightless thunk! with the butt of her palm when the colors begin to fizzle alongside the rest of him. But then again, it was the flaws of the past that made it so nostalgic.

The room’s a 12’ x 12’ suburban box. But today, it’s the jungles of Africa.

“I don’t know her by any other name, Hawn.” “I don’t know her by any other name, Hawn…”

Shay murmurs right in time, snark bitten between large teeth and a smoking pre-roll as she inspects the box before her: PAWN AMERICA PRIORITY MAIL stamped defensively across the front, as if the hostility of upper case letters will be sufficient ammunition against their local neighborhood porch pirate.

But perhaps not.

Shay seamlessly slides the switch of her trusty pink pocket knife with a soft click!, and the other half of the package’s spine gives way to the remaining haul. Inside: more globs of cheap jewelry— if anything were to resemble the gold of Amelia Danger’s Head of Waghoba, it’d need to be sandblasted off from a layer of muck— a gaggle of pagers, an unpinned brooch that bites her when she dares a closer hand, a polaroid camera, and a couple of crystals, price tags from the tourist shop barely half-scraped off. She sighs. Certainly not worth the egregious hassle of stepping outside. 

Even if the CFO of Pawn America only happened to live two doors down. 

And half-drowned in lint at the bottom, a name and phone number on a piece of cardstock. Today, Shay tells herself it's merely practice. She always wanted a camera, anyway. 

“Dani-uh-el! This is Becca Monaghan wit’ Pawn America!” The Boston accent rolls off like butter, and she nearly wacks herself to the background sound of gunfire. Dammit. She told herself she was gonna start working on her Irish. Suppose old habits die hard. “I’m-uh callin’ boutcha package ya sent us.”

“Wha—?” The aforementioned Daniel responds around what is obviously a 2pm beer bottle. Her sneer: sweeping hills. “Uh… yeah, right, sure! Any winners?”

Now that Shay thinks about it, she’s pretty thirsty herself. 

“Winner winner, chicken dinner!” “Winn-uh winn-uh, chicken dinn-uh, Danny Boy…”

She twitters amongst the whining calls of Dr. Hawn as she leans up to retrieve a half-empty plastic water bottle from a nearby shelf, the joint: into the daycare of an ashtray. She takes a swig to allow Daniel’s sigh of satisfaction to properly sit.

“Oh, thank God, because—”

“Yeah, what are these, real amethyst?” The ‘50% off’ sticker peels off in one easy swing of her fingernail. A single scoff off-receiver. “Those can spot us a pretty seventy-five each, easy. And you sent us a mountain of ‘em.”

“Oh… really?” And Arrowhead spring tastes like heaven against her lips as doubt pulls loose from his own. “Well, I mean, depends what you’re offering for them. You know, they’re a—”

“Family heirloom?” Shay finishes, a simple crinkle of her fist and the sale sticker is at home on the carpet. “They always are.” 

“Y-yeah. So I’m not willing to part for at least a hundred each.”

Awww, Danny boy thinks he has a say on the matter. 

The silence as she sucks down the remaining water tastes sweet and clear, his little gulps of pathetic mouth-breathing music to her ears. She swings toward the TV: upon, a hundred gunmen readying their weapons, Amelia Danger: perfectly-painted lips dropped in a surprised “O” as she notices the horizon cap past the palm fronds. An idea upon her swiftly-raised brow.

This was always Shay’s favorite part.

“Well, listen Danny, it’s a tough economy out there right now. Ya know I got a family ta’ feed myself.”

“Of course.” Daniel replies, teeth chattering nervously upon the glass rim.

Shay’s eyes follow as Amelia swings the Head of Waghoba teasingly to and fro, Dr. Hawn’s mismatched eyes slivered suspicious. Easy. Too easy. Amelia’s mouth parts for an innocent, white-flag-waving grin. 

“But I like ya. So I’m willing to do…” Shay sightlessly dances her hand among the junk, feigning inspection. “Six hundred for the whole thing.”

“R-really? God, thank you so much, Miss—”

Easy.

“Monaghan.”

Like breathing.

“Rebecca Sunshine Monagha—”

“HAWN!” 

Don’t worry. Shay makes sure to twist her head towards it for extra believability.

“Oh god, who the hell are you?!” After what feels like eons of practice, the tonal match is borderline seamless.

And in one flawless motion, one spinning starburst of a second, upon the screen: Amelia Danger catapults the Head of Waghoba through the leaves— and directly off the half-hidden cliff beyond. Screams (and more than a few barks) fall by the dozens. And Shay just barely manages to bite back a smile as Daniel gasps on the other line’s end. 

“No… no, wait you can’t!” — A curt smash of her thumb against the volume button. 

THUNK!

The sound of Amelia’s grappling gun soaring through the air back towards the tiger’s head trades identical for a realistic punch. Shay wails phonily, clutching a make-shift wound upon her cheek, and Danny mirrors in wonderfully earnest fear.

“Please, no, not the kids!”

“GET HER!”

Dr. Hawn’s voice clears like raucous lightning through the receiver as Shay raises it high to the television speaker, static spraying thunderous with the mercenaries’ quickly obedient gunfire and ripping flaming holes through jungle foliage.

“Miss Monaghan?!” Danny boy: pathetically.

“No! No! NOOOOOO!” Shay cries, draping an arm over her forehead.

Amelia’s victorious laughter sings in seeming villainy as the grinning, glowing Head of Waghoba meets the sharp prick of her grappling hook— dozens of burly dumb-dumbs barreling towards its quickly-emptying space, and off the side of their own death— and reeling it right back into her awaiting claws. The VHS whines within when Shay orders a fast-forward.

“You sick BASTARD!” “YOU SICK BASTARD!”

Practice has proven just the right edge of soprano turns Hawn’s mirrored call invisible. So Shay makes sure to jack it an extra two octaves.

“You’ll never take me alive!” “YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!”

Eh, why not make it three? 

Just for funzies.

“That was always the plan… Danger.” — Hawn: Certain, icy, deadly.

And for the grand finale, Shay swings the now-empty water bottle up to the receiver and gives it one, good, solid twist.

CRACK!

There is silence on the other end. Exactly three seconds before a voice warbles from the beyond.

“Miss…?

Nothing.

“Miss Monaghan?”

Nothing but the sizzling static of an overrun VHS. 1986. Classic.

“Becca?!”

And before Danny the Dumbass can utter another made-up name, she’s already hung up the phone. 

From the TV bellows a cacophony of cheers, hollers, hoots. Shay’s favorite, Shay’s medicine, an actor’s only meal: applause. Amelia: hopped into the passenger’s seat of a speeding Jeep, driven runaway by the ever-handsome Professor, Daisy Mae and Eduardo exchanging celebratory high-fives in the back.

Luck: a fickle mistress. But, friends: far, far less so. 

“DANGEEEEEER!” 

And right in sync, Shay and Amelia stand, turn, and give a long, well-deserved bow. 

And… scene. 

They could both use a victory meal. The one with actual organs decidedly more so. Her thrift-picked rainbows: wall to wall; a dozen lamps; a blaring speaker. Her fabricated world: made jungle-rous. Made hers. Made into the thing she has control over. But with a simple swing of the door, her safe world immediately bleeds for—

Quiet.

And where there once was color, adventure, life, now stands little else but a deck of cards, a lifeless shell, of a one bedroom apartment. You’d never think the same specimen could possibly live in both. 

But then again, she doesn’t really. She survives.

Reluctant, overcast sunlight turns her Oliver orphan of a cramped kitchen even more sickly-looking. A single fluorescent bulb, audibly begging for death from the ceiling. A spider scurries unseen. Shay’s starved. But dread fills everything empty when she opens the fridge hinge for what she already knows to be true. A tube of butter. A can of mandarin oranges. A half-crunched baggie of dollar ramen, flavor packet lost somewhere between the stove and the over-stained counter. Shay’s starved. All at once, she feels sick. Her belly: a hole in a tiny, miserable, quivering body.

Reality. That’s what it is.

Shay’s scared. But she said that last time, over uncooked ramen noodles.

“Well… What’s next, Danger?” - The Professor’s voice peeps uncertainly from the next room over.

And Shay can do little else but sigh, fingers freezed in the artificial wind. She reminds herself Amelia Danger probably always carries a switchblade, garden stake, bat, taser, brass knuckles, shlock (combination lock and sock, a prison tradition) and pepper spray every time she goes to the grocery store, too. 

But still she does what she does best: she lies— and tells herself she must always take the three Xanax tablets before she goes, too. 

⋆⋆⋆

Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. An ancient ritual. A witch’s curse. A brutal combination. Every day, every night. When the morning rose, and when it was slain out of the sky by an army of merciless stars that night. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick.

Earbuds in the left, knife in the right. 

Earbuds in left, knife in the right. 

Because— obviously— you should put your defense closest to the dominant hand, because a person has more strength, more dexterity in their dominant hand. Earbuds in the left, knife in the right. A box cutter in the backpack. A fire poker under the pillow. 

Shay [REDACTED] is “spunky”.

Shay [REDACTED] is “quirky”.

Shay [REDACTED] is most of the lies on the expertly color-coordinated resume that she tells herself might actually get her a job. If one’s definition of ‘job’ is ‘a life’. Keyphrase being most of.

There was once a time where mentally disturbed constituted “quirky”. At least in a movie or two. Probably some midcentury musical. Probably one of the better ones.

