He left the top latch thrown but didn’t drop the second bolt. I heard it earlier, the missing click. My father used to say numbers never lie. Neither do sounds, if you train your ear.
I trust my ears now.
I slam into the handle with my shoulder, let my weight become the weapon, driving right at the weak spot. Locks don’t care about panic. They care about leverage.
It gives with a crunch and a screech. Cold air knifes in through the gap, shocking after the stale warmth of the room. The metal frame shudders as I wrench it open and spill through.
The hallway isn’t a hallway.
It’s a throat.
A narrow spine between stacks of metal, walls looming in dull gray and flaking paint. A catwalk runs along the right, grated floor showing the drop below. The sound under the floor is louder out here, a full-body hum that vibrates in my bones, something huge and mechanical alive beneath me. Wind rides it, low and constant.
Behind me, Danner curses, the word echoing in the metal throat like a promise. Something heavy skitters—maybe the chair, maybe the lamp clattering to the ground. He’s on his feet. I picture him clutching his forearm, blood running down to his wrist, mouth split and swelling, ego bruised even worse.
He’ll be slower.
Not by much. But slower.
I have two seconds. Maybe three. They’re a gift wrapped in pain.
I run.
My bare feet slap against the grated metal, rattling it. Every step sends a sting up my legs, but I don’t stop. The catwalk pitchesme toward a square of light ahead, brighter and whiter than anything I’ve seen since I woke up here.
Salt slams my tongue on the next breath, thick and sharp and undeniable.
I clear another set of doors, push through one more with my shoulder, and then the world doesn’t just open—it drops away.
For half a second my brain can’t process it. My body expects walls, ceiling, some new shape of cage. Instead I get sky.
My heart stutters, misses a step, then folds in on itself like bad origami.
I’m not on a river. Not sitting at the docks, waiting for the city lights to glitter on black water. There’s no bridge, no skyline, no graffiti-tagged pylons.
A deck stretches out beneath me in a grid of painted lines and welded fixtures, the scale wrong in a way that makes my eyes water. Containers rise in stacks—red and blue and gray, tower-high on either side, their sides streaked with rust and salt. A crane arm sleeps, folded against the sky. Coiled ropes, yellow hazard markings, metal boxes with warning stickers I don’t have time to read.
The wind hits hard, slapping my hair back, stinging my eyes, dragging the thin fabric of my shirt against my skin. The sky is nothing more than a white-blue burn, bright enough to hurt.
And past the rails… nothing
Nothing.
No shoreline. No bridge. No tugboats cutting paths in murky water. No bluff where the trees hold their breath before the drop.Just water. Rolling out forever in tight, hard chop, tips frothing white, the horizon a thin, sharp seam.
My knees hit the deck before I even know I’m falling. The impact sends shockwaves up my thighs. My palms skid on paint and grit as I catch myself, skin burning.
For a second everything tilts, the way it does when a drone shot in a reel climbs too fast and your stomach stays on the ground. The angle of the containers, the horizon line, the railings—all of it slides in my vision.
The hum under my body is louder here, deeper. Engines. Massive ones. Churning us forward through open water, farther from anything resembling home.
I’m on a ship. A cargo ship. A ship out to sea.
The realization doesn’t come in a neat sentence. It hits in broken pieces: the rise and fall under my knees, the slap of waves against hull, the wind scented of salt and oil and distance.
My throat tightens around air that suddenly feels too big to swallow.
For the first time since I woke up in that metal box, since the first bolt slid home and the dark closed in, since I counted the screws and catalogued the welds and made lists in my head to stay human, I feel something crack.