Her fingers fidget and dig their way around the switchblade’s handle, and the air buckles in her throat when she realizes the tip isn’t facing outwards— which means that if she had to use it, it would take an extra 0.24 seconds to flip it towards the attacker. 0.24 more seconds: the difference between life and death. And so she flips it, removes her hand, wipes her sweating palm on the corduroy, puts it back in to make sure she could wrangle it in one sweeping motion if she needed to. Checks again just to make sure.

It’s a nearly sunny Sunday on the 4pm bus back from downtown, so she bares grinning teeth and too many bags and unsheaths a trembling “Thank you so much!” to the bus driver whose eyes are too bloodshot to even tease them off the road, before she slides into the leftmost upper level, row six, seat twelve. Because at 4pm, that’s where the most sun hits through the window. And Shay just luh-oves the sun. She just might love it more than anything. Maybe even more than disco. Concrete arcs and dashes and lines sweep by the towering palm trees of Pershing Square Park, dotted in burnt blood orange along the railings, somehow miraculously made more magical behind a glass pane. 

Or maybe just safer.

Shay finagles her grocery bags up the leftmost upper level, row six, seat twelve because she’s a liar. Because if she stays on the lower level, she won’t have sufficient visual vantage for an attack from the back, but if she’s too far back on the uppermost level, she won’t have sufficient distance to run through the back doors in event of an attack from the front. 

Obviously.

Golden yellow passes in warm, uneven slats where the skyscrapers’ blockade, and Shay crosses her legs thigh over thigh once she sits down— no, someone will able to see up her skirt, so she crosses ankle over ankle, no wait, because if the bus were to crash, she’d be propelled into the railing and her feet would break like twigs, snap, snap, she can practically hear it, has too vivid an imagination, so back thigh over thigh they go— but then again if a truck were to crash from the side and flip the bus over, then—

Snap.

She freezes and keeps herself thigh over thigh, even when an elderly gentleman beside her, face clouded over in menacing stubble and an even more menacing sneer: his eyes linger a hair too long. The slide over the bridge out the city pinpoints the dip between grandeur and suburb; soon, the steel highrises make way for 7/11s and sketchy-looking car dealerships parading fluttering air dancers in place of customers and the same endless, identical four-way intersections, sun sizzling yellow like a bad filter over a Hollywood movie set in Mexico. And as she watches them glide over the sewage-stained waters of the LA river, Shay uses her endless, overflowing, most whimsical of imaginations to imagine the worst.

Worst Case Scenario Handbook. Yellow cover. Page 5. 

Page 5: How to Escape a Sinking Car

She slides her earbuds into each ear, smacks her thumb into the ‘play’ button at her hip, and in a strike of honking cars and the sound of blaring trombones three thousand miles and an entire lifetime away, Diana Ross sings the soundtrack to a world better than hers. In her pesky, self-mutilated fingers— a swift chomp! of nail off the thumb of her right hand— a little, yellow book, and the tales it tells of how she’d survive if her bus plummeted off the edge and the world decided it didn’t want her anymore. Shifts back to ankle over ankle. Thigh over thigh.

Amelia Danger always gets to sit spread-eagle. Much more comfortable that way.

Disco croons paint the slits of dark shadows back in sunlight, caroling crackling from her walkman, and suddenly the little inked cartoons of drowning Buicks start to paint over in… something else entirely. The sun gives mercy between sporadic suburbs, the last few trees left in Los Angeles County, greens and yellows slashing sweet across the pages like stage lights. Before her very eyes, the words transform. Her world transforms. And there’s no better introduction to Step One, than the belaboring glides of a slide guitar.

Step 1: Open the windows, duh.

So, you’re taking your car for a swim. How… considerate. While a traditionally unideal pastime, if you are to consider such a feat, anyway, know that experts always recommend to keep your windows ajar while driving by open water—

So her eyes dart, a meerkat’s, wide and anxious, over the tops of heads and spot square where the panes of glass already trade for open air. The barest hint of release of strain from between her shoulder blades. 

“Check.” — She whispers under her breath. Careful, calculated, like speaking Shakespeare.

Step 2: Say goodbye to your swanky ride.

But if you prefer to live on the edge, and find that your windows won’t roll down in the event of an unfortunate swerve, use your foot, shoulder, steering wheel lock, or alternative weighty, phallic-shaped object to break one open.

And because she knows she can skip step two, there’s room now. 

“Check.” — Dark, distinctive, personal, like spouting poetry. Edgar Allen Poe.

Room for fantasy. An image idles beside her eyes: of her own furrowed brow and a Bruce Willis grit as she tells the passengers to stand back, a strong, certain palm thrown behind. Not for any particular purpose, but perhaps just for the sake of a flourish. Because hell no, she doesn’t understand the metrics of water pressure. She doesn’t know how many weights she’d need to sling to deadlift a car. Hell, she doesn’t even know how to shoot a gun.

But theatrics, fantasy, art, that burning, all-consuming, completely and utterly unnamable feeling in her chest that tells her she is alive: those are things she understands. 

Because those are the things that are real. 

Rising action star and sufficiently-breasted ingénue Shay Valentine (so she has enthusiastically settled on for this week) draws the garden stake she always carries from her bag and strikes the glass once, the sound of water rushing and gurgling below the tires, the wail of a police siren already calling past the middle distance. The passengers gasp in terror and joy as she plunges a second strike. Again. Again. And on the fifth and final, the center cracks open in a brilliant string of spider’s web. The water rushes, the crowds call, but the determined smirk so beautifully, so elegantly, so naturally etched across her lips never even thinks to falter. The bus-goers: wild, ravenous in their cheers. A distant trombone solo: tearing victorious through the plummeting water. All of life: a beautiful, beating, alive thing. A thing she is a part of.

Her thighs, splayed open across the seat. Because it’s more comfortable that way. 

God, she loves the fantasy of being comfortable.

But disco comes in at a damn close second.

On the intersection of Americana and Brand, a smashed Toyota wafts too thick with smoke to see its owner. To see if there’s blood. Pieces, all over the pavement. A policeman shakes his head to a curious pedestrian, who doesn’t even bother taking his headphones off first to ask.

“Excuse me?”

Her world, the real one: drowning buses— and not even making the news. 

“Sorry, excuse me?”

She moves back to ankle over ankle. 

“Sorry, but do you know which stop to get off for the Americana?”

And when her ignorance still bears no fruit, she submits, and plucks a single earbud free before turning uncertainly to the voice behind. Low and behold: the same scraggly man on the bench beside, eyes no longer leering, villainous, familiar. But rather, wide and welcoming. A soft cradle of a question.

And Shay’s heart sinks with guilt.

“Totally!” But she’s no green. The switch comes easier than breathing, everything lilting in proper, sufficient gentility, bearing a toothy smile as she twists to give full attention. She loves it when people smile at her. And so it only makes sense to smile back at him. “Brand and Harvard. Maybe… five more minutes? I can give you the heads up, if you want.”

He’s people. And Shay loves people.

“Great. Much appreciated.” He bears an earnest grin and any lingering weight lifts free as air before she can so much as graze her eyes back down to Step Three. 

Step 3: 

“Ya know, my wife and I used to go there all the time.”

And Shay loves people. She goddamn loves people. So, it’s stupid when she thinks she feels her teeth begin to grind.

“Aw, that’s so sweet!” 

Maybe she says it an octave higher than her normal register, which some people might interpret as phony. But that’s just a coincidence. She turns her head back to her book. And Shay reminds herself, between layers and layers of neon-colored sticky note, what a rancid, judgemental little insect she is. 

That’s what the pills are for.

Step 3: Get

“Ya know, it’s so nice to know there’s still good-hearted young people out there.”

…Oh.

And it is then that everything halts in its tracks. And Shay’s heart swells, alights like sunshine. What feels like the first time since she left her front door, she finally, truly breathes. And relief— that fickle, unruly mistress— trickles down between her shoulder blades in cooling rivulets. As if her very purpose, fulfilled. As if she was wrong.

She was wrong about everything.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find people who are willing to help others. Thank you.” 

Oh.

Oh.

And this time, when she replies, she looks at him. She really, really looks at him. And Shay smiles. Because she always liked it when people smiled at her. 

And the man with the wild hair and flower-picked meadows of stubble smiles right back.

“Of course, sir. I couldn’t agree more.” Purpose. People. Shay goddamn loves people, and the reasons are too many, too obvious to answer why. “I hope you and the missus have just the best day ever.”

Because when the mystery man smiles right back, it’s with wide, yellowing teeth, warm, button-pink cheeks, wrinkles that crinkle around the eyes, an embroidery laced that means joy. Joy that she made. Her lips ache at the sheer stretch, the sheer unrestrainedness of her smile, but she couldn’t possibly care less. Welcomes it, in fact. Because that’s what means she means it. That’s what means she did good today. She hopes he has the best day of all fucking time.  

In some distant reality, the water rushes forth, tumbles en masse into the socks and soles of their shoes, chaos erupting from the center of the earth… only to spring forth as quickly in its place: a brilliant myriad of light. Hope, sifting like sunbeams through the haphazard shards of broken glass, a whistle of wind like an old forgotten cowboy theme, signaling the way for exit. Signaling the way back to living. Because today is not the day it happens. Shay would smartly prop her foot upon the nearest seat, and extend her helping hand to the trembling citizen beside. Maybe she’d be a middle schooler in wilting pigtails. Maybe she’d be a girl her age, tears trading for mascara. A senior citizen carrying groceries back to his family of ten. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. And sure, maybe everybody dies eventually. 

But just not today.

“...You’re very pretty.” 

Shay’s body shoots forward when the wheels slide into a particularly hard stop at the corner of San Fernando and Brand— and she wonders what it would feel like if her shin snapped in half against the seat in front of her.

She doesn’t look at him when he says it. 

Thump thump, thump thump.

“You have a boyfriend?”

Thump thump, thump thump.

In fact, she tries really, really hard not to exist—

At all.

“Yeah, I do. He’s eight feet tall, but we’re working on it.” 

But she’s never quite able to do that.

“HA!” He bellows back an air-puncturing laugh. “Feisty!”

She’s pretty sure she took the Ativan. Two Ativan, actually. Pretty sure. 

“I like that.” (Not that she asked.)

The last therapist said to start with three and then, just go down to two, but the last therapist before her said to start with two and go down to one, but whenever she started with three instead of two, she felt—

“Love that.” He corrects, all teeth.

Oh God, she felt—

In some distant land, the water swells. It’s up to her calves now, dicey and dark, and the  girl with pigtails the woman her age the Trader-Joe’s-bag-laden crypt-keeper the face-less crowd of pedestrians horribly melt and mask and morph into each other. When she offers her hand, it’s not humanity that meets it on the other side. First their faces, then their shoulders, then their arms— becoming one in a sickly rat king— reaching out, just to pull her down with them. The water is rushing. So cold, it steals her very breath away. But she can’t leave without them. It’s not fair. The water: plunging daggers at her fear-locked knees. 

No, she lies. She can’t leave, because she can’t move. She can’t move. Because her body is no longer hers to own anymore.

“Look, I’m sorry if this is a bit forward—”

‘I’m sorry’ is what good people say. ‘I’m sorry’ is what kind people say.

“But my wife and I have been looking for a third—”

Thump thump, thump thump. The water is rushing. All he said was that she was pretty.

“HA! I’m kidding! Totally kidding!” 

Thump thump, thump thump.

And she should be grateful for that. She should be grateful for that.

“What are you, old enough to be my daughter?”

Her fingers, so small, too small to be anything useful, dip into her pocket, flip the switchblade’s tip forward from where it’s twisted back. 0.24 seconds lost. There was so much sun on her seat. There was so much wonderful, beautiful sun on her seat today—

“How lucky would I be, right?”

It was so beautiful.

She didn’t get to enjoy the sun enough. She thought she had more time to enjoy the sun.

“Though I’m sure your father would kill me.”

Did you know that in the state of California you can legally only carry a knife with a blade less than 2 inches in length?

“How old are you?”

Because if you stab someone with a knife with a blade more than 2 inches in length, you risk hitting vital organs and seriously injuring them.

“How old are you?”

And wouldn’t it just be the most fucked-up thing in the whole entire world— 

“Nineteen?”

The most lawless, decrepit, heart-breaking, earth-shattering tragedy the world has ever known—

“No… fifteen?”

Than for a young woman to kill an innocent man on the bus—

“Just kidding! Just kidding!”

All because he said she was pretty.

“Ha… I crack myself up sometimes.”

But that would never happen, because even in her wildest of fantasies, in the world she’s forced to build herself because there was no room anywhere else, the water’s fervor, its hunger, finally overtakes her meek, trembling, feminine 4’11’’ body entirely— and plunges it into the depths of the sea. 

“Yeesh, you seriously just gonna ignore me?”

Shay tries to catch the trumpets past the droning buzz of the air vents, the honking cars signaling death wishes to strangers for delaying their trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods for thirty seconds, but there is no longer any point. The song is over. And all that’s left in its place is reality, and a world that’s too big, too alive, for someone as small and insignificant as her.

The man sighs, an earnest, aching, forlorn thing.

“It’s so unfortunate that most folks can’t take a joke nowadays. The world was so much better when I was your age.”

And despite everything, crumpling her beating butterfly heart into a soggy, shallow, worthless paper ball… is guilt. 

There was never any point in reading the rest of the page, because she’s had it memorized since the day she got it, age eleven— realized there was a difference between being a child and a daughter—and decided she would never be a victim again.

Step 3: Get the fuck out of there.

But maybe it was never really up to her. Maybe that was the point.

“Check.” —  As she slams her itty bitty fist as hard as it will go into the stop request button. And if the world was kinder: a genuine bonafide witches’ curse.

Her chest heaves, writhes painful, black and barren, knuckles clenching til’ she can see the bones, shame slithering hot like wriggling maggots under a rotting corpse. On the sidewalks outside, the neighborhood bums sizzle on the sidewalk. Thump thump, thump thump. She sees their skin scramble for life against sunken ribs. Thump thump, thump thump. And she never did see the unfortunate driver of that smashed Toyota. If a tree falls in the forest—

“Th-thank you!” Her voice, a pitiful baby bird, for a bus driver who probably wouldn’t care if she lived or died tonight; it topples out of her throat, two octaves too high and heavier than groceries. Someone snickers. She feels embarrassed to be alive. Thump thump, thump thump. Maybe it would’ve been better if she had just eaten the butter. Thump thump, thump thump.

And for the thirty seconds it takes her to scurry off her seat, hop off from the door’s edge and smash her toes into the burning pavement below— bus wheels tearing past the summer heat before she can even check what street she’s on— she contemplates honor. Love. Life.

The things that make people kill.

Thump thump, thump thump.

Her world was going to be different. She swore she was going to be different.

Just not today.

“FUCK YOU!” 

A barrage of endless tears bruise her paper skin blue and black, grief a force too heavy against fragile, sniveling… prey like her. Eyeliner burning like brands into her eyes. Her bones struggle against a single bag of groceries— she’s an embarrassment, an embarrassment, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t matter— and so in what universe were they ever built to carry such debilitating rage?

“FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU!”

She’ll kill him with her milk. That’s what she’ll do. He’ll be stopped. They all will. And she’ll win. And the sun in the seat will be all hers. Forever. And ever, ever, ever. And nobody will make her not want to leave the house again.

“FUCK YOOOOU— Ah!”

Shay practically slings her arm out of its goddamn socket on the jug’s journey to Glenoaks Boulevard. And it doesn’t even hit the tail light. She squeaks in pain, hand going hard to her opposite shoulder, and in the distance, a wet PFT-PFT-PFT!-ing noise as the hollow, plastic thing goes step-stoning off the indignant blacktop. 

“Fuck… you!”   

But who could possibly believe a little nothing like her?

And Shay [REDACTED] cries. She cries and cries and cries, because it’s what she’s best at. 

She’s no hero. There’s no sweeping orchestra, no waterproof mascara. She doesn’t save beautiful men from drowning buses with garden stakes. She’s the girl who cries on the corner and imagines braver, stronger, better people doing it, instead. And what she was built to do— was hope she doesn’t look too insecure when her fingers flutter down to yank her skirt from where it’s ridden up her thighs. A few feet away, the unmistakable rumble of a gaggle at teenage boys parked on the sidewalk beneath her, guffawing at something under their breath.

She sticks her hand into her right pocket, flips the handle when the tip is pointing the wrong way. Takes her hand back out. Puts it back in again. Flips it twice. Takes it back out again. 

And Shay decides she knows the truth. The world was never as big, as alive as she thought it was—

SNAP! 

The sound of a neighborhood squirrel scurrying up behind prompts her knife in a frantic flash from its pink recess, and her jaw drops open in quivering shock when the button snaps ajar: and out pops the blade, snapping into two perfect symmetrical halves on the pavement. 

CLACK-CLACK.

—She was just smaller and more dead than the rest of it.

She refuses to be a victim. 

She refuses to be a victim.

Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. A brutal combination, every day, every night, hidden under her pillow in case of a break-in. Earbuds in the left and knife in the right. Earbuds in left and knife in the right. Garden stake in the right pocket of her backpack, taser in the left pocket of her backpack, shlock in the inner right pocket of her backpack, baseball bat (a single sock rolled over top, just in case the assailant managed to grab it in time) in the inner left pocket of her backpack, zipped to the hilt, even if it kept falling out anyway, pepper spray on her house keys, brass knuckles on her work keys.

And her breath starts to choke in panic at her chest, because she realizes she forgot the second switchblade in her right boot. Second switchblade, right boot. Everytime, no exceptions, because it’s closest to the dominant hand, and a person has more strength, more dexterity in their dominant hand. 

If only she were a person, too. 

A person like she imagines other people got to be persons.

✶✶✶

Shay clicks shut the top lock, the bottom lock, the deadbolt, the door chain, the door guard, the flip guard— and for good measure— the portable lever lock that she had bought from the hardware store for $9.99, just in case. And maybe if she had bought the more expensive one like she knew she should’ve— she knew, she knew she fucking should’ve— she might even feel like it made her safer.

For a moment, all she can do is stand there, made obsolete in the silence of her stagnation-rotted apartment. Someone else’s air conditioning unit, muffled by her meticulously locked, shatter-proof windows, buzzes unsympathetically in the distance. She can barely see the meager furniture in her living room, the black hole pulsating in the center is too big. Gravity swells. Grows and grows and grows, and Shay can do nothing but shrink.

And shrink.

And shrink.

And shrink.

And everything— her half dozen eggs (because the employee stocking the full dozen was looking at her kinda funny), the last tenant’s deflated loveseat (because she couldn’t bear being locked alone with the movers), her single scotch-taped poster weakly curling off the bottom right corner (lest she catch tetanus if she steps on a loose thumbtack), her grey laminate flooring, the cheapest one any landlord in the entire county could possibly shell out for (because landlords fucking… suck)— everything, everything is humanity-lessly crushed beneath.

She’s home, and it’s not any better.

Thump-thump, thump-thump. 

She’s not even strong enough for her own living room.

Thump-thump, thump-thump. 

So why, oh why, would something like her be strong enough for life? 

And Shay crumples lopsided onto the floor.

Somewhere across her cheap, grey, laminate flooring, her tub of hummus dully rolls to safety. But there’s no point in attempting to ask it where exactly that might be. She clasps her half-empty, dirt-smeared milk bottle in a deathgrip as she holds herself, hugs herself against the pounding anxiety. Frantically finagles her backpack off the free shoulder, fingers scavenging for whatever pill happens to rattle today at the bottom. She’s learned the tactics. Trained, memorized, made it muscle memory, like a trained assassin. 

Or at the very least… like a heavily hairsprayed treasure hunter. 

The hollow plastic squeaks when she wrests the spout to her lips, half-choked on a swig and a swallow. She imagines the forever-grinning veneers of Amelia Danger. 

One: white — like milk. 

A crumple, a crunch!, as her bitty tennis shoes find purchase against an o’erturned grocery bag. She imagines the mud, the rock, the twenty-foot-tall, moss-dewed statues of a once-beloved god. 

Two: brown — like paper.

She fights to secure her breath with quivering lungs, like a bird floundering against a cage, molting feathers in its wake. She’s trying to help. The pills were there to help. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting— 

He was just being nice.

Three: green, like— her shoulders start, fingers tremble, and the facts always outweigh whatever frivolous flowers she plants in her mind, but she tries, oh god, does she try— green, like—

Bile.

Her body heaves, and she just barely manages to make it to the garbage bin before her body dives completely overboard. 

Shay’s never tasted the sting of pure acid before, but when her tears finally fall deep enough to crest her lip, she knows she doesn’t need her expert imagination to know they’re identical. Her heart pounds so violently in her skull, a throbbing egg, broken open on the counter for breakfast, that she gets her wires crossed, tactics a-muddle. The hench-mutts are barking. She doesn’t remember where she put her grappling hook. She doesn’t remember the lines. 

Shit. Was it five things you can see, three things you can taste? No, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste? No—

Four: sour— she imagines the waving reeds of Oxalis Stricta, sour grass, dotted down the intersection on the way home from school, back before she became a— 

No, no, no. 

Green, like— She was counting co— It was green like—

Green, like the jungles of Africa. Green, like the soundstages in Hollywood pretending to be a loose, sort-of-maybe, bastardized idea of the jungles of Africa.

Bee-buh-beeeeep!

Something buzzes barely among the ravenous rings of tinnitus, angry wasps at the back of her skull. Just another, and another, and another predator she can’t outrun. Shay drags a wrist across her bitter lip before fumbling for her pager, desperately thrashing off its riptide of denim. 

IT’S VICTOR.

And her meager living room crumbles away as she frantically smears the screen clear of a fallen tear— four: blue, no, salty, no, or was it— relief flooding whatever strangled, minute body her illness left remained. An unnamed number, sitting confident, still in the dead center of evergreen glass.

JOB IS YOURS. YOU IN?

She pointlessly clears her throat against the phlegm, a rock back to sitting, a manic rush at her wilting lines of mascara, as if he could really see her, fingers smashing hard to flip out the keypad and page back a lifeline. She stops, breath knocking askew up the hollows of her throat. Stares down at what she’s created.

IS HE NICE?

Her hands shake. Reconsiders. A sickly glob of sniffle. 

Stupid. Erases it. Rewrites.

IS HE LETHAL?

She’s barely pressed send before: Bee-buh-beeeeep! 

Magic, the way his reply still glows unmistakable past the vaseline lens of her tears:

LIKE A GODDAMN PITBULL. YOU IN?

And she thinks about how the sun was so beautiful today. It was so beautiful on the seat. She thought this morning she’d maybe try going to the park today. Just for a minute. Just to try. She only lasted fifteen minutes last time because the sun was coming down and the lightbulb over her bus stop was broken. She was going to do better this time. She was gonna touch the grass with her fingers. Even if there were bugs. 

She was gonna. Even if there were bugs.

The sun was so beautiful on her seat today. 

Shay gazes up from her spot on the floor— in her mousehole of an apartment, floor to ceiling, hell to heaven grey, doused in darkness, lest her haven: a lighthouse to an animal bigger, hungrier than her—- and twiddles her toes in her milk-covered soles. Perhaps just to remind herself she’s still alive, and not a corpse in a self-built tomb. 

The sun was so beautiful.

And she counts. And she breathes. 

Five: yellow… like the sun.

Bzzzz.

Bzzzz.

"Mmf."

The phone continues its assault against her jaw, half-buried in the pillow. An eye peels open on the alarm clock. It's 8:47pm. Not the most vivacious of bed times.

Bzzzz.

"Fuck sake."

The phone screen is too bright to read; the number swims, an international blur she doesn't bother to parse. With a quick moistening of the lips, she answers anyway.

"Hello?"

"Thank g- yeah - hi, I can't read your damn writing."

She blinks at the ceiling, rubbing a flake of mascara from the corner of an eye.

"…What?"

The voice is pitched low. American? Coming out urgent, and sort of hushed down by what sounds like gritted teeth.

Two and a half thousand kilometres away, on a terrace that overlooks the harbour at Gibraltar, Sam stands at a balustrade with a glass of very expensive wine and a crushed up napkin going warm in his hand.

The terrace belongs to one Eduardo Tavares - sixties, aviator-donning, charisma of a silver fox who has spent his life getting everything he wants.

The terrace is beautiful. The terrace also comes with discreetly placed armed men, of whom Sam has counted two inside the patio doors behind him and three more dotted along the lawn that slopes down toward the harbour wall, each doing a creditable impression of garden statuary while wearing the kind of jacket that, in his experience, is tailored to disguise a shoulder holster.

Sam is wearing a rented navy dinner jacket. Sam hates dinner jackets.

The napkin in his other hand bears a phone number written in Genevieve's handwriting - Genevieve being a Mancunian antiques trader who'd lived above a chip shop in Hulme for three decades before money and an inadvisable second husband had relocated her to a tasteful little apartment north of the Gibraltan Marina Bay, and who is, by some margin, the most reliable person Sam Drake knows on the subject of pre-twentieth-century European wine. Her phone manner is brisk. Her research, impeccable. Her handwriting is a hate crime against legibility.

The number on the napkin contains, among others, two digits that Sam cannot, with any confidence, identify.

"Your writing," Sam says, into the phone. "Is this a five or a six? Ah, hell - doesn't matter - I need -"

"I - sorry, who is this?"

A pause. He looks at the napkin. He looks at the phone.

"…Who's this?"

Five or six? Seven or one? He's tried the six; that was a Brighton B&B. He's now on the five, which sounds sleepy and - as he focuses - not at all like Genevieve, which means one of two things: either he's been conned, or Gen's writing is simply dogshit. Both are possibilities. Neither helps him.

God, British cell numbers are stupid.

"You called me!"

"Yeah, but - hang on, is this not -" And there it is, the dawning realisation: this is not Genevieve. The woman who'd promised to be on the other end of this number - ready with a laptop and expert knowledge and the answer that might just keep Sam from being shot, drowned or castrated - does not exist on this line.

"- ah, shit." He hangs up, leaning against the balcony.

She holds the phone away from her face and squints.

Call Ended - 00:14.

She rubs her eyes with the heel of her palm and pulls a small screwed-up face at the ceiling - eyebrows drawn, mouth pursed sideways, the universal half-conscious the fuck was that - before rolling toward the wall with a tut, already letting the call dissolve back into the soup of half-dreams it interrupted.

Sam stands on the terrace looking at the dead screen of a burner phone, trying to sum up his remaining options.

The calculations are bleak.

Two minutes ago, before the bodyguard had interrupted them, Eduardo had been sitting across the dinner table from Sam smiling his soft pleasant smile and saying, with one hand resting beside the velvet-lined wooden case containing thirty thousand Gibraltar Pounds' worth of seventeenth-century Madeira:

"Now then, Mr. Richards."

The name sits like a slightly itchy collar. Mr. Christopher Richards is the alias on the passport Sam has currently tucked into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket, on the business cards Genevieve had run up at a print shop, on the booking for the hotel he is, hopefully, going to be sleeping in tonight. Mr. Richards is a sommelier of mid-Atlantic provenance and apparently considerable means who specialises in pre-Napoleonic European wines and works for ultra-high net worth clients in the States.

Mr. Richards, by the strictest definition of the word, does not exist.

Sam smiles at Eduardo the smile Mr. Richards would smile, which is broadly the same as Sam's smile, only slightly more wealthy.

"Before we shake on this - and I do hope we will shake on this - humour me with one last thing."

The 'one last thing' had been a name. The name of the smuggler who had brought the rebottled high-end supermarket Rioja, worth perhaps two hundred Gibraltar Pounds into Gibraltar.

Sam had forgotten the name they'd settled on. The name that linked to the fake label and engravings on the bottle.

Sam had not known the name despite Genevieve having quizzed him on the brief twice over the phone in the last forty-eight hours, because Sam had, with careless confidence, assured her he had it locked down.

He had opened his mouth, spoonfed himself another mouthful of the pistachio glop that had been served for dessert - chewing slowly, stalling, attempting to swallow around a tongue that had become inexplicably useless - and his brain had produced José and Joaquín and Manuel and Pedro in rapid undifferentiated succession, and he had been milliseconds from saying José Manuel with the kind of conviction that, on this terrace, with these armed men, would have got him politely walked off the harbour wall with his hands tied behind his back.

And then, in a stroke of miraculous luck, the bodyguard had stepped in. Some private call. Five minutes, Mr. Richards. Five minutes.Eduardo had risen, sighed, and followed his man inside.

The patio doors had slid shut.

And Sam, alone with a glass of wine and a ticking clock in his head, had walked to the lawn-side balustrade - the corner of the terrace furthest from the patio doors and the perimeter men, where the breeze off the harbour was loudest and the sound of his voice would carry to no one - and had dialled the six. The six was Brighton. He had dialled the five. The five was the disgruntled Brit.

That has now been hung up on.

Eduardo will be back in - Sam glances at the dim shape of him through the smoked glass of the patio doors, still on the phone, still gesticulating - Four minutes. Maybe.

The bottle is, currently, sitting on the dining table behind him, beside the dupe Sam has been bamboozling him into trading it for. The Madeira, in its velvet-lined wooden case, glints at Sam in the candlelight beside the dupe he’s brought with him that’s worth a mere fraction of the thirty-seven thousand smackeroonies that the legit bottle will fetch the moment he can deposit it into the hands of the man who sent him here.

The man who arranged the meeting, who fronted the cover story, who is expecting Sam to walk off a flight in twenty-four hours' time with a thirty-seven-thousand-pound bottle of fortified Portuguese wine and a clean exit - the man Sam took a job from is not the kind of man you turn up to empty-handed. Not if you want to remain un-scalped.

He looks at the burner.

He looks at the napkin.

And with a quick prayer up to whatever may or may not be looking down at him, he redials.

A hop, skip and a flight away, her phone buzzes again, and she groans into the pillow - "Oh, you're joking" - and lets it ring, two times, three, on principle. She answers on the fourth, eyes closed.

"After calling the wrong number," she says, "it's quite normal not to do it again."

"Yeah, no, listen -"

"It's the etiquette. You're meant to apologise via text, if anything, not double down with -"

"Okay, okay, hold on a sec -"

"- a second attempt, like the issue was my answering technique -"

"Hear me out. Jesus."

And against his every instinct, against the men and the napkin and the very real possibility of dying in a fancy house over a bottle of wine, Sam huffs out a tense breath; the noise of a man who would, on any other Tuesday, be enjoying this exchange enormously, and who is currently registering the loss of that pleasure as one more grievance to add to his evening.

She hears the almost-laugh. She doesn't mean to smile into the pillow.

"Hear you out about what?” she says.

He glances sideways. The terrace is still empty behind him. The perimeter men are still doing their statuary impressions in the middle distance. The patio doors are still shut.

"I appreciate this is… unconventional -"

"Just a tad, mate."

"- but have you got, by any chance, access to the, uh, the internet?"

That wakes a small patch of her brain. She opens one eye. "You're cold-calling random people for Google access? Strange man."

"Hey, that’s not nice-"

"Just use your phone!"

"Look, this is - I'm in a slightly time-sensitive situation, and the girl whose number this is meant to be is the girl who'd normally do the googly thing, and I can't read her writing, so - here you are."

"Here I am."

"Yep - and by the time I figure out which digit I screwed up, I might be… let's say, somewhere I'd rather not be, so -"

She sits up and narrows her eyes at the dark, suddenly and irritatingly awake, suddenly and irritatingly interested.

"I suppose I can squeeze in one more good deed for the day. What do you need, good sir? Are - are you good?" she says, half hard-done-by, half something else.

"Thank you, Lord. Uh - jury's out." Relief moves through Sam so cleanly it gives him butterflies.

She snickers.

"M'kay. You know your, uh - your Gibraltar history?" He says, expecting an instant 'no'.

A beat. "My what?"

"Gibraltar - as in, the R-"

"Like the Rock of. Yes, I know a little." She snorts, eyeing up her laptop sat at the end of her bed where she'd left it before her power nap. "Are you having me on?"

Sam frowns. "Having you - what? On what? What does that mean?"

"Don't worry - carry on."

Sam glances over his shoulder at the patio doors. Scary Eduardo, still gesticulating through smoked glass. Still on the phone. Sam pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a small breath, because the carry on and the snort have just cost him about six valuable seconds of his finite couple of minutes.

"Uh… Eighteenth century, specifically the lead-up to the Great Siege. There's a Portuguese name I need, of a - of a guy, who -"

"You want me to Google something about Gibraltar?" Her fingers are already moving on the laptop keyboard - thunk-thunk-thunk on her password, the electronic huff of a screen waking up, and of course the document open on it is the third draft of an essay on Iberian-peninsula trade routes in the long eighteenth century, and the cosmic improbability of this - of a stranger ringing her in need of the one thing she happens to be writing fifteen thousand words about - is so absurd she doesn't even have the wherewithal to find it suspicious.

"Yes."

"A Portuguese guy…" She drags her essay tab to the side of the screen with the heel of her thumb and opens a new one, the Google homepage loading beside it.

"Correct."

"In a hurry."

He swirls the wine in his glass with a wrist that has gone slightly impatient on him, the candlelight catching the meniscus.

From the other end of the line he can hear the faint clatter of distant typing, fast and assured.

"A Portuguese guy who smuggled wine into the island. Yep. I think my life as a man with all his original limbs depends on it."

The laugh that punches out of her is involuntary and faintly unhinged.

"Crikey. I hope I'm not becoming an accomplice in something illegal."

The joke saws slightly too close to the bone for comfort.

"Mm," he says. "Yeah. Ha."

"Hang on," she says, fortunately distracted. "Just so we're clear - when you say lead-up, you mean the British garrison period, not the Spanish reconquest attempts, yeah?"

Sam stops his nervous fidgeting, one hand braced on the cool stone, wine glass momentarily forgotten - because the woman on the phone has just produced a sentence he did not have the imagination to expect.

"…I'm sorry, what?"

"It matters which side of the supply blockade your guy was on," she says, briskly, scrolling. "If he was running goods into Gibraltar he's a smuggler-merchant working with the British. If he was running them to the Spanish lines, he's the other thing entirely. Different categories of person. The records sit in different places. It'll help me narrow it down."

And here is the thing that Sam hasn't budgeted for: that he would be standing in a borrowed dinner jacket with armed men breathing behind him - and that he would find himself charmed. Genuinely, inconveniently charmed, by a voice.

He's the literate one, the competent one, the guy in any given operation who can read a room and a document and a man's face, and he has just been comprehensively out-classed on a subject by a sleepy undergraduate in another country, and the experience is - he is appalled to discover - delightful.

He realises he is smiling. In mortal peril. Like a man on a date, and for one full second the perimeter men and the thirty thousand and the entire structure of the immediate threat of being rumbled recede to a pleasant background hum behind the considerably more pressing question of who is this person and how soon can he find an excuse to talk to her again -

"…Did I - did I call a historian?" he asks, and it comes out softer than he means it to.

"You rang a History undergrad," she says, primly. "Whose current module's on trade routes on the Iberian peninsula. Lucky you."

"Lucky me," he repeats, and he'd fistbump the air in relief if the sudden movement wouldn't get him shot on sight. "Right. Into Gibraltar. He was running stuff into. Smuggler. Wine."

She types. A list spills onto the screen after a few clicks - several dozens of names, the odd tagged painting or old photograph, the kind of Wikipedia rabbit-hole that would normally claim an entire Sunday afternoon.

"Ooh, long list of wine smugglers here. Can you narrow it down at all?"

He frowns into the harbour breeze, foot tapping nervously against the base of the balustrade. "This guy was in the salt trade too. Somethin' about Persian… somethin'?"

She types, taking in the accent as her lower lip snags between her teeth. He listens - the fast clack of her keyboard threading down the line, weirdly intimate at this distance, the sound of someone working on his behalf.

"Okay. Smaller list. Got any inkling as to a name?"

"Shit, uh… João something. Maybe Joaquim. Definitely a J."

"Cool. Cool cool cool. Anything else?"

"I'm working off a bar napkin here, sweetheart. Just… toss a name my way. I'll know it when I hear it."

The word slides in sideways and parks itself somewhere behind her ribs.

Sweetheart. Her brain - her treacherous, sleep-deprived, suddenly-very-awake brain - does a rapid double-take around the word, turns it over, examines it from several angles, and arrives at no conclusion except that she would, on balance, not mind hearing it again.

The cursor blinks. The search loads. She tells herself it was nothing, a tacky Americanism, a verbal tic, the kind of thing men like him probably say to the entire female population of whatever country they happen to be doing something nefarious in. She tells herself this firmly, though she doesn't entirely believe it.

"Miguel… Rodrig-"

"Nope."

”Ricardo Mag-“

”nah, no it’s… it’s definitely a j. Keep goin’.”

"Uhhh… João Pereira de Sousa," she reads off the screen. "Wine and Persian Blue salt. Big in the run-up to the Siege. There's a portrait - huge moustache."

A beat of silence on his end. Then a soft, disbelieving exhale. "Yes. Yes. Pereira. Moustache. That's - that's him, holy shit."

"Glad I could -"

The patio doors slide open behind him.

Sam clocks the sound before he sees it, and by the time Eduardo's voice reaches him - terribly sorry, Mr. Richards, terribly sorry, that was my daughter, you know how it is - Sam has already turned, glass in hand, the burner palmed and dropping smoothly into the inner pocket of his dinner jacket, his thumb finding the off button by touch alone in the half-second it takes to face Eduardo with a polite smile.

"Beautiful view." Sam says.

"Isn't it." Eduardo crosses the terrace, gesturing for Sam to return to the table. "I always think the harbour at night is the most honest part of this place. Everything else is theatrics.”

Theatrics. Sam’s collar tightens.

“Come - let's not keep you any longer than I already have. Where were we?"

"Your last question, I believe."

"Ah. Yes." Eduardo settles into his chair. Lifts his glass. Smiles. "The smuggler of this bottle of yours."

Sam swirls his wine. Sips it. Lets the pause sit - not too long, not too short, the considered pause of a man producing a name from comfortable memory rather than from a phone call concluded five seconds ago - and meets Eduardo's eyes across the table.

"João Pereira de Sousa," he says. "Wine, including this fine bottle here, and Persian Blue salt. Big moustache, by all accounts."

Eduardo's smile broadens. He raises his glass.

"Well. To Mr. de Sousa," he murmurs. "And… to a very pleasant evening, Mr. Richards."

Two and a half thousand kilometres away, in a darkened bedroom in South East England, the woman whose name Sam is yet to know holds her phone away from her face and watches the screen go dark - Call Ended - 04:01 - with a small, slightly bewildered smile.

Well.

That was -

That was something.

She sets the phone, face-down, on the bedside table. She closes the laptop. She lies on her back in the dark for what feels like a long time, looking at the ceiling.

She does not, for some time, go back to sleep. She lies there and replays it - the I can't read your damn writing, the supply-blockade beat, the laugh he'd huffed when she'd corrected him - vanished, mid-sentence - and she finds, to her considerable irritation, that the word her brain keeps drifting back to, is sweetheart.

She pulls the duvet up over her mouth and squeezes her eyes shut.

She falls asleep, eventually, still faintly smiling, with no idea that two and a half thousand kilometres away a man she will not meet in person for two more years is currently being shaken warmly by the hand of a man named Eduardo Tavares, who has just handed him a velvet-lined wooden case containing almost forty grands' worth of seventeenth-century fortified Portuguese wine, and who is telling him, with great sincerity, what a pleasure it has been to do business with such a knowledgeable gentleman.

In the morning there will be a text from an unknown American number, sent at what must have been three a.m. her time.

Made it. All limbs accounted for. I owe you a drink. Sam.

She will read it three times. She'll smile. She'll not reply for two days because she's got an interview at a pub and until that's over, she can't focus on anything else.

She will then reply which limb were you most worried about losing? - and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

  //

  You come to with a wrench.

Lungs first - a single violent inhale that sends you coughing on spit - and then hard, teeth-rattling impact, shoulder-first into rock, head jolted hard enough to white out everything else for a half-second.

The wet gurgle that comes out of your throat isn't a sound you've made before, doubling and tripling off a tough surface you can't see, and your eyes are open but your brain hasn't caught up and the dark is -

The dark hares violently from side to side.

The headtorch beam careens wildly, and you arc back the way you came, fast, and hit stone again on the same shoulder and this time you scream, ragged and pained, because you don't know where you are, you don't know what's happening, your body is in agony in seven places at once and-

You're swinging.

What.

What, what, what -

You slow. The beam slows with you, dragging in long strokes that show you everything in the same fractured stutter - rock face, void, rock face, void.

You're surrounded by quiet.

Just your breathing and the slow creak of rope somewhere above you.

You blink. Slow. Thoroughly disoriented. The beam steadies on a patch of pale rockface two arms' length from your nose.

There's a pulsing in your cheeks. Heavy, throbbing, behind your eyes, in your gums, in the bridge of your nose where there's a crust of dried blood flaking when you grimace. The very specific swelling, thudding sort of feeling that occurs when you're upside down for too long-

Oh.

Oh, no.

You're upside down.

You crane your neck - try to, at least, every muscle in it protesting.

Boot.

Rope.

Harness.

"What the fuck?"

A single thigh loop of the harness - the bit that should be wrapped snug around the top of your leg - was, wrapped snug, as you recall your exchange with Rob - has slid the entire length of your leg and caught, just barely, on the lip of your boot. That's it. That is what's holding you.

"What the f- no - no no nonononono-"

One frayed strip of canvas webbing hooked over the cuff of a hiking boot, and beyond that, tight rope feeding up into the dark.

No carabiner at your hip. No chest piece across your sternum. No clip, no buckle, no substantial anchor of any kind.

You whimper, too afraid to care about how pathetic you sound.

What the fuck happened?

You twist your free hand up to your waist and find the bare, slightly sweat-dampened cotton where the rig should be, and the understanding begins to slot into place.

You took the harness off.

You - she - it, whatever - undid every buckle and the thigh loop had slipped and caught itself on your boot on the way down by sheer luck.

Your stomach lurches.

"No - no - no, no, no -" you repeat, head frantically turning to the best of its ability to find an escape route.

The walkie-talkie. Get the walkie-talkie. Tell them. Tell them - they can pull you up, they can -

Your free hand fumbles at your hip - the webbing loop where the walkie-talkie should be clipped - and finds nothing. Empty. Empty webbing. Empty everything.

A sob rips out of you before you can catch it.

“Shit!”

You can’t -

You can’t tell them. They don’t know. They’ll be standing around the well right now, Scott staring at his watch, calling in every few minutes to see if you're conscious, waiting for you to radio back like a good girl and tell them what you’ve found, and you can’t - you can’t - and how long has it been already, how long were you out?

The other realisation arrives in tandem: you'd been holding something. Are still holding something. That's why you're… you again.

Hard, metal, the bite of an edge against the meat of your palm. Your fist is locked around it so tight it's gone numb.

You open it.

Slowly. Every joint pulsates in overexertion.

The headtorch beam catches the gleam first - a wink of tarnished gold against your blood-streaked palm - and then the shape resolves, and your stomach goes cold all over again.

A cufflink. The cufflink. The accompaniment to the one behind the glass casing in the British Museum that you've spent the last three weeks looking for.

Set into metal gone the colour of old tea, engraved with something dark and curling that you can't make out from this angle and don't have the strength to.

Of course.

Of course.

The thing he sent you down here for. The thing Emaan moved before he died, the thing Campbell could never find, the thing your body stripped a harness off in the dark to claw out of a recess in a rock-face and seemingly took a fucking nosedive for, bringing you back into yourself in the split second your fist clenched tight around it.

The edges have left impressions in your skin.

Hold onto it. Hold onto it. Don't drop it.

Your fingers won't unclench properly. They've been locked around this thing for god knows how long and the joints have set; you have to coax them open with your other hand, finger by stiff, sore finger, and the cufflink lifts free of your palm with sticky reluctance where dried blood has glued it to your skin.

This stupid fucking thing is all that's keeping you conscious.

The pocket. Your shorts. The thigh pocket. Get it in the pocket.

Your other hand fumbles down - no- up - across your hip, past where the harness should be, to the seam of your shorts, and you cannot find the zip- you can't find it, your fingers are too clumsy and trembly and the fabric is bunched and there is a single hot, sobbing second where you are absolutely certain you are going to drop it, you are going to drop it and watch it fall and listen for the splash or the thunk and then you pass out again and turn into little more than offal on the ground beneath you-

There.

Zip. You catch it. You pinch it between two unsteady fingertips and you draw it back along the pocket seam and you hold the lip open with your thumb and you slot the cufflink in, edge first, and it slides down into the cargo pocket with a dead weight that you feel against your thigh, and you zip it closed - slow, slow, do not pull it off the track - and then you press your palm flat over the outside of the pocket and feel the lump of it through the fabric, and you press, and you press, and you press, like if you press hard enough it might actually transport you to wherever you fell from -

You’re crying again.

Your body jolts.

A muscle spasm, somewhere in your dangling leg, the thigh, the one not tangled in rope - and your whole weight shifts, one bare inch, and the rope above your tangled calf gives a creak that you feel in your teeth.

You go very still.

The chamber goes very still.

The headtorch beam stops swinging.

Oh.

A hot wash of panic floods up through you and your eyes blur with tears that blind you, keep your eyes full and dribble down- up - into your eyebrows because you are upside down, and you let out a wet laugh that turns into a sob halfway through, and your face is pulsing now, throbbing, every heartbeat hammering against the backs of your eyes, and you can taste copper at the back of your throat, and you can’t -

You can’t stay like this.

You can’t stay like this. And now, there's a clock running because the next jolt of your body weight against this rope will undo whatever tangle is holding you up.

You have to -

“Checking in, darl’. You back in the room?”

You go rigid.

It’s faint. Distant. Crackly. It’s up. Somewhere above you in the dark, threading down through stone, a thin compressed approximation of Scott’s drawl carried by the geometry of the cave from wherever the walkie-talkie is - wherever you-she-it dropped it, wherever you came over the edge from, the lip of rock circling above you.

You sob once more, hard, and then choke it down - choke it, physically, jaw clenching so hard it hurts - because crying is making the rope move and the rope can't move any more.

Breathe.

In.

Out.

No one is going to save you this time.

Right. Fine. Get on with it, then. Flip right-way-up. Climb two metres. Get to the harness. Get clipped. Then think about everything else.

You shift your weight, infinitesimally. Test the harness loop. It creaks… but holds around your ankle.

A person who does pull-ups for fun could perhaps navigate their way out of this situation. An acrobat with incredible core strength, maybe, with hands that aren't half-bandaged and missing nails. You picture, briefly, Scott doing it, in all his lithe athleticism. Sam, who once pulled himself up onto a rotten plank twenty feet above a river with you under his chest, his teeth bared and his -

No Sam down here, though. Haha! No Sam to put his life on the line for you this time.

The reminder of his existence settles like silt, and another laugh punches out of you - a high, nigh-on hysterical laugh, because you are dangling upside down by one leg in the dark in a cave under a desert with blood crusted on your face and you are still - still - thinking about Samuel fucking Drake -

"FUCK -"

It rips out of you. The chamber takes it and ricochets it back to you in pieces, and the rope creaks, and you freeze, every muscle locking, the laugh dying in your throat as the swing rocks you gently to and from the wall again.

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Stop it.

You tip your head back - forward, up - and look at the carabiner two metres above you, at the harness hanging from it like the world's most sadistic piñata, and you start, with shaking hands, to think about how a woman who is not built for this has no choice but to give it a go.

Okay. Okay.

Abolish the imagination and focus on the facts. Science. Mathematics. The maths is mercifully simple: you move, or you die. You don't move, you pass out from lightheadedness. You pass out, your body relaxes. Your body relaxes, your boot un-flexes. Your boot un-flexes, the loop slips. The loop slips, you fall. You fall, you die.

No variables.

No clever way out. No help coming. No secret third option. There is, in fact, nothing to lose.

You try the easy thing first.

You bring both hands up and try to curl - a slow, careful crunch, drawing your torso up toward your snagged leg, reaching for your ankle, for the strap, for anything you might be able to grab onto and pull yourself up by - and your abdominal muscles, or lack thereof, quiver, and your bruised ribs pulsate, and you make it perhaps thirty degrees off vertical before your core gives out completely and you flop back down into the dead-hang with a small, defeated oof and the rope creaks at you reproachfully.

You squeeze your eyes shut, ignoring the tears and the snot and will yourself to get a grip.

You try again.

You make it less far.

You try a third time and your stomach muscles actually cramp, a hot knotting seize that makes you gasp and clutch at your own torso and the swing shifts and the rope creaks and you go very, very still.

Right.

That's not happening.

You hang there. Dead weight. Arms drifting limp toward the bottom of the chamber far below, blood pulsing in your skull, breath ragged, and for a long stretched second you are just - done. You could stop trying.

You could just hang here. You could… let the boot un-flex. Close your eyes and let the loop slip and let gravity do the rest, and it would be over, and there would be no more caves, no more of your body being used against you, no more Scott, no more anything -

Look at you. The delirium fuelled by the blood in your head has you talking to yourself.

Look at you. Melodramatic little bitch. Drugged and kidnapped and bundled across an ocean and tied into a harness by an Australian bellend, and you're going to lie down for it. You're going to hang here and die for it. Not even bother to find out what's happening to you so you can at least TRY to argue your way in court.

You scoff.

And Sam - Sam was right, wasn't he? Wasn't he, sweetheart? People like him don't fit alongside people like you, because people like you can't survive a hike without his hand on your back. People like you should be pulling pints and reading Reddit forums, whose adventures should be deciding what Tesco meal deal combination they're going to try next. People like you should never have pushed and pushed and pushed to get on a plane in the first place -

"FUUUUUCK!" you snarl and crunch again.

You crunch hard - full-body, jaw clenched, a noise tearing out of your throat as pain sears through you- and you don't make it to your ankle, you don't even come close, but the motion swings you, and you ride it, panting as your eyes catch the wall that's assaulted you multiple times already.

You keep moving. The rockface comes into reach. Deep orange stone with a scatter of cracks, of small ledges, of the kind of vague handholds a real climber would dismiss as nothing -

- and at the apex of the next swing your hands hit it.

The impact is agony. Your bandaged fingers slap stone and your nails - what's left of them - drag across rough surface and you scrabble, like a frantic squirrel, fingertips scraping for any kind of bite, and for a split second you think you have it, you think your fingers have caught a ridge -

- and then you don't, and the swing reverses, and you spin away from the wall, dangling, sobbing, your hands now actively bleeding through the bandages where the gauze has torn open, and the swing carries you back into the void.

"No, no, no, no -"

The rope jolts. An inch. Less than an inch. The loop shifts on your boot, slides down a fraction of a centimetre toward the heel, and the cuff catches it again - just - just barely -

You crunch on the next forward swing with a noise that doesn't sound like you, throwing your whole body weight into the arc, and you hit the wall again and this time you are ready - this time your hands are clawed before they touch, this time you find a crack with your right fingertips and a tiny rough ledge with your left thumb and you cling, you cling with everything you have, your destroyed hands screaming, your shoulder screaming, your face dripping, and you bring your free leg up - the one that isn't trapped in the loop - and you scrape your boot toe against the rock until it catches on something, anything, a tiny lip of stone, a crack, you don't know and you don't care, and you wedge it in and you press.

You're holding to a wall by three damaged fingers, a thumb, and the toe of one boot, and it is, for now, holding back.

You re-assess. The loop keeping you alive is on your ankle, and to get a hand on it you are going to have to fold yourself in half, head toward foot, with only your grip on stone for ballast.

You walk your fingers up the cracks and scrape your boot higher bit by bit. Hauling your torso up the rockface in tiny inverted crunches, your spine curling toward your snagged leg, folding yourself into a strange crescent shape, in the most graceless humiliating insect-on-a-windshield manner imaginable, but you are moving, and your ankle is closer, and the loop is closer, and -

A handhold gives.

A flake of rock comes away under your right hand with a small dry crack and you gasp, slipping - six inches, eight, your boot scrabbling for the lip it had just left - and the thigh loop slithers down toward the heel, and you can feel it, the canvas dragging along the leather, and you know - you know - it is about to come off entirely -

You lunge. At the ankle. Your free hand throws itself up and back and your fingers close on canvas - on the loop - on the very bottom edge of the harness webbing as the thigh loop slides off your heel and lets you go -

- and you swing.

You swing wildly off the harness strap, one-handed, your trapped leg now dangling free, the entirety of your body weight suspended from the four fingers and thumb of your excruciatingly sore hand.

You scream. You can't help it. You scream and you swing and you do not let go.

The harness creaks as you rapidly bring your left hand up.

Two hands on the harness.

You loop your forearm through one of the leg loops - through it, properly, elbow-deep, hooking your bicep over the canvas - and you hang from the bend of your own elbow, then up over your shoulder and your hands shake out.

You are right-side up.

You let yourself cry properly for ten seconds because you have just survived the worst five minutes of your life.

The blood in your face begins to drain. The pulse behind your eyes eases. Your vision, which had been blooming black at the edges, starts to clear. You hadn't realised how bad it had got until it begins to lift, and the relief is so palpable it nauseates you.

Then you reach up, free hand trembling, and you take hold of the proper line - the line, the rope above the carabiner, the one that goes up - and you wrap a coil of it around your forearm, and another around your wrist, and with a much simpler swing now you're upright, you brace your boots against the rockface. Soles flat, knees bent, and you begin, in the slow shaking manner of someone who is running on stolen reserves, to walk yourself up.

The burn in your forearms, the shake in your knees, the rope creaking, the slow shuffle of boots against rock - and then there's a gap, and then you are here, dragging yourself up and over the edge on your stomach, fingernails scrabbling, knees scraping, the harness loose and twisted around your torso, and just as your arms give out, you collapse face-first onto cool stone.

And then every feeling that had to be pushed aside to make room for adrenaline comes out of you.

There is no one to perform for. To crack a joke for. And the sob that comes up out of your chest is so big it bends you forward until your breath indents the sand beneath you. The next one folds you all the way down. You go from all fours to your side to a small curled infantile thing on the ground, the harness twisted under you, your cheek against grit, and you wail.

Wail.

The body emptying itself - an ugly, gulping, broken series of splutters, no shape, no rhythm, just heaving, guttural cries that come up faster than you can take air for them, until you're choking on your own breath and gasping and sobbing again.

You don't try to stop it.

You don't think you could stop it.

Your hands come up over your face - your forearms, really, because your hands are destroyed, you can't bear to touch yourself with them - and you press your arms across your eyes and you sob into the crook of them and you can smell the iron of your own blood and the salt of your own tears and sweat and you cry, and cry, and cry.

"Don't want this," you babble, wet and muffled, into your own forearms. "I don't - I want to go home-"

It's small. A child's voice. A six-year-old who fell off their scooter and scraped their knee.

"I want to go home - I want to go home, I want to -"

What did you do?

What did you do to deserve this?

You don't know. You genuinely, genuinely don't know. You were pulling pints in shitty old South East London three months ago. You were fine. You were bored. You were a person with a job, studying for your Masters, a small bungalow of your own, and a slightly disappointing dating life and an opinion about the new Gail's opening up on the high street, and now you are lying on stone in a cave in a desert in a country that used to excite you, with blood crusted in your hairline and a man's antique cufflink zipped into your shorts, and your hands are gone - your hands, your hands -

You sob harder.

After Cornwall - after the bridge, after the rotten plank, after Sam's chest over yours and his hands fisted in your jacket - you'd made a joke about it. Lying on the stone catching your breath, crying and laughing at once, you'd looked up at him and said something, you can't remember what, something stupid and flippant - you'd been good at that - shrugging things off.

You try now. To turn your tears into laughter. The mouth tries to do it. Well, that was a bit much. That's one for the diary. There's a career in the circus for me yet.

But the reflex is empty. There is no light, wry version of this.

God, you're sick of the taste of blood.

Sick of going back to whatever godforsaken hotel or rental Scott's carted you off to and having to stare in the mirror for ages just to recognise yourself.

Because that’s what it takes, now. Long minutes at a bathroom sink, leaning in close enough to fog the glass, looking past the bruises and the gauze and the puffy eyes and the sunburn and the slack tired set of your mouth, hunting for you.

Sometimes you find her. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes she’s somewhere behind the eyes, just barely, and you have to hold her gaze until she looks back.

You hate it.

You hate that you can’t just - you can’t just be seen. You can’t be looked at by someone who knows you well enough to do the work for you. Who looks at you with kinder eyes. You can’t be looked at the way -

You want his hands on your face. Broad and a little calloused and warm, cupping your jaw, thumbs at your cheekbones - looking down at you the way he had then, like there was nothing in the room except you, like the rest of him had gone quiet just so the looking could be louder than your mind after waking up in another man's brain matter.

You want him to look past the blood crusted in your hairline again. The grime. The split lip you hadn't noticed until just now, the salt of tears stinging it. Just like he did in Chatham. The bruise blooming along your side where the rockface had walloped you. Your disgusting hands. You want him to look past all of it to whatever's behind all that - the you of you, the thing you can barely feel anymore - and you want him to thumb a streak of blood off your cheekbone and say it in that quiet, softened voice he uses when there's no one around to hear it, you're alright, sweetheart, I've got you, you're alright -

You wipe your eyes with the backs of your wrists. How fucking pathetic.

You hate him.

You hate him and you miss him, and it's unfair and stupid and embarrassing because he's the reason you're here, he is the reason, and yet here you are, lying in the dark with your face in your forearms wanting him to hold you, and you don't know how both things can be true at once and you don't have the strength to work it out, you don't have the strength to do anything -

Your stomach turns.

A flat, sudden lurch - the adrenaline finally catching up with you, your body remembering it's been hanging upside down, that it just escaped death again, that it hasn't slept properly in weeks and that still has no fucking clue about what exactly turns it into this feral beast - and a hot wave of nausea climbs up the back of your throat and you have to clench your jaw against it, swallow hard, breathe through your nose. The smell of iron makes it worse. You roll onto your back, slowly, and stare upward at a ceiling of stone you can't really see in the cone of the torch beam.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

The nausea recedes slightly.

You lower your arms. Look at your hands.

The light catches them, lying limp on your stomach, and you look at them properly for the first time since the lip. The gauze on your left knuckles is shredded, and what's underneath is pulped, raw, weeping, a bright wet red against the older brown of the dried scabs. The surgical tape over your missing nail has peeled off entirely, exposing the soft, raw underbed, with multiple cuticles bleeding sluggishly onto your scraped knuckles. Your right hand is - somehow - worse. The skin across the heel of your palm has come away in a long strip, like rind peeled off a fruit, knuckles swollen to the point that you don't think you'd close that fist if you tried.

It's a miracle you climbed your way up here.

You don't have a word for what's happening in your chest other than… grief. It's grief, you think. It's grief for your hands, which is mad, which is insane, but they were your hands, they had pulled thousands of pints and held a thousand glasses and typed a thousand stupid texts to a thousand stupid people, and written the majority of your long-forgotten dissertation, and they were yours, and now they are these, these things, these pulped, hideous things that frighten you.

The work hadn't even been good work. You'd complained about it, hadn't you. You'd whinged about an RSI developing in your wrist at the end of every shift and rolled your eyes about the regulars and called in sick when you were just hungover, and you had taken those hands - those ordinary boring functional hands - entirely for granted.

Even that. Even that has been taken.

And underneath that, quieter still, the worse thought begins to surface - the one that had whispered at you on the rope and that you had outrun by climbing, and now that you're not climbing anymore, it catches you up.

If this is what's left.

If this is what your life is now - Scott, another rope, another cave, another threat, your hands getting worse, your sleep getting worse, the incessant possession of your body pulverising you to a shredded up, sobbing mess - then…

You don't finish it. It sits on your sternum it doesn't ask anything of you. It just is.

A quiet option that has slipped itself into the back drawer of your mind: if this is what's left, maybe it would be a kindness to stop. Maybe the worst thing is the thirty more caves after this one, and the looming threat of life in prison after those, and the slow grinding-down of you into something that finally just gives, and maybe - maybe -

Your eyes squeeze shut.

Stop. Stop, stop, stop.

The walkie-talkie fizzles.

A short, dry crackle from the dark, somewhere off to your left along the lip of the drop, much closer than it had sounded from below - and then the small mechanical click of an open channel, and then nothing. Just static. The carrier hiss of a radio waiting for someone to talk into it.

You stop breathing.

The crackle holds.

Then -

"You with me yet?"

You give yourself thirty seconds. You count them. One, twelve, twenty-seven. The crackle of the open channel hisses in the dark off to your left, patient, expectant, and you breathe through it.

Up.

You push.

Your body refuses for a half second and then, grudgingly, complies - and the noise that comes out of you as you lever yourself to sitting is embarrassing, a long low groan of pain that doesn't stop until you're upright.

You sit there for a moment, hunched, hands hovering uselessly in your lap because you don't want to put them anywhere.

The harness.

Right.

You shrug it off your shoulder where it had twisted across you in the climb and you lay it out in front of you on the stone, properly, the way they showed you the first morning at the first site. Leg loops. Waist belt. Chest piece.

You step into the leg loops - slow, slow, one boot at a time, trying not to scrape the loops up your shins because everything hurts - and pull them up your thighs. Tighten one. Tighten the other. The canvas bites into various bruises and you grit your teeth.

Waist belt. You pull it round. The buckle is awkward with hands that don't fully close - you have to use the heels of your palms, push and feed and push - and on the third attempt it clicks home. You yank the strap. It holds.

Chest piece. Up. Across. Through the loop. Click.

Right.

You drag in a breath, and you sniff again, and you scrub at your face with the cleanest patch of your forearm you can find, and you make yourself look at where you are.

The light beam cuts across stone. You're sitting on a ledge - narrow, maybe a foot and a half wide, running along the side of the chamber from the cliff lip behind you back toward - you turn your head and follow the beam - where it tapers off into the dark some distance away. Ahead of you, on the inner side of the ledge, the rock rises in roughly hewn courses, hand-cut, with the same soft-edged tool marks you'd noted on the way down.

And then, several feet up the wall, just within arm's reach if you were standing.

Recesses.

Five of them. Small jagged squares cut into the stone in an uneven row, each no bigger than a fist, the kind of thing you wouldn't notice if you weren't sitting bleeding on the ledge directly below them.

Two have been gouged - not naturally, not weathered, gouged out, the cavities cut wider and uglier by something that wasn't a chisel and wasn't gentle, the insides scored with deep parallel scrapes that catch the light in a way that turns your stomach. You already know this is the evidence of your clawing.

The other three sit untouched. You don't look at them for long. Decoys, maybe. Maybe not. You don't have the fingers left to find out.

The open recesses go back maybe eight or nine inches into the wall. A hiding place. For something small and cufflink-sized.

You stare down at the recess, and then back over your shoulder at the lip of the drop behind you, and you try to piece together what happened while you were unconscious.

You'd- no, it… it had torn the harness off - every buckle, every clip - because it had been in your way, because the harness was attached to a group of men thirty-odd metres above you telling it to come up, and it didn't want to come up. It wanted the thing. It had clawed and clawed and clawed until the covering gave way, until the cavity opened, and rubble fell, and then - and then the cufflink had dropped. Out of the recess. Down. Bouncing. Skittering. Toward the edge of the ledge and over it-

And your body had dived.

Leapt, off a one-foot-wide ledge into the dark, after a thing the size of a coin.

And by some miracle, had caught it.

And the second her fist had closed on it, you had come back, snapping into your own body mid-fall, mid-tangle, mid-snag, blood pooling in your face and your shoulder smacking rock and-

What kind of animal do you keep becoming? What kind of thing - to claw open a stone wall with bare hands, to feel no pain at the splitting of nails or the pulping of fingertips, to track a falling object off a cliff with such single-minded bestial want that throwing your body off it was the only logical move. The absolute indifference to your own life, your own - your own self - that you had operated with. Treated like a pair of disposable gloves. Worn down to the meat.

You're going in circles.

Right.

The walkie-talkie is maybe four metres along the lip, lying on its side at the very edge of the drop. Four metres. Four metres of ledge a foot and a half wide, no handholds, the void to your right, the wall to your left.

You stand and your head swims at the change in altitude, swims, the blood that had finally drained from your skull now doing other unpredictable things, and you have to lean against the stone for several seconds while the chamber stops doing a lazy spin.

Okay.

Okay.

Inner shoulder against the wall. Boots on the ledge. You walk, then once you reach the walkie, you crouch - carefully, hand against the wall. You pick it up and bring it close to your face.

You don't trust your voice for a second, so you breathe, once, in and out, slow, through your nose. The sound of it is small and rough and you hope, you hope, the EQ flattens it out by the time it reaches him.

You press the button.

"I've got it."

The carrier hiss holds.

"Welcome back to earth, babe. You're coming through a bit quiet - can you say that again?"

Sigh.

"The- the cufflink. I've got it."

"You're fucking joking."

Scott's voice has come up an octave and lost its drawl entirely, and you can hear, faintly, behind him, Rob saying something off-mic and Nick laughing, and Scott telling them both to shut up, shut up, hang on, and then his voice comes back, thrilled.

"YES."

It bursts out of him. A boyish whoop.

"Right - right, alright, hold on, love, you sit tight, we are reeling you up. We are reeling you up right now. Just follow the pull, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Good fucking GIRL. Christ. Christ, that's my girl. Hold on. Don't move. Don't fucking - yeah, alright, NICK - hold on, darl', just hold on."

The channel cuts.

You stand on the ledge with the walkie-talkie loose in two fingers and you listen to the silence after his voice.

That's my girl?

Prick.

You turn, slowly, and let the headtorch sweep the chamber one last time. The drop you'd dangled from. The lip you'd dragged yourself over. The smear of fresh blood on the wall by the recesses. The slow black void to your right, into which an hour ago - however long ago - you had nearly, very nearly, gone.

Would he be proud of you? Would he take it all back?

You hope Sam is having a very bad day.